#28 The Lottery

Most of us are familiar with the Lottery, right? Many states have them now and they are advertised all the time. You know that the odds of winning a lottery are more than a million to one, even hundreds of millions to one in the bigger lotteries. But millions of people buy a ticket anyway and start dreaming of what they will do when they win.

The thing about the lottery that gets people to buy a ticket is that someone is guaranteed to win. Somebody is going to win the jackpot. 

Let’s apply the concept of the lottery to the existence of life in this universe. Believers in evolution will assert that we “won the lottery” because life exists and evolved into us and the world we live in. It seems to make sense, right? We are here after all.

Ah, but the theory of evolution does not guarantee there will be a winner because it is based on randomness and accident. Would you buy a ticket for the lottery if the likelihood of NO winner was a million to one or even greater.

The mathematical odds of life spontaneously and randomly arising from a “soup” of chemicals has been put at one out of a number with a one followed by 40,000 zeros. There are no known chemical reactions or laws of physics that can produce a living cell. The greatest scientists in the world cannot do it.

“The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it … It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution …if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence." Sir Fred Hoyle (astronomer, cosmologist and mathematician, Cambridge University) [1]

Winning the lottery just once is unbelievable but winning it TWICE IN A ROW is beyond rational comprehension. Can you even conceive of winning the lottery three, four, or five days IN A ROW? The odds of any life happening accidentally are about the odds of you winning the lottery EVERY DAY IN A ROW for 10 to 20 years.

Therefore, the existence of life itself happening accidentally is like winning the lottery every day for 10 to 20 years in a row. Those who believe it might have happened accidentally without a God and that we won this cosmic lottery out of blind luck are lacking some common sense. They are trying really hard to believe something against all the odds and the patently obvious and simple conclusion that there must be an intelligent designer.

It is so much easier and more elegant to hypothesize that there is an original source of life outside of the physical universe. 

Note also that the lottery idea above is based on the odds that a single living cell would form by accident. I didn’t even touch on the odds of a single cell developing accidentally into anything more complicated like DNA which is necessary before you can have plants and animals.

There must be God.

-------------------------------------------------

[1]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle

Hoyle was knighted in England in 1972. He is also the originator of the term “Big Bang”. Many of his ideas were and still are controversial. Further quote from Wikipedia:

"Published in his 1982/1984 books Evolution from Space (co-authored with Chandra Wickramasinghe), Hoyle calculated that the chance of obtaining the required set of enzymes for even the simplest living cell without panspermia was one in 10^40,000. Since the number of atoms in the known universe is infinitesimally tiny by comparison (10⁸⁰), he argued that Earth as life's place of origin could be ruled out. He claimed: 'The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.'"

#27 The Truth About Mutation

Those who think there is no intelligent creator of all living beings very often rely on the process of random mutation as the way living species came to exist. They deal with living beings that reproduce and where mutations happen, mostly skipping over how the atoms and other materials got here in the first place.

They believe faithfully that this process could actually produce all the thousands of magnificently functioning attributes of the millions of species that exist.

But does this really make rational sense when you study the truth about mutation, not just assume what is possible “in theory”.

When you go to the dentist and have to get X-rays on your teeth, they put a lead vest on you to shield your heart. Why is that? The reason is to prevent mutations of your cells. Another term for it is cancer.

There is a big scare in the media about a hole in the ozone layer around the earth. Why? What's the big deal? It's because if there is less ozone to protect us, there will be more mutations going on, more sickness, more disease.

Most states have a law against getting married to your first cousin. Why? That's because inbreeding of close relatives increases the likelihood of genetic mutations. One famous one is hemophilia.

Every year the "Flu Season" strikes with a new mutated version of last year's flu. Is this a good thing?

If you think about it, you already know that almost all mutation is a bad thing. The odds of bad things happening as a result of a mutation are thousands of times greater than good things happening.

Theodosius Dobzhansky, a prominent evolutionary biologist [1], spent years irradiating fruit flies for thousands of generations to artificially induce mutations. What were the results? When asked, he couldn't think of a single mutant that was more viable out in nature. He could only think of several which might be more viable at unusual conditions like very elevated temperatures.

Nils H. Nilsson [2], famous Swedish botanist and evolutionist, was active in plant breeding. He has said, “My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed.”

How about the study of bacteria? Mutation has been studied most extensively in bacteriology because you can experiment with millions of bacteria and thousands of generations in a fairly short period of time. Alan H. Linton, British bacteriologist, wrote in 2001, "Throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another." [3]

We currently have millions of perfectly functioning species on earth all intricately woven together in phenomenal ecosystems connected to the earth. If there was a lot of mutating going on, then where are all the bad results from the mutations. The track record of mutations is mostly diseased and dysfunctional results. Where are they out in nature?

The fossil record does not show any "missing links". This is a well known fact. But, a missing link is an intermediary step along the "right" path to get to a certain developed species. But think about it. Missing links are a tiny, tiny fraction of what would have to be thousands of mutated beings that were the "wrong" path for every "missing link" along the "right" path. No mutants exist in the fossil record either.

All the species on the earth seem to exist in their "final" form, their "perfected" form, and fully functioning. How come scientists don't find any species in nature that are mutating toward something else? There are no records of ever having actually seen instances of evolution for as long as they have been looking. There have of course been changes within a species, but that’s not evolution.

Here is an even more fundamental problem for those who have faith in mutation. Mutation requires changes BUT ONLY after there is already a successfully functioning species. Where did that first species come from? You have to have a male and female correctly functioning respectively before they can have a mating relationship which could result in a mutation.

This picture from Wikipedia shows what types of mutations can occur. But note that it assumes the original DNA exists before mutation occurs. It cannot explain the original existence of the DNA.

In the old days people used to think that life could spontaneously "combust" out of nothing. No one believes that anymore. Life only comes from life.

Because there is life, the original source must have the attribute of life.

There must be God.

_____________
[1] Theodosius Dobzhansky, (January 24, 1900 - December 18, 1975) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodosius_Dobzhansky
was a prominent geneticist and evolutionary biologist, and a central figure in the field of evolutionary biology for his work in shaping the unifying modern evolutionary synthesis.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Heribert-Nilsson

[3] Alan H. Linton, emeritus professor of bacteriology, University of Bristol (U.K.), in The Times Higher Education Supplement (April 20, 2001), p. 29.