Is Life an Accident or the Result of Monstrous Causes?

If we’re not accidents, how reassuring is a godless natural order?

Richard Dawkins once tweeted that “If you think evolution means you’re a random accident, you don’t understand evolution (or accidents). Read a book.”

What he meant, I think, is that Darwinism explains precisely the illusion that we’ve been designed to thrive in a certain environment. The point is that although biologists reject the theistic explanation of that fitness, that doesn’t mean the only alternative is to chalk up the apparent fitness as being due to chance. Instead, there’s the mechanism of natural selection.

As Dawkins stresses at the end of The Greatest Show on Earth, “It is no accident that we see green almost wherever we look…Without green plants to outnumber us at least ten to one there would be no energy to power us…We are surrounded by endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random natural selection — the only game in town, the greatest show on Earth.”

But this doesn’t stop Dawkins from saying in The God Delusion that “The general theory of religion as an accidental by-product — a misfiring of something useful — is the one I wish to advocate” (my emphases). That is, religion exists as a by-product of the biological fact, as he says, “that the child brain is, for good reasons, vulnerable to infection by mental ‘viruses.’”

Children need to be receptive to instructions from their elders because unlike in many other species, in ours, infants are released into the world in a helpless, wholly dependent condition. Religious twaddle just parasitizes that weakness since children are receptive to whatever they happen to be told; children are inherently gullible.

Apparently, then, evolution by natural selection can generate accidents. If that’s so, although the fitness of organisms to their environment is explained by natural selection (and by other natural mechanisms), perhaps natural selection is itself an accidental by-product of more elementary physical processes. In that case, from this wider perspective, life’s existence would indeed be an accident, a coincidental result of chance.

All of which raises the question of what it means to talk about accidents in godless nature. If nature works according to laws, can there be any real accidents? Or do we call an event an “accident” merely when we’re ignorant of the natural causes and effects that necessitate the event?

Accidents and ignorance

In common parlance, an accident is “an undesirable or unfortunate happening that occurs unintentionally and usually results in harm, injury, damage, or loss; casualty; mishap.” The word derives from the Latin “accidere,” which means “to befall.”

A British dictionary separates the elements of accidents into different senses of the word:

• (1) “an unforeseen event or one without an apparent cause”
• (2) “anything that occurs unintentionally or by chance”
• (3) “a misfortune or mishap, especially one causing injury or death.”

(1) is just that point about our ignorance. The positing of accidents in that first sense is an epistemic rather than a metaphysical matter. There might be no real accidents, but just gaps in our knowledge. That is, the event’s cause might be there even if the cause isn’t “apparent” to us. (2) is the element of chance as opposed to intention, and (3) adds the event’s negative consequences.

One way in which our ignorance arises is due to science’s analytical procedure. By dividing nature into parts, wholes, systems, and levels with our limited, simplifying models, we leave out the possibility of interactions between the modelled domains. Indeed, a model might presume that certain factors are exceptions because the modeler wants to focus on some regularities of interest. But just because certain factors don’t interest us, doesn’t mean they’re unreal or that they’re never present.

When the exceptions happen, therefore, the result might seem accidental, but that’s only because scientific understanding proceeds by piecemeal. We have a patchwork picture of natural systems and mechanisms, with many gaps and exceptions about which we’re relatively ignorant. As a result, some events appear accidental rather than being regular or part of the natural order.

Indeed, one such gap is the relation between life and nonlife. Natural selection models what happens once life gets going, but we don’t yet have a full understanding of life’s origin. If there are mechanisms to be found in that gap, we might eventually discover how life’s emergence was probable or even necessary, in which case the appearance of life’s accidental origin would be eliminated.

God’s accident?

But let’s leave aside (1) and the epistemic, subjective conception of accidents, and turn to the objective one. Are there real accidents, regardless of the state of our knowledge?

If a deity created the universe by choice or by whim, everything that happens in nature would be indirectly accidental if the workings of God’s mind were ineffable. God might have decided not to create, and nothing could have forced him to do otherwise. The universe would be a miracle rather than the outcome of an intelligible process. We could even say that the outcome is accidental according to (3), assuming the result of Creation was the “Fall” of humanity, leading to suffering and death.

But the theistic scenario conflicts with (2), by positing God’s intention. Assuming God wasn’t caught unawares when he created the universe, but he chose to do so, the universe isn’t something that “befell” God. Things don’t just happen to occur in nature if they were indirectly or directly intended to be just as they are.

But let’s leave aside the dubious theistic scenario, too, and focus on what it means to speak of real, objective accidents in godless nature. For example, does it make any sense for a gloomy atheist to say that we exist only by accident?

