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To: SampleMan
Sample, you need to check your improbability again. The problem is that you have already picked the finishing point, and then demanded that it occur naturally. Take a penny, flip it 32 times. Before you do that, choose your outcome among the 4+ billion possibilities. Odds are you lose, right? This is your arch or your bolt, you've picked the outcome before you started so the odds are against you.

Now flip it 32 times again for evolution. We want an outcome, any outcome. We don't care what it is. We get an outcome. Now what are the odds that we now have that outcome? Well, it happened so it's 1:1. That outcome had just as much chance of occurring as any of the other 4 billion outcomes, and the chance we'd get an outcome is 1:1.

Trying to figure out the odds of us existing as we are is a meaningless exercise, because here we are. If we'd come out different with three eyes and a snorkel, you'd be trying to figure out the odds of us coming out that way. Or the odds of us coming out the zillions of different ways that may have been possible for life.

139 posted on 09/11/2009 6:56:46 AM PDT by antiRepublicrat
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To: antiRepublicrat
Trying to figure out the odds of us existing as we are is a meaningless exercise, because here we are. If we'd come out different with three eyes and a snorkel, you'd be trying to figure out the odds of us coming out that way. Or the odds of us coming out the zillions of different ways that may have been possible for life.

I fully understand, but you've mistaken what my point is. Take what you've said here and look at it from the opposite perspective. That is in effect my point. If you are willing to got down that path without question, then there is nothing that cannot be so explained. There is no number of times that the penny can land face up and not be called a natural occurance.

Indeed, I could make a statistical calculation of probability that might show a one in a billion chance of occurance within the entire known universe, during the universes entire life, yet it IS POSSIBLE and all the proof that is required is that its in front of you. And if it happens again within 5 minutes, that too is possible.

You state that my problem is that I've started at the end with a known product. Fair enough, I get that argument. My point is that you have started at the end with a "known" process which can never be mathmatically eliminated. If I argued that the pyramids were natural occurances using the same logic, people would laugh at me.

Do you at least concur that using an assumption simply because it can never be statistically eliminated is a trap of its own? Because that is my point.

147 posted on 09/11/2009 8:02:18 AM PDT by SampleMan (Socialism enslaves you & kills your soul.)
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