Coincidence?

"I don't believe in luck or coincidence."

-- Steve Camp


I don't remember exactly what song that's from, but I used to listen to a lot of Steve Camp's music in my late teens and I can still hear that line playing in my head. I can also recall sitting in church and, on more than a couple of occasions, hearing pastor so-and-so yelling about how there's absolutely no such thing as luck or coincidence. Nope, absolutely not.
I can kind of buy the part about luck- I don't actually believe that 'good' luck is some sort of good fortune that some people inherently have, and 'bad' luck is some sort of misfortune that other people just inherently have; it's all coincidence, really. If I happened to find a $50 bill on the ground one day, then I might say it was my lucky day, but it was really just coincidence that I was the one who happened to find it, and not someone else. It's so easy to find myriad examples of coincidence in everyday life that it's kind of hard to understand why so many Christians flat-out do not believe in it. It's kind of an issue for me here because it doesn't seem to be just a few believers here and there who deny it; in my experience, I find that it's very pervasive in Christian thought. (I didn't just 'happen' to find that $50 right when I needed it to pay for some unexpected expense- God blessed me!) I think it's because they think that it takes away from God being 'in control' of things. It makes him seem even more 'hands off' than he already appears to be. If things 'just happen' by luck or coincidence, then God isn't exactly out there watching over us, intervening when he deems necessary. And then from there, it's only a small step to, 'Well, maybe he doesn't even exist.'
Well, for the coincidence-deniers, I have a few examples of things that appear to me to be one hell of a set of coincidences.

