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Cover Article

FUNDAMENTALS

The fallacy of luck—good or bad

Our life isn't a lottery, a win-some, lose-some proposition. The Principle of life is unerring Love.

From the May 1999 issue of The Christian Science Journal


The World Presents a scene in which luck—good or bad—appears to play a significant part in human affairs. Individuals, if we compare one with another, have such uneven life experiences. Chance, randomness, the gamble, seem to undermine the order most of us would intuitively like to see. This can be disappointing, unsettling.

There is no final explanation for luck, as though it were a valid, real state of affairs, since it is not. There are no neat explanations for false appearances. The realism is that God unerringly governs His creation, including man, to the last detail and to the smallest corner, so to say, and that the true nature of His creation is entirely good, wholly spiritual, expressing His nature. Good—whenever and however it appears—is evidence of the presence of God, of the substance of all good. And that good is real. The bad, on the other hand—whenever and however it seems to break out—is always unreal. The good is for man, the manifestation of God. That's the divine law. But the bad is not really for anyone. Luck is never the issue but always the fallacy.

It doesn't, of course, look that way through the window of the human mind, never has. Anciently, the writer of Ecclesiastes concluded, as modern people might: "...the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all." Eccl. 9:11

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