"The more enlightened element of all denominations now admits that science has in numerous instances unquestionably demonstrated that religious teachings have at times been wrong as to matters of fact."
"The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell."
St. Augustine
Bayesian Inference
Everything discussed so far about how people look at miracles from very different perspectives, like looking at a horse from opposites ends, brings us to the idea of how Bayesian reasoning is as necessary for understanding miracles as Kepler's ideas were to understanding that planets move in ellipses rather than circles. Based on the ideas of Presbyterian Reverend Thomas Bayes (1701-1761), it is also called Bayesian inference or probabilistic reasoning. In simple terms, in order to incorporate new information with the most accuracy, we have to assess the probability that our interpretation of that information is accurate or flawed, due to either our own limitations or biases. In this way, Bayes developed a probabilistic approach to reasoning and updating beliefs based on new evidence that was at odds with his religious systems of thought, which may be why he never published his findings during his lifetime.
Bayesian inference has undergone significant evolution and become a vital component of modern statistics. Its integration with artificial intelligence enables probabilistic modeling, decision-making under uncertainty, and effective learning from data. In the financial sector and economics more broadly, which effects everything on the planet more than anything else, which is why Adam Smith described both as operating as "the hand of God," Bayesian methods find diverse applications in portfolio management, risk assessment, credit risk modeling, fraud detection, and time series forecasting, offering valuable insights for better financial decision-making and risk management. Bayesian inference, in short, follows the money by putting its faith in numbers - the same numbers Christians argue prove their claims that understanding objective reality requires a belief in a God, a God who performs miracles that are intended to be understood as breaking with the nature of how reality operates, so we can "know" he exists.
Of course, when it comes to which brand we are supposed to pick to worship said "God" to save our souls from eternal torments, however, that same God allows the devil to control the market.
While the term Bayesian inference is relatively new, the idea behind it is as old as our minds. While we are extremely poor at crunching super large numbers, everyone considers the likelihood of something as a way of defending themselves from fake news. And fake news includes everything from someone trying to sell us the Golden Gate bridge to someone selling you an eternal vacation home behind the pearly gates of paradise, but only after you die (and if you don't buy it, you'll be tortured for all eternity with the wish you had).
The brain is cautious in assimilating new information, which is why non Christians are at least as defensive about Christian claims of knowing God as Christians are about every other claim of God - including the other 40,000 different Christian claims of God - but their own particular brand.
Nothing is more natural to our brain than its habit of attenuating new information. As an important part of keeping us alive, it doesn't just give up what it knew before, but rather nudges us to higher understandings. When we encounter something we were not anticipating, the brain adds this to its
store of knowledge. Sometimes things happen for a reason, experience tells us, and sometimes
they just happen. And the brain, which is great at seeing patterns but horrible at seeing patterns in really large numbers, has to try to tell the difference between the two, or else
it will see meaning where there is none. And a snake oil salesman, from use car salesmen to fortune tellers and cult leaders, is one capable of creatively designing patterns for you to see, and convincing you you need what he's selling - even if he's trying to sell you the Gold Gate bridge.
To protect us from such false claims, false prophets, false gods, and false religions, our brain employs a kind of Bayesian reasoning unconsciously. What Bayes did was help to "make the unconscious conscious." He did this by realizing his need to express his certainly about his knowledge probabilisticaly, and then using a simple formula to update the probabilities whenever he came across new information that had any bearing on his beliefs. Again, this is how we all learn anything at all. Biases, however, girdle some areas of our understanding so they will only grow along certain paths by making it emotionally uncomfortable to venture outside the guardrails of such biases, and emotionally rewarding, though the release of endorphins, to remain within such guardrails.
This works not
just for perception but for any complex situation where you have to pull
together information from multiple sources. And it is critical for us to do this because, as Carl Jung pointed out, until we make the unconscious conscious, it will control our lives and we will call it fate (or God).
And we do this because we see things not as they are, but as we expect them to be. When signals move up and down the hierarchy of processing between our nervous system and our brains, raw perceptual input comes in from below, while expectations from past experiences trickle down from above. The problem is that, because we must depend on past experiences to navigate an uncertain future, we fall prey to the tyranny of expectations, which plague our daily life, which can so often lead us to be irritable, disappointed, and disillusioned.
In Buddhism, expectations are almost always the result of what is called “wanting mind.” This wanting mind is driven by desire, aversion, and anxiety; it creates an illusion of solidity and control in a world that is constantly changing and unfolds independently of how we believe it should be. And nothing tells us how the world "should be" more than a religion that tells us the only way it ain't so is because we have failed to behave as God commands, despite God designing us with a preference for disobedience to such commands, despite His threats and bribes of eternal pain and pleasure.
The anxiety that a Christian feels whenever someone claims a "miracle" is probably more the result of chance than proof of the existence of their own particular version of God is a result of this "wanting mind." On the one hand, we want to have some certainty about the world, and to do that, we have to be able to trust that our own mind is a trustworthy tool for finding information that can provide us with the certainty we crave. On the other hand, the very desire of wanting such certainty, and wanting that certainty to be personified in a God that protects and loves us like a perfect Father "who knows best," is what chains us to our anxieties. For our anxieties are the inevitable result of a rational mind that wants certainties that, due both to its own limitations and the nature of the uncertainties of reality as evidenced by quantum physics, is always overturning whatever certainties it thinks it finds.
And miracles are a perfect example of the tension that exists between a mind with an infinite creative curiosity that accepts what it does not know, and one that fuses all that it knows and doesn't know into a "God" that it can "believe" it knows enough to save itself from the hell of uncertainty. In this way, the uncertainties of existence are deposited into the certainty of a God, and magically transformed from objects of dread, which cause us anxiety, into "mysteries of faith," which pacify our ever curious and creative capacities.
Between "faith" that may comfort us, which we do in only one area of thinking in order to maintain our dependence upon that way of thinking, and reasoning through probabilities, which is how we learn in all other areas of thinking so we can grow in understanding, the latter grows the synaptic branches of our tree of knowledge, while the former operates more like a carpenter that cuts down that tree, fashions it into a cross, and crucifies our curiosity and creativity to it.
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