Quote:
Originally Posted by saxinc++  However, when you throw "highly complicated" into it, you change it entirely. While the dice could all be scattered around and show each number, do you honestly believe they could stack up perfectly, with all of the numbers lined up? (highly-complicated on this scale). And the universe is so much more! How can you say the universe, being highly-complicated isn't designed, but it would be nearly impossible for the dice scenario to happen?
So, while order doesn't necessarily imply design, order and high-complication points strongly to it. |
Seems that you are confusing "improbable" with "impossible."
If there is a chance a complicated event occurs without design, then it isn't impossible. If it isn't impossible, then its having occurred doesn't suggest anything at all.
Besides, it's a little weird to amaze oneself with the
a priori probability of something that is already known to have happened! SOMETHING was bound to happen, and any one possibility BY ITSELF would have been
a priori unlikely. But something happened, maybe something random. Call it X. Then we look back and say, WOW, X was unlikely to have happened!
But that's silly to say...every other possibility would have been equally unlikely!
Maybe this is not coming across nicely. Let me give an example. Suppose we ask a computer to provide a random 100-digit binary number. Guessing the right number
before the computer spits it out would be impressive. But what we're doing with the universe is looking at the binary number
after it's been spit out, and then remarking that it could only have occurred with probability 1/2^100. We then (apparently) find this startling, and we conclude that the smallness of the probability suggests that the number wasn't random, after all!
But it was random. All the strings are equally unlikely, and one of them was going to occur no matter what. The unlikeliness of the one that *did* occur suggests only that we started with a lot of possibilities, which we knew already!