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RemoteUser -> RE: Gods of the New Millennium (2/8/2014 2:16:38 PM)
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OP, you are mistaking probability for fact.
The leading argument in most of your statements is that a thing is not known, and numbers are playing a side show. Let's put them to light by quoting Bill Bryson from A Short History of Nearly Everything:
The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil. It just isn’t going to happen. To grasp what a long shot its existence is, visualize a standard Las Vegas slot machine but broadened greatly—to about ninety feet, to be precise—to accommodate 1,055 spinning wheels instead of the usual three or four, and with twenty symbols on each wheel (one for each common amino acid).1
1 There are actually twenty-two naturally occurring amino acids known on Earth, and more may await discovery, but only twenty of them are necessary to produce us and most other living things. The twenty-second, called pyrrolysine, was discovered in 2002 by researchers at Ohio State University and is found only in a single type of archaean (a basic form of life that we will discuss a little further on in the story) called Methanosarcina barkeri.
What Bill is saying here is that the statistical likelihood of life is incredibly low. This is not justification for aliens, any more than it could be said that if I type out 1,055 letters of the alphabet and you guessed the exact order, that aliens gave you the answer. However low the odds, there is a chance you could, in fact, do it.
Now to address what is known and what is not, also through statistics. If a thing is right or wrong, and equal chances are assigned, then by your theory evolution is as likely as aliens. If I tossed a coin, and said while the coin was in midair that heads meant aliens created us, does the coin landing heads up make the statement I made, true? Impartiality can grant equal odds if one ignores any other possible factors, but that's the key, isn't it. What are the odds, and if you claim impartiality, can you create a statistical theoretical model that in fact matches reality? The odds of doing so might be better than Bill's slot machines, but low is low, high is high, and to let one lead to a conclusion destroys any impartiality one might have had.
If you need me, I'm wandering off, calculator in hand.
(edited for a typo, which set off my OCD)
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