Miraculous mathematics

I've blogged before about "miraculous thinking" -- the idea that an unlikely occurrence somehow has to be a miracle simply based on its improbability.  But yesterday I ran into a post on the wonderful site RationalWiki that showed, mathematically, why this is a silly stance.

Called "Littlewood's Law of Miracles," after John Edensor Littlewood, the man who first codified it in this way, it goes something like this:

• Let's say that a "miracle" is defined as something that has a likelihood of occurring of one in a million.
• We are awake, aware, and engaged on the average about eight hours a day.
• An event of some kind occurs about once a second.  During the eight hours we are awake, aware, and engaged, this works out to 28,800 events per day, or just shy of a million events in an average month.  (864,000, to be precise.)
• The likelihood of observing a one-in-a-million event in a given month is therefore 1-(999,999/1,000,000)^1,000,000 , or about 0.63.  In other words, we have better than 50/50 odds of observing a miracle next month!

Of course, this is some fairly goofy math, and makes some rather silly assumptions (one discrete event every second, for example, seems like a lot).  But Littlewood does make a wonderful point; given that we're only defining post hoc the unlikeliness of an event that has already occurred, we can declare anything we want to be a miracle just based on how surprised we were that it happened.  And, after all, if you want to throw statistics around, the likelihood of any event happening that has already happened is 100%.

So, like the Hallmark cards say, Miracles Do Happen.  In fact, they're pretty much unavoidable.

You hear this sort of thing all the time, though, don't you?  A quick perusal of sites like Miracle Stories will give you dozens of examples of people who survived automobile accidents without a scratch, made recoveries from life-threatening conditions, were just "in the right place at the right time," and so on.  And it's natural to sit up and take notice when these things happen; this is a built-in perceptual error called dart-thrower's bias.  This fallacy is named after a thought experiment of being in a pub while there's a darts game going on across the room, and simply asking the question: when do you notice the game?  When there's a bullseye, of course.  The rest is just background noise.  And when you think about it, it's very reasonable that we have this bias.  After all, what has the greater evolutionary cost -- noticing the outliers when they're irrelevant, or not noticing the outliers when they are relevant?  It's relatively obvious that if the unusual occurrence is a rustle in the grass, it's far better to pay attention to it when it's the wind than not to pay attention to it when it's a lion.

And of course, on the Miracle Stories webpage, no mention is made of all of the thousands of people who didn't seem to merit a miracle, and who died in the car crash, didn't recover from the illness, or were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  That sort of thing just forms the unfortunate and tragic background noise to our existence -- and it is inevitable that it doesn't register with us in the same way.

So, we should expect miracles, and we are hardwired to pay more attention to them than we do to the 999,999 other run-of-the-mill occurrences that happen in a month.  How do we escape from this perceptual error, then?

Well, the simple answer is that in some senses, we can't.  It's understandable to be surprised by an anomalous event or an unusual pattern.  (Think, for example, how astonished you'd be if you flipped a coin and got ten heads in a row.  You'd probably think, "Wow, what's the likelihood?" -- but any other pattern of heads and tails, say, H-T-T-H-H-H-T-H-T-T -- has exactly the same probability of occurring.  It's just that the first looks like a meaningful pattern, and the second one doesn't.)  The solution, of course, is the same as the solution for just about everything; don't turn off your brain.  It's okay to think, at first, "That was absolutely amazing!  How can that be?", as long as afterwards we think, "Well, there are thousands of events going on around me right now that are of equally low probability, so honestly, it's not so weird after all."

All of this, by the way, is not meant to diminish your wonder at the complexity of the universe, just to direct that wonder at the right thing.  The universe is beautiful, mysterious, and awe-inspiring.  It is also, fortunately, understandable when viewed through the lens of science.  And I think that's pretty cool -- even if no miracles occur today.

Blood magic

Let me tell you a story.

