TW,
I shall be out of the country tomorrow so here's a genuine attempt to explain where the lecturer/preacher went wrong. Could you at least try to read and absorb the argument and respond to that rather than just throw abuse as a response?
Essentially he argues that, if Homo sapiens was the end plan and evolution had tried to reach that goal by a series of trial and error mutations, then the chances of ending up with you and me are fantastically small.
And he’s right about that.
He has though two major problems to address, as follows:
The first is that, even if that was how evolution worked, the huge unlikelihood of an outcome says nothing whatsoever to an alternative explanation – ie, “God”. As there’s no means to assign a probability to this god for comparison purposes, all that could be said would be something like, “wow, that was a long shot wasn’t it?”
That is, he’s attempting an argument from personal incredulity – briefly, “I can’t imagine how such an unllkely outcome could have occurred by natural means, therefore god” - which is always a logically false argument.
Second though – and much more seriously – that’s not how evolution works at all in any case. The process of evolution neither knows nor cares – nor can know or care – where it’ll end up. There is no plan, no blueprint, no end game, no anything – to guide it. Rather there were countless tiny steps of adaptation in response to environmental changes that over huge amounts of time led to speciation – ie, the branching off and development of new species all with common ancestry.
Where your man goes wrong is to start with himself and ask, “what are the chances?” He just assumes that he was the goal, and marvels at the unlikelihood of evolution getting there without a guiding hand. It’s called the reference point error – and doubtless had evolution led to a different but sentient species entirely, its not very bright members would be asking the same question about themselves.
And that’s why I referenced the puddles – it’s a famous example from Douglas Adams when he highlights the mistake of a puddle asking what the chances were of the hole fitting him precisely. The point though is that the puddle fits the hole, just as we fit out planet rather than the other way around in each case.
Now when you have this explained to you you usually go off the rails by ignoring the point and asking, “how did something come from nothing then?”
That may or may not be a legitimate question, but it has nothing whatever to do with evolution. Evolution is concerned only with stuff that exists already – where that stuff came from is a separate line of enquiry and it has no part to play in discussions about evolution.
In other words, you may have questions and challenges about evolution but asking how matter and forces came about to start with is not one of them.
So here’s your choice: you can either throw insult and abuse at this explanation, or you can say something like “OK fine, now I understand it” and we can move on.
Your choice.
