Hypothesis Testing & the Christian Faith

I'm tutoring several AP Statistics students this year, and the test this week is on hypothesis testing. When I taught this course, I usually began each lesson with a real life story, practical life application or Biblical parallel so that students would approach the topic as something valuable for life, not just something they had to do to graduate.  The parallel that occurred to me for this topic deals with apologetics, and the story I shared with my students is one I do not want to forget, so I'm sharing it here as well.

We recently traveled to Israel with a very diverse group of people with different worldviews.  There were only a few Christians, so it was interesting to watch each teammate process what we  were seeing and try to reconcile it with his or her own belief system.  One agnostic or atheist traveler was a seasoned attorney who was a voracious reader and considered himself to be an intellectual elite.  He was so confident that he often tried to correct the tour guide (a well educated PhD Israeli with at least 15 years of experience touring groups through Israel).  He tried to initiate little debates with myself or another Christian woman in the group one-on-one.  I find it interesting that he did not confront the men, but I think he saw us as weaker opponents.  He would ask me questions with the goal of making me question my faith.  We both agreed that by definition, religion requires some measure of faith, not undeniable evidence, so I merely pointed out a wide variety of examples showing how the more we uncover through archaeological digs about our history and the more we learn about how the universe works, the more confirmation Christians have that our faith is more than an idea or belief system, but that is true.  We cannot prove the Bible to be true (if we could, there would be no need for faith), but we cannot prove it to be false either.  True science reveals what is true, but it cannot prove what we want to be true.  Even so, scientists with doctorate degrees have been rigging studies and experiments to support their beliefs for centuries.  

The senior attorney never refuted any of my answers (or the other lady's I learned later), but he kept going in circles as unbelievers tend to do, asking new questions. It was a classic case of the straw man fallacy, and as an attorney, he surely knows more about the technique than I do, but when someone cannot refute your response, that's how they make you think they did.

Immediately after his conversation with me, I began overanalyzing what I said and thinking of much more "clever" responses I should have used that could have shown him the holes in his arguments.  I was beating myself up over it but decided to focus instead on reading scriptures.  Since we had just walked through the Via Dolorosa the day before, I focused my attention on the passage beginning with the plot to kill Jesus through His crucifixion and burial.  But for some reason, my eyes fell to the chapter right before the plot to kill Jesus, specifically Luke 21:13.  It had to be the Holy Spirit leading me to this specific passage in Luke 21 just above where I planned to start reading.

¹³ But it will turn out for you as an occasion for testimony. ¹⁴ Therefore settle it in your hearts not to meditate beforehand on what you will answer; ¹⁵ for I will give you a mouth and wisdom which all your adversaries will not be able to contradict or resist.  (Luke 21:13-15)

What a gift.  Chills.....tears....awe.   If I had planned what I would say to him, I would have gone on the offense...using man's reason and showy words to poke holes in his argument,  but it would have sounded cold, without love.  Instead, he caught me off guard so that I could receive the Spirit's words instead and point to God's glory through my personal testimony and in all we were seeing on the trip.

So, all that narrative to make the following point:

As with statistical hypothesis testing, our null hypothesis as believers is that the Bible is true.  We believe that Jesus is exactly who He said he was. 
The world's alternate hypothesis is that the Bible is false.  Hypothesis testing does not prove that the null hypothesis is true or false.  It merely collects data to determine if there is enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis. It is similar to our legal system which declares someone innocent until proven guilty.

Mathematically, we could write those statements as follows:

Let p = Probability that the Bible is true  (Jesus is who He says He is)

H_o:  p = 1

H_a:  p <> 1

So while we cannot prove the Bible is true, there will NEVER be enough evidence to prove that it is false.   The law of large numbers states that tif you have infinite data or repeat the experiment enough times, you will eventually arrive at the true probability.  Science is showing us that the more we dig up underground or discover about the way the universe works, from the tiniest cell to the expanse of the universe, the more evidence we have in support of the null hypothesis and the closer we get to the true probability.  As n increases, p gets closer to 1.  There will never be enough evidence to reject our null hypothesis.  Hallelujah and amen.