I Am Innocent

[David Sklansky]

I may not always meticulously explain myself. But I don't use circular reasoning.

First let me say that by "miracle" I basically mean an unusual event caused by supernatural intervention. The answering of a prayer to cure a disease, for instance. An unrigorous definition but one that should suffice here.

I am now going to make up a little story that I believe is analogous to where I am coming from.

Hugo is weak at math and physics. But he is a good statistician and investigator. One of the things he has found out is that ten percent of people lie, on purpose or not.

It is his job to check out two boasts from people. Those who say they flipped twenty heads in a row yesterday. And those who say they threw a baseball 102mph yesterday.
Three million people a year call him up regarding each of those claims. Since he has a hidden camera in everybody's house he can see whether they are telling the truth. (Of course lots of other people are trying, failing and not calling Hugo.)

Interestingly he finds that in both cases, 30 claims out of 3 million are true. In the coin case he should have been able to figure out why for himself. Because if thirty million people flipped a coin twenty times, about thirty would get all heads and about 3 million would say they did. (Twenty heads is a million to one shot.)

In the case of the baseball, he can now deduce that one in a million can throw it that hard.

Anyway he has statistically come to the conclusion that when someone makes the claim that they can do either one of those things there is a one in a hundred thousand chance it is true. Someone tells him about a claim in China and he makes it 100,000 to one. Someone tells him about a claim made in 1750 and it is 100,000 to one. As far as he is concerned.

Except that now he is also told that back in 1750 only one percent of people lied. If he knows enough math, he adjusts claims back then to 10,000 to 1 against.

Another time he should consider adjusting is if there are eyewitnesses. That's iffy because there may be trickery involved. Or collusion among the witnesses. But if it is on the up and up and the witnesses are independent, it would mean that seven witnesses, each ten percent to be a liar, plus the practitioner, all vouching for either feat, would mean that he could LAY ODDS that it DID happen. Do you see why?

Hugo also gets millions of boasts that someone got 50 heads is a row. He also gets millions of boasts that someone threw a ball at twice the speed of light. They never pan out. When he hears claims that someone did these things 2000 years ago he dismisses them. His statistical frequency is zero out of many million. So at BEST a random personal claim is maybe a million to one underdog. (At least ten million to one among all attempts.) Given a ten percent lying frequency. But if there were twenty independent witnesses he wouldn't know what to think. Because his statistics doesn't tell him how much rarer than ten million to one it might be. We know of course that his statistics don't even begin to tell the story. In the first case because fifty heads is over a quadrillion to one. In the baseball case because on top of the statistical evidence we have the fact that physicists claim that it is IMPOSSIBLE to exceed the speed of light. We are not relativity experts but we know that this claim has been statistically shown to be true uncountable times. So we know for a different reason that Hugo's statistics don't tell the whole story. And that even twenty independent witnesses, would do little to sway us.

The above story was not meant to rigorously prove anything. It was only to shed more light on my thought processes. Which in a nutshell revolves around claims of miracles. Whether it be the ressurection, God explicity answering prayers, or Jesus on a grilled cheese sandwich. Millions of such claims have been made. Those that have been investigated are disproved or at least not confirmed. The statistical evidence is zero out of whatever. Other facts point to the true price being MUCH smaller than one in whatever. And the possibility that the price is zero. (That last sentence might make a mathmetician cringe but you know what I mean.)

But even if you don't add in corroborating evidence to the statistical evidence, it is clear that claims of miracles are statistically less than one over the number of claims investigated and debunked. So you can assign that probability, or smaller to a random claim. If there are other pieces of evidence that are usually reliable that argue for the claim you have to adjust accordingly.

The point is that my scepticism about miracles (Note: rigorously speaking, my points apply only to miracles CLAIMED. I can't really talk about miracles that happen in the middle of the desert that noone knows about) does NOT come from some arbitrary faith in physics or disbelief about God. It stems from studies about prayers, adventures of Houdini, tests of Einstein's theories, knowledge of how humans incorrectly believe in rushes or that they are not paralyaed when they are etc. Period.