Are these miracles divine or random chance luck

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wjp984

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Now I am not talking about the person who gets better form illness miracle but the plane or car crash survivor or the person who falls to what should be a fatal drop and walks away.

I learned today that according to the principal of entrophy, everything continually gets disorganized. However, there are only 10 to the power of 46 possible combinations. As large as a number as that may be there is still the chance that you could fall to what should be your death or smashed to what would be smitherines by a crash, but then get that extreme luck of a 1 in 10 with 46 zeroes chance of the conservation of energy deciding to leave you basically unscathed. As rare as that may seem, it seems to be a scientific explanation for these kind of miracles.
 
WJP,

Let’s do the math. Assuming that every person in the world (say ten billion–it’s fewer than that, but I’m being generous–that’s 10 to the power 10) has such an incident that should be fatal an average of once per second (three billion seconds equal about 93 years, another 3 times 10 to the power 9), that means that any given “combination” has about one chance in 3 times 10 to the power 26 of having happened to anybody ever. The odds of it having been strictly a natural phenomenon are, simply, astronomically small.

Anybody who tries to explain this sort of miracle by invoking random chance is whistling in the dark.
  • Liberian
 
wjp984 said:
Now I am not talking about the person who gets better form illness miracle but the plane or car crash survivor or the person who falls to what should be a fatal drop and walks away.

I learned today that according to the principal of entrophy, everything continually gets disorganized.
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that is not quite what entropy is
wjp984 said:
However, there are only 10 to the power of 46 possible combinations.
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I don’t understand :confused:
combinations of what?
wjp984 said:
As large as a number as that may be there is still the chance that you could fall to what should be your death or smashed to what would be smitherines by a crash, but then get that extreme luck of a 1 in 10 with 46 zeroes chance of the conservation of energy deciding to leave you basically unscathed. As rare as that may seem, it seems to be a scientific explanation for these kind of miracles.
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I’m not quite sure of what you’re asking but no energy conservation equation that I know of could account for that.

Plain old newtonian mechanics works quite well for large bodies such as people and jet planes.
 
I know that is not quite what entrophy is and I think I confused it now that I think about it. Entrophy is the fact that everything is continually getting more and more disordered and all things lead to more disorder.
 
Liberian said:
WJP,

Let’s do the math. Assuming that every person in the world (say ten billion–it’s fewer than that, but I’m being generous–that’s 10 to the power 10) has such an incident that should be fatal an average of once per second (three billion seconds equal about 93 years, another 3 times 10 to the power 9), that means that any given “combination” has about one chance in 3 times 10 to the power 26 of having happened to anybody ever. The odds of it having been strictly a natural phenomenon are, simply, astronomically small.

Anybody who tries to explain this sort of miracle by invoking random chance is whistling in the dark.
  • Liberian
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I don’t quite follow your math :confused:
 
wjp984 said:
I know that is not quite what entrophy is and I think I confused it now that I think about it. Entrophy is the fact that everything is continually getting more and more disordered and all things lead to more disorder.
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That is not correct. Entropy was originally associated with the third principle of thermodynamics (unusable heat). Although the concept of entropy was originally a thermodynamic construct, it has been adapted in other fields of study, including information theory, psycho-dynamics, thermo-economics, and evolution. The interesting point is also that locally the Entropy can decrease and thus related to an increase in order.
 
well what about miracles like statues crying blood or St. Januarius’ blood reliquefying each year on his feast day? Is there a chance that some stones bleed just randomly? I think it make more sense to believe in divine intervention than bad unproven physics.
 
