God of the Parking Spots

This showed up on my Facebook feed today:

I don't want to pick on the specific person, because I don't know if they are being literal, or using sarcasm or exaggeration for the sake of embellishing a story.  But when I read stuff like this, I frankly don't know how to react.  I think this confusion is related to Poe's Law, which basically says that honest fundamentalism and satire/parody of same can be swapped in and out for each other.

Regardless of this specific post, the point remains that there are people who WOULD attribute little things in their day to the existence of a god.  Some people refer to this as the God of the Parking Spots.  As in, "Wow, an empty parking spot right in front of my favorite store!  God must really want me to shop here today."

That might sound ridiculous, and indeed, even Christians would admit that this theory doesn't hold much weight (or even if it does, it's not good theology to pray for parking spaces).

However, on my drive home this afternoon, a pastor was talking about setting up a new church, and some difficulties with funding, and some tough choices that needed to be made.  He said he prayed about it, and talked about how a common question with Christians is whether the thoughts you have are just hunches from your own mind, or God speaking to you and answering prayers.  To answer his own question, he said that he likes to see if anything external happens that might validate his thinking that it's an answered prayer.  In other words, if he just comes up with an idea, that is his own mind.  But if something outside of his control happens to validate his idea, that's God's hand at work.

So, with his tough choice about church funding, he decided to keep his mouth shut at the board meeting.  But lo and behold, other people voiced the exact same thing he'd been thinking.  He said this very seriously, and the person interviewing him agreed with reverence, as if it truly was God's work.  Apparently when people agree with each other or think similarly about an issue, that's a miracle.

This strikes me as almost exactly the same thing as the parking spot example.  An external event is attributed to the influence of God.  Indeed, if you traced the causal chain of events that led to an empty parking space (or a bowel movement), it's pretty clear that nothing miraculous is going on.  (Granted, how people think, how thoughts are born, and how we make decisions isn't quite as clear.)

I guess it's related to the Sharpshooters fallacy.  Thousands of things happen in our lives every day.  You can't just draw a circle around two things that happen and say "these things are related".  That is to say, you can't say to yourself "I wonder what God has in store for me today", and then see a prime parking spot and say "Ah ha!  God wants me to park here."