Welcome back everyone. Today we will be discussing an argument that is often used in support of creationism (or its alias "Intelligent Design"). It is insidious because at first glance it seems intensely compelling. I’m talking about the extreme improbability of all the conditions to support life coming together without external "help" to spawn life as we know it on this planet. One prominent example of this argument comes from Ben Stein’s epic waste of time: Expelled: No Inteligence Allowed. In the film our vapid MC treats us to a science free explanation of the almost infinite improbability of 250 proteins all coming together to create the first cell. First of all, the assumptions Stein makes to set up this argument are almost all false or misleading. The YouTube clip below shows both the original movie segment and a reasonable debunking of much of it. What is mostly absent in the debunking however, is a discussion about the problems with the nearly infinite improbability claim itself. This claim is made in this and other pro divine creation arguments and is not frequently given the full smack down it deserves.
We human beings are funny creatures. We are prone to several different common thinking errors also known as logic fallacies. The "Poc Hoc Fallacy" or similar variations of it is responsible, in my estimation, for the vast majority of superstition in the world. In this case we’re talking about the Fallacy of Retrospective Improbability.
There may be other names for it, but essentially this fallacy happens when an observer takes a hypothetical retrospective look at a thing and, seeing the extreme improbability of that event or set of circumstances arising, decides that there must have been some kind of intervention to skew or help the event to happen since it couldn’t have happened on its own. A common occurrence of this fallacy involves lottery jackpot winners. Since the odds of them winning were astronomical before the drawing, the fact that all their numbers lined up seems to have required divine intervention. I can see how this logic can be comforting to creationists looking for rationalization for their evidence free stance but, as the label ‘fallacy’ implies, this logic is fatally flawed. The mistake lies in the fact that predicting a specific winner is a very different proposition than predicting that there will be a winner. Creationist/intelligent design (ID) proponents often double down on this logic and equate it to something like hitting the Powerball jackpot 100 times in a row. In a way they’re right, but what they conveniently ignore is that if you bought a million lottery tickets each week for 1000 years, it’s far more likely that eventually you will win 100 times in a row somewhere in that stretch. The universe is so massive that it is capable of buying lottery tickets on a scale that is difficult for us to conceive of. Confused by the analogy yet? Not to worry if you are, let me try another approach. Let’s take away the analogy and break down the common argument into a bite sized chunk.
IDers will tell you that it is too much of a coincidence to believe that the Earth happens to be the perfect size, the perfect temperature, contain the perfect ingredients, be in the perfect spot in the perfect solar system, and have the perfect magnetic shield to support our life that there is no way it could have all come together without help. They would be right too, IF one were to presuppose that us human beings must occupy this exact spot in the universe and we must breath oxygen, and we must need a certain temperature range, etc, etc. I can see how the religious can easily make this presupposition, as they believe we were explicitly created as we are. To believe this does not require one to critically examine the retrospective improbability fallacy and, since truly understanding it creates a challenge to the creationist idea, it is perpetually trodden out as though it is unassailable proof of a creation origin of humanity.
It is undeniably true that there is a long string of conditions and circumstances, any of which, if missing, would make our existence on this planet impossible. The combination of all these is highly improbable. The thing is, highly improbable is not the same thing as impossible, and in a mind numbingly large universe, the highly improbable has more than a fighting chance. Think of it this way: when you have near infinite (I could say infinite, but we don’t even need the universe to be infinite in size for this rhetorical exercise, and we know for a fact that it’s pretty freaking huge just based on what we can see) number of solar systems, some with planets, you have a near infinite number of planets, some with liquid water, you have a near infinite number of blue planets with an iron core creating a magnetic shield against cosmic radiation, and so on. Eventually one of these planets, after billions of years, will get just the right conditions together to produce a cell-like structure capable of replicating itself, and through the process of natural selection living creatures will, over the course of billions of years, create life that is adapted to the environment it resides in. Eventually that natural selection process will produce a species that manages to attain higher reasoning power to overcome environmental challenges it faces before it becomes extinct and as a result becomes sentient. That string of events is highly improbable, but that only explains why we don’t have a bunch of neighbors similar to us nearby. We don’t need to make any unsafe assumptions to follow this logic chain, we merely need to abandon the notion that we are predestined to exist, and exist in the exact place in which we currently do. This is the part that creationists struggle with. If we didn’t win the lottery, someone else would have. No miracle needed.
Back to the analogies, because I’m so fond of them. Think of us as sitting on the end of a twig, on a massive tree whose trunk splits into 1 million branches, and each of those splits into a million smaller branches, and so on 1 million times. To stand at the base of the tree and randomly choose a branch and on the first try end at the twig we’re sitting on is preposterously improbable. This is the feat creationists claim must be done to show non-intervention in our existence. Again, this presupposes that we have to be on that one twig when we get to the edge of the tree. Why must that be so? What happens when we dismiss that idea and realize that we only tend to focus on the twig we ended up on because it is the one we rely on to hold us up? If the conditions for us to exist happened on another twig we would be on that one, wondering how we were so lucky as to end up on the only twig that can sustain us.
If you scatter 1000 seeds in the desert sand, and the cactus seed is the only one that grows there, you shouldn’t wonder why. The desert did not choose the cactus. The cactus did not choose the desert.
A creationist will tell you that a monkey with a typewriter will never reproduce a work of Shakespeare. They are probably right. What they won’t tell you is that 100 trillion monkeys with typewriters, being replaced as they die, over five billion years will not reproduce a work of Shakespeare. When that first Troilus and Cressida rolls out of one of those Hammond 12s they will find it and tell you "God did it," ignoring the galactic piles of "fnoEBJEDGFBNNFSn mlkfn ekbjbgdwb Hfnlla dl ajhuuuuuuuuuuuuubdkh f lekf jas fnklfgla" and Sarah Palin Autobiographies around it.
This analysis doesn’t even take into account the fact that in his film Stein intentionally distorts the science and the numbers to make his case look more convincing. But what can you expect from someone who produces a propaganda piece in which he strolls around Nazi concentration camps while claiming atheists and atheism created them? Two words for you Ben Stein: *"Bite Me!"*
Previous Atheist Digest Diaries:
Intro and How I became an Atheist By Xneeohcon
Glossary By Rieux
On Christian Claims to Moral Superiority By Xneeohcon
Debunking Dogmas, Part I: Creationism By wilderness voice
The believers' path to Atheism By Brahman Colorado
Upcoming Scheduled Diaries:
Tomorrow, Tuesday August 24th about 4 PM PST Commonmass Comes Out: An Athiest Episcopalian By Commonmass
Later this week Dubunking Dogmas, Part II By wilderness voice
Wed. September 1st, About 5:30 PM PST – Conclusion Diary
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