As a young
filthy atheist, I found the "God does not play dice with the universe" quote worrying. People who count themselves rational thinkers have to be aware of the possibility that they can be
wrong as phlogiston, which nobody wants and everybody manages, now and then. What does it mean when the great scientific thinkers acknowledge the ridiculous divine? Are there factors I'm missing?
Where's my Glorfindel to save me from the river with the horse faces?
But as I grew in my filthy atheism and got to that awesome human trick of
illogically rationalizing a defense against the apparent facts of the world, I came up with an answer that satisfied me. It may or may not be accurate on a social or scientific level, but that's not the point. So few of the things we know do we know for sure-certain, and so few of us are adapted to grasp the deep physics that's pretty much necessary to perceptive philosophy. There are situations where it's best to pull a
crazy and make what sense you can of the life.
I decided that the quote had nothing to do with God. It wasn't about spirituality. It was about order. Einstein (in my little mind) wasn't telling us that there's some creeping, haloed drag queen trolling the
cosmic Craigslist for
d/d-free in shape under-30s for play or something more. He was talking about rules. To the ordered genius, the thought that there's anything in the universe that can't be understood and predicted must be laughable pessimism. To
Archimedes, Newton and Hawking, everything is systems and interactions. Effect follows cause, and with enough processing power, everything's predictable. The quiet slam of electron into electron follows a procedure. Forces swirl in line.
There's sheet music to the humming of the stars, and it's not illegible. It just takes time to work out. There's no such thing as a random occurrence. Everything is the result of something else, and leads to another everything the next instant.
Now, don't take this as a physics lesson. I've been told that there -is- such a thing as quantum uncertainty--events at an infinitesimal level that are truly up to chance. Collisions on perfectly equal terms. That'd be all it took to set the whole mess out of procedure again. Any event that's not predictable with infinite present knowledge ruins the ocean harmony of the universe. Not saying that's a
good thing or a
bad thing; nonhuman processes aren't good or evil, and
they're beautiful no matter how imperfect they might seem to us, because perfection doesn't exist without people to create the standard.
This is philosophy. Did you honestly expect to learn anything?