Play Trap the Atheist (The atheist delusion)

by hyjyljyj , Friday, December 07, 2012, 00:38 (4371 days ago) @ dhw
edited by unknown, Friday, December 07, 2012, 00:49

I believe much of my inability to choke down the Almighty Random Chance argument, and why Occam's Razor seems to have been made specifically for it, arises from my background in the sciences, chiefly chemistry, physics and human biology. (Amazingly I read somewhere that 89% of scientists self-identify as atheists; that would amuse the early pioneers of the discipline, whose discoveries were fueled by a burning desire to plumb the mind of the "creator" and learn his laws.) Really, the number of bizarre "coincidences" we are being asked to believe are happening simultaneously in one tiny little micro-speck of a place (planet Earth) purely by chance is so unbelievably enormous that it is, if Michael Corey is even close to being on target, essentially "indistinguishable from a miracle" even if it IS by chance: "The odds for the spontaneous appearance of the first living cell have been conservatively calculated to be approximately 1 in 10 to the 78,436th, a number so vast that it is trillions of times greater than the total number of vibrations experienced by all the subatomic particles in the universe from the beginning of time until the present" (M. Corey, Back to Darwin). Corey may be a Christian, but still. The mind reels. But proteins couldn't form spontaneously; they have to be assembled step by step because the amount energy required to synthesize them is so great that if it were applied all at once, it would destroy the entire system. They would need random chance to keep providing just the right amount of energy at just the right time in each step. Over and over, billions of times, without a mistake, or no proteins, no cell, and no organism. As the famous bloke once said, "Not bloody likely."-Physics insists that entropy is the natural way, that chaos and not order is what eventually pervades any system. Physical systems at least in the observable universe simply do not increase their net inherent heat on their own; something has to ADD the heat energy to them. Every micro-step of organization requires the input of heat. For random chance to produce such an obvious system of order as we observe in our world--and here we need not even introduce the question of design to see the order in, say, a collection of gelatinous goo growing into the shape of an animal and so flagrantly violating the law of entropy as to create its own HEAT and hold it within its skin, even if the air temperature is cold, when the laws of physics tell us unequivocally that all that heat wants to do is dissipate into space. For that level of organization to occur by chance, again and again, in countless different arrays, for hundreds of millions of years without stopping is, again IMHO, simply not conceivable as being a chance event as much as one that was designed somehow, in some manner I don't know or even need to know in order to successfully function as one of those homeothermic animals. -This may sound like escapism, but really it's looking back & forth at two diametrically opposed options (is there a third? More?) and just picking the one that least violates one's innate sense of reason and logic. IMHO, postulating an uncaused, invisible, uncreated, infinite cause as a creator because nothing can create itself is far from an easy cop-out of a conundrum; as Darwin spoke of "the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man...as the result of blind chance", it feels like the only possible explanation left when the alternative seems not even remotely reasonable. Neither one does. What a pickle.