Mere chance?

gosimeon

The universe, could it really be a result of mere chance?

I know that evidence the universe was created is by no means proof the Christian God exists.

However, how do atheists react to this web page. It illustrates just how unlikely the universe was a chance happening:

http://www.doesgodexist.org/Charts/EvidenceForDesignInTheUniverse.html

Zombrex

gosimeon wrote:

The universe, could it really be a result of mere chance?

I know that evidence the universe was created is by no means proof the Christian God exists.

However, how do atheists react to this web page. It illustrates just how unlikely the universe was a chance happening:

http://www.doesgodexist.org/Charts/EvidenceForDesignInTheUniverse.html

I was playing Poker last night at a friends house. One of the girls, who had never played before, got a straight flush on her first hand. The odds of that actually happening are 1 in 80 thousand. Yet it happened yesterday. This doesn't seem that unusual because the odds of it happening in no way stop it from actually happening.

The odds of picking the correct lotto numbers in any Irish Lottery draw are 1 in 5 million. Yet people win this all the time. This doesn't seem particular unusual to anyone because millions of people play the Lotto each week. We almost expect that someone will get the correct numbers.

The odds of something like the universe being exactly the way it is are rather irrelivent since we have no evidence that a) it has to be exactly like this or b) that there were not billions of other universes springing in and out of existence all the time.

If you take those two unknowns into account then the universe being the way it is doesn't seem that improbable after all.

gosimeon

The chance of the universe coming out of nothing is far far greater than anything that can happen in a game of poker.

1/Infinity is a lot less of a chance than 1/80000.

Fallen Seraph

If the universe weren't hospitable to intelligent life then no-one ask the question "How come this universe seems tailored to our very needs?". Which I feel kinda puts it in perspective. And an awful lot of things on that list are superfluous. If the fundamental constants were any different, then the universe would vastly different. If they're as they are then the universe will end up exactly the way it is.

A lot of them are also quite silly and small minded. For example :

Number of stars in the planetary system

If more than one: Tidal interactions would disrupt planetary orbits
If less than one: Heat produced would be insufficient for life

One then wonders about all the binary systems that do exist.... Are they evidence against design?

That said, I feel the statement was irrelevant in the first place. The only things worth mentioning are the fundamental constants and the initial conditions.

Zombrex

gosimeon wrote:

The chance of the universe coming out of nothing is far far greater than anything that can happen in a game of poker.

1/Infinity is a lot less of a chance than 1/80000.

You don't know what the odds of the universe happening are. For all we know the universe could only happen the way it did, the odds being 1/1

You are inventing the odds of the universe, and then saying that this suggests that it must have been designed. Aside from the fact that what ever the odds of the universe it doesn't suggest that it was designed, you don't know the odds of the universe in the first place.

gosimeon

I am trying to comprehend the odds of something so huge coming from nothing.

Dave!

I don't see how one could apply odds/probability to something like the origin of the universe -- there's not really anything that you can use to create these numbers, is there?

The way I see it is either (a) we don't know yet; hopefully some day, or (b) god did it.

Scofflaw

gosimeon wrote:

The universe, could it really be a result of mere chance?

I know that evidence the universe was created is by no means proof the Christian God exists.

However, how do atheists react to this web page. It illustrates just how unlikely the universe was a chance happening:

http://www.doesgodexist.org/Charts/EvidenceForDesignInTheUniverse.html

Problems:

1. probability of us being here to make these charts if any criteria not met: zero.

2. known counter-examples: none

3. probability of life being present if any criteria not met: unknown

4. probability of all criteria being met, plus all my ancestors surviving long enough to breed, and meeting each other, and having kids, and those kids being exactly who they were, finally leading to me being exactly me: even huger

5. probability of me rolling a 5 on the dice I have next to me here on the desk on top of all the above: six times lower yet

6. probability of me getting heads on this coin I just flipped: half as much again.

I could go on, but it's so very unlikely that I will....

Seriously, though, this sort of thing doesn't really prove anything, because everything is so unlikely. The chances of you picking any particular hand of five cards out of a pile is 1 in 311,875,200 - worse than your chances of winning the Lotto. Nevertheless, if you pick five cards out of a deck, you'll have five particular cards.

To put it another way - if all the things listed on the page (many of which are highly speculative, by the way) hadn't happened, we wouldn't be here to exclaim how unlikely it all was.

Finally, having had this argument before - if you use the unlikeliness of things as being an indicator that God had to make them happen, where do you stop? Does God intervene for every coin toss, or does he only get involved at some specific level of odds? Is he dictating the card choices, give the chances are 1 in 311 million against any given hand?

One is left with two choices - either everything is planned, or it really is all meaningless coincidence. Pay your money, take your choice...

cordially,
Scofflaw

Calibos

What puzzles me is why ask this question on the Christianity forum?

Its kinda like you either want the Christians to answer, "The odds are too great for the universe to happen by chance, God did it, and his son was born to a goat herder in a poor desert region of the eastern meditterainian 2006 years ago. Here read this book, its all true"

Or you want the Atheists who post here to say, "Yes the beginning of the universe was most likely a random chance event", only for you to answer, "Well I can't beleive everything in the universes creation and evolution was chance. I can't get my head around the odds against."

