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Have you ever noticed things coming together in mysterious ways in your life? Like you were thinking of something or someone and then they appeared in your life? Or perhaps you desired something and the next thing you know someone gives it to you?
Today I had the realization that 3 specific things happened to me the past two weeks which seem a stretch to call random coincidences that have been extremely helpful and in alignment with what I needed at the time. If they aren't coincidences, what could they be? I'm currently describing the events as the Universe communicating that I'm doing something right (on the right track) and thus things are falling together perfectly (I have an older friend of mine that used to say things like that all the time from a Native American Reservation I once lived near). Anyone had stuff like that happen to them? What do you think about happy coincidences?
Have you ever noticed things coming together in mysterious ways in your life? Like you were thinking of something or someone and then they appeared in your life? Or perhaps you desired something and the next thing you know someone gives it to you?
Today I had the realization that 3 specific things happened to me the past two weeks which seem a stretch to call random coincidences that have been extremely helpful and in alignment with what I needed at the time. If they aren't coincidences, what could they be? I'm currently describing the events as the Universe communicating that I'm doing something right (on the right track) and thus things are falling together perfectly (I have an older friend of mine that used to say things like that all the time from a Native American Reservation I once lived near). Anyone had stuff like that happen to them? What do you think about happy coincidences?
Not sure how this relates to atheism, but sure, I've had periods in life where things have broken my way in coincidental manners, I've also had periods where my luck seemed impossibly rotten.
I do not interpret any of it as "the Universe communicating that I'm doing something right" because the universe is a thing, not a planner nor manipulator of fortune with purpose in mind.
They are coincidences, nothing more. Once I was heading to the booth to buy tickets to the annual Orange Bowl Fireworks Show when someone rushed up to my date and I and said "You want some tickets to the show?" We said, sure, and the guy handed us two and rushed away without any explanation. The tickets turned out to be spectacular, one section removed from the celebrity box they had set up for the mayor of Miami.
I do not think that the universe had been thinking "Now what nice gesture can I do for Grandstander and his date?" Do you?
My original post is related to Atheism directly, as I know the members of this sub forum will have particularly unique views on this topic vs what I could expect from Christians or Muslims or Jews who might be inclined to make a spiritual claim to how Jesus or Jehovah or Allah is rewarding you... etc. I respect you all for trying to think through things rather than jumping to a conclusion that was just spoon fed to you.
You and I are wired by natural selection, mbuszu, to run now and ask questions later when the bushes behind us mysteriously rustle. It is (or, mostly nowadays, was) a survival advantage because nothing but your pride is wounded if it's a false alarm, but you may be maimed or killed if it's a predator or aggressor in the bush. This is ascribing agency to the bush when in fact it may be nothing but the wind or a falling branch -- moreover it is ascribing more agency to the bush rustle than may be warranted, as it may simply be a passing squirrel or nesting bird.
A related evolved ability is pattern recognition, or more precisely, pattern mismatch recognition. Currently our most fruitful research in AI progresses exactly because it has abandoned the unjustified notion that the human brain is similar to a digital computer. It recognizes the brain as a sophisticated pattern-matching mechanism. When you walk up to your front door and put a key in the lock and let yourself in, this is mostly an unconscious, almost autonomic action, because you've done it a thousand times before. But what will snap you into awareness is anything that doesn't fit that established pattern: the lock is already unlocked, or jams or is balky in some new way; the door has an unaccustomed hinge-squeak; items just outside the door or just inside it are in disarray or defaced in some way. Now your brain tries to find matches for those mismatches: something is broken, an intruder has entered and may still be within, etc.
The reason these 3 events you mentioned in your post are even remarkable to you is that your brain has recognized them as outliers. In other words, most things that happen to us day-to-day are randomly related to our particular aims and desires. These 3 events are closely aligned with your aims and desires and they are fairly close together chronologically. The logical explanation is that the universe is indifferent to your aims and desires, but, like a stopped clock being correct twice a day, occasionally things from your point of view "just work" and occasionally such events even are somewhat clustered. The illogical explanation is that there is a cosmic control room somewhere that looks mostly with disapproval on your machinations in the world but occasionally rewards you for the "rightness" of your behavior or attempts to subtly or esoterically guide you toward "rightness". This ignores the totality of human experience which suggests that nothing and no one looks on at all, or if anyone does, they could care less whether you live or die, much less what you do while alive.
