Why you should think that the Natural-Evolution of species is true

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The factors that went into the final configuration of students in the class are relevant in that they offer an explanation as to why things turned out as they did.

If students know who is sitting beside them, that is the way it turned out, and there is no probability involved. It’s like the past.

They can, however, sharing the data with others, calculate the frequency of their particular situation among the fifteen that are possible (MMM, MFM, MMF, MFF, FMM, FFM, FFF, XMM, XFM, XMF, XFF, MMX, MFX, FMX, FFX) and therefore the probability of their occurence.

I’m trying to relate this to the topic at hand. This does not change my observation that “most things are this complex; that which has contributed to the diversity of life forms so much moreso.”
 
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Aloysium said:
They can, however, sharing the data with others, calculate the frequency of their particular situation among the fifteen that are possible (MMM, MFM, MMF, MFF, FMM, FFM, FFF, XMM, XFM, XMF, XFF, MMX, MFX, FMX, FFX) and therefore the probability of their occurence. Note that it isn’t a binary situation since there are walls and aisles in a lecture theatre.
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OK, we can check the frequency of all possible combinations within the population of the test, and therefore probability of occurrence, just as we can check the number of possible poker hands within the population of the deck of cards. How do we do that with creations? Our data on other creations is rather limited.
 
Glark said:
Have you ever heard of Borel’s Law, regarding mathematical impossibility? It makes a mockery of atheistic abiogenesis.
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(Health Warning: this following is from an anti-creationist site)

Curiously, in spite of the suggestive title of the book Probability and Life, Borel has no discussion of evolution or abiogenesis-related issues. However, in Probability and Certainty, the last section of the main text is devoted to this question.

From Probability and Certainty, p. 124-126:

The Problem of Life.

In conclusion, I feel it is necessary to say a few words regarding a question that does not really come within the scope of this book, but that certain readers might nevertheless reproach me for having entirely neglected. I mean the problem of the appearance of life on our planet (and eventually on other planets in the universe) and the probability that this appearance may have been due to chance. If this problem seems to me to lie outside our subject, this is because the probability in question is too complex for us to be able to calculate its order of magnitude. It is on this point that I wish to make several explanatory comments.

When we calculated the probability of reproducing by mere chance a work of literature, in one or more volumes, we certainly observed that, if this work was printed, it must have emanated from a human brain. Now the complexity of that brain must therefore have been even richer than the particular work to which it gave birth. Is it not possible to infer that the probability that this brain may have been produced by the blind forces of chance is even slighter than the probability of the typewriting miracle?

more follows …
 
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It is obviously the same as if we asked ourselves whether we could know if it was possible actually to create a human being by combining at random a certain number of simple bodies. But this is not the way that the problem of the origin of life presents itself: it is generally held that living beings are the result of a slow process of evolution, beginning with elementary organisms, and that this process of evolution involves certain properties of living matter that prevent us from asserting that the process was accomplished in accordance with the laws of chance.

Moreover, certain of these properties of living matter also belong to inanimate matter, when it takes certain forms, such as that of crystals. It does not seem possible to apply the laws of probability calculus to the phenomenon of the formation of a crystal in a more or less supersaturated solution. At least, it would not be possible to treat this as a problem of probability without taking account of certain properties of matter, properties that facilitate the formation of crystals and that we are certainly obliged to verify. We ought, it seems to me, to consider it likely that the formation of elementary living organisms, and the evolution of those organisms, are also governed by elementary properties of matter that we do not understand perfectly but whose existence we ought nevertheless admit.

Similar observations could be made regarding possible attempts to apply the probability calculus to cosmogonical problems. In this field, too, it does not seem that the conclusions we have could really be of great assistance.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/borelfaq.html
 
Plus the final comment:

… probability estimates that ignore the non-random elements predetermined by physics and chemistry are meaningless.

I don’t think some on this forum ignore such elements. It’s just that they don’t understand them. In all my years on Christian forums I have never seen so many posts by so many people that are simply ignorant of the very subject about which they are railing.

