The Black Swan – Inferring the Existence of God

My wife claims that I read some very strange books. Recently, I came home from the library with Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan – The Impact of the Highly Improbable. She picked it up and read the inside liner – “A Black Swan is a highly improbable event with three principle characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a Black Swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world…” Wendy just shook her head.

I’ve probably already lost some readers by writing that opening paragraph, but if you are still reading this and if you believe that you have a something of a mathematical mind, I highly recommend this book. It opened my eyes to see that events much larger than we can typically imagine are the events that truly shape our world. And the author makes a clear point – anyone who tries to create models that predict the stock market, weather, or the course of history are simply armed with too little information to be accurate in the long run. There are no known models to correctly predict things of this nature. My apologies to the global warming…er, I mean, climate change, crowd.

The story of the black swan analogy goes like this. Before the discovery of Australia, all swans that had ever been seen in the world were white. It was a reasonable conclusion to say that “all swans are white”. After all, no other color had ever been observed by humans. But when mankind “discovered” Australia, lo and behold, they sighted a species of jet black swans. Given the information that they had before these swans were sighted, was there any way to predict the existence of a black swan? No, there was not, and so it was bad science to simply assume that all swans are white. The point is this – we don’t know what we don’t know. Even at this very moment, we dismiss the idea that a green swan could exist – simply because we have never seen one. But does that actually prove the point?

Similarly, Taleb notes, “We are not naïve enough to believe that someone will be immortal because we have never seen him die, or that someone is innocent of murder because we have never seen him kill.” And yet, we often draw conclusions of the same nature – that the stock market is now crash-proof, or that there is no longer any way to hijack a plane.

Philosopher David Hume made the point in the mid-18th century that we cannot reasonably draw valid conclusions simply based on inductive reasoning – that is, just because we have observed something happen repeatedly does not guarantee that it will continue to happen in the future. Taleb makes this point using the excellent analogy of the life of a turkey.

Suppose you are a turkey (I have to smile at that opening). Your every waking moment for the four months of your life to adulthood consists of roaming the barnyard, basking in the sun, and watching the kind farmer turn out to feed you twice a day. For your entire turkey life, there is no departure from this routine – and there is no reason to believe that things will be otherwise.

But the farmer knows more than the turkey does, and on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, he changes his routine. Unaware of the holiday tradition, the turkey makes his contribution to the Thanksgiving dinner. He never knew that this was part of the overall plan - but for the farmer, it was always known. For the turkey, the final day of his life was a Black Swan event. Nothing in his “turkey model” predicted the change, but it happened anyway.

Reading Taleb’s book, I can’t help but think that the analogy applies equally as well to our relationship with God. From our standpoint, like that of the turkey, we cannot conceive of the full course of history, especially the future. But for God, this is easy. Our limited viewpoint may cause us to doubt the existence of God for a time, and some will draw the incorrect conclusion that there simply is no God. But we must realize that in this life, we will always be the turkey. God understands much more than we can conceive or imagine. And thankfully for us, 1 Corinthians 2:9 proves this point – “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him”. The Second Coming of Jesus will be a Black Swan event – unless you’re expecting him.