Statistics

Evolution is at best a fearsome misuse of statistics.  To claim that very small changes add up to larger ones is as plausible as it is misleading.  It ignores the simple experience of life that, whatever we might be able to 'prove' with mathematics, nearly all probabilities of events have practical limits and rarely 'tail off' endlessly.  Furthermore, adding events of this sort together makes then far, far more improbable, as a matter of strict fact.

Theoretical probabilities can be calculated for almost any event, and the statistician will be able to quote a mathematical probability that an event will occur, within certain stated limits of uncertainty.  Notice that I said that theoretical probabilities can be calculated for almost any event.  That may be true, but the calculations of probability may not necessarily have much meaning.

For instance, just to get you going, there is a definite, albeit minute, probability that you will be hit by lightning this year, a very large mathematical chance of your falling asleep tonight, which isn't quite 100% (you might have toothache), but a less than 100% probability that you will die, under normal circumstances, before you reach the age of 1000.

The calculated probability of death illustrates the problem.  The chance that you might die changes in a known way as you progress through life.  The probability does not simply rise steadily through life; it rises and falls, and then rises again.  Beyond the age of about 40 the chance of death rises continuously.  But then we run into a difficulty with probabilities.  There is always a mathematical probability of your continuing to live.  Is that common sense?  Clearly no; but that is the blind alley into which we are led by the unthinking application of the 'laws' of chance.

At age 1000 the probability that you will have died is not 100%.  Put the other way round, your probability of living decreases after about age 40, but it never reduces to zero!  In common sense terms, of course, this is simply monstrous.  Eventually we all die, and, more importantly, there are very few people who live beyond 100 years.  Further, no-one has been known to live 1000 years, and in recent history no-one has with any certainty lived more than 150 years.  Nevertheless, because of the ways that probabilities are calculated, life beyond 1000 years is not ruled out.

Let me illustrate this in another way.  When I was about 16 I learned to swim.  My first width was quite an achievement, and my first length equally so.  Since then I have steadily increased the distance I could swim.  At one point, with practice I could swim about a mile.  As my swimming distance increased there were different factors that limited my range.

At first it was the fear of drowning, then breathlessness, then cold, and then because I became rather better covered, the cold didn't matter but stamina did.  Finally I just got neck ache, and suffered boredom.  Nevertheless I am quite certain that I could have increased my swimming distance considerably.  The probability exists that I could.  But just how far could I have swim?  Five miles?  Yes, I would think so - with a lot of practice!  Ten miles?  The Channel?  Um, tricky.  The Atlantic?  No way.  Not a hope.  Not the ghost of a chance.

But then mathematics steps in, to give me hope.  The probability of my being able to swim the Atlantic turns out not to be absolute zero, even if it is vanishingly small.  Do you really believe that?  I don't, and I don't think that you do, either.

There are endless examples of this sort of thing that could be quoted.  When lighting a fire with a match how does the probability of success in lighting change as you hold the match further and further away from the paper?  Is there any chance of lighting a fire when the match is 100 yards away?  What probability is there of your playing a note on a piano in England when you are on holiday in France?  Small?  Anyone would say, "Totally impossible".

Interestingly, to the statistitian, all these have definite probabilities of occurrence.  They may be vanishingly small probabilities, but theoretically they do exist.  But actually this is a hole that we have dug for ourselves.  We have made a prediction from a circumstance which is clearly feasible (lighting a fire, playing the piano) to a circumstance which anyone with any smidgeon of common sense will acknowledge would simply never happen.

Evolutionists assert from this specious reasoning that even though it is highly unlikely that life could have begun spontaneously on Earth, nevertheless there must have been a mathematical probability of this occurring.  Since it is a fact that life is all around us, it is claimed that this wildly improbable event must 'therefore' have occurred, and that therefore events which we see as improbable are quite possible (which is one of the best examples of a circular argument that has ever been put forward, I imagine).

But of course our scientific friends are being strung from the neck by this nonsensical idea that probabilities are always things that reduce without ever coming to zero, which we would all acknowledge makes no sense at all.  The question we really have to answer for ourselves, if we are going to break this logical log-jam, is this: when do vanishingly small probabilities become impossibilities?

Curiously even this has been worked out.  Most statisticians would be quite happy to consider a thing impossible if the chances of that event occurring were 1 to 10⁵⁰ (one chance against a number with fifty digits in it - pretty small).  With this in mind it is worth calculating the probability and thinking about the reasonableness of the spontaneous generation of life.

It has been conservatively estimated that the probability of life beginning on the Earth as a simple, self-sustaining, self-replicating cell, is only 1 in about 10⁴⁰⁰⁰⁰, just one chance in a number which would cover about ten A4 pages with digits.  We are dealing with a number here which is wildly in excess of the sum of the atoms in the known universe.

A revealing way of thinking about this problem is to imagine using a rifle to hit a penny on a another planet 10 light years (about 58,656,960 million miles) distant.  Perhaps it is only fair to point out that your rifle, under normal conditions, would never have the power to put a bullet into orbit, and that the Earth is spinning .... and is in orbit round the sun, so you will have to calculate for at least two different deflections before you even leave the Solar System .... and that sort of distance demands the use of general relativity in your calculations.

Even ignoring gravity it would be an astronomical exercise in more ways than one.  But the point is that the chance of success in that round of shooting is about the same as the maximum chance that life arose spontaneously.  What chance of hitting that planet (never mind the coin)?  What chance of life arising without any creative help?

Not a particularly high one, I would think.

So here we meet a paradox.  Scientists calculate that spontaneous generation of life is possible with odds of only 1 chance in at least 10⁴⁰⁰⁰⁰.  Evolutionists claim that God is impossible - odds of only about 1 in 10⁵⁰ against.  Therefore there would appear to be an almost infinitely better chance of a living God than of spontaneous generation of life!  I am, I admit, only using the fallacious arguments of the scientists here.

There is a basic flaw in the evolutionists' assumption that because likely events occur, unlikely events must.  This parallels one of the assumptions on which radiological dating depends.  We know the break-down rates of atoms now, so this rate is assumed, without the slightest evidence whatsoever, to apply at all times.  Similarly we have evidence of the operation of the laws of chance at relatively short odds, and then assume that the laws operate at infinitely long ones.  We have absolutely no means of determining whether such assumptions have any validity, however 'obvious' they might otherwise appear to be.