Luck or God's Providence: How should we interpret our lives?

HS #8  2016.3.1

Last month after the Super Bowl. Peyton Manning, the winning quarterback, remarked that he would spend the evening drinking Budweiser and thanking the Man upstairs. Possibly he was referring to the team’s owner in the skybox, but I’m guessing he was expressing gratitude for divine support.

 Manning was feeling great - - and feeling thankful. After a long, tough season, he had won the ultimate reward. He, likely with every other NFL quarterback, had prayed for such an end to his season. So it made sense why Peyton expressed gratitude to God for the victory.

My friend and former colleague, Don Cronkite, professor emeritus of the Hope College Biology Department, once had a student tell him that he, having forgotten a needed formula while taking a physics test, had prayed for help, and that God had obliged by reminding him of the formula. Don, his tongue firmly in cheek, had suggested that the student should admit to the physics professor that he had cheated. “After all,” Cronkite reasoned,  “if a person had given you the formula, it would have been cheating.”  The student was not phased, “I figured that if God wanted to cheat, who was I to argue.”

Does prayer work the way this student and Manning suppose?

Consider this thought experiment: Suppose 1000 students of a college are each given a penny to flip. Those who land a Tail sit down – roughly half of them. Those who get a Head flip again, and again about half of them who get a Tail sit down. They continue until one student remains standing - probably after about ten flips. That   remaining student gets free tuition for a year.

I used to give that example to my senior seminar students at Hope College and ask what would be their response if they were the winner. Typically, the answer was similar to Peyton Manning - a prayer of thanks. From the winner’s point of view, something akin to a miracle would have taken place. After all, the odds were one in a thousand.

On the other hand, from the college’s point of view nothing remarkable had happened. After all, someone had to win. Did prayer make a difference?  Most students likely had offered a supplication for divine favor.

So whose perspective is correct? My father distinguished between providence and a miracle: Suppose when walking down a sidewalk that a bricklayer above drops a load of bricks. If the bricks fall all around with none hitting you, that’s providence. If a brick stops in midair above your head, slides over, and then falls – that’s a miracle.

So was the coin-flip prize the result of a miracle or at least God’s providential plan? Or are such things fully explained without such inference?

After all,  “rare events” happen all the time. A favorite party trick of mine is to leave the room and have everyone write down a random sequence of 25 H’s and T’s, while just one person actually flips a coin 25 times and records the Heads and Tails. I then return and identify which sequence came from the coin tosser.  It’s easy - - it’s the sequence with the longest uninterrupted string of Heads (or Tails).  Moral: Unlikely things are rather likely.

Several years back I was entertaining friends for dessert - a surgeon and his wife.  Our conversation ranged among myriad topics involving science and theology. On most of them the couple agreed. But when she mentioned the miracles of healing, he dissented,  “We don’t know 5% of what goes on in the human body.” He was not denying the possibility of supernatural involvement. He was just pointing out that his wife was jumping to a conclusion that he would not make.

So what is the answer?  Are uncommon happenings the result of miracles/providence, or are they just blind luck?

Maybe C.S. Lewis provides the best perspective. In an insightful essay (easily found online), “Meditation in a Toolshed”, Lewis describes being in a dark shed, with only a single crack to let light in. One could stand to the side and observe the beam, or  position oneself to look through the crack at the outside world. Two totally different experiences depending on one’s vantage point. Similarly, the conclusions one draws from experience also depends on the assumptions brought to that experience. Again, it all depends on the vantage point. As a former senior seminar student observed, “The mind believes what the heart desires.”