Return to 3rd Quarter 2023 articles.
Advocates of unguided naturalistic evolution say that evolution could have gone in many directions, and we are lucky to be here. But what are the chances of evolution producing you and me as we are today? Evolutionists say the chances are 100% since we are already here. But, if we go back to the cosmic creation event, or big bang, the chances that naturalistic evolution would have put us here are zero. On the other hand, if God planned and guided the creation because he had us in mind, the chances would be 100%.
The DNA that makes us who we are physically is a highly complex strand of information. What are the chances that it could have written itself by chance? First of all, information comes from intelligence, not chance. Calculating the likelihood of something after it has happened is a statistical fallacy. After all, DNA is here, and so are we, so the chances are 100%. But what are the chances if we go back before the fact? What are the chances that non-living chemicals could come together in a just-right way to form the first living cell? Then what is the statistical evidence for that first cell multiplying and modifying by random chance mutations and natural selection to create humans?
One imagined scenario involves a billion chimpanzees typing on a billion keyboards for a billion years, accidentally typing one line of Shakespeare. What are the chances of that? Well, the short answer is that it will never happen. Computer keyboards have various numbers of keys, from about 78 to 109. Let us simplify by selecting 100 keys for our keyboard.
Forget Shakespeare. Let us go for the line “I love you more.” without quotation marks. That is a total of 16 letters, spaces, and a period. With 100 keys and 16 letters, what are the chances of accidentally typing that line? To compute that, you would have to multiply 100 by itself 16 times, which can be expressed as 10016 or 1032. That is ten quadrillion quadrillion possible 16-letter combinations.
Typing continuously at a speed equivalent to 45 words per minute, it would take trillions of years to have a 50/50 chance that one of those chimps would type that phrase. Absolutely nobody thinks that the Earth is trillions of years old. Nobody even suggests that the universe is that old. For this thought experiment, we are only looking for one short line of text, “I love you more.” That is 16 items compared to about 3.2 billion bases in the human genome. Typing that line is nothing compared to the complex system of life on this planet.
The bottom line is that we cannot explain life or the fine-tuned physical constants of the universe by chance alone. But we can explain those things if God planned and guided the creation because he had us in mind. With God, our chances of being here were 100% from the beginning (see Genesis 1:1; 26-28).
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Scripture links/references are from BibleGateway.com. Unhighlighted scriptures can be looked up at their website.