Writer and comedian Seth MacFarland (of Family Guy fame) was suppose to be on the September 11th plane that was hijacked and flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center. He was running late that day and missed his plane by just a few minutes. When asked what significance this plays in his life today, he said:
One of my favorite quotes by Carl Sagan is that we are as a species, and as a culture, we are significance junkies. We love attaching significance to everything, even when there really is no significance and something is just a coincidence, and this is a perfect example to me… Obviously the day itself was a tragedy and a disaster, but if we’re just talking about my case, it doesn’t strike me as something that I am attaching an unbelievable amount of significance to.
Seth McFarlane: TV’s Family Guy Makes Music, Too (Interview with Teri Gross, Fresh Air, October 17, 2011)
In 1997, Carl Sagan published a book called The Demon-Haunted World, which has a chapter called “Significance Junkies”. In this chapter he writes about the way we misinterpret statistics and replace them with magical thinking instead of clear-headed reasoning. He talks about the hot and cold streaks that athletes attribute to quasi-mystical sources:
We seek meaning, even in random numbers. We’re significance junkies… So what? What’s the harm of a little mystification? It sure beats boring statistical analyses. In basketball, in sports, no harm. But as a habitual way of thinking, it gets us into trouble in some of the other games we play.
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, page 349 (Carl Sagan, 1997)
I believe religious people are wired to be “Significance Junkies”, and Mormons are Significance Junkies on Steroids! Contrast MacFarlands view of what happened to him against all the faith promoting stories that spread around Church about a group of missionaries that were suppose to have a Zone Conference that day in the Towers, but got caught up in traffic/missed their train/got sick (pick one) with God protecting them.
The word “junky” is well picked. We crave significance just as an addict craves their drug of choice. When significance is not readily available, then we invent it. We imagine significance all around us. When we do this with games and entertainment, it is harmless, but can cause problems when we apply this to other events in our life.
The examples of this in Church abound. We have all heard talks and stories about lost keys found, child saved from falling tree, miraculous curing of cancer, future prophet saved from certain death after engine of small airplane explodes in a fireball (or not) and they make an emergence landing. This randomness of life cannot stand. We need a God that is pulling the strings and saving us.
What is the harm with this? What is the impact to the person sitting in the audience that had a close relative die in a plane crash? A widow sitting with three young children morning her husband who died of brain cancer after many priesthood blessings. By attributing saving events to a benevolent God, and not just random events causes real harm to those who lost in the grand lottery of life.
But the sad fact is that we matter less than we think we do, and the universe is more random than we want it to be, and those can be painful truths to accept. We crave significance and invent meaning not because we’re stupid, but because we’re creative: it hurts to admit our insignificance. Religion provides order in the random chaos of the universe.
I think this quote from mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré sums it up well: We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling.
Questions:
1. Have you had events in your life that you attributed to a higher force, which in hind sight you now recognize as just a random event?
2. Have you even been harmed by others who assigned miraculous meaning to a random events?
3. It there a way to believe in a God, and still acknowledge the randomness of the universe? Maybe a non-interventionist God?
Wheat & Tares 
I’ve always viewed heaven as the embodiment of an orderly world. The plan of salvation required us to be sent away from that world and be placed into a disorderly world where we’re subject to chance and uncertainty. We become victims of ourselves (stupid decisions), victims of circumstances beyond our control (natural disasters, diseases/disorders, etc…), and victims of those who use their agency for nefarious purposes. The role of the Church is to help us remember why we’re here: to create order by forsaking evil, embracing righteousness, and alleviating the suffering of those who’ve become victims in their own way (at least that’s what Latter-day Saints SHOULD be doing).
That’s why I find the doctrine of preexistence and intelligences so appealing. In traditional Christianity, God created us out of nothing and then thrust us into a chaotic world without our consent, with the end goal being for us to worship him forever……and ever (and that’s if we’re not burning in hell with the majority of humanity). However, in “Mormonism”, we’re co-eternal with the Father and essentially the same species as him, albeit undeveloped. We all heard God’s plan for us and willingly accepted it even when God didn’t sugarcoat how chaotic our mortal lives would be away from his presence.
