Apparently written by an Orthodox Jewish mathematician, who has also written on game theory in Pentateuch. If Pascal had had these mathematical tools, might he have bet differently?
Superior Beings: If They Exist, How Would We Know? Game-Theoretic Implications of Omnipotence, Omniscience, Immortality, and Incomprehensibility (Paperback).
Now, this thought has occured here too. In particular, I was doing a mental reductio ad absurdum on how you actually could detect a supernatural being fiddling with a natural process such as , say, oh, just for the sake of it, purely for illustrative purposes, evolution. In particular, given that we haven’t observed ants and giraffes and Methodists appearing ka-pow out of nowhere, how it might be done subtly.
You quickly get to the ‘random’ bit of evolution. If you could show that there was a detectable bias in the randomness of mutations, a signal in what should be pure noise, you’re getting somewhere. And if you can’t – it could just be that the supernatural being was exceptionally good at appearing random. Given that mutations can be caused by radioactivity, and nuclear decay is.. I don’t know. Looked it up, but got lost in a twisty little maze of W bosons, quarks, cross-sections, quantum vacuum fluctuations and Bell’s hidden variables. But it’s defiantly random, and in determining that fact a lot of good people have spent a lot of time working out what random actually is. It’s a good hunting ground.
So if you are going to go looking for a supernatural entity having fun on our coin, then mathematics sounds like as good a bet as any. And it turns out if you take the mean square deviation of uranium atom decay time from a lump of pitchblende carved into the shape of a pentagram and divide by the total number of times the letter Q appears in the King James….
R