Quote:Peter0302: “Well, I'm no atheist, BUT that statement is proven false by mathematics, I'm afraid. When you consider the sheer amount of time the universe has existed, and the number of opportunities there were for, say, life to develop, also multiplied by the sheer SIZE of the universe, it is basically mathematically inevitable that it was going to turn out the way it did, at least SOMEWHERE, and this just happens to be at least one of the places where it did.”
It is IMPOSSIBLE to say that with certainty, simply because you and all the mathematicians lack sufficient knowledge to make such an assumption. To state this would imply that you know exactly all the possible permutations with all possible constants and variables, and NO ONE does, but even if you did, there is another issue that makes it almost impossible for the universe to come into existence by chance, and that is the lack of a conscious memory of previous, failed attempts, so that with each attempt, it does not become more likely, the chance remains the same, I will expound on this later.
A symphony of Mahler is nothing compared to the complexity of the creation we live in, mathematicians cannot even make an accurate assessment of the chance of a universe with a planet like earth with it’s complex systems maintaining a perfect balance coming into existence by sheer coincidence, they lack the knowledge to make this computation, at best they can say that since possibilities are limited, the chances of the universe coming into existence as a result of coincidence approaches infinity, which is an absurdity.
There also is the recurrence of possibilities we have to take into account, so you are dealing with a chance that, for lack of sufficient knowledge, can be described as ‘approaching infinity’, which, if you think about it deeply, is a concept our mind cannot really grasp.
Just because a chance exists it does not automatically follow that it
HAS to occur.
You may have a chance of 1:10 of picking the right number in the range 1-10, but you must not forget that each event has no memory of the preceding event, so that each time you pick a number, not remembering the number you previously picked, it may be that after 100 times trying you still have not picked the right number, because you picked nr. 1 fifty times, nr.2 twenty times, nr.3 fifteen times, nr 4 ten times and nr. 5 five times, and the right number was nr.9. Likewise the universe has no memory of any previous attempts, so that it consciously can travel new paths with each new try.
To state that this universe with the earth was inevitable and HAD TO happen is simply untrue, it is far, far more likely that it has and will never happen at all by chance.
So, even if the chance is, let’s say, 1: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 etc., even then, it gives an indication of HOW
LIKELY it is that it will occur. So how can anyone possibly say, with this in mind as well as the fact that certain paths are travelled several times over and over again, that our universe
HAD to occur? It makes no sense.
And with such an infinitely small chance, I can only repeat my original statement that the theory of an originating intelligence makes much more sense to me than betting on an infinitesimal small chance to occur, especially when the creation we live in shows so much patterns, like motives in a symphony. Just as I cannot believe a STRUCTURED symphony with thematic development will come into being out of itself, I cannot believe our physical surroundings with their properties (what gave them their property, what makes them behave in a certain way?) have their origin in chance.
Continued in next post