It’s part amusing (some of the posts just crack me up - real Doonesbury stuff) and part depressing.
 
Glark said:
I took a space shuttle, worked backards and came to the conclusion it was the result of intelligent design. Where did I go wrong?
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Nowhere. You know how space shuttles are made, at least in a general sense. You can read about their construction, the materials used, the people involved. There are pictures and documents and PBS specials on the subject. Do you have any comparable evidence for the creation of Earth? If someone asked you to demonstrate the shuttle was designed would you use metaphors about uncaused causes or would you show them wikipedia?

In determining that the shuttle was intelligently designed did you determine if it was made by man or God, or some other entity? How did you determine that?
 
PickyPicky said:
But I think you miss the point.
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I think they do too. The point was that each person was encouraged to turn to the person actually sitting beside them and inform that person that they had a fifty per cent chance of being male. Hence the lively discussion!
Glark said:
Have you ever heard of Borel’s Law, regarding mathematical impossibility? It makes a mockery of atheistic abiogenesis.
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Borel’s Law is a statement of mathematic probability that in no sense makes a mockery of abiogenesis. The “law” often attributed to Borel by Creationists is that if something is very unlikely it is impossible, which is absurd, unmathematical, illogical, nothing to do with Borel, and entirely typical of the kind of argument used by Creationists to bamboozle themselves with spurious arguments from authority.

There is another law, much more rationally based although less obviously directly mathematical, that the more improbable an event is calculated to be, the more likely it is to occur. As the probability tends to zero, so the actual occurrence becomes almost inevitable. This explains why people whose car is hit by a meteorite are so seldom surprised. “Typical”, they say, “this sort of thing is always happening to me.”
 
Hugh_Farey said:
As the probability tends to zero, so the actual occurrence becomes almost inevitable.
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As the divisor approaches infinity, the quotient approaches zero.
The divisor usually does not increase nor does it become increasingly equal to the dividend as we approach the time of the event.
It remains what it is, as does the probability of the event occurring

That is, until it happens.
Creation is like that - from zero, we have one.

We are spiritual beings having a material body, all one unity - the person. We are part of time and at the same time transcend it, existing within a finite but boundless “now”. As such we have a fixed past tied to our decisions, a future of possibilities and a present where we participate in the bringing of our eternal selves into existence through our actions. As an event comes into being within its present moment, it is actualized, transformed from a potential to a fact, unchangeable in eternity as something that happened “now”.
 
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Hugh_Farey said:
I think they do too. The point was that each person was encouraged to turn to the person actually sitting beside them and inform that person that they had a fifty per cent chance of being male. Hence the lively discussion!
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Indeed. And hence, I thought, the occasional violence!
Hugh_Farey said:
There is another law, much more rationally based although less obviously directly mathematical, that the more improbable an event is calculated to be, the more likely it is to occur. As the probability tends to zero, so the actual occurrence becomes almost inevitable. This explains why people whose car is hit by a meteorite are so seldom surprised. “Typical”, they say, “this sort of thing is always happening to me.”
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Yep, it’s a development of Murphy’s Law. If a thing can go wrong, it will; and not only that but if it can’t it is almost certain.
 
Except Rossum isn’t a theistic evolutionist. Woops.
 
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Hugh_Farey said:
. Borel’s Law is a statement of mathematic probability that in no sense makes a mockery of abiogenesis.
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I understand that low probability doesn’t imply impossibility. My point is that folks who believe natural abiogenesis is possible choose to ignore how vanishingly unlikely such an event is, thus demonstrating how unscientific their thinking is. It’s a classical case of believing what you want to believe, regardless of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Besides, one doesn’t need Borel’s Law to make of mockery of natural abiogenesis - the Law of Common Sense will do the trick.
spurious arguments from authority.
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One often hears that microbe-man evolution is accepted by the vast majority of the scientific community. This is a spuriuos argument from authority. It’s a bit like relying on a bunch of Communists to decide the question of God’s existence.
 
