Play the EPA Number Game!
Earlier this week, the Institute for Energy Research (IER)–for which I’m the resident economist–submitted its formal comment on the EPA/National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s plans to impose higher fuel economy standards on light-duty trucks.
I think many of you will be surprised at our findings. But rather than just tell you, let me motivate it by having you pick two numbers. (Really, I think it might be more fun for you if you actually go through this little exercise.) But first, some context: The EPA is obviously claiming that the new mandate is justified according to a cost/benefit analysis. They admit that there will be costs from the rules, which they are modeling as the increase in sticker price on new vehicles, since it will be more expensive for manufacturers to design vehicles that get the required fuel efficiency. For example, just in the year 2030 alone, the EPA concedes that the rules will impose costs on car buyers of $35.7 billion (in inflation-adjusted dollars, at that time).
So for the rule to make sense, the EPA is of course claiming that from today’s perspective, the discounted flow of future benefits exceeds the discounted flow of future costs. There are two main sources of these benefits: (1) EPA claims that by reducing fuel consumption and hence emissions from US vehicles, the pace of global climate change will be slowed, thus sparing future people damages. (2) For various reasons, vehicle buyers do not rationally take into account lifetime fuel economy when making their purchases. In other words, in the free market the EPA says that car buyers are effectively leaving money on the table, because they are not willing to pay an extra $1000 for a vehicle that is otherwise identical to a cheaper model, even if the first one will have more than $1000 (in PDV) in reduced fuel costs over its lifetime.
In summary, those are the two main avenues of benefits, through which the new rules will shower net benefits on Americans. So now that you have the context, here are my two questions:
(1) The EPA gives a quantitative estimate of how much lower global mean temperatures will be in the year 2100, as a result of this rule. Take a guess as to what they say. (They express the figure in degrees Centigrade.)
(2) Of the total estimated benefits accruing from this rule, what percentage do you think is due to the consumer irrationality, and what percentage do you think is due to the other benefits (which include the avoided climate damage)? For example, suppose the EPA says that in the year 2030, there will be total benefits of $100 billion (which exceed the projected costs of $35.7 billion). If the EPA thought $1 billion of benefits came from forcing consumers to make profitable investments in vehicle fuel efficiency (which are completely private benefits), and that the remaining $99 billion of benefits came from the externalities of avoided global warming, traffic noise, etc., then your answer to this question would be “1 percent.” So, guess what percentage of the EPA’s stated benefits comes from consumers irrationally ignoring completely private benefits of buying more fuel efficient cars.
Now go read IER’s comment and see what the actual answers are. Were you close?
My Cynicism Runneth Over
I remember one time I shocked the astounded von Pepe by telling him I thought Ted Kennedy was brilliant. The danger of fisticuffs eventually subsided when I clarified that I meant Ted Kennedy was really good at playing the political game, in anticipating what would sell with the voters, etc. I mean really, Ted Kennedy (allegedly) let a young girl drown rather than risk his political career, and yet he will be remembered by adoring fans as a champion of women.
Anyway, this is a typical strain in free-market / small-government rhetoric. The speaker or writer will point to some government policy doing the opposite of what its proponents claim it will do, and then we all laugh at how dumb the politician must be. Why can’t we just say the politician is lying, or doesn’t really care what the actual impact will be? Wouldn’t that be a better explanation? After all, the politicians can hire advisers.
With that context, let’s look at a quote Bryan Caplan reproduced in a recent blog post. The writer is Dan Carroll, who apparently adopted a child from Ethiopa. Carroll writes:
The pattern of behavior from the US Department of State (DOS) is to shut down adoption programs from countries that do not participate in the Hague Convention for Inter-Country Adoption. Superficially, the DOS appears to believe that rate of unethical adoptions out of countries that do not participate in the Hague Convention is too high, and therefore moves to shut down all adoptions out of those countries.
Apparently the fact that most orphans in the world reside in non-Hague countries is lost on the DOS.
To be clear, I totally support Carroll, admire him for adopting a kid from Ethiopa, and applaud him for speaking out against this policy. But nonetheless, I wrote this in the comments at Bryan’s post:
I realize it’s more polite–and probably will convince more people to come over to your side–to not question people’s motives, but I really think this typical passage from the article Bryan quoted is absurd:
“Apparently the fact that most orphans in the world reside in non-Hague countries is lost on the DOS.”
