Every now and then Christians face the accusation of blind faith. While it is true that I would trust God blindly, my faith is not based on nothing. I wouldn’t say it’s founded in science, but it certainly has scientific aspects.

Once during a long bus ride I had an interesting experience. Fanatics would call it a vision, sceptics might call it a mental disorder, probably it was just a day dream. During this, I heard God’s voice (in my head, not audibly), and have heard it since every now and then. So I obviously asked myself whether I became crazy. So I asked God three times to ensure to me, that I’m not. Here’s what happened:

The first time, he told me to look in Zechariah 12, the chapter starts with a pronouncement or an oracle (i.e. what had happened to me in the bus). And the first verse ends with “[God] formed the spirit of man within him”. Exactly what happened to me.

The second time, (I was not convinced yet), he told me to look in Amos 3.7, which states that God does nothing without first talking to his servants and prophets. Again, I felt confirmed. But both these events are subject to strong personal biases.

The third time, he told me to go and play in the lottery (seriously). I played in the swiss lottery and had 4 correct (swiss lottery plays 6 out of 42).

All these proofs were and are sufficient for me, to me they establish both the existence and the communication of God. We could compute the probability of this (the scientific way, which we’ll do below), but this would miss the point. The relationship with God is about a relationship, not about statistics. Way more important than the probabilities are how I felt when I read those passages. Maybe they are vague to you, maybe they are vague to me now as well. But you have to interpret them like a father giving his son a good night kiss before going to sleep. This kiss does not, by all means, establish anything to an objective outside observer (you). But to the child and to the father this simple kiss communicates everything that is needed. So did these bible verses. They are not to convince you (an outside observer), they were to convince me, the child laying in bed.

Two closing thoughts. First, you are most likely interested in the probabilities. The easiest is the last one, no subjectivity is involved, only mathematics, it is an about 1 in 500 chance, well beyond what is needed for a publication. The other two are quite subjective, what would I have counted as a “match”? On the one hand, God speaks a lot in the bible, so maybe taking a random verse and seeing God speaking in it is not that rare? I made a pseudo test and randomly selected (with a computer) 100 verses. I counted about 5 or 6 verses that were comparable to the two God gave me. Which is on the brim of significant. If we were to multiply these two cases, then we would have a very significant result, but that might be misleading. But again, it was (and is) about the relationship, not the statistics.

Second, it is tempting to ask God for a proof and then easily disproof him. That is not what happened. I asked God for a proof and he told me what to do, that is he agreed to the experiment. I did not, as so many do to disproof God, state to what experiment He had to agree. This would be, God, I’m opening the bible and I will read the first verse. At best this could be proof that God is not interested in your experiment. Similarly I can’t disproof the existence of my Toddlers because they don’t clean up their room upon my command. No, in my examples God told me where to look, that I agreed on His terms, not the other way around.