Emergent probability – introduction by James Parker
http://www.biblestoriesofasurprisinggod.com/about/
When I was a student at Asbury College I was introduced to both science and religion in a way that sometimes confounded me. I was an older, married with children, first time college student and found it difficult to reconcile the various worldviews that my professors presented. A few year went by and I went with some Asbury students and a professor to Notre Dame for a lecture series in philosophy and theology. There I was introduced to the work and theories of a Jesuit priest and professor Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984). One of the lessons that I learned reading his book "Insight: Understanding Human Understanding," was that philosophers, historians and theologians do not always differentiate the way that they "describe an event" form the way that they "explain the event”.
Description is a common sense way to relate something to the way a person percieves it. Scientists at their best explain events theoretically by relating things, not to themselves, but to other things. So, for example, in OT Bible class I was told that the early accounts in Genesis probably occurred around 10,000 BC (Because that is the way the account is described with farmers, craftspersons, shepherds, musicians, builders etc). But in my astronomy class my professor talked about a billions year old universe and a four billion year old earth. And he had no problem reconciling his scientific beliefs with his religious faith. The different viewpoints reflected the way the Biblical account was described while the astronomy professer talked about the explaination: (the theory) of evolution and creation. Reading Lonergan on emergent probability helped me to reconcile both viewpoints. (My comments, Mike)
James Parker writes:
Writing almost 50 years ago during a lull in the cultural wars about evolution, Bernard Lonergan didn’t set out to make a contribution to Darwinian studies. He wound up, however, providing a hint to understand how the universe might move toward its own ends and, at the same time, remain the purposeful creation of God.[1]
First, and by way of background, the key word is “hint.” Lonergan’s thought on what he called emergent probability provides not so much a theory as a hint, a heuristic notion. To understand what that means—the Greek root of heuristic means to discover—consider the Dawkins-designed computer program that introduced a single gene mutation, among a set of only nine genes, in every generation of abstract pictographs.[2] Dawkins expected the accumulating changes to modify shapes, but he couldn’t predict ahead of time what would emerge and certainly not that the rapid and startling results would include animal forms (biomorphs). His model was a heuristic or discovery device that helped him understand how rapidly and creatively gene mutation works.
Likewise, emergent probability is a set of general expectations or clues. The clues constitute the upper blade of a pair of scissors.[3] They suggest a framework for what we will find. In the case of evolution that would be upward directedness. But the work of finding, which is the lower blade of the scissors, belongs to research. Scientists must discover, to continue our example, the how of emergent transitions such as that from non-living to living entities.
Second, and still by way of background, Lonergan was concerned with understanding the methods by which scholars in any field, most especially science, acquire knowledge. He analyzed two types of questioning and two corresponding types of knowledge. Classical inquiry abstracts from time and place to discover the causal patterns or, better, correlations between things. Think of the laws of falling bodies or the laws of motion. Correlations discovered by Galileo and Newton describe the nature of free fall and the nature of motion.
Modern science adds a type of inquiry that seeks to understand the occurrence of things. It also reveals patterns, but it does so by counting the frequencies of events and then plotting them on graphs, leaving out of consideration those that lie far outside straight lines or a bell-curves. With this statistical method we can determine the likelihood that something will occur in a certain time or place. That probability can be expressed as a fraction, an average or ideal frequency of such events. How many hits can we expect in this game from a batter? When and where are finches likely to feed?
At this point a digression about a popular but confusing use of the words “random” and “chance.” Many believe that we live in a world that has come about solely by chance. However, what we call a random or chance event is really a divergence, a point outside of the straight line or bell-curve that records an ideal frequency. In view of the known circumstances of the emergence of our universe, astronomers speculate about the coming-to-be of other universes. When they do so, they come up with a probability. It is misleading to speak of the universe itself as random or the result of chance.
Returning to classical and modern scientific methods, we observe that the former seeks to understand the correlations between things. Its conclusions are of the sort that “A causes B causes C causes D.” Often, such sequences of causes loop back on themselves so that D causes A. In those cases, we have cycles or what Lonergan called schemes of recurrence. Consider the hydrological cycle: rain leads to run-off; solar heat evaporates the water; moist air forms clouds; cloud moisture condenses and rain begins again.
The hydrological cycle is just one of millions of cycles. Recurrent schemes are found in cell functioning, metabolic processes (the Krebs cycle, for example), organ interactions, population fluctuations, climate change, etc. They are nested like Russian dolls, each recurrent scheme having conditions for emergence in precursor schemes and, at the same time, being a condition for the emergence of later schemes. Temperature cycles constitute conditions for evaporation in the hydrological cycle, just as the hydrological cycle is itself a condition for the nitrogen cycle of plant life.
Modern science, on the other hand, seeks to find intelligibility in events. It can determine, for example, the probability of the mutation of a given gene. On average, counted over thousands of instances, we can assert the ideal frequency, or the average number of mutations over against the number of instances of genetic copying.
Lonergan, a mathematician by training, reminded us of something interesting about probabilities. The probability that all events A, B, C, and D will occur in the same time frame and place, may be so minuscule that if anything comes about from their interaction, it is spoken of as improbable. If mutations A, B, C, and D each occur according to probabilities of 1/10, then the probability that they would jointly occur (unless all are controlled by the same regulator gene) is the product of their single probabilities or 1/10,000. In other words, not very probable.
However, if a cycle or scheme of recurrence—A leads to B and B leads to C and C leads to D and D leads back to A—is formed against such odds, then the probability of each event in the ABCD scheme of recurrence shifts to significance. Each event will be triggered by any of three other events. The probability of the occurrence of A becomes its own probability plus the probability of B, plus the probability of C, plus the probability of D. In our example, the probability that the whole cycle will recur is their sum, or 4/10.
Now we can bring together correlations among things that make up schemes of recurrence and frequencies of events that constitute probabilities. Recurrent schemes, once assembled in the long time-frame of natural history, become more numerous and more complex as they undergo the effects of mutations in themselves and in all precursor schemes that are conditions for their emergence. New and more complex schemes of recurrence survive or die out according to probabilities determined by such selective forces as weather cycles, themselves occurring according to their own probabilities.
Moreover, as succeeding schemes of recurrence become ever more complex, future mutations have ever more specific material to work on. Emerging schemes of recurrence channel the effects of mutations so that each further scheme emerges within a narrower spectrum. Thus, evolution moves more sure-footedly in the direction of increasing systematization. In Lonergan’s words, increasing systematization means that evolution is “upwardly directed.”
Some interesting reading:
Crysdale, Cynthia and Ormerod, Neil. Creator God, Evolving World. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013.
Lonergan, B.J.F. Insight. New York: Philosophical Library Inc., 1957.
[1] Lonergan, 118-128.
[2] Dawkins, 60-106.
[3] Crysdale and Ormerod, 69.