Does God leave anything to chance for us humans in this world?

[Robert_Sock]

Is there any such thing as a car ‘accident,’ for example? If yes, would you agree that God can protect us from such accidents? For example, is praying to God for a ‘safe journey home’ fruitless?

I personally do not believe that God leaves anything to chance; all is known, and everything is in the hands of God.

The implications seem to be profound here and worthy of thought. I would contend that it would be a heresy to deny that God leaves anything to chance.

LOVE!

 

[tonyrey]

Is there any such thing as a car ‘accident,’ for example? If yes, would you agree that God can protect us from such accidents? For example, is praying to God for a ‘safe journey home’ fruitless?

I personally do not believe that God leaves anything to chance; all is known, and everything is in the hands of God.

The implications seem to be profound here and worthy of thought. I would contend that it would be a heresy to deny that God leaves anything to chance.

LOVE!

If it’s a heresy I’m a heretic, Robert!

God can and does protect us from many car accidents but obviously not all. Sometimes no one is at fault because they are due to unforeseeable **coincidences - **such as a tree falling across a road. Sooner or later such events are inevitable in an immensely complex world. If no one were ever injured or killed it would be obvious that God is protecting us. We would no longer be free to choose what to believe and afraid to do anything we think is wrong. We would be virtual slaves incapable of true love which doesn’t expect any reward or form of recognition.

Jesus chose to allow Himself to be tortured and crucified not only because He believed it was His Father’s will but also because He loved us more than Himself and wanted to liberate us from our weakness, blindness and selfishness. He needn’t have gone to such extremes but perfect love doesn’t count the cost. Could we have done that for strangers and enemies unless we were sure we would be rewarded in heaven? Jesus shared our humanity to such an extent He felt a sense of desolation on the Cross:

“My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”

In times of crisis and temptation we have to be in the dark to follow His example…

 

[Robert_Sock]

If it’s a heresy I’m a heretic, Robert!

God can and does protect us from many car accidents but obviously not all. Sometimes no one is at fault because they are due to unforeseeable **coincidences - **such as a tree falling across a road. Sooner or later such events are inevitable in an immensely complex world. If no one were ever injured or killed it would be obvious that God is protecting us. We would no longer be free to choose what to believe and afraid to do anything we think is wrong. We would be virtual slaves incapable of true love which doesn’t expect any reward or form of recognition.

Jesus chose to allow Himself to be tortured and crucified not only because He believed it was His Father’s will but also because He loved us more than Himself and wanted to liberate us from our weakness, blindness and selfishness. He needn’t have gone to such extremes but perfect love doesn’t count the cost. Could we have done that for strangers and enemies unless we were sure we would be rewarded in heaven? Jesus shared our humanity to such an extent He felt a sense of desolation on the Cross:

“My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”

In times of crisis and temptation we have to be in the dark to follow His example…

If God is able to sometimes save us from an ‘accident,’ then it sounds like He must have the knowledge and power to always be able to cause/prevent accidents. But then you seem to infer that ‘coincidences’ exists, suggesting that God may not have that power and knowledge. So, does God have that kind of power and knowledge, or does He not?

LOVE!

 

[seagal]

If God is able to sometimes save us from an ‘accident,’ then it sounds like He must have the knowledge and power to always be able to cause/prevent accidents. But then you seem to infer that ‘coincidences’ exists, suggesting that God may not have that power and knowledge. So, does God have that kind of power and knowledge, or does He not?

LOVE!

The fact that coincidences happen doesn’t negate God’s knowledge and power. They aren’t mutually exclusive. And yes, he has the knowledge and power to always protect us from accidents but he’s not a puppet master.

To answer your question, of course there is lots left to chance, that’s where our free will comes in.

 

[davidv]

Is there any such thing as a car ‘accident,’ for example? If yes, would you agree that God can protect us from such accidents? For example, is praying to God for a ‘safe journey home’ fruitless?

I personally do not believe that God leaves anything to chance; all is known, and everything is in the hands of God.

The implications seem to be profound here and worthy of thought. I would contend that it would be a heresy to deny that God leaves anything to chance.

