Christians, or I suppose anyone who believes in a god, often like to use an argument called the Design Argument to argue for the existence of God. It’s also called a teleological argument, but I’ll spare you the philosophical terms.
As a matter of fact, my philosophy professors would probably be disappointed with the overall sloppiness of this post. Oh well… I hope you can still see the general idea behind what I’m trying to say.
See, I believe in the existence of God, and I might even like some forms of the Design Argument (I’m still looking into it). But I know I definitely don’t like I certain position that many people take when they argue from design.
Specifically, some people claim that since the probability of our universe happening by chance is, for all practical considerations, equal to zero, the universe must have been created by an intelligent god. <<I don’t buy that argument.
Some people won’t even buy that the probability of our universe happening by chance is equal to zero… but even if they do, there’s a bigger flaw.
Say I dump a bucket of sand on the ground. I immediately hire a million miniature Oompa Loompas to find out exactly where and how each grain of sand fell. They analyze it and, after years of analysis, mark down the exact location and falling pattern of each piece of sand.
Now they plug that info into a super computer. They run some tests on the data and find that the chances that this would happened (or really the chances that this will happen again) are so infinitesimally small that, in a practical sense, we’d say the odds are zero. We’d say the probability of it happening by chance is absurd.
That’s what some positions in favor of the Design Argument claim. They claim that since the probability of our universe happening randomly is so small, it’s absurd… therefore, God must have created it.
But here’s the problem with those positions. In my counter example, the bucket did tip. The sand did fall. And even though the probability of it happening is almost zero, we can’t go back and use probability to show that it didn’t happen by chance. Because it did happen by chance.
Take another, more personal example: you. The chances that a person would be born on your birthday with your hair color, your ancestry, your skin defects, your personality, your blood type, your DNA, etc. is so small, it’s absurd.
But you did happen. You are here. Even though the probability would be against you happening, you happened, so you throw all the statistics out of whack.
In other words, you can’t use probability backward like that. It doesn’t work the same way like that.
Here’s an even simpler example: flip a coin 1,000 times and record the sequence of heads and tails. What’s the probability that that sequence would happen? But wait… it did.
That’s what anyone who’s against the Design Argument is going to say, or at least think. They’re like, “Yeah, sure, it looks improbable, but that’s only because you’re comparing it to other possibilities that didn’t happen. The fact is, this happened. The universe exists. So that throws all those ‘probabilities’ out of whack.”
Does this mean the whole Design Argument is bogus? Not necessarily – it’s more complex than that. I’d say this is a problem, but alone I don’t think it kills the argument completely. In fact, I think there might be a way around it.
Still, I hear people, especially Christians, taking this “probability” position all the time, so I thought I’d try to counter it a bit, at least to keep us from wasting time and credibility on lame arguments… or at least to get us to find a workaround.
