Coincidences.

Perhaps for want of anything better to write about over the Christmas/New Year period, the papers have picked up on the story of a man who claims to have found an image of the Virgin Mary in a stain on a piece of pottery. This is a classic example of seeing something significant in a random chance event. Given that the pottery is stained, then the stain has to take some form or other. Look at it this way - if I take a well shuffled pack of cards and deal out four cards, and they turn out to be the four Aces, then, assuming I've not cheated, you would probably be amazed, and if you were a good statistician, would point out that the chance of this happening was 4/52 x 3/51 x 2/50 x 1/49 = 24/6497400 or 1 in 270,725. So now I put the Aces back in the pack, shuffle again, deal out four more cards, which turn out to be the 2 of Spades, 7 of Diamonds, King of Diamonds and 10 of Clubs. Do you consider this amazing? Probably not, and yet the probability of dealing those four cards (or any other named four cards) is exactly the same - 1 in 270,725. The difference is simply that four Aces have a particular significance, whereas the second four cards have none. So the stain on the pottery could have ended up in any of who knows how many ways, all of them equally improbable. But you are unlikely to say "Oh, look at this stain - it looks a bit like a dead bird under a sort of upside-down W", whereas if it resembles something which has significance for you , you will think you've seen something special.