Abstract
This article investigates religious ideals persistent in the datafication of information society. Its nodal point is Thomas Bayes, after whom Laplace names the primal probability algorithm. It reconsiders their mathematical innovations with Laplace's providential deism and Bayes' singular theological treatise. Conceptions of divine justice one finds among probability theorists play no small part in the algorithmic data-mining and microtargeting of Cambridge Analytica. Theological traces within mathematical computation are emphasized as the vantage over large numbers shifts to weights beyond enumeration in probability theory. Collateral secularizations of predestination and theodicy emerge as probability optimizes into Bayesian prediction and machine learning. The paper revisits the semiotics and theism of Peirce and a <em>given</em> beyond the probable in Whitehead to recontextualize the critiques of providence by Agamben and Foucault. It reconsiders datafication problems alongside Nietzschean valuations. Religiosity likely remains encoded within the very algorithms presumed purified by technoscientific secularity or mathematical dispassion.
Highlights
Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service
Conceptions of divine justice one finds among probability theorists play no small part in the algorithmic data-mining and microtargeting of Cambridge Analytica
Drawing upon Vedic texts and their eventual admixture with the philosophy of mathematics that develops in ancient Greece, he claims: From problems posed by the gods stems the basis of a way of thinking without which modern mathematics would be inconceivable
Summary
One might return to supplementing Foucauldian problematization with the later works of Habermas and noting gestures by both thinkers to Barth.[6]. In his explanation of a symbol as legisign (a law that is a sign; a sign that refers to its denoted object "by virtue of a law"), Peirce writes that "this law is usually established by men."[88] Such mathematical reasoning might describe how the function of a shay, icon, or algorithm is a pragmatic practice of delimited human reason applied to creaturely existence distinct from whatever those elements may mean to divine reason (if anything, and, as such, resists idolizing its own capacities as anything resembling conceptions of gods). He is a probability theorist[91] as much as he is a Pauline thinker His essays, "On the Doctrine of Chances, with Later Reflections" and, in particular, "Evolutionary Love," evince a commitment to salvage both Paul[92] and the gospels[93] from the opportunistic theoeconomic political theology at the basis of the Hellenization of their messianic tradition of love[94] into an institutionalized Roman state religion[95] and its subsequent perversion into the Protestant ethic of capitalism.[96]. The section attempts to attend to ways by which these trends emerge within Whitehead's criticism of probability
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