That would be fine and dandy if this meant you had settled on being a deist. (believer in a universal creator though non interventionist 'IN' the universe") By posting in the Christianity forum though to me implies that you want to be or are a christian wanting to use the odds against the universe being a chance event as proof of the veracity of a 2000 year old book written by goat herders.

Its something I can't get my head around. How can one use the philosophical question of the origins of the universe as a proof of the truth of the bible? How does one make the leap from, "Well I had my doubts about the divinity of Christ but then I thought about the massive odds against the chance creation of the universe, and it was then I realised Christ was my lord and saviour."

Zombrex

gosimeon wrote:

I am trying to comprehend the odds of something so huge coming from nothing.

Who said it came from "nothing"? Who said it was "huge"? Huge compared to what exactly? All the other universes we know about?

By the way I've no great desire to preach the atheist position, but you did ask how do atheists "react" to that web page. I would imagine with mild indifference.

The odds of the universe appearing the way it has appear are mind boggling huge. But this only becomes impressive if you assume the universe could have only been like this. If the number of possible universes was equally large then it doesn't seem that impressive at all.

Think of it this way. What are the odds that you would live your life exactly the way you have lived it. Think of every second of every day you have been alive and the choices you made at each point. Then think of all the other things you could have done. The odds that you would live your live the exact way you have lived it are huge (or tiny, can never remember if something unlikely is huge odds or small odds. Unlikely anyway)

This doesn't strike anyone as particularly impressive because if you had made other choices you still would have lived your life. There are trillions of different ways you could have lead your life but all those different possible lives would still have been fine. It would have been a different life, but it would have been a life none the less.

Another way to think about it is if you deal a deck of cards that can have a trillion individual cards (doesn't matter what this number, is you can make it bigger if you wish), rather than the normal 52.

Everytime you deal the cards out you will get a combination of cards that the odds that that particular combination come up are very very very very very very unlikely. Yet everytime you deal you will still get some combination. You are not aiming for one particular combination of cards, ANY combination of cards will do, even if each individual combination is very unlikely to appear if you tried to aim to deal for that specific combination.

There is no way of telling what other universes would have been like if things had been different because we exist in this universe. But there is no real reason why one should assume that this is the only universe that could exist, just like in the example above you can deal any number of different card combinations despite the fact that each combination is highly unlikely.

We have nothing else to compare this universe to so we have no idea how to determine how likely or unlikely our universe is.

Zombrex

Calibos wrote:

"The odds are too great for the universe to happen by chance, God did it, and his son was born to a goat herder in a poor desert region of the eastern meditterainian 2006 years ago. Here read this book, its all true"

Son Goku

Bear in mind that the fundamental constants are not as random as you might think. They enter into the physics in the same way any physics from a lower scale appears in the physics of a higher scale.

For example, when I'm plotting the motion of water, I've to take into account its viscosity. At the classical scale, the viscosity is just some fundamental constant of the liqiud that I can't derive and has to be measured.

However when I scale down to the atomic scale, I can derive the viscosity from atomic motion.

Aside from this, some of the constants in the list double up. For instance the Electromagnetic coupling constant is the Fine structure constant, yet they appear in the list as seperate entries.

Finally No.1 doesn't really make any sense and all of them past No.4 are already explained.
So the only genuine entries on that list are 2,3,4 and even then they show the trademark signs of coming from lower scale physics.

Zombrex

Another point to remember is that we don't know anything about existence before the Big Bang, so we don't know what mechanism sets this initial constants. We don't know if they could have been anything other than what they are. We don't know if the Strong nuclear force coupling constant for example, can be larger or smaller that what it is in our universe.

Using the card analogy again, I dealt out a 5 card poker hand and someone who didn't know anything about cards tried to work out the odds of that hand. If they did not know that the cards only go from 1 to 13 and there are only 4 suits they would probably come out with some very strange probabilities of that 5 card poker hand. They might assume the cards can go from 1 to 100 or 1 to 1000, or that there are 10 suits. Depending on these factors the odds they come up with will change dramatically.

Son Goku

Also the list is deceptive at best. All these kind of lists are just of the form "wow, look at these numbers, imagine if they were bigger or smaller", without any explanation of the context in which the numbers appear.
(2,3,4 are just coeffecients in very long technical calculations, not as much of a cosmic mystery as you might think.)
Such lists never mention the genuine mysteries of physics.

Anyway, this should probably be moved to another forum as Calibos said.

bonkey

gosimeon wrote:

The universe, could it really be a result of mere chance?

I know that evidence the universe was created is by no means proof the Christian God exists.

Lets say for a moment that the universe was created.

So the universe has a creator.

That creator must, in turn, have either come about by chance, or been themselves created.

What are the odds of them having come about by chance? Surely so low that they too must have had a creator.

So the creator has a creator.

Jump up three lines.

---
Now, I'm pretty sure that most people who accept the "odds are too great" reasoning can explain why the above is flawed.

