September 24, 2018, Unlikely Events
Throughout my life I’ve heard people citing unlikely events as evidence for God. Often the claim is legitimate, but frequently I see flaws in their logic. The claims I hear fall into many categories, but these 4 cover most of them.
Physical healings
Life coincidences
Fulfilled prophecy
Improbability of our existence by random chance
Healing. My earliest memories as a small boy include people praising God for healings after praying for people suffering from some ailment. These range from simple things like cold symptoms quickly fading to dramatic testimonies of life-threatening cancer suddenly disappearing.
As a believer, I always found the dramatic miracles uplifting. If doctors were dumbfounded, unable to explain what appeared to be an impossible disappearance of symptoms, I assumed it was a miracle and I was encouraged to see this evidence of God working.
But I have a natural bit of skeptic in me that doubted some testimonies. Sometimes people thanked God when it appeared their natural healing processes simply worked according to design, or their medical treatment worked. It’s okay to thank God for these things, but they aren’t miracles and don’t give evidence that God is really working, at least not to skeptics who doubt God’s existence.
As I grew older, I wondered about the more dramatic healings also. I realized that some of those could have been placebo effect recoveries; some could have been a natural process that no one, not even the doctors understood. Some could have been false claims by people wanting attention. But as an adult I witnessed a few healings close up where none of those possibilities fit and I’m convinced they were miracles. One of them was my own healing.
In July of 1984 I had surgery that removed 12 inches of my small intestine because it was inflamed and bleeding from Crohn’s disease. After the surgery my pain was much less than it had been before, but it didn’t go away. For 7 months I was in pain, sometimes so intense I couldn’t sleep or even focus well, usually it was a mild discomfort that I could ignore. I tried to just carry on and enjoy life.
One Sunday I went to an evening service at a church I’d been attending and I was in so much pain I almost walked out. If I was sitting in the back I would have, but I was in the second row from the front and didn’t want to make a scene walking out while the pastor was talking. As the pastor was wrapping up his message and I was eagerly thinking I could make my escape soon, he announced that there would be a time of prayer for healing after the service. (That alone was an amazing coincidence because I don’t remember them ever doing that before or again after that night.) I really didn’t want to stay, but I couldn’t deny that I needed healing so I stuck around.
As various people came forward among the 2 dozen (more or less) who stayed, they would sit in a chair while the pastor laid his hands on their shoulders and prayed for them. Other people would also lay their hands on the person and join in prayer. This whole thing seemed strange to me and I felt very awkward and skeptical about it. I did not want to sit in that chair. I was still in a lot of pain and kept thinking about just walking out.
Finally, there was a long pause with no one coming forward. I could tell the pastor was about to close so I courageously came forward and told him about my surgery and 7 months of pain. While people prayed for me the pain diminished until it was gone. It was only a minute or two that I sat in that chair, but when I stood up there wasn’t even a trace of discomfort. The feeling was so dramatic that I pulled my shirt up as I left the church to see if the scar in my abdomen was still there! It was, but I was still excited with amazement over the miraculous healing I’d just received.
While I drove home, I calmed down mentally and convinced myself it could all be a coincidence. It could just be a temporary easing of pain as food in my intestine moved through. I was trying to be a skeptic, but even that skeptical line of reasoning didn’t make much sense because for 7 months I had never experienced a complete, rapid decline in pain like that.
I slept soundly that night with no pain. The next day, no pain. I continued pain free until I knew without a hint of doubt that God had healed me. Months later I had a new but mild flare-up of my Crohn’s disease so I knew the healing was just from the post-surgery pain, not a complete healing of the disease. I still have a mild case of Crohn’s disease that I easily manage with diet and exercise. Like the Apostle Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” (2 Corinthians 12:7-9), God won’t heal me from that disease, but my faith is strengthened from the experience I had.
