Vlad,
The purpose of this thread is to hopefully prompt an answer to the question ''what would get you to believe?'' Regarding expecting an asteroid to crash into the moon and the debris to spell out the name of god in every language, given that the universe is mediocre (in the sense that it is pretty samey throughout), to believe that this occurance is common place seems to be the less reasonable choice....and having plumped for it your doubts about other extremely unlikely events seem like special pleading.
The universe may be "pretty samey throughout" yet the number of shapes snowflakes can be is for practical purposes infinite, so there is no special pleading. Your mistake here is to assume that the great unlikeliness of an event is evidence for it having an intentional cause, in particular when you apply your own narrative to infer its meaning. It isn’t though. Consider for example the number of ways a randomly shuffled standard deck of cards can be dealt. It’s called 52 Factorial (52!). Written out, the number is:
80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000.
So how unlikely is it would you say that any particular order of 52 cards would be dealt?
Here’s a clue:
“This number is beyond astronomically large. I say beyond astronomically large because most numbers that we already consider to be astronomically large are mere infinitesimal fractions of this number. So, just how large is it? Let's try to wrap our puny human brains around the magnitude of this number with a fun little theoretical exercise. Start a timer that will count down the number of seconds from 52! to 0. We're going to see how much fun we can have before the timer counts down all the way.
Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator. You're going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years. The equatorial circumference of the Earth is 40,075,017 meters. Make sure to pack a deck of playing cards, so you can get in a few trillion hands of solitaire between steps. After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe. The Pacific Ocean contains 707.6 million cubic kilometers of water. Continue until the ocean is empty. When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground. Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you've emptied the ocean.
Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun. Take a glance at the timer, you will see that the three left-most digits haven't even changed. You still have 8.063e67 more seconds to go. 1 Astronomical Unit, the distance from the Earth to the Sun, is defined as 149,597,870.691 kilometers. So, take the stack of papers down and do it all over again. One thousand times more. Unfortunately, that still won't do it. There are still more than 5.385e67 seconds remaining. You're just about a third of the way done.
To pass the remaining time, start shuffling your deck of cards. Every billion years deal yourself a 5-card poker hand. Each time you get a royal flush, buy yourself a lottery ticket. A royal flush occurs in one out of every 649,740 hands. If that ticket wins the jackpot, throw a grain of sand into the Grand Canyon. Keep going and when you've filled up the canyon with sand, remove one ounce of rock from Mt. Everest. Now empty the canyon and start all over again. When you've leveled Mt. Everest, look at the timer, you still have 5.364e67 seconds remaining. Mt. Everest weighs about 357 trillion pounds. You barely made a dent. If you were to repeat this 255 times, you would still be looking at 3.024e64 seconds. The timer would finally reach zero sometime during your 256th attempt.”
(
https://boingboing.net/2017/03/02/how-to-imagine-52-factorial.html)
And yet these odds against the specific hand we deal actually being that hand instead of another one is something we barely notice.
So would you say that your example of an asteroid hitting the moon and the debris spelling “god” is more or less likely than a random distribution of 52 cards? It’s impossible to say of course, but there’s no doubt is there that both are fantastically unlikely events. And yet you seem to think that a random hand of cards wouldn’t be evidence for “god”, but the asteroid example would be just because you happen to attach your own meaning to one outcome but not to the other. Why?
I suggest you start with the link I gave you to the Wiki article about survivorship bias…
Incidentally, as well as your car crash in reasoning you might want to consider too that your asteroid example would break no universal laws – it would just be an unusual event from our perspective so would be a Poundland trick for a god to do. You’d have been better advised suggesting something like, say, “what if the visible stars suddenly one night rearranged themselves to say, “Hi – God here!”?” You’d still have the problem of knowing whether our basic understanding of physics was wrong such that gravity wasn’t as we thought it was, but it’d at least give more pause than would rocks acting according only to known laws and forces.
