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What Are the Odds?
We live in a vast universe, so immense that it is impossible to understand the distances involved in any sensible way. Just our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is 150,000-200,000 light years across and contains 100-400 billion stars (latest estimates). And there are billions of galaxies – at least which can be seen from space telescopes – and vast distances of space in between them. What are the odds that life suddenly sprang into being on this planet with no purpose or design behind it?
In all of this vast expanse we know of living organisms only here on earth. Our planet is uniquely suited for life. Indeed, there are dozens of properties of physical reality (gravity, light, electromagnetism, the earth’s distance from the sun, the position of the moon, composition of the atmosphere and oceans, etc.) that are within such extremely fine tolerances that to alter any of them in the slightest degree would make life impossible. What are the odds that all these elements that sustain life were created by a random mega-explosion billions of years ago?
One of the basic assumptions of naturalism is that life is totally accidental; i.e., there was no mind creating or governing the evolutionary process. The main mechanism of life’s formation was the natural selection of random mutations. That is, a genetic mutation would accidentally occur, and though it had no immediate function it was preserved until it eventually combined with other random mutations to build an eye or a kidney.
Think about that for a moment. The very definition of atheism is a rejection of belief in God. There is no overarching creator or mind who exists outside the material universe and brought everything into existence. Rather, everything had to happen randomly, without plan or purpose. Here is the position statement of the American National Association of Biology Teachers: “The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments” (Phillip Johnson, Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds 15).
This assertion of randomness is staggering. There are literally trillions of transitions that would have to randomly occur over eons of time to produce life. Outside of the physical constants mentioned earlier, the hyper-complexity of genetics makes randomness so implausible as to be ridiculous.
The average person has been duped by naturalists into believing that life came into being by a random lightning strike hitting random lifeless elements that came into being by a random explosion 13 billion years ago. Presto! In a primordial, lifeless world there suddenly existed some basic components that would eventually become a “simple” life form. But what is a “simple life form”?
“The incredible specified complexity of life becomes obvious when one considers the message found in the DNA of a one-celled amoeba … Darwinist Richard Dawkins … admits that the message found in just the cell nucleus of a tiny amoeba is more than all thirty volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica combined, and the entire amoeba has as much information in its DNA as 1,000 complete sets. In other words, if you were to spell out all of the A,T,C, and G in the ‘primitive amoeba,’ the letters would fill 1,000 complete sets … these encyclopedias do not consist of random letters but of letters in a very specific order …” (Geisler and Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist 116).
When one rules out the existence of God – an originating mind and designer – then one must also accept the absurdity and illogic of explaining how complex things came into being and arranged themselves symbiotically to form everything we see around us. If, for example, one believes, as evolutionists do, that reptiles predated birds, can you imagine the random sequence of events that had to take place to turn a cold-blooded, scaly reptile into a warm-blooded, delicate, feathery ibis? Remember, the changes in body structure, chemistry, genetic material and reproduction must be slight, incremental, random and preserved over millions of years in order for a crocodile to fly. If pressed about the reasonableness of such, all the evolutionist can say is, “Well, given enough time and chance, anything can happen.”
And “anything” must happen trillions and trillions of times to produce not only a bird from a reptile but all life forms. In other words, such random selection of accidental genetic mutations had to happen over and over and over again to transform “simple” life into the vast array of living things from the ocean depths to the atmosphere above, from frozen mountaintops to sizzling deserts, from blue whales to the microorganisms that inhabit our intestines. Oaks, owls, oranges, orangutans, oats, olives, opossums, orcas, onions, octopi, oleanders, orchids, ocelots, oysters and okra – all from the same original “spark of life,” all their individual features developing over millions of years and trillions of mindless, random genetic changes. All of the unique, exquisite life on planet earth spontaneously developing out of dead matter (we’ll not even discuss where that matter came from in the first place). Quite the “miracle,” wouldn’t you say?!
What’s behind such a senseless, baseless view? Anti-God bias, pure and simple. Darwinist Richard Lewontin candidly admits: “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs … in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment to naturalism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create … concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive … Moreover that materialism is absolute for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door” (ibid 123, italics original).
Don’t be fooled; not all scientists are pristinely logical, dispassionate researchers. They are humans with all the same flaws, foibles and weaknesses as the rest of us. And don’t let them hoodwink you into thinking they hold the intellectual high ground. The more we learn about the complexity of the universe and life, the more absurd is the assumption that everything happened by chance.