You decide which is more likely. But be careful not to mix into your deliberations, what you wish to be true, or to be influenced by ideas that are pleasing to you or that elevate your personal significance.
But couldn't there be an agency? I mean, we now have the ability to watch everyone from space. If we wanted to, even a human agency (let's say the CIA since they're sufficiently covert, although I'm fairly certain they're involved in intelligence, not wish-granting) could at least make John Smith out there happy. If a human agency, why not a divine one?
Also, on a simplistic scale there are such agencies. You annoy someone, they and their friends will make your life miserable. They may do it secretly, which if you don't see their hand will look like coincidence. Your rival called 50 people you apply to for jobs, and it seems strange that the only place you can find work is a gas station. Likewise, the opposite is true if you make them happy.
I'd love to know what 3 coincidences he saw, so we could confirm or deny whether they were in fact only random chance or part of something larger. If 3 different people told him he'd get a job, and he did, I'd call that something other than coincidence.
Myself, I have gotten more free tickets to stuff I needed in the last year, and people talking about stuff that actually helped, that I've come to the conclusion people were trying to help me. Thanks guys.
If you really stop to think about the sheer number of variables and possible permutations of how your life could have turned out, every day is filled to bursting with these coincidences.
For example, look at me, from a nation far enough away that many in the US would call it "exotic." Yet when I came here, where did I end up? A tiny town with roughly 700 people in it.
Now, for most immigrants, they'd end up in one of America's major cities, not some fly speck town in a very remote region of the Eastern Seaboard. I could easily argue that there might be 100,000 people alive right now that have any ties to this town which puts me in a very exclusive club. Everyone has heard of New York City, Chicago, and LA - and most people have been to at least one of those cities. But how many people have been to my little village? And how many have actually heard of such a place?
Yet everything I am, everything I have done - they were shaped and molded by my experiences here, and if I had ended up somewhere else, my life would have been very different. Whether that 'other' life would be for good or ill, no one can say.
My point, though, is that we only notice the more dynamic "coincidences" like bumping into someone you were just thinking about or finding money just when you needed it most. Events that solve pressing problems or fulfill a particularly poignent desire will almost always be remembered more than the more blase coincidences like where you were born or who your parents are. If even one variable was out of whack, things in your life would be unrecognizeable.
Every turn of a corner opens up new possibilities while forever closing others; if one could accurately trace precisely how she arrived at that precise place at that precise time to meet her future husband, she'd see a bedazzling chain of "happy coincidences" that brought her to a great place in her life. If she had turned left instead of right just once in that journey, she would have missed him by 10 seconds - but she wouldn't know that, of course, and life goes on.
Have you ever noticed things coming together in mysterious ways in your life? Like you were thinking of something or someone and then they appeared in your life? Or perhaps you desired something and the next thing you know someone gives it to you?
Today I had the realization that 3 specific things happened to me the past two weeks which seem a stretch to call random coincidences that have been extremely helpful and in alignment with what I needed at the time. If they aren't coincidences, what could they be? I'm currently describing the events as the Universe communicating that I'm doing something right (on the right track) and thus things are falling together perfectly (I have an older friend of mine that used to say things like that all the time from a Native American Reservation I once lived near). Anyone had stuff like that happen to them? What do you think about happy coincidences?
I've never considered such things mysterious, because:
1) I can do basic math, and
2) I understand that my incredulity would be irrelevant to why something happens, and
3) I don't ascribe to things causes that are made-up and for which there is not a shred of evidence
Have you ever noticed things coming together in mysterious ways in your life? Like you were thinking of something or someone and then they appeared in your life? Or perhaps you desired something and the next thing you know someone gives it to you?
Today I had the realization that 3 specific things happened to me the past two weeks which seem a stretch to call random coincidences that have been extremely helpful and in alignment with what I needed at the time. If they aren't coincidences, what could they be? I'm currently describing the events as the Universe communicating that I'm doing something right (on the right track) and thus things are falling together perfectly (I have an older friend of mine that used to say things like that all the time from a Native American Reservation I once lived near). Anyone had stuff like that happen to them? What do you think about happy coincidences?
