Monday 3 May 2010

Intelligent Design

Mrs Smith just won the lottery. She's a bit of a geek (a rich one now mind) so she sits down with a cup of coffee (she's not into champagne) and calculates the odds against her winning. The light dawns. If she did the lottery for a thousand years, the chances of her winning are statistically insignificant. 'It's fate' she shouts - 'the probability of me winning is so low, someone up there must have planned for me to win'. Johnny Smith (her 12 year old son) responds 'don't be silly mum' (his chances of a new games console reducing all the time...) 'anyone who won would now be saying the same thing. The chances of you winning are the same as anyone winning. Whoever won would think that "fate" had intervened'. (he has a large vocabulary for a 12 year old...) 'Oh I see' said Mrs Smith 'Given that someone wins, the chance of any individual winning is roughly the same and they'd all feel 'special' if they won'. Sadly, Mr Smith now comes in and confesses that he didn't buy the ticket this week - but that's another story.

So it goes with the argument that humans are so unlikely to have evolved by chance that there must be a designer. It is true that the probability of humans is so low as to be statistically insignificant - but it is equally low for any other form of intelligent life. So, if I was sat here typing with my eighth arm whilst combing my blue fur with the specially suited tool on the end of my sixth, I would be thinking 'the odds against me evolving such a comb are so remote it must mean there is a designer'. The argument only works if you start from the presupposition that the outcome you see is the outcome that was desired. It's a circular argument: I want humans, humans have evolved against impossible odds, someone must have wanted humans... But if it really is chance evolutionary paths that led here, then they could equally have led elsewhere and whatever had evolved with the intelligence to ask the question could conclude that the outcome they see is the one intended.

Lucy Smith (who has been listening to her brother) says 'So it would have been equally likely for us to have evolved with only one head and only two legs?' 'Don't be ridiculous' said Mr Smith trying to distract attention from his failure to buy the lottery ticket.

1 comment:

  1. Interesting.. So is your argument that the statistics against evolution shouldn't be on the 'against' side? And instead that when you explore the evolution/creation/whatever you want to call it debate, there are other questions that are more important than the statistics? If so, what do you think those questions might be?
    Or is your argument that we could have ended up looking like that 8 armed 'thing', and therefore God wasn't overly bothered as to what we looked like? Well, and how does God fit into it?

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