Fair waved the golden corn

Fair waved the golden corn

in Canaan's pleasant land,

when, full of joy, some shining morn,

went forth the reaper-band.

Every week-day morning at Alresford Preparatory School we sang a hymn probably followed Miss Curtis reciting a prayer. That was our morning "assembly". The hymn was chosen from a fixed and short list, round robin style. And one of the hymns, and the one that for some reason I hated, was "Fair waved the golden corn". Possibly because of the very dull melody, possibly because of the lyrics the point of which is nigh incomprehensible to me even now.

The other hymns in the list? Sorry, but I cannot remember. Strange that I should only remember the one I disliked.

The God of chance

The lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing thereof is of the LORD.  (Proverbs 16:33)

Casting lots was a method used in the Old Testament to determine the "will of God". This verse was quoted in this morning's sermon to show that God still controls outcomes so that there is no such thing as "chance" regarding events in our lives.

My son has four girls. If they were to have a fifth - what would be the probability (i.e. chance) of it being a girl? A trick question and of course the "correct" answer according to statistics is about 49%.  But actually, quite apart from God, it is somewhat meaningless to talk statistics when the sample size is so small. The best one can say is that it will certainly be either a girl or a boy. Or, if you believe in the God of Proverbs 16, that it will be the exact sex that God appoints. And so were born two boys: John to be "the Baptist" and Jesus "the son of God".

So, if indeed God interferes with the laws of chance, doubt is cast on the outcome of physical phenomena that the law is supposed to govern.  And modern physics is all about probability.  Enter quantum mechanics with Schrödinger's cat and Maxwell's demon, Bose–Einstein statistics and Fermi–Dirac statistics and wot-not. Carbon 14, and any other radioactive-isotope, dating not only assumes that things were then as they are now, but also depends on probability.

Maybe God putting his spanner in the works and tweaking chance explains miracles, and could even justify creation. Like as in the angel Gabriel's For with God nothing shall be impossible. (Luke 1:37)

Not that I can prove this anymore than I could predict the sex of my son's fifth child. Indeed the point about the "thought experiment" named Schrödinger's cat is that, according to quantum mechanics the cat is both dead and alive at the same time and this reality collapses into one or other possibility only when the box is opened and the cat is observed. I'll only know for such when my daughter-in-law gives birth (or is scanned)... in the unlikely event that they have a fifth child!