Steve,

I was doing an exercise in “expected value.” Suppose you enter a lottery and have one chance in a million of winning. If the prize is two million dollars, then (on average) here is how things will turn out if you enter the lottery, say, ten million times:
  • Since the chance of winning the lottery is one in one million, on average for every one million times you enter, you will win once.
  • If you enter ten million times, on average you can expect to win ten times (once for every million entries)
  • Since the prize each time you win is two million dollars, you can expect (again, on average) to win a total of twenty million dollars in this lottery.
Similarly, I was using the original poster’s chance of one in 10 to the 46th power of a lucky coincidence allowing somebody to survive an otherwise fatal accident. With that chance of survival, if each person in the world had one such accident every second of his life, the chances of such a coincidence happening would still be vanishingly small.
  • Liberian
 
Liberian said:
Steve,

I was doing an exercise in “expected value.” …
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Oh yes I understand that

I just didn’t know where wjp984 got the 1 in 10E46 or where you got the once a second assumption.

For things like plane crashes you can model wish way the pieces may fly and come up with probabilities. I just wasn’t sure where yours were coming from.
If there is some new rumor going about the net quoting 10E46 I would like to be forewarned and forearmed.
 
On a similiar note I wonder about “healings” in general. Healings are substantially our most common form of miracle.

Two things about healings trouble me.
  1. With the many many people who suffer from aflictions such as cancer, cancerous tumors, tuberculosous, various forms of blindness etc, why is in not possible that the miraculous healings were not simply natural healing the body performed on itself. The body heals many things. Just looking at a skinned knee heal over time displays this. Why could it not be that in a lucky few, the body worked overtime?
  2. Why are all of our miraculous healings invisable? Meaning we do not hear (as far as I know) of limbs being restored, morbid obesity disapperaing, horrible disfigurments (burns, accidents) being restored to normalcy?
This has always troubled me.
 
steveandersen said:
Oh yes I understand that

I just didn’t know where wjp984 got the 1 in 10E46 or where you got the once a second assumption.

For things like plane crashes you can model wish way the pieces may fly and come up with probabilities. I just wasn’t sure where yours were coming from.
If there is some new rumor going about the net quoting 10E46 I would like to be forewarned and forearmed.
Click to expand...
oh, I really don’t know a lot about the topics and probably confused it. The number I got was from an example of why things always go from orderly states to disorderly states and not the other way around. Like eggs always crack and splatter but splattered eggs don’t go back to an egg. Then there was some explanation with this 10^46 combination of possibilities of what can happen so of course the splattered egg is not going to go back to normal since only one of those is an egg. Then profesor brought up that in a head on car collision, it is going to be really bad but there is a minute chance that the conservation of energy will randomly select some combination that does not do much disorder. So then I thought well maybe there are at least a few million or so possible combinations out of that 10^46 where someone could not be seriously injured in what should be fatal collisons or falls.
 
Mijoy2 said:
On a similiar note I wonder about “healings” in general. Healings are substantially our most common form of miracle.

Two things about healings trouble me.
  1. With the many many people who suffer from aflictions such as cancer, cancerous tumors, tuberculosous, various forms of blindness etc, why is in not possible that the miraculous healings were not simply natural healing the body performed on itself. The body heals many things. Just looking at a skinned knee heal over time displays this. Why could it not be that in a lucky few, the body worked overtime?
  2. Why are all of our miraculous healings invisable? Meaning we do not hear (as far as I know) of limbs being restored, morbid obesity disapperaing, horrible disfigurments (burns, accidents) being restored to normalcy?
This has always troubled me.
Click to expand...
I believe I have brought this up two times in my tenure here at CFs. Both times it was left unanswered. Possibly it is because it was a side point, not belonging in the thread.

God, being selective about what type healings He performs is quite troubling. I will start a thread on this matter and we will see where it goes.
 
steveandersen said:
I just didn’t know where wjp984 got the 1 in 10E46 or where you got the once a second assumption.
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Steve,

I can’t speak for the 10 to the 46th number, but my assumption of one accident-that-should-be-fatal per person per second was simply an attempt to place an upper limit on the numbers. It was a VERY generous upper limit; most people do not have this sort of thing happen at all, and for most of the people to whom it does happen it only happens once in a lifetime. So you can make the already astronomically-small chance even smaller by a factor of a billion (these things do not happen every second, but rather every thirty years or even less often).
  • Liberian
 
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