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 are 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.