On Thu, 22 Feb 1996 23:26:23 -0500 you wrote:
[...]
BH>First let me say that I agree with Glenn in spirit. The probability
>argument against abiogenesis, as usually presented, is bad bad bad :),
>and the sooner it disappears the better. The reason its bad is not
>because a functional protein has a chance of forming in the hypothetical
>soup, but rather that the "chance scenario" for the origin of life
>met its demise some thirty odd years ago. To talk about the improbability
>of life forming purely by chance is to completely ignore all the
>modern scenarios for the origin of life. Nobody working in the field
>today believes in the "chance scenario", so what's the point in
>refuting it?
[...]
Because it is still the official creation story of blind watchmaker
Darwinism:
"We can accept a certain amount of luck in our explanations, but not
too much. The question is, how much? The immensity of geological
time entitles us to postulate more improbable coincidences than a
court of law would allow but, even so, there are limits. Cumulative
selection is the key to all our modern explanations of life. It
strings a series of acceptably lucky events [random mutations]
together in a nonrandom sequence so that, at the end of the sequence,
the finished product carries the illusion of being very very lucky
indeed, far too improbable to have come about by chance alone, even
given a timespan millions of times longer than the age of the universe
so far. Cumulative selection is the key but it had to get started,
and we cannot escape the need to postulate a single-step chance event
in the origin of cumulative selection itself....
The more we can get away from miracles, major improbabilities,
fantastic coincidences, large chance events, and the more thoroughly
we can break large chance events up into a cumulative series of small
chance events, the more satisfying to rational minds our explanations
will be. But in this chapter we are asking how improbable, how
miraculous, a single event we are allowed to postulate. What is the
largest single event of sheer naked coincidence, sheer unadulterated
miraculous luck, that we are allowed to get away with in our theories,
and still say that we have a satisfactory explanation of life?
..So, there are some levels of sheer luck, not only too great for
puny human imaginations, but too great to be allowed in our
hard-headed calculations about the origin of life. But, to repeat the
question, how great a level of luck, how much of a miracle, are we
allowed to postulate?...The answer to our question - of how much luck
we are allowed to postulate - depends upon whether our planet is the
only one that has life, or whether life abounds all around the
universe....There are probably at least 10^20 (i.e. 100 billion
billion) roughly suitable planets in the universe.
..It is entirely possible that our backwater of a planet is literally
the only one that has ever borne life....If the origin of life is such
an improbable event that it happened on only one planet in the
universe, then our planet has to be that planet.
..Our question was, how much luck are we allowed to assume in a
theory of the origin of life on Earth?...Begin by giving a name to the
probability, however low it is, that life will originate on any
randomly designated planet of some particular type. Call this number
the spontaneous generation probability or SGP. It is the SGP that we
shall arrive at if we sit down with our chemistry textbooks, or strike
sparks through plausible mixtures of atmospheric gases in our
laboratory, and calculate the odds of replicating molecules springing
spontaneously into existence in a typical planetary atmosphere.
Suppose that our best guess of the SGP is some very very small number,
say one in a billion....if we assume, as we are perfectly entitled to
do for the sake of argument, that life has originated only once in the
universe, it follows that we are allowed to postulate a very large
amount of luck in a theory, because there are so many planets in the
universe where life could have originated. If, as one estimate has
it, there are 100 billion billion planets, this is 100 billion times
greater than even the very low SGP that we postulated. To conclude
this argument, the maximum amount of luck that we are allowed to
assume, before we reject a particular theory of the origin of life,
has odds of one in N, where N is the number of suitable planets in the
universe. There is a lot hidden in that word 'suitable', but let us
put an upper limit of 1 in 100 billion billion for the maximum amount
of luck that this argument entitles us to assume
...We go to a chemist and say...fill your head with formulae, and
your flasks with methane and ammonia and hydrogen and carbon dioxide
and all the other gases that a primeval nonliving planet can be
expected to have; cook them all up together; pass strokes of lightning
through your simulated atmospheres, and strokes of inspiration through
your brain; bring all your clever chemist's methods to bear, and give
us your best chemist's estimate of the probability that a typical
planet will spontaneously generate a self-replicating molecule. Or,
to put it another way, how long would we have to wait before random
chemical events on the planet, random thermal jostling of atoms and
molecules, resulted in a self- replicating molecule?...we'd have to
wait a long time by the standards of a human lifetime, but perhaps not
all that long by the standards of cosmological time....even if the
chemist said that we'd have to wait for a 'miracle', have to wait a
billion billion years - far longer than the universe has existed, we
can still accept this verdict with equanimity. There are probably
more than a billion billion available planets in the universe. If
each of them lasts as long as Earth, that gives us about a billion
billion billion planet-years to play with. That will do nicely! A
miracle is translated into practical politics by a multiplication
sum."
(Dawkins R., "The Blind Watchmaker", Penguin: London, 1991, p139-145)
When Darwinist propagandisers like Dawkins finally admit the chance
origin of the first self-replicating molecule is impossible, even in a
universe filled with pre-biotic soup, then Christian apologetes won't
have to counter it.
God bless.
Stephen
"How much of this can be believed? Every generation needs its own
creation myths, and these are ours. They are probably more accurate
than any that have come before, but they are undoubtedly subject to
revision as we find out more about the nature and the history of life.
The best that can be said for any scientific theory is that it
explains all the data at hand and has no obvious internal
contradictions." (Wilson E.O., et al., "Life on Earth", Sinauer
Associates: Sunderland, Mass., 1973, p624)
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