The Problem with Christians

[pocaracas]

Let's say, for argument's sake, that the odds of that happening by sheer chance are a billion to one.
Out of every billion people on earth, one has such a dream at the same time as someone else in their close vicinity and it's temporally close to the actual dream "coming true".

How many people are right now on the face of this planet?
7 billion!
That means that, by sheer luck, 6 more people are having the same sort of prophetic dreams as your wife and her sister.
Still way more likely than god-did-it.

How about you learn some statistics?



As I see it, you're the one who fails at properly grasping the numbers...

Also, "chance" is a word that describes our ignorance of all the factors that play a role in a particular outcome. Just because we don't know them all, doesn't mean they're unknowable (in theory), just unavailable in practice.

I'm not trained in statistics but I think a common sense approach should suffice. If I asked you to pick the correct statement out of two options, with a) having a 99.99999999% chance of being true, and b) having a 0.00000001% chance of being true, I daresay you'd pick a). So when I ask you to determine whether something is either by deliberate design or random chance, you choose the 0.000000001% option. I don't follow the logic. Could it be that bias/prejudice is at work here?

Oh, but if one thing has 0.00000001% chance of being right, while the other has 10^-1000% chance of being right, then I pick the first.

Or are you wanting to suggest that the unverified, unverifiable, mental construct which you are calling supernatural has any more likelihood of being real than 10^-1000%? (And I think I'm being generous there)

The problem with the supernatural is that it can't be repeated... Any scrutiny into it is barred at the gate... All we can work with is someone's testimony. And testimony is a remarkably fragile sort of evidence, considering all the ways in which our brains conspire to make us use faulty reasoning, faulty memories, and reach faulty conclusions based on those.
A good subject to learn about is psychology. It may seem unbelievable to you, but all sort of crazy stuff has been catalogued as illusions, ways to deceive your brain and systematically make you reach a particular result.
Here, have fun with this sample: http://www.npr.org/2011/07/14/137552517/...-our-lives