Understanding Miracles: An Athiest Perspective Part IV - Why Miracles Happen All the Time

"[O]ld beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false." 

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, p. 256.

 

Argue with a Christian long enough and eventually they will try to support their claims about God being the author of all absolute truth with the example of 2 + 2 = 4. In doing so, they are using the existence of objective mathematical truths as evidence of the existence of objective divine truths, and thus an author of those divine truths they called God. But this is to equate one for the other, even though the two are very different. One is held “in faith,” which is to believe something in the absence of evidence, while the other requires proof. 

Imagine doing math without needing evidence to support ones conclusion, so that 2 + 2 can equal, well, whatever one's sacred scripture says it equals, or whatever anyone wishes to "believe" it equals, with both being equal acts of pure faith. Faith of the religious variety does not give you the answers so much as it stops the asking of any questions that might lead to any answer other than the one you began with before asking the question. It does not ask what does 2 + 2 equal, it only asks "what will equal 4?" and then prohibits the asking of any questions in which the answer is anything other than 4.

  And in the same way an infinite number of other questions could be asked of an infinite number of numbers, which results in an equally infinite number of answers, so an infinite number of questions could also be asked about an infinite "God," even as institutional religions only allow for one answer and one answer only - "God." And if that's always the answer, why bother asking any questions at all? Imagine doing the same thing on every math test you've ever taken.

Yet there is another way in which Christians who use mathematics truth as evidence to support their God-claims, also reject mathematical evidence that disproves that "miracles" must come from their brand of God. Mathematics, in other words, illustrates how the corner stone of Christian beliefs is a double standard.

In previous posts, we saw how Alan Turing demonstrated how new patterns could form from homogeneous conditions, Karl Weierstrass discovered an "insane" new shape that challenged the traditional ways of thinking about calculus and geometry, and Niels Bohr revealed how chaos underwrote the order we perceive in reality as described by classical physics. All of them discovered these paradoxical truths using mathematics - the same mathematics Christians use to prove their God-claims when they say 2 + 2 = 4, but reject whenever 2 + 2 = no need for such a God. 

 Like Turing, Weierstrass, and Bohr before him, the statistician David Hand also discovered something new by looking at miracles through the lens of mathematics. While the former were able to see deeper truths about reality by looking using mathematics as a microscope to examine shapes and particles, Hand used mathematics like a telescope to look at "miracles" from a God's eye view. And when he did, he found a deeper reality at work, one that was reflected in the findings of Turning, Weierstrass, and Bohr.

Using mathematics and the aid of computers to crunch super large numbers in ways the human brain alone is unable to process, Hand was able to shift his focus from looking at one “miracle” at a time to studying data from massive collections of miracles. When he did, as Hand explains in his book, “The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day," he discovered that what we call “miracles,” rather than being the rare exception to the nature of our reality, are actually the rule. They just "feel" like exceptions because we are so bad at doing math with really large numbers.

If our brains were really the logic machines we like to think they are, which Christians imply by offering 2+2=4 as evidence for their God, they would function more like quantum computers and be capable of doing a million computations a second. With a brain like that, noticing that miracles are merely the result of the patterns that from from throwing dice enough times would be as easy as noticing color patterns on a candy cane. Instead of noticing patterns in extremely large number sets, however, we more easily see patterns in things like clouds or a piece of burnt toast. 

Yet even the patterns we see in various stimuli can be simply our mind playing tricks on us. The tendency for our perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one sees an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none, is known as pareidolia. A simple example occurs when we see faces in the clouds or someone sees Jesus in a piece of burnt toast. 

Through his study of massively large data sets, Hand discovered patterns that led to what he called "the improbability principle." Mainly comprised of five rules that he defined as laws, Hand defines those five laws as the Laws of Inevitability; of Truly Large Numbers; of Selection; of the Probability Lever; and of Near Enough. He goes on to offer convincing evidence for how such a principle reveals miracles to be everyday events attributable to chance. It is inevitable that, when the number of people who get cancer is large enough, some will experience spontaneous remission.  Nevertheless, many people choose to interpret such inexplicable events as evidence that confirms their belief that miracles are extremely rare gifts that come from their own brand of God, but not necessarily other brands.

Of all of the examples that Hand provides to illustrate how miracles are as common as the common cold, the simplest example of all is winning the lottery. According to Lottery USA, the odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot are 1 in 302.6 million. Because of our craving for meaning and talent for recognizing patterns, mixed with our difficulty for processing large numbers which leads us to prefer answers that are simple rather than complex, the simplest way to respond to winning with those odds leads us to feel like, if we win, it must be a miracle. 

