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The Cosmic Horror of Nature’s Profound Dumbness
What it really means to say life is an accident
There’s a meme you find in secular discourse, which is that “life is an accident.” By this, the atheist or naturalist usually means that the emergence of life was highly unlikely.
For instance, the physicist Alan Lightman wrote an article for The Atlantic called, “Life Is an Accident of Space and Time,” the point being that “Even if life existed on every planet that could support it, living matter in the universe would amount to only a few grains of sand in the Gobi Desert.”
In Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins evaluates that calculation:
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
In short, we’re lucky to be alive because life is so rare, due to its accidental origin.
Yet both points, that life is rare and therefore precious, whitewash the root meaning of life’s accidentality.
Nature’s tragic accidents
Primarily, “accident” means “an undesirable or unfortunate happening that occurs unintentionally and usually results in harm, injury, damage, or loss; casualty; mishap.”
This is what we think about most car collisions, for example. The result may be lamentable, but there’s no one to blame because even though people drive cars, no one intends the injuries or deaths that may result from the collision. Driving is dangerous because distractions or weather conditions can interfere with the intention to drive safely. Thus, that collision of vehicles is…
