The Save My Soul Via Government-Run Gambling Challenge

The religious ask me from time to time what would convince me that God exists. I have written about various ways that I would be convinced, but they all lack in detail and specifics. Today I’m offering one example of exactly what would convince me in a challenge that would likely save my soul, be compelling to readers of my blog, and almost certainly make the news as a story that would be picked up by Christians everywhere.

The steps you, the believer, must take:

1. Ask your God for the winning Mega Millions lotto numbers for Tuesday, 5-5-15.
2. Give me the numbers privately.

I’ll take it from here. I’ll use my own dollar to play your numbers on that date. The odds of those numbers hitting, while not impossible to hit by chance, would be a sufficient sign to me that God gave you the numbers and I would therefore join your faith. If they win, I will donate the jackpot to a charity affiliated with your (our) religion. Yes, I imagine a guy donating his winnings to charity because he says that he was tipped off by God would make the news.

Why I think this is a reasonable challenge.

1. Most religious apologists already say God makes his existence known via a similar trick of probability in their fine tuning argument. However, the fine tuning argument is only meaningful under a variety of assumptions that make the odds that we are here unlikely. No assumptions will be needed in this challenge. It will be a very straight forward beating of the odds. Obviously when this hits the news, it wouldn’t convince everyone because, well, someone has to win the lottery, but it will convince me and I’ll do what I can to convince others.
2. I’ve heard that prayer works best when they are not made selfishly. Praying for the winning numbers in this case is not selfish. (It might be the first time in history praying for the winning lotto ticket isn’t selfish.) You are praying for someone else to win (me) who will give all the money to charity and use the experience to spread the good news.
3. Biblically speaking, God occasionally proves himself--whether it be a resurrected Jesus appearing to doubters to staffs turning into snakes to convince the authorities. I'm asking for a much lower-key miracle here.

What if the challenge fails?

If it fails, it fails. I remain an atheist and you remain a whatever. I don’t ask anything of you beyond an honest acknowledgement that we tried and it didn’t work. Ideally, you'll also think on that.

The untrusting, less interesting alternative.

After buying the ticket and before the drawing I will post the vendor from which I bought the ticket. If there is a winning ticket, it will be a matter of record where the ticket was sold and you'll all know if it could have been me. That said, if you still don’t trust that I will keep up my end of the challenge, you can post the God-given number you are going to play publicly in the comments and you can donate the money to charity yourself. It won’t be as good a story and you might have to split the winnings with someone else who plays your posted numbers, but it’s your call. I save a dollar.

Rules and regulations

I will buy multiple tickets if needed, but I am only accepting one challenge per faith. So if a Catholic gives me numbers I won't accept numbers from another Catholic. If the Catholic God wants to convert me, he should be able to do it in one-shot.

To Falsify Evolution

I recently had a discussion about what it would take to falsify evolution with another atheist. We both agreed that theories based on evidence are all falsifiable by counter-evidence, but we disagreed on the amount of counter-evidence it would take in the case of evolution.

Here is the hypothetical evidence that he believes would falsify the theory: “If we found an organism that clearly breaks out of the evolutionary tree we know. Say - a 5 legged creature, or an animal without DNA, or an animal that has a DNA that doesn’t have any common parts with the rest of the life on earth.”

Such a find would certainly be compelling, but I would first consider that the outlier was created artificially or evolved in isolation of all other known life before throwing out evolutionary theory. As unlikely as either of these sound, they would be more reasonable explanations. To show evolution is false, each line of evidence needs to be overturned. Each aspect of the theory needs to be falsified. Evolution isn’t too big to fail, but it’s certainly too big to die of a single counter-point.*

(*Unless, of course, that counter-point was that all known evidence was found to be lies planted by the Great Deceiver. Positing the devil as a way to reject evolution is one of the more honest and internally consistent methods--if only it wasn’t based entirely on mythology.)

Back to reality...or at least hypothetical reality--even if such a find could impact evolution as a whole, it would revise the theory, maybe falsifying parts, before it would falsify the whole shabang. This happened before with the theory of gravity. Isaac Newton understood gravity in a manner that worked to explain all gravitational movement...at first. It didn’t quite work with the solar orbit of Mercury, much like current evolutionary theory wouldn’t work for the aforementioned hypothetical creature. It wasn’t until Einstein hashed out relativity that a new understanding of gravity could account for Mercury. If we one day discover gravitons or something, we might have to adjust gravitational theory further. Edits aside, I can think of no natural evidence regarding either evolution or gravity that could falsify all previous findings that work perfectly well with what we have. Natural selection happens. Mutations occur. Heritability is a thing. If you find a glaring example of uncommon decent, let me know. It could modify evolutionary theory, but smart money says it's an alien.

The Vampire Clause

Extraordinary Evidence

Recently, I've seem some atheists post this flowchart as an indictment on theists' ability to discuss religion. You need not look far to see where most theists fail in this chart. In fact, it needs not "flow" anywhere. The first statement is: Can you envision anything that will change your mind on this topic?

Religious faith, by definition, makes the answer to this question no. If you have doubt, then you don't have faith. How different are atheists? We hang our worldview on critical thinking and the lack of compelling evidence and leave faith out in the cold. I am very certain that atheism is currently the wisest position. Still, we should ask ourselves what kind of evidence would be needed to change this.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. ~ Marcello Truzzi

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. ~ Carl Sagan

The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness. ~ Pierre-Simon Laplace

In my recent interview series, you may have noticed that I'm consistently asking the question "Is there anything that would convince you that there is a god?" The answers can be paraphrased as "barely." A believer might think that Jesus returning would immediately bring all the infidels into the Christian fold. Not so much. The general consensus is that, atheists would remain skeptical. This new Jesus would be subjected to the scientific questions posed to all supposed evidence. Is he authentic? Are his miracles more than tricks and illusions? Does he provide some wisdom that could only come from God? Some of us go so far to posit he could be the product of other worldly technology. 

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

Nevertheless, I would at least consider a magical Jesus in the real world is authentic, but it wouldn't get me speaking in tongues as fast as some other extremely unlikely scenarios. Below is a chart of events that would make a believer out of me. I used Dawkin's Scale of belief to show what degree of belief I would hold for each event. This is an approximation because each event could be more or less convincing depending on the circumstances. Of course, combining events would also hasten my conversion. For example, a previously dead religious figure performing a large-scale miracle with witnesses might seal the religious deal.