"It ain't necessarily so, It ain't necessarily so, the t'ings dat yo li'bal to read in de Bible, they ain't necessarily so... "
George Gershwin

We live with the fuzzy world view. We can’t help it, because we are forced by intellectual honesty to presume that we cannot disprove certain things with 100% certainty. This leaves quite a few folks with the impression that if it’s possible in a statistical or scientific sense, it is therefore likely or even probable. For instance, by the vague and chaotic nature of Brownian motion, it is possible for all the oxygen molecules that occupy the room I’m in to migrate to the far upper northwest corner, thus leaving me to writhe in asphyxia on the floor. The chance of this happening is so infinitesimally small. So small in fact, that I think none would call me wrong or close minded if I assert, “That’s impossible.”

I was in a heated exchange with a lad on one of the innumerable Atheists lists I frequent, he had made a statement to the effect that he had WITNESSED a young boy grow back a forearm which had been lost in a farming accident, due to the power of prayer alone, in a tent show revival.

I called ‘bullshit’.
I also called the young man a liar, several times and with some amount of fervour.

He responded by pointing out that I hadn’t been there and asked “How could I know he was lying?”

I stated; “Because what you described is medically, physically and logically impossible, since it could not have happened, yet you claim you saw it happen, I fairly assess that you are lying.”

We wrangled for a bit as the odor of troll shit wafted on the cyber air, and he finally admitted that he had indeed made it up from the whole cloth. He left the discussion claiming to have scored ‘points’ for showing that atheists simply REFUSE to believe…

If someone were to tell me that a corpse had lain around a warehouse in New Jersey for several days, and had, yesterday, suddenly gotten up and walked away, I’d again call “Bullshit” for all the same reasons as above.
It’s not a more likely story if we remove it in time by 2000 years and substitute Jerusalem for Hoboken.

Call me confrontational, call me a materialist, but, don’t call me wrong when I say that some things are so unlikely that from any rational, pragmatic real world point of view, they are impossible. An open mind is like a vacant lot, if you don’t keep an eye out, someone will want to dump their garbage on it.

LC >;-}>