Am I saying that miracles don’t happen? Not at all, but the purpose of the Gospel is to empower us to be miracles in other peoples’ lives. When people accept Christ’s atonement into their lives, “they are redeemed from the fall they have become free forever, knowing good from evil; to act for themselves and not to be acted upon” (2 Nephi 2: 26). By acting for ourselves, we’re not acted upon by the chaos of the world.
These are powerful and daring ideas in an LDS context. My upbringing included a lifetime of monthly testimony meetings where numerous near-misses to tragedy were recounted and credited to heavenly father. These meetings also included lengthy gratitude lists that reminded me how much the lord was supposedly giving to my fellow ward members but never to us. What had we done to earn so much less than these testifiers of bounty, safety, and prosperity? Or was i witnessing rameumptom-like pride? And if the latter, why has this continued on for decades and in several different stakes without being remedied by the brethren?
I am thoroughly convinced that life is mostly random, and I am likewise unconvinced that there’s somehow a purpose in everything that happens. You could accuse me of lacking faith but I thought this way back in my TBM days too. There’s just so much evidence for my way of thinking.
We’d love to believe that God helps us find our lost car keys or kitten. But what about the mother in Ukraine whose husband was killed by the Russians and whose little kids may not eat tomorrow? Seems like those prayers aren’t being heard. I know I know, we have free agency and that includes Putin and the Lord isn’t going to get in the way. But honestly think how random it is that you are reading this on a peaceful Saturday night while Ukraine burns.
We tend to think that the world revolves around us. This is easy to do as (1) a member of the COJCOLDS because we know what nobody else knows and (2) an American, because we are citizens of the most powerful country in the world. But there’s a whole world out there that can’t relate to our perspective. We (Mormons) represent 2/1000 of the world’s population and since we are 50% + inactive it’s really more like 1/1000. You really think the master of the universe is more focused on the 1 than the 999?
Let me close with this example of how random and irrelevant we all are: In March of 2020 Covid hit to the point that we had to close down. It seemed like doomsday. And then in Utah we had the big (for us) earthquake a couple of weeks later. There were people around here who thought the end was near given Covid + earthquake. Meanwhile, most of the world and even most of the US had no idea Utah had experienced this quake. Yet the feeling that the end was near was all over SL Valley. There are 100 billion planets in our galaxy and there are two trillion galaxies. Think about that next time you pray to the Lord for your lost car keys.
Bill, as a denomination, we practically HAVE to be significance junkies. A huge part of the Church’s doctrine is that the heavens are open and that God speaks and interacts with mankind just as He did in ancient times. Joseph Smith time and again spoke of miraculous occurrences attributed to God and angels literally appearing on earth. Call me crazy, but I don’t think a non-interventionist God fits very well with that history.
The problem is that we really don’t get those kind of stories anymore. We’d like (I assume) for our prophets and apostles to get up in Conference and clearly and boldly proclaim their latest angelic visitation or in-person interview with the Savior. But we DON’T get that despite the desire and expectation that Mormonism’s founding sets up. So what do we do? The answer is exactly what you point to, seeing God-woven patterns and significance in the randomness of a planet with over 7 billion people on it where a lot of weird but nearly always explainable things happen. We might not get the parting of the Red Sea or our Chipotle burrito divided up to feed 5,000 people but just maybe God can find the time to heal our loved ones’ ailments.
Also, where the heck are my keys?
3. It there a way to believe in a God, and still acknowledge the randomness of the universe? Maybe a non-interventionist God?
I don’t know. It’s interesting to think that if there is a God, why would she/he/they create a world indistinguishable from a world created by random chance?
Staying a bit from Mormon Doctrine here… Is God a loving god that allows evil to exist so that we could recognize and enjoy the good? Or (sorry if this offends somebody) is God a sadistic overlord who only allows good to exist so that we can really feel the pain caused by evil? Or perhaps God is, just watching what we do without interfering? Or what if God created earth-life by accident by accidentally spilling a bit of DNA on the planet when they were actually trying to work on their biochemistry lab in God-school? They may not even know we exist.
