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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6749639" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yes.  That is quite right.  There is a story where a man is travelling in Tibet, and he comes upon monastery where it is the custom to flip a coin as an augury every day.  He observes the ceremony and the coin comes up heads.  After spending the night in meditation, the man observes the ceremony the next day and again the coin comes up heads.  So he says to the host, "It's come up two heads in a row."   And the host says, "No, it has come up heads 37,845 days in a row."  And the man is taken aback and says, "Are you sure that coin is fair?", and the monk says, "How can one know?"You could have stopped there and made a much stronger point.  But in the case of Tolkien's writings, there is strong internal evidence in the stories that the meaning of the story regards this "luck".  In the chapter, "Shadow of the Past", Tolkien takes on the problem head on when Gandalf observes to Frodo that Bilbo the Shire putting his hand down in the dark deep inside a mountain in a forgotten passage right on to the lost One Ring of power had to be the luckiest coincidence in the entire history of the universe.  The writer is you might say calling the readers attention to what the reader might regard as the writer's own poor writing.  He directly addresses the problem that it would appear the writer keeps appealing to deus ex machina.  And then Gandalf says, "If luck it was.", and begins to expound on a theory by which there are competing wills in the world arranging it to their desires.   Gandalf you might say, doesn't believe in luck.  And Tolkien, by bringing the readers attention to the fact, is telling the reader that perhaps he should not believe either in luck or that Tolkien's stories are careless writing simply because they contain astounding coincidences, but instead have deliberately been crafted with those astounding coincidences to some designed end.And we don't have to appeal to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings for that.  We can look at the meaning of the Hobbit.  At the end of the story, Gandalf sums up what the story means, in what is almost Tolkien's thesis statement: There is more that exists than is in your philosophies.Well, strictly speaking option 'a' is not forbidden by the laws of physics.  Quantum mechanics in the form it currently exists allow the possibility that a cause could come after the effect, and there are experiments being conducted now to try to detect retro-causality.  But really, anything that accurately predicts the next state of things from their current state and acts on it can be said to be influenced by future events, which makes your own brain something of an imperfect retro-casual engine.   And there are many things we could suppose might be true about the physical universe which would allow retro-casuality.  Your 'law' is on shakier ground than you suppose.Exactly where do you think he failed in the execution?  What effect do you think he was trying to achieve?</blockquote>

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