Like I said, this is typical in the oh-what-a-bunch-of-buffoons-those-bureacrats-are genre, of which I used to be a proud member.
But that’s not what’s going on here. The people in the State Department–especially those promulgating adoption policies–probably know the basic facts about international adoption as the person writing the article.
I don’t claim to know what motivates the policies, but I *do* claim that this isn’t just some honest mistake, and the people in the State Department can’t get to sleep at night because they’re so worried about foreign orphans.
I Hope Everyone Who Likes This NPR Story Uses Contraception
Just listen to this NPR story on the contraception “compromise”:
It’s hard to know where to begin. First of all, let’s say you believe the White House line, that this new mandate will provide contraception to millions (?) of employees who don’t have to pay for it, and that no one–not the employer and not the insurer–will see higher costs because of it. Umm, so the White House was really stupid last week, when it was going to implement a plan that achieved the same results but imposed huge costs on a bunch of employers, right? And they can’t say that they just figured out this magical solution within the last 7 days; they are saying it is “well known” that contraception contains costs.
OK after you’re done gouging out your eyes from that issue, consider the fact that the NPR story didn’t interview an outside economist to ask whether these claims made any sense. Suppose the White House had come up with a “compromise” that said, “We will distribute a bar magnet to any woman who requests it, as a different means of avoiding unwanted pregnancy. We have checked with the Vatican and they don’t oppose this ‘Maxwell planning.'” I’m guessing, in this case, NPR would have gotten comments not just from the White House official in charge of the magnet plan, and not merely an anonymous insurance industry insider, but also–oh I don’t know–maybe a medical doctor to evaluate the biological claim. So since the White House is now making a claim about a government policy’s impact on costs… Ah, if only there were a group of professionals who thought about such things. I imagine such a hypothetical group of professionals would find the “compromise” to be Orwellian (see Rizzo and Landsburg and Mankiw).
Now if you read any of those three articles, you’ll see the problem: the two policies are effectively the same policy. Whether you force Catholic employers to pay for contraception, or whether you force Catholic employers to provide insurance that in turn has to cover contraception, is effectively the same policy. That’s why I’ve been putting “compromise” in quotation marks. The White House claims that no, it’s not the same policy, because it will make it illegal for the insurers to raise prices in order to cover their now-higher costs, but the economists won’t take their verbal assurances on the matter.
Now what’s truly amazing in this episode, is that the NPR story actually does let its listeners know that there is some question as to whether the White House plan can work. Specifically, some employers self-insure, meaning they take in health insurance premiums from their employees and put them into a big pot of money, out of which they pay medical claims. So for those employers, the White House is effectively saying, “You don’t have to pay for contraception, because you will pay for it. And don’t worry, if we catch you trying to make yourself pay for it, we won’t let you.”
And here is where the NPR story at least allows a critic to object, that maybe this doesn’t make sense. But it’s not definitive, mind you; it’s just one competing voice, against the authority of the other people quoted in the story.
P.S. I am pretty sure I’ve correctly crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s in the above, but I am not taking the time to go back and carefully read all the source material. I’m not Catholic. So let me know if I’m fudging the actual details…
Skullduggery in Maine
If you haven’t really been paying attention to the allegations of vote fraud in Maine, you really need to watch this whole thing. (HT2 LRC) It starts out a bit slow in the beginning but then it gets pretty good.
For rank-and-file Republicans, I have a question for you: Isn’t it weird how your side has such a strong bench–firebreathing true conservatives as defined by Rush Limbaugh and so forth–and yet, for some inexplicable reason, your party keeps putting up duds like John McCain and Mitt Romney? Isn’t that weird, how that keeps happening?
At some point, do you think you should seriously look into the nature of our political process, and stop blaming everything on Nancy Pelosi? What if the problem is much deeper than that, and the Republican establishment uses your hatred of Pelosi to distract you from the bipartisan pickpocketing?
Checkmate, Landsburg
Bob Wenzel passes along this video, which I think we can all agree ends the debate. I can’t even wait till Sunday.
Happy Jaded Valentine’s Day!
Having polite discussion with all of my brothers and sisters (well, brothers) on this post has put me in a joyous mood. Here are some fun songs to celebrate today.
This song sounds sweet, but the beginning is actually not.
Then just to make sure you know where they’re coming from, try this one.
