Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Not a chance


To some extent, events often appear to be random. When you have the sole survivor of a plane crash or train crash, when a passenger is thrown from a car and survives unharmed, some people, especially friends and relatives of the survivor, call that a miracle.

But atheists respond by saying that's random. Odds are that every so often, that's bound to happen. But what about all the other cases? What about the causalities? 

The atheist has a point. Statistically speaking, we'd expect that to happen by chance every so often. So these anomalies don't necessarily reflect the hidden hand of providence.

Mind you, apparent randomness is consistent with particular providence. To take a comparison, pi is apparently random, yet pi is utterly and exactly predictable. Indeed, there are formulas for generating pi:


So there's a hidden pattern in pi, even if pi is too big for the human mind to detect the hidden pattern. 

Likewise, the fact that some people die in accidents while others survive isn't proof of randomness. Who dies and who survives affects the future. Even one individual's life or premature demise can have an enormous impact on subsequent events further down the line. We don't see the pattern because we don't know the goal, and we lack the overview to see how apparently independent events converge on the goal. Ye everything happens for a reason–however obscure to you and me.  

So even if the only kinds of events in life were seemingly random events, that would still be consistent with predestination. With God prearranging the outcome to further his long-range aims. 

But in addition to deceptively random events are other examples, like answered prayer, where a pattern is more evident. Of course, some apparent answers to prayer may be coincidental. But there are other cases where it's too specific to be random. And that's just one type of divine intercession. There are miracles, prophecies, premonitory dreams, &c. 

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