The best explanation of the physical world at the very smallest scales is quantum mechanics. The problem with quantum mechanics as an explanation is that when it attempts to make predictions, it can only produce probabilities. This is obviously better than nothing, but saying “that event was random” is similar to saying “Tyche willed it”. There is no good definition of randomness, and no way of testing a sequence for whether or not it has this property called randomness.
If you ever find yourself saying “that’s random”, it’s not a good explanation. Saying something “is random” much closer to an expression of faith than a scientific explanation.
This faith is in what I’m calling “The god of randomness”. It’s no less a god than Tyche or Apollo or Jesus Himself, we just use modern secular language to express it, but the ancients would see through what we are doing.
The Physicist David Deutsch defines a good explanation as one that is “hard to vary” while still accounting for the phenomena it purports to explain². The reason randomness is a bad explanation is because it’s extremely easy to vary, and also it does not account for the phenomenon it purports to explain.
Donald Knuth, the author of The Art of Computer Programming, writes in his second volume³ that computers can’t actually generate random numbers. This surprises many people who normally assume that it’s a basic thing that computers can do, but since computers are deterministic, they have to fake it. What he proceeds to explain in volume 2 is something called a “pseudorandom” number generator. Those actually generate the exact same sequence every time, so you need to seed the generator with the time, so it always starts with a part of the pseudorandom sequence that is different than the last time it was run.
One thing the parapsychologists noticed (including the CIA scientists in Project Stargate) is that belief in parapsychological phenomena actually makes them work better. So consider one possibility: that the conscious observers in the labs doing physics, they believe a certain way (that the physical world is lawlike and has an existence independent of conscious observers), and those beliefs influence the measurements that they participate in producing.
They select for the kinds of phenomena that are easily reproducible (on average over many similar repetitive trials) and then attempt to reduce the rest of the worlds’ phenomena to those, assuming that “smaller” is the same thing as “more fundamental”. This materialist worldview works well enough until we try to work out what consciousness is, but then physicists either have to deny it’s a real thing, or hand-wave about “emergent complexity” and just ignore the problem.
It’s been over a century and still physicists don’t know what quantum mechanics means. Copenhagenists say “shut up and calculate”, Everettians say the wave function in Hilbert space is reality and that all components of the superposition are happening simultaneously in parallel universes, Retrocausalists say that randomness is actually just future events causing things in their past, QBists say that the wavefunction is just a map of the knowledge of the observer, and that reality includes the subject, and that a measurement participates in the creation of the observed values, and that reality is fundamentally mysterious and unconstrained.
The fact that they don’t know what it means, and there are many compatible interpretations that all have “randomness” as some foundational explanatory component, means that we should be cautious about taking on the materialist worldview.
If you then ask the obvious follow-up “what worldview should I believe in then?”, I can’t tell you the answer, but you should try very hard to only believe things that are true. René Descartes attempted to use his method of radical doubt to establish the cogito:
“I think, therefore I am”
as the foundational certainty in his Meditations on First Philosophy and Discourse on the Method. He then argues for the existence of God on this foundation.
There is a fundamental difference between the gods of the many pantheons of the world, and this infinite all-powerful creator God that we just deduced must exist by necessity. The lesser gods were called idols in the Bible, and even without leaning on Biblical authority, we can prove that the god of randomness is not necessary. It’s entirely possible to imagine a deterministic world with no randomness. This is the Maxwell’s Demon thought experiment. Even Einstein said
God does not play dice.