AB,
Absolutely wrong.
The more specific complexity needed to achieve a goal, the more probability that the goal was intended.
Wowee – you really don’t get the point at all do you. I’ll explain your mistake again, but in exchange could you try as a hard as you possibly can to understand the argument this time? OK then…
Your huge error here is the word “goal”. For there to be a goal there must have been a “something” to decide in advance that there was a goal at all and, specifically, what it was. That’s what the word “goal”
means. OK, let’s for the sake of argument call that initial goal setter “God”. Still with me? Good.
Now let’s say that for the goal to be achieved there must have been a trillion, or a trillion trillion, or even a trillion trillion trillion if you like (the actual number doesn’t matter at all) specific environmental events in place and, lo and behold, all of those events did happen and so here sits little old you. Remarkable eh? The odds against are so fantastically long that surely a god must therefore have been required to engineer matters so all of those conditions are in place right?
Now then, can you see for yourself what’s wrong with that line of reasoning?
Take your time. I’m in no hurry.
Have you got it yet? Yes, that’s right – the argument “they’re so unlikely that god must have made all those events happen, therefore god” only "works" (well, kind of)
if you also insert a god to have determined the goal “Alan Burns” in the first place! Yep, your premise (“God”) and your conclusion (also “God”) are the same thing!
Doesn’t work does it? Now turn the logic telescope round the right way and try again: start with a universe that neither knows nor cares what sentient life if any it might produce. In short, there is no “goal”. Now let’s say that if if you'd run that universe forward with minor changes to its starting conditions an unimaginably large range of different environments would have arisen, and let’s say too that some of them would have produced sentient life forms, and that some of those life forms would be as logically challenged as you are and so also falsely reasoned that their universes must have been made that way just for them too.
Would you be able to see where they went wrong?
Good, because that’s where you’ve gone wrong too. If you just want to assume that a god had Alan Burns as its goal
a priori, then you can’t also deem the conditions necessary for there being an Alan Burns to be evidence for god. Having both is just circular reasoning, a basic failure in thinking
Do you understand this now, because I can’t think of many simpler ways to explain it to you.
The puddle analogy provides little evidence for an intended goal, though it is certainly possible that the hole was meant to contain a puddle.
When it comes to contemplating the specific conditions needed to achieve the unfathomable complexity of life as we know it, there is no feasible comparison to the conditions needed to fill a puddle.
Actually you hugely underestimate the complexity of a puddle “fitting” the hole to the nearest molecule, but the level of complexity is irrelevant in any case for the reasons I just explained to you. Again.
Your problem is a mistake
in logic,
not in
probability.