Natural accidents and causality

If there’s no God, we seem to have the element of (2) since no natural event would be intended. But we don’t want to say that all unintended events happen by chance or accident, precisely because there’s a natural order to explain, and we explain that order by positing laws, mechanisms, forces, systems, cycles, and so on.

Is it, then, contradictory to speak of chance or of an accident within the natural order? Chance is roughly coincidence, and both are subjective in the relevant senses. That is, “coincidence” means “a striking occurrence of two or more events at one time apparently by mere chance.” The “striking” aspect is the subjective part since we can disagree about what we regard as uncanny.

Meanwhile, “chance” means “the absence of any cause of events that can be predicted, understood, or controlled: often personified or treated as a positive agency.” That reference to what we can predict, understand, or control is likewise subjective, which is to say it has to do with us, not with the rest of reality.

But chance is also “a possibility or probability of anything happening,” and possibilities or probabilities can surely be objective. If you flip a coin, you have a one in two chance of the coin landing on either side. There’s a remote possibility, too, that the coin will land instead on its third, much thinner edge. In any case, those “chances” have to do with the coin’s objective structure and with the physical conditions of the environment. If there are no flat surfaces around, and you’re flipping the coin in outer space, the coin won’t land at all.

If all natural events have some probability of occurring, all events happen “by (some) chance,” but that’s evidently not the sense we have in mind. There’s the chance or probability of X happening, but that’s not the same as X happening by chance. When we say an event happens by chance, what we mean is the subjective sense, which is that the event seems uncanny because the event has no known cause that can be predicted, understood, or controlled. That is, the event seems strange because of the incompleteness of our knowledge.

Some coincidences may be rare but of little interest because they don’t lend themselves to our pattern detectors. Only when coincidences are meaningful to us do we call them “synchronicities,” as Carl Jung said. And all of that is subjective.

Thus, when we understand why an event occurs because we recognize the causes and effects involved and how the event follows as part of a known process, we don’t say the event happens by chance, not even if the event is probable rather than necessary. On the contrary, we say the event is forced, ordered, or caused. Consequently, the event isn’t accidental, in which case “accident” and “natural order” or causality seem to be antithetical to each other.

If that’s right, assuming all natural events are objectively caused, regardless of whether we understand the causes, there are no accidents in nature. There are only inevitabilities, probabilities, or possibilities, depending on the prevailing conditions.

The monstrous natural order

But we’re not done yet because this Faustian confidence in our talk of causality and of natural inevitabilities and probabilities is hubristic and illusory, as David Hume pointed out when he discovered a problem with inductive reasoning. We only presuppose that the future will be like the past, and we never demonstrate as much. However many laws, systems, and mechanisms we may be justified in positing, a godless natural order is still exceedingly strange.

This is the mystery of why there’s something rather than nothing. Why is there any natural order at all, and why does that order persist? Sure, we think we understand how complexities emerge from simplicities, how natural elements and forces evolved into the universe of galaxies and planets, and how complex life evolved from simpler life. But the strangeness persists and infects every natural event because each godless causal relation is a monstrous brute fact.

This monstrousness of a purely natural order, of a self-perpetuating domain of matter, energy, space, and time is somewhat subjective because the hideousness in question is exacerbated by our social preference for mind-first explanations. We evolved to expect that events would have mental causes, because we’re used to living in society, not alone and alienated in the wild. When it turns out that most events happen godlessly, unintended and having no plan, purpose, or inherent social or moral value, that seems alien and grotesque to creatures like us.

The so-called objectivity of nature uproots our social mindset. Instead of saying that the gods make it rain, we’re compelled to say that the rain just happens, that it results from a cause that just happens, or that the rain happens within a natural order that just keeps carrying on by itself.

But the subjectivity of this hostile reaction to the nature of objective reality is so fundamental, it’s existential and transcendental. The apparent monstrousness of godless nature isn’t idiosyncratic or a matter of prosaic personal preference. We expect events to have mental causes because that’s our deepest kind of understanding.

Hangovers from obsolete theism

In fact, we’re almost just bluffing when we speak of a pure domain of objective and godless causality. Many terms of our scientific understanding of nature derive from our social, mind-first orientation. We speak of “natural laws,” for example, but that’s outdated after the demise of theism as a rational hypothesis. Talk of natural “laws” is only metaphorical. We’re comparing the natural order to our social one, which presupposes theism.

Certainly, without God there are no prescriptive laws, rules, or programmers’ codes governing nature, but what about descriptive laws? Is that even a coherent notion? A descriptive law would have to be a generalization about how some type of event is necessitated by another. But without a divine guarantor of that necessity, positing that law is a sheer act of hubris that flies in the face of Hume’s problem of induction. Even with God, there’s no metaphysical necessity, assuming God could always change his mind.