LOVE!

Seems to me that your terms need refinement in order for there to be a valid response.

What do you mean by the following terms?
Accident -
Chance -

 

[empther]

  The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie in green pastures; he leadeth me to still waters.
Though I walk through the valley of death :ehh: I will fear no evil for thou art with me.
Goodness and mercy :bigyikes: :extrahappy: shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

What is “Goodness and mercy”?

Is it preservation from accidents, wars, crime, disease and all that?
No. This world will kill us one way or another,
but God gives us the grace to get to his eternal home and we can know this all the time we’re here.

 

[Robert_Sock]

Seems to me that your terms need refinement in order for there to be a valid response.

What do you mean by the following terms?
Accident -
Chance -

Accidents and chance would be any coincidence that happens outside of God’s power and knowledge.

LOVE!

 

[davidv]

Accidents and chance would be any coincidence that happens outside of God’s power and knowledge.

LOVE!

That definition is so broad as to make an dialog meaningless.

For “accident” which of the following definition apply to your OP?

1. an undesirable or unfortunate happening that occurs unintentionally and usually results in harm, injury, damage, or loss; casualty; mishap: automobile accidents.
2. Law. such a happening resulting in injury that is in no way the fault of the injured person for which compensation or indemnity is legally sought.
3. any event that happens unexpectedly, without a deliberate plan or cause.
4. chance; fortune; luck: I was there by accident.
5. a fortuitous circumstance, quality, or characteristic: an accident of birth.

For “chance”?

1. the absence of any cause of events that can be predicted, understood, or controlled: often personified or treated as a positive agency: Chance governs all.
2. luck or fortune: a game of chance.
3. a possibility or probability of anything happening: a fifty-percent chance of success.
4. an opportune or favorable time; opportunity: Now is your chance.
5. Baseball. an opportunity to field the ball and make a put-out or assist.

 

[Robert_Sock]

That definition is so broad as to make an dialog meaningless.

For “accident” which of the following definition apply to your OP?

1. an undesirable or unfortunate happening that occurs unintentionally and usually results in harm, injury, damage, or loss; casualty; mishap: automobile accidents.
2. Law. such a happening resulting in injury that is in no way the fault of the injured person for which compensation or indemnity is legally sought.
3. any event that happens unexpectedly, without a deliberate plan or cause.
4. chance; fortune; luck: I was there by accident.
5. a fortuitous circumstance, quality, or characteristic: an accident of birth.

For “chance”?

1. the absence of any cause of events that can be predicted, understood, or controlled: often personified or treated as a positive agency: Chance governs all.
2. luck or fortune: a game of chance.
3. a possibility or probability of anything happening: a fifty-percent chance of success.
4. an opportune or favorable time; opportunity: Now is your chance.
5. Baseball. an opportunity to field the ball and make a put-out or assist.

Accident=4; chance=1. But I want to keep clear that ‘chance’ is what is beyond the knowledge or power of God.

LOVE!

 

[davidv]

Accident=4; chance=1. But I want to keep clear that ‘chance’ is what is beyond the knowledge or power of God.

LOVE!

If God is omniscient, then even chance is within His Knowledge. Your conclusion of heresy is a non sequitur.

 

[pianistclare]

God does have control of the universe.
God is “in control”. Meaning the prince of lies has no power over Him.
Does God monitor everything that happens like a watchmaker watches the time? No.
Don’t we have free will? We know well that if we choose wrong…God permits it.
Just as God permits accidents. We don’t know why, but God does not interfere with weather, accidents caused by others, or random occurrences.
What God does involve Himself in, is our lives through the power of the Holy Spirit.
If we taught that God controls every event, then why would children be stillborn? Why would some be stricken with cancer? These are things we cannot know. We will only know at the end of time when God makes His plan clear. We have to accept that things happen. We pray for protection, yes, and the fulfillment of God’s will.
But some things are outside of what we as humans believe are reasonable. They may seem terrible to us, but may have a purpose in the fulfillment of His plan.Chance is certainly within God’s knowledge. HE knows everything. To suggest that He does not, is to deny Him.

