No one was in the building, so no one was harmed.

Transcription

1 1 Is the Universe Random, Or Is There Something Out There Controlling Things? November 3, 2013 Rev. Roger Fritts Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota One March evening in 1950, in the town of Beatrice, Nebraska, fifteen people were planning to attend a church choir rehearsal at 7:20. In the past, these fifteen people had agreed as a group on the importance of punctuality. None of them liked the rehearsal sessions to run late, and it irritated the more punctual members to arrive on time and wait around for stragglers to drift in. Promptness was the rule. Nevertheless, March 1, 1950 all fifteen people, including the director, were late. They were late for at least ten different reasons. Car troubles delayed two women. A dress that needed ironing delayed the minister, his wife and his daughter. The pianist awoke late from a nap. Others were late because they paused to complete homework, finish a letter, or hear the end of a favorite radio show. Because of these different reasons the church was still empty at 7:25, five minutes after the rehearsal normally began. That was when an explosion destroyed the church building. Firemen thought the explosion was caused by a natural gas leak, ignited by the church furnace. No one was in the building, so no one was harmed. According to Life Magazine, which did a story on the event, some choir members talked of a protecting hand. Some talked of precognition and mysterious hunches. One said after the explosion, "I had this funny feeling there was a reason for being late." Some talked of destiny, astrology, and providence. "It wasn't our time to die," they said. These comments are not unusual. One survey reports that 71 percent of Americans believe that when good or bad things happen, these occurrences are part of God's plan. They believe God is involved in their everyday lives and concerned with their personal well-being. Consider these examples: "I was destined by God to win the lottery" said a cancer victim who had been out of work for a year. She won $60 million. "What will you do with all that money?" asked one journalist. She replied that she would like to buy George Clooney. "Only later did I realize that God had a plan for me," wrote Scott Walker, the Governor of Wisconsin. After making a serious political blunder, Governor Walker picked up his daily devotional and saw the title "The power of humility, the burden of pride." The Governor wrote, "I looked up and said, I hear you, Lord.' God was sending me a clear message to not do things for personal glory or fame." "I feel God gave me exactly what I wanted," said Kanye West, an American recording artist. About his engagement to Kim Kardashian, Mr West said, "I have to just follow what God really wants me to do."

2 2 "God saved me from death" said a soldier. God intervened to spare his life, amid rioting when he found himself stranded with two of his men. A hail of gunfire cut down the other soldiers, fatally injuring one, while he emerged unscathed. "God had shown me his love and his protection," he said. As different as these four events are in human terms, they all raise the same religious question. They all suggest that there is something out there controlling things. The problem with this belief is that $ While some people win the lottery, other people do not. $ While sometimes a Bible reading seems relevant, often times it does not. $ While sometimes people are happy engaged to a partner, other times engagements end and couples do not get married. $ While sometimes a soldier escapes death in war, others do not. In other words, if something is out there controlling things, why do disappointing, painful, tragic things happen? A common reply to this question is that when God does not rescue people, God is punishing them. According to this explanation, injury, illness and death are punishments for evil acts. However, sometimes the nicest people are injured in accidents. Sometimes innocent children die of illness. Kind, loving people suffer as the result of natural disasters. In the face of such sad events, the belief that hardship is a punishment is difficult to justify. In response to this problem, some clergy developed a theory that when injury, illness or death happens to innocent people, it is a test of their faith. For example, if you have lived a good life, attended church regularly, had always been kind to your children, and suddenly find yourself seriously ill, this is not punishment. It is a test of your faith, and a test of your family's faith. Yet a problem arises when a kind, loving, churchgoing person does die a tragic death. Does this mean that the person has failed the test? If death is a punishment, and the threat of death is a test of faith, then people who keep the faith should not die young. Yet they sometimes do. Clergy explain this by saying that God needs that person in heaven. They tell us that we should not be sad. They say we should be thankful that God needs the person we love for a higher purpose. Many people in our society accept this system of explanations about how providence intervenes in the world. The basic belief is that a conscious will is acting in the world, helping determine our fate and the fate of all the earth. This doctrine supplies an explanation as to why things happen. Derived from old scripture and theology, this belief that God is controlling things

