I swear before all that is holy, I was sitting here, reading this post, which made me think about my Mom, when I heard the little beepbeep* that indicates someone has come into my offices. I thought it was Maria, who had left just a little earlier, but instead it was large sweaty man with a bicycle! This has never happened before. What are the odds of that?
Now, had it been my mother and a bicycle I’d have fallen off my chair. As it was I was merely quizzical. Turns out he works next door and had the doors confused.
I have the most amazing luck. It works even when I do incredibly stupid things. Now matter what horrible, evil thing happens, something good normally happens soon that either fixes or makes up for that evil thing. I could probably jump off a bridge and I would land in just the right way or a boat with a really soft top would go under right at that moment. I try not to push it though.
When I was religious, I attributed it to God really, really liking me. Now I’m agnostic and God either still really likes me or I am just a lucky person.
Sir Francis Galton, the father of modern statistics, once asked himself almost this same question. Actually, what he asked himself was whether or not people for whom others prayed with unusual frequently, such as the king and queen (“to the King’s health!”), actually had better health than the average joes for whom people prayed an average amount. The obvious answer was that the royal family did not enjoy significantly better health. In fact, they had a cruddy gene for hemophilia that spread nastily throughout the reaches of royalty as a consequence of too many first cousin marriages.
As George H. Smith (and another reader) point out, it would take very few bona fide miracles; i.e., talking bushes and the like, to convince all the atheists of the world to change their minds. Is is the lack of convincing miracles that keeps us out of the religion game.
