Article June 1, 1974 Issue

No Room for Chance

THOMAS GILBERT RUSSELL

Chance often plays a big role in people's thinking. To the material senses it looks as if we are governed by chance, that man is a victim of the caprice of "natural" law and forces of matter. "Accepting the verdict of these material senses, we should believe man and the universe to be the football of chance and sinking into oblivion," Rud., p. 5; writes Mrs. Eddy in Rudimental Divine Science.

But Christian Science shows that the judgment of these senses has no basis in divine fact. The belief that the world is a material creation, subject to the laws of probability, is fallacious and without authority. Spiritual man, our true identity, is the image of God, living in a spiritual realm, governed by spiritual law, and exempt from unpredictable happenings. Commenting on an old hymn that proclaims in a single stanza man's decay and God's unwaning mercy, Mrs. Eddy states in Unity of Good, "Now if it be true that God's power never waneth, how can it be also true that chance and change are universal factors,—that man decays?... If God be changeless goodness, as sings another line of this hymn, what place has chance in the divine economy?" Un., p. 26;

Recently I passed a new car on display in a suburban shopping mall. Apparently it was the grand prize of a lottery. The young woman there asked, "Would you like to take a chance?" I declined, but realized that the question was more far-reaching than it seemed. She was asking a question that confronts us in many subtle forms every single day. I wondered whether I was always consistent.

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