Happy coincidences are nice and it is certainly a boost when everything seems to fall into place.
But I'm wondering what you think about 'unhappy coincidences' and if you think they fall into a similar category?
I used to be the sort of person who wondered vaguely if there was anything in the concepts of yin and yang or karma... you know the idea that for everything negative there is something positive and vice versa.
That was until I was struck by about 6 of the sh**tiest years you could possibly imagine.
I went through a period of time when myself and my immediate family were hit by one thing after another, all of them entirely outside of our control.
I'm not talking about minor things like a tree falling over or breaking something valuable, I'm talking about serious life threatening and life changing events one after the other.
Some of these events (unrelated to one another) happened on the same day. You could call them coincidences. I would sit here and type it all out and describe it, but you'd seriously think I was making it all up.
Now if I was a bad person, you could say, well, it's a cosmic way of showing me that I needed to be punished. But I wouldn't wish what happened to my family on my worst enemy and I don't think of myself as a bad person.
So now I just think life is life. There is no rhyme or reason to it.
Sometimes things just happen to come together; sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way. But if you think about it - what if you went through life and nothing ever seemed to come together - ever. Wouldn't that be a lot stranger?
Wouldn't you now be starting a thread called 'How come nothing ever comes together?'
Coincidences are an inevitable part of life. It's all about chance.
(I didn't mean this post to sound like a big downer by the way, I'm just illustrating a point)
A fair question. But not really relevant to my point about agency inference, which talks about how we tend to jump to conclusions in assigning agency, and says zilch about whether or not agency is possible and/or extant in any specific instance. The point of that is, we tend to see agency where there isn't any, because it is how our brains evolved -- and we tend to notice events that don't match established patterns, for the same reason. Therefore, we ought to be aware of this perceptual quirk and compensate for it with a little healthy skepticism.
Now ... if I was thinking a great deal about, oh, say, a corned beef sandwich on rye bread, and it's not something I regularly eat or ask for, but my wife comes home from shopping and surprises me with a corned beef on rye, COULD it be that some unknown being or force observed my private thoughts, and had a wild hair to make me happy, and thus influenced my wife to buy me exactly that? It is possible, but the far, far, far, more likely explanation is that either it's mere coincidence or that I somehow subtly tipped my wife off to what I was thinking about, or perhaps even that my wife mentioned in passing that she was going to stop at the Deli and that got me thinking about corned beef on rye -- or something along those lines.
Now suppose that I was a theist, one of the "pray without ceasing" types, and aside from just idly thinking about how I'd like that sandwich, I actually tossed it into my internal god-talk? "Lord, a corned beef on rye would taste really good right now!" And behold -- when the sandwich cometh, guess what connection I would tend, for multiple reasons, to make? And guess how much validity that adds or subtracts from the notion that goddunnit? Yep: zilch, zip, nada. Associating god as the instigator of the sandwich delivery would be no more valid than those folks who go on all the time about how you create your own reality, name it and claim it, think it and receive it -- and then ask if you've read this amazing book, The Secret yet. They are just inferring their own agency (or that of some impersonal Tao or karma or universe) rather than that of a specific god -- but the principle remains the same.
But couldn't there be an agency? ... If a human agency, why not a divine one?
To consider the possibility that a particular event is due to a divine agency, you would first have to demonstrate that a supernatural power having agency exists.
The fact that unexpected good things happen is not evidence that a supernatural power exists, anymore than unexpected horrific things happening demonstrates that a supernatural power exists.
Keep in mind that positing that divine agency or agencies causes things to happen must account for both good and evil. Once you explain your good luck in, say, finding $1000 in the pocket of that thrift store coat, with divine agency, you bring up the question of why, the same day you bought that coat for $5, divine agency caused some parent in thailand to sell their 8-yo into sex slavery for not a whole lot more money.
And then you are off, multiplying possibilities and building fantasy worlds in your head.
BTW, if you enjoy multiplying possibilities and building fantasies, tibetan buddhism is a better vehicle than any of the abrahamic religions - although I will admit that mormonism is reasonably florid.
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