I think it was in A Crucible of Doubt where the Givens posit that there could be an evil God, but they would have no interest in worshiping him, so they choose to worship a benevolent god. That is fine, if you feel like you can choose what to believe. I can’t do that anymore. I don’t feel like I can choose to believe in a certain thing just because I want to.
—-
The human brain seems to primarily be a detector and pattern recognition machine. It is how we make sense of pretty much everything. We translate sound vibrations we hear on our ear drums into sounds of leaves rustling, balls bouncing, engines roaring, or people taking. We translate sound vibrations into the thousands of different words in a language. We translate visible patterns into colors, into the objects that we see every day. That phone you are holding, you can only recognize it visually because your brain recognizes the patterns that make it similar to other phones. Virtually everything you see, hear, touch, or smell is recognized as a pattern.
It shouldn’t be a surprise then that sometimes we see patterns that aren’t there. We are accustomed to this idea and understand optical illusions. We have less experience with hallucinations, but we’ve all heard about them. Conspiracy theories might be another pattern recognition problem, one that may be harder for people to recognize.
On the other hand, we know some of the limitations of our pattern recognition. The earth looks flat from the surface, but most of us understand the earth to be round. So we can think past the some of the limitations of our senses and pattern-recognizing brain.
One of the most common patterns throughout history has been a belief in God or Gods. It seems to be a pattern that most civilizations see. Is it because it is real, or is it the equivalent of an optical illusion? I honestly don’t know.
After reading this, I having been pondering as to whether the LDS teaching/belief in Foreordination plays a role in some of us being significance junkies on steroids. Even though the doctrine is a bit hazy – and in some LDS’s minds borders on predestination – our belief that God has a specific plan for us that was laid out from the foundations of this earth and is hinted at in our patriarchal blessings may cause one to attach extra significance to events that happen in our lives. It seems like placing a great deal of emphasis on the belief that one is foreordained to accomplished specific goals -possibly even great ones – could, on the one hand, serve as great motivation (i.e. Joseph in Egypt) or great frustration (i.e. many of the rest of us). Possibly a more reasonable approach to everyday life for most of us is to remove ourselves from being the centerpiece of existence in which events happen with us in mind and simply follow Paul’s advice to “prove all things, hold fast that which is good”.
Good morning deconstructionists,
I have spoke about this before around the edges. Now the rest of the story, sorta. I arrived to my mission in 1989 in Costa Rica. My mission President was there with his young family, including a 5 year-oldish son. This son had severe scoliosis. The MP made a covenant with God, that if his son was saved and such, that the Mission would baptize 100% on a single month. Well, they traveled to the USA and got the necessary surgery and his son was “saved”. Hence, we spent the next 22 months, being guilted and punished and pushed and driven to the extreme, to keep HIS covenant with God, not ours. The physical, emotional, and spiritual trauma we all went through for the next 2 years was HELL. The MP then manipulated the system so much, that on the very last month, the moment we had a baptism, we would get pulled out of our area to a non-baptized area within the Zone, until they baptized and so forth. On the literally last day, ALL the missionaries were working in the remaining areas. (Many many more details, I could expand on of abuse and unrighteous dominion.). Then the mission baptized 100% in June 1991 and the MP could go home a faithful servant, (at what cost to the missionaries and the local membership, requires an entire book).
To question #2, yes and yes, we we all harmed in the mission for the MP assigning a random event ( genetic disorder) to being cured by God (professional surgeons). When it is your child, and we were brought up the way we were in Mormonism, I get it. I need to help my child, I see myself in the scriptures and I will do as the prophets of old. But then I do not understand. Pulling us all into a covenant is wrong. The SLC church headquarters knew all about his extreme behaviors and system, but then if you look at the baptism chart worldwide 1990 was the peak of baptisms, and I had heard of other MP at the time who were also such extremists. SLC did nothing, just swept in under the rug and we were all told to be obedient. When I got home, I spoke to someone with knowledge of the case and they knew. At the same time, John Dehlin had come home and told his abuse stories. Many others of us came home and no one would acknowledge the trauma. I would never be the same after my mission. There has to be many of us out there, and its time to speak up about the abuse we suffered during the mission.
