Reply To: Imagine Winning the Lottery ……

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feivel
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Hoyle and his associates knew that the smallest conceivable free-living life form needed at least 2,000 independent functional proteins in order to accomplish cellular metabolism and reproduction. Starting with the hypothetical primordial soup he calculated the probability of the spontaneous generation of just the proteins of a single amoebae. He determined that the probability of such an event is one chance in ten to the 40 thousandth power. Prior to this project, Hoyle was a believer in the spontaneous generation of life. This project, however, changed his opinion 180 degrees. Hoyle stated: “The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40 thousand naughts [zeros] after it. It is enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.” Hoyle also concluded that the probability of the spontaneous generation of a single bacteria, “is about the same as the probability that a tornado sweeping through a junk yard could assemble a 747 from the contents therein.”

The odds of winning a state lottery are about 1 chance in ten million. The odds of someone winning the state lottery every single week from age 18 to age 99 is 1 chance in 4.6 to the power of 1,029,120. Therefore, the odds of winning the state lottery every week consecutively for eighty years is incomprehensively more likely than the spontaneous generation of just the proteins of an amoebae!

A more detailed estimate for spontaneous generation has been made by Harold Morowitz, a Yale University physicist. Morowitz imagined a broth of living bacteria that was super-heated so that all the complex chemicals were broken down into their basic building blocks. After chemically analyzing the hypothetical mixture, he concluded that the odds of a single bacterium re-assembling by chance is one to the power of 10100,000,000,000. This number is so large that it would require several thousand books just to write it out. To put this number into perspective, it is far, far more likely that each member of an entire extended family would each win a state lottery every week for a million years than for a single bacterium to form by chance, over the estimated age of the Universe, even if all the building blocks were present all over the surface of the earth!