There once was a woman named Elizabeth Báthory, who was a countess in Hungary.  Elizabeth was very beautiful, with fair skin and long, lustrous hair, and men from all over the kingdom fell in love with her.  She married Ferenc Nádasdy, a valiant military man, and they lived happily together for years -- until he died in battle.  By this time, Elizabeth was 43 years old, and still in the prime of health, but she began to worry that she was aging and losing her famous beauty.  So she came up with a brilliant solution:

She would bathe daily in the blood of virgins.

During the next decade, Elizabeth allegedly killed 650 young girls.  History doesn't record whether it worked to keep her skin looking young.  Finally, the people in the surrounding areas rose up and demanded that something be done, despite Elizabeth's power and wealth.  Having no choice, local authorities arrested Elizabeth, and had her imprisoned for the rest of her life in Csejte Castle -- although she was never brought to trial.

She was, apparently, batshit crazy.

Blood has long been thought to have magical powers of restoration and vitality; thus the vampire mythos, and the hundreds of cultures that included blood sacrifice as part of their ritual beliefs.  The scientific world has more or less shown this all to be nonsense, with the exception that keeping your blood flowing through your arteries and veins is pretty essential to your health and vitality.  But this hasn't stopped people from believing that blood has magical powers, and there are still nutjobs running around who claim they're vampires, lo unto this very day.

And this whole wacky belief system has given rise to a new "alternative medicine" fad: the "vampire facial."

In this technique, which when you hear about it will make you wonder who the hell ever thought this could be a good idea, blood is withdrawn from your arm.  It is then centrifuged to spin out the plasma and platelets from the red and white blood cells.  The plasma and platelets are then injected into your face, in order to "stimulate new collagen growth," "get rid of wrinkles," and "revitalize the skin." 

Below is a picture of noted deep thinker Kim Kardashian getting a "vampire facial:"

And if that photograph wasn't enough to dissuade you from ever doing this, allow me to add just a couple of comments about the procedure: You are (1) poking your face full of holes, and (2) injecting fluid into those holes.  Of course your skin feels fuller.  You are also causing inflammation, resulting in the production of histamines, causing swelling.  So, okay, the wrinkles may go away for a while, rather in the fashion of pumping air into a flat tire, but as soon as the injection sites heal, the inflammation subsides, and the body reabsorbs the fluid, you're going to be right back where you started -- wrinkled, or, in the case of Kim Kardashian, dumb as a bag of hammers.

Oh, and did I mention that the cost of the treatment is $1,500?

Me, I think I'll just stick with the wrinkles, thanks.

So, that's the latest from the world of alternative medicine and "beauty treatments."  Every time I see some new thing arise on this front, I always think, "What will they come up with next?"  And I'm never disappointed, because it always turns out to be more ridiculous than the last thing.  Of course, the I-don't-want-to-get-old crew has yet to try out the Elizabeth Báthory method.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe it's because so many of them live in Hollywood, and virgins are hard to come by.  I dunno.

The voices of the ancestors

One of the (many) reasons I love science is that as a process, it opens up avenues to knowledge that were previously thought closed.  Couple that with the vast improvements in technological tools, and you have a powerful combination for exploring realms that once were not considered "science" at all.

Take, for example, historical linguistics, the discipline that studies the languages spoken by our ancestors.  It is a particular fascination of mine -- in fact, it is the field I studied for my MA.  (Yes, I know I teach biology.  It's a long story.)  I can attest to the fact that it's a hard enough subject, even when you have a plethora of written records to work with, as I did (my thesis was on the effects of the Viking invasions on Old English and Old Gaelic).  When records are scanty, or worse yet, non-existent, the whole thing turns into a highly frustrating, and highly speculative, topic.

This is the field of "reconstructive linguistics" -- trying to infer the characteristics of the languages spoken by our distant ancestors, for the majority of which we have not a single written remnant.  If you look in an etymological dictionary, you will see a number of words that have starred ancestral root words, such as *tark, an inferred verb stem from Proto-Indo-European that means "to twist."  (A descendant word that has survived until today is torque.)  The asterisk means that the word is "unattested" -- i.e., there's no proof that this is what the word actually was, in the original ancestor language, because there are no written records of Proto-Indo-European.  And therein, of course, lies the problem.  Because it's an unattested word, no one can ever be sure if it's correct.  The inferred word comes not from any hard evidence, but from the application of one of the most fundamental rules of linguistics: Phonetic changes are regular.

