It seems I messed up the formatting of my previous post, and chopped out my answer to these:
I believe the word "many" is overstating things by several orders of magnitude.
Maybe so, but the number of people who believe something, of course, has nothing to do with whether it's true or not. And in defense of my point, I believe something like 30% of scientists believe in God, which would constitute "many". And there is research going on in the areas I talked about, and certainly not every scientist doing the research is convinced in a materialistic explanation.
The licence plates are something you were amazed by the coincidence of because it happened within hours of your wife mentioning them, and because there were two of them. This was 2 days later, and there was just the one. And isn't New Mexico more than 3 hours' drive from where you live?
Yes, my wife accurately (or at least talked about) a rare event that then happened twice just hours later. It wouldn't be rational to
not be surprised by that, unless my wife predicts or talks about this stuff all the time, which she doesn't.
New Mexico is several
states away from California. Carlsbad, which she also talked about (and I saw a few days later), is about three hours from where I live. Not as impressive as the N.M. plates, but another "hit" for my wife.
Running in to him would have been an amazing coincidence when your troubles started up again, too. Or if it had happened right after you first saw your current doctor. Or after your wife had mentioned the possibility of you taking up therapy again. Or after you'd thought about taking up therapy again. Or when you were given your first prescription. Or running in to his wife. Or running in to another patient you used to see in the waiting room. Or running in to a friend you had at that time who you've not seen since. Or finding a picture of the dog you owned when you were having therapy. Or seeing 2 more New Mexico licence plates.
I see what you're saying here, but it doesn't ring true. The last time this happened to me was 15 years ago. I've moved three times since then, I've gotten married, had a kid, etc. I have almost no mementos from that time. I never met the therapist's family. The therapist, himself, is the best reminder of that time in my life, and out of hundreds of thousands of possible people, I run into him.
Nor was I actively looking for a "sign", or going through old things. I was just dropping off a prescription and he was literally two feet away from me. Your explanation, therefore, is not a satisfactory one. Running into my old therapist, while I happen to be going through an identical crisis, is exceedingly strange, and while there are other "strange" events that could also fit the bill, none would carry the relevance that has, and nothing else strange happened that day.
And so on. There's any number of things you can attach significance to after the fact.
And this is why assigning meaning to events after the event is the wrong way to go about things.
Not at all!
If you rolled a six-sided die and got 66666666666666666666666666666666's, you would certainly attach meaning to the event, after it happened. You would, rightly, conclude the die is loaded. We attach meaning to events after they happen all the time.
Take the fine-tuning problem in physics. The values of the physical constants are what they are. Yet they are so exceedingly coincidental that multiverse theory is invoked to explain it away. This is a perfect example of meaning being attached to an event after it's already happened.
When very strange results are obtained (like a supposedly RNG that spits out 3.14, or someone winning a lottery ten times in a row), explanations have to be offered. The stranger the result, the less likely the "chance" hypothesis is true.
Let's say that you're rolling 10 ordinary, fair dice. Then you add all the pips together, and look at the number. Is it meaningful? Well, let's see.
Say you get 10, well that's the lowest number it's possible to get, so that must be meaningful. 60 is the highest, so that must be meaningful. 11 is the lowest number that's got identical digits and it's the lowest prime. 25 is the only odd number where the last digit is the square root of the number. 36 is the only even number where the last digit is the square root of the number. 16 is the lowest cube. 55 is the highest number that's got identical digits. 35 is slap-bang in the middle. We all know about the significance of 13. And of 23.
And so on.
The point is, if you attach meaning to something after the event, then you can attach meaning to anything you like, and everything can have meaning.
Not at all. If I roll 10 ordinary fair dice and get 3.141592653, I'm going to conclude someone messed with the dice. Don't tell me you would assume they were fair dice after getting a result like that. You wouldn't, would you?
Or, to put it another way - it's like the Birthday Problem. Have you heard of this one? It's a probability problem that seems absolutely wrong, but is 100% correct. If there is a room full of strangers, then how many people need to be in that room to make it more likely than not that two of them share a birthday? I'll spoiler the answer, but genuinely take a guess before looking:.
Seems low, doesn't it? Seems like it should be more unlikely that two strangers share a birthday. But the maths works out.
I'm sure it does, but let me ask you what you would conclude if everyone in the room (50 people) all had the same birthday? I would not believe it was chance, as the odds of that being true are astronomically low. Would you believe it was chance?
