RichardSRussell (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} richardsrussell) wrote,@ 2008-02-29 01:35:00 |
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Odds against the Universe
Carl Sagan once remarked “In order to truly create an apple pie from scratch, first you must create the Universe.” Well, how hard could that be?
According to the fundies, lots harder than you’d think. This is where they get to quoting the
As we move on to the next 3 paragraphs in Williamsen’s essay, here’s a preview of coming attractions:
(1) He doesn’t know the difference between evolution (a subject in the field of biology) and cosmology (a subject in the field of astronomy).
(2) He confuses abiogenesis (rise of life from non-living matter) with evolution (development of species from already existing living species).
(3) He refers to examining things mathematically but never trots out a single number.
(4) He can’t tell the difference between atheists (a philosophical position denying the existence of gods) and scientists (an occupation dedicated to discovering facts about nature).
And here he goes:
= = = = = =
... strict evolutionary theory fails utterly when it is examined mathematically. For life to exist in the universe, every condition must be just the way it is — from the speed of light to the mass of an electron.
The slightest change would disallow life. The odds against a life-allowing universe happening are uncomputedly high.
To explain this spectacular coincidence, science postulates that there are trillions of universes — multiverses — each operating in a different manner, meaning one was bound to allow life. Is this what atheists term "verifiable" and "logical"?
= = = = = =
It’s true that there seems to be a very narrow range of physical constants that would have permitted the existence of a large, expanding Universe at all, let alone one capable of supporting intelligent life (or at least what passes for it on this planet). The details of this are quite abstruse, but you can Google “anthropic principle” if you’d like to learn more.
Remember the “God of the Gaps” arguments I discussed a couple of days ago? That’s where science has discovered some interesting phenomenon — religion never discovers these phenomena, because it long ago stopped looking — and doesn’t yet have an explanation for it. This is a gap in our knowledge. Into that gap leap the ardent religionists, getting their jeans all creamy with excited exclamations of “Aha! Aha! We told you so! Science doesn’t have all the answers. Only God could have made things work just this way. That’s what we’ve been saying all along. Now do you believe us?”.
And, as I pointed out at the time, every one of those historical gaps in our knowledge, the ones that supposedly only God could fill, has subsequently been filled with perfectly naturalistic explanations.
“But”, the fundie fanatics will claim, “this one is different. The odds against any one of those physical constants having a value that gives rise to intelligent life is very small. The chance that the entire collection has just exactly the right combination of values is so miniscule you can hardly find enuf decimal places to express it.”
OK, let’s explore the logical flaw in that statement. I’ll do so by analogy to the card game known as bridge. It involves 4 players, and the entire deck of 52 cards is dealt out so that each of the 4 players holds a hand comprising 13 cards. Each of these cards has a suit (spades, hearts, diamonds, or clubs) and a value (2 thru 10, jack, queen, king, or ace). There are many, many possible combinations of 13 cards. And, since we know exactly the conditions under which these hands are generated, we don’t have to be content with just saying “many, many combinations” — we can figure it out precisely. And we have. There are exactly 635,013,559,600 possible bridge hands. You can look it up if you’d like.
So you’re sitting at the bridge table, and they deal out all 4 hands, and you pick up your own hand and there it is: a freaking miracle! You’re holding a hand which consists of a combination of cards that has only 1 chance in 635,013,559,600 of happening by random chance.
Furthermore, after expressing your astonishment at this amazing coincidence, your 3 fellow players chime in with their own wonder stories. It turns out that each and every one of them also holds a hand that can only occur 1 time out of 635,013,559,600. That means the chance of all 4 of you holding these amazing hands simultaneously is 635,013,559,600 times 635,013,559,600 times 635,013,559,600 times 635,013,559,600 to 1 against, a number so large that I can’t run it on my computer’s calculator, so I’ll content myself with just counting decimal places and say that the odds against this astounding occurrence are 10 to the 50th power (that’s a 1 followed by 50 zeroes) to 1.
I can start boosting the amazement factor by having everybody lay down their hands and comparing them to each other, only to discover *gasp* that none of the hands includes even one card that shows up in somebody else’s hand. A little quick math will show that, in general, there’s only a 1.28% chance that any 2 bridge hands dealt at random will have no cards whatsoever in common. And yet here it’s happened not just once but 6 separate times. (Why 6 and not 4? Because there are 6 possible pairs of hands.) That’s 1.28% to the 6th power, or 0.0000000004%. Another tremendously unlikely coincidence, and one which increases the overall improbability of getting those 4 hands in the 1st place.
Shocked at this miracle, the 4 of you take pictures for posterity, then realize that you can’t very well play that hand of bridge now that you’ve all seen each other’s cards, so you reshuffle the deck, redeal, and look at your new hands only to discover — beyond all possible doubt that miracles do happen — that once again all 4 of you have triumphed over the staggeringly large odds against holding the particular unique hands that you’re now staring at.
I think you start to see how the game is played. And I don’t mean bridge. I mean what I will politely call the mind-diddling game.
