January 11, 2021 - Existence as Accident

A promotional for an upcoming webinar stated the following: “Like every other species, we humans are here by accident. But it is shocking just how many things—any of which might never have occurred—had to happen in certain ways for any of us to exist. From an extremely improbable asteroid impact, to the wild gyrations of the Ice Age, to invisible accidents . . . evolutionary developmental biologist Sean B. Carroll will explore how we are all here through an astonishing series of fortunate events.”

Accidents, huh? If so, there’s problem with what is being promoted here (which, incidentally, is nowhere near close to being scientifically “proven”), a problem big enough to pretty much discredit what is being claimed.

If everything about us, from the very beginning of time, to this very moment, rests on accidents, that means that all our thoughts, all our beliefs, all our everything, from start to finish, are founded upon accidents as well, including the belief that we are “here by accident.” The belief that we are here by accident—like the accident that, we’re told, turned non-life into life; and the accident that then turned that life into self-replicating life; and all the accidents afterward that led to us—that belief is, itself, just another accident.

And so why should we believe it? It’s just the result of accidents, and so our belief in it would also be accidental. If thousands or millions or even billions of years ago an accident went a different way, we today might not believe that we are accidents. We might believe something else, but whatever that belief was, it would still be accidental. If its accidents all the way down, then whatever we believe, we really have no reason to believe it, nor even any reason to believe why we don’t have any reason to believe it.

What a contrast to, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” (Genesis 1:1). We’re no accident, and we have plenty of reasons to believe that we aren’t as well.