Have you ever noticed that it always seems like the way things just happen to be is always the way that God just happens to work? Or, the way things are in the real world is just how God 'chose to do it?' For instance, the Bible was written thousands of years ago, in Middle Eastern countries- a time and place where women had few, if any, rights at all. God 'just happened' to choose that place in time and geography to inspire men (of course, men) to write his word for all of humanity for all time? And also considering when and where it was written, doesn't it seem like a really big coincidence that God, even though 'he' is supposed to be genderless, 'just happens' to want us to refer to him as being male? Father, Son, Holy Spirit? Why not Father, Mother, Holy Spirit? Why not just Holy Spirit 1, 2, and 3 (or even just the Great Triune Holy Spirit, since 1, 2, and 3 seem a little impersonal)? Considering the anti-female environment of the time, seems like it would've been a great way to show off his power if he'd have included a female element to his persona- 'Dare you challenge my God status? I'll show you...!' and then proceed to call down fire upon their heads or some such similar display of his God-status. (Considering all the people that he killed/had killed in the old testament, it's not like anyone can say he would've been above doing that sort of thing.) I just think that since he wanted us to refer to him with a gender, it would have added to his stature to have included the female gender as well, since of course people would have challenged him on it and then he could really show off his/her/its power and shut all the naysayers up. But, funny how he chose not to do it that way. Funny how he only chose men to be his prophets, and forbid women to teach or have authority over men. Funny how it was the woman who sinned first and led the man to sin too. Funny how it's women who get to bear the pain of childbirth, and not men. So God designed women to be the ones to give birth (though it supposedly would've been pain-free, had Adam and Eve not sinned) and not men? Women who have to go through monthly periods and hormonal changes, and not men? And funny how it was the Son who was the only one who could save humanity, and who himself only chose men to be his disciples. Doesn't this all seem like a bunch of crazy coincidences to you? It does to me. Some might mention the book of Esther, and say she held a place of esteem in God's eyes. Hell, she got an entire book of the Bible named after her. Mary, mother of Jesus; she was well-thought of, as were plenty of other women in the Bible. And the fact that Satan is not a female. (I guess he's technically genderless, having been an angel and all, but in common culture is generally thought of as male.) As for Esther and Jesus' mom and all the other women that modern Christians point to to show that the Bible isn't misogynistic, so what? Taken as a whole (in context, you might say) the Bible is clearly male-centric. As you would expect it to be, considering when and where it was written. As for Satan not being explicitly female, to me that's just a good example of the Bible having been written in a dynamic process, over time- which is to say, a group of guys didn't just get together one day and make up a story and then another group of guys put it together and called it the Bible. Just because us nonbelievers don't accept the Bible as being 'true' doesn't mean we think it's 'just a made-up story' (though I've heard that misconception before). So, looking at the Bible and its history as a whole, I see a whole lot of 'coincidences' in the way God 'chose' to do things. Believers tell me he wants me to believe in him, and the 'evidence' is overwhelming if only I'd consider it with an open heart, but the way God 'chose' to do things sure makes it easy to think that the Bible was just a product of its time and place. Why couldn't he have done it some other way? Some other way that was far more compelling and believable?
Daniel over at Unreasonable Faith had a post awhile back entitled 'How would you reveal yourself?' It wasn't a post, per se, but just a question to his readers- supposing you were an all-knowing, all-powerful (all-that...) deity, and you wanted to reveal yourself to your human creations so that they could know you and choose whether or not to worship you- how would you go about doing it? Never mind the 'Well you're not God, so it doesn't matter,' and 'God is God so whatever way he chose to do it was the Right way,' b.s.- it's a legitimate question, one that should be considered if believers want unbelievers to consider the merits of their faith. Funny how the god of the Bible chose to reveal himself- speaking first thousands of years ago to tribal people- paper hadn't even been invented, for crying out loud! They were writing on papyrus and who knows what else? The ten commandments? Stone tablets! Was that really the best way to go about revealing himself to his creation? I suppose it had to have been, since he's perfect and wouldn't have done something less than perfect. (Or would he?) Fast-forward to the new testament- the old law has to go, it's time for a change; it's time for grace to come in the form of Jesus (which makes me wonder- why was the law even there in the first place? If it was working, why change it; if it wasn't, why bother with it to begin with?). So Jesus comes in, does his work, then charges his disciples and followers with spreading the gospel. I remember in the early days of my faith, long before the internet came around with it's e-mail and instant messages and whatnot, a common question was what about those people who live in far-off lands who haven't heard the gospel? Are they going to hell for not being given a fair shake? After all, if they've never heard of Jesus, how can they be blamed for not believing in him? Then the preacher would point to that verse (in Romans, I think) about how noone was without excuse because all you had to do was look around and you could see Creation, so you just *knew* that there was a Creator (and somehow you were also supposed to know that his name was Yahweh, as opposed to Allah, or whatever). But that brings up a couple of interesting questions- if everyone is without excuse and already 'knows' that there is a creator (called God, named Yahweh) then what's the point of sending out missionaries to lands near and far, preaching the gospel everywhere? That's a whole lot of resources that could be put to other, better use. So why did he did tell us to preach the gospel and make disciples of all nations and peoples? And if the ultimate goal is to preach the gospel to all nations and peoples and bring everyone in the world (or at least as many as humanly possible) to a saving knowledge of Jesus, why send Jesus to earth to die for everyone's sins and start the Christian church 2000 or so years ago? The printing press hadn't been invented (and wouldn't be for quite some time) so it's not like you could just go around handing out Bibles to everyone in town. Mass transportation? Sure, a herd of camels. Or you could put a few dozen people on a ship and go to sea for a few weeks before reaching a far-off land. It just seems like if you're an all-knowing deity and you have a fallen race of people, and you want them to have a 'relationship' with you- it seems to me like there would be a better way of going about reaching that goal than the one laid out in Christianity and history. Maybe send Jesus in the year 2000 instead, when the internet is humming along nicely, and air travel is taken for granted? Why not? It's only a couple thousand years later. And since a thousand years are like a day with God, no big deal, right? Could it be, could it just possibly be, because 2000 years ago when Jesus was around doing his thing, people were a lot less