Accounting for randomness

O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the LORD our maker. For He is our God; and we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand. Psalm 95:6-7

So I took a vacation day last week.  Not for something sensible, like for instance, doing Turbotax or cleaning up my closets and pruning back frozen death in the backyard in preparation for lots of company and Sergio and Janelle’s wedding. Not even for something typically soulful like hiking up to Thimble Rock.  

I was a judge at the annual Southern Arizona Science and Engineering Fair, where hundreds upon hundreds of grades 1-12 science projects line the Tucson Community Center to overflowing.

Because for me, this is soulful.  A joyous celebration of my very favorite things for kids to do: Notice, Think. Act. Reflect.  And do it all over again.  That is what science is all about.  What life is all about.  Observing the world.  Coming up with a hypothesis.  Acting as if it were true.  And reflecting on the measurable results.  The empirical evidence.

So one of my old students sent me his hypothesis this morning.  After observation.  After thinking.  He formed this hypothesis and acted upon it: There is a God. He hears my when I pray. He understands me completely. And He loves me.  

The rest of his email was the detailing of his proof, the quantifiable demonstration that supported his IF / THEN statement.  And the whole thing about science is that if indeed you run an experiment and it proves true, then the assumption is that it is true throughout the universe.  And the more subjects participate in the test, the more valid the statistical probability.  Inferential Statistics uses patterns in the sample data to draw inferences about the population represented, accounting for randomness.

I have been around a long time.  And I have run a lot of tests on this hypothesis.  Held a lot of tangible results in my hands and measured them.  After a perfect evening under a perfect downtown sky last night at Maynard’s Happy Hour and the Hub ice cream, I recounted to Monica, Gio’s mother, the reason why Dustin ended up as a dean of students at a school of wildcats when he was only twenty-three years old.  And how we all saw with our very own eyes solid white eyeball of Heather once again sparkle blue.  And thus it is reasonable to extrapolate that since He has proven himself to be my God and myself the sheep of His hand, it is quite likely that He is indeed the LORD our maker.  And each of we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand.  

O come, let us worship and bow down.