There are only two ways to live
your life: either by chance or by miracles.
Only two. This binary option is not done for convenience. It is not done
so as to simplify life. No. The way I see it, there are no other options. There
is no middle ground because chances and miracles are mutually exclusive. The
prevalence of one would necessarily exclude the other.
A life lived by chance does not
and
cannot allow for miracles - period. And a life lived by miracles cannot and will
not attribute it to chance. This is somewhat in line with the great thinker
Einstein's famous quote, "There are two ways to live: you can live as if
nothing is a miracle; or you can live as if everything is a miracle."
At this juncture, one may be bursting
at the seam with these questions, "How about the jackpot, lottery, Russian
roulette? Surely, the turn of a pair of dice
cannot be the deliberate work of a
miracle maker? Where does he find the time? Surely they all happen by pure
chance right? If not so, do we then have a divine croupier up there
pre-determining the fate of every mortal gamble on earth? And who is he rigging
it for, his votaries or just for his own amusement?"
Now, the questions are rhetorical I know. It's just not that subtle. But the point
about a world
predicated on miracles is that a miracle is self-actualizing and
self-perpetuating. And every state that comes after that (and every state
thereafter) is attributable solely to the birth of that one miracle and no other. Let me explain.
Imagine a cosmic canvass all rolled out
before the miracle maker. He then put his divine color palette to work by
painting out an event and scripting the minutest consequences to follow from
that event ad infinitum. He continues to
do so until he fills it all up, leaving no canvass
space untouched, that is, pre-crafting one grand beginning and allowing that
mother-lode of all beginnings to give birth to the beginnings of many
beginnings.
In this way, each consequence arising from every single miracle
(event) is accounted for; leaving no stones unturned, even for numbers that
were predestined to appear on the face of a pair of dice after they have
stopped spinning in the future.
Then, the miracle maker rolls up the canvass
with diligence, making sure it is rolled up air tight. And this
brings us to the genesis of all miracle whereby the miracle maker starts the
big bang of the grand unraveling. That is, the beginning of time and humanity;
that one elemental event that birth everything big and small.
This un-rolling takes place in human time and space and it proceeds with
calculated grace.
Each event comes up at its own time and the consequences
following it show up as self-initializing. All details, however
inconsequential, unfold in the way that they should unfold including the
spinning of a pair of dice, the evaporation of a droplet, the trajectory of a
strayed bullet, the cracking of dawn, the wisp-like curvature of an escaping
poison fume, the sinuous mutation of a chromosome, and the winking of an eye
intend on murder. All of them happening at their own time
in various past,
present and future, either simultaneously, separately, concurrently, or
divergently. Up to our present time, the canvass is still unfolding, and the
events first scripted by the miracle maker on the canvas each takes their turn
to become the manifold realities as specifically planned. There is really no room for chances here.
However incomprehensible this is to
the human mind, a life based on miracles would be unraveled in this way. I
guess the philosopher David Hume would
roll in his grave if he came to know of
such a canvassed possibility (pun unintended). But to a believer of miracles,
an atheist's claim that he understands how it all works based on nature-aided
randomness, and nothing more, would seem even more ludicrous. I guess one man's
reality is another man's absurdity.
Now, how about a life lived to
endorse chance in everything? What can be said about him? Well for him, the
possibility of a
world of miracles, more so to the lamest aspect involving the
belief that the miracle maker had a painstaking hand in crafting the minutest
variations in nature to account for the emergence of about 400,000 different
species of beetles, is as remote a chance as trying to hit, with a medieval bow
and arrow, a target no bigger than a pin's head that is perched on a pin of
another pin and placed as far off as the most distant edge of the expanding
universe. I know it's a mouthful here but simply put, miracles to an
atheist is
nature-defying and there is nothing more absolute than nature and her empirical
laws operating in this world. So god has no part to play here. Neither does his magical miracle wand.
To such a life, chances and
randomness rule everything; even the genesis of life as we have come to know.
It is therefore a life that does not defer at all to the god hypothesis. And if
one would to rewind the universe's clock back to the very start, what
eventually turns up
today may very well be different from what is seen today.
Humanity may not happen. The world as we know it may be completely different.
Life may not even exist. The earth may be as lifeless as Mars or anyone of
Jupiter's 63 known moons. This is how a world of randomness and chances work,
that is, a minutest variation by the decimals to such a
daunting complexity like the emergence of our universe(s) would unavoidably
produce results that differ greatly from
one another.
But while such a life may make sense
in the interim, at least to a certain extent, the herculean struggle
lies with coming up with an explanation for the origin of this universe. A life
of chance would be hard pressed to argue against the ex nihilo conundrum in
this nagging refrain of “what started it all?” or “who started it
all?”
Personally, solving this great mystery by offering a chance-ruled world
as the all-encompassing explanation is a little way off for me.
Considering that what we know is just
the tip of the iceberg of what we don't know (being the whole iceberg under the
water), I guess the odds would be slightly better when one attempts to shoot an
arrow at a pin's target placed at the other end of the expanding universe as
compared to
conveniently reducing it all to pure random luck as the ultimate
explanation. Hyperbolically speaking, of course. And if I may be forgiven for
being so X-file-ishly portentous to declare this, "The truth is (still) out there."
So, we have returned to Einstein's
quote about miracles. Of course, the great discoverer of the most powerful
equation of all time did not endorse a supernatural entity with that quote. But
I can safely wager that between the two options, that is, a life by chance and
a life of
miracles, the life that hints to something far greater than pure and
isolated chance is to me a better and safer bet for now. Cheerz.
* Image from "www.layoutsparks.com".
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