“Customer goes on violent rampage over taco order at DC Chipotle.” That was a May 19 headline in the New York Post. * The guy was upset that his order took longer than he expected. Fortunately, he hurt no one, but he did frighten the server behind the counter. Chipotle: The War Zone. I can see the book and the subsequent movie. No, probably not. There are other risky situations more deserving of coverage, situations that not only pose risks, but also concretize them to the detriment of individuals and groups.
Earthquakes, tsunamis, eruptions, sinkholes, landslides, floods, tornados, hurricanes, straight-line winds, falling trees, heat waves, and cold spells haven’t done you in so far. It’s safe to emerge. What could possibly ruin your day? A trip to Chipotle? What might have happened had you been in Chipotle trying to buy tacos that May Day?
How about a missing 30 tons of ammonium nitrate, the stuff that Timothy McVey used to bomb the Murray Federal Building, killing 168 people in 1995. Yeah. It’s missing. ** Seems that it was shipped via railcar from Cheyenne, but went missing either before or at a rail stop in the Mojave sometime before April 26 this year. Is there some madman, mad group, or terrorist group out there intending harm? Should you be on the alert for a truck full of ammonium nitrate?
Or did it just end up fertilizing some farmland? If it was stolen, it’s a worry, for sure. But maybe not. Dyno Nobel says it’s likely that the railcar had a “leak,” so the stuff just kept dropping out of the car as it traveled. In which case, maybe Whew! Another potential day spoiler not on the horizon. And of course, some train track might now be so well fertilized it will become a thousand-mile garden of weeds.
Natural disasters coupled with human disasters make living chancy at best. The human ones are especially concerning. No one has to live in an earthquake or volcanic zone. No one has to live beneath a potential avalanche. But all those gang members thinking nothing of firing guns of revenge and neighborhood hegemony make some cities “war zones,” and those are places where people live in great numbers. And all those mass shootings motivated by who knows what’s next on the list of grievances make shopping or going to church or school potentially hazardous. Then there are those intoxicated or high drivers that make an ordinary trip to the pharmacy or a birthday party a potential danger. Did I mention the careless janitor who forgot to put up the “Slippery When Wet” signs outside the restroom door? Well, at least you are perfectly safe in your home. What are the chances of a home invasion in your neighborhood? Just make sure to use the handrail when you descend the stairs—or, if you are the President, ascend them to enter Air Force One. Sometimes trips in the home are as dangerous as trips to Tijuana.
So, how do we deal with the risks we face? Some of us wallow in anxiety: “Something bad will happen.” Some of us wallow in resignation: “Hey, if something happens, it’s just my time.” Some keep their “head on a swivel,” concerned that any moment of laxity might result in an attack. And some ignore or even take risks, climbing an active volcano, for example, climbing an ice wall, or swimming among sharks. In either hubris or ignorance, some of us even ignore travel warnings or refuse to do their State Department homework before selecting a destination. A trip to Sudan or Ukraine might not be a good idea at this time. Certainly, Americans in Russia or China must walk a very narrow line lest they face charges of espionage. Traveling to Wuhan during the coronavirus pandemic or to the Democrat Republic of the Congo during the Ebola outbreak would not have been wise—unless taking needless risk is one’s thing.
We have, if we are attuned to the news, constant reminders that the world is a risky place. But it has always been risky to live. Surviving as you have is worth some gratitude. Maybe it’s just good fortune, but maybe it’s a matter of Providence.
If you are either atheist or agnostic, you probably ascribe your survival in the midst of so much risk to chance. You’ve never been “in the wrong place at the wrong time”; you never leave the casino slots down by much and often walk out a winner. You might even ascribe your good luck to personal intuition or careful planning. But no matter how you frame your good fortune, just because you selected the slot machine or picked the card table doesn’t indicate a rational control over your destiny. Its only hindsight after loss or gain that establishes the validity of perception and insight. “I had a feeling I would win.”
