Keep this simple. A fictional example.

Joe has won the lottery... without buying a ticket. He just found a lottery ticket, and it turned to be a winner ticket. Now Joe is millionaire.

Now, the possibilities of this happening to Joe should be low.

Yet the possibility that this happens is not as low as the possibility that it happens to Joe. One of the tickets will be the winner. That's a fact. The guy who bought it lost it. People loses things continuously. And someone will find that ticket. There is a chance it's destroyed as garbage, but people finds things all the time.

So it is possible that a lottery ticket is a winner, gets lost and is found and so someone wins the lottery without buying a ticket. And we KNOW that's exactly what just happened to Joe.

Of course, we may calculate what are Joe's posibilities of being who wins the lottery with a found ticket. This possibilites will be much smaller than the ticket's possibilites of being a winner, go lost, then being found.

Yet no matter how low the possibilities, it has happen.

We may claim that this has been a work of the FSM (Flying Spaghetti Monster), who, with His Noodly Appendices, removed the ticket from the buyer's pocket and put it right under the eyes of Joe -and nobody else. Then the FSM picked the right ball so the ticket won.

Yet, how do we tell? Joe has won the lottery. With or without the FSM, the output would be the same to Joe's eyes. Joe can't tell why has he won the lottery. Actually, he can't well wether there is a "why". He may calculate the possibilities and estimate they're terribly low -but, well, it has happen, nonetheless, and nobody saw the FSM. As the FSM, we know, is terribly stealthy and never does anything that couldn't happen without His intervention.

Conclusion is that by the fact that Joe has won the lottery without buying a ticket, this does not demonstrate nor negate that the FSM exists. Actually Joe and the universe would be the same without the stealthy FSM since the moment Joe has won and nobody can tell why, or wether there is a "why". Joe just won. And the FSM is not a necessary explanation of it. Neither the low possibility means anything in itself.

Am I wrong?

(Keep it simple. English is not my language and I am specially slow when dealing with abstraction in English)

I'm not certain I follow.  Is there a typo? "The probability that the universe has the exact atomic configuration as it did 1 second ago was unimaginably small"  should this read "is unimaginably small".  If so, this does not seem to support "Events with low probability happen all the time".  If not, it implies there was a time when the universe DID have such a configuration.  When?


Edit:  re major's post  see  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

To be honest, I think RF's view is that it is like a Lottery in which there is only one slection of numbers, and if a certain sequesnce doesn;t turn up (say 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.) then the whole thing disappears. It never happened.  Either that number shows up, or you never knew there was a lottery in the first place - kin of thing.


The thing I don't get is that RF always starts from the beginning and measures from there, whereas a carbon atom is quite common, so its like the 1.2.3. are already in place and then a 6.7. might be floating around and an 8.9., not to mention, if a 4 is near an 8, it makes the 4 want to attach to a 5.


All in all, it is very apparent that he has no idea, and ID is utterly bankrupt.  It's a shame, really, I would have like to know how one could distinguish a real Can Gogh from a fake. That would be a useful application of ID.

If it is designed its not unlikely, it was very likely. In fact, so likely that chance has nothing to do with the whole thing. (If god made the universe then the probability of everything you would find would be 1.)

BTW, are you going to accept my challange and post your "Theories" on the NOVA site?

Really? How about go on Panda's Thumb? Convince scientists of your theory.
Or, do you like feeling that you are right more than actually being right?

Callum I see you persist in your misunderstanding whenever your opponent does not use proper phrasing and make poor word choice. 

Relative to the total number of events that occur in this universe, few of them are design events.  Absent of background information about a design event, and given the permutations possible for any design event where we lack background information our ability to predict the outcome is unlikely.

Let me clarify to say: Design is very proficient at bringing about events for which a very very large number of permutations is possible.

Can anyone with no background information predict the next invention to be announced?  No.

In summary MLZ has stated the obvious, his example considers the huge number of permutations but he does not consider the probabilistic resources available to bring out the event in question.  He demonstrates why it is important in probability to look at both permutations and resources.  Probabilistic resources include both numbers of opportunities for the event to occur and the number of permutations that are probabilistically attached and therefore indistinguishable from each other.

I thought they all were - or are you admitting there's no God?