LJ Idol Homecoming, Week 10: Open Topic
"Numbers Game"
There is a phenomenon known to the French as l'esprit de l'escalier, literally translated as "the spirit of the staircase." It refers to that feeling of coming up with the perfect thing to say--a line of argument in a debate, the perfect zinger, the pickup line that might have actually worked--as one is descending the staircase to leave.
Of course, this need not be so immediate. I was having a conversation with my aunt Lynn* at Christmas, and only yesterday did I figure out how to encapsulate my point in a single sentence.
Lynn was talking about a coincidence she had recently experienced, and was asking me, the math major, what the odds were of it happening. "It has to be a sign of something." Now, I fully acknowledge that God moves in mysterious ways. But to speak through the cards in a board game? That seemed, well, unlikely to me.
We went back and forth on this, me pointing out that similar odd events pass by unnoticed, her insisting that something that unlikely could not happen by chance. This diverged into a discussion of the gambler's fallacy, which I explained as follows: "If a roulette wheel comes up red twelve spins out of fifteen, there will be some people who will insist that you have to bet on red, because 'red is hot.' Others will insist you need to bet on black, because 'black is due.' They can't both be right, and indeed, neither is. The next spin is always fifty-fifty."
We never did establish the actual odds (mostly because there are so many factors involved that it's impossible to quantify them all), but I think I finally convinced her to use this coincidence as a tiebreaker in her decision-making, but nothing more.
Of course, now that l'esprit has kicked in, I know what I was supposed to say:
"Just because it's unlikely doesn't make it a miracle."
One-in-a-million chances do happen. One time out of a million. There's a similar paradox with, for example, the lottery. The odds of you winning the lottery are infinitely small. The odds of someone winning are, depending on the number of people who bought tickets, likely to nearly certain. It's all a matter of perspective.
Does this mean God can't act through probability? That everything is purely chance? Lynn would definitely disagree, but I'm not so sure. Our human tendency to look for patterns, even when we know there isn't one, may be too ingrained to overcome.
But I'm sure I'll come up with the answer someday.
I just need to walk down a few more staircases.