Amongst the many arguments for and against creation the probability arguments stands out. It goes something like this:
“the improbability of generating the necessary proteins by chance—or the genetic information to produce them—to balloon beyond comprehension. ... The odds of getting even one functional protein of modest length (150 amino acids) by chance from a prebioitc soup is no better than 1 chance in 10164.” Meyer continues, “Another way to say that is the probability of finding a functional protein by chance alone is a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion times smaller than the odds of finding a single specific particle among all the particles in the universe.”
The evidence for the probability of origin of life arising from Darwin’s “warm little pond” seems to have vanished beyond the realm of any possibility—regardless of any early Earth scenario.
I really, really want to put it in the grave because i think its an embaressment to the theists and thinking humans in general; Its right up there with 'noahs ark has been found' and 'humans have less chromosomes than monkeys', but for some reason people dont see through it.
One of the reasons i hate it so much is that the people who quote it does not have any idea what the statement they make really say. The key is the use of the word 'chance', 'assembled at random', etc. – notice that this is included by all the scientists who actually calculate the probabilities, but omitted by all creationist.
Thats for a reason: the probability is strictly true, but it only cover one very limited model for how proteines are assembled (at random), and does not consider other paths; essentially it leave out the fact that the world is governed by physical laws.
This point may seem technical, and i am quite sure that a lot think that it does not matter much, if the propability is 10^-3000 there is a rather large room for error. The thing is that it is not a trivial point and it invalidate the entire calculation before the question has been resolved. I will demonstrate that by a simple example:
Yesterday i heard a noise from the kitchen. I ran out and saw a large number of rice on the floor, and my girlfriend was standing with a half-empty bag of rice. There are two options: Either she spilled the rice, ie it landed on the floor 'on random', or she carefully designed the configuration of the rice. Lets try to use creationist math to determine if there is 'intelligent' (mischiveous) design involved:
The first thing we have to do is to ignore physical laws, causal history and all that junk (thats what we do with proteines, remember?) so in this case we ignore gravity. Then, just as with proteines, we have to specify our 'configuration space'. When we have ignored gravity, the rice can be anywhere in the room (litterally!).
A grain of rice is at most 3 mm high. The room is 3 m. high. That mean that a grain of rice can be placed (vertically) in about 3m / 3mm = 1000 = 10^3 places. Lets say there is 100 grains of rice on the floor, then the probability to see all 100 lying on the floor is 10^-300. Want lower probability? just add rice or (the horror!) she may have dropped the rice outdoors..
Holy fucking shit batman! 10^-300'th must rule out the 'random' hypothesis, surely my girlfriend must have painstakingly placed the grains of rice on the floor one by one, surely i must scold her for calling it an accident and blaming 'random'!
But i am wrong. The real probabillity, when you do not ignore physical laws and causal history is 1, because rice automatically fall to the floor because of gravity. Thats why we cant ignore stuff like gravity, thats why nature has to enter into our equations unless there are extremely good arguments why it can be left out.
My example might sound artificial, but how about two beaches where on one the rocks are small and on the other the rocks are very large? ripples in the sand? Cloud formation? The earths magnetic field? Neutron stars? All of these are examples that the naive 'lets ignore physics'-calculations will tell us must be explicitly designed and they are wrong. Nature trivially do this because of some mechanisms that are hard to pin-point a-priori and have to enter into the calculation.
Thats why the 'probability' arguments are so extremely stupid. The person is REALLY arguing that, as in the case of rice, you can just ignore physics, that the system does not exhibit criticallity or complex behaviour and behave more like a cloud of gas at high temperature. They are making that statement without even knowing what enviroment we are discussing, what temperatures the system is at, or what it contain; its just a bunch of unfounded assumptions that the person dont even KNOW they should test or argue for.
ps.
Dont try to debunk this post by posting some stuff from an article by a scientist you have not read which just restate the propabilities. My objection is that either the calculation should take into account physical laws, or strong arguments should be made why they can safely be left out. READ the damn thing, THEN answer those points. If you want to convince me that these objections does not matter, make sure the same argument does not give you a probability of 10^-300 in the 'rice'-example.
pps.
Bonus question: Explain why the configuration of rice on the floor does not exhibit 'complex specified information' or whatever Dembski call his drivel these days.