If you are excessively proud, you might even ascribe your survival to your superiority over those less fortunate, less capable, less intelligent. Just be careful in your hubris. Keeping your head in a cloud of pride might lead to a misstep on a loose edge of carpet and a fall down the stairs. You know the old saying in King James English that “pride goeth before the fall.” (Could there be a counter for successful entrepreneurs? Pride goeth before the rise)
If you are a believer, you might ascribe your good luck to Divine Providence that has spared you serious injury or disease. “Someone up there” is watching over you, intervening for you against the forces of Risk. For reasons unfathomable to others, you are “the chosen one.”
Belief in yourself or belief in God? Certainly, you have a choice. But if you choose the former over the latter, recognize your limitations. As an occasional scuba diver, I was always concerned that my mask limited my peripheral vision in an environment foreign to my land skills. I was essentially wearing blinders like a parade horse, able to see straight ahead, but limited to seeing laterally without turning my head like a fixed-eye owl. Some critter with teeth could easily sneak up on me or attack with rapidity. Of course, like other scuba divers, I tried to be vigilant, and I dived without incident in tropical waters. But, in fact, I had little control over the randomness of placement: On a given dive day no hungry shark or barracuda swam near enough to seek satiation.
An argument against Providence that atheists and agnostics might make centers on the story of Job, the blameless, once wealthy and healthy Old Testament patriarch who suffered numerous tragic losses. Why did Providence treat him so? And that brings us to an associated problem, the problem of evil. In the story of Job, the Adversary (aka Satan) gets permission from God to inflict Job with loss of children, wealth, and health. Eventually, Job is restored to a semblance of his former condition, with God intimating the incomprehensible nature of His actions. Paltry humans are just incapable of seeing the big picture, we learn. Job wasn’t around, as the biblical text notes, when God made the Leviathan. Job’s story makes challenge a divine motivation. Hear the voice of God? What if Providence wants to challenge and not provide the means for an easy, risk-free life?
And here, believers are caught in a justification scheme.“Accept this challenge. Accept that bad things can happen to good people, good atheists, good agnostics, and good believers. Accept, also, that good things, at least in the short term of a finite life, can happen to bad people. Essentially, life’s ills are a test, and the test derives not from an adversary (Satan), but rather from a benevolent Providence that gives permission to the adversary.” The justification has even led some to posit a positive: In eighteenth century optimism as expressed by Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide, “This is best of all possible worlds.” For modern physicists and theologians, that has become “a world fine-tuned for humanity,” a somewhat circular argument for the Many World hypothesis. You are what you are here, slightly different there, and some ten to the six-hundredth plus power (10^647) universe elsewhere exactly the same in all aspects of your life history, your doppelgänger a precise replica. But in all other worlds you would already be injured or dead, a Job upon the dung heap, maybe even nonexistent. Thus, Providence has fine-tuned the universe not just so humanity could exist, but so that you, specifically, could exist. And your having survived all the near misses, all the life-taking accidents or evils, is a further argument for Providence’s care.
Personally, I don’t like attributing the randomness of survival to Chance in Chaos. I do see a kind of human existence that extends beyond the merely physical existence of an organism. But I have only anecdotal evidence and supposition to support my view. The “meeting of minds” is a one example of such evidence for me. Tales of “out of body” experiences, though driven by infusions of neurotransmitters, also seem to support a nonphysical world. That two people in love can “hear bells” and experience a momentary mingling that occurs outside their bodies is a rare but reported experience. Is it just coincidence that both have infusions of neurotransmitters at the same intensity simultaneously? That both experience an out-of-body moment that joins them? With billions of us walking the planet, sure. Lots of things can occur in human interactions. Coincidences and synchronicity abound in a world of eight billion conscious and semi-conscious organisms. But are we just basically perceptions of ourselves?
Then there’s the strange case of the unexplainable, the miracles. And I don’t mean the appearance of Mary on a piece of toast or a stained glass window, both such types of “miracles” attributable to our penchant to organize, to see patterns, to analogize. I mean those rare occurrences when no accounting can be made for the anomaly, regardless of however exhausting an investigation one makes. Can I give an example? No. Do I need to believe in miracles? No, also. But many accounts seem to support their occurrence. Why should I in hubris say that those who investigated were just too gullible to see underlying physical causes? Or even that reality is perception?
