Leonard Mlodinow• Prominent physicist• His parents were both

Holocaust survivors. His father was a leader in the Jewish resistance under Nazi rule in his hometown of Częstochowa, Poland.

• When Nazi troops took over her mother’s home town, they randomly executed Jews. Her mother survived. Did it happen at random or due to a divine purpose? If God saved his mother, what would we say to those who were massacred?

Common challenge againstChristian testimonials?

• Christian testimonials are self-selected samples, not random samples.

• People who feel good about their life-transforming experience tend to evangelize others; people who don’t feel good keep silent.

• A bias sample does not reflect randomness in the real world.

Jesses Bering • The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life

• A thief was eaten by a crocodile when he attempted to escape by jumping into a pool.

• A criminal who was just released from the prison hit the jackpot in a casino.

• Good things happen to both good and bad people

• Bad things happen to both good and bad people

• All things are random, but humans tend to find a pattern or a purpose in random events

Is the sequence random?

• 100111100110111001101

•100111100110111001101100111100110111001101100111100110111001101

• Argentine-American mathematician and computer scientist Gregory John Chaitin: any attempt to decide the randomness of a sufficiently long binary string is inherently doomed to fail.

• The goal of statistics is to examine whether something happens at random (by chance alone) or has a systematic pattern

• But it is unable to detect randomness or patterns in the long run

Central Limit Theorem (CLT) and sampling distributions

Mandelbrot Fractals

• Fractal sets appear to be random but there are unifying rules to govern the appearance of each beautiful fractal.

Fractals in nature

Fractals in the human world

• Heart rate variability, music, and Internet traffic

Chinese Ink Painting

• Design and random together

Agency theory

• Children may regard their toys or puppets as living beings

• We humans tend to imagine that there is an agent behind every inanimate object– Thunder Thor– Sun Apollo

Hyperactive Agency Detection Device• In ancient times, the natural environment is a threat to

humans. It is better to be safe than to be sorry. E.g. when you hear some noise while walking in the forest, it is better to assume that the noise is made by the movement of a predator, not by wind.

• Given the relative costs of failing to a potential threat, the mechanism is hyperactive, resulting in more false alarms (Type I errors) than misses (Type II).

• Cognitive psychologists said that these false positives can explain the emergence of supernatural beliefs. If a boy is drowned in a river, it is better to assume the river spirit is angry and do something.

The origin of Christian belief

• Throughout the Christian Bible we cannot see that the concept of God originated from the fear of nature or misidentification of natural objects as God.

• On the contrary, the first book of the Bible, Genesis, bluntly denounces equating natural objects with deity. The Bible condemns worshipping natural objects as worshipping idols.

The origin of Christian belief

• In the eyes of modern science the account of the origin of universe depicted in Genesis is unscientific. For example, Genesis mentioned that God created two lighting objects: the sun and the moon. Today even a primary school student knows that the moon itself cannot emit light; it reflects the light from the sun.

• But the main point of Genesis Chapter 1 is not to describe the sun and the moon scientifically. Rather, the main points are that God is the Supreme Creator that turned chaos into order. The sun, the moon, and all other natural objects are created; they are not gods. There is nothing to fear about.