Suppose you engage in a betting game with a friend, involving a series of coin tosses. You have the privilege of providing the coin, and of making the call each time. (Such a friend!) You always call heads. But the first 20 tosses are tails, and you lose a bundle. Would you conclude that your friend must be cheating somehow, or that someone, somewhere, somehow, is manipulating the coin? If you did, you would be thinking like a creationist — you would be insisting that “pure chance” cannot lead to extraordinary results, and therefore some outside force must be responsible.

Or suppose that instead of losing, you won 20 times in a row. Would you conclude there must be some divine or supernatural intervention then? Perhaps so, but you would be more inclined to think of it as a benign rather than a malevolent force. Yet both outcomes are equally (im)probable– as is a series of 5 wins, 5 losses, 5 wins, and 5 losses.

Such patterns stand out, of course, because they are much more uncommon than shorter, more irregular sequences. But as any seasoned gambler will tell you, anything that theoretically can happen will happen if you stick around long enough. And absolutely without any outside interference. That’s true in gambling, and it’s true in just existing — if not as an individual, then as a species.

While playing poker once, I drew a hand of 4 of a kind; naturally I bet big, holding the third-highest possible hand, which occurs only once in 4165 trials. But alas, another player showed a royal flush — which is the highest hand, with odds of 649,739 to one. The odds of both of these rare hands cropping up in the same showdown are about 2.7 billion to one. But it happened; and I was not at all a frequent poker player. Yet at no time did I conclude that the hand of God must be slapping me in the face. Because I understood how math works.

Cart and horse

What applies to the poker table or the casino also applies to the universe itself. Creationists, however, are haughtily dismissive of “pure chance” because they view the world teleologically; they look at the final result and falsely conclude that it was inevitable, and therefore there must have been a conscious plan behind it. Not only are both of these assumptions fallacious, but they are — contrary to what creationists also assume — independent.

This mindset is perfectly epitomized in an anecdote (which I believe I’ve told before) related by the great Douglas Adams, who told how as a student in a parochial school, he heard one of his nun-teachers comment that it was surely a sign of divine providence that there was so much green in the world, since green is a color very pleasing to human eyes. But even at that tender age, little Doug knew that the good sister had it ass-backward: the human eye has come to regard green as pleasing because there is so much of it in nature, not vice-versa. If most vegetation were orange instead, we’d now be waxing poetic about orange valleys, forests and mountains.

Creationism, in short, is geocentric, anthropocentric, egocentric, and downright arrogant. It is based on the presumption that the universe exists to serve us; the truth, of course, is that we are a mere blip on the universe’s radar, and a tremendous fluke of a blip at that. We are here because of an astoundingly long chain of highly unlikely events — the evolution toward homo sapiens began with the random mingling eons ago of two single-celled organisms, a convergence that occurred only once and has not been repeated since.

Flukes and flaws

This process, and other fascinating tidbits, are discussed in the book Fluke by Brian Klaas. Purely by a fluke, I began reading this book shortly after having a protracted discussion about such matters with a fundamentalist nephew, which already had prompted me to begin drafting this essay.

Whether by pure chance or divine guidance, Klaas is uniquely qualified to author a volume like this, both professionally and personally. As he reveals early in the book, he literally owes his very existence to the horrific murders of four children a century ago. Chance isn’t always pretty, even when it produces beneficial results –which in many cases it doesn’t. And there are plenty of eye-opening examples in this work about how random elements drive the forces of history, science and human affairs.

He also addresses two other false assumptions that creationists make, and which we’ve discussed here before. One is that every event has just a single cause; in fact, it has a virtually infinite number of such causes — cause and effect isn’t a chain, but an astoundingly complex web. Klaas might say that because those children were murdered by their mother, who then committed suicide, their father later remarried — and that couple were his own great-grandparents. True enough. But that mother would not have killed her children and herself had she not been mentally disturbed; so one could say that actually that is the cause. But what caused her instability? Trauma? Genetic factors? One could follow the lines of inquiry indefinitely.

The other false assumption is that big outcomes must have big causes. In fact, even the most enormous of outcomes can be produced by very minute and seemingly insignificant factors. As Klaas puts it so aptly, “when you change anything, you change everything”.

He begins his tome with an account of how U.S. forces in World War II, when plotting to bomb Japan, originally had Kyoto pegged as the primary target, with a couple of backups. The change of plans to go after Hiroshima and Nagasaki instead was the result of at least a couple of fluky factors, including the cloud cover on the day of the second bombing; and the fact that one official in charge of making the choices had vacationed in Kyoto years earlier and fallen in love with the place. The decision to spare Kyoto saved about 200,000 lives.

It’s important to realize that the butterfly effect, though it deals with fluky factors, is itself not a fluke; it’s the norm, not an aberration — the guiding principle of reality as we know it. And creationists consistently overlook that inconvenient fact. They look at the human animal and the planet we live on, and assume that it all just came into existence instantaneously, and on demand. In fact, the universe and everything in it are all the result of a long, long, long series of trials and errors — with the “errors” outnumbering, by many orders of magnitude, what we would consider the “successes”.

