Commanding Officer sacked

 

I found these writings in my Google drive that I had saved on various computers from way back in the day. These essays present an interesting mathematical point of view to those who struggle with or maintain the notion, of life sprouting on our planet from chance events during the history of our ~13.8 billion-year-old Universe.

Even if you don't believe in Creation, these essays give pause to the big question. 

Thoughts?

Given Enough Time Anything is Possible - Even Evolution

By David N. Menton
(C) copyright 1991 Missouri Association for Creation, Inc. 

This myth is the ultimate argument of those who attempt to "explain" the origin of the Cosmos and all life by CHANCE and the natural properties of matter and energy. Evolutionists hope that by invoking immense amounts of time, highly improbable events can somehow be made probable. But with this type of argument, it is possible to "explain" ANYTHING. We've all heard it said, for example, that "given enough monkeys and enough typewriters, EVENTUALLY one of them is bound to type the sonnets of Shakespeare error-free."

But this outrageous myth violates the statistical foundation on which all modern science rests.

One theory of life begins with an asteroid collision

Statistically controlled experiments are useless if we do not assume that highly improbable events simply do not occur. The probability of any event which has a known number of possible outcomes can be calculated quite easily. The probability of rolling a particular number on a die, for example, is one chance out of six (the total number of possible sides) or 1/6. The probability of getting TWO particular numbers on two successive rolls of the die is 1/6 x 1/6 or 1/36, which is to say you would expect to succeed once in 36 rolls.

What then is the probability of randomly selecting the appropriate letters and spaces from a Scrabble set to spell "THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION"? There are 26 different letters and a space in the alphabet (total 27) and there is a total of 23 of these letters and spaces in our sentence. The probability of spelling this sentence without error by blindly drawing and replacing letters from our 27 character set is calculated by multiplying 1/27 x 1/27 x 1/27 .... 23 times. The answer reveals that we would expect to spell this simple sentence correctly by CHANCE approximately ONCE IN 8 HUNDRED MILLION, TRILLION, TRILLION draws!! If we drew and replaced letters at the rate of a billion a second we would expect to succeed once in 26 THOUSAND, TRILLION YEARS!!

Now the simplest living organism is so vastly more complex than our simple sentence, that we have no way of really calculating its probability. If, however, we consider just one particular protein of average size (say 500 amino acids) from among the thousands of proteins in a living organism, we can easily calculate the probability of forming it by CHANCE. Proteins are made of a tightly linked chain of amino acids. There are only 20 different amino acids used in the proteins of ALL living organisms and they are arranged in a linear sequence much like the letters of a long paragraph. Assuming an inexhaustible supply of each of the 20 different amino acids, the probability calculation would be 1/20 x 1/20 x 1/20 ... 500 times.

The number of possible combinations of the amino acids in this protein is 1 with over 600 zeros after it! Even if we were, to begin with, the proper mixture of 500 amino acids to make our particular protein, we could never get the correct sequence for them by CHANCE. Even if the entire universe were packed tight with computers the size of electrons, each trying a billion combinations of our 500 amino acids a second, we could sample only an infinitesimally small fraction of all of the possible combinations in 300 billion years!

Even if every medium-sized protein molecule that ever existed on earth were ALL DIFFERENT, our vast "fleet" of busy computers could not be expected to come up with the combination of amino acids in ANY ONE OF THEM in a mere 300 billion years!! What all this means is that if the whole of evolution were reduced to the question of the probability of forming ANY ONE biologically useful protein of average size, we could safely conclude that evolution would be a VIRTUAL IMPOSSIBILITY by reason of the fact that there would be INSUFFICIENT TIME AND MATTER IN THE UNIVERSE!!!

Now calculate how much faith it takes to believe in evolution. 

This next one begins as a rebuttal from a scientist named John Baumgardner to someone who called him out on the idea of Creationism. I have no idea who Llewellyn Jones is and a cursory Google search did not reveal enough to indicate which Jones Baumgardner was directing his response to. Regardless, Baumgarner sends an atomic slam by way of mind-numbing statistical probabilities.

Not Long Enough for Evolution:
A response to Llewellyn Jones

Llewellyn Jones in his 3/21 letter seems to be persuaded that 15 billion years is an abundance of time for life to arise by random interactions of atoms and molecules, whereas I have been arguing such an idea is sheer fantasy. I believe a simple arithmetic lesson is in order.

To have some sort of ultimate limit on the number of trials -- the number of coin tosses -- we have to work with, let's use the maximum conceivable number of atom-atom interactions in all the universe during its entire history. Taking 10 to the 80th power as a generous estimate for the number of atoms, 10 to the 10th power for an extreme average number of interatomic interactions per second per atom, and 10 to the 18th power seconds, which is about 30 billion years, as a limit for the age of the universe, we get 10 to the 108th power as an upper limit on the number of coin tosses available.

We next need to address how many trials we require randomly to sort through enough of the possible protein combinations to get the thousand or so that are needed for even the most primitive form of life. Let's ignore that there are some hundred or so amino acids and restrict our consideration to the special set of 20 found in most living systems. Let's also ignore the fact that only left-handed forms appear in life proteins. Let's also ignore the extremely unfavorable chemical reaction kinetics involved in forming long peptide chains in an aqueous solution. 

Let's merely focus on the task of obtaining a sequence of amino acids that yields 3D protein structure with some essential functionality. Various theoretical and experimental evidence indicates that in some average sense, about half of the sites must be specified exactly. For a protein of length 200, the number of random trials needed for a reasonable likelihood of hitting a useful sequence is 20 to the 100th power or 10 to the 130th power. This is ten million billion times the limiting number we computed for interatomic interactions in the history of the universe! And this estimate is only for one of the thousand or so proteins needed for the simplest type of life!

In the face of such stunningly unfavorable odds, how can any scientist appeal to chance interactions as the explanation for the complexity we observe in living systems? This line of argument applies, of course, not only to the issue of biogenesis but also to the issue of how any new gene/protein might arise in any kind of macroevolution process.

Mr. Jones rightly presumed that my own answer as to how life originated is to be found in the writings of Moses. The greatest detail on this question is given in regard to how human beings first appeared. Genesis 2:7 says that "God formed man (or Adam) from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." As a scientist, I offer no apology for my conviction that all living systems absolutely require an intelligent and supernatural cause for their origin. To me, this conclusion is so self-evident from what we know of living systems at a molecular level that, on the surface, it is bewildering why so many reject it. But then I remember the years in my own life when I also rejected it. 

John Baumgardner