GRGR (2) "great bright hand"

[MalignD at aol.com]

In watching two strands--one about Poisson distributions, etc., one about 
religion, I wonder whether it has struck anyone else to see 
affinities--between predestination and statistical thinking.  Some random 
thoughts:

It is axiomatic to statistical thought that "the coin has no memory"; also 
axiomatic that, if the coin is flipped a thousand times, there will be 
something close to five hundred heads flipped and five hundred tails.  What 
is true (or free), then, for the single flip is not true or free in the 
aggregate:  laws of probability tend not to allow that ten thousand coins 
will come up heads.  

A similar tension exists in Calvinism between predestination and free 
will--between the free will allowed the individual and the predestined 
aggregate actions of mankind.  Each man may or may not be elect or damned.  
Provided no certainty either way, he experiences the freedom to act--to 
choose a moral life, to work, hopefully to prosper--or not.  Nevertheless a 
fixed (God-known) number of souls always come up tails.

Calvinism grows out of the reformation's concept of grace and its rejection 
of the Catholic Church's (reducing it somewhat overly here) cause-and-effect 
theology of good works leading to salvation.  So similar, perhaps, the 
conflict between statistical Mexico and Pointsman, the consummate cause and 
effect guy.

On the other hand--

In reformation theology, grace is absolute, all or nothing, paradoxical; one 
is separated from God or not; it is a qualitative state, not quantitative.  
This as opposed to the Catholic church's quantitative, relativistic 
notion--good works or their absence leaves one more or less close to grace.  
Seen this way, Mexico and Pointsman would seem to shift seats somewhat and my 
little analogy begin to collapse ...
  
So, on another tangent:  If free will is discounted (it has been asked about 
Calvinism), isn't God responsible for worldly evil?  Calvin, answering, 
called the world "the theater of the divine glory," in which God's glory 
takes precedence over his redeeming and forgiving love (an apt God for a 
world war).  The Calvinist God allows men to do evil in order that his glory 
may be revealed.  Predestination reveals God's grace at work, in that all are 
not accepted blindly.  What is given to some must be denied others.  A 
zero-sum game, then.