Mark Gagnon

So, I mean, if you see a person just levitating out of nowhere, it's like, well, that's violating the laws of nature.

So, all of our recorded history says people don't just levitate, and if this guy's levitating, there's more evidence against it than for it.

Now,

Hume argued, it's always more rational to believe that the witness was mistaken or deceived or lying or having some type of delusional episode than to believe that the laws of nature were actually broken.

This didn't kill the belief in miracles, though.

I mean, not even close.

I mean, obviously, it did create an intellectual space for the concept of the coincidence because people were basically reckoning with this thing where, you know, two things happen that seem remarkable.

But yeah, I guess it would be strange if all of a sudden things started happening in the universe that we couldn't explain.

So

What do we do?

If miracles are off the table as explanations, you need another word for these events.

And this is where we get the word coincidence.

So coincidence as a concept really gains traction in the 18 and 1900s alongside the development of modern statistics and probability theory.

Mathematicians like Pierre Simon Laplace gave us the tools to actually say like this amazing thing was statistically likely to happen to someone.

But we'll come back to

More math stuff in a second.

So, synchronicity as a concept arrives last in our timeline, in 1952.

Specifically when Jung published his book, Synchronicity, an acausal connecting principle.

And the timing here is really significant.

Jung is writing in the aftermath of World War II at this...