And when something is beyond our intuition or imagination for example the distance from earth to the sun, or the age of man kind, mass of a black hole etc, a feeble mind does take support in an easy to understand yet most probably wrong explanation! As usual, it connects to my favourite creature :-) There are a lot of logical and physical arguments for it, and the believer shall refute them because they don't trust the safety in logical arguments or/and it's very difficult to imagine a smoothly running universe without constant intervention. IMO, it's difficult to imagine because it's counter intuitive (for example it's very intuitive to conclude that a machine requires a mechanic, and thus the world requires a think tank), but as we find it, and we have good reason to believe that most of the world around us is indeed counter intuitive! And that's okay, because there's nothing sacred about intuition anyways.
One needs to understand that science suggest that there is nothing sacred about human imagination and intuition or human existence for that matter when it comes to the time and length scales much bigger than the biggest we can really imagine. Science has had a pretty nice track record in explaining things. If one doubts the success of science, all I can say is that they need to read a bit more than they have! So in a sense, it might be actually true that in a cosmic balance, humans offer nothing and nothing at all. I must make it clear that this doesn't take away all the values and ethics and beauty we believe in. That is related to human experience and consistent with the earlier statement, has no contribution in the cosmic balance! Though it matters the most for us.
I would like to use the shock treatment method of explanation, I'll work out the calculation first and then dwell into its implications.
Consider a coin tossing machine. After every 2 , 4 , 6 (every even number) tosses, it counts the number of heads and the number of tails. We know that for large n, we expect half of the things will be heads and half of them will be tails. Suppose in a trial, we get 2 head more than tails, we call it event A. The relative probability for event A with respect to the even of having half and half heads and tails is what we want to look at. It is intuitively clear that this relative probability will be small for low n and large for big n. For example, if I am just doing 6 coin tosses it is a bit unlikely to have 4 heads and 2 tails compared to 3 heads 3 tails. It's a trivial calculation and I am plotting the relative probabilities for some values of n. Surely and stressing again, this is not a simplification but a way to imagine how things happen at large scales.
Now we can consider the following analogy. It is clear that the event of having 2 more heads than tails is an unusual event. But we also find that in vague terms, the degree of unusualness decreases . The X axis can be regarded as either time or space and we want to study the Y axis which we will define shortly when the time or space under consideration increases beyond our imaginations to several billion years and several billion galaxies.Now suppose when the unusual event happens, it triggers a very special mechanism. Suppose the earth was populated by molecules which replicated themselves using other stuff from other replicator molecules. There are indeed examples of such molecules which can be considered the first steps of abiogenesis. Let the unusual event be that this replicator molecules gets enclosed in a semi permeable membrane. The probability of that happening is similar to having the unusual dice statistics and thus the Y axis.
Now certainly this molecule has a better chance to survive and thermodynamics tells us that such molecules will have a longer life time than the rest. Boom! That's life created right there. Now suppose we decide to stick to our own brain's imagination of distance and time, we will stick to 6000 years and size of the earth. By our brain's imagination, I mean the following:
When someone tells us that Baltimore is 200 miles away from Newyork, we can imagine the route, perhaps traverse it in our mind. Maybe we can do it for Newyork to Bombay. But in the middle world we have evolved, we certainly cannot grasp the vastness of a light year. (If you can, you are lying or you are awesome!) Similarly, we can imagine time intervals of 100s of years, but when the numbers say that Hamlet was written 1600 years after water was turned into wine, it's very difficult to imagine the time gap such large. And yet again! 1600 years is surely a nothing in the cosmic balance. So I think 6000 years and size of earth are very generous estimates of our imagination.
So if we stick to our own intuition and try to build a theory for life, we are very close to 0 on the X axis, and consequently we are very close to 0 on the Y axis as well. What I want to stress is that for our naively thinking brains, the probability of creation of life is so low that we have to seek naiver explanation. And what I want the reader to appreciate is that the imagination limits of our brains are nothing compared to the cosmic scales (even the age of earth is big enough!). When our close friend Kent Hovind asks the audience if they think that their great great great great ... (he'd say this 20 times) grandfather was a monkey, the audience is ought to say no! For essentially the reason that we cannot imagine the time scale of evolution because our life spans are so tiny with respect to that. We can perhaps write the age of the earth, sun and the universe, I can say the age is 4 billion years, but it is very unlikely that I grasp the grandeur of that in the mere number. But if I were to look at the probability of that event happening in the vastness of the universe, it doesn't seem like the really rare event we thought it was! Obviously the numbers are qualitative. I hope it helps the reader understand the parallel I am trying to draw.
What science has to offer is the promise that though the universe is counter intuitive, there is a systematic way to explain it. This method teaches us to think above my imagination, and against my intuition. This whole exercise was a support for the previous post, the gist of which was, If you believe in crap do it for yourself, don't say it's logical. That's the harsh way to put it, but what I eagerly want to show is that there is a way to circumvent the theistic belief by realizing our position in the universe. I do strongly think that this belief arises because of the physical limitations our brain imposes on us and surely there is a way to get rid of the ego-centric nature of the brain child of theism which personally is far more peaceful and satisfying.
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Fuck that shit, Jesus Christ died for your sins. Muhammad will show you the path to eternal pleasure.
