yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

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


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

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.

More Articles

View All
Jerome Powell: The Great Inflation Stalemate Has Begun
We know that reducing policy restraint too soon could result in a reversal of the progress that we’ve seen on inflation. At the same time, reducing policy restraint too late or too little could unduly weaken economic activity and employment. Right now, th…
Feel the Photon | StarTalk
So I tried to get Wayne Shorter to express sounds of the universe through jazz, through his saxophone. OK. So I prepped him for a cosmic phenomenon to see how he—can he roll with it. Uh-oh. This is going to be deep. Let’s check it out. I want to describe…
Fireside Chat with Ivana Djuretic of Asher Bio
Welcome back! Next, we have a fireside chat with YC’s Jared Friedman and Ivana Dreadich. Yeah, let’s give them both a big round of applause! Ivana is the founder and founding CEO of Asher Bio. Uh, before we get started, go ahead and take a seat. But befo…
Conditions for IVT and EVT: table | Existence theorems | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
We’re told this table gives a few values of function f. It tells us what f of x is equal to that x is equal to 2, 3, 4, and 5. Which condition would allow you to conclude that there exists a maximum value for f over the closed interval from 2 to 4? So pa…
Percent word problem examples
In a video game, Val scored 30 percent fewer points than Peta. Peta scored 1060 points. How many points did Val score? Pause this video and see if you can figure out how many points Val scored. All right, well now let’s do this together, and there’s a co…
MARS | Exclusive Sneak Peek
And now an exclusive sneak peek at the first episode of [Music] [Music] Mars Retro Rockets about to fire in 1, 2, 3… bre… 1, 2… [Music] three. We dream it’s who we are, down to our bones, ourselves. That instinct to build, that drive to seek beyond what …