Limits of Probability after the fact…

Do not feel compelled to click on my ad above. – BUM

"No, not a limit of imagination. A probability argument, i.e.:

It is more likely with the information coded in life and the process of things required to happen to spawn life, than it was purposed rather than it was accidental.

It’s a flat probability argument…[StealthPudge18]"

Stealth, when you have the time acquire a standard deck of playing cards. Shuffle them to your heart’s desire, and make sure they’re good and mixed up.

Then, come on here, and type out each card’s suit and rank in order.

Once you’ve posted that, I’m going to counter with the very same argument, ready?

That’s impossible! You can’t have those cards in that order! The odds of all 52 cards in that deck being in that exact order are 1 in 8.06 times 10^67 (that’s 67 decimal places!!!). You CAN’T have the cards in that order…it’s too much of a miracle.

Shuffle it again, read them off again, it’s another miracle! Go ahead and produce another miracle with your very own hands! You want some really sick numbers? try shuffling 3 or 4 decks together…

Perhaps you see the limits of taking a probability of a situation after the fact?

StealthPudge18

December 4, 2005

A poor example. Cards don’t code for anything, and they don’t carry any interrelated information. You’re assuming that the system is both interrelated and random. Neither of those is necessarily the case. As an ID’er I don’t have to posit that it is one way a priori, I am only making a judgement based on the information coded, and the series of coincidences it would take to get that.

52 cards (or 104, 156 or 208) is nothing like trying to get one set of cards falling for a probability. So, instead, let’s make it more realistic, shall we? I will give you an order in which my random shuffle of the deck MUST come out with in order for life to exist on earth. Then I will give you a bunch of time to make that EXACT order come out. Only with millions of cards.

I’ll give you billions of years to make it come out in the exact order. According to your logic, it would HAVE to come out that way sooner or later, right?

“According to your logic, it would HAVE to come out that way sooner or later, right? StealthPudge18” Are you asking me if I think that life evolving was inevitable? If you are, then no, I don’t really see any reason why life would necessarily arise.

life didn’t have to come about, but under certain conditions it can come about, those conditions obtained, and so it did. There’s a fine line between living and non-living, they are just conceptual categories, think of viruses, think of fire. There a definite chain of complexity going all the way down and no definite break between life and non-life.

besides, your argument ‘against the odds’ for evolution has been practically proven wrong by tests on mendelian genetics with fruit flys (who have such short life spans) mutations do occur and spread through the progeny, thus why shouldn’t all life be explained that way? Think of the potential eternity which preceded us as well, anything could have happened infinite times

December 5, 2005

Bum, by my saying you HAVE to assume it, I mean: Since it did happen, and we are obviously here, that your logic must ultimately end with it actually happening. The cosmic lottery hit our exact set of numbers. We know the way this ended up–we’re here. There are great many things we can deduce from this fact, but no matter what, we must at the end posit that we do exist.