**“Accidents and chance would be any coincidence that happens outside of God’s power and knowledge”. **

Impossible. Nothing is outside the knowledge or power of God.
Peace.

 

[losh14]

I think your actual question is more like “Does God control every event?”

Let me digress a second …
“Chance” is a human concept, a way we have of framing an understanding around things we can’t explain but that nevertheless have an explanation. I work as a statistician - I model things as random because I don’t have the information to precisely predict them, but I recognize that with enough information, everything can be predicted.

For example, we say a car accident is a chance occurrence, but we know that a driver was texting and didn’t look up in time to avoid colliding with the car in front of her. Or we say that it was a random tragedy that a young man died in his sleep, but an autopsy will show a previously-unknown heart defect, and if this happens often enough we put together medical testing guidelines and treatments, and the proportion of cases like this decrease over time. That’s not truly “chance”, that’s just unknown.

Back to your question. Does God let us change things? Yes, but only so much. I can’t change that Deji was born to a pastoral tribe in Nigeria during a period in which developers were stealing his tribe’s land, shooting their herds and burning their homes. But his uncle in Chicago brought him to the U.S., and I was Deji’s day camp counselor for a summer. Neither the uncle nor I could stop the illegal development, but at least we introduced Deji to the United States and a better life.

But we shouldn’t let that limit us. With God, all things are possible. When Jamie Herrera-Buetler’s unborn daughter was diagnosed in utero with Potter’s Syndrome, which is always fatal, she asked for prayers. I prayed hard - so hard that I followed some links about Potter’s Syndrome, including one to a foundation (NILMDTS - Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep) which takes family photos as rememberances for parents of stillborn or terminally-ill infants. Through a supernatural gift of the Spirit, I mourned and I wept, and I - the father of healthy, living, beautiful children - offered a deep sorrow that God has twice spared me from suffering, for the unborn baby of a woman I’ve never met. I offered a heart-rending pain for this baby, and I prayed a long time for God’s blessing.

Today, Abigail Buetler is the only known case of a baby with Potter’s Syndrome to have survived birth. With God’s abundant blessing, I pray she will be able to celebrate her one-year-birthday next month.

So does God leave anything to chance? No. But don’t think for a second He doesn’t leave it up to prayer. God listens, God loves, God weeps, and God laughs. But God never shuns us, nor denies us the good that He, as a loving Father, would give to us.

 

[tonyrey]

God can and does protect us from many accidents

Of course He does.

But then you seem to infer that ‘coincidences’ exists, suggesting that God may not have that power and knowledge. So, does God have that kind of power and knowledge, or does He not?

God foresees coincidences and very often intervenes but does not do so for the reason I have given: if He did so **on every occasion **we would be aware that **everyone **is **always **being projected from injury and death.

There would be so many exceptions to the laws of nature they would cease to be laws. Science would no longer explain all physical events. Miracles would be so commonplace everyone would be compelled to believe in supernatural reality. It would be impossible to reject religion and be a materialist. People would no longer be able to choose what to believe and how to live. **We would be virtual slaves incapable of true LOVE! **

 

[Pat_Albertson]

God is outside of time. Chance and randomness are human formulations of events which are:

1. ]too complex; (example: random molecular motion obeying the laws of thermodynamics),]simple, but intrinsically requiring more accuracy than we are capable of (taken from chaos theory),]quantum mechanical; (while the mathematical representations evolve deterministically in time, they are still either wave-functions or else vectors and matrices describing raw probability (actually the square root of raw probability, a probability amplitude - all quantum mechanical mathematical representations must be finite and square integrable)),]pseudorandom; in priniple knowable by humans but often too difficult for a human alone to compute; computers can “know” them though, and one computer, given an algorithm for a pseudorandom number can compute it just as well as another, indicating that pseudo-randomness is not truly random.
   and are inside time.
   
   I think it is a fundamental philosophical (or perhaps theological?) error (a category error?) to describe the actions of an infinite Being outside of time has with terms more suitable for (extremely) limited finite beings inside of time.

