For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about exploring the intersection of divine foresight and random events in Abrahamic traditions.
Does God play dice with the universe? Although Einstein famously denounced the possibility, he was not making a theological claim. He was rather voicing his frustration with the apparent implications of quantum theory, which seemed to upend the notion of determinism in physics according to which knowing every detail about a system’s present state allows one to know what will happen to it in the future.
Many religious believers face a similar tension when confronted with true randomness in nature, whether at the quantum level, in the mutations that fuel natural selection, or in the contingent events that define every human life. “I think most religious believers in the past thought that God is in some way not the immediate cause of everything, but certainly the ultimate cause,” says Kelly James Clark, Senior Research Fellow at the Kaufman Interfaith Institute at Michigan’s Grand Valley State University. “When randomness enters the picture, then you have to figure out, as a religious believer, how that is possible.”