From Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushie, we have:
Unless, of course, there's no such thing as chance; in which case Musa--for all his age and servility--was nothing less than a time-bomb ticking softly away until his appointed time; in which case we should either--optimistically--get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning, and are spared the term of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or else, of course, we might--as pessimists--give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway; things will be as they will.
First of all, I think by Musa Rushie is referring to Moses, Musa being the Islamic term for the Hebrew prophet Muslims revere as one of the greatest predecessors of Mohammad. Musa would be one of the progenitors of faith, the man who, along with Abraham, set religious thinking in motion.
What I love about this sentence is how scatterbrained it is, full of dashes, pauses, charges forward, and reversals--the second to last clause, for example, takes away most of the energy of the clause before it ("we should get up and cheer...we might give up right here and now"). The sentence is more or less arguing that there is no such thing as chance, while its structure is wild and the very embodiment of randomness. The structure belies the sense.
And yet logically, it doesn't--the appearance of randomness doesn't necessarily mean randomness exists. Much of Midnight's Children is an exploration of this idea, the tension between randomness, freedom, and fate. The sentence doesn't answer the question. Neither does the entire book, but I would be disappointed in the book if it did.