FATE?

Chance versus design or intention is a subject that has long exercised the minds of humanity and I am most grateful to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for his views on this subject, given in his excellent book, “The Stark Munro Letters.”

“Do you think that such a thing as chance exists? Cast your mind back over your own life and tell me if you think that we really are the sports of chance. You know how often the turning down this street or that, the accepting or rejecting of an invitation, may deflect the whole current of our lives into some other channel. Are we mere leaves, fluttered hither and thither by the wind, or are we rather, with every conviction that we are free agents, carried steadily along to a definite and pre-determined end? I confess that as I advance through life, I become more and more confirmed in that fatalism to which I have always had an inclination.
Look at it in this way. We know that many of the permanent facts of the universe are NOT chance. It is not chance that the heavenly bodies swing clear of each other; that the seed is furnished with the apparatus which will drift it to congenial soil, that the creature is adapted to its environment. Show me a whale with its great-coat of fat, and I want no further proof of design. But logically, as it seems to me, ALL must be design, or all must be chance. I do not see how one can slash a line right across the universe and say that all to the right of that is chance and all to the left is pre-ordained. You would then have to contend that things which on the face of them are of the same class are really divided by an impassable gulf, and that the lower are regulated, while the higher are not. You would, for example, be forced to contend that the number of articulations in a flea’s hind leg has engaged the direct superintendence of the Creator, while the mischance that killed a thousand people in a theatre depended upon the dropping of a wax vesta upon the floor, and was an unforeseen flaw in the chain of life. This seems to me to be unthinkable.

It is a very superficial argument to say that if a man holds the views of a fatalist he will therefore cease to strive, and will wait resignedly for what fate may send him. The objector forgets that among the other things fated is that we of northern blood SHOULD strive and should NOT sit down with folded hands. But when a man has striven, when he has done all he knows, and when, in spite of it, a thing comes to pass, let him wait ten years before he says that it is a misfortune. It is part of the main line of his destiny then, and is working to an end. A man loses his fortune; he gains earnestness. His eyesight goes; it leads him to a spirituality. The girl loses her beauty; she becomes more sympathetic. We think we are pushing our own way bravely, but there is a great Hand in ours all the time.”

Sir Arthur’s comment about the seed being designed to find the most congenial soil brought back a memory to me of the great hurricane that occurred in London and the South East of England in the early nineties. Acres of woodland were destroyed and two things happened as a consequence. Firstly, the following spring, a mass of wild flowers sprang up where the trees had once been and had prevented the sunlight from penetrating to the ground to germinate the seeds. Secondly, over the next two years, the Forestry Commission directed a huge tree re-planting programme to replace the trees that had been blown down. They planted the new trees in the same places where the old ones had been. Many of the trees planted under the programme withered and died BUT many trees sprang up in other parts of the former forests, of their own accord! - Chance or design?