dear hilary: if the impossible is true

Dear Hilary,I'm learning a lot about probabilities right now, and how to apply them. I'm learning that there are high probabilities for some things and low ones for others, based on evidence, based on prior ideas or beliefs, based on... you name it.What if there is no probability for something? What if there is no probability that God is real, the way you talk about God? Is trusting in something that isn't really trustworthy is a bad idea?Love,ProbablyDear Probably,I have a high probability for believing that I am sitting in my apartment typing this to you. I have a low probability for believing I am a brain in a vat, or secretly a monkey typing on a typewriter into infinity. I suppose lots of things are possible, but they have low probability.Honestly, though, what a curious idea - that you would measure belief by something like probability, up and weigh and judge things by how rational they are and seem. It's not a bad way of going on for some things, but it isn't the only way we measure belief. It isn't the only way we measure familiarity or trustworthiness.So maybe I wonder whether the probability of me being a brain in a vat or being a monkey typing on a typewriter to achieve Shakespeare's Hamlet is really in the end the best way to think about your questions about God.The Incarnation kind of messes around with all our probability.What is that line, from the L'Engle poem? Had Mary been filled with reason, there'd have been no room for the Child.Probability is a way of filling the room, the paper, the equation, with reason. And sometimes, when you're filled up with reason, there is no room for the Child. There is no room for the Incarnation in its particular, improbable, unyieldingly unlikely way, to live in your heart.I'm just now learning a lot about probability and probability calculus. I'm learning about how much we trust something based on what appears to us to be true or on what an authority says versus what we see, or think we see...There is a beauty to what it can show you about how you think. There is a goodness and a truth to it, too. But there is this resistant, stubborn part of my heart, or maybe the whole of my heart, that says even when it is good and helpful, it's not everything.The improbable is sometimes remarkably true. And our measure of believing in that improbable truth can't be contained in the neat lines of a pencil on a calculus problem on graph paper.Had Mary been filled with reason. Maybe this is a post about reasonable-ness, that elusive thing we so often want to defend us. We want to be justified in being angry and hurt and confused when something happens, or being elated and grateful and full of joy. We want reasonableness to keep us on the straight and narrow, give us the right opinions, protect us from being fools or from being in error. We want a hedge of protection around the happenings of the world.There'd had been no room for the Child.And isn't it the Child, after all, that we should stretch enough to make room for?And isn't it the Child, after all, that makes room for us?I want to tell you, young philosopher in the making, you who seek the probability, the justified and justifiable reasons, and even you, who might be reading this, who think that the best thing is the most probable thing -Welcome the wonder of the impossible: the Lord, come among us as a child.Let us make room.Love,hilary