Theism and Humanism: Being the Gifford Lectures Delivered at the University of Glasgow, 1914Balfour, Arthur James
Religion
Theism and Humanism: Being the Gifford Lectures Delivered at the University of Glasgow, 1914
Balfour, Arthur James
Humanism; Naturalism; Theism
There is here, surely, a rather awkward transition from the “objective”
to the “subjective” point of view. We were dealing, in the first case,
with groups or series of events about which the doctrine of chances
enabled us to say something positive, something which experience would
always confirm if the groups or series were large enough. A perfect
calculator, endowed with complete knowledge of all the separate group
members, would have no correction to make in our conclusions. His
information would be more complete than our own, but not more accurate.
It is true that for him “averages” would have no interest and “chance”
no meaning. Nevertheless, he would agree that in a long series of
fair throws of a fair die any selected face would turn up one-sixth
times as often as all the others taken together. But in the second
case this is no longer so. Foresight based on complete knowledge would
apparently differ from foresight based on the calculation of chances.
Our calculator would be aware of the exact manner in which the die
was loaded, and of the exact advantage which this gave to certain
numbers. He would, therefore, know that in asserting the chance of any
particular number turning up on the first throw to be one-sixth, we
were wrong. In what sense, then, do we deem ourselves to have been
right?
The answer, I suppose, is that we were right _not_ about a group of
throws made with _this_ loaded die, but about a group of such groups
made with dice loaded at random—a group in which “randomness” was so
happily preserved among its constituent groups that its absence within
each of these groups was immaterial, and no one of the six alternative
numbers was favoured above another.
A similar reply might be given if we suppose our ignorance carried
yet a step further. Instead of knowing that our die was loaded, and
being ignorant only of the manner of its loading, we might be entirely
ignorant whether it was loaded or not. The chances of a particular
number turning up on the first throw would still be one-sixth. But the
series to which this estimate would refer would neither be one composed
of fair throws with a fair die, nor one composed of a series of throws
with dice loaded at random, but one composed of a series of throws with
dice chosen at random from a random collection of dice, loaded and not
loaded!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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