SamuelTheLamanite Posted October 15, 2017 Author Posted October 15, 2017 On 9/8/2017 at 11:38 PM, cinepro said: If you're asking for "help" in understanding what your friend is talking about, I highly recommend this book: The Improbability Principle It's a good overview of the math involved in probability, and why humans are so bad at understanding the probability of events (and what that event means). The book won't make you an atheist, but it will make you a little more skeptical of people who claim divine intervention for an event based on their estimate of improbability. this On 9/11/2017 at 10:46 PM, cinepro said: Can you explain why it couldn't be a "coincidence" (meaning, I assume, an encounter that was the result of seemingly random chance and not the result of divine intervention)? What part is difficult for you to understand? There are a lot of ways people make mistakes in probability, and I think you may be interested to think about two of them. First, it's easy to think that every day is "normal." Meaning, we should only expect "frequent" events. But that isn't the case. While we usually experience normal, expected events, we should also expect extremely rare and coincidental events to occur. It would be unusual if they didn't. If you only expect normal events to occur, then it's easy to give unexpected events extra (and possibly undeserved) meaning. Second, it's misleading to only consider the probability of events after they occur (i.e. the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy). What if I told you that a woman named Kate Bradley won a lottery with odds of 350 million to 1. That's pretty slim odds, and it may sound like a miraculous event. But what if the day before the lottery drawing, I told you that over 50 million people had purchased over 200 million tickets for the lottery. What would you say the chances of someone winning the lottery would be? It's not unreasonable to assume that someone might. But it would be amazing to name the specific person the day before. But that's not what happened; we only cared about Kate Bradley after she won. So think about stories about LDS missionaries. Finding a long-lost relative or golden contact is like winning the missionary lottery. And certainly after it happens, the odds of two specific people meeting in that specific time and place are astronomical. But that's only after the story happens. But look at it the way we looked at the lottery before the drawing. There are 70,000+ missionaries in the world. Each day, they go out and spend 12 hours doing everything they can to meet people. They knock on doors. They talk to people on buses. They street contact. Let's say the average missionary is meeting 10 people a day. That would be 700,000 contacts each day. Over the course of a year, that would be over 250 million "contact" points between missionaries and people on the street. So now you can ask "Out of 250 million contacts each year, what are the odds that a missionary is going to run into a long-lost family member or golden contact?" I don't know what the actual odds are, but I would be more surprised if it didn't happen every once in a while. Even if God has nothing to do with it, if you send that many people out and have them make every possible effort to talk to everyone they see, eventually you're going to make a connection. Whether or not that makes sense to you, hopefully you can see why someone might respond to a story you consider miraculous with a response of "Yeah, that's what we would expect." and this. Please Ryan
Gray Posted October 15, 2017 Posted October 15, 2017 On 9/11/2017 at 9:34 PM, SamuelTheLamanite said: Yes my friend told me something very similar. You are making a lot of sense and I honestly don't know what to think right now. Have you ever heard of a miracle during Testimony meeting that doesn't have a rational explanation? I am sure there are many, but I can't think of one right now. My goodness Maybe life itself is the miracle; improbable events are just built in to the whole miraculous system. That's just the nature of the cosmos.
Recommended Posts