Thought Experiment: Russian Roulette

We have in our possession 2 people.

Person A possesses a gun, a quarter, and 6 bullets.
Person B possesses his own head and at least 1 trigger finger.

Person A is ordered to take the Gun, open the Cylinder, and flip a coin 6 times. For every flip of the coin that results in "heads," Person A will load a bullet into the Gun. According to the laws of Probability, 3 out of the 6 chambers should be loaded. Further, our beloved Person B, who is ordered to point the gun at his head and pull the trigger, boasts a 50% chance of dying.

For the purposes of this thought experiment, Chance and God are the same. They are different names for the thing that causes the coin to produce heads or tails, which will in turn produce death or continued existence. Despite the dramatic addition of death into this experiment, the fundamentals are straightforward; we do not know why or for what purpose the coin flips produce heads or tails. We can clearly see a pattern- half of time it will be heads, half tails, but we cannot know a deeper cause beyond it. Either people can say there is no deeper cause; there are simply the mathematical laws themselves that demonstrate probabilistic patterns. Or, people can say that these patterns are the work of God and are evidence of his control over the course of life on earth.

Now let's reconfigure the experiment.

We have in our possession 7 people.

Person A possesses a gun, a quarter, and 6 bullets.
Persons B,C,D,E,F, and G, all possess their own heads and at least 1 trigger finger apiece.

Person A goes through the same process of flipping and loading, bullet for heads, empty chamber for tails, and according to the laws of probability, produces a half loaded gun. Now here's the difference. Persons B through G are ordered to sit in a circle and pass the gun around, shooting themself in the head in turn. Probability says that 3 of these people will be dead, assuming, and probably so, that a bullet in the head will produce death. We know according to probability that these three should die, but what determined which chambers those bullets went in? They obviously resulted from, and form a pattern of, Chance, but probability didn't determine which of the chambers the bullets went in.

Chance is a descriptive phenomenon; it doesn't seek to explain events, only describe the patterns in which they unfold.

God is a causitive phenomenon; it emphasizes that these events happen according to patterns, although we do not have anything else to ascribe to besides a force which we cannot explain- God.


Thanks to Steven Carr for provoking these thoughts...