Does coincidence really mean anything?

Doubt it? Try this. Go to your favorite web search engine and type in "Ronald and Reagan and 666" and hit the search button. Oooo. Scary. Reagan is the Beast.

Now, type in your first name and your last name and 666, just like you did for Ronald Reagan. When I did this, I got 356 hits. Oooo. Maybe I am the Beast.

The truth is, the number 666 happens a lot. When I typed in "Ronald and Reagan and 666" I got 2,850 hits. But when I typed in "Ronald and Reagan and 555" I got 2,910 hits.

Why? Is 555 any Beastlier than 666?

No. 555 is lower. Lower numbers occur in our lives more often than higher numbers. Type in "Ronald and Reagan and 111" and you get 9,980 hits. "Ronald and Reagan and 14" gets you 133,000 hits.

So, coincidence alone does not mean anything.

There is a religious theory floating around which says that since a lot of things in our universe happen to be just right for us to exist, and since the odds of that happening by chance are wildly unlikely, the universe must have been created by a divine being just for us.

The problem with this argument is we don't know what we are comparing our universe to. If there is only one universe, and if it is perfect for life, and if that is wildly unlikely, then maybe that shows a divine being did create it for us. But if there are trillions and trillions of dead universes, maybe ours happened this way by chance. Of course, the universe in which people ask the question, "Did the Creator make this Universe for us?" is going to be the universe with people in it. So, to those people, their totally random universe is going to seem like a specially created universe.

Getting back to the Reagan thing. Does this suggest all those coincidences mean nothing?

For you, yes? For me, no.

We have devised a system for testing our explanations of events. This system is called "Science." The way it works is, you observe some events. You guess why the events happened. Your guess is called a theory. You devise and carry out experiments or observations which test your theory. If the new observations match the predictions from your theory, you suspect that your theory is correct.

I handed you the Reagan coincidences all wrapped up in a package. No more observations to make, unless that Revelation 13:14-15 thing happens, in which case, you are on your own.

For me, it is a little weirder. I had one observation, the assassination attempt and its coincidence with Revelation 13 and 17. I devised a theory and began observing. Each of the other coincidences has trickled in since then. Years later, when I got to the UN Resolution 666 thing, I started to feel like I had a well tested theory. Which, considering my agnosticism, is an awkward position to be in.

To make it even stranger, the day I noticed the first Reagan coincidence, I went shopping for groceries. I stood at the cash register and thought to myself, 
"What would I do if the groceries happened to ring up to a total of $6.66."
A moment later, the last item was totaled, and the clerk told me I owed the store $6.66. To you, since this is not an observation you can make but just a wild story I am telling you, this is meaningless. To me, it was pretty scary.

A few months later, I was walking down the street thinking to myself that if you waved your fist at the heavens and challenged God to strike you with a lightening bolt, and if you were struck, and it hurt like hell, but you lived, it would actually be a wonderful thing, because then you would know God was really there. "Yup," I thought, "I would love it if God would hit me with a lightening bolt to let me know the truth." At that exact moment, I looked up at the person walking toward me. It was a college kid wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a guitar player being hit by a lightening bolt. That is two amazing coincidences in my life.

But, let me tell you about my third amazing coincidence.

When I was in college, I had a subscription to Playboy magazine. At some point during my marriage, my wife and I chose to let the subscription lapse. My wife, always a hoarder, packed the magazines into a big cardboard box. And a few years later, she left me. (There was a lot more to the marriage, but none of it is relevant to this discussion.) One day I was driving home from work, and I felt a sudden unusual compulsion to look at one of the centerfolds in one of those Playboys. I drove home feeling like I really, really wanted to see that one particular centerfold.

But it was a busy day, and I had lots of things to do around the house. It got to be my bedtime, and I still hadn't looked for the box of Playboys. Now it was a battle between a silly compulsion and a desire to get some sleep. The compulsion was just strong enough to get me to pull the box out of the closet and open it. When I looked inside, I realized that my now ex-wife had put five years worth of Playboys, sixty issues, into the box. She had stood them on end, so that I was seeing the top edges and not the covers. There were an awful lot of them, and I was tired. And I did not have the faintest idea which issue held the centerfold image I wanted to see. So I decided to close the box and go to bed.

That is when the really inexplicable thing happened. I suddenly knew, in the same way that I know I am sitting on a chair right now, that I was going to reach into the box and pull out a Playboy. I was going to open it, and the centerfold would be the one I had been looking for. Odds were one in sixty against. I reached into the box. I pulled out a magazine. I opened it. It was the centerfold I had felt strangely compelled to see. Tracy Vaccaro, if you must know.

I sat there on the edge of my bed thinking, "What the hell was that all about?"
And to this day, I don't know.

Coincidence will do that to you.