Chance as a sole-product of the Universe

from this website:

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It is not unusual to hear people suggest that time plus chance will accomplish the evolution of simple organisms into more complex entities. There is a logical error in such statements. There is no such thing as chance. That is, chance is not an entity which causes things to happen.

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In the tossing a coin we say that we can count on the coin coming up heads half the time, and tails the other half of the time. The odds are 50/50. What we forget is that one flip of the coin involves a whole chain of causal factors. The weight of the coin, the shape of the coin, the upward impulse of the toss, air resistance, spin--the initial conditions--all interact on each toss of the coin. It is a mathematical convenience to say that the probability of heads is 50% and the probability of tails is 50%. The more tosses of the coin we make the closer the spectrum will come to a pure 0.5000 probability. But every individual toss of a coin is controlled by the laws of physics. There is no mechanism called "chance" determining the outcome of any toss of the coin.

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Its amazing to me how people see no difference between measurable probability and the whole idea of chance as a thing. Edited by Phat, : speklling

I can see a huge difference.But this concept of "chance as a thing" is incredibly strange and this is the first time I've heard of it.I've never thought that chance is an actual thing causing things to happen.
Can you indicate any group of people that do follow such a strange idea?

You're very easily amazed.It doesn't matter whether 'chance' is a 'thing' like a table or the description of the probality of a 'thing' happening, like a coin landing heads. We all know what it means.We know that it's the occurrence of a mutation (as an example) plus selection that causes evolution and that process involves chance. So what strange point are you trying to make? If it's that because chance isn't a 'thing' evolution doesn't happen, you're very, very, wrong.If you're just saying that chance is not the causal factor, then it's a 'no shit Sherlock' moment.

Im not attempting to falsify evolution. I have no issues there---it is unimportant to me.What I am trying to do is to define this thing called chance. My take on it is it does not exist. Explain how chance is involved. Do you mean that the event is entirely random? at random
: without definite aim, direction, rule, or method

Reminds me of ICANT and the "existence of existence". What are the chances that chance exists?It's the kind of philosophical mumbo-jumbo that mike the wiz loves and Phat phalls phor.

So, let's talk about Roulette.When they drop the ball in the wheel, there's forces acting on the ball that cause it to end up on one of the numbers. There are a series of events, that are not based on chance, that govern where the ball is going to end up landing. It is an incredibly complicated list that is practically impossible to measure/calculate. So, from your point of view, it looks like the ball is just landing on a random number and that it gets there by chance.From the point of view of the ball and all the forces acting on it, there isn't actually any chance involved - all the numbers that come up are just a result of the processes that the ball goes through.But from your point of view all those process are invisible so as far as you can tell it is all just a result of chance. The event is not entirely random. There are forces in play that cause a particular mutation to happen, but from the point of view of the individual animal, all of that stuff is invisible and the mutations appear to be random. We say that they are random with respect to fitness. The environment does not reach down into the cell and cause the mutation to happen (there are exceptions to this that are unimportant to this point), so from the point of view of the environment (where the selective pressure happens) the mutation is random, or a result of chance.Chance does not cause anything. Chance is a term to describe the fact that from where you are standing, and despite the fact that there are underlying rules that govern how the even unfolds, the event cannot be predicted from the data that you have and also that a reproduction of that event given actually random inputs will behave in the same way as the naturally occurring event.

It does exist. Unless you're redefining it to mean something else.Even your quote talks about it: "The odds are 50/50."
That's the chance, it's the same thing.Doesn't matter if it's random or not, deterministic or not... that's the chance of it happening.Any other re-definition of the word chance is simply the gambler's fallacy (if it's tails 10 times in a row... then the next must be heads because it needs to be 50/50!). That's the idea that chance is forcing something... and that's what we call the "gambler's fallacy"... because that's the idea that doesn't actually exist. It's not real.Chance is only descriptive, not prescriptive. Chance is involved because we are aware of multiple possible outcomes without being aware of which one is determined (yet).
The rate at which different outcomes can occur is called their "chance" of happening.It doesn't matter if they are truly random or fully deterministic.
All that matters is that we are not currently aware of which one is going to happen, and we are also aware of multiple possible outcomes.You may be asking the question "is everything actually deterministic or is anything truly random?"But asking this question and re-defining it as "does chance exist?" is merely confusing and a re-definition of the word 'chance.'

