Fundamentals of Penny Faith and Science

Where science seeks to resolve complex epiphenomena to the fundamental principles governing their existence and behavior, so too the penny faith is the most parsimonious of religions. We recognize luck as the one fundamental force governing human affairs and, for that matter, since human activity determines the welfare of the planet—existence itself. Our God (whose mystic name is Token) makes no claim whatsoever to creating or controlling this whole sorry irrational mess we call life on earth. Thus, intercessory prayers, churches, hymns, altars, sacrifices, inquisitions, proclamations and excommunications are not only irrelevant but in questionable taste. The Penny God has given us but two commandments to follow, which are both compatible with the scientific enterprise and also very salutary for laboratory heads and tenured professors to bear in mind.

Some of the fundamentals of the penny faith are remarkably concordant with scientific principles:

Luck is neither created nor destroyed.
Copper is an excellent conductor of luck.
Copper (in the form of a falling penny) acquires a luck charge coincident with the gravitational pull of the earth.
The luck force occurs as discreet but non-quantifiable units.
Luck is uncertain. Observer interventions to monitor luck (i.e., to consciously search for lucky pennies) or to channel its force in a specific direction (e.g., to give a found penny to another) change its behavior.

Genes and Evolution: The Luck of the Draw

Penny worshipers regard with bemusement the current uproar about evolution versus creationism. Certainly, much about evolution and species diversification does not seem especially intelligent in design—knees, elbows, government functionaries, and fundamentalists, to name just a few obvious examples. Many other aspects of nature seem fiendishly rather than divinely inspired—such as tapeworms, HIV, bubonic plague, and religious zealots. Yet one feels all the same that randomness is inadequate to account for the beauty and symmetry of it all—for the astonishing fact of being alive. For random mutation-driven evolution, for intelligent design, the Penny Priestess proposes a happy compromise: lucky design. Life is hardly intelligent and benign in all its details—but it is lucky enough.

Lucky, that is, for featherless bipeds. Not so lucky for dodos, bonobos, aurochs, mammoths, passenger pigeons, wild salmon, bears, tigers, elephants, pumas, wolves, whales and walabees. Not so lucky for the harmless hyperintelligent termites who might evolve to take our place, if only they didn't get a toxic blast of chlorpyrifos every time they are on the point of solving Euclid's fifth postulate. Ah, well, maybe it is random after all. But it will take some luck to keep it all going.

O ye godless scientists and ye brainless fundamentalists, honor the Penny God! Before it is too late!

Luck, the Grand Unifying Force?

Although science has told us much about our world and its origins, many vexing questions remain. While we all know that if you drop something, it falls to the ground (and, if you are unlucky, breaks), the precise nature of gravity is elusive. Science has thus far been unable to account for the mechanism of gravity as a force. Yet here, perhaps, the penny religion might provide guidance to science. When a copper penny drops to the ground, it acquires luck! Believers ascribe that luck to the divine intervention of the Penny God, but might not science offer a parallel explanation?

Might there be a luckitron, the ultimate particle that allows things to work when they really shouldn't, causes laboratory experiments to come out right, and fills embarrassing theoretical holes like Super Glue? Is luck a fifth force or indeed the grand unifying force that subsumes all others? Could any such "Theory of Everything" be complete with accounting for luck?

We leave these questions to the scientists to ponder.

Entropy: When Our Luck Finally Runs Out

The Penny God seeks to help humankind by redistributing the forces of luck more equitably. The far distant time point when the Penny God has succeeded will, in some accounts, be the earthly Paradise, an eternal age of utopian bliss. Yet could humans adapt to bliss? Wouldn't we lose all motivation and all drive to accomplishment if we were all equivalently lucky—assuming there is enough luck to go around? An absolutely equal distribution of luck might produce a state of profound inertia, a biological parallel to the heat death of the universe.

If so, it is ultimately lucky for us all that the Penny God is neither all-powerful nor absolutely and predictably benevolent.

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