The Death of Coincidence and the Rise of Modern Causality
Abstract
This analytical essay examines a contemporary cognitive and cultural tendency to treat coincidental events as causally meaningful. The central proposal is modest. In everyday life, causal explanations frequently extend beyond what the available evidence can justify, especially in environments marked by uncertainty, high stakes, and strong narrative incentives. Drawing on signal detection theory and Hume’s account of causal necessity as an inference shaped by repeated pairing, the essay describes how ordinary meaning making can drift into overattribution. It then holds this account in productive tension with theistic belief and faith commitments. Many people understand the world as containing objective meaning grounded in God, while also recognizing that humans actively participate in meaning making through interpretation, choice, and response. This dual claim aligns with contemporary grief literature, including David Kessler’s proposal that meaning forms a distinct stage in grief, and it provides a framework for distinguishing meaning from overconfident causal storytelling.
1. Introduction
In many contemporary settings, people approach daily experience with an expectation that outcomes should be traceable to identifiable causes. This expectation can be adaptive. It supports learning, planning, and intervention, and it helps individuals and communities improve health, safety, and relational functioning. At the same time, this expectation can produce systematic errors when causal explanations are assigned to events that are probabilistic, multiply determined, or only partially observed.
The focus here is not on denying causality, nor on treating the world as arbitrary. My focus is on calibration. Human beings routinely infer causal structure under incomplete information, and modern cultural conditions appear to reward causal confidence more than causal humility. In practical terms, sequence and correlation can become psychologically compelling enough that they are treated as if they imply necessity, even when alternative explanations remain plausible.
The term coincidence is used in an epistemic sense. It refers to events that appear meaningfully connected in time or content while lacking sufficient evidence, given the observer’s current information, to support a direct causal linkage. This avoids metaphysical claims about whether a fully specified account of the world would remove contingency. The question is psychological and interpretive. What do people infer, how strongly do they infer it, and what happens to them when the inference becomes a fixed story?
2. Theoretical background
2.1 Signal detection theory and meaning overattribution
Signal detection theory describes decision-making under uncertainty in contexts where an observer must decide whether a signal is present amid noise. The framework distinguishes correct detections from errors, including false alarms, where a signal is detected even though it is absent. Importantly, false alarms are not always irrational. They can be expected when the perceived costs of missing a signal are high.
Applied to meaning and causality, the human mind frequently operates in ambiguous conditions. People constantly evaluate whether an event carries diagnostic information about risk, opportunity, social standing, rejection, safety, or future outcomes. When stress is elevated, uncertainty is high, or the stakes feel consequential, an individual may shift toward stronger meaning detection. In those conditions, the threshold for deciding that an event “means something” can become more permissive, and the rate of false positives can increase.
This is not best understood as a defect. It is a feature of a mind that evolved to organize experience quickly and to protect itself in uncertain environments. The problem typically arises when the detection of meaning hardens into claims of necessity, or when a meaning hypothesis becomes insulated from revision despite weak evidence.
2.2 Hume and the psychology of causal necessity
Hume’s account of causation offers a useful philosophical anchor for this cognitive picture. The key idea is that the experience of causal necessity arises from mental habit rather than direct perception. Observers encounter repeated pairings of events, what Hume described as constant conjunction, and the mind forms an expectation that one event will follow another. Over time, expectation can take on the felt quality of necessity.
This helps explain why causal certainty can feel strong even when evidence is limited. Temporal sequencing and repeated co-occurrence produce psychological confidence faster than they produce warranted inference. Under many everyday conditions, people lack controlled comparison, adequate sample size, and careful consideration of base rates, and yet the mind still generates the subjective experience of “this leads to that.”
From this perspective, causal inference remains indispensable, but it becomes important to distinguish perceived necessity from justified confidence. A person can feel a causal connection with high conviction while standing on correlational input, small samples, selective attention, or emotionally salient memories.
2.3 Post hoc reasoning and culturally preferred explanations
Post hoc ergo propter hoc describes a familiar inference pattern where temporal order is taken as evidence of causation. This inference persists because temporal order is salient and because narrative comprehension relies heavily on sequence. Modern cultural environments can intensify post hoc reasoning by acting as distribution systems for simplified causal stories. Advice markets, institutional reporting, and social media often select for explanations that are concise and actionable, which can inadvertently discourage uncertainty language and boundary conditions.
This selection pressure does not require bad faith. The formats that travel well tend to compress complexity. As a result, probabilistic relationships can be communicated as if they were universal, and multi-causal outcomes can be framed as the product of a single interventive lever. The psychological effect is cumulative. Repeated exposure to clean causal claims can make a person feel that the world ought to behave cleanly, even when their lived experience repeatedly shows otherwise.
3. A cautious model of causal overreach
A useful way to organize these ideas is to separate causal learning from causal overreach while treating both as points on a continuum rather than as opposites.
Causal learning is the ordinary process of noticing regularities, testing actions, and updating beliefs as more information becomes available. It supports both personal and scientific progress. Causal overreach occurs when the mind treats limited regularities as if they implied necessity, or when it interprets correlation as explanation without adequate attention to alternative causes, base rates, and contextual moderators.