3 3 provides a degree of certainty as we move through life. Although about 71 percent of Americans believe this, it is a system of theology that I cannot accept. The belief that injury or illness is either a punishment for wrong doing or a test of faith leaves me to imagine an all-powerful God who is capable of sadistic testing. I am left with an image of a God who likes to watch us suffer. For the most part, people attracted to Unitarian Universalism have left behind this theology. The belief in divine intervention is no longer part of most of our personal theologies. Religious liberals generally do not believe that when something good happens to us God is rewarding us. We do not believe injury or illness is God punishing us or testing us. And we doubt that when one of us dies the death occurred because God needed us in heaven. Still, this leaves us with a question. Why were all those people in Nebraska late to a choir rehearsal on the same night that the furnace blew up? My explanation is to say that the universe is random. The Nebraska church incident is a coming together of random events in a way that appeared meaningful but had no purposeful, controlling force behind it. Tardiness for choir practice in churches is common. In my experience to find fifteen people late for a church gathering is less rare than to find fifteen on time. Having attended hundreds of church meetings, I can say that situations of 100 percent tardiness, in which a dozen people all arrive at a church gathering late despite requests for promptness, happen frequently. Most of these situations pass unnoticed because there is nothing interesting about them. The Nebraska church episode made news because an explosion occurred, and the explosion made an ordinary and otherwise uninteresting situation seem to take on special meaning. Coincidences happen to everyone. Most of them are trivial and elicit nothing more than a vague feeling of puzzlement, a grin or a shrug. Something reminds us of a long-gone friend whom we have not thought of in years, and the next day we receive a phone call from that friend. We learn the definition of a word we have never noticed before, and in the next few days the word pops up in everything we read. We have been job-hunting for months and nothing has turned up. Suddenly we get three offers on the same day. We dutifully enter charity raffles for many years without winning anything and then suddenly we win a trip to Europe. These experiences are evidence offered in support of the guardian angel theory of life. Yet they illustrate nothing more than the normal workings of the law of probability. When mathematical experts calculate probabilities, things that appear amazing turn out to be predictable. For example: In a group of twenty-three people the odds are better than fifty-fifty that there will be at least one pair of people in the group who have the same birthday.

4 4 If we toss a coin 1,024 times, we can expect that there will probably be one run in which tails comes up eight times in a row. Someone deals a perfect hand in bridge once every sixty-three billion tries. If every one of the 10 million bridge players in the U.S. dealt 20 bridge hands, 365 days a year, on average every 9 years someone will get a perfect hand. If we enter a state lottery along with a million other people, the odds against us winning the top prize are a million to one, or even higher. Therefore, if we win, we might be tempted to see it as a sign that we have been living right, that a guardian angel is looking over our shoulder. However, to the officials conducting the lottery, nothing astounding has happened. One person was supposed to win the top prize. The lottery is a reliable machine that does precisely what the officials designed it to do each time around. An outside spiritual force does not control it. Each time, uncaringly, it creates a situation in which one person wins a fortune against staggering odds. Sometimes things that happen to us seem incredible, because the odds against them are so huge. However, we live in a vast turbulent sea of endless happenings, and within that sea all kinds of people experience all kinds of events. These events are not signs of divine intervention, but instead just part of the universe in which we live. Of course, the universe is not entirely random. There is also order and harmony. There are amazing patterns. There are ecological, mathematical, astronomical systems. There are webs of relationships. We live our lives in the midst of amazing scientific discoveries of patterns. In liberal religion we express amazement about what science has discovered so far, knowing that each generation adds to the understanding of the patterns of the universe. Before 1924 my grandfather experienced the swelling of his neck because of an enlargement of his thyroid gland, a condition prevalent in the Pacific Northwest where he lived. I imagine that he could have concluded that this illness was given to him by God to punish him or test his religious faith. I would argue that God was not testing him or punishing him, that this illness was a result of the random nature of the universe. However, a nutritional scientist would explain that this illness was neither a test nor a punishment from God, nor a random event it was caused by a lack of iodide in my grandfather s diet. In the fall of 1924, Morton Salt Company began distributing iodized salt nationally and the epidemic of enlarged thyroid glands in the Pacific Northwest ended. In other words, when I say something is random, it is a way of saying I do not know why something happened. It is an expression of the limits of my knowledge. In the future we will gain more knowledge and understanding of why things happen, but I do not expect that anyone will ever prove that there is some power out their controlling our destiny. No reliable evidence exists of a force that intervenes in our lives to test or punish us. Sometimes we are minding our own business trying to lead a good life and suddenly disaster will strike. A

5 car will hit our car, a flood will hit our home, an illness will invade our family. We ask ourselves why? What have we done to deserve this? What could we have done to prevent it? A random universe has touched us, a universe in many ways outside our control. No one is punishing us or testing us when we suffer misfortune. No one is rewarding us when we win money in a game of chance. Life is chaotic and accidental. It touches equally the good and the bad, the wise and the humble, the young and the old. In time something strikes everyone. Developmentally I think we start by imagining that a reason exists as to why things happen to us. This is what Freud would have called narcissism, a feeling that events center around us. As we gain knowledge, experience and a wider perspective, we begin to recognize the randomness of the universe. Our lives are played out in the arena of chance. As troubling as pattern-seeking humans may find it, randomness is the reality of the universe. Is the universe random, or is there something out there controlling things? Obviously we are discovering some predicable laws of science. Nevertheless, I suspect that no matter how many scientific discoveries we make about the laws of physics, chemistry and astronomy, the randomness of the universe will never be completely replaced with a full understanding of why things happen. Some things will continue to happen randomly. 5

6 6 Closing Words From a passage by Harold Kushner... chaos, chance and mischance, things happening for no reason, will continue to be with us... We will simply have to learn to live with it, sustained and comforted by the knowledge that the earthquake and the accident, like the murder and the robbery, are not the will of God, but represent that aspect of reality which stands independent of any conscious will.