Dogmatists tend to consider everything, including the human body, to be perfectly “designed”. Actually, the human body has a great many design flaws that are inconvenient, senseless, harmful, sometimes deadly, and even– if one were to attribute them to a creator — inexcusably inept. (See This Book May Save Your Life by Dr. Karan Rajan.) If we regard the universe as “perfect”, it’s only because we have warped our concept of perfection to fit it, as Douglas Adams’s teacher did.

Probabilities, providence and parallels

Calling the universe a divinely ordained creation is like viewing a series of 20 consecutive “heads” coin tosses as divinely ordained. In both cases, you are taking a single improbable outcome in isolation. But it did not occur in isolation. An untold number of coin tosses, or at least potential coin tosses, led up to that series. And an untold number of cosmic experiments led to this “Goldilocks zone” with conditions that happen to be just right to produce life as we know it.

Meanwhile, there may be other planets out there where there are creatures very similar to humans, but with three arms. There may be others that are identical to ours except that females dominate most societies instead of males. And this vast array of possibilities only takes into account the universe as we know it, on this plane of reality. Scientists now postulate that there are alternate realities; thus, it’s possible that absolutely any kind of world you possibly can conceive of exists at some level. After all, the number of possible factors, possible interactions, and possible outcomes, is more or less infinite. The world we inhabit may or may not be unique; but it’s no more special — no more favored by God — than any of the others.

Creationists no longer can even assail the Theory Of Evolution (actually more than one theory, and they’re not mere theories) on the grounds that it can’t be proven. Because it can. As Klaas details, a laboratory experiment involving e coli (which reproduce through more than 6 generations a day) led to a striking and unexpected mutation in one particular segment of the bacteria population. And there you have it: the evolution of a biological species in a test tube, in a relatively short time span. If one cell can evolve, then certainly a being composed of many cells can evolve, particularly given enough time and enough trials.

Of course, the creationist may simply respond to all of this by saying “So what? It’s still God who causes such things to happen. ”

Well, it’s true that we can’t disprove the existence of God, or disprove that God created the universe, any more than we can prove the validity of those propositions. (And for the umpteenth time, it would be most helpful when discussing God to define just what the word means.) But what modern science can and does do is prove that it isn’t necessary to invoke a creator in order to explain the universe. Good old-fashioned chaos will do quite nicely, thank you. And hey, if you linger at the roulette table long enough, you just might see 20 reds or blacks in a row. (Though it’s not advisable to stake the deed to the house on it.)

Que sera

There is a fair amount of compelling evidence to support the premise that many things– if not all things — that happen to us, as well as things we do, and even things we think, are beyond our control. You might feel that this understanding of reality as the product of random factors is depressing. But in fact it’s quite liberating. It can relieve us from blaming ourselves for our misfortunes, or passing judgment on the misfortunes of others. In can prevent us from getting too cocky over our good fortunes, or heaping undue adulation on others for their own.

To take a totally random and hypothetical example, suppose there was a major presidential election, between one well-qualified and very likeable candidate, and one utterly abominable and incompetent candidate — yet the latter somehow won. People might be pounding their heads against the wall trying to figure out what went wrong, and how such a disaster might be averted in the future. But the outcome was the result of countless very tiny factors, mostly or entirely out of our grasp.

It’s true that changing even one of those tiny factors might have produced a different winner. But it’s also true that changing all of them might have produced the same result. Because an election is a closed system, with a limited range of outcomes (only two in our totally random and hypothetical example). The universe at large, on the other hand, has a literally unlimited number of possibilities. And while the ugly outcome of that totally random and hypothetical election might have been completely beyond our control, we can take heart in knowing that tiny random butterfly factors can (and probably will) effect another alteration of course in the (hopefully very near) future.

The mistake creationists make is treating the universe like a closed system — assuming that it had to either come into existence exactly as it is, or not exist at all. But there are infinite variations of the universe which could have existed — and indeed which may exist somewhere.

Human beings have an innate craving for narrative, order, reassurance that everything is unfolding according to a plan. (Those evil demagogues win elections because they sell the public on a compelling and simplistic story — even if the public doesn’t really believe it.) Thus the enduring appeal of conspiracy theories.

The New Agey notion that you are completely in command of your destiny, and can cause things to manifest just by sending out the right vibrations may be a total crock. But if it’s an illusion, it’s not an entirely useless one. The same for trying to elicit assistance to get what you want by petitioning a divinity. At the very least, both of these approaches (even if they both turned out to be self-deceptions) help maintain focus, engagement and hope. And that’s not bad.

Still, whatever ideology or worldview we may adopt, we should not forget the essential, eternal truth that sometimes — if not always — shit just happens.