Chapter 23
ORDER FROM SEEMING RANDOMNESS
What looks chaotic from inside may be perfectly lawful from outside.
23.1 The Perspective Problem
Imagine you are a cell in Conway’s Game of Life.
You exist on an infinite grid. You can see your eight neighbors—the cells immediately surrounding you. Each tick, you observe: some neighbors are alive, some are dead. Then something happens to you—you survive, you die, or (if you were dead) you’re born.
From your perspective, the universe is mysterious.
Why did you survive this tick when you died the last time you had two neighbors? Why did your neighbor suddenly appear when the tick before that square was empty? Why do some patterns persist while others vanish?
You might try to find patterns. Sometimes two neighbors means survival; sometimes it means death. (You don’t realize that it depends on whether you’re already alive.) Sometimes a dead cell stays dead; sometimes it springs to life. (You don’t realize that it depends on having exactly three living neighbors.)
The rules are there. They’re simple. But from inside the grid, without knowledge of the rules, everything looks contingent, unpredictable, perhaps random.
Now imagine a different perspective: Conway’s.
Conway sees the entire grid. He knows the rules. He can predict, with perfect accuracy, what will happen at every tick. Given any configuration, he can calculate the next configuration—and the next, and the next, forever.
From Conway’s perspective, there is no randomness at all. Everything is determined. The apparent chaos of the cell’s experience is an illusion born of limited perspective.
23.2 Inside and Outside
This is the perspective problem: what seems random from inside a system may be perfectly ordered from outside.
The distinction matters for how we understand our own universe.
From inside—from our human perspective—events often seem random. A car accident at this intersection rather than that one. A cancer cell arising in this person rather than that one. A storm hitting this village rather than that one. We look for patterns, causes, reasons. Sometimes we find them; often we don’t.
This apparent randomness troubles us. If events are random, they’re meaningless. If they’re meaningless, suffering is absurd. The universe becomes, in Steven Weinberg’s phrase, “pointless.”
But what if the randomness is an artifact of our position?
We’re inside the grid. We see only our neighbors—the immediate causes and effects surrounding our lives. We don’t see the whole pattern. We don’t know the rules with certainty. We can’t calculate forward from initial conditions.
From outside—from a God’s-eye view, if such a view exists—the picture might be entirely different. What looks random from inside might be determined from outside. What looks meaningless from inside might be structured from outside. The chaos might be order we can’t perceive.
23.3 Our Position
We can never take the God’s-eye view. We’re finite creatures embedded in the system we’re trying to understand.
This is not a failure; it’s a feature of what we are. A cell in the Game of Life can’t step outside the grid to see the whole pattern. A character in a novel can’t read the book they’re in. A wave can’t observe the ocean.
But we can know that the limitation exists.
We can know that our sense of randomness might be perspectival—a function of our position rather than a feature of reality. We can know that order might exist even when we can’t see it.
This is not proof that order exists. It’s humility about our ability to judge.
The atheist who says “the universe is random and meaningless” is making a claim about the whole from a position inside a part. The claim may be true, but it exceeds the evidence. From inside the grid, you can’t know whether the grid has rules.
The theist who says “everything happens for a reason” is also making a claim about the whole. It too may be true, but it too exceeds what we can verify. We can trust that there are reasons; we can’t see them.
What we can say with confidence: our perspective is limited. What seems random may be ordered. What seems meaningless may be meaningful. We don’t know.
23.4 Ecclesiastes
The ancient wisdom literature knew this.
The book of Ecclesiastes is a meditation on human limitation. Its author—traditionally Solomon, but probably a later sage writing in his voice—surveys human life and finds it incomprehensible.
“I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.” (1:14)
The Hebrew word translated “vanity” is hevel—breath, vapor, mist. Life is like mist: insubstantial, hard to grasp, quickly gone.
