Consider the universe from the big bang to the moment before life started. What does it mean to say that some event happen by chance during that period?

— Emanuel Derman (@EmanuelDerman) December 17, 2018

Here’s how to make an event occur completely by chance and completely non-deterministically: take a uranium atom. Or many of them. Have it hooked up to a detector (Geiger counter). When there is a radioactive decay detected, rig the detector to trigger a switch which turns on a sign. The sign will say, “This was a non-deterministic event.”

There is absolutely no way to predict — even with perfect information — when this event will occur. None. Zero. It is a chance event. If you rewound the universe and started again, it would not happen the same way (despite what you might have been told).

This means that the event occurred by chance. Why do people have so many problems with this? Why are they so wedded to the obviously false determinism?

By the way, this doesn’t mean that there is free will. The two are not related. But it does mean two things: 1) Strict determinism is not true in this universe and 2) Causality is weak or violated in this universe because nothing caused the uranium atom(s) to decay; they just did.