"Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about"
About this Quote
Polkinghorne is trying to rescue "chance" from the two caricatures that usually swallow it: the casino metaphor (life as meaningless roulette) and the hard-determinist fantasy (everything pre-scripted, so nothing genuinely new can arrive). As a physicist who also thinks like a theologian, he’s after a third register: contingency. Not chaos, not fate, but the branching fact that the world is full of real alternatives, and history is the record of which path got taken.
The deft move is rhetorical. He begins by negating the gut-level association people have with chance - "meaningless randomness" - then replaces it with a term that sounds almost bureaucratic: "historical contingency". That swap matters. Contingency suggests causes, conditions, and constraints; randomness suggests vacancy. He’s saying the universe can be law-governed without being narratively closed.
The subtext is a critique of any worldview that treats novelty as an illusion. If the future is merely the past unspooling, then creativity - biological, cultural, even personal - is just bookkeeping. Polkinghorne insists novelty is structurally possible because "this happens rather than that": selection among possibilities is where newness enters. It’s a subtle defense of freedom and meaning that doesn’t require abandoning science; it reframes indeterminacy as a generative feature, not an existential glitch.
Contextually, this lands in late-20th-century debates about quantum mechanics, complexity, evolution, and providence: how a world with stable laws can still produce surprise. Polkinghorne’s answer is neither mystical nor mechanistic. It’s historical.
The deft move is rhetorical. He begins by negating the gut-level association people have with chance - "meaningless randomness" - then replaces it with a term that sounds almost bureaucratic: "historical contingency". That swap matters. Contingency suggests causes, conditions, and constraints; randomness suggests vacancy. He’s saying the universe can be law-governed without being narratively closed.
The subtext is a critique of any worldview that treats novelty as an illusion. If the future is merely the past unspooling, then creativity - biological, cultural, even personal - is just bookkeeping. Polkinghorne insists novelty is structurally possible because "this happens rather than that": selection among possibilities is where newness enters. It’s a subtle defense of freedom and meaning that doesn’t require abandoning science; it reframes indeterminacy as a generative feature, not an existential glitch.
Contextually, this lands in late-20th-century debates about quantum mechanics, complexity, evolution, and providence: how a world with stable laws can still produce surprise. Polkinghorne’s answer is neither mystical nor mechanistic. It’s historical.
Quote Details
| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
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