Is the universe random, or does God uphold and orchestrate things like the bible says he does? Randomness is a term we use for things that are unpredictable to the human mind. However, the laws of physics are consistent enough that things don’t just happen for no reason. Even coin flips can be predicated with 100% accuracy if one knows all of the parameters with precision and then sets up controlled flips with fixed parameters. With the knowledge of things like the mass of the coin, flatness of the landing surface, height from the ground plane, and force used to flip the coin, one can figure out how much torque the coin will have when flipped with a specific amount of force at a specific point on the surface of the coin.

If the coin’s spin number in the air is even, then the coin face that’s up when it lands will be the same as the initial up face. If the coin’s spin number is odd then its landing face will be the opposite face of the starting one. So if we start heads up, an odd number of flips will land tails up, and even will be, heads up. We can adjust parameters and see how the coin’s motion is affected and make accurate predictions of how it will land because the acceleration of gravity on the earth’s surface (-9.8m/s^2) and the mass of the coin are consistent variables. Meanwhile, height, surface type, and flip force can be changed but with the right equation, one can determine the outcome with each kind of change.

The ability to calculate things like this comes from the fact that the universe isn’t random. The sky doesn’t randomly turn green, people don’t randomly turn into statues, cars don’t turn into butterflies, etc. If things were truly random wouldn’t we be popping in and out of existence? Nothing we know today should exist consistently if everything was random. This article should pop out of existence along with all of us. All of it is engineered to be what it is, nothing randomly deviates from its true attributes. Every action is the result of another action (Newton’s third law).

I say all this to illustrate a point on an issue I see with the naturalism worldview, which says that the universe randomly exploded and all life just randomly emerged. Naturalism requires components of a cell to form and exist in a sustainable state before they randomly bump into each other and form a cell, yet many components inside a cell cannot exist outside of the cell, so can anyone claim that to be true when it is not observable? The presence of water supposedly suggests life on another planet, yet water itself is anti-life since DNA/RNA dissolves in water. This is because water dissolves sugar, the sugar molecule that connects the phosphate to the nitrogen base cannot survive in a primordial soup environment if water is present because of the solubility rule of “like dissolves like” in chemistry. The rules that prevent matter from being created or destroyed, couldn’t exist in a world where matter randomly appears to violate the rule. The matter must have pre-existed the law, but then where did the law come from? How can there be consistent rules in a totally random universe? Who/what turned off the random? Some force outside of the rules of the natural world had to create the material world and then subdue it with rules to keep it consistent. The 2nd law of thermodynamics, suggests that chaos doesn’t lead to order, so how did the universe randomly create itself in chaos, and then subdue itself with order? Again who/what turned off the random?

I leave you with a quote from a French scholar and polymath, Pierre Simon Laplace:
“We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”
— Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities