Editor’s note: For previous entries in the “Doctor’s Diary” series, see here.

Many people believe there is no such thing as a coincidence. Instead, they think these kinds of happenings occur by design, not accident, and may have a purpose. The Internet, in its wisdom, credits some catchy sayings on the subject to noteworthy individuals. The attributions seem open to doubt so take them for what they’re worth. Einstein: “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: “There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.” Author William S. Burroughs, straight to the point: “There are no coincidences.” It is factual that psychotherapist Carl Jung wrote a little book on meaningful coincidences, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. Some people call these God winks or God shots. 

Nonetheless, there are some high-probability “coincidences” that may not have a deeper meaning, such as thinking about someone and then having the phone ring with that exact person on the other end or discussing a long lost friend and then bumping into him or her at the grocery store. I believe most of these are random events or statistical likelihoods (accidents), ones that happen to all of us and mean nothing more than nothing.

A true coincidence, as I view it, has a near impossible chance of happening on its own. There is no discernible cause. It gives one the feeling that a person might get while sitting alone on a seesaw in a deserted children’s park and then suddenly feeling himself going way up when, just to remind you, there’s no one on the other end. 

Irreducible Complexity

The fabric of life is woven with inexplicable coincidences, which I believe have to be designed. These events are often dependent on other inexplicable coincidences (even more designs), that may be further dependent on other coincidences (more designs). One sometimes needs to put on the right kind of glasses, clip on high-resolution optic magnifiers, insert sound-augmenters in your ears, warm up tactile sensors, and shine the right kind of light in the right direction. Inside our bodies we find tens of millions of events that happen simultaneously and/or in succession, with feedback loops, at the macroscopic, microscopic, and submicroscopic levels. Many (probably all) are irreducibly complex in the Michael Behe sense, meaning all the parts have to be present, in good repair, and in place to carry out the function(s). 

Within our bodies, indeed within all mammals, the absence of one kind of enzyme, one nucleotide, or one type of amino acid may break the chain of coincidences and permanently fracture an important process. Examples include the making of bone into the necessary shapes, sizes, and strengths at the proper time (a femur looks like a femur, not a humerus), the kidneys clearing different kinds of breakdown products from the blood and managing the balance of fluids, and our brains retaining critical memories such as how to walk and talk and who is Mom.

Accident or Coincidence?

Consider the groupings of tens of thousands of cells along the inside of the small intestine that have very select functions for absorbing specific minerals, different salts, individual vitamins, or specific nutrients. The specific functions might be likened to a biological Mount Rushmore with many heads (and moving mouths), each insisting on very specific items and then sending them to very different locations. See William Dembski’s book The Design Inference. I think this would fit his theory of specified complexity.

I find coincidences everywhere I look, all the time. Consider a simple blade of grass. One could write a long treatise about the simultaneous goings-on therein. One major function is photosynthesis where sunlight plus carbon dioxide and water are converted into glucose and oxygen. We breathe in oxygen and out carbon dioxide all day long. Meanwhile, plants breathe in carbon dioxide and out oxygen all day long. This is an incredible life-sustaining, interdependent coincidental cycle (designed?) . All these components have to be present at the same time, in the right amounts, at the right time, and in the right place. And, be replenished. Common sense would say this cannot be an accident.

Butterflies and Moths

The lives of butterflies and moths are classic examples of coincidences. One cannot fully explain how the metamorphosis-soup inside a cocoon (the chrysalis stage) comes to organize itself into a beautiful insect that breaks out and flies away. And then, how do the successive offspring of a monarch butterfly find their way to and from a precise location in Mexico, a place that they have never seen before? If the process happened by trial and error as described by Darwin, all of these butterflies would have perished en route.

Ever wonder why starting a campfire in the Pacific Northwest doesn’t cause a massive conflagration that instantly spreads across the United States and probably across the globe and kills everyone? The reason it doesn’t, states biologist Michael Denton in his writings and videos, is the coincidental presence of nitrogen in the atmosphere at a very specific concentration. Nitrogen is a natural fire retardant. Another great coincidence (design?)! Also note, if the oxygen concentration were higher, we would spontaneously combust; if lower, we would die of hypoxia.

Feeling Thirsty?

It’s clear that water is critical to our survival. As it is, our bodies are composed of 60 percent water. Men need about 3 to 4 quarts of water per day and women about 2 to 3 quarts, depending on ambient temperature, the level of activity, general health, and body size. There’s an imprecise but usable rule, 4-4-4. We will die if we are deprived of oxygen for four minutes, of water for four days, or of food for four weeks. Some of us, however, these days might last months, considering the nationwide obesity rate.

