IS THE UNIVERSE RANDOM,
OR IS THERE SOMETHING OUT THERE
CONTROLLING THINGS?
Roger Fritts
May 5, 1996
Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
One winter evening several years ago, in the town of Beatrice, Nebraska, fifteen people were
planning to attend a 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.
Therefore, promptness was the rule. Nevertheless, on this night all fifteen people, including the
director, were late. They were late for at least ten different reasons. One man could not get his car
started. A young couple had trouble finding a baby sitter. A woman's watch was running slow.
The phone rang just before one singer left his house.
Because of these different reasons the church was still empty at 7:30, ten minutes after the
rehearsal normally began. That was when the explosion of the furnace destroyed the church
building.
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. When we humans have a close call with injury or death, we
often wonder whether God has saved us. We wonder whether a conscious will that overlooks our
destiny has protected us from disaster.
A state lottery has an advertisement showing an attractive young woman who, throughout her
day, encounters the number 802. Seeing this as a sign, she buys a lottery ticket of this same
number and cheerfully departs, confident that she is about to win a great deal of money.
On the local news a man explains that at the last moment he did not take the ill-fated Commerce
Department flight. Because of a business meeting in Virginia, he could not join the group.
Looking into the TV camera after the crash he said, "It must be God's will."
And the actor, Christopher Reeve, explained his accident to Barbara Walters by saying that the
accident must be part of God's plan for his life.
As different as these events are in human terms, they all raise the same religious question. They all
suggest that there is something out there controlling things.
I see several problems with this belief in divine intervention. First, although some people escape
death or injury, other people do not. We all have friends or relatives whose lives have been cut
short by a tragic accident or illness. We have to ask, where were their guardian angels?
When a small child dies of illness, why didn't some all-powerful force intervene to save him?
When a mother dies in an accident, why didn't the guardian angel act?
When bombs or shelling kill people in the Middle East, where are the intervening spirits?
The simplest and most commonly accepted answer 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. In this way, some conservative clergy claim that AIDS is punishment
for persons who are sexually promiscuous.
I have a problem with this belief that illness, injury and death are a form of punishment. The
problem is that sometimes the nicest people are struck and killed in accidents. The most innocent
children die of illness. Kind, loving people suffer as the result of natural disasters. In the face of
tragic events, the belief that hardship is a punishment is difficult to justify.
In response to this problem, theologians 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. 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. The theory explains this by saying that God needs that person in
heaven. Theologians tell us that we should not be sad but instead we should be thankful that God
needs the person we cared about for a higher purpose.
People in this society widely accept this system of explanations about how providence intervenes
in the world. It rests on the basic assumption that there is a conscious will acting in the world,
helping determine our fate and the fate of all the earth. It is a system that provides a degree of
certainty as we move through life. It provides standards of truth and falsity and of right and
wrong, standards derived from scripture and theology. It promises security and safety in the face
of death and tragedy. Surveys of religious belief suggest that more than two thirds of the people
in this country believe in this theory of divine intervention. Yet, although it is a popular system of
theology, it is one that some of us cannot accept.
The belief that injury or illness is either a punishment for wrong doing or a test of faith leaves us
to imagine an all-powerful God who is capable of the most sadistic testing. Historians have filled
books with accounts of kind, loving people who have suffered much. It is a cruel God that allows
so much pain, so much suffering by people who have never harmed anyone.
Although we sometimes regress when we are under the stress of crises, for the most part people
attracted to Unitarian Universalism have left behind this theology. The belief that we have a
guardian angel floating over us is no longer part of most of our personal theologies. Religious
liberals generally do not believe that injury or illness is punishment or testing. And we doubt that
if one of us dies in the midst of life that the death occurred because God needed us in heaven.
Still, this leaves us with a problem. If no guardian angels exist, how could all those people in
Nebraska be late to a choir rehearsal on the same night that the furnace blew up?
One answer is to say that the universe is random. We can describe the Nebraska church incident
as the 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% 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 Hawaii. 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.
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 every seventy-nine billion tries, or roughly once every
three or four years, to some bridge player somewhere in the United States.
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.
Life is like this. 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 random universe in which we live.
No reliable evidence exists of a force that intervenes to save us from random events. Sometimes
we are minding our own business trying to lead a good life and suddenly disaster will strike; a 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 betting on a horse in the
Kentucky Derby or after buying a raffle ticket at a church.
I think we move through stages developmentally:
We start by believing 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 and wider perspective and experience, we begin to recognize the randomness of the universe.
However, the poet in me wants to add a third stage of development. I want to suggest that at
some point we move from seeing the world as random to seeing the world as a mysterious
miracle. In the words of Albert Einstein, "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as
though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is."
Focusing on mystery instead of randomness suggests that we need to respect the possibility of a
larger, little understood pattern of which we are a part. I do not think this is a regression back to a
belief that there is someone out there controlling things. By mystery and little understood
patterns, I am thinking of ecological systems--webs of relation that we are only dimly aware of,
which we feel more than understand.
Sometimes Unitarian Universalists suffer from the illusion that we think we know more than we
know. I suggest that we live our lives moving from mystery into patterns and then back into
mystery. One purpose of liberal religion is to encourage respect for mystery, and to point out the
limitations of human knowledge.
This is why we have no creed. It is not because Unitarian Universalists can believe anything they
want. We have no creed because creeds are based on the assumption that we have attained final
knowledge, final truth, the final answers. In this church we believe that the human race is
constantly growing, learning, and that much of the nature of the universe remains a mystery.
Future generations will discover much more. The decision not to have a creed is a statement of
modesty.
I propose that we are up against mystery and that our knowledge is limited. We can dare to make
only the most modest claims about religious truths. This leads to an ethical imperative. We need
to speak and act modestly, being aware that failure is possible, that mistakes are possible, and that
second chances are desirable.
Is the universe random, or is there something out there controlling things? I believe the universe is
mysterious. I use the word mysterious to describe our limited knowledge. The universe often feels
full of chaos and mischance. These words describe how we feel about the limits of our knowledge. Because of these limits, the world feels full of chance and luck. Things happen without our
knowing why. Even the church choir has no guarantee. So, to Dick, Mary and the choir members,
I promise: we will do our best to keep the furnace clean and safe.
Acknowledgment: Thanks to Betty Walters for her help in researching this sermon.
| 
