In the midst of his historic debate with Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein famously declared that god does not play dice with the cosmos. Einstein was objecting to the then-new conclusions from quantum mechanics that the world was fundamentally probabilistic rather than deterministic. The proposal that the world is inherently random offended Einstein’s sensibilities. Niels responded by asking Albert, “Who are you to tell God what to do?”
Einstein also said when asked if he believed in the Almighty, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.” The intended irony of his belief in Spinoza’s “god” was lost in the reporting by people who apparently had never read Spinoza.
With these multiple references to god, Spinoza’s or otherwise, we might come to believe that our famous cohort of physicists was a cabal of theists in disguise. That would be incorrect. True, Einstein often made reference to god, but in doing so created the mistaken impression that he actually believed in one. His supposed faith is often cited by believers in discussions with rationalists along the lines of: "Einstein is smarter than you are and he believed in god; what makes you think you know more than he did?”
One serious flaw with that argument, in addition to the problem of appealing to authority for support, is that Einstein did not believe in god. This conclusion is unambiguous if we simply listen to the man’s own words on the subject:
“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this…” Lest there be any remaining doubt that Einstein did not believe, he also said, ““The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naïve.”
For those who remain unconvinced by Einstein’s own words about his own views on religion, we could also point out that while Einstein never seemed to comb his hair we do not use that fact as an argument against personal hygiene and an occasional visit to the barber.
We know after more than 60 years of experimentation and advances in theory that Bohr was more right than Einstein. Chance, luck and randomness play an essential, core, profound and deeply embedded role not only in physics but in all aspects of life, from its origins and evolution to the mundane and profound in our daily lives. As an aside, that inherent randomness belies any notion of purpose or design.
In a truly random world, good and bad luck exist; luck is real. A baby born into poverty and hunger to a broken home, burdened with a terrible disease and a negligent mother would universally be considered unlucky. An infant coming into the world with robust health and embraced by loving parents in a home with no economic stress would be lucky by any standard. The differential condition between those two children is of no fault of either, just a consequence of rolling life’s cosmic dice.
We demonstrably occupy a world in which randomness plays a role. Some events in life, both trivial and grand, are simply beyond our control. Getting hit by a drunk driver while strolling on a sidewalk cannot be avoided by careful planning or by becoming a better person. Such a sad fate is not an act of god hiding some unfathomable purpose, but an act of randomness, without any meaning. The dice rolled six instead of three.
But the existence of luck, good or bad, offers no refuge from personal responsibility. This central point is commonly misunderstood, with luck often being confused with fate. “The dice made me do it” is not a viable defense. Luck is real but living in a contingent world offers no excuse for shirking duty, or for not taking control of, and responsibility for, our lives. In daily life we routinely make decisions that affect ourselves, our family and friends. The outcome from those many choices is much in our own hands, independent of surrounding circumstances: we can create opportunity for advancing our life and we can mitigate risk; we can choose to be moral; we ourselves can create meaning and purpose in our lives. We have tremendous power to create our own path, within the limits of chance. We are rulers of our own thoughts free from the constraints of a random background.
To understand this complex relationship and interplay between luck and personal responsibility, consider an orb weaver spider. Let’s call him Hairy. As a student in web-weaving school, Hairy studied diligently until his eight eyes were red and blurry in order to master the delicate art of laying silk. As a graduate student he studied micro patterns of wind and rain and devoted himself to understanding insect behavior so that he would know exactly where best to build his precious web to trap his daily meals. Hairy did everything within his power, and within the limits of his biology, to become a professional builder and materials science expert extraordinaire. He graduated with honors.
With his newly acquired expertise and Ph.D. in Web Design, Hairy set out on his own into the world to apply his new skills. His mother meanwhile wondered why he did not become a real doctor. Hairy suspects his mother may have eaten his father who has been suspiciously absent of late. In any case, using all that he learned Hairy designed and built a beautifully constructed web that soon became the object of arachnid envy for its flawless blending of form and function. Awards were surly to follow. Using his knowledge of insect flight, Hairy positioned his artful web in the perfect location between two Blue Agaves offering just the right orientation to the sun and wind.
Putting the finishing touches on his last strand of silk Hairy contentedly crawled back to the center of the web and waited for his first fly. And waited. And waited.
And the fly never came.
While committees were established to assign blame for the failure, the paucity of flies was in fact not Hairy’s fault. Instead the result was a consequence of life’s random nature. Hairy did everything he could as a spider, building the perfect web in the perfect location based on all the available information about where the most flies would be most of the time. He could do nothing else to affect the outcome. The rest was up to chance and chance alone. He could not will or make a fly stumble into his web. He could only build the web to the best of his abilities to optimize the probability that a fly would hit.
We are all like Hairy, just with six fewer legs. That means we have an obligation to maximize opportunity through personal responsibility, up to the limits of chance. We each have the personal responsibility to create the best and biggest surface area we possibly can to optimally capture life’s opportunities. Like Hairy, we will not always be successful in spite of our best efforts. We have to build the best web we possibly can because we can do no more than that, and we do so with the full knowledge that we cannot force the fly into our carefully woven trap.
Most events in our daily life are under our direct command. But not all, and not all the time. Luck is important but is alone not our master. Einstein was right; there is no god. Just a spider, a web and a random fly.