Omar Khayyam and chess by Jim McGuiggan

Omar Khayyam and chess

The Persian mathematician and poet, Omar Khayyam insisted that we are, "But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days; Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays, And one by one back in the Closet lays." And it would appear that even the great Player himself is as determined by fate as the rest of us. "And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky, Where under crawling coop'd we live and die, Lift not your hands to It for help--for It As impotently moves as you or I."

But George Arthur Buttrick would have none of it. "Almost every word in the dictionary refutes the poem. The word ‘coward,’ for instance means that a man is free to be brave; and the sign ‘Keep out’ means we are free to enter. Always the arguments are on the side of fixed fate; always our instant assumptions are on the side of free will, and we cannot help making the assumptions. We deduce by apparently unbreakable logic that we are bound, but we still assume that our brilliant argument is free. Not soon shall I forget the sight of a psychologist, famous for the doctrine that all our actions are but inevitable responses to external stimuli, pleading with mothers to train their children in the theory. What use in pleading? Despite his doctrine he had to assume that the mothers could choose to train their children in some other theory."

Words like praise, blame, wrong, sin, good and ten thousand like them deny the claim that we are bound by iron determinism because they all imply that things could possibly be other than they are. If the whole of reality (including those who reflect on that reality) is bound by chance and the necessity of physics (Jacques Monod) not only can we not "blame" we cannot "praise". We are left speechless or at least we know in our bones that our speech is patent nonsense. Not many are like the Stratonician atheist, Bertrand Russell, who openly confessed that there were things going on in the world that troubled him deep within, things he felt compelled to condemn but he knew, he said, that he had no rational grounds to condemn them. Might as well blame a chess piece for moving into a losing square as blame a man for raping a child. Might as well praise an apple for falling down off a tree as praising a parent for loving a child. In a reality where every particle and form of reality is a pre-played chess game there is neither praise nor blame, good or bad.

It might be amusing if it were not so pathetic to hear religious people sniff in derision at the physical and philosophical determinism of non-believers and then substitute for it their theological determinism. In the end whether it’s Omar Khayyam or some rabid hyper-Calvinist, "God ordains whatsoever comes to pass." Ah, no! Sin is our own!

©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.