“Littlewood’s law states that what we think of as miracles should happen to everyone about once every thirty-five days. He defined a miracle as an event that has a one in a million chance of happening. When it came to human beings Littlewood was generous. He assigned miracle-spotters union hours, assuming about eight hours of alertness per day every day. If one defines thinks of each second as another possible event, it should only take a million alert seconds, or thirty-five eight-hour days, to witness a one-in-a-million event. If that’s the case, I think we’re all a little behind on our miracles.” – Esther Inglis-Arkell.
I just watched the debate between Richard Carrier and David Marshall. In the debate, Marshall tells the story of how he met his wife . It involves a very unusual coincidence: he returns the wallet of an unknown person and leaves a not saying in it saying, “God Loves You.” A few years later he runs into a woman, and he happens to find out that the wallet had belonged to her. He reckons the odds of this happening is about one in five million.
What people so often fail to realize is that big coincidences prove nothing: all kinds of events happen, some of them are very improbable (or infrequent). Some of those infrequent events we observe have beneficial effects on us or on other people. Thus, lucky coincidences are expected regardless of whether a deity exists or not.
Marshall also brought up the fact that “God transcends culture.” He pointed to Shangdi, the god of the chinese people. While there are some broad similarities between Shangdi and Yahweh, it seems to me that there are also many big differences. So I don’t think Marshall’s argument holds water. There seems to be a general human tendency to believe in gods, but those gods are as different as human cultures are. There also seems to be a tendency to imagine an Emperor god or King god, like Zeus, but I suspect that just represents the ancient people’s tendency to imagine the world of the gods working the same way the world of humans does. It is interesting that both the Chinese and the Israelites have seen a need to have one or more mediators between them and their god. But, I’m not sure that a broad point of agreement between a couple of religions indicates even slightly that they are on the right track.
