<HTML>Excerpts from an editorial posted at townhall.com by Marvin Olasky
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www.townhall.com]
[Roger Penrose, who helped to develop black-hole theories, estimated as one in one hundred billion to the 123rd power the odds of a Big Bang producing by accident an orderly universe as opposed to chaos.
Big Bang theorists argue that the universe, one second after its purported start, had to expand at a rate rapid enough to keep in check the gravitational attraction of galaxies. Stephen Hawking has noted that if the rate of expansion had been smaller by an infinitesimal amount, the universe would have collapsed.
What about the origin of life? A chance of one out of 1,000,000,000,000,000 is considered a virtual impossibility, but when DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick calculated the possibility of a simple protein sequence of 200 amino acids (much simpler than a DNA molecule) originating spontaneously, his figure was 10 with 260 zeroes after it.
John Blanchard, in "Does God Believe in Atheists?" quotes useful analogies about the likelihood of the universe allowing for the existence of life: "Hitting a target an inch wide on the other side of the observable universe, or expecting a pole-vaulter's pole to remain standing, poised on its tip, for centuries following his vault."
Those who remember one past fad will appreciate British scientist Fred Hoyle's view of the odds against evolved life. "Anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the Rubik cube," he wrote, "will concede the near impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind person moving the cube faces at random. Now imagine 10 to the fiftieth blind persons (standing shoulder to shoulder, these would more than fill our entire planetary system) each with a scrambled Rubik cube simultaneously arriving at the solved form."
Hoyle's best-known analogy has a tornado in a junkyard taking all the pieces of metal lying there and turning them into a Boeing 747. It would be amazing, but possible, for two pieces to be naturally welded together, and then two pieces more in a later whirlwind, but production of even a simple organic molecule would require all of the pieces to come together at one time.
Three decades ago, Frank Salisbury of Utah State University described the odds this way: "Imagine one hundred million trillion planets, each with an ocean with lots of DNA fragments that reproduce one million times per second, with a mutation occurring each time. In four billion years, it would still take trillions of universes to produce a single gene -- if they got lucky."
During these recent decades, however, the odds have not inhibited the true believers in evolution. Or are they true believers in avoiding at all costs the alternative? The late science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov acknowledged that he did not "have the information to prove that God doesn't exist," ]
I have not checked out the source of the quotes. Some will argue the scientists cited are biased by their beliefs.
The irony of this position lies in the axiomatic nature of the foundations of ALL knowledge.</HTML>
