Einstein's Dice

Albert Einstein once famously said: “God doesn’t play dice with the universe”.

He made this comment as a consequence of being confronted by the implications of his own work (and that of other physicists such as Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg); work that eventually resulted in the creation of the discipline of quantum physics. Contrary to the charming picture painted by Newtonian mechanics, quantum physics says the cosmos isn’t a stately dance of heavenly bodies working in smooth, clocklike precision. Instead, it's a random, contrary, baffling confusion of mysterious processes and startling possibilities whose depths and complexities we have scarcely imagined, never mind explored.

This proposition was deeply disturbing to Einstein, because he was a man of deep faith who viewed creation as the product of God's "rational" being, which necessarily obeyed the “logical” (ie: structured) ordering of God’s mind. That it might be something somewhat more apparently paradoxical was, for Einstein (and others) very confronting.

Hence, the quote at the head of this post. As far as Einstein was concerned, the universe wasn’t like a game of dice, depending on random chance and the interplay of variables. Just as it took Darwin more than two decades to publish The Origin of Species because the implications of his work offended his understanding of God’s role in the cosmos (and of the cosmos itself), so Einstein rejected the powerful and puzzling implications of his explorations in physics.

But here’s what Bohr said in response: “Einstein, stop telling God what to do with His dice”.

This riposte is frequently overlooked by those to whom the “ordered universe” concept provides comfort and reassurance. Because what was implied in Bohr’s response was that God doesn’t actually intervene in the cosmos as though it were God’s personal plaything. God’s intervention in the universe already exists in the form of the laws of nature and the internal structure of the cosmos. Thus, what humans perceive as randomness, complexity, and confusion are actually reflections of the higher workings of God’s mind – workings which need not be expressed as order and logical function, but which may manifest themselves in systems and processes that seem (to us) frighteningly arbitrary. In essence, what Bohr was saying was that we cannot possibly hope to fully understand or perceive the "hand of God" in cosmic operations, and that our attempts to do so will be necessarily flawed and limited.

And it is from this proposition that we recoil, because it challenges our simplistic understanding of being - and God. But that’s precisely what the “ordered universe” and “rational creation” views amount to: an attempt to reduce God to the level of human understanding. The universe is powerful, subtle, complex, and simultaneously majestic in its beauty and terrifying in its unfathomable depths. Just like God. Not because the cosmos is God; rather, the fact of the cosmos points to God, and to the difference between the divine and the human.

And it’s a difference that, frankly, fills me with inexpressible joy.

Talk to you soon,

BB