Any idiot can come along after something’s happened and point out zillions of factors that had to line up just exactly so for that particular thing to have occurred in that particular way to that particular person at that particular time.
And yet, as you discover holding your hand of bridge, that sort of thing indeed happens so routinely that nobody pays a bit of attention to it at all. For there you sit, holding your miracle. And you’ll be doing it again in less than 5 minutes.
The real miracle would be if you were able to predict the exact cards you’d be holding before the hands were dealt.
So Williamsen is playing his little mind-diddling game of after-the-fact odds-making, but let’s just go along with him and say that the odds against this particular set of cosmological constants is indeed some spectacularly large number to 1. The fact remains that any spectacularly large number is effectively zero when compared to infinity. And, if there’s an infinite amount of time to work with, sooner or later every number will come up, including ours.
We just happen to live in a Universe that’s capable of supporting intelligent life. If it didn’t support intelligent life, we wouldn’t be here to wonder about it.
And, of course, Williamsen knows nothing whatever about the circumstances that give rise to these fundamental constants of nature in the 1st place. Remember how astonishing it was that none of those 4 bridge hands held a single card that appeared in any of the other 3 bridge hands? Well, it turns out that that situation is not at all unlikely. Quite the contrary, it’s guaranteed by the way in which the 4 hands were generated. They weren’t generated at random. As soon as any given card (say the ace of spades) was dealt to any given player, the odds of it going into any of the other 3 hands dropped right straight to zero.
Maybe it’s the case that all of these factors that so impress Williamsen (mass of the electron, speed of light, gravitational constant, etc.) work the same way. That is, they may not be independent of each other at all. It could be that, as soon as 1 of them is set, there remains only 1 possible value (or a narrow range of possible values) for a different one.
Since no human has ever built a Universe, how would we know? We can’t even get outside our own Universe to take a good look at it. (It’s been said that the reason the Universe is so hard to comprehend is because there’s nothing to compare it to.) This doesn’t stop people from speculating, of course, but hypothesizing is all we’re doing. We don’t know anything.
But let’s grant arguendo that Williamsen is 100% right, and that the odds are overwhelmingly against the Universe existing as we know it. That still tells us nothing whatsoever about God.
There’s one thing we can infer about God, tho, and it’s this: The odds against something as unlikely as God are so unbelievably huge that they make Universes like ours seem like everyday occurrences.
See, both sides can play the statistical mind-diddling game.
Next: What Christians would have you believe instead.
Note that I wrote “next” instead of “tomoro”. I’m not quite sure when my next posting in this series will be, since I’m headed into UW Hospital for a knee-replacement operation tomoro, and it’ll probably be awhile before I’m fully functional again.
Carl Sagan once remarked “In order to truly create an apple pie from scratch, first you must create the Universe.” Well, how hard could that be?
According to the fundies, lots harder than you’d think. This is where they get to quoting the
As we move on to the next 3 paragraphs in Williamsen’s essay, here’s a preview of coming attractions:
(1) He doesn’t know the difference between evolution (a subject in the field of biology) and cosmology (a subject in the field of astronomy).
(2) He confuses abiogenesis (rise of life from non-living matter) with evolution (development of species from already existing living species).
(3) He refers to examining things mathematically but never trots out a single number.
(4) He can’t tell the difference between atheists (a philosophical position denying the existence of gods) and scientists (an occupation dedicated to discovering facts about nature).
And here he goes:
= = = = = =
... strict evolutionary theory fails utterly when it is examined mathematically. For life to exist in the universe, every condition must be just the way it is — from the speed of light to the mass of an electron.
The slightest change would disallow life. The odds against a life-allowing universe happening are uncomputedly high.
To explain this spectacular coincidence, science postulates that there are trillions of universes — multiverses — each operating in a different manner, meaning one was bound to allow life. Is this what atheists term "verifiable" and "logical"?
= = = = = =
It’s true that there seems to be a very narrow range of physical constants that would have permitted the existence of a large, expanding Universe at all, let alone one capable of supporting intelligent life (or at least what passes for it on this planet). The details of this are quite abstruse, but you can Google “anthropic principle” if you’d like to learn more.
Remember the “God of the Gaps” arguments I discussed a couple of days ago? That’s where science has discovered some interesting phenomenon — religion never discovers these phenomena, because it long ago stopped looking — and doesn’t yet have an explanation for it. This is a gap in our knowledge. Into that gap leap the ardent religionists, getting their jeans all creamy with excited exclamations of “Aha! Aha! We told you so! Science doesn’t have all the answers. Only God could have made things work just this way. That’s what we’ve been saying all along. Now do you believe us?”.
And, as I pointed out at the time, every one of those historical gaps in our knowledge, the ones that supposedly only God could fill, has subsequently been filled with perfectly naturalistic explanations.
“But”, the fundie fanatics will claim, “this one is different. The odds against any one of those physical constants having a value that gives rise to intelligent life is very small. The chance that the entire collection has just exactly the right combination of values is so miniscule you can hardly find enuf decimal places to express it.”
