Coincidences of Life – Ender’s Game and a UPS Truck

UPS Truck . . . without a driver





Sort of.







Why not?







(c) 2009 Katherine Gehl Donovan







I should have a reason for believing this, shouldn’t I?






About Doug Geivett

6 Responses to Coincidences of Life – Ender’s Game and a UPS Truck

  1. Pingback: Geivett on Coincidence | if and only if…

  2. Tom Wanchick says:

    Even if we took a Calvinist view wherein God directly controlled Doug’s listening to the audio book at the very moment he saw the UPS truck (and also controlled the UPS driver to be at that place right at that moment), I doubt we could still rule this out as being a kind of chance coincidence. For what if God’s willing both these things had broader purposes (e.g., if Doug had been at that location 20 seconds earlier, he would’ve been in an accident and/or the UPS driver would’ve missed out on an important conversation if he’d gotten there later). In that case, the fact that Doug spotted the UPS truck at that time did not in itself have a deeper meaning, i.e., God was not communicating anything by orchestrating that. Just a thought.


  3. Alex says:

    You ask yourself: what purpose does this coincidence serve me? Your answer: no. And yet it had a purpose for you: to be blogged about by you. Did it have that purpose before you decided it did? Yes, but though it had the purpose before you decided it did, it nevertheless had that purpose because you decided, and it had the purpose, for all eternity. And all this, I believe, because of your worldview –the doctrine of divine meticulous providence.


  4. Win Corduan says:

    I think that one has to distinguish between the ontological component, which includes God’s efficient and transcendent causality and an epistemological aspect that entails that we can discern God’s final causality in the event. The former does not imply the latter. Except, of course, that the “coincidence” led you to speculate on the nature of the universe. 🙂


  5. Paul Pardi says:

    Hey Doug. If this event was special and intended by a supernatural agent, it seems odd that you would have to “decide” anything. All the guesswork itself seems to me to be an indication that the event was not special and that no intentionality was involved. In other words, assuming there might be some special purpose behind the coincidence, the fact that the intention behind it is so obscure seems to be evidence that it was not intentional. This carries even more weight if we suppose this supernatural being is anything like the Christian God. The fact that you might need to decipher events to decide whether those events were intentional seems to me to be evidence against its intentionality. If you ask further questions like, “How do you know this supernatural being didn’t want it to be ambiguous and obscure?” you end up in an epistemic regress and it seems to only compound the problem.

    Your bonus questions: the image is provocative (whether it’s too provocative is a matter of opinion I suppose). Whether it was poor judgement depends on what you hoped to provoke. I can tell you that the image (which showed up in my Facebook feed) is the only reason I clicked on the link.

    Actually, your bonus questions are intriguing to me by virtue of the fact that you thought you had to ask them in the first place.


  6. Win Corduan says:

    Doug, the cute demons may be attractive, but that does not make them inappropriate. God created female pulchritude. Bad art maybe, bad theology, most likely, but fun. I feel sorry for anyone who would take them seriously.
    How could your listening to the reference to UPS trucks and seeing a UPS truck possibly be a coincidence? Which one of those two events would be beyond God’s control? You can call it a “conincidence” if by that term you mean that there are two event that appear unrelated to you in every causal respect. Additionally, you can assert, (as you come close to), that if their occurence is not a coincidence, then it does not follow that a) their conjunction is significant, or b) that you would have an explanation for their conjunction. However, in a theistic universe, in which God is sovereign, there can be no gratuitous events or chance events.
    Have a great day.


Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: