The creation lottery

Paralipomenon

Now most creationists use the argument that life just HAD to be created because it is so complex. After all, the chance of it just happening is so remote that it negates any chance of just happening.

Using that logic however, the lottery is impossible. The odds of a single individual winning are so astronomically high, that it would be easy to conclude that it is impossible to win. But most weeks someone does win. Sometimes it takes a few weeks, but eventually someone will win.

To date, I don't think anyone has taken a look at their winning ticket and say "The odds of me winning are too high, this ticket must be false" and tearing it up.

Okay, okay, I can hear the creationist minds starting to get into gear here already mentally drafting their posts on how to school me over. The odds of winning a lottery are just mere millions. MILLIONS! That doesn't even take into account that there are millions of people buying tickets, some of them buying multiple tickets. When you look it from the lottery's point of view and ask the question "will someone win the lottery tonight?" The odds get alot better, I'd hazard to guess about one in ten.

But life? Do I know, or even fathom how complex life is? This is no mere biological lottery. The raw chance of life just happening is so much more remote. Then you have to factor in multiple types of life, and them working together and ecological balance. Wow, that just makes me want to drop to my knees and look to the heavens and give thanks to a great and mighty creator.

Oh wait, what's that I see up there?

Stars.

Hmmm, they're pretty. Nice of God to create those.

In fact alot of what we see as stars are actually galaxies, that is clusters of millions of stars, and then there's even super clusters that are clusters of galaxies. And to think that God is so powerful that he can remember the name for each one.

Ah that warm and fuzzy feeling washing over me of a kind benevolent creator that knows all this information and still knows me individually. I feel at ease with completely missing the point of a recent astronomical think tank took a look at the given universe and roughly calculated how many stars they felt they would be able to accurately catalog if they had the proper resources.

The figure?

70 sextillion.

If that number doesn't sound right I'll tell you, it's a 7 followed by 22 zeros. For a more visually impacting display, here it is:

70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

That's alot of names. If my faith wasn't strong enough I would even hazard to think that each of those stars can support multiple planets and each of those planets represents one chance for life to form.

Now since God has no beginning or end, that means that time is infinite so that means that in an infinite period of time, if 70 sextillion solar systems bought multiple tickets to the creation lottery, they would never, ever win. Even if they played forever.

My friend used the saying "Lotteries are a tax on people that are bad at math". I'd like to offer that the belief in creationism is a perfect avenue for individuals that are equally math impaired.

Qcmbr

I'd respectfully suggest that creationists are starting to avoid overstepping the mark when trying to explain what creation actually means. Most thinking christians are seeing an allegory at the beginning of the bible rather than a 6 day period prior to which only God existed.

Warlock

Someone is very well aware of the odds. Me.

California State Lottery is about 43 million to 1. The Super Lotto is about 173 million to 1. You have a better chance of winning the State, but someone WILL win.

Warlock

kid-A

There are several obvious problems with this old creationist "improbability" canard.

First, we dont know what the precise primordial conditions were on this planet when the earliest cellular lifeforms emerged. We know the planet was largely covered in liquid, but the levels of primordial elements that would be prerequisite for life such as nucleic acids that could organize in a self-replicating manner leading to larger amino acid chains, etc. are unknown.

Given large enough proportions of these primordial elements the "probability" that such molecules could organize into simple life forms may have been extraordinarily high. So, the "probability" argument holds no validity. The "odds" of life forms emerging in these early conditions may have been very low, or very high. There is no way to know.

More importantly, at the very least, astrobiologists can provide a hypothetical and logically progressive mechanism (complexity emerging from simple components) to account for primordial life emerging on the planet that goes beyond the mythos of some sky creature waving his magic wand and causing life to appear in one fell swoop, in some enchanted "garden"......

The creationist is left with nothing except an ancient text written by wandering, barbaric and ignorant desert nomads thousands of years ago upon which to base their "theories".

I wonder, can a creationist calculate the "probability" that some omnipotent "god", simply "always" existed, and one day decided to create a universe populated with disease-prone, poorly "designed" hominids that would exist for the sole purpose of gratifying his infinite ego? Um....yeah.......THAT makes sense! .....

Finally, the creationist arguments "design clause" is its own fatal flaw: if all complex life forms require a designer, than obviously, by logical extension, "god" would require a designer and creator.....and so on......and so on.....and so on............

LtCmd.Lore

Absolutely brilliant Paralipomenon.

I heard it put another way: If someone told you that last week a single black woman named Gloria with triplets won the lottery. You probably wouldn't say: "Yeah right, the odds of a someone winning the lottery are very slim, and you're telling me that a single black woman named Gloria with triplets won the lottery entirely by chance? The odds of that happening without intervention are ridiculous. It must have been rigged."

But if someone told you that NEXT week a single black woman named Gloria with triplets is GOING TO win the lottery. Then your sceptisism would be justified.

Abiogenesis doesn't predict the future, it explains the past.

Qcmbr

What I'm interested in is not the odds but the very simple questions.

Can life start under any circumstances without prior intelligence? Must chaos be ordered or does it self-organise sufficiently to engender carbon based life? Is God the eventual end result of evolution or is evolution the end of God or is evolution the effect of the causer?

And then the more complicated (and interesting) questions.

Is life actually more than mere animated organic chemistry (does it have/require a soul - the 'breath of God')? Evolutionary processes seem to produce whimsy and beauty as though an ulterior driver , more direct and powerful, than selective mutation was actually pre-selecting the direction of change rather than change itself simply being selected - is this so? Why can I appreciate (some!) art and more strangely why can I produce it? This feeling I have that I'm part of something greater than myself is it merely an evolutionary misfire, self delusion born of an inculcated worldview or is it something that we all share, a spark of knowledge we feel but can't quite grasp that argues for more than genetics?

Right now I have found great explanations for some marvellous processes but I haven't found the scientific answers to the longings and feelings that are part of me. Until science can unflatten my emotional and spiritual world I have to stick with my beliefs.

jaguarbass

I am just an observer, I dont know if we evolved or were created. But the way I think, all the circumstances to allow life would be far more complicated than random lottery numbers being picked.

IP_SEC

lol at odds. very funny about odds. I was thinking about lotto odds today as I was driving around.

odds dont mean anything.

You have just as good a chance at hitting the number the first time you play as you do the 173 millionth time you play (173 mil to 1)

You have just as good a chance to hit the right number twice in a row as you do hitting them once. (it would seem very odd to us but the math is the same)

tetrapod.sapien

the chances of this universe being exactly the way it is:

1:1

tetra

Madame Quixote

Using that logic the formation of salt crystals (and any other kind of crystal is also impossible). Oh yeah, right, god has a finger on the formation and development of every single itsy bitsy, eensey weensey, teensey tiny molecular, atomic, cellular and cosmic process in the universe, but he is also very simple, according to many biblical scholars. blah blah blah. religion is such balderdash! so is god.

The creation lottery

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