Winning the lottery happens to atheists and Christians alike, however. But the former feels such an event is a miracle of chance, while to the latter it is a miracle from their brand of God. But is one simply anthropomorphizing the other?   

 

Why We Believe Miracles Come from a God

 More than anything else, the thing that convinces us that an event must be a miracle not of chance but from a God is three things: the way we feel about ourselves; the way we feel about the universe and life itself; and the way winning the lottery makes us feel. 

If we are raised in environments that lead us to feel more insecure, either because of trauma or poverty, we tend to feel more of a need for someone else to help us. As a result, the travails of life and the specter of the unknown, which are things we tend to feel more frightened by than excited about, lead us to desire someone will protect us. Such a desire exercised on a collective level leads to the embracing of an authoritarian dictator, one who is given power to the same degree he promises security. 

On the other hand, if we hear a noise in our house in the middle of the night, we may dismiss it as simply the wind or the house settling. But if you grew up in a more insecure environment, or suffered from trauma, the wind or settling of a house may prompt us to fear a burglar or a serial killer has come in through a window. 

But if we are running low on food in the refrigerator, and suddenly groceries show up at our door, we can only conclude that someone is looking out for us, even if the groceries were simply delivered by accident to the wrong house. The former scenario is dismissed as a chance occurrence, while the latter scenario looks to us far more like someone, "up there," is looking out for us. 

 Wining anything, whether the lottery or free groceries, triggers an emotional euphoria that leads our more irrational and emotional brain to override our more evolved critical thinking brain which does all our number crunching for us. Because this euphoric feeling is infallibly real, many who experience it then interpret it as evidence that they are experiencing a miracle, a “gift” given from a God like those we receive on Christmas morning as children, rather than that we are simply experiencing a mathematical probability.  After all, learning that 2 + 2 = 4 has probably never triggered as much euphoria in a child as that child experiences from opening Christmas presents.

 To us, winning the lottery feels like not only a-once-in-a-lifetime event, but it can also potentially change our life forever. Because society is based on money, even though money is entirely man-made, winning a huge sum of it is to receive protection from abject poverty. As a result, it feels exactly like someone is protecting us from our greatest fears. When looked at from the perspective of those who pick the lottery winners, however, this “miracle” happens on average at least 13 times every year. From the perspective of the winner, it can only feel like a miracle from a loving God, but from the perspective of Lottery USA, it’s just another day at the office, because someone always has to win. Otherwise, no one would bother playing at all.

However common it may be for someone to experience the “miracle” of winning the lottery, we still think it must be a genuine “miracle” of more than mere chance when one person wins it multiple times. Take Richard Lustig, for example, who came to prominence for winning relatively large prizes in seven state-sponsored lottery games from 1993 to 2010. That must be a miracle of something more than mere chance, right? Well, according to Hand, the Law of Truly Large Numbers establishes that, “with a large enough number of opportunities, any outrageous thing is likely to happen.” 

 

Struck by Lightning

To illustrate how the law of large numbers explains the luck of Lustig, consider the chances of getting struck by lightning. The average number of lightning strikes worldwide every second is 100. That’s 8.6 million strikes per day, and 3.139 billion strikes each year, 20 million of which occur in the U.S.A. Enter Roy Cleveland Sullivan, a U.S. Park Ranger in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park. Virginia isn't even on the top-10 list of biggest lightning hot spots. But between 1942 and 1977, Sullivan was struck by lightning 7 times - the same number of times Lustig won the lottery. All seven strikes occurred in the same basic geographic location.  In fact, many who believe in a God might say surviving even one lightning strike is a miracle, let alone seven! ( In actuality, however, almost 90% of lightning strike victims survive.) But the fact that people overwhelmingly avoided Lustig as a result, leading him to eventually end his own life in 1983 at the age of 71, suggests surviving such strikes was anything but a blessing.

As it turns out, miracles are less of an exception than something almost to be expected. As Hand convincingly illustrates from what we know about statistics and probability, not all events that seem rare or extraordinary are seen that way because they are in fact rare, but because they so rarely happen to any one person. The fallacy of such thinking is that it can lead us to feel special and “approved of” by a father figure if ever it happens to us. Yet we can only be chosen by such a figure when that same figure rejects everyone else. A perfect example of this is what happened to Frank Martin.

 

 

Why Does God Love College Basketball More Than Innocent Children? 

Frank Martin was the assistant basketball coach at Kansas State University. In 2006, Martin was admitted to the hospital in a deteriorating condition and eventually diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Dubbed “The Miracle in Manhattan” by ESPN, Martin reports that, after being told he would likely die, a mysterious Asian woman (why Asian? Is she like the Bagger Vance of the far East?) entered his room and prayed with him. This, according to Martin, led to him being miraculously cured.