Sounds like double talk to me. Of course there is such a thing as the concept of chance, the question might be whether chance is fitting description for reality. Whether or not chance renders God futile is partially a theological question and not a purely philosophical question.If there were no concept of chance, then what would the denial that chance exists as a concept be other than meaningless double talk. You are denying nothing? Your claim is essentially that if we knew the value of all involved variables, then the result of a coin flip is determined. I can accept that to be true. The problem for your point is that not every 'chance' operates like dice, coins, and even roulette wheels.There are non-deterministic processes for which even perfect knowledge of all variables does not allow predicting the outcome. The Schrodinger's Cat illustration is one example. Quantum physical probabilities are fundamentally different from coin flips and dice rolls in that there are no hidden variables which govern their behavior. Some processes are inherently uncertain and no amount of prior knowledge allows us to decide their outcomes on an individual basis.

You don't have to, it already has a definition - 2 actually.chance
tʃɑːns/
noun
1.
a possibility of something happening.
"there is a chance of winning the raffle"
synonyms: possibility, prospect, probability, odds, likelihood, likeliness, expectation, anticipation, conceivability, feasibility, plausibility; More
antonyms: unlikelihood
the probability of something desirable happening.
"he played down his chances of becoming chairman"
an opportunity to do or achieve something.
"I gave her a chance to answer"
synonyms: opportunity, opening, occasion, turn, time, moment, window (of opportunity), slot;2.
the occurrence of events in the absence of any obvious intention or cause.
"he met his brother by chance"
synonyms: accident, coincidence, serendipity, fate, a twist of fate, destiny, fortuity, fortune, providence, freak, hazard; More You've just been bamboozled by bollocks.

When the probability can be strictly measured, chance is a good definition. When it cannot be measured, chance becomes a sort of godless deterministic factor. We may as well say God rather than chance. Chance is a way for the human mind to understand the process...yet chance is of itself powerless to determine the process. Intelligent design makes much better sense than random design. The whole idea of we humans being the "winner of a cosmic lottery" is so much nonsense.

Only if your personal recourse is to credit or blame God out of human ignorance. I imagine that lots of gamblers blame God for their losses even when the outcome is perfectly calculable and extremely likely. How is what you say here any more correct that the losing Gambler? Chance is merely a description of state when an outcome is non determinable. Your statement is ridiculous. Of course chance does not contain power. It simply enables us to talk about things that do occur. Of course chance is not a choice. Or perhaps your thought processes are simply not very rigorous.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Now that is just a really silly statement that makes God look pretty stupid. You seem to like making God look either stupid or evil or more often, both.How are humans any greater winners of some cosmic lottery than cockroaches or pond scum?

By total mass, micro-organisms win hands downd.Haldene though thought it was beetles (quote later attributed to Darwin.)

There is a good series on the concept of chance which I listen to regularly.Their basic premise is that chance is logical only when verified by probability. Chance in and of itself can't cause anything because chance in and of itself is not anything.
You Tube

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Can something come from nothing? Was "chance" the cosmic power behind creation? Despite scientific advances, there remains an undercurrent of irrationality in scientific writing.

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The statement does not convey anything meaningful. On the other hand, I do not recall hearing those words when listening to the video, so perhaps something else is actually the basic premise. This second statement seems to me to be double talk. Essentially what the writer has managed is an irratreification of a concept followed by a denunciation of said reifiication. When people say that something occurs by chance that are not saying that some entity known as chance is the actual cause. So how is it reasonable to denounce such statements by pretending that they do mean that?In any case, the summary here wouldn't convince me to purchase the book.Here is a summary from another source:

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Because chance can do nothing, and because it violates the law of non-contradiction to claim you "created yourself," they conclude that it's logically impossible that the universe simply popped into existence.

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Not much better. Is the entire book like this?