The Evolution of Life, Probability Considerations and Common Sense-Part 5

The Evolution of Life, Probability Considerations and Common Sense – Part Five

Faith Beyond Reason

Dr. Harry Rimmer (SC.D., D.D.) was allegedly one of only 12 men around 1940 capable of understanding Einstein’s theory of relativity. He was precisely correct when he wrote the following: “I fail to see how the natural man can scoff at the faith of a Christian who believes in one miracle of creation, when the unbeliever accepts multiplied millions of miracles to justify his violation of every known law of biology and every evidence of paleontology, and to cling to the exploded myth of evolution.”^[1]

To this point in our discussion we have cited mostly creation scientists or theists. Evolu­tionists may respond that creationists have a bias to uphold and thus our methodology or conclusions are suspect. So next will continue and amplify our probability argument exclu­sively from the writings of evolutionists.

The esteemed late Carl Sagan and other prominent scientists have estimated the chance of man evolving at roughly 1 chance in 10^{2,000,000,000}.^[2] This is a figure with two billion zeros after it and would require about 2,000 books to write out. This number is so infinitely small it is not even conceivable. So, for argument’s sake, let’s take an infinitely more favor­able view toward the chance that evolution might occur.

What if the chances are only 1 in 10¹⁰⁰⁰ the figure that a prestigious symposium of evolutionary scientists used computers to arrive at? This figure involved only a mechanism necessary to abiogenesis and not the evolution of actual primitive life. Regardless, this figure is also infinitely above Borél’s single law of chance—(1 chance in 10⁵⁰)—beyond which, put simply, events never occur.^[3]

On April 25 and 26, 1962, a scientific symposium was held at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in which some of the most distin­guished evolutionist scientists were gathered.

At the beginning of this Symposium, which was entitled, “Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution,” the Chairman, Sir Peter Medawar of the National Institute for Medical Research in London, England, stated the reasons why they had gathered:

… the immediate cause of this conference is a pretty widespread sense of dissatisfaction about what has come to be thought of as the accepted evolutionary theory in the English-speaking world, the so-called neo-Darwinian Theory…. These objections to current neo-Darwinian theory are very widely held among biologists generally; and we must on no account, I think, make light of them. The very fact that we are having this conference is evidence that we are not making light of them.^[4]

In his paper, “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory,” Dr. Murray Eden, Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, emphasized the following: “It is our contention that if “random” [chance] is given a serious and crucial interpretation from a probabilistic point of view, the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws, physical, chemical and biological.”^[5]

In “Algorithms and the Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution” Marcel P. Schutzenberger of the University of Paris, France, calculated the probability of evolution based on mutation and natural selection. Like many other noted scientists, he concluded that it was “not con­ceivable” because the probability of a chance process accomplishing this is zero:

… there is no chance (<10-¹⁰⁰⁰) to see this mechanism appear spontaneously and, if it did, even less for it to remain…. Thus, to conclude, we believe there is a considerable gap in the neo-Darwinian Theory of evolution, and we believe this gap to be of such a nature that it cannot be bridged within the current conception of biology.^[6]

Evolutionary scientists have called just 1 chance in 10¹⁵ “a virtual impossibility.”^[7] So, how can they believe in something that has less than 1 chance in 10¹⁰⁰⁰? After all, how small is one chance in 10¹⁰⁰⁰? It’s incredibly small—1 chance in 10¹² is only one chance in a trillion.

We can further gauge the size of 1 in 10¹⁰⁰⁰ (a figure with a thousand zeros) by consider­ing the sample figure 10¹⁷¹. How large is this figure? First, consider that the number of atoms in the period at the end of this sentence is approximately 3,000 trillion. Now, in 10¹⁷¹ years an amoeba could actually transport all the atoms, one at a time, in six hundred thou­sand, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion universes, each universe the size of ours, from one end of the universe to the other (assuming a distance of 30 billion light years) going at the dismally slow traveling speed of 1 inch every 15 billion years.^[8] The amoeba could do all this in 10¹⁷¹ years. Yet this figure of one chance in 10¹⁷¹, quite literally, cannot even scratch the surface of one chance in 10¹⁰⁰⁰—the “chance” that a certain mechanism necessary to the beginning of life might supposedly evolve. Again, who can believe in something whose odds are 1 “chance” in 10¹⁰⁰⁰ to 1 “chance” in 10^{2,000,000,000} or even far beyond this? As we saw previously, Yale University physicist Harold Morowitz once calculated the odds of a single bacteria reassembling its components after being superheated to break down its chemicals into their basic building blocks at 1 chance in 10^{100,000,000,000}.^[9] And, in fact, when you add up all the different odds for all the millions of miracles necessary for evolution, the actual “chances” that life could evolve probably couldn’t even be adequately expressed mathematically.

Please note that in exponential notation, every time we add a single number in the exponent, we multiply the number itself by a factor of ten. Thus, one chance in 10¹⁷² is ten times larger than one chance in 10¹⁷¹. One chance in 10¹⁷⁷ is one million times larger than one chance in 10¹⁷¹. And one chance in 10¹⁸³ is one trillion times larger than one chance in 10¹⁷¹. So where do you think we end up with odds like one chance in 10^{100,000,000,000}? In fact, the dimensions of the entire known universe can be packed full by 10⁵⁰ planets—but the odds of probability theory indicate that not on even a single planet would evolution ever occur.^[10]

Notes

1. ↑ Harry Rimmer, The Magnificence of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1943), p. 116
2. ↑ Carl Sagan, F. H. C. Crick, L. M. Muchin in Carl Sagan, ed., Communication With Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 45-46.
3. ↑ Emile Borél, Probabilities and Life (New York: Dover, 1962), Chs. 1 and 3; Borél’s cosmic limit of 10²⁰⁰ changes nothing.
4. ↑ Paul S. Moorehead, Martin M. Kaplan (eds.), Mathematical Challenges to the NeoDarwinist Interpretation of Evolution, Wistar Institute Symposium Monograph Num­ber 5 (Philadelphia, PA: The Wistar Institute Press, 1967), p. xi, third emphasis in origi­nal.
5. ↑ Murray Eden, “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinism Evolution as a Scientific Theory” in ibid., 109.
6. ↑ Marcel P. Schutzenberger, “Algorithms and the Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution” in Moorehead and Kaplan, eds., 75; cf., Bird, I, 79-80; for reasons why natural selection would not modify randomness and decrease these probabilities, see Bird, I, 158-165.
7. ↑ J. Allen Hynek, Jacque Vallee, The Edge of Reality (Chicago, IL: Henry Regenery, 1975), p. 157.
8. ↑ Coppedge, Evolution, pp., 118-120.
9. ↑ Cited in Eastman, Missler, The Creator Beyond Time and Space, p. 61.
10. ↑ cf., Frank B. Salisbury, “Natural Selection and the Complexity of the Gene,” Nature, Vol. 24, October 25, 1969, pp. 342-343 and James Coppedge, Director Center for Prob­ability Research and Biology, North Ridge, California, personal conversation; cf., Coppedge, Evolution: Possible or Impossible?, passim.

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