Is it by chance, coincidence, or synchronicity that a family member just sent me a viral TikTok video of two doctors saving a heart attack victim in a theater? The narrator says something about a miracle that two doctors were in the audience and that they immediately began slapping the inner elbow of the victim who recovered. The mechanism of slapping the inner elbow isn’t part of the American practice of pumping the chest, but it seems to have worked. Yet, there’s no scientific evidence that the treatment actually works. Would the victim have survived anyway? Inner-elbow slapping might, in fact, be a useless waste of a victim’s last moments that could be thwarted from being the last moments by pumping the chest while calling for help. That both doctors were present in a large audience might also be just a happy coincidence. China has more than four million doctors. Surely, some might coincidentally go to the theater; some might even be friends who plan to go to the same show. But what if, just what if, in Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history and 3.8 billion-year evolution of life, all the Cosmos conspired to have those two doctors present at the moment the man suffered the heart attack? Of course, one might say “pure luck.” What of the millions who have died without the presence of such doctors armed with a technique involving the slapping of arms? Surely over a billion Chinese could not have the good fortune of having a heart attack in the presence of doctors, folk or otherwise. Isn’t scientific methodology a better miracle-worker than folk medicine? Swallow an aspirin. Slap a glycerine patch on an arm. Pump without breaking ribs.
You and I know that the Sun is big, almost a million miles in diameter. We also know that it is far away, 93,000,000 miles away on average. And we know that Earth is little, just eight thousand miles in diameter. Yet, I have friends who on a pilgrimage swear that they saw with others the Sun appearing to swirl and to come toward their bus as they returned from Međugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina. “We thought it was going to hit the bus. People screamed.” Skeptical, I said, “That’s impossible.” And then I explained the differences in sizes, temperatures, and character between Earth and Sun.
Nevertheless, they stood by their claims, even when I suggested a mass hysteria or a group misperception of some sort among like-minded believers. Still, they insisted that no one was expecting or looking for an anomalous behavior of the Sun—though such similar incidents have been reported at other pilgrimage sites and vague memories of those incidents might have lain in their brains. I can’t reiterate enough how adamant they were about what they saw in a bus filled with people of many ages from many lands and many cultures.
One might easily argue that though the people on that bus were politically, linguistically, and culturally different, they were religiously similar. After all, didn’t they just go on a pilgrimage that suggests a common belief? I offered that argument, also—to no avail.
And probably like you, I have experienced some anomalous physical occurrences, most of them just fleeting and soon forgotten, but occasionally one that suggested a link to whatever one wants to call a different level of existence, God, Spirit, or a George Lucas Force—some form of existence that ties individuals to the universe on the grandest of scales, and I don’t mean dopamine wonder or drug-induced euphoria.
Does that mean that Providence does play a role in human existence? That we are more than perceptions of reality? Certainly, perception is important, and it might even be the reason that artificial intelligence will not easily rise to the level of human existence. Perception always takes place in a context. Whereas it is true that like a computer that receives bad data and outputs bad results, we humans have been imbued with ways of seeing the world, some of them determined by our native language, that lead to limited numbers of behaviors and responses. No Providence necessary, here.
Is there a reason that a tornado destroys one house in a neighborhood and not another? Chaos theory would justify the randomness. What do you think? Your neighbor’s house destroyed, yours spared; your house destroyed, your neighbor’s spared. Chance? Providence? A challenge or a test?
Not easy to answer. Is there a compromise between a universe fine-tuned for your existence and a universe haphazardly producing your existence? Must we choose one or the other? If you choose chance, then all is rather meaningless save what you personally make meaningful. Your perception is then reality. But with your passing, that meaning passes. All meaningfulness becomes mere perception under the aegis of hubris. Is that view any different from the perception that the Sun approached a bus full of pilgrims? Does that perception make the atheistic view better than the religious view?
