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The statistical god : Deus In Machina - Page 2

© Francois Tremblay

Synchronicity is such a context with limited data. Take the example of the car. How are we to evaluate the probability of a car, that has a certain range of colours and kind of stripes, passing by this person ? And what if the car passed him by ten minutes later ? That would probably be a "hit" too. How about fifteen minutes ? I used the word "hit", and it fits well here : like a John Edwards reading , a "hit" can be scored very loosely in this type of situation.

The fact is, we simply cannot afford to record and explain every single event in the world. We cannot analyze statistically every possible exterior attribute of a car and correlate it with someone's thoughts at a given moment. Information is an important commodity, and nowadays a crucial commodity. We specialize in certain areas of knowledge. When confronted with seemingly incredible events, we need epistemic investigators, such as "skeptics" like James Randi, to study events or contexts which may or may not have far-reaching interest.

Lack of information on a context does not mean we should assume divine planning. Lack of evidence for natural explanations is not evidence of lack of natural explanations. In most cases, we have to say we simply don't know, and that insofar as natural, scientific explanations have been shown to explain most things, we must assume that the event has a natural explanation unless demonstrated otherwise.

But in some cases, we already know for certain that probabilities are trivial or easily explained, even though the event itself may seem incredible. One such example is the so-called "power of prayer". Many believers claim that prayer can heal a person's diseases. But since we already know that medicine can cure disease, that diseases can have remissions, and that prayer has no measured statistical effect, the scientific explanation (i.e. only the treatment had any effect) is infinitely more likely than the anti-scientific explanation (i.e. prayer had a significant effect).

Another example is given to us by conversion stories. Many believers claim that their lives were in a bad shape before they converted to their favoured religion, then their lives changed for the better. Once again, this can be interpreted extremely vaguely : how long after the conversion should we stop considering this significant ? One month ? One year ? Ten years ?

Secondly, statistically speaking such a change is almost inevitable. Once you are at the bottom, there are much more chances that you will go up, than there is that you will keep being miserable. Finally, there is the selective thinking problem again. You don't hear about people who converted to a religion and then died of an overdose. How many of them are there ?

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