Originally posted by Lilitu
Ah! Irreducible Complexity! The unscientific idea that life is far too complex to have evolved either by chance or by natural selection. So complex that there must be a designer or creator. But if that were so then that designer would necessarily be much more complex than its designs which leads directly to the question "Who designed the designer?" and so on ad absurdum.

In a somewhat limitless universe we do have one limit and that is time. With about 14 billion years we do have a time barrier that prevents a random act that puts together a 747 by chance. First we need to define infinite in some way and science suggests it is something below 10 to the 100 power since that number is bigger than all the elementary particles in the known universe.

When talking about life we are dealing with 20 amino acids that line up in a string from 200 to 1000 to create protein and then life. In a random fashion if we had a slot machine with 200 wheels and 20 different pictures on each wheel it would take 10 to the 235 power to get a jackpot, but chemistry is not some random act even though we cannot reproduce life today. In any event life started rather quickly on our planet at about 3.8 billion years ago, and it basically all started from one single source since all life…trees, bugs, animals, micros etc are all related through our entire DNA.

So the odds for some random act to create life is impossible as is the random act of a tornado to assemble a 747 since I'm sure the chances would be higher than 10 to the power of 100...

Originally posted by Benevolent Heretic
A jetliner is not a part of the "natural world". Trees, plants, humans, rocks... These are all part of the natural world and need nothing more than nature to "assemble" them. WE (humans) made the jetliner. That's not nature's job.

I would argue that humans are nature's tornado for 747s, since we are just nature. Could a tornado do this, with unlimited attempts?

Even in the face of unlimited attempts, this would depend on whether such a form of assembly was possibly in congruence with the laws of physics.

If it is, then yes, the 747 could in fact be assembled by a tornado if it had all the parts, since it has the advantage of unlimited an varied re-occurrence, it will eventually hit the exact correct sequence. This would be just as likely to occur on the first "attempt" as the 1,000,000,000,000th attempt. Since all possible occurrences would have the same odds of occurring. When someone says there is a 1/x variable exponentially low chance of an occurrence, but the reality is, any truly 'random' occurrence would all have equal odds of occurring, so no matter what happens, it's against the odds (but guaranteed still that SOMETHING will happen).

If it's not possible, then it could not.

Originally posted by hippomchippo
I guess eventually there's a chance they would, especially if it's infinite, then it's inevitable.

agreed. Inifinite is the key. 1 in 500 billion chance? Infinity means a billion of those 1's in that billion.

Same rationale for existence of alien life. Given a infinite number of possibilities planets/stars it is.

Originally posted by imnotbncre8ive

Originally posted by Confusion

Question 2: If there are an unlimited amount of days, and tornado hits Football field full of Boeing 737 parts daily (thus infinite amount of attempts), would the tornado ever assemble the jetliner?

If the probability of success is nonzero and we conduct an infinite number of trials, then we expect to find an infinite number of successes.

But I suspect you're just playing the tired old creationist game - which doesn't merit a response.

That is purely imagination without any grounding in reality, that you conduct an infinite number of trials, because you cannot conduct an infinite number of trials, for you are not infinitely always around to do it, owing to your being overtaken by death in the next fifty years at most.

Here we have an abuse of the concept of the infinite, even in the mind of humans there can be no concept of the infinite except as something lasting very long or very big or very self-repeating, but in reality there is no such thing.

Even in mathematics what starts out as doing math with the infinite, in actual computation the infinite has become some finite value, very big in space, very long in time, very long in repetition, but still a finite whatever it is, but nothing infinite in the sense of without beginning and without ending, or not bounded in any way.

Why? because otherwise the computation or calculation or whatever exercise has never begun and has never ended, so there is no answer or end product whatever.


Pachomius

Originally posted by Lilitu
Ah! Irreducible Complexity! The unscientific idea that life is far too complex to have evolved either by chance or by natural selection. So complex that there must be a designer or creator. But if that were so then that designer would necessarily be much more complex than its designs which leads directly to the question "Who designed the designer?" and so on ad absurdum.

Who designed the complex designer?

You can repeat that question only until you die, but even if you don't die, there is only repeating the question but it is not any reasonable question, for it is just a stubborn question-repeating.

Who designed the designers that started the material or observable by humans universe?

Who else but a necessary self-existing one primeval designer who has always been existing.

That is the conclusion arrived at by inferential thinking, otherwise there can be no reasonable explanation for anything at all in the observable universe, if you keep repeating stubbornly the question, who design the designer, on and on and on -- which is impossible because you cannot be around in the next at most fifty years.

All right then, not in the next hundred years.


Pachomius