As a quick illustration of this -- and believe me, I could write about this stuff all day -- we have Grimm's Law, which describes how stops in Proto-Indo-European became fricatives in Germanic languages, but they remained stops in other surviving (non-Germanic) Indo-European languages.  One example is the shift of /p/ to /f/, which is why we have foot (English), fod (Norwegian), Fuss (German), fótur (Icelandic), and so on, but poús (Greek), pes (Latin), peda (Lithuanian), etc.  These sorts of sound correspondences allowed us to make guesses about what the original word sounded like.

Note the use of the past tense in the previous sentence.  Because now linguists have a tool that will take a bit of the guesswork out of reconstructive linguistics -- and shows promise to bringing it into the realm of a true science.

An article in Science World Report, entitled "Ancient Languages Reconstructed by Linguistic Computer Program, a team of researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of California - Berkeley has developed software that uses inputted lexicons to reconstruct languages.  (Read their original paper here.)  This tool automates a process that once took huge amounts of painstaking research, and even this first version has had tremendous success -- the first run of the program, using data from 637 Austronesian languages currently spoken in Asia and the South Pacific, generated proto-Austronesian roots for which 85% matched the roots derived by experts in that language family to within one phoneme or fewer.

What I'm curious about, of course, is how good the software is at deriving root words for which we do have written records.  In other words, checking its results against something other than the unverifiable speculation that historical linguists were already doing.  For example, would the software be able to take lexicons from Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Provençal, and so on, and correctly infer the Latin stems?  To me, that would be the true test; to see what the shortcomings were, you have to have something real to check its results against.  (And for any historical linguists in my readership whose hackles got raised by my use of the words "unverifiable speculation" -- c'mon, you have to admit that what you're doing does have the inherent upside of being unfalsifiable.  If you think a particular Proto-Indo-European root reconstructs as *lug and your colleague thinks it's *wuk, you can argue about it till next Sunday and you still will never be certain who's right, as there are very few Proto-Indo-Europeans around these days who could tell you for sure.)

But even so, it's a pretty nifty new tool.  Just the idea that we can make some guesses at what language our ancestors spoke six-thousand-odd years ago is stunning, and the fact that someone has written software that reduces the effort to accomplish this is cool enough to set my little Language Nerd Heart fluttering.  It is nice to see reconstructive linguistics using the tools of science, thus bringing together two of my favorite things.  Why, exactly, I find it so exciting to know that *swey may have meant "to whistle" to someone six millennia ago, I'm not sure.  But the fact that we now have a computer program that can check our guesses is pretty damn cool.

The trials and tribulations of Pope Francis

I have it on good authority that the new pope, Francis I, is either a spy in league with extraterrestrials, or else is an emissary of the Antichrist who will oversee the destruction of Rome.  Or possibly both at the same time.  It's hard to tell, frankly, because my source for this, an article called "Pope Francis: His Jesuitical, Extraterrestrial, 'False Prophet,' and Political Identities," doesn't seem all that certain itself.

And I have to admit that "good authority" may be a bit of an exaggeration, here.  This article was authored by none other than Alfred Lambremont Webre, who has previously claimed that President Obama has visited Mars, that the Earth would be bombarded by "fourth dimensional energy" on November 11, 2011 resulting in all of us being able to engage in "fourth dimensional sex," and that there is a brown dwarf star on the way that will reach its closest approach this year in July and which will trigger "massive electrical discharges" that will result in a catastrophic flood.  (None of us can see the approach of the star except for Alfred, apparently, because the government is hiding its approach from us with chemtrails.  He himself saw it using a "chronovisor," which is a machine that allows him to see the future.)

So, as you can see, he's not exactly the most credible witness right from the get-go.  Be that as it may, let's give him a chance, and hear what he has to say in his rambling diatribe.  Um, article.

