Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
Just Right
By Dr. Charles A. Coats of the First Avenue Christian Assembly in Chilliwack, B.C. dredges up that hoary old apologist's argument, The Argument From Probability, and does his darndest to make it fly.
[link] The number of electrons in our universe must be fine-tuned to better than one part in 1,038. That's a one with 38 zeros behind it.
How precise is this? Well, imagine covering the entire continent of North America with dimes. Now make the stack go as high as the moon, 239,000 miles away. (As a comparison, the number of dimes it would take to pay the United States federal government debt would only cover one square mile a few feet deep.)
Now take this stack of dimes covering North America all the way to the moon and multiply it times 1,000,000,000 (one billion). Mark one dime in the billion stacks with a secret mark, and blindfold a friend. Send him through the billion stacks and have him randomly pick one dime.
More below the fold...
The chances that he will accidentally pick the marked dime is one chance in 1,038.
Faced with having to play Russian Roulette with those kinds of odds stacked against them has caused astrophysicists globally to jettison mere chance as an explanation, and turn to some form of belief in a Designer."
Horse manure. All this shows is that even astrophysicists can be complete idiots when it comes to superstition and religious mania.
Try this: Grab a deck of cards - poker cards will do nicely - shuffle them thoroughly, and then begin laying them on the table one at a time in a row.
You will begin to see a series of cards, one after another. The probability of that first card appearing first is 1 in 52, or 1/52. the probability of that exact second card appearing is 1/52 x 1/51. The third card's probability of appearing third in the sequence is 1/52 x 1/51 x 1/50! And so on - until you reach the last card in the 52-card deck.
Wow!
Now, the probability of producing the exact 52-card sequence is:
1/52 x 1/51 x 1/50 x 1/49 x 1/48 x 1/47 - (etc., etc.) - x 1/4 x 1/3 x 1/2 x 1/1
This can also be expressed as 1.2398E-68 in scientific notation, which simply means "1.2398 with the decimal place shifted left 68 places". Let's write the whole darned thing out:
0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000012398
Huh?!? That number is so vanishingly small that it is literally impossible that you just did what you did with your deck of poker cards. What you just did is trillions of times less likely then the formation of our universe through purely materialistic means.
Which just goes to show that statistics are largely meaningless when talking about a deck of cards - or a universe. We exist now. Our universe exists.
The actual probability of our universe existing is exactly 1/1 - regardless of whether or not starry-eyed religious astrophysicists and small-town pastors want to admit it.
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Uh...I think you'd better
Uh...I think you'd better do your homework. The point the author was making was not that any combination of cards would suffice, but that an exact set had to be in place a priori. Would you bet your life that you could prescribe a PARTICULAR order of all 52 and then have them come up in exactly that order at random? One card off and you get the bullet to the head. No. You wouldn't, because you know better. Odds are something rational beings live with. You have simply not gotten the point. It left you.
Secondly, check out the astrophysicist claim. When Heinemann Prize winners make it, I'm inclined to believe them before the contributors to this page.
Finally, the precise needs of the universe are well documented (including the need for the exact number of electrons) by institutions such as MIT and Caltech.
Don't just call names and act like school-yard whiners. Do your homework.
-Sunetos
Why 10e38
This argument is completely bunk for another reason: why does it have to 10e38 electrons? It is nowhere explained, he just tries to bamboozle us with numbers.
A major shift has been occurring in our time. Astrophysicists have increasingly become men convinced of a Designer.
I wonder where he got that claim...
Heh.
A coworker asked me recently what the chances were of life developing on only our planet in this solar system. I replied, "As far as we currently know, 1/9."
He looked nonplussed.
Sad, isn't it?
Wait a second
I'm not sure what he's saying. Is he saying that, without a God, only chance can explain the fact that the universe is balanced with respect to charge?
Uh, no, sorry. Positive and negative charges are created and destroyed in pairs. All it takes is an initial condition with zero charge; the rest follows automatically.
Exactly! It's the old
Exactly! It's the old argument along the lines of, "Gosh, this puddle fits the hole in the ground exactly!"
It kills me the way these apologists say things like "jsut a small change in conditions would mean that this planet would be unsuitable for life!" - What, you mean like the other trillion trillion planets around this corner of space?
He's not even making the intelligent argument
There's an argument that goes that some numbers are particularly fine-tuned, so that for example only a narrow range of values allows atom formation. Now that argument obviously suffers from similar flaws, and has four completely different lines of response (infinite universes, wider range than Fred Hoyle thinks, alternatives to atoms, and unknown probability distribution). But unlike Coats' argument, that one is not inherently dumb.
Hmmm..
Brent, so let me get this straight(no pun intended)... there is no cosmic designer, but there might be a cosmic dealer? I'm wondering what religious symbols to adopt for this new religion, and can I worship at the casino boat only minutes from my house?
- Matt
p.s. Does this make you a messiah, and if so, may I be one of your apostles?
Yes
Applause.
Very well done.
But virtually no astrophysicists agree with Mr. Coats's nonsense. To say that this bullshit "...has caused astrophysicists globally to jettison mere chance as an explanation, and turn to some form of belief in a Designer" is completely incorrect.
Once something HAS happened,
Once something HAS happened, figuring out the odds for it TO have happened is nuts. For instance, I might be killed by a taxi while jaywalking in St. Louis. But figuring out the odds of that happening on my first birthday in Schenectady is just silly. However, once that cab has done the deed and I'm indeed dead... Regardless of the odds, we ARE here. I guess...?
people
I agree with it.
Getting it.
Agree with what? That you would bet your life that you could PREDICT all 52 cards? Naaahhh. You wouldn't, and you know it.