Water is the perfect solvent for minerals in our bloodstream and in the waterways. It is extremely useful in all three states: gas, water, and ice. This could not be an accident. Water has to recycle itself again and again to be beneficial to life. Stagnant waterways would kill us all. Fortunately, there’s the systems of clouds, which act like long-haul trucks, taking lighter moisture back up to the mountains where it is dropped and converted into water, snow, and ice (for storage?). It then flows back down, collecting minerals and feeding the land, over and over again. Sometimes, clouds conveniently drop part of their water loads at places along the way. I’ve also been struck by the fact that ice rises to the surface (floats), which is a good thing for creatures in our lakes and rivers. If ice did not float, such life could not continue to exist in the midst of very cold winter.

Consider human breast milk. If the first swallow were to come in a different flavor, have the wrong scent, or lack critical vitamins and minerals, might not all newborn babies have spat it out, much to the harm of the human race? There are way too many life-sustaining items therein, like potassium, sodium, glucose, vitamin B₁₂, and iron, that should not show up in random amounts. Coincidences?

I Hear What You’re Saying

Dependent, reciprocal systems are coincidences in my mind. If you have this, you have to have that. Some form of non-quantum entanglement? What if each of the earliest human beings was born speaking (transmitting) different frequencies and the other person’s inner ears were not attuned to picking up (receiving) those frequency? Is it coincidental that we can hear each other? Do most of us (innately) know to turn our heads sideways when passing through the birth canal? Facing straight up and down won’t cut it. The bony passageway is way too narrow except for the occasional premature baby.

And, why is the spinal cord system — two long bundles of nerves — “twisted” 180 degrees? The left brain manages the nerves to the right side of the body, and vice versa. Darwinists have no idea why this is. I think it has to do with having the dominant system of the brain further away in a fight, and thus less likely to sustain injury. No one really knows, however. These nerve tracts are way too complicated — much more complicated than all of the highways across the globe together — to have switched sides by trial and error. It has to be a coincidental design. 

There are many coincidences outside of humans. For example, a newborn camel passes through the birth canal with extremely sharp hooves, each covered with rubbery capsules (much like horses and all other animals with hooves). These fall off within days. Without such protection, the very first newborns would have torn up their mothers’ anatomy and eliminated the species. And, Marco Polo might still be waiting in China. In a like manner, porcupine quills and pangolin scales are very soft as they pass through the birth canal but soon thereafter become hard and sharp.

“Day to Day” Coincidences

I have always been interested in “day to day” coincidences, like the story about a wedding ring that once fell into deep water while its owner was fishing and was found many years later inside a filleted fish. Or, the note in a bottle washing up at a cousin’s home in another state ten years later. There are many very interesting books on these kinds of events.

I once had a dangerous gas leak in my car happen while we were driving along the coast of Oregon on a Sunday afternoon. I stopped at one of three gas stations in Yachats, a tiny, beautiful coastal town. The manager determined that the problem was a leak in a gas hose located under the hood. Unfortunately, the only car parts place, twenty miles south in Florence, was closed. He told me I’d have to stay in one of the local motels overnight and leave midday Monday. Not a bad idea if it had been a Saturday, but I needed to be at work the next day. I had some worrisome patients scheduled to see me. By coincidence, a teen, who was pumping gas, mentioned that he owned a car of that exact same model as mine. A different paint color, of course. He said if I gave him the catalog price of $22 to get a new hose for his car Monday, he would give me his hose. It was an immediate done deal plus ten bucks for his inconvenience.

“I Owe Him One”

Many years ago I treated a young street person for a life-threatening heart valve infection. He had less than a 10 percent chance of surviving. Yet, he beat the odds in our ICU for over a month. He didn’t have insurance and, not unexpectedly, he “stiffed” me and the hospital. Twenty years later, an incredible coincidence happened. My father-in-law was seeing a cardiologist in L.A., a doctor whom he had randomly chosen from over two hundred cardiologists’ names in the area. He had an extremely serious and pressing heart problem. Months later after surgery, after many meds and many P.T. appointments, my name casually came up. The cardiologist immediately realized that I was the same doctor who had cared for his cousin (he had called my hospital to check on my qualifications twenty years before). He immediately canceled out $14,000 in bills for my father-in-law and said, “I owe him one.” One of my books is now dedicated to Dr. Howard Cohen. 

The week that I finished writing my book What Darwin Didn’t Know, I got a new patient, Terry Glaspey. His profession, recorded in the intake sheer, was acquisition editor for Harvest House Publishing (HHP). I told him about my newly completed manuscript; he said he was only one of two editors in the country with an interest in intelligent design. It would have been nearly impossible to sell my type of material to any bicoastal editors. (Things have changed since then.) With HHP, it went on for eleven printings and is still available. It is also a coincidence, with too many details for the moment, that I became a Fellow with Discovery Institute. 

Whenever I lecture, I like to quote what Michael Denton has stated in lectures, that our life and environment are “a series of staggering, ludicrous coincidences.” I particularly love to quote Yogi Berra, however, who once said, or so the Internet tells me, “That’s too coincidental to be a coincidence.”