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The statistical god : Deus In Machina

© Francois Tremblay

The idea that God is not a being acting on the whole universe, but rather a force which affects our lives at a personal level, has been going on for a while now, especially in New Age circles. People who hold such beliefs call the effects of this force "synchronicity". I have discussed this new vision of God in my article "Where is the faith ?". A significant proportion of believers uphold that there is a spirit or life-force that exists as a guiding principle of the universe.

Obviously, not all people who believe in a "spirit or life-force" also believe in synchronicity. However, that position is rather vague, and synchronicity is usually the argument you hear when people are asked to prove their beliefs in things like "life-force". Their rallying cry seems to be "maybe most things are explainable, but this is unexplainable, and you can't refute that !".

As an example of this argument, there is an Infidel Guy show where a believer presented his argument. He was driving on the highway, and thinking about what kind of car shape he'd like and what stripes he'd like to have painted on his car. After five minutes, he saw a car coming the other way that had that same general shape and those same stripes. He claims he never saw a car like it again. This, he opined, proves that God exists : how else could such a coincidence happen ?

Infidel Guy's reply was to point out that this is a case of selective thinking - he could have seen such a car later on, but since we don't usually pay attention to such things, he would just have no memory of it. The believer conceded that this was true. The other objection raised was that God could communicate his existence much better than just making a certain car cross his path.

These objections are perfectly valid. However, there are much more fundamental objections to this kind of "god as probability" conception.

There is the simple fact that people have no sound knowledge of probabilities. We have a great deal of epistemic biases when evaluating contexts with limited data. One important bias is that high-profile events or dangers are rated as more important than low-profile ones, even though the high-profile events or dangers are less common. For instance, public perception is skewed against plane travel, despite being the safest mode of transport, because plane accidents are high-profile events. When the evening news talks about a new food disease or a possible environmental problem, people will panic regardless of the actual probability and gravity of the problem.

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