Richard Dawkins, Is He Real?

..I mean I cannot be sure can I? All I have is a lot of indirect evidence supporting the idea that Richard is real, but still we could all be in a dream machine could we not?

You see this is my problem with Atheism, a non-belief can never be a belief in itself can it? shall I knock on my neighbours door and ask him if he as heard the bad news?

So after browsing the God Delusion, I thought I might help Richard out a little, a shortcut so to speak.

"If the probability of something happening is less than about 1e-15 (or 0.000000000000001) it is considered to be impossible. The probability of life occurring 'by accident' is far less than this, therefore it must be a miracle caused by God.." 

There is a lot wrong with the above statement itignores the size of the universe. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars, any of which might have planets capable of supporting life. Even an "impossibly improbable" event is almost a certainty (and we already know of one planet that supports life).

Lets experiment! Shuffle a deck of playing cards, and lay them out on a table. The probability of the sequence you see appearing is 1/52 for the first card, 1/52 x 1/51 at the second card, 1/52 x 1/51 x 1/50 by the third card and so on. The probability that you produced the sequence you just did is 1/52 x 1/51 x 1/50......x 1/3 x 1/2 x 1/1 ( more simply, 1/(52!) ), or 1.2398e-68 (which is an incredible 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000012398). How can this be?!? Maybe you are hallucinating and it did not actually occur?

You have just done something statistically impossible, trillions of times more unlikely than the formation of life (some say 1e-50 is the "impossibility threshold" instead, but we've beaten that as well). You could even do it six times before breakfast every day.

Comments

[Mark Wadsworth]

I'm not at all sure whether you agree with Dawkins' overall idea that religion is nonsense, or whether you are passionately disagreeing.
???

[The SageKing]

thats exactly the point, in absolute terms you cannot be sure of anything, but that does not mean things are not for sure.

Lets do it the opposite way around....

Imagine you have infinite time, which is a bit of a paradox as if time is infinite, then it ceases to be a concept in its self.

And in the "infinite time" you have infinite dice, and the dice have infinite sides, what are the chances of you throwing all straight sixes?

Absolutely certain is the answer given that time ceases to be an issue, so it could be argued that this universe was always certain to be, you was always certain to be, and strangely their is enough time you for to be again, and in other dimensions, of which their are bound to be infinite, there is more of you already.

So if in real terms everything becomes certain, even God.

Its strange how physicists are more likely to believe in god than biologists

Personally i think its the wrong question.
http://sageking.typepad.com/journal/2007/08/the-certain-unc.html