Gambling for glory remixed: connecting sovereignty and free will

An occasional essay

Apr 13, 2026

This is a top-and-tailing of a post I published on June 14, 2024:

Gambling for Glory: does God play Dice?

My problem is that the theologians I’ve come across tend either to emphasise the sovereignty of God to the exclusion of all other choosers, or emphasise our free will as people so that they end up diluting God’s sovereignty.

This essay is the start of a different idea: can we embrace both ends of the Scriptural message that God is God and yet we can make valid and free choices?

For this post, the key question is whether God is a real gambler? Think of those supergamblers who clean out casinos and then get banned for life. They don’t rig the machines, but they come away winners. They don’t interfere with the choices of the croupiers or the other gamblers, but they still win. Is there any way in which a metaphor like that might apply to God?

Logical models of sovereignty and free will don’t work well, as far as I can see, but what about models of probability and chance?

I think they might take us in a better direction.

The short story:

The physicist and the apostle. We’ll start with Einstein and St Paul on taking a gamble, and go on to look at relativity and quantum mechanics to see that reality is highly counterintuitive and founded on randomness
We’ll review economic history and argue that explosive growth has sprouted as we have mastered randomness
Then we’ll backtrack to St Paul and ask what happens to our understanding of sovereignty and free will if we see God as master of chance beyond all our imagining.
It doesn’t answer all our problems – but it’s a start.

Now, here’s the longer read.

The physicist and the apostle

‘‘God does not play dice with the universe.’ Albert Einstein

‘For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.’ St Paul (Romans 8^19-20, NIV)

In this essay, I want to explore a strange idea. It is highly speculative but if it works, it may connect two very different worlds – faith and science – in unexpected ways.

The quotes above are unusual because the writers seem to be saying the opposite of what we thought they would. We don’t expect Einstein to make theological statements (he wasn’t) and we don’t expect St Paul to focus on risk (maybe he was). Let’s start with Einstein and work our way back to St Paul.

This isn’t a physics lesson, so I’d recommend Carlo Rovelli’s, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics if the science interests you. I like his elegant style, clear explanations, and find him a reliable guide to contemporary physics.

Einstein was at the height of his powers as two huge theories were emerging. He was the one who proposed that spacetime curves around mass and that all movement has a speed limit, so that nothing goes faster than light in a vacuum. Special and general relativity provide an elegant geometric description of the universe. At the same time, wildly different ideas were developing in which everything boiled down to particles that could only be described in the language of waves and probability: quantum mechanics.

Both theories are colossally weird and counterintuitive; both are supported by over a century of evidence and are among the best attested theories we have. Neither theory fits easily with the other, to the extent that Einstein and two colleagues (Podolsky and Rosen) wrote a paper in 1935 showing why both could not be true at the same time. This became known as the EPR paradox and while the experimental results have consistently sided against Einstein and his friends – but without undermining relativity – untangling the paradox remains an active field of research 90 years later.

Critically, and in different ways, each appeared to undermine a basic tenet of Christian faith.

Newton knew there could be no universal frames of reference, but Einstein took this to a whole new level. Perhaps the most puzzling piece is that everything runs to its own clock, and so time and distance behave oddly (phrases such as time dilation now hover on the edge of popular consciousness). There is no place from which you can watch the universe ticking along – what you see depends on where you are and how fast you are moving relative to what you watch.

As these ideas percolated through society, it appeared that there could be no absolutes, everything was relative. But if Einstein’s equations did not talk theology, they did not talk sociology, either. They substituted one concept of absolutes for another: universal frames of reference were completely out, but a universal speed limit ruled all.

Quantum mechanics appears to undermine any form of certainty. It is truly wild and only a small number of academic physicists (count me out) have played with the maths enough to have an intuitive grasp of quantum behaviour. Perhaps the most puzzling piece is that any measurement yields a chance result that you cannot know before the measurement is made. This means that quantum behaviour is completely different from real life: you don’t walk to work and see a lamppost but worry that it wouldn’t have been there had someone else, on their way to the shops, looked there first.

