8. What about miracles and other amazing occurrences?
People go through life noticing coincidences. These experiences are unusual and so make an impression and so people remember them. You go through life collecting these memorable coincidences and forgetting all the times when amazing things don't happen. When these coincidences are collected together in books on the supernatural, or UFOs etc the weight of these coincidences seems very persuasive, but one MUST consider the number of times these coincidences didn't happen. Situations contrive to produce coincidences. In addition, a lot of these occurrences are often proven to be hoaxes. People, unfortunately, are very gullible. There is a society in England which offers a reward for any evidence whatsoever for any supernatural occurrence, however small. Not one person has come forward to claim this prize. One must ask oneself why? Why is it that no mystic or astrologer or clairvoyant has ever had their abilities proven by the scientists (parapsychologists) who interest themselves in these phenomena. Public interest in these matters is so great that any proof of this would spread through the media like wildfire.
Chance, luck and randomness are amazing things, and sometimes so amazing that it is very difficult for humans to put freak occurrences down to chance. But randomness is inherent in nature, enshrined in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Even Albert Einstein, possibly the greatest scientist who ever lived, spent much of the latter half of his life trying to refute the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and much of the rest of the Quantum Mechanics (the field of physics that describes the interactions of very small particles), making the oft-quoted remark "God does not play dice". He was eventually forced to admit that he was wrong and accept the theories. If he was wrong about that, he could have been (and, in my opinion was) wrong about his belief in the existence of God.
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"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives - who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worth of it? There has never been a greater deed - and whoever shall be born after us, for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto."
