Probabilities For Life

How did life come about? Could there be life elsewhere? NASA conducted an interesting study. They needed to know the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. Earth could not afford the danger if one of our space vehicles were to bring back a deadly microbe for which man had no resistance. NASA hired Yale University’s Harold Morowitz, a theoretic expert. Dr. Morowitz deals with “the laws of large numbers and probabilities.” Here is how the probabilities theory works: you take a set of circumstances, and you scientifically determine the odds of a certain outcome. For instance, if you flip a coin, you have “even odds” of heads or tails. The more you flip it, the greater the odds are against it coming up “heads” every time. Once you get to 1/1015, the probability of an event ever happening is negligible. If you get to 1/1050, the event could not have happened even once in 15 billion-years.

After studying the complexity of a protein molecule, Dr. Morowitz concluded that the probability of life occurring by chance is 1/10236. 1/10236 takes into account all the atoms in the universe, and the chance that the right ones came together just once to form a protein molecule.He said "The universe would have to be trillions of years older, and trillions of times larger, for a protein molecule to have occurred by random chance." It's a bit like throwing 4 billion pennies into the air and having them all land heads-up. Evolutionists tell us that given enough time, this could happen. But as we just learned, there wasn't enough time and there weren't enough pennies.

By the stretch of logic, many of those same scientists say that a DNA molecule containing four billion bytes of perfectly arranged information did not come from a source of intelligence. It just "happened!". Ruhla's "Physics of Chance" that I learned how to derive the predictions of quantum theory - the predictions which show that two distant objects can exert influence on one another, "faster than the speed of light.

The text begins with rather simple treatments of probability, applied to coin tosses and telephone queues, on to Boltzmann Statistics, and then finally to quantum theory. So as your reading through the chapters in the book, you pick up the "tools" you need as you go along, in order to understand the more difficult material later on. Ruhla's writing style is engaging, although silly at times.

Interestingly, there is nothing in textbooks or any other serious books about life’s mathematical possibilities. Who in their right mind would ever believe that a dictionary developed because of an explosion in a printing press. Every designed product in the human experience points to a designer. The design argument is literally as old as the hills. That’s why it does not matter how loudly the skeptic shouts “chance.” The skeptic has not been able to conquer our counter-intuitive certainty—that information assumes a mind. And so the skeptic, filled with contradictions, ends up giving designed arguments to argue against design. How ironic.
Now it is important to note what is being said here. We are not just talking about aesthetic design (time plus matter plus chance can possibly explain aesthetic design), what is being discussed here is intelligent design. You see friends, If you were to walk around on another planet and see stones in a perfect triangle, you could possibly assume that it all came together over eons of time by chance. But if you were to come upon a wrapper which had the words “Big Mac with extra cheese, lettuce, pickle, and tomato,” you would certainly not say, “look what the atmospheric pressure has done here.” Why is that? Information assumes intelligence. And so there is a fine twist to this argument.

It is actually better called the “argument to design,” the original information density in human order. Evolution cannot, simply cannot explain the information order of the human cell. You see, all order has not evolved. Think of this: there is enough information in a single thread of human DNA to fill 600,000 pages of information. That is specified complexity, not just aesthetics.
If I were to make an absolute statement such as, "There is no gold on the moon," what is needed for that statement to be proven true? I need to have absolute or total knowledge of the moon, from it’s surface to it’s core. I need to have information that there is no gold in any of the rock, all the way to the core, in any crevice, even one speck, of the entire moon. If there is one flake of gold, then my statement is false and I have no basis for it. Therefore, by necessity, I need to have absolute knowledge before I can make an absolute statement of that nature.

No human being has all knowledge. Therefore, none of us is able to truthfully make this assertion. If you insist upon disbelief in God, what you must say is, "Having the limited knowledge I have at present, I believe that there is no God that I know of. Owing to a lack of knowledge on your part, you can not know for certain if God exists. So, in the strictest sense of the word, you cannot be an atheist. And since you do not have complete and absolute knowledge, by definition you are an "agnostic" - one who claims he "doesn't know" if God exists.

One of the greatest scientist minds who ever lived, Thomas Edison, said, "We do not know a millionth of one percent about anything." Let me repeat: Let's say that you have an incredible one percent of all the knowledge in the universe. Would it be possible, in the ninety-nine percent of the knowledge that you haven't yet come across, that there might be ample evidence to prove the existence of God? If you are reasonable, you will be forced to admit that it is possible. Somewhere, in the knowledge you haven't yet discovered, there could be enough evidence to prove that God does exist.

One scientist has remarked that the possibility of the human enzyme and our chemical makeup coming together by accident is one in ten to the 40,000th power. Ten to the 40,000th power is more than all the atoms in all of the known galaxies of the universe. Any mathematician understands that when you reach that level of improbability, then it can be reasonable stated that it could never happen! If there is design, then there must be a purpose. Stephen Hawking once wrote that if we knew the “why” of life, we would know the mind of God. Thank God we do, and it was not by our own, but the Father Who drew us to Him by the Holy Spirit (John 6:44). We don’t have to wonder about the origin of life or our purpose (to worship Him). We know the original Author and Finisher and He explains everything there is about all that exists (John 1:3).