#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.

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[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.'"