Chance
&
Uncertainty

Now

we know that when people are talking

about chance or probability

they do it in ways that are more or less exact,

from simply wondering whether rain is probable or not,

and whether to take an umbrella,

to the narrower odds used by gamblers,

like five to two, or eleven to ten, to state their chances.

People can be very interested in calculating chances,

because if chance can be calculated for certain

that can give you an advantage,

and people can use that in business,

but also in competitive games.

And in both those cases calculations can get very complicated,

especially when there's more than one way to get a result.

Calculating the chance results of a coin toss is a simple thing,

no matter how much it sometimes seems

it ought to be more complicated,

but in a pack of 52 playing cards,

what are the chances of drawing an ace?

And what are the chances of drawing two?

Or if you roll two dice,

what is the chance that you will throw a seven?

and is it the same for throwing a nine?

And calculating chance gets even more tricky

for games like backgammon

or chess

where the pieces move in different ways,

or the game of Go,

with so many different choices of where to place your stone.

So people use games to play with numbers and chance,

but even though they are only games

those skills can be useful in the rest of their lives.

But even board games have rules to keep things simple.

In life sometimes it can seem like there are so many things involved

it is impossible to calculate an answer,

but still it may be possible to work with data

to see when and how often things happen over time,

and that is enough to calculate some kind of probability with those numbers.

Sometimes when you don't have the numbers you want,

you need to look for ways to get

some kind of useful answer

from the numbers that you've got.

When we are born into life,

nothing is really certain

except that it will eventually end in death.

And with all our efforts to alter our chances,

the result of everything we do inbetween

will always be dependent on the grace of God.