...type, type, type...

In our gut we feel that life cannot have arisen randomly. But consider other hard-to-believe things proven to be true. For example, we know from a wide range of instruments that the universe is nearly incomprehensively vast. If we could truly understand the scope of the universe, hold its disorienting vastness in our mind, then it would be a simple thing to understand how conscious life arose from a serious of improbable events.

Why?

Imagine that the universe was a practically endless field on which you could lay out every possible combination of events necessary to generate life--presence of raw materials, appropriate proximity to a star, animating events, etc. Given the nearly infinite scope of that imaginary field--the universe--the emergence of life is, in fact, practically unavoidable.

Consider the issue from another angle: it has been said that if you have enough monkeys typing for long enough one of them will replicate the works of Shakespeare. This sounds absurd until you imagine that you have a near infinite number of monkeys and typewriters. Given that, success becomes inevitable. So it is with life.

Is God missing from this picture? No. God's being is the fabric of the universe animated by his grace and emerging from his creative pulse, some 15 billion years ago.

What Are The Chances?

I do this gratuitously philosophical training module, which I might call 'What are the chances?' In it, I step the students through their lives in reverse, noting moments that would have led them somewhere other than NYC in this particular moment ... class, career path, etc. I then extend the exercise to their families, home towns, respective nations, the earth, solar system, etc., back to the Big Bang. (A bit like the scene from Our Town.) From all this we are able to do a rough calculation of how infinitely improbable it is that we find ourselves here and now. I show them a picture of a person standing on the tippy top of a pyramid to illustrate the point. But then I ask them again what the chances are that they are here. It's a trick question in that the answer given that they are here is 100%.

The sense from the ensuing conversation is that miraculously--god or no god--we are here against incredible odds and that means, in a sense we arise inevitably from an environment well suited to bear us up--a beautiful idea. And even if this weren't true, it can be significant if one student hears it and believes it. Because, then, they might take the chance in the next moment to do something truly weird but deeply true to their deepest natures, and from that something beautiful might arise.