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The Power of Chance
The uncanny role of luck in our lives
Introduction: Origins
Many, if not most, events may be a matter of luck, occurring almost by accident. The fact that you exist involves an incredibly complex singularity of chance events: your parents fornicated on a specific date at a specific time, and from one egg and one in millions of sperm, there was manifested a certain specific zygote; nine months passed and you were born, emerging fully formed, although not yet autonomous, and quite angry about having no idea what was happening. Lucky for you, the earth had previously emerged seemingly from nothingness over a period of billions of years, as the solar system coalesced out of dust and gas, orbiting in oblivion around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, where the earth happened, by sheer accident, to begin orbiting the sun at a surpassingly fortuitous distance, allowing for life to emerge in the liquid water that came to encircle the globe, followed by millions of years of evolution. The odds of you coming into existence are unrepeatable and nigh impossible. According to science, our existence is altogether implausible, yet here we are.
Explaining Our Origins
We should not be surprised, therefore, that religions and philosophies, for thousands of years, have contrived…
