Omar Khayyam and chess
The Persian mathematician and poet, Omar Khayyam
insisted that we are, "But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays Upon
this Chequer-board of Nights and Days; Hither and thither moves, and
checks, and slays, And one by one back in the Closet lays." And it would
appear that even the great Player himself is as determined by fate as
the rest of us. "And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky, Whereunder
crawling coop'd we live and die, Lift not your hands to It for help--for
It As impotently moves as you or I."
But George Arthur Buttrick would have none of it. "Almost every word
in the dictionary refutes the poem. The word ‘coward,’ for instance
means that a man is free to be brave; and the sign ‘Keep out’ means we
are free to enter. Always the arguments are on the side of fixed fate; always our instant assumptions
are on the side of free will, and we cannot help making the
assumptions. We deduce by apparently unbreakable logic that we are
bound, but we still assume that our brilliant argument is free. Not soon
shall I forget the sight of a psychologist, famous for the doctrine
that all our actions are but inevitable responses to external stimuli,
pleading with mothers to train their children in the theory. What use in
pleading? Despite his doctrine he had to assume that the mothers could
choose to train their children in some other theory."
Words like praise, blame, wrong, sin, good and ten thousand like them
deny the claim that we are bound by iron determinism because they all
imply that things could possibly be other than they are. If the whole of
reality (including those who reflect on that reality) is bound by
chance and the necessity of physics (Jacques Monod) not only can we not
"blame" we cannot "praise". We are left speechless or at least we know
in our bones that our speech is patent nonsense. Not many are like the
Stratonician atheist, Bertrand Russell, who openly confessed that there
were things going on in the world that troubled him deep within, things
he felt compelled to condemn but he knew, he said, that he had no
rational grounds to condemn them. Might as well blame a chess piece for
moving into a losing square as blame a man for raping a child. Might as
well praise an apple for falling down off a tree as praising a
parent for loving a child. In a reality where every particle and form of
reality is a pre-played chess game there is neither praise nor blame,
good or bad.
It might be amusing if it were not so pathetic to hear religious
people sniff in derision at the physical and philosophical determinism
of non-believers and then substitute for it their theological
determinism. In the end whether it’s Omar Khayyam or some rabid
hyper-Calvinist, "God ordains whatsoever comes to pass." Ah, no! Sin is our own!