Irish_Guevara said:
Think about it: all your parents and grandparents hit jackpot on the ol' D-20 survivability check. You are failing to take into account that a great many individuals didn't hit the jjackpot and didn't survive.
i'm talking about on a macro level. the human species, all the characteristics that is needed for the mere survival of the entire species, environmental and physiolgogical factors. jackpot means that at each turn of what atheists claim we developed from, there had to be a jackpot when the dice was rolled. I'm not talking about certain individuals not surviving etc.
You are making two huge mistakes in this thread:
1) Equating evolution with atheism.
2) Equating evolution with "dumb luck".
atheism believes in the combination of abiogenesis and evolution, i'm not stating that atheism=evolution. underlying the belief is that all that occured to get to what we have today, atheists suggest that it was a result of random coincidences and not intelligent design.
random coincidences is a nice way of saying dumb luck.
We might not be in kindergarden, but it sure feels like it from this perspective. I shouldn't have to flesh out such simple concepts.
Here it goes, when you roll the dice, there is a 1/6 chance that it'll land on any number for 1 through 6. No duh. Let's say I do that 10 times and get these results: 1,5,3,5,4,1,6,3,2,2. Now, what's the probability that such a result would happen? Pretty low. Your argument is that there is no way random chance could produce this result, essentially taking odds after the fact. Same thing applies with your probability that there's no way random chance could produce life. The universe is very, very large and contains billions of planets. With even the slightest chance of life arising, chances are good that will arise at least once. Further, biochemistry isn't chance, so trying to calculate the odds of life arising on Earth is futile.
your 1,5,3,5,4,1,6,3,2,2, result is just that.... giberish, it means nothing. and likewise if our universe contained the same giberish result then you would have a point. but the result is not giberish. It would be the same if those numbers represented a musical note and the result of random rolls produces a melody. I'm not taking odds after the fact, i'm asking what were the odds of it occuring by random coincidence. We're not talking about biochemistry, as it has to deal with what is, not where we came from.
calculating the odds of life arising on earth may be futile, but this is the futility that atheist believe to be the cause of existence.
Evolution isn't abiogenesis and it isn't dumb luck. That's strike three. Somewhere down the road, life happened. This is obvious, because we know that because there is life on the Earth now. So trying to calculate the odds of life is irrelevant to the theory of evolution.
atheists believe that random coincidence produced life, and they believe evolution and abiogenesis is the best explanation.
trying to calculate the odds is very relevant when a theory is based on those very odds.
Maybe it'll help you see what the theory of evolution is and isn't if I explain evolution. The theory of evolution assumes the existence of life and explains how populations of organisms change over time - individuals with alleles that result in an increased ability to survive and reproduce pass on those traits to their offspring, who repeat the process. The frequency of alleles within a population of interbreeding organisms changes over time. Natural selection pressures and geographical isolation can cause speciation. Also, populations vary genetically because of genetic copying errors known as mutations. Bam, there's evolution in a nutshell. What's so irrational about that?
thanks for the lesson, but the specifics of evolution has nothing to do with its premise that the catalyst for those changes in environment or life is the result of random coincidence. that is what we are investigating in this discussion.
it is irrational to think that a result can occur without something causing that result.