 

[tonyrey]

I think your actual question is more like “Does God control every event?”

Let me digress a second …
“Chance” is a human concept, a way we have of framing an understanding around things we can’t explain but that nevertheless have an explanation. I work as a statistician - I model things as random because I don’t have the information to precisely predict them, but I recognize that with enough information, everything can be predicted.

For example, we say a car accident is a chance occurrence, but we know that a driver was texting and didn’t look up in time to avoid colliding with the car in front of her. Or we say that it was a random tragedy that a young man died in his sleep, but an autopsy will show a previously-unknown heart defect, and if this happens often enough we put together medical testing guidelines and treatments, and the proportion of cases like this decrease over time. That’s not truly “chance”, that’s just unknown.

Back to your question. Does God let us change things? Yes, but only so much. I can’t change that Deji was born to a pastoral tribe in Nigeria during a period in which developers were stealing his tribe’s land, shooting their herds and burning their homes. But his uncle in Chicago brought him to the U.S., and I was Deji’s day camp counselor for a summer. Neither the uncle nor I could stop the illegal development, but at least we introduced Deji to the United States and a better life.

But we shouldn’t let that limit us. With God, all things are possible. When Jamie Herrera-Buetler’s unborn daughter was diagnosed in utero with Potter’s Syndrome, which is always fatal, she asked for prayers. I prayed hard - so hard that I followed some links about Potter’s Syndrome, including one to a foundation (NILMDTS - Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep) which takes family photos as rememberances for parents of stillborn or terminally-ill infants. Through a supernatural gift of the Spirit, I mourned and I wept, and I - the father of healthy, living, beautiful children - offered a deep sorrow that God has twice spared me from suffering, for the unborn baby of a woman I’ve never met. I offered a heart-rending pain for this baby, and I prayed a long time for God’s blessing.

Today, Abigail Buetler is the only known case of a baby with Potter’s Syndrome to have survived birth. With God’s abundant blessing, I pray she will be able to celebrate her one-year-birthday next month.

So does God leave anything to chance? No. But don’t think for a second He doesn’t leave it up to prayer. God listens, God loves, God weeps, and God laughs. But God never shuns us, nor denies us the good that He, as a loving Father, would give to us.

One reason why Jesus chose to be a sacrificial victim was to show us that some people have to suffer more than others in this life. It takes all sorts to make a world and even though suffering is evil it can be transformed into a means of sanctification. Saintliness is not achieved without carrying a cross. Those who are born blind, deformed or retarded are precious in the sight of God:

“But many who seem to be important now will be the least important then, and those who are considered least here will be the greatest then”

Matthew 19:30

“Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven”

Matthew 18:3-4

BTW The term “chance” also applies to coincidences, many of which cannot be predicted because life is so complex:

Probability is the very guide of life. - Cicero

Not certainty!

 

[tonyrey]

The fact that coincidences happen doesn’t negate God’s knowledge and power. They aren’t mutually exclusive. And yes, he has the knowledge and power to always protect us from accidents but he’s not a puppet master.

To answer your question, of course there is lots left to chance, that’s where our free will comes in.

We can choose, for example, to react positively or negatively to accidents.

 

[Linusthe2nd]

Is there any such thing as a car ‘accident,’ for example? If yes, would you agree that God can protect us from such accidents? For example, is praying to God for a ‘safe journey home’ fruitless?

I personally do not believe that God leaves anything to chance; all is known, and everything is in the hands of God.

The implications seem to be profound here and worthy of thought. I would contend that it would be a heresy to deny that God leaves anything to chance.

LOVE!

Since God created the universe, one must assume that nothing happens by chance. Thomas Aquanas agrees. And it seems to be the best interpretation of Divine Revelation.

Linus2nd

 

[oldcelt]

He may not even know that we are here.There is no evidence one way or the other.

 

[davidv]

He may not even know that we are here.There is no evidence one way or the other.

You don’t have to believe it, but I am evidence that He does.

 

[oldcelt]

You don’t have to believe it, but I am evidence that He does.

How is that David? Billions of others don’t prove anything except that humans are good at reproduction.