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. To me this is akin to throwing all 1,000,000 parts of a aircraft carrier up in the air over and over and expecting at some point to have them all fall together as a perfectly-built sea vessel. Not gonna happen.
To me this is akin to throwing all 1,000,000 parts of a aircraft carrier up in the air over and over and expecting at some point to have them all fall together as a perfectly-built sea vessel. Not gonna happen.
If the odds of my winning the lottery are 1 in 176,000,000, how do you explain the fact that I'm able to predict last weeks winning numbers with 100% accuracy?
If the odds of my winning the lottery are 1 in 176,000,000, how do you explain the fact that I'm able to predict last weeks winning numbers with 100% accuracy?
If the odds of my winning the lottery are 1 in 176,000,000, how do you explain the fact that I'm able to predict last weeks winning numbers with 100% accuracy?
Amateur, I can predict last years winning numbers with 100% accuracy.
Even more astonishing If I write them down and save them in two years they will be predicting the winners from 3 years in the past.
Exactly! ...so you see the trouble with trying to calculate the odds are of life having occurred after it has already occurred? (the odds are actually 1:1)
As infinitesimal as the chances are of that ordered structure coming together, which is like 10 to the 50th or 100th power, the chances of it falling apart after building itself half-way are even greater. To me this is akin to throwing all 1,000,000 parts of a aircraft carrier up in the air over and over and expecting at some point to have them all fall together as a perfectly-built sea vessel. Not gonna happen.
Ooooh, an aircraft carrier!
Well, crap, if Christian apologists had used an aircraft carrier as an example from the very beginning instead of a 747 and a junkyard, I would have been a Creationist by now!
Well ... on a more serious note, I won't delve into ALL of the problems with your analogy, but one of my favorite bubble-popping needles is this:
Your analogy (as do all similar analogies) is more accurately used against Biblical creation than evolution or even the origin of life. What most closely mirrors your analogy is God poofing Adam into existence fully formed. Because that's what you're saying about the aircraft carrier. It is a pile of 1,000,000 parts until it becomes a fully-formed aircraft carrier without any transition. Just as Adam was a pile of dirt until he was a fully formed human being.
Yeah, I know you're not a Christian but rather a theist, but that still denies science and presupposes magic is the cause of life. I won't usually cross swords with those who believe God kickstarted evolution (even though I disagree), but when someone tries to say that God poofed us here with magical spells reminiscent of Sabrina the Teenaged Witch, I start to get a facial tic.
I hear apologists all the time triumphantly declaring that the odds of life forming through natural means is so astronomically small that it is essentially impossible!
Except ... where are they getting the numbers? I mean, if you're going to determine the odds of anything, you need numbers. Well ... where do those numbers come from? How were they determined?
Plus, when I hear creationists talk about the odds, the one number in the equation that is almost -never- included is: How many chances did the universe have in producing life? Keep in mind that there is a REASON why we say "astronomical" odds. Because in astronomy, numbers are impossibly huge. Thus to claim "astronomical odds" for an astronomical event, well ... heehee ... I think you can see where I'm going with this.
But to bolster my argument, thanks to careful experiments using very precisely calibrated lasers, scientists have not been able to detect the slightest curve to the shape of the universe. That heavily implies, but does not quite prove, that the universe is most likely infinite.
IF the universe is infinite, then through sheer mathematical odds, somewhere out there is a planet where the 1,000,000 parts of an aircraft carrier were, in fact, tossed into the air and fell back down to earth randomly creating a fully functioning ship. And somewhere else, a tornado really -did- blow through a junkyard to create a 747.
Well, crap, if Christian apologists had used an aircraft carrier as an example from the very beginning instead of a 747 and a junkyard, I would have been a Creationist by now!
Well ... on a more serious note, I won't delve into ALL of the problems with your analogy, but one of my favorite bubble-popping needles is this:
Your analogy (as do all similar analogies) is more accurately used against Biblical creation than evolution or even the origin of life. What most closely mirrors your analogy is God poofing Adam into existence fully formed. Because that's what you're saying about the aircraft carrier. It is a pile of 1,000,000 parts until it becomes a fully-formed aircraft carrier without any transition. Just as Adam was a pile of dirt until he was a fully formed human being.
Yeah, I know you're not a Christian but rather a theist, but that still denies science and presupposes magic is the cause of life. I won't usually cross swords with those who believe God kickstarted evolution (even though I disagree), but when someone tries to say that God poofed us here with magical spells reminiscent of Sabrina the Teenaged Witch, I start to get a facial tic.
I hear apologists all the time triumphantly declaring that the odds of life forming through natural means is so astronomically small that it is essentially impossible!