Well, first, we have the obvious relevance of the date Pope Francis was elected:

March 13, 2013, the date of Pope Francis I nomination, was the 16th anniversary of the Phoenix Light, a massive space craft that overflew Phoenix, AZ. on March 13, 1997. March 13, 1997 is a significant event in the Exopolitical community that follows the Extraterrestrial presence on Earth.

Don't expect me to believe that's a coincidence.  Alfred either.  You just know that the College of Cardinals was sitting there, on the first day of the conclave, and one of them said, "Hang on... let's wait till tomorrow to decide.  Because then we'll be voting him in on the sixteenth anniversary of a random UFO sighting.  That will send a message, won't it?"  And all of the other cardinals said, "Amen, Your Holy Eminence, that sounds like a dandy idea."

Then, we have a bit about the "Prophecies of St. Malachy," about which I've previously written.  The last pope in the prophecies was one "Petrus Romanus" (Peter the Roman), who was supposed to be the Antichrist's right-hand man, and was going to be in charge of the church during the Tribulation.  So, there's lots of speculation as to whether Pope Francis is actually Petrus Romanus, even though he's not really Peter from Rome, he's Jorge from Argentina.  But hey, close enough, right?  After all, Alfred doesn't even touch on a much greater likelihood, which is that Pope Francis is actually George Bluth from Arrested Development:

Then we have a long, confusing bit about how Pope Francis, in his previous life as Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, was a Jesuit.  First of all, the Jesuits are somehow connected with research into extraterrestrials, so that's significant.  Don't ask me how.  Secondly, we all know how the Jesuits are an evil secret organization bent on world domination.  Alfred then tells us all about the "Jesuit Oath," which includes the following lovely passage:

[I] declare and swear that His Holiness, the Pope, is Christ's Vice-Regent and is the true and only head of the Catholic or Universal Church throughout the earth; and that by the virtue of the keys of binding and loosing given to His Holiness by my Saviour, Jesus Christ, he hath power to depose heretical Kings, Princes, States, Commonwealths, and Governments, and they may be safely destroyed. Therefore to the utmost of my power I will defend this doctrine and His Holiness's right and custom against all usurpers of the heretical or Protestant authority whatever, especially the Lutheran Church of Germany, Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and the now pretended authority and Churches of England and Scotland, and the branches of same now established in Ireland and on the continent of America and elsewhere and all adherents in regard that they may be usurped and heretical, opposing the sacred Mother Church of Rome. I do now denounce and disown any allegiance as due to any heretical king, prince or State, named Protestant or Liberal, or obedience to any of their laws, magistrates or officers. I do further declare the doctrine of the Churches of England and Scotland of the Calvinists, Huguenots, and others of the name of Protestants or Masons to be damnable, and they themselves to be damned who will not forsake the same.

The problem is, the "Jesuit Oath" is a hoax.  It was a bit of anti-Catholic vitriol passed around by Protestant fear-mongers in the early 20th century (the same era that produced the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion).  So, really, these two pieces of nasty nonsense constitute two of the first-ever-recorded conspiracy theories.  The evil Catholics are trying to destroy the world!  No, wait, it's the Jews!  No, wait, its both!

In any case, the whole thing is wrapped up with aliens, somehow.  In a passage that should be enshrined forever in the Annals of WTF, Alfred writes:

One hermeneutical interpretation would have "the dragon" of the Book of Revelations identified as "Extraterrestrial civilizations that the False Prophet (putatively Pope Francis I) promotes to humanity. This role of a Jesuit Pope, promoting "Official ET Disclosure" along with other major institutions such as the United Nations and the major space-faring and extraterrestrial knowledgeable nations such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and China, would certainly fulfill one dystopian view of extraterrestrial "Disclosure", that of a false flag extraterrestrial invasion such as was predicted by Dr. Wernher von Btraun [sic] on his death bed and related to Disclosure Project witness Dr. Carol Rosin.

Oh.  Okay.  What?