And of course we can’t invoke the Beatles without this one. (You get what happens at the end, right?)
How do these jerk guys get away with it? I don’t know, but Pat Benatar celebrates being a doormat.
How about a chart-busting song about stalking?
Here’s another in the same genre.
And my all time favorite in this respect: You Can’t Change That. Just hit play and let this go in the background, while you do other stuff. I think you’ll find the direction of the song changes around 1:05.
Fiat Money Useful After All
From The Telegraph:
Hungary’s central bank is burning old monetary notes to help the needy in Europe’s deadly cold snap.
The bank is pulping wads of old notes into briquettes to help heat humanitarian organisations.
“It’s a very useful charitable act, a vital aid for our foundation because we can save part of our heating costs,” said Krisztina Haraszti, the head of a centre for autistic children in the impoverished northeastern town of Miskolc.
It helped the centre, which also provides aid to autistic adults, save between 50,000 and 60,000 forints (£200) a month, which is a “considerable sum in this time of crisis,” she told AFP.
Since the briquettes have a high calorific value, “one only needs to add a few bits of wood and the rooms are really warm,” said Haraszti.
The central bank has been converting unusable notes into briquettes for the past four years.
The centre and another association dealing with handicapped children in the south-eastern town of Veszto are the institutions chosen to receive the briquettes this year.
The head of the central bank’s cash logistics centre, Barnabas Ferenczi, said: “Our examination showed that the heating properties of these shredded currency briquettes are similar to brown coal so they are pretty useful for heating … and resolve the problem to find fuel.”
They can be used in boilers that use mixed fuel, he added.
When the initiative started, the notes were simply burnt. Then the centre decided to compress them into briquettes for better heating efficiency and got machines to transform the unusable cash.
“Approximately, 200 billion Hungarian forints are turned into briquettes that is useful for heating in poor regions.
“For the central bank, corporate social responsibility is an important thing. That’s why we thought that since we destroy approximately 40 or 50 tons of currency every year, this thing can be useful for charities that have a problem finding fuel for burning.”
It takes about 5 million forints (17,000 euros) to make a single one-kilogram briquette. The notes are cut into pieces of 1 to 5 millimetres and then the paper is compressed without any chemicals being added.
Every year, the central bank withdraws about a quarter of the notes in circulation and prints new money to replace the unusable and old currency.
The process of turning old cash into briquettes is held under tight security. People working here have to wear pocketless clothes.
The institutions are chosen they make bids for the briquettes. This year, some 20 organisations made a pitch.
The central bank just has one criterion: that the organisations chosen have no public debt.
Why I Know There Is a God
At first I had titled this post, “Why I Believe in God.” But as you’ll see, the reasons I will give, lead to the conclusion that I know there is a God. Now it’s true, it’s possible I could be wrong (as we’ll see), but by the same token, I might be mistaken when thinking I have a father. And yet, I don’t walk around saying, “Why I believe I have a father.” No, I know I have a father.
The motivation for this post comes from frequent commentator “Major Freedom,” who wrote last week: “This is why I dislike the Sunday posts. It turns an economics blog that satisfyingly demolishes economic ignoramuses, into an idiotic festering stinkpile of contradictions and crap logic.”
Now Major Freedom here touches on something–in his inimitable fashion–that plenty of other people have expressed over the months. These people just can’t understand why I am so logical and smart when it comes to views they agree with, and yet I am so illogical and stupid when I talk about spiritual matters.
I claim that this is a very bad hypothesis on their part. It’s much more consistent with all of the facts to say that I am making reasonable points in defense of theism. I might very well be wrong, but (I claim) it’s highly unlikely that my ability to parse an argument, or to recognize if evidence comes down in favor of one theory versus another, suddenly ceases to work every 7th day of the week.
Note that I am NOT saying, “If you think I am right about free markets, then you are inconsistent if you think I’m wrong about Jesus.” To repeat, I am NOT saying that. Rather, what I AM saying is that you should pause before saying that I’m spouting idiotic festering stinkpile of contradictions and crap logic. Sure, I could be wrong about Jesus, but I’m not that obviously wrong, where it only takes two seconds of thought to see the flaw in my worldview before the atheist can move on to other debates.
