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Notes -
If you have a habit to pray and wait for it to work, it's not implausible that a few times in your life you actually notice it to appear to work. Do you count the times when you pray and do not get instant results delivered?
Event 2 in particular sounds like "you were returning from an event in the same college that she goes to, you were looking for her so you saw her, duh". I suppose I don't have handy explanations for the rest of them other than "stuff happens sometimes, that doesn't mean there's got to be a superintelligence out there looking out for you".
"Spiritual confirmations" you described also look like, well, literally just internal monologue to me. There was a book I heard about - something something "Bicameral Mind"? - that basically theorized that the ancient man conceptualized internal monologue not as his own voice of reason, but as Athena or the equivalent bestowing wisdom upon him in his time of need.
I understand that, which is why as I said the timing of these events is the most significant aspect of them to me. Praying and having something happen immediately is very different from praying and having it happen a few days later. I understand that the events that I listed are generally like 1/100 to 1/10,000 coincidences, which isn't that much if I have said a lot of prayers, so all I can say is that the success rate seems to be much higher than it would be by chance.
I essentially disregarded the results of minor prayers, both positive and negative, since they are numerous enough to be impossible to track. Major prayers (where I am sticking my neck out by saying a prayer, or praying very desperately) are different and as far as I can recall and have recorded they have been answered to my satisfaction 100% of the time. I would put all but #1 in that category, plus all of those were answered immediately.
I did back when I was less sure in my faith. I would pray for something, then if it didn't happen revise my Overall Estimate downwards, and if it did, I would estimate the odds of that thing happening by chance within that timeframe and adjust my Overall Estimate accordingly. I also chose hypotheses which were firmly based in the teachings of my religion, tested them, evaluated whether the results were "good", and then adjusted based on how likely a good result would be if the church weren't true. So I would pray for guidance on something, get a prompting regarding what to do, then conduct the above actions on that prompting i.e. evaluating how likely it was that the prompting was actually the Spirit vs just my own opinion regarding what to do, then follow through and judge the results likewise.
While I saw very strong results, I grew worried about my own ability to be an objective interpreter of the events happening in my life. It didn't really seem like the more scientific approach actually removed any bias from my search for the truth, and it was very time-consuming. So much of the results depended on my own estimation of the odds of events happening beforehand, an estimation which is just rife with inaccuracy since a) if I want the church to be true, I'll adjust all estimates downwards, and b) I just have no idea what the odds are of most random events happening. I attempted to play prediction markets for a while in order to train my own intuition of odds, and won a lot of money which somewhat assuaged my worries, but still the overall approach was just painfully inaccurate and I could not think of a better one. Prediction markets are flawed anyways because [skill at evaluating the odds of some political thing happening] really doesn't have much to do with [skill at evaluating the odds of some mundane thing happening] but it was the best I could do.
Still, the "test hypotheses" approach had extremely strong results, and a weaker version of that forms some of the basis of my testimony today. I have a journal containing most of my notes from that approach somewhere in the house--will look around for it when I get the chance. I also have a Google Sheets from 6 years ago containing (I believe the first) 5 days of the approach--I can DM it to you if you'd like.
Yeah, I've heard that as well (Scott Alexander had a great piece on it which I think we're both talking about), and for a long time was very concerned that that was what was happening. As I mentioned this is a concern I have had since childhood. The human brain seems capable of manufacturing virtually any sensation from nothing under certain circumstances, and I found it much more likely for any spiritual sensations I felt to be a result of that than of actual divine intervention. That's part of why I wasn't willing to give the spiritual experiences any value until I had seen a lot of physical evidence.
Besides evidence of any sort (physical or spiritual) I find the doctrine which my church teaches to be highly logical. It's hard to explain in-depth on a random comment board, but the philosophy and approach behind it make sense in a way nothing else does. Alma 32:28-43 basically describes what I consider the religious form of the scientific method. Test out the doctrine and you'll see both spiritual growth and external results. It's definitely what I've seen in my own life.
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