The Preacher observes injustice:
“There is a vanity that takes place on earth, that there are righteous people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked, and there are wicked people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous.” (8:14)
The distribution of outcomes doesn’t match the distribution of virtue. The system seems random, unfair, meaningless.
But then comes a crucial verse:
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart, yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” (3:11)
Two claims are juxtaposed. First: everything is beautiful in its time—there is order, purpose, fittingness. Second: no one can fathom it—the order is invisible to us.
We sense the order. (“Eternity in the human heart.”) We cannot see the order. (“No one can fathom from beginning to end.”)
This is the perspective problem, stated three thousand years ago.
We are inside the grid. We experience events as fragmentary, disconnected, sometimes cruel. But something in us—the eternity in our hearts—suspects that there’s more. A pattern we can’t see. An order behind the apparent chaos.
Ecclesiastes doesn’t resolve the tension. It lets it stand. This is wisdom: holding what we sense and what we see together, without forcing premature resolution.
23.5 Living with Partial Vision
What does it mean to live inside the grid?
It means accepting uncertainty. We don’t know the rules with certainty. We don’t know whether our suffering serves a purpose. We don’t know whether the apparent randomness is real or perspectival. We live with not-knowing.
It means trusting despite uncertainty. Trust is not certainty; it’s commitment in the face of uncertainty. We can trust that there’s order even when we can’t see it. This is faith—not blind belief, but oriented hope.
It means acting anyway. We can’t see the whole pattern, but we can act well in our part of it. We can reduce suffering where we can, create beauty where we can, love the people near us. Our limited perspective doesn’t excuse us from acting; it locates our action within limits.
It means humility. We don’t know enough to declare the universe meaningless. We don’t know enough to declare it perfectly just. We know what we experience, and we know that our experience is partial. Humility is the appropriate response to partiality.
It means wonder. The grid is astonishing. Even from inside, even with limited vision, we see marvels—the complexity of a cell, the sweep of a galaxy, the emergence of consciousness. Whatever the full pattern looks like, our corner of it is extraordinary.
23.6 The View from Nowhere
Perhaps there is no view from outside. Perhaps there’s no God’s-eye perspective because there’s no God. Perhaps the apparent randomness is real randomness—events happening without pattern, without purpose, without meaning.
This is a coherent possibility. We can’t rule it out.
But we also can’t confirm it. To confirm that the universe is meaningless, we would need the very God’s-eye view whose absence makes the universe meaningless. We can’t see that there’s no order; we can only fail to see order.
The honest position is agnosticism about the whole while attending carefully to the parts.
We don’t know if there’s a pattern. We can live as if there is—treating each event as potentially meaningful, each choice as potentially significant, each life as potentially purposeful. This is not self-deception; it’s choosing an orientation in the face of irreducible uncertainty.
The cell in the Game of Life can’t know whether Conway exists. But it can live as if its survival matters, as if its neighbors matter, as if the grid has structure. From inside, that’s all any of us can do.
Coda: The Fog
Think of it this way.
You’re walking through fog. Dense, gray, visibility ten feet. Beyond that—nothing visible. You don’t know what’s out there. Maybe the path continues; maybe it ends at a cliff. Maybe there are other walkers; maybe you’re alone. Maybe the fog lifts ahead; maybe it extends forever.
From inside the fog, you can’t know.
But you keep walking. You trust the ground beneath your feet, even though you can’t see where it leads. You put one foot in front of the other. You attend to what you can see—the path here, the rocks here, the sounds around you.
This is life inside the grid. Visibility is limited. The whole is hidden. We walk by faith, not by sight—not because we’ve chosen faith over sight, but because sight fails and walking continues.
The fog may lift. There may be a vista at the end—a God’s-eye view granted after death, or a gradual lifting as understanding grows. Or the fog may simply be the way it is, forever.
We don’t know.
But we walk. Through the fog, on the path, inside the grid—finite creatures with eternity in our hearts, sensing order we cannot see.