Schrödinger’s cat is a way of understanding this disconnect between our reliable big world and the wavey, chancy, quantum world.

A cat is connected to something that will kill it when a particular result is recorded from a system sampling a stream of particles. It is set up, so the property to be measured records one of two possible outcomes. Sooner or later a measurement will be made that registers the result that kills the cat. The cat and measurement system are sealed in a box so nobody can observe them until a big world measurement is made (by opening the box, for instance). At that point we will know not just whether the cat is alive but if it is dead, we will also be able to infer how long it had been dead before we opened the box. Not so with the quantum world – you cannot know what the state of any particle was before the measurement was made. So, Schrödinger’s cat is a statement of a problem, rather than a solution, but it helps guide the discourse.

The many worlds interpretation provides another bridge between what we experience and quantum behaviour. We imagine that every time anything happens at the quantum scale, anywhere, the universe splits, so that all possibilities are covered. On this view, somewhere there would be a universe where Manchester United can retain a manager long enough to win the occasional trophy. You don’t have to believe that all these worlds really come into being, but you have to believe that the description in which they are all accounted for captures reality.

Einstein’s problem with quantum mechanics was that he couldn’t believe that a predicable reality could be built on such a world of chance, and the randomness at the heart of the universe remains a deep puzzle. Why make any decision if the neurons in your brain are only traceable to random events?

It’s a big question and I want to leave it hanging and start off in a completely different direction.

An alternative view of how we got rich and made ourselves comfortable

In his book The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty Before 1900 Stephen Stigler points out that before 1700, we had little idea of statistics. His book covers probability in the physical sciences and then in the social sciences. My take is that natural scientists got off to a faster start because variation was smaller in their world than it was in social situations. The error in measuring the position of Mercury in the night sky, for instance, was always much easier to handle than the variation in, say, people’s eating preferences.

With these theories came an understanding of randomness and from there mastery. If you could make standard pieces of a product you could manufacture things from identical parts instead of creating a bespoke product every time. Taming randomness, for instance, enabled the Union to assemble the Springfield Model 1842 musket, which lowered costs and sharpened accuracy. In the end the Union beat the Confederacy – though I haven’t found an historian who connects victory solely to the Springfield Rifle.

The more we standardise, the cheaper and more reliable our products and the greater our ability to standardise the next generation of products. In the past 50 years, the war on randomness to reduce faults has become truly ferocious with extreme measures to produce clean rooms that ensure that each of the billions of transistors they turn out are (almost!) identical.

Crucially, however, we also learned to manage randomness where we cannot eliminate it. We cannot eliminate all risk, but we can manage it. We now know how much to compensate for the risks we face in order to reach almost any objective. For example, we cannot build a computer that never makes a mistake, but we can build failsafe systems. Airliners are a powerful case in point: 2017 was the first year without a passenger jet crashing anywhere in the world. There have been a couple of serious setbacks since then, but being in the air is still one of the safest spaces on earth, and still getting safer.

However they go about it, those who master variation and randomness are masters of the universe: they sell more – from groceries to cars – and deliver better experiences – from home movies to ticketless travel. Tomorrow’s magi will simply wave their wands and unwanted randomness will shrivel.

Back to Stigler who concludes his story around 1900 just as quantum mechanics was getting going. Quantum randomness is completely different from the randomness against which industry has been fighting since the Springfield Rifle. It is not about any randomness you can reduce, it’s about randomness that you can’t: it says that uncertainty has forged the fundamental fabric of reality.

However, even there, the modern magi are learning to tame what they cannot change, and we are developing quantum computing which promises to be especially effective in, for instance, cracking codes. The security of all your important information is now based on probability. Your passcode is shredded into needles that are hidden in a haystack. Normal computers are slow at searching haystacks, so your information stays safe for anything from hours to several lifetimes, depending on how fine the needles and the haystack chaff. It’s all a game of chance and you have to hope the magi responsible for your bank account are better than the magi trying to hack it.

