“Look at that! Things like that don’t just happen. There must be something behind it, and I’ll tell you what it is.” This type of argument is called the Argument from Incredulity. This type of argument may be valid for provoking a further look at something, but it is rarely conclusive. Often a further look reveals fundamental errors in supposing just how unlikely the event actual is.

One false argument is that events must be a either a product solely of randomness or of design. The argument is made in at least two different contexts. In the religious context it is used to support the Intelligent Design variety of Creationism. In the political or historical context, it is used to support conspiracy theories as an explanation of history.

In either context the proponent calculates or supposes the probability that some event could happen by the chance occurrence of assumed independent events. For example, the probability that life is created by various molecules randomly colliding is calculated to be vanishingly small or that human genetic codes are created by random combination of codes is calculated to be small. In the historical context, significant events like a successful terrorist attack are claimed to be the product of many unlikely events occurring in an impossibly fortuitous conjunction. The argument in either context concludes that since the probability of the event occurring randomly is so small, then it must have been the product of design. The existence of a god-like designer, or a secret conspiracy, is thereby claimed to be proved.

For the dichotomy of random events versus designed events to be false, there must be at least one other alternative to the two offered. Natural processes are one alternative. They are neither chance nor supervised design.

Natural processes interact with random events to narrow the range of outcomes. There are enormous numbers of simple examples of this happening. If I throw a handful of sand into the air it falls to the ground in some pattern. We do not suppose that the sand might fly off into space with each grain having an equal probability of going in each direction. If that were assumed, the probability of it all ending up on the ground would be vanishingly small. Gravity is the natural process that brings it all to the ground, ruining the simple calculation of the probability that it would all end up on the ground by chance. There is still chance involved, as we do not know exactly where each grain will land, but the pattern is dramatically limited by natural processes.

One might argue that throwing a handful of sand is fundamentally disordered, so that we did not see order coming from disorder. But having the sand lying still in the ground plane is more ordered than having it moving in cloud through the air, but it is easy to find processes that produce more obvious order. Crystals, for example, grow in highly ordered structures based on very simple laws of nature.

Also, events may occur as a result of vanishing low probabilities that are nonetheless observed. The probability of dealing any one hand of bridge (in a particular order) is one chance in 52! = 8.06581752 × 10⁶⁷ If you were to deal one hand per second, whatever four hands dealt would not be likely to occur in a trillion trillion trillion lifetimes. Yet there is no problem at all playing bridge, because we only care about the one game we are dealt, and we always get one at every deal.

Similarly, no matter how many worlds there are that are incapable of supporting life, we are observing the one that is, and that is a valid reason to believe that it is not so improbable as to not have happened. In history, there are improbably strings of events that lead up to historic milestones. Indeed the chain is improbable. What makes the event notable is that some chain occurred. If the chain didn’t lead to an event of significannce then we would never have noted it. We pay no attention to the chains of events that lead to nothing remarkable, we pick out and note the ones that do. All bridge hands are equally likely, but we only remember the few that lead to a memorable game.