Let me offer my analysis of the infamous passage that has sparked so much discussion that it took the contestants a whole thread to arrive at the situation that the final posts do not differ much from the first.
Here's what RAZD said:
RAZD writes:
The difference between improbable and impossible is vast, no matter what the number calculated actually turns out to be. Life could indeed be a highly unlikely event on the grand cosmic scale. That does not prevent it from happening, and more to the point: once it has happened the probability is irrelevant. You could flip 50 heads in a row the first time: probability does not say when in the course of events the improbable happens. To argue from the existence of life that the "improbability" of it is evidence of miraculous intervention is just a post hoc ergo proctor hoc logical fallacy.
Math is not evidence for reality. If you have a mathematical model that says something cannot happen when you have evidence around you that it has, the probability is high that the mathematical model is erroneous.
This is Faith's comment:
Faith writes:
Through this post RAZD has been arguing about the probabilities involved, just the math Ma'am, claiming that creationists compute outlandishly low probability for abiogenesis or evolution as such. I get the basic idea but I didn't try to grasp his points in any depth. They may be correct -- or not. In any case he admits his own calculations also give highly unfavorable odds.
And THEN he blows the whole enterprise with the above statement. "Well duh," he seems to be saying, it DOES exist, so therefore it just ISN'T improbable. That's where I laugh.
Well, WHAT isn't improbable? Well, that EVOLUTION brought all that about, rather than a Designer. But that is what is under dispute. That is what is being discussed. It isn't just that life exists, the dispute is about how it came to be, and very low probability for evolutionist processes is evidence for the creationist side. All he is doing here is massive begging of the question, assuming his conclusion in his premise, circular reasoning.
Let's pick RAZD's statements apart:
RAZD writes:
The difference between improbable and impossible is vast, no matter what the number calculated actually turns out to be.
This is true. If an event has a probability of exactly zero, then it is impossible. Any other probability, however close to zero, means the event is
not impossible,
it could happen.
Life could indeed be a highly unlikely event on the grand cosmic scale. That does not prevent it from happening, and more to the point: once it has happened the probability is irrelevant.
In the first sentence, RAZD forgot to specify the
kind of life event: abiogenesis or special creation. It is a safe assumption that he meant abiogenesis. He said it could be highly unlikely, and he is right: abiogenesis could be - but is not necessarily - highly unlikely. The fact is that we simply don't know how likely or unlikely it is.
He goes on to say: "That does not prevent it from happening", and again he is right, as per his previous correct assessment of the difference between improbable and impossible. But then he makes a crucial mistake by saying: "and more to the point: once it has happened the probability is irrelevant."
Generally speaking, this would not be a problem: once
something has happened, its probability is irrelevant. But the problem is that he's not clear about the "something". RAZD's probability argument was about abiogenesis. Next he's talking about something that has in fact happened: life on earth. But we do not know how
that happened, it could be abiogenesis, or it could be special creation.
RAZD equivocates when he says "once
it has happened", "it" meaning "life on earth". He cannot say that the probability is irrelevant, because the probability he's talking about is the probability of something else. He can only be right if he assumes that life on earth is the result of abiogenesis. But that was what was under dispute.
And that's exactly what Faith is on about. Faith is right: RAZD commited a fallacy.
The rest of RAZD's statements are correct, except that his latin is a bit rusty.
{edited for spelling}
This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 06-Oct-2005 10:11 PM
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins
™ Version 4.2