Desperation, Prayer, and the Lottery

I was recently listening to a podcast about the power of prayer (It was geeks without god if I recall correctly). One of the things they said that stuck in my brain is that a lot of people pray as an act of desperation. They feel like they have no other options and praying at least feels like they are doing something. Perhaps they are stuck in a situation that they don't like and they don't see a way out of it, so they pray that things will get better.

source: wikimedia

Often when I see atheists talk about this kind of thing they will say things like "why waste your time praying, why not do something useful instead?" While I agree with this sentiment at times, there are also times when I don't think it is appropriate. Let's say for example someone is working a lot of hours and still just barely getting by. They are trying to get themselves out of the situation, but they are just treading water. If they do a little praying before they go to bed, or while they are commuting, or whatever, I don't see the harm in that. And it could give them a little hope to get them through the day. As long as they are also trying to get things better as well, why not? (If they are instead "leaving it up to God" and just sitting back waiting for things to get better I see it as destructive, but let's assume this is someone not in that situation)

I was thinking about my own current situation, I am currently working a ridiculous number of hours. I work most nights after my son goes to bed until about midnight, and I am pretty sure I haven't had a single day where I didn't work at all in about 6 weeks. I'm probably hovering at about 80 hours a week with no end in sight. If I'm being honest with myself, it will probably pretty similar to this until June. (next year will be better as I can reuse a lot of my teaching materials, but this year I'm building 2 classes from scratch on my own and another with a team of 3 others). I really love my job, but this workload is fucking nuts.

Sometimes I feel pretty pushed to the limit and it can be a bit depressing. As a mathematician, I feel somewhat embarrassed about this, but I will occasionally buy a lottery ticket. I have calculated the odds, I know I am not going to win, but it is fun to think "what if?" As I said, I love my job I'm just overworked. I would love to work half-time, so I could still do it but I could do other things that I enjoy as well. The point is, I see a parallel with the prayer, it really is a fantasy I am allowing myself to have as an act of desperation. In the case of prayer, they are imagining that God is going to make things better, he is going to help them into a better situation. In my case, I'm just imagining being able to buy myself into a better situation. I think the parallel is interesting.

Should We Credit God or Simply Change Our Perspective?

Parkside High School
(I don't work here, it's just a nice picture of a high school)

I work at a high school, and school is about to start up again so we are doing our in-service days leading up to next week when the kids return. Part of the first day of this is meeting the new teachers, hearing their stories and telling them ours. One of the new teachers was telling the story about how she got her job. Basically, a series of very unlikely events led to her meeting the superintendent of our district and he encouraged her to apply for the job and she ultimately got it.


She then was telling us she had several potential career paths in front of her and she was having trouble deciding which way she should go and before that fateful meeting she had asked God to open whatever doors he wanted her to follow and close any others. As it turned out, interviewers for 2 other jobs had left messages on her phone asking her to follow up on their application process, somehow she had missed those calls and didn't see those messages until after she had accepted this job.

I've left out any identifying details so the story has lost most of its impact, but it was quite emotional and impressive the way she told it. I can totally see how a religious person would hear this story and think that it is amazing that God has worked in this woman's life to lead her to where she needs to be. There are 2 problems I can see with this point of view though, one is that it is jumping from a coincidence to God, and the other is that she would have attributed any outcome to God.

One thing that is interesting about probably is that really rare things happen all the time. I've written about this kind of thing before, but basically if you have enough people doing stuff some of those things will look extremely unlikely on their own. Hell, people win the lottery all the time. A powerball ticket has about 1 in 175,000,000 chance of winning, so if you buy a ticket you shouldn't expect to win. But if we know that 200,000,000 people are playing, you shouldn't be surprised if someone wins.

So what about this woman? How unlikely was this meeting really? It certain seems like a bit of a long shot. But what about from the perspective of the superintendent? He's a pretty outgoing guy, I bet he talks to people out in public quite often when he is out and about. He was also aware of the unfilled position and it was on his mind, it doesn't seem too unlikely that he would bring it up in a conversation. If he hadn't met her he could very well have run into someone else, or maybe in another week they would have gotten some applications just from it being posted online. From this perspective it doesn't seem too unlikely that he would run into some qualified person and encourage them to apply.

The other thing I was thinking about was that no matter what happened to her, she would have attributed it to God. The fact that he was so impressed with her shows that she's well qualified and would likely have landed another job if she hadn't met the superintendent. She even has some other very promising leads based on those voice mails she told us about. If she hadn't gotten this job she probably would have been telling a different group of people about how she initially missed the call from HR, but God led her to see her missed voicemail messages which ultimately led to her getting that job. It really boils down to one of those situations where God just can't lose no matter what happens in the end.

My Most recent amazon review: Equal Rites (Discworld Book 3)  [4 stars]

Coin Flip Game

The topic of probability came up recently in several discussion threads and it reminded me of a coin flip game an old buddy of mine told me about a few years ago. The game is very simple, everyone in the country gets a quarter to use for the game, and any time you come across someone who is still in the game, one of you flips a coin. Whoever wins gets the coins of the other and the loser is out. (We'll assume the coin flips are fair and there is no trickery going on, maybe you have to throw the coin over your head and let it land on the ground).

Suppose we continue this game until there is only one player left, what can we say about the guy who wins all of the money? Did God want him to win? It certainly might feel that way to him, he just beat out a whole bunch of people. It's not a skill based game, so he can't credit practice, he can't honestly say he is good at flipping coins, he just got lucky. The thing is, somebody had to win. If there is a God, he might decide to manipulate our fair coin tosses and make it so that particular guy wins. But if there is no God, or if God is not interested in this game, somebody would have to win, it could be anyone and it has to be someone.

If the country we are talking about is the united states, the odds of any particular person winning is about 1 in 300,000,000. It might seem that with odds this drastically low it would be impossible for it to happen by chance. There must have been someone or something guiding the coin flips for him to overcome those impossibly low odds of winning. But that is just not the case. It is true that for that guy, the odds of winning were one in three hundred million. But there are three hundred million people all with the same odds. If you look at the entire situation instead of the one guy who happened to win, it doesn't seem so crazy.