And what about a natural “order”? That idea derived from polytheism, from the Greek concept of a cosmos held in place by the Olympians against the Titans’ perverse preference for chaos. “Order,” too, has its subjective and social connotations since an order is primarily “an authoritative direction or instruction; command; mandate.” Once again, that conception of natural patterns is obsolete, a hangover from prescientific thinking.

A more objective sense of “order,” according to the dictionary, would be of “the disposition of things following one after another, as in space or time; succession or sequence.” But even here, “disposition” (meaning “tendency”) only conceals the strangeness of a natural development. Aristotle interpreted natural tendencies as purposes or as designs that guide events to what’s good for them. Scientists stripped nature of that vitality and of that anthropocentric bias, but just as we kept the hollow shell of “descriptive law,” we kept the husk of “tendencies” that sustain a natural “order.”

Nature’s monstrousness hides in plain sight in those very cases. What is a descriptive “law” that’s issued by no lawgiver? What is a pointless, unintended “tendency”? What is a nonauthoritative “order”? These are vestigial, self-contradictory notions, giving us the illusion of security despite the horror of a godless, self-assembling universe.

Pantheistic grotesquerie

What we have here, then, are inklings of the pantheistic implications of scientific theories. Philosophy reenchants nature once science is done disenchanting it by stripping nature of the more naïve, animistic, or theistic enchantments. In place of full-blown minds (gods or spirits) at the bottom of natural “processes,” what we have are monstrous dispositions, pseudo-laws, and a sham of a natural “order” that could cease at any moment, for all we know (according to the problem of induction).

How, though, is this relevant to the issue at hand? Well, if all godless causality is fishy, we no longer have so firm a distinction between objective effectuation and mere accident or eerie coincidence. All causal relations are eerie on the condition of pantheism. If the universe somehow created itself from virtually nothing, with no guidance from any mind, everything that follows from the poisonous tree of that absurdity is tainted with eeriness.

We understand how effects arise from causes, relative to the model or the system we’re working with. But the broader, existential perspective awaits us, whereupon we notice that our confidence in this part of the natural order is foolhardy. Sure, for practical purposes we assume the world will continue as it has in the past, and we live on that basis. But the confidence in that arrangement is the stuff of human ambition and vice.

The more enlightened assessment is that the natural order’s godless flow is a grotesquerie, a pointless, ultimately baffling, zombie-like shuffling between events. Instead of being blithely confident in the natural order, we should be shocked and revolted by it. Nature’s godlessness should alienate us because scientific explanations are antithetical to our mind-first intuitions. All of which comes to a head when scientists plumb the furthest reaches of nature’s inhumanity in the quantum realm, in black holes, and in the horrifying depths of geological and astronomical time.

Existentialism and the accident of life

Is life, then, an accident in the natural order? All natural events are unintended, which fulfills (2), and given entropy and dark energy, all order in the universe will eventually come apart at the seams, in which case we have the negative outcome which fulfills (3). For example, all living things die partly because of the lack of intention in nature’s self-development.

Recall that we wanted to preserve the distinction between accidents and causality or probability, because we didn’t want to say that all natural events are accidental. Scientific understanding seems to count against that judgment. But natural, godless causality is worse than accidental since it’s monstrous, grotesque, inhuman, and alienating to social, intelligent creatures.

Scientific disenchantment depends on the hubristic, promethean attitude whereby we objectify the world, setting aside our personality and our personal biases in our imagination, and figuring out how we can exploit the apparent natural order. But that instrumental attitude, too, should be set against the philosophical one whereby we appreciate nature’s pantheistic re-enchantment, including the monstrousness of that godless order.

According to the first, exploitative attitude which takes for granted the distinction between causality and accident, life might not be accidental because fulfilling (1) and (2) would be problematic. There would be causes that at least partially explain how life got here, and how each of us came to be, and although those causes might not have been intended or intelligently designed, they wouldn’t be due to chance in the relevant sense. The probabilities would be forced, ordered, systematized, processed, cycled, and so on.

But according to the second, philosophical attitude, objective causality is itself a problematic concept. Life’s advent would be as eerie and off-putting as every other natural event, no matter how justified we might be in saying that those outcomes are “caused.” Godless causality is the source and substance of that weirdness.

Thus, if the existential point of saying that life is accidental is to loosen our bonds to hubris and to our vain egos, to disturb us into adopting a more enlightened, philosophical perspective which might shift our priorities, the existentialist finds an even more powerful weapon, as it were, in the scientific discourse that was supposed to render life ordered rather than accidental. Either way, our vain preconceptions and assurances are subverted.