The Truth About Evolution and Religion

The point is that it is a standard part of biology to do probability calculations of this sort. Here is another two:"By comparison, if we question how long it would take a high-speed computer to write randomly a specific Shakespearean sonnet, we are asking that all the letters of the words of the sonnet will come up simultaneously in the correct order. It is an impossible task, even if all the computers in the world today had been working from the time of the big bang to the present. Even to compose the phrase, To be or not to be, letter by letter, would take a typical computer millions of years." ( page 32, The Plausibility of Life)Natural Selection and the Complexity of the Gene (Nature, Vol. 224, 1969, p. 342):Subtitle: Conflict between the idea of natural selection and the idea of uniqueness of the gene does not seem to be near a solution yet.First paragraph: Modern biology is faced with two ideas which seem to me to be quite incompatible with each other. One is the concept of evolution by natural selection of adaptive genes that are originally produced by random mutations. The other is the concept of the gene as part of a molecule of DNA, each gene being unique in the order of arrangement of its nucleotides. If life really depends on each gene being as unique as it appears to be, the it is too unique to come into being by chance mutations. There will be nothing for natural selection to act upon.

Even with the filtering, there is no explanation for the increase in the complexity of life. The relevance of this is that you are being deceived by atheistic humanists. Atheistic humanists are people who think they are more rational and enlightened than those who believe in God.One of the reasons to believe in God is the big bang. The Bible says God created the universe from nothing. The big bang is a sign that God inspired the human authors of the Bible. To a lesser extent, there is no explanation for the origin of life 3.5 billion years ago. However, there is speculation about the origin of life. There is more than speculation about the cause of evolution because Darwinism explains the adaptation of species to their environment.

So you admit that the theory of evolution has limited abilities to explain living organisms.

This is a quote from Kenneth Miller. He is disagreeing with Behe about intelligent design, not about evolution and biology:"In Behe’s view, these are examples of nothing more than a kind of trench warfare in which the two species have progressively disabled or broken parts of themselves in order to survive. Nothing genuinely new, novel, or complex has resulted from this struggle, and we shouldn’t expect otherwise. The reason, according to Behe, is that the sorts of changes we see in this well-studied interaction represent the limit, the edge of what evolution can accomplish. They can go this far and no further. A line in the sand is drawn, and the other side of that line is intelligent design.
How does Behe know where to draw that line?" (p. 67, The Battle for America's Soul)

There seems to be some confusion about terminology. I'v been reading about evolution since 1970s and have had book reviews published about evolution. I must admit, however, that I have only a layman's understanding of evolution. The research that is currently being done is beyond me, so I can only tell you what I mean by the words:Evolution is the object of study of evolutionary biology.
Common descent is also called macroevolution and refers to the 20th century observation that all life evolved from a single bacterium or many bacteria over a period of 3.5 billion years.
Adaptation refers to the ancient observation that species adapt to their environment.
Theory of evolution is an out-of-date term that was relevant in the 19th and early 20th century.
Orthogenesis is the discredited theory that living organisms have an interior drive to evolve into bigger and more complex organisms.
Natural selection includes random mutations, survival of the fittest, etc.
Facilitated variation is an improvement over natural selection and is considered a refutation of intelligent design. Intelligent design does not deserve a definition because it is not science. It refutes intelligent design because it helps explain adaptation. Since there is no hard and fast line to be drawn between and common descent and adaptation, it can also be regarded as an explanation for common descent. Biologists don't say natural selection and/or facilitated variation explains common descent because it would make them look like they don't understand how complex life is.
Second law of thermodynamics states that a system of particles tends towards a state of greater disorder. The free expansion of a gas is an example. It is based on probability theory and statistical mechanics. We can assume that common descent does not violate the second law of thermodynamics. However, non-biologists and crackpots who say there was so much time and so many organism and so many mutations that common descent is explained by natural selection are violating the second law of thermodynamics.