Proving God Statistically

I don't think so.The odds of any occurance are the number of desired outcomes divided by the number of possible outcomes.The odds of drawing number one are 1 in 10, because there's 10 coins. The odds of drawing number two on your second draw is 1 in 9, because there's only nine coins in your pocket. Remember, "dice have no memory".Think of it this way. Pretend that, in an astronomical conincidence, you've drawn coins one through 9 in order. There's only one coin in your pocket. What are the odds that it's number ten? According to your model, something like one in a bazilion. But there's only one coin in your pocket. The odds that it's number ten, if all other nine coins are out of your pocket, must be one. Obviously your model is in error.

Oops, you're right.But even then it's still 1 in 10 every time. The odds of drawing one on the first draw are one in ten. The odds of drawing 10 on the tenth draw are one in ten.The odds of succeeding on all draws are 1 in 10^10, obviously. But the odds don't go up for any one draw.

David, how is this supposed to prove the existence of your god? All you've done - assuming your argument is valid, which it's not - is prove the existence of whatever creator you like.Well, you've done it. Vishnu is obviously my lord and creator thanks to you.

Should I? It depends of course on how many trials it took before they got that result. See, you had it right at the first part; partitioning all possible strings into two different sets. The set of significant strings is considerably smaller than the set of insignificant strings, yes.So, the odds of acheiving a significant string is the number of such strings divided by the number of all possible strings. If it's your position that this number is astronomicall small, you would be correct. But, when you say things like this: You seem to be implying that there's zero chance. There's a considerable difference. In fact it's the difference between something and nothing. Could you explain your mathematics here? Especially how you get 0 from p divided by q, where p and q are both non-zero integers.[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 11-16-2003]

What's the point of this thread? Precisely which thing are we saying couldn't have happened by "chance"? (How about chance + selection?)

But say, if we were talking about a trillion trials a second, perhaps, for a billion years, you wouldn't find anything odd about arriving at those sequences? And how low is that? Is there a specific threshold? Or are we just supposed to "know"? And then of course the problem is showing that the specific chemical reactions that lead to life (if that is indeed where this thread is going) fall under that threshold.[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 11-16-2003]

Did it ever occur to you to address the substance of someone's post, rather than their spelling shortcomings? Just curious...

So your answer is "no", then?(BTW "their" in this context is neuter, not plural. It's an emerging usage.)

Yes. It's like, the odds of winning the lottery are really low. Yet, people win the lottery. The odds that the lottery will be won are much more reasonable.Of course, finding out the odds for life would require knowing the exact numeration of how many configurations represent life and how many don't. Since we have a sample size of one, we can hardly attempt such a calculation - though I suspect that won't stop DNAunion.

You keep mentioning this. I don't find SETI's failure to date indicative of anything at all. After all why would aliens necessarily use radio? Turn the tables - our own bubble of radio transmission is only 80 years or so in radius. Why assume theirs is any larger? Figures that are useless, yes. If you restrict to only the life we know, then you're painting the bull's-eye around the arrow.

That you know of. What indications? How can you have indications about something we don't know anything about? Sure. And SETI's failure to date may disprove that assumption, or render it doubtful at best. But that hardly disproves the existence of intelligent aliens in general. It just disproves the existence of aliens that are working really hard to be detected by us. Young compared to what?[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 11-22-2003]

Um, no. He's saying that aliens are talking to themselves, on their own planet, and aren't trying to talk to us. So if they're not talking to us, why would they care about how far radio penetrates interstellar dust? You keep saying that, but I can send a visible light message over 2 km on a clear day using nothing but a mirror. Again, why is that an advantage to an alien race who's not concerned about talking to other planets? But you haven't addressed why you think they would want to do that. SETI isn't looking for "Hello, Earth" messages, they're trying to pick up routine radio traffic from other worlds.

They'd have to know we were here in order to be sending us messages.I'm sure that if we got a "Hello, Earth" message, SETI would pick it up. I didn't mean to imply that they're ignoring those kinds of messages. But that's not the only thing they're looking for. It would be different than the normal background radio/microwave radiation. You might be interested in this link: Page not found | The Planetary Society

No, I'd say that they're saying that our current models of radiation emission don't allow for the spontaneous generation of narrow-band signals, and that this is confirmed by observation.Why are we talking about this? Can we get back to the topic, whatever that was?