knowledgeable about how the natural world worked, and also a lot less skeptical? So when you said that someone walked on water or rose from the dead, it didn't seem totally far-fetched because after all, people could be possessed by demons- something that we don't see any real cases of today, by the way. (Imagine if the illusionist David Copperfield were to go back to that time and perform some of his tricks. He'd be thought of as divine for sure. Or at least having a lot of 'supernatural' powers.) In the old and new testaments God routinely manifested himself in dramatic, unmistakable ways, performing obvious miracles even before the eyes of nonbelievers- but not today. Suppose Jesus never lived at that time and instead showed up in the 21st century and started doing his thing? What then? It'd be a lot harder to pull off, considering some of the things that the world's greatest magicians can do, but on the other hand, if you can just say the word and restore someone's sight- if you're God in human flesh, in other words, then it shouldn't be a problem. And why restore just one person's sight? Why not cure blindness in everyone? Why not heal amputees? Now that's a tough one- somebody survives, say, an 'incurable' deadly brain tumor that absolutely noone realistically expected him to, and everyone thanks God for saving him. But no amputee has ever had their missing limb 'supernaturally' restored. What's so hard about that? Salamanders can do it like it's business as usual. Does God like salamanders more than us? Only relatively recently has medical science been able to do something like that, and even then it's not a 'new limb', it's an artificial, man-made one. How many decades of diligent medical research by thousands of people, and how many millions of dollars have been spent to be able to arrive at that technology? If God would have just built in the ability in us like he did with salamanders, humanity could have saved countless hours of study and millions of dollars- time and money that could have been put to other uses.
Imagine if only Jesus had shown up in the 21st century instead- we do have a whole lot of gullible people nowadays, but we also have a lot of naturally-minded scientists and skeptics, people who want actual, testable proof of stuff before they accept it as true. Jesus could step in and heal some blind people and walk on water and shut up all the skeptics. Turn them into believers, even. Instead, God chose to manifest himself in human flesh 2000 years ago and work 'through' ordinary men who had to write his words on papyrus manuscripts. A quick google search turned up a page over on the Christian Apologetics Research Ministry mentioning 'a fragment of the gospel of John that dates back to around 29 years from the original writing.' A fragment? Again, why not just show up in modern times and write on easily copied paper, or post on the internet for millions (billions, even) to see, and not have to worry about piecing it together thousands of years later from fragments nearly lost to history? Or why not just send him at the beginning? If Jesus coming in to save all of humanity was God's plan all along, why bother with the Law in the first place? Clearly it wasn't working, which is why he had to send Jesus and do away with it. I know, I know, he didn't do it that way, so the way that he did do it must have been the best way because his wisdom is infinite and that's the way he chose to do it; if the way that I mentioned was the best way then he would have chosen that way, etc. etc.
Step back for a minute and look at the bigger picture; look at all the things I've just mentioned, take a minute and think about it for yourself and see what you can come up with as well. Doesn't it seem just a little bit odd the way that he 'chose to do things?' Commanded that the gospel be spread far and wide, yet he starts his church at a point in time when animals are the predominant mode of land transportation. Radio and television? So far off in the future that if you were to describe them to someone in that day, they'd think you were bonkers. Maybe even demon-possessed. Yet they can reach far more people and far easier than the way things were two thousand years ago. And speaking of things being more primitive back when Jesus was around, take it a little further and go back to the garden of Eden- why create a race of people so primitive, with absolutely no knowledge of science or physics or anything of the sort? Knowing that they're going to sin and then have to deal with diseases and such, why not just create them fully advanced, with all the science and medical knowledge and technology we have today? I mean, he was nice enough to equip our bodies with an immune system so we could fight off diseases and such once we got kicked out of the garden, why not go whole hog and give us an advanced knowledge of medicine like we have today- the kind that lets us build robotic limbs that can feel. But not only did he choose not to do anything like that, but he didn't even bother to tell us about that immune system, a little bit of knowledge that would have been handy to know sooner rather than later so we could've started working on making vaccines and saving lives. But getting back to my point, if he'd have created us, say, 20 years ago or so, all fully advanced and whatnot, then, instead of having to piece the Bible together from ancient texts, scattered about and buried in clay jars and such, it could be written electronically and printed and distributed on a massive scale. And we could also trace back human history to the very beginning so much more easily! We could say, 'Sure, God created humanity just a couple decades ago! In fact, let's walk over to where the garden of Eden is right now and look at the angels with the flaming swords, preventing us from getting in.' Would sure make things much easier to believe, wouldn't it? But, the way he chose to do it instead coincides nicely with something you'd expect to see if there there is no supernatural intervention in the world, making it very easy to believe just that. Yet I constantly hear from believers that they 'don't have enough faith to be an atheist;' that it's just so obvious that the way things are laid out in the Bible and taught by Christianity is the way things really are, and anything that contradicts it is just plain wrong (or worse, a flat-out lie). Well it's not obvious to everyone. Do you really think that out of the entire time-line of humanity, out of everyone who has ever not believed, that every single one of those nonbelievers really 'knew the truth,' but chose to ignore it? That not one of the millions of nonbelievers (or people who believed in a different god or faith) over the years had actual intellectual and logical reasons for not believing? Because that's what the Christianity I used to be a part of says, and what the Christianity that I'm still surrounded by now says.

Some might say to me, ''Who are you to judge God? Who are you to tell him what he can and cannot do, should and should not do, what's good or bad. He's God, so if he does something and calls it good, then it's good, no matter what 'we' think or if we like it.' I've heard those arguments before. To those people, I say, 'Who are you to tell me what God wants for my life, what he says and doesn't say, likes and doesn't like, is like and is not like, and then tell me that it's not you saying it, but him 'saying it through you?' Throughout history 'God's people' have had a reputation for getting it wrong (and never admitting to it when they know they're wrong) so how do they know they've got it right this time? It goes back to what I said before- I can think for myself and decide for myself- 'they' don't get to decide for me. In fact, I wish 'they' would just shut their pie-holes and let God speak for himself.