Ville

Fifteen years old, young and naivë, I participated in the Finnish Lutheran tradition, the confirmation class. It was the last step before I had the right to marry: as if I was going to meet a girl anyways, not to mention marry, ever. An outsider could describe the ceremony as a cult trying to brainwash the young plastic minds with the mighty deeds of Jesus, and the word of the God and the Holy Spirit.

I wasn't too keen to take the old grey-bearded dude as the grand explanation of everything. For one, I didn't give a damn. And secondly, at the time, the concept of evolution contradicted the notion that God was behind everything (of course, God could actually be the one behind creation of science itself!). Personally, I was skeptical of taking God as an answer. Thus, I gravitated more towards science.

Funnily, science shed light no better on the matter. I pondered...are we then but accidents of the universe? Maybe, we are nothing more than deviations in the course of nature? I asked this from my dad, though he disagreed and didn't say why.

Seven years later, I think I am beginning to understand how it really is. I noticed that the whole sentence:

We are accidents in the universe

is fallacious and inaccurate.

The word accident has a negative image to it, for it is actually a soft synonym for calamity, disaster and hazard, to name a few. Suppose nature knew accidents, and given that I am merely an accident―a lousy, miscalculated event―it would imply that nature had morals, a cause for its actions.

In doing so, we fall victim to the naturalistic fallacy, for in reality, nature has zero direction, no judgment, or morals. Nature does not differentiate right from wrong. Those fancy concepts are simply products of our minds.

Ergo, there are no accidents in the natural world. Only events in a specific place, in a specific time. I think we are (miraculous) events.