[The following is from a letter sent to a friend, who had reported a troubling coincidence, some years ago.]
~
COINCIDENCE AND COSMOS
I don’t see those two coincidences – yours or mine – as
particularly startling. But
neither my being unimpressed, nor your being impressed, should weigh
particularly heavily in the epistemological balance-pan. For mankind is notoriously incapable of
estimating probabilities in most instances.
One of the side benefits of faith is supposed to be that it tends to preserve us from superstitions
that might otherwise get sucked in to the vacuum where faith should be. (Chesterton
was fond of emphasizing, and dramatizing, this point.) Actually I was never superstitiously
inclined, even before baptism; but now there is a warrant to just wave these
things off – things superficially much more suggestive. For, I don’t believe that God
communicates via such hole-in-corner monkey-tricks.
Such incidents, when they crop up, are undeniably
intriguing. The appeal seems to
be that they hint at a pattern on
the other side of the carpet, which we see only wrong-side-on. But then, as theists, we already know that; we don’t need the
occasional odd chiming of chance, to tell us so. What is worthy only of Las Vegas, should stay in Vegas.
*
One of the things
I’ve been doing with my new-found, fiber-furnished bandwidth, is watching
free online episodes of a TV series, “Lost”. The whole thing is predicated on Baader-Meinhof
phenomena.
The problem with that
as the basis for a multi-year series, is that it is all too easy to conjure
up. Just as magic tricks are
yawners if performed on television, which can always resort to special effects,
so spooky coincidences are startling only if they happen to you. It’s a very lazy genre. For comedy to work, it has to be funny; and even a
decent car-chase demands artistry to stage.
But any footling apprentice can have a stranger say (after you meet him
in an empty stadium in Australia, and then part company), “See you in another
life”; and then a few minutes later, a world away on a mysterious island, in a
bunker far below the earth, you run into the same guy, now wild-eyed and
bearded, and stammer, “Y-y-y-you….!” Still, “Lost” not a boring
show. The whole art consists in
having an artfully selected Bridge-over-San-Luis-Rey set of castaways -- the pert freckled girl, the doughty
doctor whose stubble is never shorter nor longer than a four-day growth, the
Black guy, the Fat guy, the this-and-that guy – and send them through a minuet
of interactions, spiced by tingly synchronicities, so that the coincidences become tonal, as in music.
Featuring prominently among the guiding coincidences of the
show is a short sequence of small integers, arranged in order. Fat Guy overhears a mental patient
(whom the numbers have driven mad) muttering them over and over, and with them,
wins the lottery! Woo-ooo! But then very bad things start
happening to everyone he goes near!! Woo-oo-ooo! And then they turn up engraved at the entrance to that
bunker! Woo-oo-ooo-oo-oooo! The sequence, unremarkable upon
inspection…
Actually, I must confess at this point, that I am loath to
write the sequence down, though it is only the whim of a TV show. It is not superstition exactly; more
like, “Get thee behind me…” For,
although God does not communicate by
such monkey-tricks, the Devil
might… Anyhow, it contains an old
favorite “23”. An otherwise
highly intelligent (though atheist) friend of mine
was mesmerized by this number, whose spectral footprint seemed to be
everywhere. It turns out he is not
alone in his obsession; an entire movie was made (unfortunately, not a good
one), about the eerie qualities of this integer.
*
There is one place where startling coincidences really are
intriguing; and it is as far from Old Pagan or New Age spookery as
possible. I mean: math and science. For, the same underlying structures
keep popping up in a variety of guises; the wild kaleidoscope of the world appears, upon analysis, to be dreamed
up out of a few symmetries and a
few bits of colored glass.
Here too it is possible to go astray, seeing significance
where there is none.The great Eddington was much taken with the fact, that the
Fine Structure Constant of physics (a dimensionless number, of course,
otherwise its numerical value would be arbitrary) is very very close to 1/137
(or whatever the figure was). Odd
he should have noticed, this, actually; did he carry around reciprocals of all
the integers in his head? Anyhow,
he hypothesized that the FSC was exactly 1/137; and busied himself
attempting to explain the discrepancy as measured. Well, it turned out to be mere gematria. The FSC is not the reciprocal of an
integer, and there’s an end to it.
The smaller the integer, the more it is likely to play a
role in disparate structures essentially by happenstance. Two
is the king of them all – duality, binarism – and thus is indeed a very
significant number, but rather in the way that water is a significant compound
– you don’t get goosebumps when you discover another example. Much more troubling are huge
numbers, such as the ratio of the strength of the Coulomb force to that of
gravity – how do you construct a cosmos out of such ill-matched yoke-mates? Or, to take a recent example from
mathematics, consider such apparently unrelated fields as the study of
j-functions, and that of finite simple groups. The first nontrivial factor in one of the series of the
former is 196,884; the smallest number of dimensions in which the largest of
the latter can operate, is 196,883.
A connection, or close but no cigar?
~
Foot-note (tail-note, butt-note) anent the Dark Prince.
Two of my favorite Christian authors, G.K. Chesterton and
C.S. Lewis, offer antithetical depictions
of the Devil. Chesterton’s is more
romantic and medieval:
Roses are redder when you believe in the Devil.
Lewis’s, by contrast, in the Silent Planet trilogy, in Screwtape,
and in The Great Divorce, depicts what we might call the Trivial Devil
(though no less dangerous for all that).
There is no romance to him; there is, we may say, Nothing to Recommend
Him. He is no Satanic Majesty, but
more like a Satanic Misery, a
Satanic Minionism -- a Mere Mechanism.
And as a mechanism, he is given to chitter-chattery repe(titi)tition.
An example of what we could term a “diabolical” coincidence,
in this Lewisian sense, occurs in “The
Matrix”, when a black cat (Satan in miniature, as it might be) passes, right to
left, outside the doorway, and then, right after that, or sort of seguing into
it, a -- a black cat passes, right to left, outside the doorway. Neo remarks on the coincidence,
merely curious, but his more seasoned team-mates are instantly more knowing and alarmed,
for they recognize a revealing glitch in the diabolical master-program that runs
the Matrix. The faults and
behaviors of the dark lords who run the place, are eminently mechanical, since
they are, in fact, machines.
