Some coincidences defy credibility
Friday Jan. 1, 2021. New Year’s Day. I thought I should start the new year by tackling some old business.
For the last 20 years, Joan stored her growing collection of murder mysteries in our spare bedroom. They started in boxes. I put up shelves. They overflowed the shelves. We assembled Ikea cabinets. The collections kept increasing.
On New Year’s morning, I listed 18 authors, ranging from Ngaio Marsh to Ellis Peters to Gail Bowen and L.R. Wright. Laurie R. King had the smallest collection, with only six books; Anne Perry had the most, at 40.
Plus, 34 books from Alexander McCall Smith. Not classifiable as murder mysteries. Humour? Human interest? Social analysis?
One set of books caught my eye — 18, by P.D. James, the undisputed queen of British murder mystery writers. A publisher’s promo calls her the author of 11 books, but I counted 20.
Including her one foray into science fiction, “The Children of Men,” published in 1992.
I had never read it before. I opened the book. On Friday the first of January, 2021, the opening words were, “Friday 1 January 2021.” I felt a shiver go up my spine.
What were the odds, I wondered, that Ms James would have chosen to start a book published 28 years ago with the very date on which I would open that book?
Astronomical, I suspect.
As I read the opening chapter, the coincidence stretched even farther towards impossibility.
The story takes place in England, of course. At a time when a medical crisis has afflicted the entire world. No one knows how it where it came from, nor how to cure it. But increasingly people expect all-powerful authority figures to run their lives and their countries. Sound at all familiar?
No, the novel is not about a corona virus pandemic. James imagines a world where humans have stopped having babies. The men are sterile, the women infertile. Everywhere on earth. The last human baby had been born 25 years before, in Buenos Aires.
Given that context, the less immediate threat of global warming, climate change, and environmental degradation provides a more fitting parallel for James’s gloomy future than the coronavirus .
The more pessimistic scientists say that if average global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius, coastal plains will flood. If temperatures rise 4 degrees, everything between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn will become lethal heat-stroke territory — except for those who can afford air-conditioned bubbles.
Life as we know it will end.
Unlike P.D. James’s scenario, though, we will take countless species with us.
I won’t spoil her plot by saying any more. But the probability of my opening that book, on that subject, on that day, boggles my mind.
In another bestseller from the same period, The Celestine Prophecy, author James Redfield claimed that there are no coincidences. Period. Everything that happens, happens for a purpose.
He presumed a supreme intelligence, setting up those coincidences. Our job, he argued, is to recognize those coincidences as part of a plan, and act on them.
I don’t buy his argument.
Since then, quantum physics has taught us that even the electrons and protons within atoms are best described as probabilities, not physical particles. The chair I’m sitting on consists of probabilities. So does the universe.
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, deep beneath the Swiss Alps, fires probabilities at other probabilities to see if any new probabilities emerge from the collision. It’s hard to see those as part of a pre-ordained plan.
The probability that any Supreme Intelligence could program all the probabilities inherent in everything, everywhere, strikes me as, well, improbable.
And even if it were possible, why would such an intelligence bother manipulating all the probabilities of the universe to set up a coincidence so that I open a book on the day mentioned in the first line of its text? It makes black holes seem like child’s play.
And yet it happened.
But maybe I don’t have to look for a reason. Maybe it was chance; maybe inscrutable fate; maybe God.
The question is not how or why, but what shall I do about it?
I shall read the rest of the book, certainly. I shall also pay more attention to other coincidences.
I don’t believe that God — however you choose to describe Her — runs the universe like Microsoft software. But I do think that somehow She offers us opportunities. It’s up to us to decide what to do about them.