Statistical Probablility or Divine Mystery

The world is an interesting place. Countless hours of scientific work gives us more and more hints as to how things work and yet we're nowhere near truly understanding the world. In all this, I have discovered two very different ways of looking at everything. You can see the world as a fabulous mystery or you can try to analyze everything into statistics. Neither view is necessarily better than the other but it is good to know that you have a choice and that at any given time one view may serve you better than another.

Let's look at an example... Statistically, it is clearly a bad idea to buy a lottery ticket. The chances of winning the big jackpot on a lottery ticket differ from lottery to lottery. Say the odds are 1 in 13,983,816 - that's 1 in 14 million odds of the big win. But if 14 million tickets are bought, there's a good chance that one of those tickets will win it and that one person will have beat the odds. At the individual level, the statistics seem to rule but when you look at the world as a bigger place the statistics take on a bit of a different meaning. I'm not saying that you should spend all your money on the lottery because it's still clearly not the way to make money, but if you're inspired to buy a ticket for the fun of it, don't let the stats ruin your fun.

Now, think for a moment of yourself and how you came to be on the Earth as you are. Your parents had to survive long enough to meet each other and have children together. Each of their sets of parents had to do the same as did their parents and their parents and so on and so on. Some of those ancestors lived through horrible diseases, terrible accidents, horrific wars, ice ages and countless other life-threatening experiences. Some of those terrible things may have even brought some of those men and women together. What would the statistical probability of each of those people surviving and procreating with each other exactly as they did? YOU, in a way, are almost statistically impossible. Of course, some people would say that for the race to survive somebody has to have survived and been born and that it's just random that you happen to be someone who ended up here. But that is one of the choices you can make... Either you are a product of luck or you are a beautiful divine mystery that has already beat the odds. I prefer to look at it the second way.

There are lots of common present-day situations where people "beat the odds." There are many people who have been told that statistically they won't make the Olympics, they won't get the job, they won't have children, or even that they won't survive their disease and some of those people have made the Olympics, gotten the job, had children, and survived their diseases. Each of those people had the choice of seeing themselves as a statistic or of living their life as they chose.

Every time you think that you can't do something, for whatever reason, remember that you may have defied reason to even exist. If someone's statistics are standing between you and something you want, go for what you want and forget the statistics!

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