*Patrick Reilly. https://nypost.com/2023/05/19/customer-goes-on-rampage-over-taco-order-at-dc-chipotle/
** Ted Goldberg for KQED.
Earthquakes, tsunamis, eruptions, sinkholes, landslides, floods, tornados, hurricanes, straight-line winds, falling trees, heat waves, and cold spells haven’t done you in so far. It’s safe to emerge. What could possibly ruin your day? A trip to Chipotle? What might have happened had you been in Chipotle trying to buy tacos that May Day?
How about a missing 30 tons of ammonium nitrate, the stuff that Timothy McVey used to bomb the Murray Federal Building, killing 168 people in 1995. Yeah. It’s missing. ** Seems that it was shipped via railcar from Cheyenne, but went missing either before or at a rail stop in the Mojave sometime before April 26 this year. Is there some madman, mad group, or terrorist group out there intending harm? Should you be on the alert for a truck full of ammonium nitrate?
Or did it just end up fertilizing some farmland? If it was stolen, it’s a worry, for sure. But maybe not. Dyno Nobel says it’s likely that the railcar had a “leak,” so the stuff just kept dropping out of the car as it traveled. In which case, maybe Whew! Another potential day spoiler not on the horizon. And of course, some train track might now be so well fertilized it will become a thousand-mile garden of weeds.
Natural disasters coupled with human disasters make living chancy at best. The human ones are especially concerning. No one has to live in an earthquake or volcanic zone. No one has to live beneath a potential avalanche. But all those gang members thinking nothing of firing guns of revenge and neighborhood hegemony make some cities “war zones,” and those are places where people live in great numbers. And all those mass shootings motivated by who knows what’s next on the list of grievances make shopping or going to church or school potentially hazardous. Then there are those intoxicated or high drivers that make an ordinary trip to the pharmacy or a birthday party a potential danger. Did I mention the careless janitor who forgot to put up the “Slippery When Wet” signs outside the restroom door? Well, at least you are perfectly safe in your home. What are the chances of a home invasion in your neighborhood? Just make sure to use the handrail when you descend the stairs—or, if you are the President, ascend them to enter Air Force One. Sometimes trips in the home are as dangerous as trips to Tijuana.
So, how do we deal with the risks we face? Some of us wallow in anxiety: “Something bad will happen.” Some of us wallow in resignation: “Hey, if something happens, it’s just my time.” Some keep their “head on a swivel,” concerned that any moment of laxity might result in an attack. And some ignore or even take risks, climbing an active volcano, for example, climbing an ice wall, or swimming among sharks. In either hubris or ignorance, some of us even ignore travel warnings or refuse to do their State Department homework before selecting a destination. A trip to Sudan or Ukraine might not be a good idea at this time. Certainly, Americans in Russia or China must walk a very narrow line lest they face charges of espionage. Traveling to Wuhan during the coronavirus pandemic or to the Democrat Republic of the Congo during the Ebola outbreak would not have been wise—unless taking needless risk is one’s thing.
We have, if we are attuned to the news, constant reminders that the world is a risky place. But it has always been risky to live. Surviving as you have is worth some gratitude. Maybe it’s just good fortune, but maybe it’s a matter of Providence.
If you are either atheist or agnostic, you probably ascribe your survival in the midst of so much risk to chance. You’ve never been “in the wrong place at the wrong time”; you never leave the casino slots down by much and often walk out a winner. You might even ascribe your good luck to personal intuition or careful planning. But no matter how you frame your good fortune, just because you selected the slot machine or picked the card table doesn’t indicate a rational control over your destiny. Its only hindsight after loss or gain that establishes the validity of perception and insight. “I had a feeling I would win.”
If you are excessively proud, you might even ascribe your survival to your superiority over those less fortunate, less capable, less intelligent. Just be careful in your hubris. Keeping your head in a cloud of pride might lead to a misstep on a loose edge of carpet and a fall down the stairs. You know the old saying in King James English that “pride goeth before the fall.” (Could there be a counter for successful entrepreneurs? Pride goeth before the rise)
If you are a believer, you might ascribe your good luck to Divine Providence that has spared you serious injury or disease. “Someone up there” is watching over you, intervening for you against the forces of Risk. For reasons unfathomable to others, you are “the chosen one.”