Several conditions can increase the likelihood of overreach.
One condition involves information quality. When the available information is noisy, incomplete, or filtered through selective exposure, the mind interpolates. Another condition involves affect. When an outcome matters deeply or threatens a person’s sense of safety, the desire for clarity can pull interpretation toward greater certainty. A third condition involves social reinforcement. Environments that reward decisive explanations, even when such explanations are poorly supported, can shape what feels credible.
A further condition is moralization. When causal claims are presented as if they guarantee outcomes, outcomes begin to function as evaluations. Success becomes evidence of having performed the correct inputs, and struggle becomes evidence of having failed. In such contexts, causal stories move from being explanatory tools to being identity statements.
This is one plausible route by which cultural causality becomes psychologically costly. It reduces tolerance for variance in complex systems and encourages self-blame or interpersonal judgment when life diverges from the promised causal map.
4. Coincidence, contingency, and the question of meaning
A critique of causal overreach can look, on the surface, like a critique of meaning itself, but these are not the same. It is possible to argue that specific causal claims are often inflated without concluding that the world is devoid of meaning. In fact, the two claims frequently coexist in human thought.
Many theistic traditions hold that the world contains meaning grounded in God, including moral meaning and the kind of meaning that makes responsibility coherent. Within that view, meaning is not merely projected onto a neutral universe. At the same time, even within a theistic framework, human beings still conduct interpretive work. People discern, respond, and integrate experience. They participate in meaning making through memory, narrative, commitment, repentance, gratitude, and love. Faith does not remove ambiguity from the ordinary flow of events, and it does not eliminate the fact that people routinely operate under partial information.
This is where coincidence becomes psychologically and spiritually interesting. Coincidence can name the category of events that feel significant without supplying an immediate causal map. It can protect humility by reminding the observer that not every pattern implies a mechanism that can be identified, controlled, or morally decoded. It can also protect compassion by weakening the impulse to treat outcomes as proof of worthiness or failure.
Importantly, acknowledging coincidence does not require reducing life to randomness. It can function as a disciplined refusal to claim more than one can know. In some contexts, that refusal is part of intellectual honesty. In other contexts, it aligns with a theological posture that recognizes creaturely limits, including limits on inference about providence in specific circumstances.
5. Absurdism and the regulation of uncertainty
Absurdism describes a tension between the human appetite for coherence and the world’s consistent refusal to deliver coherence on demand. From the perspective developed here, causal overreach can be interpreted as one strategy for managing that tension. A strong causal narrative promises control, and control promises reduction of anxiety. When the narrative fails to deliver, distress can increase, particularly if the person lacks acceptable categories for chance, complexity, and partial observability.
This does not imply that meaning is unavailable. It implies that meaning is not always immediately legible in the way a simple causal story suggests. A faith-informed perspective can address a similar tension without requiring an inflated causal certainty about each event. One can hold that life is meaningful in a deep sense while also admitting that much of that meaning is not straightforwardly inferable from local sequences.
6. Meaning as discovered and meaning as made
A final integration point comes from grief psychology. David Kessler has argued for meaning as an additional stage of grief, alongside more established models. The relevance here is not that grief neatly proceeds through a fixed linear set of stages, which clinicians often regard as an oversimplification, but that meaning can emerge as an identifiable task. After loss, people often engage in a process of integrating what happened into a workable narrative and a livable future. That narrative work can involve both discovery and construction.
This supports a dual claim that fits the tension you want to preserve. There can be meaning to be found, including meaning anchored in God, and there can be meaning to be made through human response, interpretation, and chosen commitments. The second claim does not replace the first. It describes a human role within the broader landscape of meaning.
In this light, the problem with modern causal overreach is not that people seek meaning. The problem is that they can confuse meaning with mechanism, and mechanism with guarantee. Meaning can be present without being reducible to a clean causal chain. Meaning can also be shaped without being fabricated. These distinctions provide a more stable alternative to the cultural demand that every outcome should be fully explainable in the narrow language of input and output.
7. Conclusion
Modern cultural conditions appear to increase the attractiveness of confident causal stories, and basic cognitive principles help explain why. Under uncertainty and pressure, minds infer patterns quickly, and repeated pairings can generate strong feelings of necessity even when evidence remains limited. Hume’s analysis clarifies the psychological character of causal necessity, and signal detection theory clarifies why false alarms become more common when the costs of uncertainty feel high.
A careful critique, however, does not require rejecting meaning. It can instead recommend epistemic restraint, especially in domains characterized by multi-causality and variance, including health, relationships, and emotional life. Within a faith-informed frame, it remains coherent to affirm that the world is meaningful under God while also recognizing that humans participate in meaning making through interpretation and response. Grief psychology provides one practical example of this participation, where meaning can be approached as a task that helps integrate suffering without demanding a simplistic causal account.
In practical terms, the goal is not to stop asking why. The goal is to ask why with the right level of confidence, to allow coincidence to remain a legitimate category under partial information, and to preserve a concept of meaning that is larger than the modern instinct to turn every sequence into a mechanism.
