First, this statement is very misleading. Given our known universe and its maximum age according to evolutionists, this is not true.
For instance, could we randomly generate the short, 12-line poem “The Arrow and the Song”? Assume we had a trillion other universes, each the size of our known universe, and each one filled in all directions with supercomputers running around the clock. Assume that each supercomputer calculated for a trillion times longer than the age of our universe (according to evolutionists). This is still not enough time to generate this short, 12-line poem. Generating more complex works randomly, like entire books, is simply not supported by math or science. (See the math behind this calculation.)
Second, some things could never happen because they are impossible by chance. In other words, the laws of physics prevents certain things from ever happening by chance. For instance, ocean waves on a clear beach would never produce a paragraph of neatly written text in the sand. It’s not that writing would be improbable, but rather, it is actually impossible by chance. Waves just don’t produce neatly written text written in the sand because they follow the laws of gravity and physics. Sometimes evolutionists get the concept of possibility and probability confused. 1
Debate
Evolutionist: But evolution isn’t about chance only. Natural selection is non-random.
Response: First, we are not talking about natural selection. We are talking about the origin of the first life (or “hereditary replicator”). Since natural selection works only on existing life, natural selection cannot explain the first life. Second, the other side of natural selection is still chance (raw mutations), and so this argument still applies after the first life as well.
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Sources
Dawkins, R. (1996). Climbing Mount Improbable. New York: Norton.
Notes
- Dawkins, 1996, p. 6: “The weather could have done the same job as the artfully deployed dynamite. But of all the possible ways of weathering a mountain, only a tiny minority would be speaking likeness of four particular human beings. Even if we didn’t know the history of Mount Rushmore, we’d estimate the odds against its four heads being carved by accidental weathering as astronomically high–like tossing a coin forty times and getting heads every time.” ↩