Belief in yourself or belief in God? Certainly, you have a choice. But if you choose the former over the latter, recognize your limitations. As an occasional scuba diver, I was always concerned that my mask limited my peripheral vision in an environment foreign to my land skills. I was essentially wearing blinders like a parade horse, able to see straight ahead, but limited to seeing laterally without turning my head like a fixed-eye owl. Some critter with teeth could easily sneak up on me or attack with rapidity. Of course, like other scuba divers, I tried to be vigilant, and I dived without incident in tropical waters. But, in fact, I had little control over the randomness of placement: On a given dive day no hungry shark or barracuda swam near enough to seek satiation.
An argument against Providence that atheists and agnostics might make centers on the story of Job, the blameless, once wealthy and healthy Old Testament patriarch who suffered numerous tragic losses. Why did Providence treat him so? And that brings us to an associated problem, the problem of evil. In the story of Job, the Adversary (aka Satan) gets permission from God to inflict Job with loss of children, wealth, and health. Eventually, Job is restored to a semblance of his former condition, with God intimating the incomprehensible nature of His actions. Paltry humans are just incapable of seeing the big picture, we learn. Job wasn’t around, as the biblical text notes, when God made the Leviathan. Job’s story makes challenge a divine motivation. Hear the voice of God? What if Providence wants to challenge and not provide the means for an easy, risk-free life?
And here, believers are caught in a justification scheme.“Accept this challenge. Accept that bad things can happen to good people, good atheists, good agnostics, and good believers. Accept, also, that good things, at least in the short term of a finite life, can happen to bad people. Essentially, life’s ills are a test, and the test derives not from an adversary (Satan), but rather from a benevolent Providence that gives permission to the adversary.” The justification has even led some to posit a positive: In eighteenth century optimism as expressed by Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide, “This is best of all possible worlds.” For modern physicists and theologians, that has become “a world fine-tuned for humanity,” a somewhat circular argument for the Many World hypothesis. You are what you are here, slightly different there, and some ten to the six-hundredth plus power (10^647) universe elsewhere exactly the same in all aspects of your life history, your doppelgänger a precise replica. But in all other worlds you would already be injured or dead, a Job upon the dung heap, maybe even nonexistent. Thus, Providence has fine-tuned the universe not just so humanity could exist, but so that you, specifically, could exist. And your having survived all the near misses, all the life-taking accidents or evils, is a further argument for Providence’s care.
Personally, I don’t like attributing the randomness of survival to Chance in Chaos. I do see a kind of human existence that extends beyond the merely physical existence of an organism. But I have only anecdotal evidence and supposition to support my view. The “meeting of minds” is a one example of such evidence for me. Tales of “out of body” experiences, though driven by infusions of neurotransmitters, also seem to support a nonphysical world. That two people in love can “hear bells” and experience a momentary mingling that occurs outside their bodies is a rare but reported experience. Is it just coincidence that both have infusions of neurotransmitters at the same intensity simultaneously? That both experience an out-of-body moment that joins them? With billions of us walking the planet, sure. Lots of things can occur in human interactions. Coincidences and synchronicity abound in a world of eight billion conscious and semi-conscious organisms. But are we just basically perceptions of ourselves?
Then there’s the strange case of the unexplainable, the miracles. And I don’t mean the appearance of Mary on a piece of toast or a stained glass window, both such types of “miracles” attributable to our penchant to organize, to see patterns, to analogize. I mean those rare occurrences when no accounting can be made for the anomaly, regardless of however exhausting an investigation one makes. Can I give an example? No. Do I need to believe in miracles? No, also. But many accounts seem to support their occurrence. Why should I in hubris say that those who investigated were just too gullible to see underlying physical causes? Or even that reality is perception?
