To what extent do coincidences affect our lives?

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“Cleopatra’s nose, had it been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed.” - Pascal
 
Nelka said:
If Hitler got into art college the world would be different.
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I doubt it. He had at the core of his personality, psychotic tendencies. He would have used something else as an excuse to take over and kill millions of innocent people in the process. If there had been another group of people readily available for him to persecute other than the Jewish people, he would have slaughtered them.
 
I failed the physical to get into the Navy. It saved my life.

So coincidences do have affects we can’t imagine. But we also have different ways of responding to those circumstances that can change how things turn out.
 
Hmm. I don’t want to de-rail this thread, but none of the stated events are coincidences.
 
Cricket2 said:
I doubt it. He had at the core of his personality, psychotic tendencies. He would have used something else as an excuse to take over and kill millions of innocent people in the process. If there had been another group of people readily available for him to persecute other than the Jewish people, he would have slaughtered them.
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Other factors needed to be at work. If Germany hadn’t been humiliated, with the brutality of the Communists next door in Russia worrying a lot of them, and if there hadn’t been the great depression, Hitler would probably have never had the grounds to start the Nazi movement. He may have still had psychotic tendencies, but their effects would have been much more limited.

So in that respect circumstances (large scale coincidences) still played a big part.
 
schaeffer said:
Yes!

Define coincidence first.
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“A situation in which events happen at the same time in a way that is not planned or expected.” - Merriam-Webster

“A remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection.” - Google

“The appearance of a meaningful connection when there is none.” - Wiktionary

“A coincidence (often stated as a mere coincidence) is a collection of two or more events or conditions, closely related by time, space, form, or other associations which appear unlikely to bear a relationship as either cause to effect or effects of a shared cause, within the observer’s or observers’ understanding of what cause can produce what effects.” - Wikipedia
 
I have seen people “apply” coincidences in various ways.

Some people use them to increase their faith that “someone up there” is looking out for them. God, Jesus, guardian angle, a departed loved one, for example.

Some use them to fortify an idea of “fate”, that something was meant to be as part of a grand cosmic scheme.

Some find them amusing and interesting, but as something that is bound to happen from time to time given the odds.

I have known people who have had coincidences profoundly change their perspective on life and the direction they were headed in.

Also, people have a vastly varying idea of what constitutes a coincidence. Some people find great meaning in seeing the number 17 several times over the course of a week. Others need something akin to a miracle to stop and take notice.
 
Some coincidences occur so often they affect our lives deeply. There have been so many cases of answers to prayer that chance is a hopelessly inadequate explanation. No one lives as if life is absurd and purposeless. The best test of any theory is whether it is successful in practice. That is why belief in the power of prayer is far more effective than scepticism.
 
by the definitions and examples given, Jesus was a coincidence of man and God.
Therefore our faith is a coincidence and we walk, coincidentally, by faith in him. Therefore
our whole life path is a coincidence of soul and faith, in him.
What is life for those who claim to have no faith, no belief in God?
They are constantly running into us. Does that make a coincidence?
 
Unless any of us are the product of a prearranged marriage, we all are the product of a coincidence.
 
vz71 said:
Unless any of us are the product of a prearranged marriage, we all are the product of a coincidence.
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Statements like this are the reason I asked which definition of coincidence was being discussed.

I don’t consider it a coincidence that two people inclined towards marriage, found a partner among the people they knew, married, had sex and at some point had a child.

There is nothing uncanny about the great majority of marriages and births…unless you are a person that if given the opportunity to follow any situation back to it’s complex origins, declares them all coincidences.

The odds of any event, if truly examined are very very small…if you really look at all the machinations since creation that led to them.
 
The extent to which they are likely to do so seems, in my readings and in my experience, to be a function of two prime factors:

1.) How unlikely does the coincidence seem to be to the observer?

There is meaningful difference in strangeness of say finding a penny on the ground after we just finished joking about superstitions like “See a penny, pick it up” versus that of seeing a man with a picture of an elephant on the Eiffel Tower on his t-shirt after you just finished explaining to your friend over lunch why examples like that often stump computers attempting to pass the Turing test.

2.) How much does the incident resonate with the heart of the person?

Consider how much less moving the voice in the garden might have been to Augustine if his heart was not already taut and troubled with matters of faith and doubt.
 
It does seem like there are two “camps” when it comes to coincidences.

The “camp” that says “wow, that’s such a coincidence that it must mean something significant”

and the second “camp” that says…"eh, it was just a coincidence, doesn’t mean much of anything.
 
It is God alone who affects our lives, with nothing due to chance.

LOVE! ❤️
 
schaeffer said:
It does seem like there are two “camps” when it comes to coincidences.

The “camp” that says “wow, that’s such a coincidence that it must mean something significant”

and the second “camp” that says…"eh, it was just a coincidence, doesn’t mean much of anything.
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There is another camp that says “Everything is a coincidence and nothing is significant”…😉
 
Michael19682 said:
by the definitions and examples given, Jesus was a coincidence of man and God.
Therefore our faith is a coincidence and we walk, coincidentally, by faith in him. Therefore
our whole life path is a coincidence of soul and faith, in him.
What is life for those who claim to have no faith, no belief in God?
They are constantly running into us. Does that make a coincidence?
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We cannot always distinguish planned from unplanned coincidences. I believe our infinitely loving God intervenes far more than we realise…
 
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