If you throw a ball up into the air 99 times, and 99 times it falls back down, and then you throw it up into the air for the 100th time, what do you think it'll do?
It'll fall back down.
Are you sure? Are you certain? Here's the clincher: Would you stake your life on it? You've done it 99 times and it's behaved the same each time. Is that good enough?
Let's say you're flipping a coin. It's not impossible for it to come up heads 99 times in a row - So let's do a math problem: How many times would I have to flip a coin such that there would be a 100% chance of it coming up heads 99 times in a row while I was flipping it? I don't know, but the problem has an answer, and that answer is an integer, and however big that integer is, that's basically how certain you can be that the ball will come down again the 100th time.
But that's not absolute certainty, is it?
The moral of the thought experiment is: Experiments Never Give You Absolute Certainty About the Future.
Would you stake your life on something that wasn't an absolute certainty? I mean, if you were an old man, and you had just a few weeks left to live anyway, maybe you would stake your life on the 100th toss of the ball - But I'm a young man. I wouldn't. It's not impossible that the ball is like the coin, and I just happen to be in a statistical spike. I wouldn't risk it.
What if you had an infinite number of years to live? Would you stake them all on a non-absolute certainty? Think about that.
The claim of Christianity is that you do have an infinite number of years to live (or something like that - Actually eternity is a bit different, but close enough), and that that infinite time is going to be either great or terrible. Do you want to risk that time on anything less than absolute certainty?
Monday, April 30, 2007
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