Miracle Or Coincidence? What Are The Chances?

Here is an anecdote—one of several in a theme, they say—about the actor Jim Caviezel during the filming of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ:

This was especially evident during the making of The Passion of the Christ, which was marked by a series of extraordinary and, for many, providential occurrences. One of the most remarkable events involved lightning striking (literally) actor Jim Caviezel – not once, but twice. During the filming of the Sermon on the Mount scene, Caviezel was struck directly in front of a plethora of onlookers who rushed over to provide medical assistance; a crew member was subsequently also hit. Caviezel later described the experience, saying he felt “light surrounding his body” before losing consciousness.

The coincidence is not only the strike during the obvious religious circumstances, but walking away from it unharmed. This is rare. Not unheard of: rare.

You may be as delighted as I was to discover our government keeps a list of people hit by lightning who weren’t kilt deed outright. Many of the situations were where you’d expect, on a beach or under a tree and the like. Curious to me were the list of injuries. A very few, like Caviezel, had none. Most others developed obvious pains, like headache, nausea, burns, seizures and similar.

But three people, coincidentally (our word of the day) who were struck while inside, or so it is reported, who after being stung claimed to have developed psychic abilities.

Coincidences become defined because of their seeming rarity. Take away the uncommonness of events and the magic is sucked out. You don’t see it as a coincidence to find another man walking down the sidewalk on a Monday morning as you head to work. You would call it a coincidence if the man turned out to be a boyhood chum you hadn’t seen in forty years.

Unlikeliness, too, is a seeming requirement for the miraculous; miracles are coincidences writ large. A cold clearing after five days is not credited to the divine. But a cancer disappearing a week after diagnosis would be.

The role of rarity is odd, though, because of passages like this: “And hospitality do not forget; for by this some, being not aware of it, have entertained angels.” Entertaining an angel would qualify, I think, as miraculous. You do not have to believe that passage to take away its import. It is your unawareness of who you entertained that strips out the feeling of amazement, yet the miracle remains. If you didn’t recognize your old friend on the sidewalk, the event still occurred, but no sensation of coincidence occurs because of your unawareness.

Coincidences and miracles become important to us only when incidents are bundles with a possible common divine or occult (hidden) cause. The rarity helps suggest the possibility of such causes, even if we eventually dismiss them.

Long-time readers might have seen this coming: since nothing has a probability, thus probability is always in the mind, any judgement of rarity or commonality is based on evidence assumed. What evidence you entertain, however it arrives from whatever sources, always in the end is picked by you. Which doesn’t mean what you pick is best, or all evidence true. Plus, recall that not all have the ability to form judgements of all things.

This is not just throat clearing. It is key. In considering any event, we are always seeking to explain it, and to explain it means to lay out its full cause and the conditions of those causes. It is only when we do not, or cannot, know a full cause that there is uncertainty. With all this in mind, let’s look at the cases before us.

First is nurse Thais (on the weather service list). Best to read each entry, but briefly: she was inside during a storm and saw lightning in a mirror as she attended a patient. A glow enveloped her; later watches stopped working well in her presence. Years later another storm gently raged outdoors and she felt “an odd sensation.” She claims to have uncovered a secret affair by psychic means.

Second is Blair. She was in the back of an apartment with the door open and lightning came inside and chased her to a back bedroom. She “was in a state of semi-consciousness.” After a week, “huge changes in me began. I started to ‘know’ so much, such as when I was being lied to, I could see who was a bad person and predict when things would happen.” She also claims depression and “terrible insomnia”.

Third is David, but we only have the claim of psychic abilities, because the link is broken.

Fourth is Caviezel, as above.

Now what you might see, in relating events like this, are calculations on being hit by lightning and surviving, modified by where standing and other circumstances. I mean “If you are on a golf course and a storm is brewing, there is an X% chance of being stung” sort of things. Useful enough in their way, though often overly vague (because nothing has a probability). In any case, these are the wrong calculations.

It’s all backwards.

What we want—and if you hear bells ringing as you read this sentence, I will be most proud—is not the chance of being struck here or there, but the probability of the Important Cause being true given one was struck. In our examples, the Important Cause is the force that causes development of curious abilities, as in the Weather Service examples, or the cause of a signal of religious importance in Caviezel’s case.

In other words, we want the chance that zapping someone with 300 million volts at 30,000 amps (something around a trillion watts) gives them psychic abilities. Or we want the chance God wanted to demonstrate a point about the sacrifice of our Lord after buzzing the actor portraying him. The second example is more difficult because we must also define the event more precisely: just what is being claimed here? That might depend on sets of premises that differ between people.

What we want, therefore, is the same as what we want in science. We do not want the probability of data assuming the Important Cause wasn’t operative, which is the rarity; we want the probability of the hypothesis given the data we observed! Read this.

Think: the probability, in coincidences, miracles or in science, of the data assuming the Important Cause is operative is 1. Obviously! There is nothing do with rarity here. (Pause here if you do not grasp this.) After all, the assumption is the Important Cause did the deed. So of course it generated the data we thought it would.

Besides all this, the probability of the data assuming that Important Cause is inoperative really doesn’t exist. Because nothing has a probability. For any event, miraculous or no, once we discover its full cause and conditions, the probability of what we observed is 1. Uncertainty only arises in absence of knowledge of cause.

Knowledge of full cause is often on short supply. What is the probability what happened to Caviezel is a miracle? Depends on the premises you bring to it. I give it some weight, but I’m not going to give it a number, because my premises are not definite enough.

What is the probability Thais was given psychic powers in her warm glow? Low, most low, I think, because I’ve seen many stories like this and can see the weakness in it. Same for Blair. For David? Who knows. I can’t say the probability is 0, precisely, in any of these cases. But I judge it low enough so that the decisions I make regarding them are all negative (for instance, I’m not going to follow any of the stories up).

You might entertain different premises.

Incidentally, the picture atop today’s post is from Lightning Strike and Electrical Shock Survivors International, a support group of folks who received excessive electrons and lived to tell the tale.

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