Is it by chance, coincidence, or synchronicity that a family member just sent me a viral TikTok video of two doctors saving a heart attack victim in a theater? The narrator says something about a miracle that two doctors were in the audience and that they immediately began slapping the inner elbow of the victim who recovered. The mechanism of slapping the inner elbow isn’t part of the American practice of pumping the chest, but it seems to have worked. Yet, there’s no scientific evidence that the treatment actually works. Would the victim have survived anyway? Inner-elbow slapping might, in fact, be a useless waste of a victim’s last moments that could be thwarted from being the last moments by pumping the chest while calling for help. That both doctors were present in a large audience might also be just a happy coincidence. China has more than four million doctors. Surely, some might coincidentally go to the theater; some might even be friends who plan to go to the same show. But what if, just what if, in Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history and 3.8 billion-year evolution of life, all the Cosmos conspired to have those two doctors present at the moment the man suffered the heart attack? Of course, one might say “pure luck.” What of the millions who have died without the presence of such doctors armed with a technique involving the slapping of arms? Surely over a billion Chinese could not have the good fortune of having a heart attack in the presence of doctors, folk or otherwise. Isn’t scientific methodology a better miracle-worker than folk medicine? Swallow an aspirin. Slap a glycerine patch on an arm. Pump without breaking ribs.
You and I know that the Sun is big, almost a million miles in diameter. We also know that it is far away, 93,000,000 miles away on average. And we know that Earth is little, just eight thousand miles in diameter. Yet, I have friends who on a pilgrimage swear that they saw with others the Sun appearing to swirl and to come toward their bus as they returned from Međugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina. “We thought it was going to hit the bus. People screamed.” Skeptical, I said, “That’s impossible.” And then I explained the differences in sizes, temperatures, and character between Earth and Sun.
Nevertheless, they stood by their claims, even when I suggested a mass hysteria or a group misperception of some sort among like-minded believers. Still, they insisted that no one was expecting or looking for an anomalous behavior of the Sun—though such similar incidents have been reported at other pilgrimage sites and vague memories of those incidents might have lain in their brains. I can’t reiterate enough how adamant they were about what they saw in a bus filled with people of many ages from many lands and many cultures.
One might easily argue that though the people on that bus were politically, linguistically, and culturally different, they were religiously similar. After all, didn’t they just go on a pilgrimage that suggests a common belief? I offered that argument, also—to no avail.
And probably like you, I have experienced some anomalous physical occurrences, most of them just fleeting and soon forgotten, but occasionally one that suggested a link to whatever one wants to call a different level of existence, God, Spirit, or a George Lucas Force—some form of existence that ties individuals to the universe on the grandest of scales, and I don’t mean dopamine wonder or drug-induced euphoria.
Does that mean that Providence does play a role in human existence? That we are more than perceptions of reality? Certainly, perception is important, and it might even be the reason that artificial intelligence will not easily rise to the level of human existence. Perception always takes place in a context. Whereas it is true that like a computer that receives bad data and outputs bad results, we humans have been imbued with ways of seeing the world, some of them determined by our native language, that lead to limited numbers of behaviors and responses. No Providence necessary, here.
Is there a reason that a tornado destroys one house in a neighborhood and not another? Chaos theory would justify the randomness. What do you think? Your neighbor’s house destroyed, yours spared; your house destroyed, your neighbor’s spared. Chance? Providence? A challenge or a test?
Not easy to answer. Is there a compromise between a universe fine-tuned for your existence and a universe haphazardly producing your existence? Must we choose one or the other? If you choose chance, then all is rather meaningless save what you personally make meaningful. Your perception is then reality. But with your passing, that meaning passes. All meaningfulness becomes mere perception under the aegis of hubris. Is that view any different from the perception that the Sun approached a bus full of pilgrims? Does that perception make the atheistic view better than the religious view?
*Patrick Reilly. https://nypost.com/2023/05/19/customer-goes-on-rampage-over-taco-order-at-dc-chipotle/
** Ted Goldberg for KQED.
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