Russell
Posts: 1082
Joined: April 2005
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Hey, this is intriguing. Getting impatient for Avo's explication of Spetner's gaffe, I did a little googling and came across this:, posted by someone using the nom de 'nette "onething" | Quote | Tika mentions personal incredulity. This one of Dawkins favorite mocking points. And Darwinists in general constantly assure us that we have a problem understanding big numbers. Discussing the probability of life originating, Dawkins said we should drop our intuitive feeling for chance. He said we should imagine a hypothetical long-lived alien of millions of years. This alien might from time to time see a perfect hand of bridge. It would be nothing to write home about. Yet he never bothered to do the calculation, which turns out to be 4.47 X 10 -28., according to Spetner, Not By Chance.
And he says it is an easy, straightforward calculation. So, playing 100 hands of bridge per day for 100 million years, said alien has a chance of one in a quadrillion of seeing a perfect hand of bridge in his lifetime.
This has been bothering my mind for months now. Dawkins didn’t make the calculation, and it is one that an advanced high-schooler could probably make. He wasn’t caught off guard, speaking off the cuff. It was in his book.
I keep asking myself, is Dawkins dishonest, or can it be he actually believed what he wrote? Because if he did, it means that he has no feeling for chance or probability, and this is truly worrisome. Dawkins, after all, is both Britain’s leading intellectual, and the Grand Wizard of the Public Understanding of Science, and he is a professor at a famous university, and he writes books defending evolution.
I would have to assume that a person with a Ph.D in any science field would have some education in math and be able to do probability calculations. Probability difficulties are one of the greatest detractions from evolution theory. And he throws out comments like that about a bridge playing alien, but doesn’t bother to actually calculate and see if he is right.
And people like me are told that we have no feeling for the great periods of time that evolution calls for, and that we should be ashamed of making arguments about personal incredulity (although it is alright for them to be incredulous about any divine being). But if Dawkins had an adequate feeling about probability, he would know when to check his calculations.
He did not check, which means he is operating in a fantastical mode of thinking. He has no feel for it. Since Darwinism relies on the miraculous, they must have miraculous entities, albeit those entities cannot be living or intelligent. Time and chance are the deities, as others have noted. No wonder they find incredulity offensive, it is unseemly to question a deity.
I believe in God, but not in miracles. |
So, either Avo & onething are one person, spreading the same uninformed blather over the net, or they're both part of an anti-evo network promulgating talking points without bothering to reword or investigate, or - most bizarrely - without bothering to check the very calculations they point out are so elementary!
Care to shed some light on this, Avo?
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Must... not... scratch... mosquito bite.
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