Busting the myth-making behind ‘miracles’

Samir Malhotra

AS I started to write this, I paused to think of some recent event resembling a miracle. The very same day a student came to meet me after more than a decade and informed that he was now settled in Denver, the US. We talked about the usual stuff and he asked me to visit him whenever I happened to go to the US. Just a day earlier, I had received an invitation to present a paper at a prestigious conference in, yes, you guessed it, Denver! What makes it more uncanny is that this happened while writing about miracles. I wanted to cite a real-life personal example. Although my daughter immediately said, “coincidence, dad”, many of us will attribute it to supernatural powers, or destiny, even non-believers may ascribe it to forces we do not yet understand. 

My limited knowledge about the work of English scientists John Littlewood and David Hand makes me wonder though. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a miracle as an event “not explicable by natural or scientific laws and therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency; a highly improbable event”. According to Littlewood, it's an event occurring once in a million. Miracles can occur at any moment, in a fraction of a second. For ease of calculations, let us say one second. Therefore, in a day there are 24X60=1440 moments (seconds). The Earth is home to 7.5 billion people and trillions of non-human living organisms. Even if we only count humans (incorrectly, as miracles often involve animals), there are 7,500,000,000X24X60X365=3942000000000000 moments in a year for miracles to occur. At the rate of once in a million, we can expect nearly 4 billion miracles to occur in a year. This is Littlewood's law of truly large numbers. So, when a few months ago a paper described a patient whose aggressive lymphoma (a type of blood cancer) spontaneously regressed without treatment and did not recur one year later, this was a miracle. Such spontaneous cures have been described for other cancers as well. You may have heard of “miracle cure” stories, often attributed to visits to religious places. Medical literature reports rates of spontaneous remission of about one in one lakh. With 15 million new cases of cancer worldwide each year, the law of truly large numbers become operational, and we expect a few remissions every year. Of course, such statistics are useless for an individual with cancer, and no doctor will rely on spontaneous remission for her patients but we do get an idea what really large numbers mean. 

Hand's book, The Improbability Principle, discusses such events, he gives an interesting account about US presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy:

“.....both were assassinated, on a Friday, shot in the head from behind, in the presence oof their wives. Lincoln was killed in Ford's Theatre, while Kennedy was killed in a car made by the Ford Motor Company. Furthermore, each had a son who died while they were president. Lincoln had a personal secretary named John, and Kennedy had one named Lincoln. Lincoln became president in 1861 and Kennedy in 1961. Lincoln's assassin, JW Booth, was born in 1839 and Kennedy's assassin, LH Oswald, was born in 1939. Both  were succeeded by presidents named Johnson who, wait for it, were born in 1808 and 1908, respectively. They each had four children.”According to the law of truly large numbers, with so many personalities to choose from, we can always find examples when some aspects of one will match with another. Hand then mentions “the law of selection” — in this example only those instances are cited which match, thousands of dissimilarities are left out. Another is the law of the probability lever — “The fact that they were both shot in the head — gun assassinations normally involve being shot in the head or the chest (you don't often hear of someone who was assassinated by being shot in the foot). So, given that they were both shot, the probability that both were headshots is quite high. Likewise, the fact that they were both killed in the presence of their wives. Spouses often accompany presidents, so the probability that their wives were present is not as small as it might seem” (Hand).Then there is “law of near enough” — even if there isn't an exact match, we will cite something close. In the case of my student, had the events described occurred a week apart, I would have still seen a pattern and called it a miracle. This is what psychologists call apophenia — a tendency to look for patterns in random data. Evolution has made our brains into what some call “pattern-detection machines”, giving meaning to images or words that we come across — most of us have “seen” an image in cracks in a wall. With more than 10 million miracles expected in a day, the question we should be asking is why we do not encounter them more often. Finally, that the student had come to me was not a paranormal event — he wanted a letter of recommendation for his wife!

The writer is a Professor in PGI, Chandigarh