It appears to me very few people appreciate the huge difference intelligence makes and why this difference makes the existence of God so much more reasonable than atheism. Follow this simple example.
Imagine I take ten “coins” and number them 1 through 10, put them in a basket and draw them out one at a time. On average, the odds of me drawing them all out in order (first the coin numbered 1, then 2, then 3…) is 10 to the 10th power. In other words I would have to draw them out, on average, 10,000,000,000 times to get them in order once.
Lets say I have some assistants who will put the coins back in the basket so that I can draw out the 10 coins every 5 seconds (I’m really, really fast – give it a try). At that speed I would have to repeat the process every 5 seconds, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for 1585.49 years! That’s a long time for 10 simple coins.
Now give the 10 coins to an average 4 year old and explain to the child what you want them to do. On average it will take them about 11 seconds.
Chance take 1585 years.
VS.
Intelligence takes 11 seconds.
Now consider the complexity of all the universe. Physics, cosmology, and biology continue to “discover” amazing complexity in everything around us. One of the most striking examples of course is DNA. MIT Professor of Mechanical Engineering Seth Lloyd, an atheist, eloquently describes DNA:
It’s been known since the structure of DNA was elucidated that DNA is very digital. There are four possible base pairs per site, two bits per site, three and a half billion sites, seven billion bits of information in the human DNA. There’s a very recognizable digital code of the kind that electrical engineers rediscovered in the 1950s that maps the codes for sequences of DNA onto expressions of proteins. – Read More
Look at the numbers involved, they are BILLIONS! It takes 1,585 years to produce a sequence of TEN! Physicist and cosmologist have estimated the Big Bang to have occurred 13 Billion years ago. That sounds like a long time, and it is, but it would literally take more than a billion times 13 billion to produce the DNA in the simplest living organism known to exist.
It appears to me that the most probable explanation of our complex universe is that it was designed with intelligence, or I prefer, by God. You can choose to put your faith in “chance”, but it obviously requires you believe there is an infinite amount time, which is called an eternity, which sounds an awful lot like God.
The more I think about it, the odds of our universe being created by chance are so outrageous, that “chance” would have to be a “god” for anyone to even consider it a possibility. Perhaps atheists are simply choosing a “god” without rules, rather than choosing a universe without a “god”.