So.  Anyway.  I know that regular readers of this blog know me well enough to realize that I'm very far from a Catholic apologist.  I think a lot of the Vatican's policies are repressive, backwards, and medieval, and there's no indication that Pope Francis is anything but a party liner in this regard.  And there are, apparently, some questions to be asked about the new pope's past, especially his alleged complicity with abuses by the military junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983.  But other than that -- for cryin' in the sink, leave the poor guy alone.  He's barely had a chance to do anything yet, good or bad.  It seems a little premature to conclude that he's going to sell us out to the extraterrestrials.  Or the Antichrist.  Or the evil Jesuits.  Or whoever.  My guess is that he'll just continue the same policies of the last pope, pretty much, and things will go on in the church as they always have.

So, anyway, I'm willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt for the time being.  And given that I'm an atheist, I think that's pretty generous, don't you?

Sneak thievery

Having dealt with such issues in recent posts as the ethics of resurrecting extinct animal species, and the difficulty of addressing the problems with the American educational system, I want to look today at an even more serious problem: penis theft.

At this point, you are probably thinking, "Did I just read what I think I just read?"  I know that's what I thought when I came across the article on AlterNet entitled "Penis Snatching On the Rise -- Africa's Genital-Stealing Crime Wave Hits the Countryside."  So, yes: you did just read that.  And yes, it's what it sounds like.

Well, sort of.  My first guess would have been that for some reason, better left un-thought-about, there was a cult of some sort that was stealing the body parts off of corpses.  If that's all it had been, it would have merited little more than a quick retch before moving on.  But no, it's weirder than that.  These people believe that somehow, guys are being relieved of their favorite body part magically, while they're still alive.

For example, the author of the article, Louisa Lombard, tells of a Sudanese traveler going through the Central African Republic town of Tiringoulou.  The traveler stopped for a cup of tea, and after receiving it, shook hands with the tea seller.  The unfortunate tea seller felt "an electric tingling," and at that point realized that "his penis had shrunk to a size similar to that of a baby's."  There was an outcry from the alleged victim, which led to a small-scale riot, during which a second man fell prey to the same fate.

Kind of gives new meaning to the phrase "going off half-cocked," doesn't it?

Anyhow, it'd be nice to think that there would be at least one voice of rationality in the crowd who would demand that the two supposed targets drop trou and prove that they had been de-privated, but I guess no one thought of that.  Everyone just sort of said, "Oh, okay.  That makes sense."  And alas for the poor traveler, he was subjected to a "harsh interrogation" and was eventually shot to death for his magical crimes.  And as far as the leader of the armed rebel group who governs the town, and who oversaw the traveler's execution, he tells a different story; he said that the man wasn't killed, that he "mysteriously vanished from his holding cell."

And lest you think that this weird belief is confined to central Africa, allow me to point out that Singapore has had outbreaks of, um, dewangification as well.  Check out, if you dare, this article, entitled, "The Great Singapore Penis Panic and American Mass Hysteria," which is about an epidemic of "koro," a condition in which men suffer "a catastrophic loss of yang energy," causing their penises to shrivel away.

Well, needless to say, there's no such thing as any of this stuff.  So, for any of you guys in my readership who has read this post hunched over in a protective half-crouch, and with a horrified expression on your face, fear not.  There's only one thing I know of that can cause a similar effect:

And fortunately, it's temporary and reversible.

What I find astonishing about all of this is how credulous people are, and how seldom it ever occurs to anyone to say, "Prove it."  You claim that you're a psychic, and can accurately predict the future?  Prove it.  You claim that you can communicate with the spirits of the dead?  Prove it.  You claim that someone magically caused your willie to shrink?  Prove it.  The burden of proof lies with the person making the outrageous claim -- not, as in the case of the poor Sudanese traveler, with the one trying to defend himself from it.

But, apparently, such an approach is sadly uncommon in the world, and not only in such undeveloped, poverty-stricken areas as the Central African Republic, but in the urban First World streets of Singapore.  As always, there's just one solution to all of this, and that's education in science -- the only thing I know of that is successful at eradicating myth, irrationality, and superstition.  But given that here in the United States we still have a significant percentage of the population who believe in horoscopes, homeopathy, and young-earth creationism, maybe I shouldn't point fingers.  After all, none of those ideas is any more scientifically supported than the claim that someone can magically steal a guy's penis by shaking his hand.

