As an example of this class of event, if I were to pray “Oh Lord, give me enough money to never have to work again” and then two hundred thousand people were to buy copies of my books in the next five years, that would be enough evidence that it would be rational for me to believe in God.
Do you really think that would be enough? Even if you don’t think that the God hypothesis has a truly massive prior probability to overcome, you’d still have to reconcile this with the fact that most prayers for improbable things go unanswered, to the point that nobody has ever provided a convincing statistical demonstration that it has any effect except on people who know that prayers have been made.
Taking this as sufficient Bayesian evidence to hold a belief in God seems like believing that a die is weighted because your roll came up a six, when you know that it’s produced an even distribution of numbers in all its rolls together.
Do you really think that would be enough? Even if you don’t think that the God hypothesis has a truly massive prior probability to overcome, you’d still have to reconcile this with the fact that most prayers for improbable things go unanswered, to the point that nobody has ever provided a convincing statistical demonstration that it has any effect except on people who know that prayers have been made.
Taking this as sufficient Bayesian evidence to hold a belief in God seems like believing that a die is weighted because your roll came up a six, when you know that it’s produced an even distribution of numbers in all its rolls together.