Chance and the God of religion

Chance and the God of religion Dedicated to Anton Zeilinger 1. When one of the leading scientists of our time, quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger, celebrates the discovery of chance as the most significant discovery of the 20th century, we should take notice.*1* He directly opposes a tradition that goes back to the Babylonians and, of course, to all those practices spread all over the world, by which man wanted to find out the future by consulting celestial constellations (astrology), by examining the liver and other oracles, believing that the course of things was fixed since the beginning of creation. In the seventeenth century, this belief - for a mere belief it is – had been turned into a scientific dogma and decree. Chance was not allowed to exist because it was considered a mere synonym for human ignorance. Classical physics even gave a Latin name to this revolt against chance, it spoke of determinism - from Latin "determinare" made it sacrosanct and unchallengeable for three centuries. When Professor Zeilinger calls chance the greatest discovery of the 20th century, I assume he meant to say that with this discovery three centuries of scientific misconception were finally laid to rest. Does this have anything to do with God? Not yet. But the discovery of chance is significant, as it frees man from the nightmare of a machine-like universe. 2. Fully developed we find the nightmare already with Leibniz. Everything comes about by necessity, this is as certain as three times three is nine. That is because necessity makes all things follow each other like in a chain so that what still has to happen will happen in a definite way, while what has already happened could not happen otherwise.... so that you only need a sufficient insight into things combined with an appropriate degree of memory and reason in order… to be a prophet who, looking at the present state of things, would foresee all their future relations like in a mirror (cf. Cassirer 1957: 143). A century later, David Hume expresses himself in the same manner: Look round the world, contemplate the whole and every part of it: you will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 1779). His younger contemporary, the French mathematician Laplace, only repeats the central idea of Leibniz when he asserts: An intellect, which, at a certain moment, would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes“ (1886, vol. VII, p. VI). And even in the twentieth century, long after the findings of quantum physics, Bertrand Russell continued to cling to the common dogma of classical physics. It is thought that