Atheism and the Metaphysics of Chance

The world we experience is characterized by individuality, novelty, and change. The world is contingent. It can even be said that the most persistent empirical experience we have is that the world is contingent and constantly changing; everything is on the move.

If we combine such a picture with an atheistic view, we see that the atheist is committed to a metaphysics of Chance. Chance reigns supreme. Absolutely anything can happen. The world is contingent, so there are a lot of things that are possible. Absolutely anything can be birthed from the womb of Chance.

To avoid this, the atheist will most likely posit the existence of laws of nature. Firstly, due to Hume's problem of induction, he cannot know from particular experiences that there's a uniformity of nature. The atheist does not have universal experience. Even if he could have such experience, he can never know what nature MUST be like. Laws of nature, to an atheist, are - at best - descriptive. They're neither necessary nor prescriptive. For all he knows, the laws of nature themselves may be constantly changing just like the rest of the world.

Since the world is contingent, the atheist cannot disallow the possibility of uncaused events - novelties - that violate what he perceives as "laws of nature". Atheism cannot say that "freak" events don't happen since it ontologically permits contingent chance to affect reality. Unlike the Christian system, in the atheist system there's no God who providentially controls and orders the physical world. As such, anything can happen. Chance becomes ultimate.  

What follows from this then? When a worldview ontologically allows for Chance to govern history, facts cease to be facts in the true sense of the word. Since every event is possible, then nobody knows what may happen. Probability loses all significance. No one event is more likely to happen than any other. No hypothesis would have more relevance to the facts than any other hypothesis. Did the force of gravity cause the ball to fall down when released? Perchance it did. Was it invisible monkeys? Perchance it was. One can no longer argue from the facts. Facts become meaningless if atheism  is true.

When it is pointed out to the atheist that his worldview commits him to a metaphysics of pure contingency and Chance, he will appeal to laws of nature. He'd say "no, not everything is possible since there are laws of nature that regulate things".

But even "laws of nature" pose problems for the atheist. First of all, it isn't clear what exactly laws of nature are. What does it mean for something to be a law of nature?  That aside, even positing laws of nature does not do the job for the atheist.

For the atheist to escape pure contingency in his metaphysics, the laws of nature have to impose some kind of necessity on the world. But laws of nature, whatever they are, are contingent. It seems obvious that they are not necessarily true. There are possible worlds in which they are false. So the laws of nature, in order to do the job the atheist needs them to, must be both necessary and contingent. But how can something be both necessary and contingent? Laws of nature need to have a distinct type of necessity - one that's not as strict as logical necessity. The atheist, given his metaphysics, cannot account for such things. There's no way to impose necessity on the contingent world.

Unlike the Christian who believes in a God who is in sovereign control of the world and who brings to pass every event in history according to his counsel such that the "laws of nature" are necessary but still contingent on God, the atheist has no way to avoid pure contingency in his metaphysics. As such, he cannot account for the uniformity of nature, the success of science, probability, and the facts become meaningless rubbish.

This is one illustration of the futility of an unbelieving view of reality. For more illustrations, see The Folly of Unbelief here.

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