Except ... where are they getting the numbers? I mean, if you're going to determine the odds of anything, you need numbers. Well ... where do those numbers come from? How were they determined?
Plus, when I hear creationists talk about the odds, the one number in the equation that is almost -never- included is: How many chances did the universe have in producing life? Keep in mind that there is a REASON why we say "astronomical" odds. Because in astronomy, numbers are impossibly huge. Thus to claim "astronomical odds" for an astronomical event, well ... heehee ... I think you can see where I'm going with this.
But to bolster my argument, thanks to careful experiments using very precisely calibrated lasers, scientists have not been able to detect the slightest curve to the shape of the universe. That heavily implies, but does not quite prove, that the universe is most likely infinite.
IF the universe is infinite, then through sheer mathematical odds, somewhere out there is a planet where the 1,000,000 parts of an aircraft carrier were, in fact, tossed into the air and fell back down to earth randomly creating a fully functioning ship. And somewhere else, a tornado really -did- blow through a junkyard to create a 747.
It's a very good post, Shirina and a good defense of spontaneous appearance of life even if the argument is that it did occur over billions of years.
I can't trace the debate down on YouTube because I have watched so many o them of late, but I did recall one statement: that a certain number, something like 1 in 10 to the 50th power or something--such a number reaches a threshold, oh yes now I remember the debate; it was between Lenny Esposito vs Richard Carrier. Anyway the statement was that a number reaches a certain threshold and beyond that mathematicians determine that such a chance becomes an impossibility.
Now taking my analogy of the aircraft carrier, those parts could be thrown up in the air from now to infinity and the math calculations determine that those parts would never come together as a fully-formed aircraft carrier. Some scientists (whether they are creationists or non-biased, I don't now) have determined that a fully formed human body, with all of the billions of complex functions it performs on a daily basis, coming into existence as a result of spontaneous generation stretches beyond that number applied to the aircraft carrier; in other words, where the aircraft carrier might be 1 in 10 to the 100th power, a impossibility according to actuarialists, the number applied to a human body is even higher, maybe 1 in 10 to the 120th power. Both are impossibilities, but the human body is a greater impossibility than the aircraft carrier.
That's the point I was trying to make with my analogy. From my point of view (and others) the odds of a human body evolving from a single atom combining with another atom to form a molecule and then to keep building on top of each other, forming through quadrillions of complex combinations are so remote that we can't even write such a number out; I think one scientist said that such a number would be higher than all the atoms in the universe by his calculations. For me that is proof positive that a higher intelligence had to form man. Now I am open to the suggestion that a higher being guided it step by step i.e. spontaneous generation of life from molecules and then evolution over billions of years but I am closed to the idea that it could have happened on its own without divine intervention. I think the actuarials bear that out.
It's a very good post, Shirina and a good defense of spontaneous appearance of life even if the argument is that it did occur over billions of years.
I can't trace the debate down on YouTube because I have watched so many o them of late, but I did recall one statement: that a certain number, something like 1 in 10 to the 50th power or something--such a number reaches a threshold, oh yes now I remember the debate; it was between Lenny Esposito vs Richard Carrier. Anyway the statement was that a number reaches a certain threshold and beyond that mathematicians determine that such a chance becomes an impossibility.
Now taking my analogy of the aircraft carrier, those parts could be thrown up in the air from now to infinity and the math calculations determine that those parts would never come together as a fully-formed aircraft carrier. Some scientists (whether they are creationists or non-biased, I don't now) have determined that a fully formed human body, with all of the billions of complex functions it performs on a daily basis, coming into existence as a result of spontaneous generation stretches beyond that number applied to the aircraft carrier; in other words, where the aircraft carrier might be 1 in 10 to the 100th power, a impossibility according to actuarialists, the number applied to a human body is even higher, maybe 1 in 10 to the 120th power. Both are impossibilities, but the human body is a greater impossibility than the aircraft carrier.
That's the point I was trying to make with my analogy. From my point of view (and others) the odds of a human body evolving from a single atom combining with another atom to form a molecule and then to keep building on top of each other, forming through quadrillions of complex combinations are so remote that we can't even write such a number out; I think one scientist said that such a number would be higher than all the atoms in the universe by his calculations. For me that is proof positive that a higher intelligence had to form man. Now I am open to the suggestion that a higher being guided it step by step i.e. spontaneous generation of life from molecules and then evolution over billions of years but I am closed to the idea that it could have happened on its own without divine intervention. I think the actuarials bear that out.
Oh, and I'm a deist, not a theist.
Ah, but again, where are these numbers coming from? How can -anyone- know what the odds are of 1,000,000 aircraft carrier parts (actually there are just over a billion parts to an aircraft carrier) being thrown up in the air and falling back to earth as a fully formed ship? To me, it's just pulling big numbers out of a hat to justify divine intervention.
