Probably yes at the deepest level, but most of what we call chance is not it. Quantum mechanics on the standard interpretation contains irreducible, objective randomness; everyday "chance"—dice, weather, luck—is almost always deterministic processes we cannot track, i.e., ignorance, not indeterminism.
Three distinct things travel under the word "chance".
Epistemic chance is missing information: a coin flip is governed by deterministic mechanics, and we call it random only because we cannot measure the forces precisely; a calculator with full data would predict it.
Statistical chance is the stable pattern many such unpredictable events produce—casinos profit on it—without requiring any fundamental randomness.
Objective chance is genuine indeterminism in the world itself, where identical conditions can yield different outcomes.
Whether objective chance exists turns on physics, and the evidence is strong but not decisive.
Quantum measurement outcomes are, on the orthodox interpretation, irreducibly probabilistic—no local hidden variables can restore determinism, given Bell-inequality violations.
But interpretations differ: pilot-wave theory is deterministic, and the many-worlds interpretation removes chance by making every outcome occur, relocating the appearance of randomness into self-location.
So the existence of fundamental chance is interpretation-dependent and not settled by experiment.
The practical upshot separates cleanly from the metaphysics.
For decisions, treat nearly all real-world chance as epistemic—reducible by better information and modeling—because that is what it almost always is; reserve the possibility of irreducible chance for the quantum scale, where it may or may not be real.
The metaphysical question would be settled only by evidence discriminating the interpretations of quantum mechanics, which we do not yet have.
Probably, at the very bottom of physics—but almost everything you'd normally call "chance" isn't really chance at all. It's just causes you can't see.
Sort the word into three:
Does the last kind exist? Quantum mechanics suggests yes—measurement outcomes look irreducibly probabilistic, and Bell's experiments rule out the easy deterministic fixes. But it's not settled: some serious interpretations (pilot-wave, many-worlds) put determinism back. So "fundamental chance exists" is a strong maybe, not a fact.
Practically, this barely matters: treat essentially all everyday chance as ignorance you can chip away at with better information and models. Save the "maybe it's truly random" thought for the quantum scale. When you lose a bet, the universe didn't roll dice—you just didn't have the numbers.
The Quarrel Over God's Dice.
"God does not play dice with the universe," Einstein insisted, and Niels Bohr is said to have shot back, "Einstein, stop telling God what to do." Behind the quip lay the deepest disagreement in modern physics: is the randomness of the quantum world a real feature of reality, or a temporary confession of our ignorance? Einstein could not accept that nature was random at its root; he was sure a deeper, orderly layer waited beneath the probabilities. A half-century of experiment has not been kind to his intuition—the dice appear to be real—but even now the question is not fully closed, and the greatest scientific mind of the age may have simply been wrong about whether chance exists.
The Demon Who Would Abolish It.
Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined an intellect that knew the position and momentum of every particle in the universe. To such a demon, he argued, the future and the past would lie open like a book already written—nothing would be uncertain, and "chance" would be revealed as the mere shadow of human ignorance. For two centuries this was the confident faith of physics: the world is a clockwork, and randomness is just the fog in our own eyes. Chance, on this view, does not exist at all; it is the name we give our own incapacity, the humility of a small mind facing a determined cosmos. Quantum mechanics is the reason the demon may be impossible even in principle—but the dream of a world with no true dice is not so easily surrendered.
The Mother of Everything New.
Suppose, though, that chance is real—then it is not a defect but the source of nearly everything that matters. Evolution runs on random mutation; without copying errors, life would still be a single unchanging molecule, and you would not exist to object. Creativity leans on the fertile accident, the unplanned collision of ideas; discovery is littered with lucky mistakes. A perfectly deterministic universe unspooling from fixed initial conditions contains, in some sense, no news—everything is already implicit in the start. Chance is what lets the universe surprise itself, the crack through which genuine novelty enters a world that would otherwise only be unfolding what was already there.
Order Woven Out of Randomness.
Here is the paradox that unsettles the intuition that chance means disorder: at scale, randomness becomes the most reliable thing there is. No one can predict a single coin, yet a million coins land almost exactly half heads with near-certainty; no one can say when a given atom will decay, yet a lump of uranium keeps a half-life you can set a clock by. The insurance industry, thermodynamics, the very steadiness of the gas pressure holding up the room—all are order distilled from underlying chaos. Chance at the bottom does not prevent law at the top; it generates it. The most dependable regularities we know are statistical ghosts, built from events each of which is individually a shrug.
The Contingency That Is You.
And then there is the chance you can feel in your own biography. A different sperm among a hundred million, a train missed, a party you almost skipped where you met the person who changed everything—your existence hangs on a chain of coincidences so improbable that, laid out, it looks less like a life than a lottery won ten thousand times in a row. Whether or not the universe is random at the quantum root, your particular self is the child of contingency, unrepeatable, standing on a foundation of near-misses. There is vertigo in this, but also a kind of grace: in a fully rigid cosmos nothing could have been otherwise and you would be a theorem, not a gift. Chance, if it exists, is the give in things—the reason the world holds real alternatives, and the reason your one specific, unnecessary, precious existence counts as something that happened rather than something that merely had to be.
Most of what we ordinarily call chance is not genuine randomness but ignorance—deterministic processes, like a coin flip or the weather, whose causes we cannot track, and which pile up into stable, predictable statistics. Whether truly irreducible chance exists is a question for fundamental physics: quantum mechanics strongly suggests it does, but the matter is interpretation-dependent and not settled by experiment. For practical purposes nearly all real-world chance is the reducible kind, best met with better information and models rather than treated as fate. The genuinely open possibility of objective randomness lives only at the smallest scale of nature.