§ 21. The simple fact is that any rational attempt to decide between chance and design as agencies must be confined to the case of finite intelligences. One of the important determining elements here, as we have seen, is the state of knowledge of the agent, and the conventional estimate entertained about this or that particular arrangement; and these can be appreciated only when we are dealing with beings like ourselves.
For instance, to return to that much debated question about the arrangement of the stars, there can hardly be any doubt that what Mitchell,—who started the discussion,—had in view was the decision between Chance and Design. He says (Trans.
Roy.
Soc.
1767) “The argument I intend to make use of… is of that kind which infers either design or some general law from a general analogy and from the greatness of the odds against things having been in the present situation if it was not owing to some such cause.” And he concludes that had the stars “been scattered by mere chance as it might happen” there would be “odds of near 500,000 to 1 that no six stars out of that number [1500], scattered at random in the whole heavens, would be within so small a distance from each other as the Pleiades are.” Under any such interpretation the controversy seems to me to be idle. I do not for a moment dispute that there is some force in the ordinary teleological argument which seeks to trace signs of goodness and wisdom in the general tendency of things. But what do we possibly understand about the nature of creation, or the designs of the Creator, which should enable us to decide about the likelihood of his putting the stars in one shape rather than in another, or which should allow any significance to “mere chance” as contrasted with his supposed all-pervading agency?
§ 22. Reduced to intelligible terms the two following questions seem to me to emerge from the controversy:—
(I.) The stars being distributed through space, some of them would of course be nearly in a straight line behind others when looked at from our planet. Supposing that they were tolerably uniformly distributed, we could calculate about how many of them would thus be seen in apparent close proximity to one another. The question is then put, Are there more of them near to each other, two and two, than such calculation would account for? The answer is that there are many more. So far as I can see the only direct inference that can be drawn from this is that they are not uniformly distributed, but have a tendency to go in pairs. This, however, is a perfectly sound and reasonable application of the theory. Any further conclusions, such as that these pairs of stars will form systems, as it were, to themselves, revolving about one another, and for all practical purposes unaffected by the rest of the sidereal system, are of course derived from astronomical considerations.[10] Probability confines itself to the simple answer that the distribution is not uniform; it cannot pretend to say whether, and by what physical process, these binary systems of stars have been ‘caused’.[11]
§ 23. (II.) The second question is this, Does the distribution of the stars, after allowing for the case of the binary stars just mentioned, resemble that which would be produced by human agency sprinkling things ‘at random’? (We are speaking, of course, of their distribution as it appears to us, on the visible heavens, for this is nearly all that we can observe; but if they extend beyond the telescopic range in every direction, this would lead to practically much the same discussion as if we considered their actual arrangement in space.) We have fully discussed, in a former chapter, the meaning of ‘randomness.’ Applying it to the case before us, the question becomes this, Is the distribution tolerably uniform on the whole, but with innumerable individual deflections? That is, when we compare large areas, are the ratios of the number of stars in each equal area approximately equal, whilst, as we compare smaller and smaller areas, do the relative numbers become more and more irregular? With certain exceptions, such as that of the Milky Way and other nebular clusters, this seems to be pretty much the case, at any rate as regards the bulk of the stars.[12]
All further questions: the decision, for instance, for or against any form of the Nebular Hypothesis: or, admitting this, the decision whether such and such parts of the visible heavens have sprung from the same nebula, must be left to Astronomy to adjudicate.