PLUS - another one of my bubble-popping needles involves the fact that you're comparing an inanimate object to an organic one. Aircraft carriers do not reproduce themselves which means they cannot evolve. Nor are aircraft carriers adaptable to their environments and they are not under environmental pressure to survive. They cannot be the beneficiary of a random mutation that significantly alters its progeny.
An aircraft carrier will always be an aircraft carrier - and not one single bolt or screw on that ship can change unless a builder directly changes it. Ergo, an aircraft carrier cannot naturalistically evolve.
Well... of course organic beings can, and because they reproduce offspring, each successive generation CAN be slightly different than the preceding one. After all, you have half your mother's and half your father's DNA, but it's not as if your right side is identical to your father and your left side is identical to your mother (wow, what monstrosities we would be!). No, you are uniquely different in all ways from either of your parents.
But really, the bottom line for me is that in an infinite universe, that threshold of mathematical impossibility is rendered moot. If the universe has an infinite number of chances to create human life, then human life becomes a certainty. In fact, the -only- way an infinite universe wouldn't eventually spawn a planet with that "magical" aircraft carrier is if most of the parts were absent.
However, evolution doesn't work that way. Instead, would be like throwing 1,000,000 parts into the air, but only 2 parts join up together. That works. So the next time, 999,998 parts are thrown into the air, keeping the two parts that work joined together. Perhaps the second time, 100 parts land where they're supposed to. Next time, 999,898 parts fly into the air and 500 land where they need to. So the next attempt, only 999,498 parts are tossed into the air ... etc. etc. until all 1,000,000 parts form the carrier. In other words, each attempt doesn't reset the puzzle, so to speak. Again, this is why your analogy works better to defeat arguments that humans were created fully formed because proponents of that view seem to think that all of the atoms in the human body had to fall into place at the same time to (presto!) form a full human instantaneously.
And finally, though not to belabor the point, but there is far less reason to believe in some kind of "magic" being the cause of life because there is no precedent for it. Even if the Creator was divine, the only way it could create humans - thus circumventing the impossible - is to use some kind of magic.
Magic as an explanation doesn't tell us anything except, well ... it's magical. It's an unknown as is the entity using it. It reminds me of my mother sometimes. I'll ask her, "Hey mom, do you know where the TV remote is?" And she'll respond absently, "It's over there somewhere," and she'll vaguely point in some general direction.
Well... "over there somewhere" tells me virtually nothing. Where, exactly is "over there?" Sure, I have a general direction, but does she mean it's on the kitchen table? Or is it lying in an alley somewhere in Des Moines, Iowa? Or worse, on another planet 64,000 light years away (but still in the same general direction where my mother pointed).
Who knows? All we can do is use our heads and eliminate the most unlikely answers first. Thus, despite how much we still do not know about the origin of life, a transcendent being using magic is still by far the most unlikely of all explanations.
Oh, and my bad about calling you a theist instead of a deist ... I always get them mixed up.
Again, you present excellent arguments, Shirina. The numbers I cannot give you references to, just the detail that after a certain point a number is so high that for math experts it enters the realm of impossibility even though the theory says that after so many chances something should randomly come together. Also, the chances are greater of a molecular bond breaking after coming together in the right sequence than of it staying together. We're talking about quadrillions of these molecules finding their right partners and bonding. Think of the likelihood of you finding your perfect soulmate out in the 7 billion people on this planet and then doing it over and over and over in an infinite number of lifetimes. A bad analogy perhaps given the scientific aspects involved, but I just don't see any possibility of this happening on its own.
The numbers I cannot give you references to, just the detail that after a certain point a number is so high that for math experts it enters the realm of impossibility even though the theory says that after so many chances something should randomly come together.
However, the analogy fails in the first place because evolutionary theory applies to biological organisms -- its very mechanism cannot operate on inorganic objects. There is zero possibility of raw materials (or even parts) self-assembling into a toaster or whatever regardless of how much time is involved, because there is no natural selection involved whatsoever. Not to mention that the same applies to a sack of severed body parts, because evolution operates at the genetic level, not the macro level. A chopped up human is no longer a human, but a sack of organic substances. In fact, evolution doesn't explain how nonliving things become living, only how living things evolve. So even a chopped up human wouldn't work either, as that human would be dead.
Finally, evolution does not say that things "randomly" come together, so the analogy fails on that level also. What it actually SAYS is that some mutations are beneficial and are preserved in the genome. What is beneficial over time is far from random, it is a matter of an organism become more and more fit to its environment (and hopefully faster than the environment changes). Evolution is not a game of chance, it is an emergent property of survival itself. That which survives is selected for.
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Not again???!!!
