Nothing happens just by coincidence

I guess I would call myself a naturalist. I believe that we are here to teach something or to learn something from nature. We do have free will, but if we get off the path we’re supposed to be on, we are gently urged to take the path we are supposed to be on. We have to get back to our lessons. So I believe that coincidence is merely trying to push us back to the path. Those thorns in the road can be interesting, but we are here to learn or teach.

By the way I have a friend that believes everything is random. We are many billions of people on this earth and nothing is a coincident, everything happens in a huge cloud of confusion. We agree to disagree. and that’s alright. I tell him, “If I am wrong, I will become nothing, just random cells. But if I am right, and you are wrong, you’re going to be surprised.”

Of course to say everything is a coincidence by random chance happening does not take into account determination, planning and execution of various events. To say that nothing is a coincidence assumes there is someone or something that arranges things so everything that happens is due to a planned sequence of events. To rigidly hold to either of these two opposing claims would be wrong. The truth of the matter lies somewhere between the two polar opposites.

On the other hand The Taoists hold to the Yin / Yang idea, you have seen the two opposites swirling around each other, black vs white, but both carry a little bit of the other. Let us say nothing is a coincidence stands for the black, the everything is a coincidence is the white, the two combined form the Tao, which is the complete picture. You can see there is a little of each in both the black and the white.

It simply depends on what side of occurrence your on. From one’s view it will be something that has order and falls into place accordingly, or it will be a discombobulated array of non connecting points that create confusion. Everything has a purpose, even if you cannot see the value? A blind perspective to the choices in life.

However, some people believe that everything happens for a reason. Every event coincides with every other event. So yes everything is a coincidence. If you think particular events are somehow special, that's your preference rather than magic. You can't, because coincidences occur. In statistics, there is a theorem called the Law of Large Numbers, which states: As the number of trials of a random process increases, the percentage difference between the expected and actual values goes to zero. Let's say you walk in a room of 20 people and one other person just so happens to share your birthday. You can actually calculate that by:

No the odds of two people sharing a birthday among twenty would be about 0.411438, or 41.1%. Raise that to twenty-three people, and you get 0.507297, or 50.7%. As the number of people in a room increases, so does the chance that two people share the same birthday (eighty people in a room will result in 0.999914, over 99%). This can also be applied to other events. The more people you have and the more events that occur, the more likely that seemingly related things are going to occur, as well.

Let's say a man meets the love of his life at a museum. At this museum, there are thousands of people. The man just so happens to meet this woman there, which is a seemingly unlikely event; even more unlikely, they only give each other a glance and walk by each other, but meet once again at a restaurant. Now, while this seems very unlikely, if you consider that perhaps most people that leave a museum are tourists and would probably go to a local restaurant there, it becomes less unrealistic.

Furthermore, there are thousands of people leaving there, and a certain number of them are likely to go to the same restaurant, especially if there are not many restaurants nearby. I have actually followed people for miles, only to go to the same destination. When you look at an entire population, this number greatly increases, just like before. Getting behind one person going to the same destination as you seems very unlikely, but when you look at all of the cars on the road, the likelihood increases drastically, just as with the birthday example. Improbability does not imply impossibility.

And that a particular specified event or coincidence will occur is very unlikely. That some astonishing unspecified events will occur is certain. That is why remarkable coincidences are noted in hindsight, not predicted with foresight. If you think about neuroscience, perceived coincidences are the only clues we have to the nature of objective reality. There is no such thing as direct perception.

Through data we stream from our sensory organs, we build our model of reality through coincidences that happen in time and space. Reasons of coincidences are what build our perception of causality. Therefore the statement that "nothing is coincidence" can just mean that at some level of perception, there is a cause behind every effect. Cheers!