Near miss

A stock objection to Christianity is that if God existed, he'd intervene to prevent evil. But as I've remarked on more than one occasion, that's circular in the sense that there's no trace evidence for nonevents. If something never happened, it leaves no record. 

To take a concrete example, during summer break I used to go for walks at the football field of my old junior high. One time two adolescent boys, friends or brothers, were there when I arrived. They brought their Rottweiler with them. They were fooling around inside the field, I was walking around the track, while the dog was lying in the shadows beyond the track. At one point I came between the boys and the dog. It suddenly rose up and began to snarl. The boys were too foolish to anticipate the danger of taking a dog like that into the public arena. They were able to verbally retrain it, but it was clearly untrained, with a hair-trigger reaction. They had no real control over what it did. That dog was a mauling just waiting to happen.

For me, that was a near miss. If it attacked me, I would have been hospitalized...or worse. That's a concrete illustration of a tragedy that didn't happen. And it's forgettable in a way that the alternative is not. We don't generally remember a close call because it didn't come to a head. It's the tragedies that make an impression.