BY CHANCE?
Some wonderful changes appear to have come into being largely through
the mysterious element of chance
It may be that this continent on which we live was “discovered” by
wandering Norsemen long before Columbus set off to find a route to the riches
of India and, on the way, chanced upon the Caribbean Islands. There is also a
theory now being talked around that we were also discovered from the other
direction. It is widely held someone from China visited our Pacific shores,
probably at about the same time as the Norsemen hit the eastern edges of what
is now Canada. He, or they, may have drifted with Pacific currents which
still bring us occasional reminders of Asia, or they may have been a bit
later trying to find a new route to the markets of Europe.
No one knows because chance leaves no records on purpose. We find
some by accident, however, and our intense studies are based on, yes ...on a
chance of finding proofs some day ... somewhere.
Only when we get into the areas of religious concerns do we shy away
from the idea of chance.
What is providential and destined by a deity vies with the very idea
of chance happenings. I cannot agree with the Deist view that holds the
Universe came into being due to more or less accidental circumstances
prevailing at the time. It has been, it seems, set up as a giant clock-work
mechanism of some type which has been ticking away and running down ever
since. That would be chance, but it seems to me, to be a wider concept which
demands more than such a trite and trivial categorization.
When your child is in the process of being born at the hospital, you
don’t want the doctors and nurses to be doing things by chance, do you?
Think about it from time to time. To put your reliance on chance is
risky at best. If you lose a dollar of two on the lottery from time-to-time,
trusting to chance, the loss may not be too great, and that should be the
extent of such ventures for most of us.
To “bet you life” or any portion thereof, is foolishness.
Much in Mankind’s history which may seem to have happened by chance
really came about from the concerted mental and physical efforts of scores of
people in the past who contemplated and worked diligently trying to make
their world a better place in which to live. We are doing it now in our space
ventures and in countless other ways, and, in truth, we leave very little to
chance.
We don’t trust it...and wisely so.
A.L.M. January 26, 2005 [c455wds]