To question #1, yes. Despite no longer trusting LDS leaders, I was still all in, with the doctrine for another 20+ years. I had an old car and no money. It needed to last all through graduate school. I believed the promise, if paid tithing I would be blessed. With paying tithing, the car sorta ran for another 2 years. I attributed it to church blessings. Now in 2022, not paying tithing to the LDS church and I am making more money than ever, I realize it was circumstance and luck. Life events are more random. Where religion could play a part, is to reach out and truly help to bring positive circumstances to other people who have unfortunate circumstance. Some LDS members are great at this, but the institution literally fails in every measure.
to #3, yin & yang with chi could be an alternative approach.
When you are all in at church, many people attribute everything in life to the church. Good—- blessing come because of the church, not God, because only Mormons are truly blessed with the full Gospel. Bad–your fault for not being obedient. I still believe/hope for a God/higher power. I think the LDS church has stained our relationship with God, with how we view spirituality and we approach life. Hence, deconstructions, the purpose of this blog; and thank you for your view points and experiences.
I love this perspective, thanks for it. Like Richard Rohr says, we need to accept the ideas that I am not that important and that I will die.
Let us all take a moment and thank God for sending us Saint Carl, may he rest in peace. Demon-Haunted World is good. Another is The Varieties of Scientific Experience, a posthumous book published in 2006. It was based on his Gifford lectures from 1985.
Question 2 above takes many forms – I for one would like to abolish missionary plaques (picture, favorite scripture etc) – these days it’s a miracle if your kid goes on a mission, what about all the ones who don’t?
Much harm is also caused when someone says “all of our children married in the temple…”
Yes Rockwell, the human brain loves to recognize patterns. When we look at clouds, we see faces or animals. This was vital to our survival 10,000 years ago, recognizing the pattern of a saber tooth tiger, or the face of a relative vice a foreign person.
True story – random is when a family member dies the same day as speaking in Sacrament Meeting. Could the associated stress have triggered the demise of this person? Not sure they were needed for service in the Spirit World.
When it comes to distinguishing causation from coincidence, we humans are severely hampered by a host of biases and poor intuition. Patterns that seem unlikely to us are often well within the reach of chance. One example is the well known “birthday problem” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem).
Another example is an experiment that a teacher can perform with their class. Have half of the class flip a coin a certain number of times and record the results, and have the other half record fake results, trying to make it look like they flipped a coin when they really didn’t. The results are then submitted to the teacher, who shuffles them and tries to determine which results are genuinely random and which are fake. It turns out that it’s fairly easy, as the fakers usually try too hard to avoid patterns such as long runs of consecutive heads or consecutive tails. (A sequence of 30 genuine coin flips has better than even odds of containing a run of at least 5.)
So claims that “in the work of the Lord there is no such thing as a coincidence” are motivated by faith, not by math. We can expect to see some coincidences daily on average, less likely coincidences monthly on average, and even less likely ones yearly on average. Outside of religious contexts, people who don’t believe in chance are called superstitious.
This issue has been one of the big challenges I experience within the church.
I find it difficult that we believe in a Heavenly Father that. answers our prayers to find lost rings, children’s toys, iPhones etc, yet allows children to die from hunger, abuse and neglect.
I also find it hugely disappointing and troubling that in our prayers in church we rarely, if ever, mention those who are suffering—outside our congregations.
It seems to me that Heavenly Father must be more “ hands-off” than intervening at such a trivial and minute level.
Question #3.
The religion which believes in a non interventionist god is called Deism. Many of our founding fathers were professed deists who believed in rationality and science over God based miracles. . A strict deist does not pray, because what would be the point? However, many of our founding fathers did pray, as some of their prayers were recorded. Most notably is George Washington praying for the protection of his army at Valley Forge. So could we say “there are no strict deists in foxholes?
I think God does intervene with information to stack the stats in our favor. Activities which build Zion would lower the crime rate, increase educational opportunities, provide medical care, help the environment, etc. The problem is that we adopt political ideologies and engage in selfish practices which diminish or even fight against the establishment of Zion.
