RE: Coffee and Philosophy: Order vs Chaos
I do believe in coincidence as these things are simply a confluence of choices made by individual actors. I don't believe it's a matter of chaos verses order. Why must coincidence and order be mutually exclusive? I think it's more like actions or choices have resultant consequences, either negative or positive. These consequences may not be equal in every respect or within a particular time frame but they will come to fruition and be either negative or positive according to the nature of the associated action. An action of one sort can be expected to have a consequence of the same sort, either negative or positive. One always follows the other.
In other words "Whatsoever a man sows, that also shall he reap." This is what is "determined". I don't believe that the divine interferes with volition. If he did then it wouldn't be volition and love would be meaningless and so would life itself since, the actors would simply be playing their predetermined parts.
The parameters have been set but the actors are still able to move within those parameters from one end of the spectrum to the other. Choices have consequences and choices made by one actor will coincidentally intersect from time to time with choices made by other actors. The parameters remain constant. We don't have to wonder why some random thing may have happened to us because within the parameters of the material universe this thing, whatever it is, can be expected as it is a thing that has resulted from someone's choice or choices. "The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike" does it not and this random thing, while being unexpected at the time, is certainly something which is common to all mankind and to be expected?
Thirty years ago my two year old daughter drowned. If you examine everything that led to her drowning it is all a culmination of the choices made by different actors on that day. Did God allow this or cause this to happen to teach my wife and me a lesson? No, absolutely not! In a fallen world, accidents happen. The important thing in this is what was or should our reaction or attitude to this accident have been and what did we learn? Did we learn that God's grace is sufficient? Yes we did and yes, we can learn from anything and everything that happens to us in life but that does not mean that God or some other force is causing it but only that we should use it to learn and grow into the full stature of the mind of Christ, for those who are believers or for those who are not, into their "authentic self" as someone else commented above.
There are some hard lessons to learn in life. You have had to endure one of the hardest as far as understanding loss. I don't write to convince anyone of anything, but in my mind, if anything at all that has ever happened in our life is by design, then it all is. Order and coincidence cannot coincide because they are contradictory beliefs. You can't pick and choose when and how to have faith, if you believe in a higher entity and believe it has any semblance of control over existence, then it has control over all existence because order and chaos do not coincide. For example if a man was meant to be some great world leader or spiritual teacher in his thirties, but a random act of violence had him die in his twenties, then the whole purpose and intention behind his existence was just counteracted. If it's all chaos, then anyone can and will do anything they want and there is no purpose to any of it, so why believe in anything if it doesn't ultimately matter? These are just my thoughts and an attempt to clarify why I believe in order.