{"corpus":"steiner","locus":"GA 163/1915-08-23/p013","lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"text":"Now there is a certain way of thinking about divine providence. Materialists say something like this about it: We want to examine the reasoning of those who believe in God and providence; what are their thoughts? Believers in providence say, Let us take a work like Goethe's *Faust* or Homer's epics. What is Goethe's Faust in the last analysis? If we think as the materialists do, picturing the world as composed of atoms or molecules, we would really have to conceive *Faust* in its entirety as composed of letters, of single letters, unless we wished to go deeper. People who believe in providence and also believe in atoms and molecules formulate the situation more or less like this: Let's imagine that we have a container of type and in it all the letters that make up *Faust*, and some machinery—not some intelligence—spreads out these letters. The believers in providence could now ask how great the probability is of Goethe's Faust emerging from a typesetting machine that simply put the letters one after the other as they happened to fall on being thrown out of the container. They ask the question, perhaps, but have to admit that the probability of such a thing happening is so slight as to be nonexistent. One cannot assume that a haphazard scattering of type could possibly result in a chance (Voltaire's “His Majesty, Chance”) printing of Goethe's Faust. Since that can't be the case with Goethe's Faust, we can scarcely think that this world, which is much, much more gloriously put together, could have been flung down so thoughtlessly and simply.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"title":"1. Probability and Chance, Fritz Mauthner's Studies of Improbability","site_heading":null,"date":"1915-08-23","location":null,"word_count":266,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/163/1915-08-23/p013","alignment_confidence":"medium","alignment_reason":"beads:length","two_voice_volume":false,"translation_credit":{"scope":"unit","status":"established","translator":"Marjorie Spock","identified_edition":"AP1988","book_title":"Chance, Providence and Necessity","publisher":"Anthroposophic Press","publisher_inferred":true,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA163/English/AP1988/19150823p01.html","evidence":"lecture_list_row","publisher_note":"The publisher is inferred from the edition code in this lecture's source URL, not stated by the source page. The translator IS verified for this lecture: its own source names the translator (evidence: the lecture's page, rsarchive's lecture list, or the cover of the book it was published in), and that page's text was matched against this unit (see match_score and source_url). Cite the translator with confidence; attribute the publisher only as probable."},"edition_coverage":{"de":["original"],"en":["English"]},"available_versions":[{"lang":"de","edition":"original","edition_basis":null,"is_original":true,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/163/1915-08-23/p013"},{"lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/163/1915-08-23/p013"}],"record":{"record_type":"unknown","scope":"volume","note":"How this text was taken down (shorthand transcript, listeners' notes or manuscript) is not on record here. Unknown is not an assurance of a stenogram: check the edition's own notes before resting an argument on one word.","evidence":null,"evidence_translation":null,"evidence_source":null},"german_anchor":{"de_prefix":"1915-08-23","de_passages":[],"bead_confidence":"medium","pairing_state":"proposed","verified":false,"correspondence":"unestablished","note":"NOT ALIGNED. The aligner could not pair this English passage with a German passage. This does NOT mean the German lacks the content — the English edition may merge or reorder what the German numbers separately. Search the German lecture for the passage's key nouns before drawing any conclusion."},"paired_german":{"status":"no_counterpart","note":"The paragraph aligner found no counterpart for this paragraph. That does not mean the content is absent: the other witness may merge or reorder it. Read its whole unit (german_unit.fetch_unit) before concluding anything.","german_unit":{"lang":"de","edition":"original","unit_locus":"GA 163/1915-08-23","paragraph_count":25,"fetch_unit":{"ga":"163","lecture":"1915-08-23","lang":"de","edition":"original"},"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/163/1915-08-23","json_url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/ga/163/1915-08-23?lang=de"},"pairing_state":"proposed","verified":false,"nearest_pairs":{"before":{"de":[8],"en":[10,11,12]},"after":{"de":[9],"en":[14]}}},"witness_completeness":{"ratio":0.97,"band":"comparable","note":null,"word_count":5067,"original_word_count":5225,"may_be_abridged":false},"witness_quality":{"translator":{"scope":"unit","status":"recorded","translator":"Marjorie Spock","identified_edition":"AP1988","book_title":"Chance, Providence and Necessity","publisher":"Anthroposophic Press","publisher_inferred":true,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA163/English/AP1988/19150823p01.html","evidence":"lecture_list_row","publisher_note":"The publisher is inferred from the edition code in this lecture's source URL, not stated by the source page. The translator IS verified for this lecture: its own source names the translator (evidence: the lecture's page, rsarchive's lecture list, or the cover of the book it was published in), and that page's text was matched against this unit (see match_score and source_url). Cite the translator with confidence; attribute the publisher only as probable."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}}