There is no credible evidence that G. Washington prayed at Valley Forge. He may have done so but there is no contemporaneous evidence that he did so. Probably should be filed with the cherry tree.
larryco – i definitely caused myself tons of unnecessary stress while trying to figure out God’s plan for my life and make sure that everything I did fit into it! Now it’s nice and relaxing to just live day to day without worrying about if I’ve discovered my life’s true path.
On the topic of why God helps us find keys but ignores huge awful things — sometimes I wonder if the Greeks and their mountain full of gods had the right idea. There are lots of gods. Some are more attentive than others. Sometimes one might bless you if they feel like it. Others will cause havoc just for the heck of it. Some aren’t paying attention at all. I mean, either God is super inconsistent and unpredictable, or Lost Keys God is much more diligent than Prevent Atrocity God.
In 48 years in the Church, God has;
1. answered my prayers
2. not answered my prayers, especially with my late wife’s failing health
3. And finally, God has dumped blessings into my life that I never thought to ask for.
I’ve given up trying to figure it all out. Someday I will be able to ask God about all this. And I think that is when I will learn a new language. I have seen evidence of a loving God, and I have see. God allow things to happen randomly.
From the book SnowFalling on Cedars: accident rules almost every corner of the universe, except the recesses of the human heart.
God has been good to me, but allowed my dear friend to get in A Terrible wreck and it took this good man thee years to walk again.
1. Have you had events in your life that you attributed to a higher force, which in hind sight you now recognize as just a random event?
Briefly, yes. But I would like to turn this around as well. There have also been events in my life that have seemed completely random at the time, but looking back they have had more significance than I imagined. A chance conversation that eneded leading to a career path change. A phone call that led to reconennecting with a long lost friend. Peter-Hanz Kolvenbach, S.J. told a story of an abbot that spoke about finding God. He then shared the story of Moses and God, where Moses cannot see the face of God, but can see him pass by. “And thus, looking over the length and breadth of his life the abbot could see for himself the passage of God.” (How Can I Find God 181-182) I guess I am more curious about how God interacts with me and not whether God interacts with me.
2. Have you even been harmed by others who assigned miraculous meaning to a random events? Not really.
3. It there a way to believe in a God, and still acknowledge the randomness of the universe? Maybe a non-interventionist God?
I think Mormon theology is fundamentally non-interventionalist. Yes, we have moments where God appears and speaks, or provides over the top miracles, but those are few and far between and usually are part of a new dispensation. Otherwise, our scriptures are very clear that our agency is the most important aspect of our earth life. “God would cease to be God” according to Alma, if the consequences of our actions are not allowed to be played out. I think God does not physically intervene because God cannot physically intervene if it means taking away the agency of us. I make a distinction between physical intervention and spiritual intervention. God may not (or cannot) heal a person with cancer or prevent a car accidient, but God can and will inspire a neighbor to bring over a meal or bring up a beloved memory or even suggest to your mind to read a certain scripture or lookf for your keys in a corner of the house. I love Elie Wiesel’s answer to “How Can I Find God?” He says, briefly, “How do I find God? you ask. I do not know how, but I do know where – in my fellow man.”
So yes, I do think there is a way to believe in a random universe, one in which agency (action/consequence)is a supreme law and in a God whoi journeys with us and intervenes through our fellow humans to make sure we are noticed, heard and loved.
I think Not a Cougar makes an excellent point that the conventional LDS view requires a God who intervenes quite a bit. For example, he babysat the plates Nephi and others wrote and even planned for the lost 116 pages (and all for Joseph Smith to not even use them for the translation!). I also like Not a Cougar’s point that the super miraculous interventions are clearly on the wane.
I’m very much not a fan of our human tendency to find patterns in things even when they aren’t there, particularly as it manifests in the Church. The problem is that looking for significance in everything goes hand-in-hand with victim blaming and belief in the prosperity gospel. Why was so-and-so raped? It’s because she was wearing the wrong thing or going to the wrong place. Why does so-and-so have a big house and a boat? It must be because they’ve been so righteous.
“either God is super inconsistent and unpredictable, or Lost Keys God is much more diligent than Prevent Atrocity God.” -Janey
Classic.
Church News now has an article about “the miracle of the rain” in Cape Verde coinciding with the temple dedication. YMMV