If I had the statistical data, I could calculate a probability that this healing was simply a random coincidence. I could assume it was a partial intestinal obstruction because the symptoms are close. So, I’d have to find the probability of partial intestinal obstructions following surgery like that. It’s probably a small number like one in a hundred thousand. Then I’d need a probability distribution to find the probability of it lasting 7 months. I’d also need to factor in the probability of a blockage releasing quickly over a one-minute interval, taking me from intense pain to nothing. Then I’d need to factor in the probability of it releasing at the exact minute that I was being prayed for. Finally, I’d have to factor in the probability of the church having a healing prayer time during the one church service where I was experiencing intense pain. When you put all those things together, you’d find that the chances of my healing being a random coincidence are almost zero. I’d guess it’d be something of the order of 1 in 10 to the power 12. (The odds of being struck by lightning twice in a life time are 1 in 10 to the power of 7. That means my healing being a random chance event might be 100,000 times less likely that being struck by lightning twice.)
If you were in court and something happened that made you look guilty and you claimed it was random chance, but the odds were that strong against you, they’d convict you without hesitation. This improbability is legitimate evidence. It’s not absolute proof, but in court it would be considered proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The attorney arguing against me would not try to say the improbability wasn’t evidence. Rather they would try to discredit me as a witness because the improbability is such solid evidence.
Life Coincidence. This category has some similarities to the healing category. Sometimes people claim coincidence as a sign from God even when the coincidence isn’t very unusual, but occasionally the improbability of the coincidence seems convincing. Frequently things we’re praying for seem to work out as if God is answering our prayers and guiding us through life. This happened to my son, Nolan, when he moved to Utah. He was 20 years old, but we felt he wasn’t ready to live on his own so far away yet due to developmental delays associated with mild autism.
My wife and I were praying that God would somehow block him from moving because we didn’t want him to leave yet. He seemed to answer our prayers (to Nolan’s great discouragement) as all his efforts to find work and a place to live fell through. Then a friend recommended a web site where Nolan might find a place to live. I checked it out and found a few places with potential. I didn’t think he was ready to move away, but I felt God nudging me to respect his wishes and share the information with him. So I did.
My wife also found a dinning services job and told him about that. We changed our prayers, telling God we’d trust him if things worked out for our son to move. Nolan found a good place to live and a job so quickly after all those months of searching that I think God was sending him a message. It could be an extremely unlikely coincidence, but I think God was telling us that he has his hand on Nolan’s life. God was giving him evidence that he’s there on a personal level.
It’s not empirical proof, but it is legitimate evidence. The kind of improbability that we can weigh in favor of an argument. I can respect someone saying that isn’t convincing enough, but to deny it as evidence is simply irrational.
Deceptive Probabilities. Before I discuss the other two categories, let’s look at faulty use of probabilities.
Something like it had to happen. One misuse of probability is to claim something improbable is evidence of divine involvement after the fact. If I flip a coin 10 times, I’m going to get some sequence of heads and tails. The probability for that particular sequence will be 1 in 2 to the power of 10, which is about 1 in 1000. I could argue that God led me to toss that coin sequence because the probability of getting it by random chance is so small, but I’d be making an error of logic. I had to get some result to my coin toss and the one I got happens to be the one I got. It doesn’t give evidence for anything.
All sequenced events become increasingly improbable as you add more events, so saying something that happened was extremely unlikely to happen means nothing in and of itself. Some other circumstance needs to give it meaning.
I’ve seen Christians make this error in logic by looking back on their lives and saying, “Wow, I’ve been through so many unlikely events and managed to get to where I am today. God was clearly guiding me!” God may well have been guiding them, but the unlikelihood of what they experienced isn’t evidence of that guidance, because they had to experience something whether God was guiding them or not.
For something to be evidence of God, there must be some kind of parameter indicating God’s involvement that didn’t have to happen at all. In my healing, the fact that I was healed very quickly during the time I was being prayed for makes it statistically compelling. For Nolan’s move to Utah, it was the way God seemed to be answering our prayers one way, guided us to change to match his will, then worked everything out perfectly to answer our new prayers. The unlikely events followed our prayers precisely and nothing like that had to happen. In fact, it was extremely unlikely to work out anywhere close to what we prayed for.
Unlikely fulfillment of prophecy is another example of legitimate improbability because it was predicted in advance. If someone predicted the result of 10 coin tosses in a row before they tossed the coin and claimed God revealed the result to them, that would be strong evidence!
Many events happened. If I had a million people tossing coins 10 times each and said some were chosen by God because their toss matched mine, that would be an error in logic. Statistically, out of a million people I’d expect about 1000 of them to match my results. There’s nothing improbable happening here to indicate divine guidance.