Raising the dead

In the iconic movie (and book) Jurassic Park, scientists use genetic technology -- and samples of blood from the stomachs of mosquitoes preserved in amber -- to recreate various dinosaur species.  With, of course, terrible results, being that in science fiction, nothing good ever comes out of scientists trying to "play god."  Various people were messily devoured, and the ones that escaped (barely) were left to ponder if it was possible for scientific research to go too far.

We seem to be at the point of finding out.

Not, of course, that it will be dinosaur-era animals, at least not at first.  Way too little DNA is left intact in fossilized remains from 65-plus-million years ago to pull a Jurassic Park-style trick and resurrect, say, the Pteranodon (always one of my favorites).  But we will, in, short order, see the first reborn extinct species created in a lab.

The best candidate for the winner in this Race to Raise the Dead is likely to be the Gastric-brooding Frog, a bizarre amphibian species from Australia that gets its name from the females' behavior of carrying their tadpoles around in their stomachs.  The frog was declared extinct in the wild in 1979, and the last captive individual died in 1983.

The technique is simple to describe, and immensely difficult in practice; obtain DNA samples from preserved specimens, insert that DNA into the fertilized egg cell of a related species that has had its own DNA removed, and hopefully this zygote will begin to divide and develop -- into an individual of the species that donated the DNA.

Of course, a million things can go wrong.  The role of genetic switches in development is still a new area of research; it's known that your DNA when you were an embryo was different than your DNA is now, especially with regards to which segments were being actively transcribed and which were not.  In order to get this technique to work, the nucleotides in DNA not only have to be in the correct sequence, the genes encoded therein have to turn on and turn off in a tightly-orchestrated fashion in order to produce a normal individual.

The hurdles, however, haven't discouraged scientists in this field.  The research team working on the Gastric-brooding Frog, led by Mike Archer of the University of New South Wales, has actually gotten the genetically altered embryonic cells to divide, apparently in a completely normal fashion, which has encouraged other groups working toward the same goal.  In the United States, a group called "Revive and Restore" is trying to bring back the Passenger Pigeon, once the most abundant bird in North America, which was driven to extinction by overhunting in 1914.

And Ben Novak, of the Passenger Pigeon "de-extinction" project, believes that it is only a matter of time.  "This whole idea that extinction is forever is just nonsense," he said, in an interview in Forbes.  "Someone could make a major breakthrough in next two years."

Me, I'm of two minds about this.  As a biologist, I have to say that the whole idea is just tremendously cool.  The idea that I could one day see a formerly extinct animal, alive and well, is just thrilling.  I'd give a lot to see a Thylacine, a Carolina Parakeet, a Moa, a Kaua'i O'o, or a Giant Ground Sloth.  And what about more remote animals, ones from further back?  How would you like to be eye-to-eye with a Brontops?

Of course, the more distant in the past you reach, the more difficult the procedure becomes.  Not only has any DNA from prehistoric animals had longer to degrade, often to the point of there being no useful fragments left, there's the problem of finding a related species in whose eggs you could do the insertion process.  Whether Gastric-brooding Frogs and Passenger Pigeons will return soon is a matter of conjecture, but it is nearly certain that seeing a Brontops stomping around in your garden is a far more remote possibility, one which may never be realized.

Then, of course, there are the inevitable ethical issues surrounding resurrecting extinct species.  The time of the Passenger Pigeon, for example, is long past -- when there were thousands of square miles of trackless forest in the eastern half of North America.  This bird only survived well in huge flocks (tens of thousands of individuals), which "darkened the skies when they flew over," according to accounts of people who saw them.  One, two, or even a couple of dozen of birds would be nothing more than a curiosity -- it would not be the same as truly reintroducing the species, a goal that is probably impossible due to the changes in the ecosystem.

But still, it's a fascinating idea.  For me, the coolness factor outweighs my ethical qualms, which probably isn't a good thing to admit.  Be that as it may, it is absolutely stunning how far science has come since the last Passenger Pigeon closed her eyes in death in 1914.  The ways in which the world has changed are far deeper, and more meaningful, than the visible alterations in the landscape.  And it looks like very soon, one of the laws we thought was an absolute -- extinction is forever -- may be overturned.