Quantum computing, when it matures, should be able to create a shadowy, wavy world of all possible haystacks in which your needles immediately drop to the floor. Hey presto! What took zillions of operations takes place almost immediately.

Mastery of randomness is the new key to the knowledge of good and evil, and we are close to becoming gods in around 300 years.

Living with randomness

The challenge for the secularist is whether meaning can ever be founded on pure chance – and there are lots of ways in which philosophers and thinkers are wrestling with this.

The message for the Christian is that there is little point discussing sovereignty and free will in logical terms, when everything in our world that is logical and reproducible floats on a chaotic sea of randomness.

As far as we can tell, all the predictability of the world we know is founded on a shadowy microscopic world of chaos. This is a crazy situation, but as far as we know, it is true. Will we discover a world of determinism beneath the world of randomness that lies beneath the world we recognise? Who knows?

But if a dependable world can be laid on a foundation of randomness, why not meaning, too? That’s the challenge, as I said, for the secularist. For the believer, however, meaning comes from the Creator, who appears to have built deep-seated uncertainty into the predictable certainties of daily life. It’s certainly odd, but is it unreasonable?

Let’s step back and rehearse the journey we have made as humans in the past few centuries in moving from hunger and extreme poverty as the near-universal norm to a world of extreme wealth in places and shrinking poverty in others (although not shrinking nearly as fast as the available wealth would merit), while our lives lengthen. Looking at the story in the way I have told it, it is not about what we can do but about how we have learned to manage uncertainty. The world of subsistence to the knowledge economy is paved with a mastery of randomness.

Let’s leave that there and draw another parallel that takes us, finally back to St Paul.

Frustration, randomness and restoration

Against the instincts of Christian apologists, I can’t see that the Bible ever tries to prove that God is there. I was heartened recently to discover that Pascal was sympathetic to this position:

Blaise Pascal: the man who made the modern world, by Graham Tomlin (2 March 2026)

Contrary to prevailing thinking, God’s existence is not a matter that is up for disproof. The Bible simply claims to reveal the God who is there, and to state that the resourceful, creative, ingenious, humanity around us is a sadly flawed replica of the Creator. The narrative that the Bible relates is about how the flawed replica can be restored.

And now, here’s the half-developed idea of the gambler that I introduced at the start. What if God is such a master of randomness that He can get to any desired outcome regardless of the individual events along the path? God wouldn’t have to tilt the table or rely on invisible props since, give or take a bit of scaling of the time axis, any outcome becomes inevitable once you can tame randomness to your own ends.

Since humanity is learning to master randomness more cleverly and more often, and creation seems to do it all the time as it furnishes us with a reliable world founded entirely on unpredictability, could God not do even better?

Clearly, looking down the other end of the telescope is always a dangerous way to try to understand God as a human being, but if we can at least imagine that God is master of chance at a deeper level than we ever can be, then other paradoxes may unexpectedly unlock themselves.

One way of reading St Paul in Romans, is that God took a risk, a real gamble, in creating a world where things could go wrong. Perhaps it is only in that world of potential for enormous harm that the possibility ‘the freedom and glory of the children of God,’ could ever emerge, and because God is the master it was certain to emerge. It doesn’t solve the deeply disquieting problems of suffering or the punishment of evil, but even there, we might have glimmer of light toward an ultimate solution. Another essay, maybe, and probably not by me.

If so, it might explain why the hand of God is so often gloved in randomness, or why even when God took off his cloaking device and walked, as Jesus, down dusty paths, and died a criminal’s death, that even then the evidence could never convince most people. It’s interesting that the Christian story comes to a climax in resurrection, not in rewinding, to start again.

It might even shed light on how God’s sovereignty might interact with our free will, especially if the two are buffered from one another by a world of genuine randomness.

Does God play dice? As far as we know in this world, it looks like the answer is yes. And in the world to come? I think the answer may still be yes.

Terry’s Substack

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