Now here’s why I say that this hypothesis offered by Major Freedom ill-fits the empirical evidence. First of all, it’s not merely that people (like Major Freedom) who like my political/economic views think that I come down on “the right side.” No, it’s more than that. With the possible exception of my focus on Paul Krugman, most people agree that when I talk economics, I at least really try to fairly present the various viewpoints in a dispute. I’m not too often accused (again, with the possible exception of my Krugman posts) of deliberately misrepresenting the views of the person I’m critiquing, when the person is a non-Austrian or a non-libertarian.
Second of all, I have nothing to gain (in a worldly sense) from holding my views, and certainly not from expressing them on a weekly basis here on the blog. In fact, this stuff actively hurts my career. Do you think it helps me get consulting contracts from hedge fund managers, if a quick Google search shows me talking about multiplying loaves and fishes?
It’s not like I’m ever going to run for office, and so need to be able to point to a church that I attended. It’s not that I need to be a good Christian to get in with the people I work with. (If I had gone back to Catholicism that would be a more plausible theory, but not evangelical Christianity.) I also didn’t convert from atheism because of a girl I wanted to marry; I was single when my conversion occurred.
Now some people over the months have said things like, “Bob maybe you need the comfort of knowing a magic man in the sky will take care of you after you die, but some of us have the courage to face the truth.” Oh really? Is that the kind of guy I strike you as? Someone who doesn’t search for the truth, but instead embraces a worldview based on convenience? Does my career really make sense if that’s how you diagnose my religious views?
Third of all, I used to be a devout atheist. I had read Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason, and Mencken’s Treatise on the Gods, and thought I could draw on their best arguments, but write a single book that made the case against Christianity more succinctly. You know what I did with free markets in my PIG to Capitalism? I was going to do the same for atheism. In college, I would actively try to get my closest Christian friends to abandon their superstitious beliefs that imprisoned them. I thought I was freeing them.
So, believe me when I say that I really understand the appeal of the atheist position. And yet, I abandoned it. That doesn’t mean I’m now right, and that atheism is therefore wrong, but it does mean that it’s very unlikely that I simply haven’t thought much about the issue. If I had been born to evangelical parents, and walked around my whole life thinking it “totally makes sense” that Jesus died for my sins, then you could plausibly say, “Bob is a smart guy, but he just takes his religious views for granted, and hasn’t subjected them to his usual withering analysis.” But you can’t really say that, if I used to be an atheist and then flipped.
Why It’s Not a Good Hypothesis to Suggest I Am Ignorant of the Laws of Physics
I apologize for the narcissism of this post, but I think it’s necessary. After all, I’m explaining why I personally came to believe in God, and I’m defending myself from the typical attacks offered by Major Freedom and others on a weekly basis here. So forgive me, but in this section I am going to brag a little bit.
When I was in 8th grade, my science teacher and I would (after class) talk about special relativity. At that point in my life, when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would say, “A theoretical physicist.” My hero was Richard Feynman.
In high school I took the two AP Physics courses and knocked them out of the park. For example, if the question asked us to compute the velocity of a ball dropped from rest, after it had fallen 10 meters, other kids in the class would use F=ma and the value for g, in order to set up the force as a function of distance and then integrate the acceleration over the interval of height. But I would solve the question in a matter of moments, by looking at the change in potential energy (because of the change in height), and then plugging it into K = 0.5*m*v^2 since energy had to be conserved. My teacher was this cool Indian guy who was getting his PhD, and he was really disappointed when I told him I was going to study economics in college, not physics.
Even so, when I went to Hillsdale College they put me in PHY 505 (Electricity and Magnetism) just because I had so much of a physics background, and it satisfied some requirement for a liberal arts degree. The only other people in the class were all juniors or seniors who were physics majors, and I’m pretty sure I was the first freshman in the college’s history to take that class. Besides crushing the exams, during office hours the professor and I would talk about things like explaining the behavior of a siphon in terms of Newton’s laws acting on the individual water molecules. (So this was like the opposite of the approach I took to the falling ball in high school.) When my schedule was too busy and I dropped Quantum Electrodynamics (I think in my junior or senior year), that professor very reluctantly signed my Drop card because he had looked forward to having me in the class.
