False statement: Without intelligent design, cells could only be produced by random chance. P(Cells|~God) is very very small.
You’re absolutely right! This is one of the key mistaken beliefs that creationists hold. I’ve had the most success in convincing them otherwise (or at least making them doubt) using the argument given by Dawkins in The God Delusion:
Our likelihood heuristic is strongly tied to both our lifespans and the subjective rate at which we experience time passing. Example: if we lived hundreds of times longer, current probabilities of, say, dying in a car accident, would appear totally unacceptable, because the expected number of car accidents in our lifetime would corresponding be hundreds of times higher.
The hundreds of millions of years between the formation of the Earth and the appearance of life are simply much too large of a time-span for our likelihood heuristic to apply, and doing some simple math [omitted; if someone wants to give some approximate numbers that’d be nice] shows that the probability of replicators arising in that time-span is far from negligible.
You’re absolutely right! This is one of the key mistaken beliefs that creationists hold. I’ve had the most success in convincing them otherwise (or at least making them doubt) using the argument given by Dawkins in The God Delusion:
Our likelihood heuristic is strongly tied to both our lifespans and the subjective rate at which we experience time passing. Example: if we lived hundreds of times longer, current probabilities of, say, dying in a car accident, would appear totally unacceptable, because the expected number of car accidents in our lifetime would corresponding be hundreds of times higher.
The hundreds of millions of years between the formation of the Earth and the appearance of life are simply much too large of a time-span for our likelihood heuristic to apply, and doing some simple math [omitted; if someone wants to give some approximate numbers that’d be nice] shows that the probability of replicators arising in that time-span is far from negligible.