Admin webmdave Posted August 6, 2007 Admin Share Posted August 6, 2007 By Dave, the WM The Christian arguments against evolutionary science habitually revolve around impressive sounding statistics that seem to indicate the extreme unlikeliness for life to have evolved. These stats are used as an apologetic against natural processes in favor of a hands-on, designing creator. You know what? They are right! No, not about the creator, about the astronomical chances against me existing. I've thought about this. My father and mother have been married just short of 50 years. They have slept in the same bed their entire married life. And they had a normal sex life. From what I understand, each time they slept together, millions of potential humans died. Only four out of all the hundreds of billions of potential human beings that left my father to find happiness in the womb of my mother survived the process. Only four out of billions. Remarkable. My embryonic genesis was marked by the tragic deaths of millions of competitors. Had the tail twitched just a tiny bit slower, some other crying infant would have been born to my parents, and I wouldn't be here today. I was just a shot in the dark, but I beat the odds. But wait, the deck was just as stacked against my parents, wasn't it? Yet, somehow they were born, whereas hundreds of billions of their competitors never made it either. Had either of my parents lost the game of "He who swims fastest gets more chromosomes," I wouldn't be here. So, the impossibly large odds against me existing just went up. But wait again! What about my grandparents? And their parents? And theirs? And on and on... Understanding how reproduction works -- that millions of potential individuals draw the straw during each act of copulation, but only one (usually) gets lucky -- makes the possibility of any of us being here seem extremely unlikely. Compounding the odds by adding in all the known preceding generations, well, the statistical chances of any of us existing is decreased to virtually nothing. In fact, it's impossible. Yet, here we are. Most people acknowledge that when it comes to making babies, it's a fairly random process. You don't know what kind of person a coupling will bring. Boy, girl, athlete, musician, smart, loving, kind, bully, sickly... no one can tell you a thing. "Will he be pretty, will he be rich, please momma please tell me. Que Sera Sera..." Life? It's random. It's chance. It's accident. And the person that the two lovers make together will be only one (usually) out of millions who will never breathe air. Millions against one. You might say that another person, against impossible odds, has won the lottery of life. The only alternative for the Christian, in his or her railing against the evil wickedness of chance, is to say that God is directing every single spermatozoa into the exact right egg. And in that case, Monty Python's “Every Sperm is Sacred” is true and the Catholic Church is right to forbid men from putting those little rubber thingies on their willies. So what is it? Is life random and accidental? Or does God surf our prostatic fluid? Are the odds against nature so high that there is no reasonable explanation for the existence and proliferation of life but belief in a magical, ultra-dimensional deity who "poofs" everything into existence? I say that life is the chance result of an incomprehensibly large number of randomly combined accidents. What do you think? http://exchristian.net/exchristian/2007/08...ave-chance.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ouroboros Posted August 6, 2007 Share Posted August 6, 2007 And add to this the chances that your mom and dad ever met. Multiply 1 in 5 billion to the chances of the the billions of tiny swimmers making it, and then multiply that for each generation back. The chances that you exist Dave are so small that I'm not sure you exist at all... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heimdall Posted August 6, 2007 Share Posted August 6, 2007 Well, for a person that possibly does not exist, you hit another one over the fence Dave! I say, Good Show! - Heimdall Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlueGiant Posted August 6, 2007 Share Posted August 6, 2007 Well if there are a finite number of people in an infinite universe then that should approximate to zero....thank you Douglas Adams. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ouroboros Posted August 6, 2007 Share Posted August 6, 2007 infintesimals have that effect on you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Legion Posted August 6, 2007 Share Posted August 6, 2007 Another thing that gets me about some arguments against a natural emergence of life is that in my experience there is no consensus or widespread agreement on how terrestrial life began. We just don’t know how it happened yet. So how can one even begin to assign statistics or probabilities to a process which remains a mystery? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grandpa Harley Posted August 7, 2007 Share Posted August 7, 2007 As I posted else where... the chances of a specific sperm meeting a specific ovum is of the same magnitude as two oxygen atoms spontaneously fusing at STP to produce a single atom of gold and some neutrons... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
freeman Posted August 7, 2007 Share Posted August 7, 2007 Definitely random and accidental! During a human male ejaculation, 300,000,000 (300 million)spermatozoa are released! And only one fertilizes an egg. To add to the accidental; According to Stanford School of Medicine, "Even after implantation, spontaneous abortions can occur. In the normal course of human reproduction, about 60 percent of embryos spontaneously abort and are simply flushed in the course of the menstrual cycle". So much for the soul being given at fertilization! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ouroboros Posted August 7, 2007 Share Posted August 7, 2007 So much for the soul being given at fertilization! That's the funny thing. The Bible say that the soul is in the blood (in Leviticus somewhere, 11:19 I think it was, but I'm to lazy to check), and the blood production doesn't start until the 3:rd week. So up to the 3:rd week, a fetus does not have a soul. (And that's the Biblical view - yet not the heretical Christians view) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
white_raven23 Posted August 7, 2007 Share Posted August 7, 2007 And a good response for the Christian trying to eat his cake and have it too....the one who will say... "God choose for your mother to become preganant with you! It's alllll about Gooooood!!" Remind them that the process of becoming pregnant to begin with relies on those stacked odds 1 : 300 mil for pregnancy to even become a possibility...."Let me get this right....your "omnipotent" being has to have odds stacked 300 million to one? Why would he have to have those odds in the first place?" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Piprus Posted August 7, 2007 Share Posted August 7, 2007 That's a great thought Dave, and a good post. We are all what we are simply because of "the way it happened", not just with us but from the beginning of it all. I've often had the thought, similar to yours, that every one of us here on this little planet are the end result of many, many screwings over millions of years. That's a lot of sperm cells spewed out. Awesome... Ah, but like WhiteRaven alluded to, the xian would say, "See! See how Gawd can manipulate random chances!" Oh, Good Grief! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
white_raven23 Posted August 8, 2007 Share Posted August 8, 2007 That's a great thought Dave, and a good post. We are all what we are simply because of "the way it happened", not just with us but from the beginning of it all. I've often had the thought, similar to yours, that every one of us here on this little planet are the end result of many, many screwings over millions of years. That's a lot of sperm cells spewed out. Awesome... Ah, but like WhiteRaven alluded to, the xian would say, "See! See how Gawd can manipulate random chances!" Oh, Good Grief! Ah....but the gig is up the moment they even admit the possibility of those "random chances" even being possible. Because they've denied the possibility of random chance where the universe in concerned. And does that make a controceptive diaphragm or IUD the modern equivalent of an iron chariot? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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