The Rarity or Probability of a Miracle | The Story of God

how do you define a miracle how rare
does an event have to be before we would
call it miraculous one in a million one
in a billion if a miraculous thing is
something that happens one in a billion
times it happens all the time because
with six billion people in the world
there are so many opportunities for
something really unusual to happen we
would expect it to happen to some of
them your attention is biased to things
that happen as opposed to things that
don’t happen right now there’s all sorts
of non miraculous things that aren’t
happening and we don’t notice them but
you can be sure if something really
unusual happened we’d pay attention we
think only special things are happening
but in reality we’re just neglecting all
of those other things before we
determine that something is miraculous
we should probably rule out more mundane
explanations for things like chance how
many times were there opportunities for
something to happen and it didn’t
miraculous is divine but sometimes it’s
not actually miraculous sometimes it’s
just probability playing its tricks on
you nothing I’m saying here rules out
the possibility of the divine but when
we’re trying to determine if something
is a miracle or not we might want to
start by thinking well what are the odds
that we would get this by chance and if
it seems very likely well that doesn’t
seem very divine or miraculous we should
reserve the term divine for things that
we wouldn’t expect by chance alone
you