Indeterminacy

There are aspects of our world that we believe to be - for all practical purposes - unpredictable, namely, quantum, chaotic, and complex systems. As such, the possibility of Divine action in these systems is hard to rule out. Quantum indeterminacy has been offered as a way for God to communicate information to the Universe. This would allow God to act from the "bottom up". Peacocke has criticized the idea that God changes quantum events because of the need to manipulate an "absurdly large"number of events to ensure the behaviour remains deterministic at macro scales. I don't find this to be a harsh criticism. How could we know what's too large or 'conveniently small' for God?

However, I believe there are other problems with quantum-scale accounts of Divine action. Whenever communication occurs, we expect to find coding, transmission and decoding. But with radio decay (for example) the coding step is not visible, since what we see is random. It is pure noise and no signal. It is quite possible to take an information processing system and provide noise as input - indeed non-digital systems always deal with noise at some level. If we were to take a device that accepts an audio signal in Morse code and outputs the corresponding text, and hook it up to a Geiger counter placed near a radioactive source, we will see some text output. But why would the resulting text be 'information' rather than 'noise'? I wonder if seeing God communicating through quantum indeterminacy is an entirely subjective move. I would go so far as to say that the only information that can be obtained from a radio source is its half-life. I should acknowledge this cuts both ways. On the one hand, calling the output information may be ultimately subjective, but such a setup could conceivably allow God to communicate with us - the ‘God-Phone’.

Some key questions that will help us in our understanding of Divine agency are: What is chance? What is randomness? Are these the same thing? Are they distinguishable from limits in our knowledge? My view is that the unpredictability we run into at the quantum scale (and in complex and chaotic systems) is real enough (to us) that we may as well call it ontological indeterminacy. I agree with Peacocke in that it seems reasonable to expect gaps in our world to remain 'uncloseable'.I also follow Peacocke's positive assessment of Chanceas a source of creativity rather than Monod's pessimistic view.

Ironically, I see the deterministic aspect of quantum behaviour as most open to a theological response. At the small scales (say the next 10 decay events of a radio-isotope) we have no explanation for what causes particular quantum events, so we have to resort to statements like "It just happens" or "God did it". Of course, at the large scale, quantum phenomena are law like, and the fact that this "just happens" day in day out does also needs and explanation, but this somehow doesn't seem as suggestive.

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