HS #8 2016.3.1
Last month after the Super Bowl. Peyton Manning, the winning
quarterback, remarked that he would spend the evening drinking Budweiser and
thanking the Man upstairs. Possibly he was referring to the team’s owner in the
skybox, but I’m guessing he was expressing gratitude for divine support.
Manning was feeling
great - - and feeling thankful. After a long, tough season, he had won the
ultimate reward. He, likely with every other NFL quarterback, had prayed for
such an end to his season. So it made sense why Peyton expressed gratitude to
God for the victory.
My friend and former colleague, Don Cronkite, professor
emeritus of the Hope College Biology Department, once had a student tell him
that he, having forgotten a needed formula while taking a physics test, had
prayed for help, and that God had obliged by reminding him of the formula. Don,
his tongue firmly in cheek, had suggested that the student should admit to the
physics professor that he had cheated. “After all,” Cronkite reasoned, “if a person had given you the formula, it
would have been cheating.” The student
was not phased, “I figured that if God wanted to cheat, who was I to argue.”
Does prayer work the way this student and Manning suppose?
Consider this thought experiment: Suppose 1000 students of a
college are each given a penny to flip. Those who land a Tail sit down – roughly
half of them. Those who get a Head flip again, and again about half of them who
get a Tail sit down. They continue until one student remains standing - probably
after about ten flips. That remaining student gets free tuition for a
year.
I used to give that example to my senior seminar students at
Hope College and ask what would be their response if they were the winner.
Typically, the answer was similar to Peyton Manning - a prayer of thanks. From
the winner’s point of view, something akin to a miracle would have taken place.
After all, the odds were one in a thousand.
On the other hand, from the college’s point of view nothing
remarkable had happened. After all, someone had to win. Did prayer make a
difference? Most students likely had
offered a supplication for divine favor.
So whose perspective is correct? My father distinguished
between providence and a miracle: Suppose when walking down a sidewalk that a
bricklayer above drops a load of bricks. If the bricks fall all around with
none hitting you, that’s providence. If a brick stops in midair above your
head, slides over, and then falls – that’s a miracle.
So was the coin-flip prize the result of a miracle or at
least God’s providential plan? Or are such things fully explained without such
inference?
After all, “rare
events” happen all the time. A favorite party trick of mine is to leave the
room and have everyone write down a random sequence of 25 H’s and T’s, while
just one person actually flips a coin 25 times and records the Heads and Tails.
I then return and identify which sequence came from the coin tosser. It’s easy - - it’s the sequence with the
longest uninterrupted string of Heads (or Tails). Moral: Unlikely things are rather likely.
Several years back I was entertaining friends for dessert -
a surgeon and his wife. Our conversation
ranged among myriad topics involving science and theology. On most of them the
couple agreed. But when she mentioned the miracles of healing, he
dissented, “We don’t know 5% of what
goes on in the human body.” He was not denying the possibility of supernatural
involvement. He was just pointing out that his wife was jumping to a conclusion
that he would not make.
So what is the answer?
Are uncommon happenings the result of miracles/providence, or are they just
blind luck?
Maybe C.S. Lewis provides the best perspective. In an
insightful essay (easily found online), “Meditation in a Toolshed”, Lewis
describes being in a dark shed, with only a single crack to let light in. One
could stand to the side and observe the beam, or position oneself to look through the crack at
the outside world. Two totally different experiences depending on one’s vantage
point. Similarly, the conclusions one draws from experience also depends on the
assumptions brought to that experience. Again, it all depends on the vantage
point. As a former senior seminar student observed, “The mind believes what the
heart desires.”
