First Things - Chance, by Design
نویسندگان
چکیده
The question of how to reconcile chance with divine providence long predated Darwin. People didn’t need science to tell them that chance had something to do with their being here. Each of us is the product of a long and tenuous chain of improbable events. We wouldn’t have been born if our parents hadn’t happened to meet or if some ancestor hadn’t escaped disaster by a hair’s breadth. Nor is the role of chance in the world news to theologians. “If the nose of Cleopatra had been shorter,” wrote Pascal in the seventeenth century, “the whole face of the earth would have been changed.” “No one in this life can escape being tossed about at the mercy of chance and accident,” observed St. Augustine in the fourth. “Time and chance happeneth to them all,” lamented Qoholeth much earlier than that.
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