Our brains are programmed to seek patterns, even in the wildest storms of chaos. Imagine the universe spitting stars across galaxies, in a physical process that literally bends time, as close to perfectly random as possible. Now imagine standing on a rock in the middle of all this and looking up at it. What do we see? A connect-the-dots picture of a hunter with a club and a belt; a saucepan; and a giant bear.
Assuming the universe truly is random, why then do we indulge in this kind of silliness? It must serve some evolutionary purpose for us to believe in patterns, in fate, in a hidden intelligent design behind the apparently random.
Maybe ideas like karma evolved because they can help us to curtail psychopathic tendencies, by fostering in us the belief in some external enforcer of socially desirable behaviours. Once comforted by such a belief, the very idea of pure coincidence, of random outcomes behind which there is no deeper meaning at all, can provoke an almost existential level of angst – that moment when atheists stare into the abyss of their own belief systems and recoil in horror.
If God truly does exist, I am sure He create the concept of randomness and its bastard child coincidence with a very specific purpose – to scare the shit out of anyone foolhardy enough not to believe in karma.
