All Our Lives Are Stories

(Found here)

“All our lives are stories, That is why storytelling, or narrative, is the most fundamental and universal of all human arts. And since a story requires a storyteller, our story is evidence for a Divine Providence.

For if not, then our art of storytelling is inherently deceptive, for it is our imposition of design and order, our illusion of free choice and meaning on an objective reality that is formless, random, logos-less, void of order and meaning and design, ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’, in the words of Macbeth, who is on his way to damnation. That is why no determinist (like B. F. Skinner) can write good novels. (His Walden Two is boring and ridiculous.)

My favorite example of this divine design in my ancestry is the acorn that fell from a tree one day in a city park over a hundred years ago where my great-grandfather sat alone on a bench eating his lunch. The acorn hit a branch and bounced. Had it bounced to the left rather than to the right, it would have hit a soggy, grassy patch of ground and made no noise. Instead, it bounced to the right and landed on a pile of dry autumn leaves, making a sharp sound that called my great-grandfather’s attention to it. He turned his head in that direction and thus ‘happened’ to notice, just behind that pile of leaves, a pretty girl sitting alone on another park bench. Overcoming his shyness, he chose to sashay over to her, pretending nonchalance, and politely asked her whether she would like some company or an extra apple from his lunchbox. She, too, chose to overcome her shyness and accepted both his company and his apple. A fruitful conversation ensued. He asked and received her permission for a date, and a year later he was asking her father’s permission for her hand in marriage. If that acorn had dropped one inch to the left rather than to the right, I and all my family would not have come into existence.

That story is invented, but it is totally realistic. That is how things in real life do actually happen. As Pascal notes, if Cleopatra’s nose had been a quarter of an inch longer, the whole history of the world would have been changed...

Divine Providence and human free choices, divine purposes and human purposes, not only do not contradict each other but imply each other. Both are necessary if human life is a story, a drama, rather than a random, pointless brute fact; that is, if there are such things as persons, entities with intelligence and free choice, real characters, interacting in a real story whose meaning they do not merely invent but discover. Every story ever told reconciles human free will and divine design, predestination, or destiny. There is no story if the characters are only predictable machines, and there is no story if there is no storyteller, no script, all ad lib.

The fact that you, a person with free will, have freely made the meaningful choice to read this ... story, a story about another person who has also freely made meaningful and important choices in his life, is a very strong reason for believing in both free will and the existence of God. If there is design, there must be a Designer. If there is a play, there must be a Playwright. If life is a story, there must be a Storyteller.

There are other reasons for believing in the existence of God, the Divine Designer; but the fact that human life is a story is one of the best ones. There are other reasons for believing in free will (for instance, if we are not free, then all morality and all justice is meaningless; we do not praise or blame, reward or punish, preach to or plead with, machines), but the fact that human life is a story is one of the best ones.”
~Peter Kreeft