On Chance

Last night, I was watching a show (Flash Forward) in which the premise is that, one day, everyone blacks out and has a vision of their life at some point in the future. Now, of course, people are going to be acting to either meet that future or avoid it, which brings up all sorts of issues with determinism and the like. The point of interest in the episode I saw last night, though, was how some people had avoided things that were supposed to happen. People were supposed to die at some time, avoided it, but then some of them ended up dying anyhow. One of the characters tried to pass it off as an accident, but another replied that there are no accidents. But what does this phrase mean? It comes up in other contexts, such as with those who believe that God (or the universe, or whatnot) doesn't do coincidence. It seems that there are at least four different ways of looking at the reality of chance, though: (1) chance is a necessary explanatory principle, (2) chance is a property of events, (3) chance is a mode of consideration of events, and (4) chance has no place at all.

In the first case, chance is a necessary explanatory principle. What do I mean by this? I mean that, if we have all of the determinate causes for an event, we still don't have a full explanation. Something utterly random could happen, and this randomness is simply a brute fact of the world which comes into play. There would be something profoundly unintelligible about the event, not just from our standpoint as limited human knowers, but even if we were to have perfect knowledge. Some interpretations of quantum mechanics may flirt with this approach, but that would get us involved in too many issues for the present post.

In the second case, chance is a property of an event. Let us say that I throw a stone, and that you throw a stone, and the two stones hit. I didn't mean for the stones to hit, and you didn't mean for the stones to hit, but they did so anyhow. The event was a chance occurrence. However, unlike in the first case, chance is not a cause of the event; we can completely explain the event by talking about how I threw a stone and you did the same. It is the intersection of these causes which is chance, since there is nothing in the causes themselves to lead to the chance event when regarded apart from each other.

In the third case, chance is merely a mode of consideration, but a mode of consideration made possible by the way the world is. So let us go back to the example of throwing stones again, and this time, let us assume that the world is entirely determined by the laws of mathematical physics (or substitute your own form of determinism if you prefer, and make the throwers zombies lacking free will but with wicked cool cybernetic rock-launchers). So I throw the stone, and you throw yours, and they hit again. There is still an element of chance here, since my throwing and your throwing do not in themselves contain the fact that the stones will hit. But, at the same time, we can find some prior state of affairs such that all of this is determined already, perhaps at the big bang if necessary. There is some point in time such that, if we but work out what it means for everything to exist as it did then, we would see that I must throw the rock, you must throw the rock, and they must intersect. Therefore, the event is not a chance event in itself, but only when we consider the relation of causes abstracted from their context. Chance is therefore an illusion, one which arises because we were not looking at reality according to its own structure, but an illusion which yet has some basis in reality. We have this particular illusion because the world is a certain way, and we bring our own set of expectations which cut against the grain of the world, and chance is where our expectations and reality's structure fail to line up.

In the fourth case, there is no chance whatsoever. This is what seems to be entailed by those who claim that there is no coincidence at all. But the way in which it is intended has to be stronger than the third case: when we think of two events having happened together, there is no chance involved. In the third case, there is still a basis in reality for my thinking that the stones hitting is a chance event when I simply think about my act of throwing the stone and yours. In this fourth case, even that event is not accidental. A character in the TV show who is supposed to die from a car accident, who survives past that day and later gets hit by a car anyhow, does not experience any chance event in any consideration.

I'm not sure that the fourth case is actually intelligible when analyzed. Denying that chance is a real feature of the world doesn't mean that there isn't some conceptual and relative reality to chance when I measure up the world compared to human ends, including my own needs and interests. I can affirm the third case, say that the world is entirely determined in one way or another, and still say that the relation of two events pulled from the larger context (which I am incapable of truly understanding) is a chance relation.

Even if I were to believe that there were a benevolent deity running the universe (and I think that http://thomstark.net/?p=834 has some good points to raise about that, h/t Daniel), then I still end up with case three. Let's say that God has some end in mind, such as self-glorification. God needs to accomplish two other ends to meet this end (pick whatever you want), x and y. Now, x requires some means to accomplish it, and y requires some means to accomplish it (not that God would need to work this out step by step or think through it discursively, but there is some logical order in the structure of the realization of the action). The means for x and the means for y, then, considered in themselves and abstracted from the context of God doing something for his ultimate end, are related by chance. They only lose that aspect of chance when regarded as both leading to that ultimate end. What this means is that the means for x and the means for y may have nothing to do with each other in themselves, and so even in the case of God's providence, there still would be coincidences of the third case sort.

In sum: even if there is no real chance in the universe, coincidences generally have absolutely nothing to do with you.