 God must be one hell of a fan of Kansas State basketball, because that same woman never bothered to visit the child wing of that same hospital to help facilitate miracles for children dying of cancer. The bigger miracle, as a result, is how many Christians choose to interpret Martin’s “cure,” which was required perhaps to override the consequences of Martin’s “free will” to live a less healthy life than he could have, as a miracle that proved the existence of the very same God that choose to ignore all of the innocent children who He choose not to protect from pedophile priests within His own Church. And asking "why not?" is often seen as an act of disrespect.

The list of other people God chose also not to cure with this very same miracle includes Aretha Franklin, Steve Jobs, Luciano Pavarotti, Jack Benny, Margaret Mead, Joan Crawford, "Dizzy" Gillespie, Patrick Swayze, and countless others around the world. Nor did God choose to “cure” anyone else in the hospital that night of a terminal condition, or any other hospital for that matter, including mothers, children, infants, and even the unborn. And He didn’t because, as we all know too well, “God works in mysterious ways.” And for those who find the mysteries of the unknown unsettling, a belief in a God who can override the nature of a cold and uncaring universe is not only comforting, but essential. Using mathematics, however, David Hand helps to pull back the curtain on such a “mystery.”

But recall that, because fractals have the tiniest of variations in their details, they demonstrate how self-similar patterns in reality are not mere cookie cut-out, but capable of generating whole new patterns, given enough opportunities. In a purely mechanical world, in which the chaos of quantum mechanics is not free to produce variations from the standard set by a grand designer, everyone who gets cancer is destined to die unless they either receive a reprieve from the designer or we thwart the designer's plans by finding a way of eradicating such cancer. In a world governed by chance, large numbers, and quantum mechanics, however, cancer can spontaneously disappear.

As it turns out, while it is quite rare, cancer does spontaneously cure itself without treatments like chemotherapy or surgery. Only 12 to 24 such cases appear in the medical literature every year. If such "miracles" were the result of an all powerful doctor, for example, one would be left to wonder why a doctor who is fully capable of curing all of his patients should be praised for choosing instead to only cure one or two of them - per continent!

So is it really true that God is more of a miser with His miracle cures than Ebenezer Scrooge was with his money? And if so, wouldn’t worshiping such a miser be like Bob Cratchit worshiping Ebenezer Scrooge, before getting a raise in his salary? Fortunately, thanks to Hand removing the cross shaped beam from our eyes by providing us with a larger context of perception, we can see that what we define as “miracles” are actually the result of recurring patterns. 

 

Conclusion

When Christians claims that 2+2=4 to support their all of their God-claims, but then reject the truths that those same mathematical equations reveal to us about miracles, in the same way they've enlightened us about everything from pattern formation to quantum mechanics to flying to the moon and Mars and such, the double standard they are exhibiting becomes evidence that their "belief" in miracles is not the result of divine revelation, but of a desire to believe such events are messages from a God who is looking out for them. It is proof, in other words, that old beliefs never really die, even when they are demonstrably false.

Between the classical and the quantum view of physics, physicist Werner Heisenberg explained how words can get in the way of actually understanding what is really going on with reality itself. Math revealed that Einstein was only seeing half the picture of reality, for example, missing the rich complexity of quantum mechanics that Bohr had discovered through the looking glass of numbers. 

Like the truth about morphogensis, zig-zag geometric shapes, quantum mechanics, and fractals, that could only be seen through the lens of mathematics, so Hand demonstrates how that same looking glass allows us to zoom out and see miracles from a God’s-eye-view. Doing so allowed us to discover that what we define as "miracles" are comprised of a trinity of human components: a penchant for pattern recognition, a craving for meaning, and a lousy aptitude for complex mathematics that disposes us to crave simple answers to life’s most complex questions.

 And to top it all off, engaging in all three of these components triggers an endorphin release in those areas of our brain that make us feel an agent somewhere must be looking out for us, “saving” us from a cold cruel and wholly indifferent universe.  

What all of this boils down to for the atheist is that it is certainly not a belief in "miracles" that is the problem between Christians and atheists, but the different meanings that each derives from them. The Christian accepts miracles to be “signs” sent from a God who, rather than ever showing himself, prefers instead to offer only hints of his existence by selectively showing to those who “believe” He exists already “miracles” that are ambiguous enough to be highly debatable on the one hand, or merely the result of chance on the other.

 In short, the Christian thinks a miracle informs us about the existence of a higher intelligence, while the atheist knows a miracle is simply evidence of our own ignorance. And while one sees them as a license to act like God, the other sees them as a reminder that we are only human.