Review: Chance and the Sovereignty of God: A God-Centered Approach to Probability and Random Events

Chance and the Sovereignty of God: A God-Centered Approach to Probability and Random Events
Chance and the Sovereignty of God: A God-Centered Approach to Probability and Random Events by Vern S. Poythress
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an excellent book. It started out reminding my of Jonathan Edwards on the decrees of God but soon struck out on a different path. I must caution, for the truly averse, the book does contain a lot of math. The purpose of the math was to show that even what we call chance or random can be seen to involve order and points to the Creator.

In some of the chapters, where Poythress is working out his proofs, you could always skip to the end of the chapter where he summarizes his findings. If you read nothing else in this book, it’s worth reading the two chapters on chance where he reveals the erroneous thinking and actual idolatrous nature of the way we often approach chance.

He spends a lot of time on probability and makes application of probability to gambling. The material on gambling is also well worth the time to read.

If you haven’t studied much of the sovereignty of God, this probably isn’t the place to start. Overall though, I believe it is an important contribution to the study of God’s sovereignty.

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