What are the odds of that?

cards

This is by no means a definitive argument against evolution, but I offer it to put the “time, chance and random mutation” theory in perspective. 

Everyone knows that micro-evolution occurs, such as dog breeding and bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics.  But macro-evolutionists believe that with enough time an amazingly complex single cell of unknown origin could make lots and lots of small changes, develop reproductive capacities and eventually become humans, elephants, caterpillar/butterflies, chameleons and so much more.

Let’s consider something very simple.  Imagine that you shuffle a deck of cards.  If you shuffled it one time per second, how often would all the cards go back into their original order? (Ace of spades, King of spades, etc.)  The math is simply 1/52 (the odds of the Ace of spades being on top) times 1/51 times 1/50, etc. I left out the Jokers to make it easier.

Guess how many years it takes?  I’m not kidding: 2,557,653,956,460,680,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

If everyone on the planet shuffles the cards instead of just one person, it only takes 393,485,224,070,873,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.  That is still 87,441,160,904,638,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times the age of the earth, and even more times the period that life has existed here. You are much more likely to win the Lottery seven times in a row.  We even have a term to describe the practical probability of that happening: Zero.

I make it so easy — you didn’t even have to create the cards or the people to shuffle them.  But when you’re done, all you have is a particular card sequence.  You haven’t brought anything to life.  You haven’t created new cards.  You haven’t developed different sexes of cards that can make new cards that evolve to a computerized version of Monopoly.  Most importantly, you just created a pattern, not information.  DNA is full of information, not just patterns.

The odds of all that would be enormously higher.  This is a very simple view of the requirements for structural changes:

  • Many genes must change at once.
  • A change to any one gene affects many functions.
  • The probability of a genetic mutation being beneficial is very low.   Harmful or insignificant mutations are far more likely.
  • Significant changes require many simultaneous beneficial mutations.

When you extend the odds of each of these things it becomes quite fantastical that, as some evolutionists claim, a mammal would go from exclusively consuming fresh water to salt water and more.

And remember, even if macro-evolution proved to be true it still wouldn’t disprove God.  Evolutionary theory doesn’t explain where the universe came from or even where life begins.  Its proponents just assume that there is no God and work overtime trying to prop up their massive non sequitur and stifling the speech of those who dare to disagree.  Their theory is so transparently false and ridiculous that even with their crushing of academic freedoms, their monopolies in public schools and the complicity of the media, most people still don’t believe it.  It reminds me of a quote by J. Budziszewski:

Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that you must be highly intelligent and educated to commit. 

Meditate on the figures above the next time someone tells you that the universe came into being with no creator and that chemicals came to life and organized themselves to all we see today.

Macro-evolutionists must think the Lottery is a sure thing.

Also see the Wintery Knight’s post on this, which addresses how the formation of a single protein is vastly more complicated than this example.

A typical protein isn’t made of 52 parts, it’s made of around 200, and there are 80 possible amino acids, not just 26! And in the case of proteins,the vast majority of the possible sequences that you can make won’t have any biological function at all! (And there are many more problems besides, such as chirality, cross reactions, and bonding type). Even if you filled the whole universe with reactants and reacted it all at Planck time, you still wouldn’t be likely to get even one protein!

And this link is a keeper — Could life have emerged spontaneously on earth?