Bargain basement miracles

You know, the quality of miracles has really gone down, of late.

Back in biblical days, god really knew how to conjure up a miracle, didn't he?  Consider the following:

• God makes Balaam's donkey talk (Numbers 22:21-31)
• Jesus feeds "a great multitude" with five loaves and two fish (Matthew 14:13-21)
• Joshua makes the Earth stop rotating so he can finish a very important battle (Joshua 10:13)
• Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead (John 11:1-44)
• Moses parts the Red Sea and drowns lots of Egyptians (Exodus 14:1-30)
• God smites the crap out of Sodom and Gomorrah, and turns Lot's wife into a pillar of salt for having second thoughts (Genesis 19:24-26)
• God makes the entire Syrian army go blind, and then cures them all a few minutes later (2Kings 6:18-20)

And so on.  That's just a few.  And I think I am not alone in saying that any one of these -- not all, mind you but one -- would be sufficient to convince me that I really should reconsider my stance as an atheist.

But these days?  Yesterday, on Glenn Beck's website The Blaze, Billy Hallowell posted a piece called "3 Real-Life 'Miracles' That Took Place on the Set of The Bible."  Most of you have probably heard about the Mark Burnett/Roma Downey production that dramatizes the stories of biblical times, which debuted on March 3 and which has received critical acclaim (most of the critics I read acclaimed, "Meh").  But now Hallowell -- and others -- have put forth a stunning statement: that there were some genuine miracles that occurred during filming, miracles that not only prove god's existence, but show that he is 100% in favor of Burnett & Downey's film.

So, what are these miracles?  Hallowell tells us all about them:

1)  When they were filming the scene where Jesus is talking to Nicodemus about the Holy Spirit, the "wind literally picked up on its own."
2)  Burnett and Downey had hired a "snake wrangler" to round up any poisonous snakes that might be in the set area and potentially threaten cast or crew.  Before they were going to film the crucifixion scene, the "snake wrangler" found 48 snakes.
3)  During the filming of the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist, an "irreplaceable" piece of Jesus' costume came loose and floated away.  It was later found and returned by a kid who lived nearby.

And I'm thinking: that's the best you can do?  The wind "picking up on its own?"  (Because apparently under normal circumstances, the wind only blows when it's encouraged to.)  Some snakes... in a freakin' desert?  A kid returning a prop when everybody in a hundred-mile radius knew there was a movie being filmed?

As miracles go, those aren't exactly Grade-A quality, you know what I mean?  They're more "KMart Blue-Light Special."

You have to wonder, with all of the increasing disdain for religion you see in Western society, why god is insisting on playing coy with us.  It's a bit like the UFO cadre who believe that crop circles are aliens trying to communicate with us, and prove to a doubting populace that extraterrestrials are real.  You'd think, being super-intelligent aliens and all, that deciding to land in Times Square would occur to them as, on the whole, a more convincing alternative.  Likewise, if god really is invested in proving to humanity that he exists, the wind blowing is just not doing it for me.

Okay, yeah, I know the biblical passage about god being the "still, small voice" (1Kings 19:11-13).  But you know, that just won't wash.  God was sure as hell not a "still, small voice" when he smote 50,070 people for looking at the Ark of the Covenant (1Samuel 6:19).  So, what's going on, here?

Now, mind you, I'm not saying that god smiting fifty-thousand-odd people day after tomorrow would be a good thing.  That's a whole city's worth of people, for pete's sake, and there are no cities that have no redeeming features, even if you include Newark.  But some of the less smiteful miracles would sure do a lot to convince us doubters.

In any case, Hallowell's article ends with the line, "What do you think — mere coincidences or evidence of God’s intervention? You decide."

Okay, thanks, I will.  And my decision is: coincidences.  And in the case of the wind, it was: the wind.  If those are what pass for miracles these days, all I can say is that heaven's Quality Control Department sure is slacking.