Christians sometimes make a similar error in logic when they claim answered prayers as evidence of God. If a farmer prays for rain every day during a drought and after 3 weeks of daily prayer it finally rains, I wouldn’t be terribly impressed. Perhaps God did send rain in response to his prayers, but when you pray for rain every day it’s eventually going to happen whether God’s involved or not. There is the opinion that God’s involved in everything and the answer to the farmers prayer was, “no,” for 3 weeks then he finally answered, “yes.” That’s a theological opinion, not evidence for whether God exists and answers prayer.
Also, when millions of people are praying for healing, some will get well when the odds of their recovery were very small. That’s not compelling evidence.
When I was healed from my pain, I’d been praying for my own healing for a long time, so if my healing had just come over night while I slept it wouldn’t provide much evidence that God had answered my prayer. It’s the specific, unique circumstances that make it strong evidence of God. Even if you factor in that lots of people suffer from pain after surgery and consider the possibility that I’m just a lucky one, the probability of my healing under those circumstances was so extreme that it’s still strong evidence for a miracle.
There are other ways that people can use probability deceptively, but these are the two that I see most frequently in faith assertions.
Fulfilled prophecy. In my skeptical questioning mode, I’ve spent a lot of time considering the evidence of fulfilled prophecy. Many Old Testament (OT) prophecies that came true can’t be proven. There’s no evidence outside of the Bible to prove that the prophecy actually happened before it’s fulfillment. But there are plenty that we do know came true hundreds of years after they were given.
Many of these relate to Jesus Christ. We have manuscripts of the prophesy that predate Jesus. We also have historical evidence that the entire OT was complete hundreds of years before Jesus was born. The details of Jesus that are so improbable serve as legitimate evidence because we know they were predicted in advance. The one area of doubt that I’ve had is the “many events” reasoning. There are many statements in the Old Testament that could be construed as messianic prophecy. I’ve noticed that Christians conveniently profess those that seem to have come true while filing many others away as being connected to his second coming. This is a big problem until you examine the prophecies more closely. OT prophecies show both a suffering servant messiah and a victorious, reigning forever messiah. The concept of two comings makes perfect sense and the passages in Daniel 9:25-26 and Isaiah 11:10-11 seem to indicate these two comings just as the New Testament describes.
Some aspects of the case for prophecy aren’t as strong as apologists try to make them sound, but when I analyze them skeptically, I find Biblical prophecies to be very compelling. That is one reason why so many people try to discredit the New Testament as myth. If you accept it as a historical record, even ignoring the miracles, there’s so much fulfilled prophecy there that it’s difficult to deny supernatural involvement.
Improbability of our existence. You may have seen numbers where scientists or mathematicians try to quantify the probability of the big bang happening with the right initial conditions (something like 1 in 10 to the power of 60) or a planet like our earth forming randomly that can sustain life (even more improbable), etc. I’ve never seen an analysis of the probability of a self-replicating strand of DNA forming by chance, but I think that’s even more improbable than the other two examples above.
The “something had to happen” argument fails here because what happened is so unusual. This isn’t just one of many possibilities—we have something truly amazing in our existence. It’s like all of the million people I spoke about earlier having all 10 coin tosses land perfectly on edge and stay there so that we don’t get any head or tail results—instead we have 10 million edges. (Having a tossed coin land on a smooth, hard surface and stay on its edge actually does happen. With a wide coin, like a nickel, the probability is about 1 in 6000, but with narrower coins, like quarters, it would be more like 1 in hundreds of thousands, maybe millions.)
The usual justification for our existence without a creator is to say there must be an infinite (or exceedingly large) number of universes. This is taking the “many events” condition to an extreme. Then you could say a universe where life exists can happen no matter how improbable it is and we happen to be in the one we’re in. The problem is, there’s no evidence for the existence of other universes. We’re assuming an extreme case of many events with only one event to support it.
The nearly infinite improbability of our existence combined with all the order and beauty in the universe, and especially on our planet, point intuitively to a creator. Since we have so much other evidence of a creator, that conclusion makes a lot more sense than assuming infinite universes. With no evidence to support the infinite universe theory, you can’t rationally ignore the improbability evidence for creation. It stands as very powerful evidence for a creator. To dismiss this evidence of improbability is an extreme case of “just dismissing” evidence.