BY CHANCE We cannot escape entirely from the feeling which insists that some strange and wonderful things happen to us which can be explained only by considering chance to be a logical avenue of change.
Look at your life critically and pick out those factors which have been instrumental in making you what you are today. Set aside a few of those elements over which you had little or no control. Your birth, for instance. Did you get to select your parents; choose your place of birth; your heritage?
Some searchers think they see a pattern here...an ideal, a plan or purpose of some sort which guided the towards certain objectives.
Our western hemisphere was discovered, some think, 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, an idea and plans of men of other lands, cultural habits and relationships which determined what our future was to become according to the plans of men from other lands who had never even seen our side of the world.
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 in their
view, 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 vastly more complicated concept demanding more such trite and trivial categorizations.
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,in our war efforts, as well, and and in countless other ways In truth, we leave very little to chance.
We don’t trust it, and rightly so.
A.L.M. January 12, 2006 [c588wds]