Last anecdote: When I was at NYU getting my degree in Economics, physicist Brian Greene–author of the popular The Elegant Universe–came to give a guest lecture (on string theory I think, but I can’t remember). During the lecture, he walked us through a thought experiment in which the sun suddenly vanished, and the earth at the same time started moving out into the solar system, tangent to its original orbital path. I emailed Greene and said that this actually was wrong, because it would take a little more than 8 minutes for the earth to get the information that the sun was no longer there, providing gravity. He agreed with my criticism. (I can’t remember if he intentionally made the simplifying inaccuracy, or if he hadn’t realized that subtlety during his talk. But, either way, he agreed that I had corrected something he’d said in his lecture.)
OK don’t worry, I’m done telling you how smart I am. What’s my point? I am NOT saying, “Because I got good grades on my high school physics tests, I have credibility when it comes to theological arguments.” No, what I AM saying is that you really have no business dismissing my worldview because I “obviously” am ignorant of the findings of modern science. I promise you, I have a pretty good feel for how the natural sciences work.
Why I Know There Is a God
Now that we’ve got that preamble out of the way, here are some of my experiences, which make me sure that a God exists. The following is not a story of my conversion. Instead, I am simply reporting things that have happened in my life, so that you have a better idea of why I find armchair arguments “disproving” God to be so inadequate.
==> The moment when it first dawned on me that God existed (it’s a long story that I don’t want to tell right here in this post), I felt intense contrition. After all, I had spent a lot of energy trying to get my good friends to drop their faith. I said out loud, “I’m soooo sorry….” Then, in my head, I heard another intelligence say, “I forgive you.”
==> Roderick Long one time had a blog post challenging the internal logic of Christianity. It was a very strong critique, and I had no idea how to answer it. But I prayed about it and the answer just popped into my head. (Unfortunately this article isn’t online anymore.)
==> One time I was walking around in Auburn thinking through various things at night. My train of thought led me to a particularly clever insight about something, and I felt a bit worried at how proud I was of myself, but I kind of looked up at the sky and said, “C’mon, that’s a pretty awesome idea,” or something like that. Immediately, my mind was suddenly filled with this proposition: “The moment we decide to be with God, we are saved, and could go to heaven and live in paradise. However, God asks us to remain on the earth a while longer, to try to save some of our brothers and sisters, because they won’t listen to Him.” Now this proposition had nothing whatsoever to do with what I had been thinking about previously; it wasn’t at all related to the “great idea” over which I had just been congratulating myself. At this point I have no idea what my “great insight” was, because it was vomit compared to the beautiful gift of a morsel of His knowledge that God gave to me, to remind me of my place.
==> When I was a professor at Hillsdale (now a Christian), I went and re-read a bunch of books on evolution that I had remembered loving when I was a student at Hillsdale (and an atheist). I couldn’t believe how obviously they were constructed on one non sequitur after another. It wasn’t that I could prove anything about the origin of life, but I’m saying that things that had seemed like knockdown arguments to me when I was an atheist, no longer seemed so convincing when I was now a Christian and open to the possibility that the standard Dawkins-esque story was wrong. (Note that I wasn’t committed to being a Biblical literalist at this point.) Anyway, I was all fired up, writing a bunch of articles on this stuff, defending at least weak versions of Intelligent Design theory. I was walking around a room in my house, thinking things through, and I was getting really worked up about Eugenie Scott and the other people I was taking on in my articles. At one point I got really aggressive in my daydreaming, I think basically saying something along the lines of, “Oh it’s so hilarious how sure these people are of their position. They can’t even see how they’re assuming their conclusions. Many I can’t wait to blow them up!” And at this point, something in my room fell over. I don’t remember what it was, but it wasn’t something that should have fallen over on its own. So I took that to be a gentle reminder to chill out, that the point wasn’t to defeat opponents but to help people see the bigger picture.
==> Another time I was wrestling with a very serious moral dilemma. I was talking to a former pastor about it, and he was showing me different passages from Scripture about the issue. After talking to him, I prayed and asked God that if He wanted me to do something a certain way, I genuinely needed guidance. I then flipped open my Bible “randomly” and I promise you, the chapter I started reading literally started with the Pharisees coming and asking Jesus about exactly this issue. It freaked me out it was such a tailor-made message from God about how He wanted me to think about the issue. (I’m being vague since it’s personal.)