OK, let’s explore the logical flaw in that statement. I’ll do so by analogy to the card game known as bridge. It involves 4 players, and the entire deck of 52 cards is dealt out so that each of the 4 players holds a hand comprising 13 cards. Each of these cards has a suit (spades, hearts, diamonds, or clubs) and a value (2 thru 10, jack, queen, king, or ace). There are many, many possible combinations of 13 cards. And, since we know exactly the conditions under which these hands are generated, we don’t have to be content with just saying “many, many combinations” — we can figure it out precisely. And we have. There are exactly 635,013,559,600 possible bridge hands. You can look it up if you’d like.
So you’re sitting at the bridge table, and they deal out all 4 hands, and you pick up your own hand and there it is: a freaking miracle! You’re holding a hand which consists of a combination of cards that has only 1 chance in 635,013,559,600 of happening by random chance.
Furthermore, after expressing your astonishment at this amazing coincidence, your 3 fellow players chime in with their own wonder stories. It turns out that each and every one of them also holds a hand that can only occur 1 time out of 635,013,559,600. That means the chance of all 4 of you holding these amazing hands simultaneously is 635,013,559,600 times 635,013,559,600 times 635,013,559,600 times 635,013,559,600 to 1 against, a number so large that I can’t run it on my computer’s calculator, so I’ll content myself with just counting decimal places and say that the odds against this astounding occurrence are 10 to the 50th power (that’s a 1 followed by 50 zeroes) to 1.
I can start boosting the amazement factor by having everybody lay down their hands and comparing them to each other, only to discover *gasp* that none of the hands includes even one card that shows up in somebody else’s hand. A little quick math will show that, in general, there’s only a 1.28% chance that any 2 bridge hands dealt at random will have no cards whatsoever in common. And yet here it’s happened not just once but 6 separate times. (Why 6 and not 4? Because there are 6 possible pairs of hands.) That’s 1.28% to the 6th power, or 0.0000000004%. Another tremendously unlikely coincidence, and one which increases the overall improbability of getting those 4 hands in the 1st place.
Shocked at this miracle, the 4 of you take pictures for posterity, then realize that you can’t very well play that hand of bridge now that you’ve all seen each other’s cards, so you reshuffle the deck, redeal, and look at your new hands only to discover — beyond all possible doubt that miracles do happen — that once again all 4 of you have triumphed over the staggeringly large odds against holding the particular unique hands that you’re now staring at.
I think you start to see how the game is played. And I don’t mean bridge. I mean what I will politely call the mind-diddling game.
Any idiot can come along after something’s happened and point out zillions of factors that had to line up just exactly so for that particular thing to have occurred in that particular way to that particular person at that particular time.
And yet, as you discover holding your hand of bridge, that sort of thing indeed happens so routinely that nobody pays a bit of attention to it at all. For there you sit, holding your miracle. And you’ll be doing it again in less than 5 minutes.
The real miracle would be if you were able to predict the exact cards you’d be holding before the hands were dealt.
So Williamsen is playing his little mind-diddling game of after-the-fact odds-making, but let’s just go along with him and say that the odds against this particular set of cosmological constants is indeed some spectacularly large number to 1. The fact remains that any spectacularly large number is effectively zero when compared to infinity. And, if there’s an infinite amount of time to work with, sooner or later every number will come up, including ours.
We just happen to live in a Universe that’s capable of supporting intelligent life. If it didn’t support intelligent life, we wouldn’t be here to wonder about it.
And, of course, Williamsen knows nothing whatever about the circumstances that give rise to these fundamental constants of nature in the 1st place. Remember how astonishing it was that none of those 4 bridge hands held a single card that appeared in any of the other 3 bridge hands? Well, it turns out that that situation is not at all unlikely. Quite the contrary, it’s guaranteed by the way in which the 4 hands were generated. They weren’t generated at random. As soon as any given card (say the ace of spades) was dealt to any given player, the odds of it going into any of the other 3 hands dropped right straight to zero.
Maybe it’s the case that all of these factors that so impress Williamsen (mass of the electron, speed of light, gravitational constant, etc.) work the same way. That is, they may not be independent of each other at all. It could be that, as soon as 1 of them is set, there remains only 1 possible value (or a narrow range of possible values) for a different one.
Since no human has ever built a Universe, how would we know? We can’t even get outside our own Universe to take a good look at it. (It’s been said that the reason the Universe is so hard to comprehend is because there’s nothing to compare it to.) This doesn’t stop people from speculating, of course, but hypothesizing is all we’re doing. We don’t know anything.
But let’s grant arguendo that Williamsen is 100% right, and that the odds are overwhelmingly against the Universe existing as we know it. That still tells us nothing whatsoever about God.
There’s one thing we can infer about God, tho, and it’s this: The odds against something as unlikely as God are so unbelievably huge that they make Universes like ours seem like everyday occurrences.
See, both sides can play the statistical mind-diddling game.
Next: What Christians would have you believe instead.
Note that I wrote “next” instead of “tomoro”. I’m not quite sure when my next posting in this series will be, since I’m headed into UW Hospital for a knee-replacement operation tomoro, and it’ll probably be awhile before I’m fully functional again.
