A Matter of Luck

By Bill Creasy

As atheists, we usually find it easy to criticize the holy books of religious people. We wonder how anyone can believe such things as supernatural deities and their strange commands. However, there are topics in which religious people seem to have more emotionally satisfying explanations of nature than secularists. We should acknowledge these topics and work on a response to them.

Luck, or coincidences, is such a topic. According to science fiction writer Larry Niven, luck is the ultimate psychic power, because psychic powers tend to be abilities that make the user a little luckier than anyone else. Luck may also be the ultimate religious testament, because good luck is viewed as a gift from God. People believe many strange, supernatural, superstitious practices, including religion, because they think it explains how luck happens and how to get more. Las Vegas has a countless number of lucky charms, lucky rituals, or lucky streaks.

But what does it mean to be lucky? Good luck is an event that is apparently random, happening in a way that is favorable to a person's needs or wants. The events seems to be out of anyone's control or prediction, although people often try to control it. It may be a result of someone being in the right place at the right time.

Everyone has an intuitive idea of what is lucky and what isn't. For example, if a boy rides a bicycle down a hill and runs into a stone wall, it isn't luck, just stupidity. If he rides down a hill and runs into a moving garbage truck that only goes by once a day, then it's bad luck. It's a coincidence that the garbage truck happened to be in the way at the wrong moment.

Even though everyone knows what luck is, it's not easy to explain in precise terms. According to physical science, luck is just a matter of interactions between objects. Uncorrelated chains of events happen in a way that is separate and unconnected with each other. At some point in time, the separate events converge to affect each other. A new effect results from the interaction of the previously unrelated sequence of events. The exact kind of effect can depend very sensitively on the exact time and place of the interaction, or on how the events coincide. Someone might say that the event is a coincidence if the resulting event seems unlikely, or if it seems like it didn't have to happen by necessity, but happens anyway. In some cases, the result can be favorable to a particular person, known as good luck. In other cases, it is unfavorable, or bad luck.

An individual person's life can be drastically changed by specific coincidences. That person doesn't necessarily care about averages or probabilities; he or she is worried about specific events that happen in his or her own life. Is the particular time and place of a coincidental event determined so exactly that no other outcome was possible? This is a key question, since there are cases for which small differences could cause large differences in the outcome.

Clearly, the idea of a coincidence involves both an objective event as well as our perception of its importance or likelihood. But science has little to say about why particular coincidental events happen as they do. According to psychology, we tend to remember the most extraordinary events and forget the mundane ones. It isn't unusual for some kind of extraordinary event to happen, simply because there are so many odd events that could possibly happen. In other words, good (or bad) luck has a lot to do with quirks of memory.

But that doesn't explain why specific important, life-changing events happen the way they do. Events are real and objective. The fact that an event is memorable doesn't change the fact that it really happened. We want to know why certain things happen, but other events that seem likely don't happen.

Science is our best approach for explaining real events. Scientific methods can be divided into two classes: mechanistic methods, and statistical methods. This is an oversimplifiation, since most studies include both of these kinds of methods, but it is a useful distinction for this discussion.

Mechanistic methods have specific rules for causes and effects. For example, a transfer of energy, momemtum, material, or information causes a change. The change can be predicted. After Isaac Newton's laws of motion, there was a belief that everything in the universe could be exactly predicted from a mechanistic theory, if all the conditions are known exactly enough.

In the 20th Century, statistical theories showed that exact predictions were impossible with mechanistic methods, for a number of different reasons. Statistical methods were developed to measure properties of averages or probability distributions of populations. In some cases, cause and effect relationships may not apply to the averages. Quantum mechanics showed that elementary particles behave in statistical ways. Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics showed that large numbers of particles can only be understood by bulk properties, not properties of individual particles. Chaos theory showed that measurements of initial conditions may never be precise enough to calculate effects indefinitely into the future. Social sciences often study averages over populations of people, and it is often difficult to identify causes from measurements of the correlations of average properties.

So where does that leave us? Coincidences that happen individually fall into a gap between mechanistic and statistical methods. The coincidences can't be exactly predicted by mechanisms. But a statistical average has little usefulness for explaining one event. For example, suppose an individual is looking for a partner, and meets someone in a bar. Were both of those people's actions determined to the extent that they had to be there? Or were they as likely to have met other people? Statistical populations don't get married, though, individuals do. Does that mean that meeting between particular persons in a bar is destined, probable, or just good luck? What does it mean for the way that we should lead our lives?

Theists have their own explanation for luck that they find emotionally satisfying. Coincidences are believed to be one of God's ways of granting prayers. Luck is presented as evidence that prayers were answered. For a theist, the response is that real coincidences don't exist. Everything that happens is God's will, and God is believed to be benevolent. Therefore, what happens must be for the best. Of course, these assumptions are unprovable and unfalsifiable.

Polytheistic religions, for example of ancient Greece and Rome, are slightly different. People pray to particular gods for benefits or protection. But randomness is introduced by actions of other gods. Even if some gods are helpful, other gods, or fate, can introduce unexpected problems. There are always several gods to introduce random luck.

Science has better explanations than old religions for some natural phenomena, such as lightning or the motion of the planets. But some questions about particular coincidences, or luck, seem unanswerable in detail by science. No one knows why they happen.

Humanists need a common-sense approach to questions of luck as an alternative to the theist approach. The approach probably needs several parts.

First, life without some randomness would be boring. Randomness is a intellectual irritation, because no one can think they are completely in control if random events can happen. But anyone who's played a game of computer Solitaire, for example, realizes that the game would be very uninteresting without some randomness. It is the reason there is a challenge to the game. On a bigger scale, evolution wouldn't take place without random variations. So some randomness is necessary for life, even if it makes life more unpredictable.

But the world is not totally unpredictable. There are some circumstances that can be affected to make better outcomes, or better luck. People can make their luck better by anticipating possible problems and taking actions to improve the odds. Instead of being at the right place at the right time, people can go to the right place at the right time.

For example, one can decrease the odds of a fatal car wreck by maintaining the car to prevent mechanical failures and by wearing seat belts. People who have strong social networks tend to seem luckier, because they talk about their problems to other people and often get assistance in solving them.

People should have political freedom to take any actions that they can take, short of unethical behavior, that improves the pursuit of their happiness and better fortune.

Even with the greatest care, though, some events will be uncontrolled and unanticipated. People can be bothered by the idea that bad things can just happen for no reason. That can lead to fatalism and can become an excuse not to take any risks. Many religions take the view that whatever happens is God's will, so it is pointless to try to change anything.

The only rational approach for a secular humanist may be to decide to be irrationally optimistic. In the words of Paul Kurtz, we can have "joyful exuberance." We must make the optimistic assumption that things usually work out for the best, and that even unanticipated problems can usually be solved. By taking this approach, we will be best prepared to handle random problems and take advantage of coincidences. Of course, sometimes we'll be wrong. Disasters and deaths do happen, but they will happen no matter what our state of mind is. By choosing to be optimistic, we will be better prepared to deal with the consequences.

Perhaps we can borrow a prayer used by Alcoholics Anonymous, but make it secular. We need the courage to change what we can change, the serenity to accept what we can't change, and the wisdom to know the difference.

We can add one more thing, as well, to make it more active and less passive. We need to have patience and persistence to wait until we get a favorable coincidence, and then take advantage of the situation.

The author thanks Don Evans for his Special Interest Group lectures in WASH, and Margaret Downey for her Friggatriskaidekaphobia Treatment Nurse, who got the author to think about this topic. This article was previously published in the August, 2006, issue of WASHline, the newsletter of the Washington Area Secular Humanists.