A local newspaper columnist, who is quite smart and often makes good sense out of any topic he cares to address… has “found religion”. In his mid-fifties, he has now decided that he’s Roman Catholic. So, he recently was taking scientists and lay philosophers to task about various theories of life, the universe and all that. Specifically, he can’t allow anyone to believe that life could have arisen from non-living antecedents, and certainly that mere unguided natural processes could have led to the existence of humans. One attack that he mounted was to assert that the number of years that the entire universe has been in existence (and even that, multiplied by some arbitrarily large number) would not be enough time for life to have just “happened” without the intelligent direction of some kind of god. I disagree with the validity of his approach, and I submitted a Letter to the Editor that got “considered for publication” but didn’t make it all the way.

Where does [the columnist] get his numbers? He assures us that 15 billion times 15 billion years (the current estimate of the age of our universe) would be “too short a time for random processes to produce a non-random result” [the first self-replicating process, or as we like to call it, 'life'].

We who exist, and who are trying to investigate or deduce how it is that we came to exist, are not required to posit a situation where our existence is guaranteed.

Just as it is extremely unlikely to flip an honest coin 100 times and get 100 outcomes of “heads” and no “tails”, it is still possible for that to happen. For it to happen does not require that we flip some arbitrarily huge number of coin-tosses. If I started now, the 100-heads-in-a-row could happen in the very first 100 tosses, or it could fail to happen in enough tosses to wear out the coin, and a million replacement coins.

The same applies to the fact that we are here. If we postulate that our existence might have arisen from a highly improbable chance combination of random events, there’s nothing in “the rules” to require that all other possible combinations of events must happen first. As far as the laws of probability are concerned, the peculiar circumstances that made our universe and our world what they are today could have randomly, accidentally happened “on the first try”. Or, we might be living the umpty-trillionth “try”. We don’t know. What we do know is:

a) it’s not probablistically necessary for there to have been some arbitrarily vast amount of time and events prior to us, and
b) the fact that Mr. [columnist] doesn’t grasp this notion tends to cast a cloud on his other pronouncements, entertaining though they might occasionally be.

That was the end of the letter.

I’ll add that there are a lot of arguments on both sides of the “intelligent design” debate that show a distressing lack of understanding of (or just a lack of caring about) how science is supposed to work, how math - particularly probability is supposed to work. The more intelligent and (otherwise) thoughtful the person making the argument, the more inclined I am to distrust their motives. That is, if they have the education and the mental ability, then they must be able to see the gaping holes in what they’ve just said, and therefore their motive must be to fool the less knowledgeable masses who _don’t_ know how to de-construct illogic. If you can’t blind them with science, baffle them with bullshit.

That’s the way I see it, anyway.

Copyright 2008