Coincidence or God? Exploring the Meaning of Life

One thing is certain about coincidence. The phenomenon fascinates believers and skeptics alike. It’s a porthole into one of the most interesting philosophical questions we can ask: Are the events of our lives ultimately objective or subjective?

Is there a deeper order, an overarching purpose to the universe? Or are we the lucky accidents of evolution, living our precious but brief lives in a fundamentally random world that has only the meaning we choose to give it?

If someone were to look at the Bible or Christianity from the outside in, coincidences could seem to play a large role. But from the inside out, there are no coincidences. As a Christian, God is in control of our path.

For those with a highly empirical bent, a coincidence is a happenstance, a simultaneous collision of two events that have no special significance and obeys the laws of probability.

“In reality, the most astonishingly incredible coincidence imaginable would be the complete absence of all coincidence. Believing in the significance of oddities is self-aggrandizing. It says, ‘Look how important I am.’ People find it dispiriting to hear, ‘It just happened, and it doesn’t mean anything.'”

To the mystically inclined, however, coincidence is a synchronicity, the purposeful occurrence of two seemingly unrelated events. The argument is not likely to be resolved anytime soon. Of late, though, the phenomenon of coincidence has begun to yield new scientific insights. It turns out that we may actually be hardwired to connect anomalies in a meaningful way.

Many of the remarkable feats our brains regularly perform—including our ability to learn the meaning of words or decode the unspoken laws of social decorum depend on our penchant for noticing coincidences.

In fact, mathematicians, cognitive scientists, and paranormal researchers are applying the tools of statistics and probability to tease out just where coincidences lie on the bell curve of everyday experience. Are they easily explained, or so improbable they must signify something?

Some examples include:

In A.D. 66, a comet was seen across the sky in Jerusalem just as the Jewish people were revolting against the Romans. In 1066, another comet appeared, just before the fateful Battle of Hastings was fought over the throne of England. Were these merely strange coincidences—or are comets portents of divine intent?

In 1705, English astronomer Edmund Halley was looking through old records of comets when he noticed a coincidence: The bright comets of 1531, 1607, and 1682 had almost the same orbits and appeared approximately every 75 years. Halley concluded they were one comet and predicted it would reappear in 1758. On Christmas night of 1758, Halley’s comet appeared, forever changing our understanding of comets.

Coincidences are a paradox. On the one hand, they seem to be the source of our greatest irrationalities—seeing causal connections when science tells us they aren’t there. On the other hand, some of our greatest feats of scientific discovery depend on coincidences.

If you’re struggling to work through specific events in your life, or you’re want to explore the meaning or purpose of certain circumstances, feel free to contact me to schedule a counseling appointment.