The probability of God

I once said to my mother, "Show me a person who believes in God and I'll show you a person who doesn't understand probability." She didn't like that very much. I'm a scientist, she's not, and we don't always see eye-to-eye on these issues. But I'm also a teacher, so I decided to come up with a way to explain myself in more than one line.

Most belief in God or gods or some higher power comes from events that people consider to be unexplainable by simple mundane reasoning. Burning bushes, walking on water, immaculate conceptions and the like are usually the beginnings of such thinking, but the problem with all of these is that we have no hard, concrete evidence for them. So I'm going to put them on the back burner and focus on more common "miracles."

To understand what a miracle really is, we need to look at what the word's become and work backwards from there. People say surviving a terrible car crash is "a miracle." A pregnancy that occurs after doctors say people are unable to conceive is "a miracle." Lately everything seems to be "miraculous" though, everything from finding the right doctor to finding a bathing suit that fits. And that's how I came to the conclusion: a miracle is nothing more than something unlikely.

Now, I understand that technically a miracle is the hand of God, some act of the divine. But for me to recognize the hand of God, it would have to violate the laws of physics because anything else could have happened without God's hand. Since I'm fairly sure we do not yet even know all the laws of physics, I cannot see the hand of God. So without the ability to recognize a defiance of the laws of physics, it seems most people have taken to altering the definition to 'something extremely unlikely by known laws of physics.'

Because of this, people see things that are very unlikely occur and decide to attribute them to a divine power. This is completely understandable and has a huge history. In fact, I'd make the claim that religion arises from a lack of understanding. Don't know why the sun's moving in the sky? A god on a golden chariot is driving it. Don't know why the crops are failing? God's angry with you. Even, as a child, don't know why that loud thunder noise is coming from the sky? God's bowling. You can even trace the death of polytheistic religion to the gaining of knowledge of the universe. You simply need fewer gods to fill in fewer holes. That's probably a post of its own though.

So, without further ado, the point: probability is deceptive. People see two people together that compliment each other perfectly, one fills in the other's gaps and together they can accomplish more than either could fathom alone. They feel that this combination is so highly unlikely that the two must be "meant for each other." In other words, this did not occur in accordance with any universe following the laws of probability, there is some divine plan. Their relationship is a miracle.

But is it? Yes, the odds of those two getting together are probably very very small. That's probably not nearly enough "very"s, in fact. Our couple is improbable, but is it unlikely? After all, there have been trillions of couples since the beginning of time. What are the odds that one of those couples would be this couple? They're actually very good. They're likely 100%.

Most people can't get their head around this, so I'll explain:

Let's start with something everyone can understand: a coin toss. I toss a coin, you decide whether its heads or tails. You guess heads, I uncover heads, you win. I uncover tails, you lose. Now let's expand this idea: An enormous coin toss tournament. The contest has 100 rounds, and is set up in bracket form. So to win this tournament, you have to win 100 consecutive coin tosses.

What are the odds of someone winning 100 consecutive coin tosses, you ask? 7.9 x 10^-31. I'd say anything with that sort of minute probability qualifies as a "miracle," wouldn't you? No? OK, make it 1,000 rounds. I don't feel like looking up the probability of that, but keep going until you're happy. Make a day of it. (NOTE: I got bored and calculated it on excel. At exactly 1,023 rounds the probability becomes zero, according to Microsoft. Maybe we should set that as our "miracle" threshold.)

So we can agree that the probability of this event occurring is prohibitively small. But what is the likelihood? 100%! Someone will win this contest, and thus win 100 consecutive coin tosses. If I ever come across thousands of really bored people, I'll prove it.

So, show me a person who believes in miracles and I'll show you a person who doesn't understand probability. Maybe God's going a little far. After all, someone had to organize the contest right? Stay tuned...