Random Events

I have heard a lot of strange stories from people supposedly offering evidence for the existence of some god. Usually, the person has prayed to god to provide a sign of his existence, and at some point in time later an event occurs which is interpreted as the sign. I've heard things like, I prayed and then a moth flew in the window. I prayed and two weeks later while I was cleaning out the garage I found a Bible I had forgotten about. I prayed and a month later someone invited me to church. These are the kinds of occurrences offered as "proof" of an all-powerful, all-knowing god.

To my ears as an atheist, none of this is remotely compelling. There are all sorts of random events in our lives that are discarded without a thought, even though a lot of Christians want to claim that our lives are being guided by their deity. In the case of Catholics, the list of helpers in our lives extends to the Virgin Mary and all the saints too. There's even a saint to help you find lost objects.

It is true that as humans there are events that can bring about changes in ourselves, how we see the world, and our behaviors. We might, for example, remember an event that showed us that the world is not as safe as we had imagined, that a hero we revered was only human, or that a respected friend or colleague was dishonest. We might be the cause of some harm or damage that brought to light some bad tendency in ourselves that we realized needed changing.

What I'm saying is that I am not denying the reality of significant events that reveal some truth that had been previously hidden, but these are personal revelations about ourselves and/or the world. How can a random event truly reveal the supernatural realm? A mundane event like those mentioned above, even if they have some attachment to religion, strikes me as cherry-picking. Saying "I prayed and found a cross I had put away, so god exists," is vastly different from "I found out Ted had been using company money for personal expenses, so he is not as honest as I imagined." The first is not connected to the conclusion at all. God did not magic a cross into existence. That person found a cross he or she had already owned. If you came across an old photo you had forgotten, what would that say? On the other hand, if I think Ted is an upstanding individual and I find evidence he has lied or stolen, his actions have changed my view of him.

It always strikes me that these supposed signs of god are fairly lame with no deadline attached. He can do whatever and act whenever he wants. The defense theists offer is that god does things in his own time. We can't compel him. I guess I just wonder why a supposed all-loving god would make you wait. Sure, let's just assume that this god does things the way he wants, but making you wait because he can is not a sign of an all-loving god. If your boss made you wait for something you asked for to show his power over you, you would think he was a jerk. Why is god different? Why does god need to continually flaunt his superiority?

The fact of the matter is, we humans can find meaning in any random event. Here is a true story from my recent life: I woke up in the middle of the night to find the cats had brought a mouse into the bedroom. They were messing around with it, as cats do. It was still alive and I found a way to get it out of the house: I covered it with a glass bowl and put some file folders underneath it. My plan was to take the mouse outside and let it go. It worked well until I go to the door, where I jostled something at the door causing folders and bowl to slide out of my hands onto the deck where the bowl promptly shattered into millions of pieces. Well, at least the mouse was out of the house. Since it was 4 a.m., I decided not to clean up the mess and went back to bed.

Can I find meaning in this story? Absolutely! If my life were a novel, I could see myself in that tiny mouse, picked on by tormentors (the cats) and scooped up deus ex machina style and unceremoniously dumped to my salvation. Or, maybe my life is the bowl, shattered by some revelation, never to be rejoined into the shape of its former self.

Imagine if I had prayed to god for a sign!  I could really go to town with this story and inject supernatural meaning everywhere including demonic forces trying to tempt me away from my True Path.

Our lives are full of empty occurrences into which we inject meaning as we create the narrative of our existence. None of this lends any credence to the existence of forces beyond the natural acting upon us. The pattern is not really in the events - it's in our own mind.