It’s been said that chance favors the prepared mind. To me, this is another way of saying that the power of intention negates, or at least reduces, the tyranny of chance. It tempers the influence and significance of randomness in the universe. Those who claim that pure arbitrariness is the governor and god of this cosmos fail to take into account the presence and power of intention. It’s why prayer and meditation work, and why belief has power, for better or for worse. It’s why confident people succeed more often than unconfident people, and why positive thinking serves us, while negative thinking sabotages us.

The weather seems random and we have little to no control over it. Yet people have sailed around the world by knowing how to work with the wind. The raw substrate of the cosmos may be random, but it’s not all there is, is it? Who can deny the existence of consciousness? And consciousness, backed by free will and by intention, seems anathema to pure chance.

Some believe that consciousness actually came before the universe of chance. These believers are theistic in their orientation. Some assume that randomness, and later probability, came before consciousness and gave rise to consciousness and its associated faculties of will and intention. These individuals are most likely materialist in their orientation. And there are some who believe that the two – the random physical substrate and the conscious mind – co-arose in a kind of primordial metaphysical soup. So excluding agnostics – who perhaps wisely reserve judgment because they can’t prove what came first – two out of three of the belief systems invest conscious intention with at least parity with chance.

Even if you believe that our minds are governed by random biochemical, atomic and subatomic (quantum) fluctuations, you must admit that the probabilities imposed on these physical variables by conscious decisions at least influence randomness. Free will imposes parameters on the random. Through human action, we place boundaries around what occurs. Chance may influence intention, but human will influences random events, too. It’s hard not to admit to this argument and at the same time remain rational.

Chance favors the prepared mind. Chance favors intention. Chance is influenced by intention. If someone were to come up with a proof that the universe was governed by randomness and that randomness preceded the creation of consciousness in the universe (that random processes gave rise to the conscious mind), that proof would be suspect and invalid. If logic was able to definitely prove that the mind which produced logic is random, then that logic is irrational. The logic itself would be governed by pure chance and would therefore be irrational as well. It would invalidate itself, or at least place itself forever beyond authentication. We cannot therefore, ever conclude that pure chance predates, has created or governs the universe, consciousness, any facet of reality or reality as a whole, since to conclude so would invalidate the conclusion as produced buy an unreliably random system. It cannot be proved otherwise.

For similar reasons, the scientific method can never show us that that randomness governs all or that it gave rise to the power of intention. The experimental method breaks down, for it cannot show experimentally what came before the universe or that pure randomness controls the designer of that method. If it could, then it would invalidate the experimental method itself as something governed by randomness. Even if certain experiments show that random events exercise absolute control over the brain, how could we ever be sure that the measurements taken by that random are correct? If the brain is random, how could be certain that the sight, hearing, tactile sense and the olfactory sensations produced by the measuring brain are accurate? How could we know for certain that our memories are not also random and therefore flawed? How would we know that the devices engineered by that brain governed by random events to measure experimental results are not also random and therefore flawed? If the brain was created by or is controlled by pure randomness, then the scientific method which that brain designed is invalid as well, since there’s no way to prove its results aren’t random. Just as with logic, internal consistency does not equate with ultimate proof which extends beyond any system of logic, experiment or mathematics.

True, it’s also impossible to prove that consciousness predated and therefore created the cosmos. However, this absence of proof isn’t proof of its opposite.  Reductionists claim proof of the nonexistence of pure consciousness as the decisive factor in the creation of the cosmos. This claim is as unproven and unprovable as those who claim proof of God. The agnostics may have it right. Belief in anything – God or randomness – is a choice.

But then there’s this: something had to create consciousness. What do you believe it was?

© 2025 by Michael C. Just