It never ceases to amaze me how people can apparently claim a solid understanding of causality, odds, etc. but can immediately turn around and explain that I cannot make assumptions about the creator since we have no frame of reference in which to calculate the odds etc. and how its a false assumption to assume that the creator must have been created and couldn't just have existed "forever" (ignoring that forever is a temporally-bound concept which has no meaning outside of the existence of time).

Now...look at the original problem again - the creation of the universe. We have no model for this. We have no science dealing with this. Science does not address this question. It looks at everything that has happened since the creation of the universe and shows that given the initial parameters (to the best we can determine) there is no need for a guiding force to have brought us from there to here.

bonkey

Its also worth noting that the author not once quantifies what "greater" or "less" signify.

For example, earth's albedo is not a constant. Indeed, global dimming is a factor one increasingly hears being mentioned in debates regarding global warming.

Thus, it is unquestionably incorrect to suggest that if the albedo were at all greater or less that catastrophe would ensue. It would be equally incorrect to suggest that the albedo is a non-issue. The real questions are what the range of tolerance is, and whether or not its independant of other factors or not.

As Son Goku points out, most of these issues really break down to more fundamental ones, but even if we ignore that, the author is presenting a list of criteria and implicitly suggests that if any of them were at all different that no life could exist. This is patently untrue.

It may be true that if any of them had been sufficiently different, that life as we know it could not have evolved....but a comment like that is heading dangerously in the direction of Wicknight's deck-of-cards. Allowing that different life may have evolved, or that different life may evolve / have evolved elsewhere where conditions are also within the "valid range" is also not something the author seems to wish to deal with.

So the question really does seem to be of the "what are the odds that we would be here right now to ask this question". One would expect the author to be familiar with the anthropic principle.

Zombrex

bonkey wrote:

Lets say for a moment that the universe was created.

So the universe has a creator.

That creator must, in turn, have either come about by chance, or been themselves created.

What are the odds of them having come about by chance? Surely so low that they too must have had a creator.

So the creator has a creator.

Jump up three lines.

Turtles all the way down, as it were

Scofflaw

bonkey wrote:

Its also worth noting that the author not once quantifies what "greater" or "less" signify.

For example, earth's albedo is not a constant. Indeed, global dimming is a factor one increasingly hears being mentioned in debates regarding global warming.
Thus, it is unquestionably incorrect to suggest that if the albedo were at all greater or less that catastrophe would ensue. It would be equally incorrect to suggest that the albedo is a non-issue. The real questions are what the range of tolerance is, and whether or not its independant of other factors or not.

It would have been significantly higher during an ice age.

bonkey wrote:

As Son Goku points out, most of these issues really break down to more fundamental ones, but even if we ignore that, the author is presenting a list of criteria and implicitly suggests that if any of them were at all different that no life could exist. This is patently untrue.

We can let the author have this one:

Number of stars in the planetary system:
If less than one: Heat produced would be insufficient for life

Definitely not this one:

Orbital eccentricity If too great: Seasonal temperature differences would be too extreme

Hmm. The author reckons it's the eccentricity of earth's orbit that produces seasons?

Oxygen to nitrogen ratio in atmosphere

This has been hugely variable during earth's history - oxygen from virtually nothing to over 30%.

Oceans to continents ratio

Has increased through geological time....naturally, the author assumes that this has always been fixed. Not sure why he thinks land is necessary for life at all.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Barnabas

Calibos,

God's Son was not born from goat herders but of the Virgin Mary who married Joseph - a carpenter. Now you may not believe that but chances are that you possibly know that this is what we Christians believe, in which case you are consciously trying to offend us by purposely fabricating elements of what we believe. If you genuinely didn't know this (which I hope is the case) then perhaps you could refrain from making such statements which might cause offence and research the topic before you speak.


Yours Respectfully

Barnabas

PoleStar

As a nice example to the odds argument: I guess if improbability is a sign of gods work, then I guess every week we should praise the Lord when someone wins the lotto!

Zombrex

Barnabas wrote:

Calibos,

God's Son was not born from goat herders but of the Virgin Mary who married Joseph - a carpenter. Now you may not believe that but chances are that you possibly know that this is what we Christians believe, in which case you are consciously trying to offend us by purposely fabricating elements of what we believe. If you genuinely didn't know this (which I hope is the case) then perhaps you could refrain from making such statements which might cause offence and research the topic before you speak.


Yours Respectfully

Barnabas

If it more offensive to have a father who is a goat herder rather than a carpenter?

BrianCalgary

PoleStar wrote:

As a nice example to the odds argument: I guess if improbability is a sign of gods work, then I guess every week we should praise the Lord when someone wins the lotto!

Whole different discussion, you're comparing apples with broccoli.;)

The one who won it should be praising the Lord.:)

Barnabas

Nothing wrong with being a goat herder, but Jesus wasn't a goat herder, Joseph wasn't a goat herder, nor the Virgin Mary. The point is Jesus' Father is God. And that he is the son of the Virgin Mary. That's all I want to clarify with you in the hope that you are not trying to be offensive by misrepresenting Christian beliefs