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It's funny, because this very concept is one of the ideas that, when I was very young, gave me the epiphany as to precisely how we could have evolved without a creator.


Right, that is the other way of looking at the evidence (which I briefly addressed in my first post). What I'm interested in is how to determine the difference between the two.

In fact, I believe I remember an example on the Skeptics Dictionary site talking about a shuffle of cards. The argument was that when you get dealt an extraordinary hand (say a royal flush in poker) that you do not assume that the game is rigged- in fact you know for certain that this improbability is a possibility because you saw it happen. This is analogous to your theory about how we could have ended up in the ideal location for our existence. We know the ideal poker hand can happen because it has happened, and with enough shuffles it’s going to happen at some point.

I find this example particularly interesting because I played a lot of spades in college. One time I managed to rig a deck so that another player got dealt every single spade in the deck. I just wanted to see his reaction, and he immediately laughed and turned over his cards. He hadn’t seen me rig the deck, and being dealt all of the spades is as probable as any other hand you can be dealt. However, he knew (as would you are I) immediately that the game was rigged.

So how do we know whether our “game is rigged”? If we could evaluate the number of shuffles- i.e. were there a number of opportunities for life to evolve and it just needed to find the right set of variables- then I think we’d have a good idea. But just saying that the universe is big, or even infinite, doesn’t convince me that life was waiting for an opportunity to evolve. Certain elements necessary to life as we know it are dependent on variables that are the same everywhere in the universe.

Ah, so how about “Life as we know it?”

Douglass Adams, who was an atheist I trust you know, made the analogy of a puddle of water contemplating its existence. It would assume because of the way the ground around it was perfectly suited to its shape then there must be a creator, rather than attributing its own shape and size to the ground around it. It’s a good argument, however not conclusive. There are plenty of other examples that can be made where an object’s surroundings were created with the object in mind by an intelligent designer- say microphone in a form fitting case- obviously it was created by a designer with purpose and intent- the case was created based on the microphone’s need to be protected, which is the reason it fits so well.

In both cases of the microphone and the puddle, scientific observation can tell us whether specific design was involved. The question is whether science can tell us that about our own existence (either way).
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-Jeff
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings; they did it by killing all those who opposed them.