==> Those who have been long-time readers will remember that the reason I went to Haiti is that I thought God was telling me to, and my joke was that I’d rather travel in a plane than a whale. Now Steve Landsburg should appreciate this aspect of the story: Whether you think I’m crazy or sane, the best theory to explain my behavior is that I believed God was telling me to go. I am a germaphobe. When I am on a roadtrip and go into a restaurant, I take a little bottle of hand sanitizer in with me, because I’m worried that the menu will be dirty from the previous customer. Also, I am uncomfortable traveling to foreign countries; I was very relieved when the illustrious von Pepe was on the same flight as me to the Mises Supporters Summit in Vienna. So put those two together: I am a germaphobe and I was stressed out about flying to Austria. Do you think I relished the thought of doing manual labor in a makeshift volunteer camp in Haiti? Can you imagine anything else motivating me to do that, besides, “I’m on a mission from God”?
==> Finally, one time I was pacing around the downstairs of my house (here in Nashville). I was alone in the house. For some reason I had lately been thinking along the lines that natural scientists and theologians were explaining the same events, just using different approaches. For example, theologians would say, “When Jesus was born, a star appeared in the sky to lead the magi to the new King.” Yet astronomers would say, “Oh, that was just a supernova in galaxy XYZ. Nothing supernatural about that. Given the state of the physical universe, that had to happen. It would have been a miracle if a ‘bright star’ didn’t appear in the sky to the people at that time.” So anyway, I was pacing around my downstairs, in the room holding a couch, table, and my computer desk, thinking along these lines. Just as I had satisfied myself that nothing really “miraculous” occurs–because God wants the universe to be orderly for us to understand–I turned around and saw my son’s rocking horse from when he was a toddler, sitting on the floor right where I must have paced at least 10 tens in the previous half hour. It was normally something that would be in the corner of my son’s room upstairs, and yet here it was, “suddenly” resting right where I would clearly have tripped over it 10 different times in the previous 30 minutes. There was no way I could have just not seen it for that long; it was smack dab right in between the wall and the table, where I had been pacing. This too freaked me out, because I interpreted it to be the least frightening thing God could have done, that was frightening enough to shock me out of my silly “deduction” regarding His position vis-a-vis the physical world.
One (Probably Vain) Parting Request
In closing, I want to remind everyone why I spent so long establishing my background in physics, and my previous “devout atheism.” I know full well how I would explain away all the above, if some Christian had told me those things back when I was in college. I would have said the guy felt really guilty upon his conversion experience, and so he “had” to hear this fictitious God forgive him, so he could get on with his life. When he was walking around the house in Hillsdale, getting really worked up about refuting the atheist biologists, he stomped the floor really hard and knocked that thing over. His “inspired” thoughts about writings articles, or having ideas on why God makes us remain on a miserable planet, and even being able to flip open to a Bible passage that he had obviously read several times during his life–these episodes just show how powerful the human mind really is, even though we aren’t consciously aware of what we can do sometimes.
(It’s like the story when Richard Feynman just “randomly” pointed to a problem in the schematics that an engineer showed him–Feynman thought he was lucky, but I always thought it was that Feynman’s mind was incredibly powerful and subconsciously he saw the problem in the blueprints in a matter of seconds. There was another occasion when Feynman got “lucky” and turned somebody’s safe to the correct combination on the first try; again I think he actually had the power to do that, even though he didn’t think it was possible that his mind was that powerful.)
As far as the Haiti stuff, well this guy was under a lot of stress at the time from his job and the expenses of his son’s diagnosis of autism, and he actually needed to take a vacation that would completely remove him from that situation. But he would never in a million years be able to take a fun vacation with all of that responsibility waiting at home, and anyway at a regular destination he still would have had frequent internet access. But by going to Haiti for a week–where he could only check his email every other day, for a few minutes, and where he engaged in exhausting manual labor and had to stay focused to avoid getting diarrhea–he had no choice but to forget everything else and walk back from his looming nervous breakdown. How to justify all of this? His subconscious invented the notion that “God really wants me to do this.”
In conclusion, I hope the above anecdotes at least make atheist readers understand why I am so sure that God exists. Rather than attribute a weekly failure of my logic and reason, I would appreciate it if you’d give me the benefit of the doubt of having a series of unlikely coincidences. For an analogy, if some guy got stuck in an elevator at the airport, and then missed his flight that ended up crashing, and then he won the lotto that same day, and later that night he got a call from his church’s pastor saying he was retiring and urging this guy to go into ministry–you can understand why this guy might suddenly “find Jesus.” You would still think he was wrong, but you could cut him some slack and not accuse him of ignoring the “overwhelming evidence” that there wasn’t a God.
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