Miracle, Luck or Chance? | The Story of God

Most of us have a turning point in our lives, a pivotal moment where you wondered, "How did this happen?" Mine was 1989. I made three films: Lean on Me, Driving Miss Daisy, and Glory. Did I make it happen? Was someone up there calling the shots, or was I lucky? To try to understand this, I've arranged to meet a psychology professor who thinks we often mistake random occurrences for miracles.

“Danny Oppenheimer, it's nice to see you! How are you today?”
“I'm good, you?”
“I'm good. Good! What are you doing?”
“I'm flipping coins.”
“Why?”
“I'm looking for streaks.”
“Streaks?”
“Yeah, if you flip enough times, you're going to get a streak.”
“Really? That's a lot of tails. Well, if I flip a coin twice and I get heads both times, is that miraculous?”
“Uh, no. You do it 50 times and you get 60, that's a miracle.”
“Well, yeah, if you get more than 50, then you flip, certainly. But how rare does an event have to be before we would call it miraculous? One in a million? One in a billion?”
“I'll choose billion.”
“All right, one in a billion. But let's try something. All right, Jack of Diamonds, Six of Spades, yeah, King of Spades, Two of Hearts, Seven of Diamonds, and Ace of Spades. Is it miraculous to have gotten this sequence?”
“No, I mean, it's just a random select of cards off the deck.”
“Well, right, but this particular sequence, starting with the Jack and then getting the Six of Spades and then King of Spades, it only happens one in about 14 billion times you draw six cards, so it's pretty miraculous by your one in a billion standard.”
“So you're telling me that this is miraculous?”
“Well, no, as you said before, it's just a random set of cards. What if it was the first six digits of your Social Security number? What if it were the last six digits of your Social Security number? The first six digits of your phone number?”
“Sometimes it's not actually miraculous. Sometimes it's just probability playing its tricks on you.”
“All right, so how do we include the Divine? Because there are people who really do think that every divine intervention in these kinds of interplays is absolutely real, and nothing I'm saying here rules out the possibility of the Divine. The fact that probability predicts certain things doesn't mean that there can't be divine intervention. But miraculous things that are so unlikely that you think it can't happen by chance alone? They do happen, and they have to happen. It would be odd if they didn't. 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.”