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poche said:
don’t see a conflict between the biblical narrative and the theory of evolution
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Genesis 2:7 says God took some dirt (ie, inanimate matter) and fashioned it into something “living” - a man, in fact, whom He called “Adam”. This seems to be completely at odds with theistic evolution, which claims Adam was the offsping of a pre-existing, living being.

Jesus said Adam and Eve existed at “the beginning of creation” (Matt 10:6), but theistic evolution says humans didn’t exist until BILLIONS of years AFTER creation. Both can’t be right.
 
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I agree that calculating the probability of a living organism coming into existence is so speculative as to be almost pointless. But it’s madness to think that something as functionaly complex as a living cell can arise by chance. The capacity of the human mind for self-deception shouldn’t be underestimated.

Common sense suggests that the chances of discovering a chest full of gold buried under one’s house is too miniscule to be taken seriously, but if that’s what one wants to believe, then one will believe it.
 
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Glark said:
But it’s madness to think that something as functionaly complex as a living cell can arise by chance.
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Nobody thinks that. Living cells arose initially from chemistry, which is not chance, and then changed by a combination of random mutations and natural selection. Natural selection is not a chance process, so the overall process is not a chance process either. Natural selection actively removes deleterious mutations from a population and actively spreads copies of beneficial mutations. Neither of those processes is chance.

rossum
 
Glark said:
My point is that folks who believe natural abiogenesis is possible choose to ignore how vanishingly unlikely such an event is, thus demonstrating how unscientific their thinking is.
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I think that’s mistaken. Scientists studying abiogenesis do not ignore its probability, they concentrate on it. I do not think any scientific consensus can be said to have been achieved, but it is a continual topic of discussion. It may have occurred once or millions of times across the universe, and it may have occurred more than once on earth. These possibilities are being investigated. That’s what scientists do.

Creationists, of course, begin with the assumption that life in the universe is unique to the earth began once only by direct divine fiat, and could not have happened otherwise. They should boldly acknowledge that this means there was zero chance of abiogenesis occurring by any other means. Unfortunately, they rarely have the courage of their convictions and have to invent all sorts of spurious numbers to try to demonstrate that it was “vanishingly unlikely” in order to fool real scientists into accepting their case. It doesn’t work, and we don’t.
Glark said:
One often hears that microbe-man evolution is accepted by the vast majority of the scientific community. This is a spuriuos argument from authority. It’s a bit like relying on a bunch of Communists to decide the question of God’s existence.
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Exactly the opposite. Argument from consensus is the opposite of argument from authority. It is like relying on a bunch of scientists to decide the question of the existence of science. Creationists, who argue solely from authority, and each consider that they ‘know’ what the ‘truth’ is, generally ignoring the possibility that anybody else’s truth might be more valid than theirs, invariably misunderstand the value of consensus. Science is not a declaration of ‘truth’, or ‘proof’ of anything. It is a comprehensive, coherent explanation for observations. Its various models, such as atomic theory, or the theory of relativity, or the theory of evolution, all work together to provide this explanation, and are, ultimately, accepted or rejected, by consensus. Where different explanations of specific phenomena appear to contradict, then it is an article of scientific faith that sufficient further investigation will enable them to be reconciled eventually, using rational methods, or that one of them is wrong.
 
Abiogenesis isn’t subject to natural selection. Which law of chemistry allows inanimate matter to arrange itself into DNA and complex, interdependent systems?
 
Glark said:
Common sense suggests that the chances of discovering a chest full of gold buried under one’s house is too miniscule to be taken seriously, but if that’s what one wants to believe, then one will believe it.
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Common sense suggests that the chances of of God saying “let there be fruit-trees” before he created the sun is too miniscule to be taken seriously, but if that’s what one wants to believe, then one will believe it.
 
Hugh_Farey said:
All of them. Molecular theory is entirely about exactly that.
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A theory is not a law. Scientists can dream up all manner of theories about how life arose from mud, but that doesn’t mean anything; it’s just talk.
 
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