Not many believe in fairies.
Evidence? Not
as many I am quite prepared to believe but I doubt you have any idea of actual numbers. There are a number of communities in scotland, such as the findhorn community, where fairy belief is widespread. The volume of belief is entirely irrelevant to the supernatural status, or indeed existence, of any particular entity.
To compare the two as you frequently do (if memory serves me correctly), to be or the same order is do YOU no justice.
Your memory doesn't serve you correctly at all.
You may chose to see it as opening up to probabilites something which currently appears improbable.
That isn't how I see it at all. It probably is relatively improbable, improbable things happen all the time. The question is how improbable and which mechanisms are least improbable.
For you it would be a step forward in copperfastening your existing belief (No God). It is illustrative that you might be looking forward to the day when life-in-the-lab occurs will give you further assurance.
I'm not sure why you consider yourself to be familiar with what my beliefs are, especially since you appear to be under the apprehension that you are talking to someone else. One would have to be a very strange sort of atheist to need 'life-in-the-lab' to give them assurance. I doubt that most atheists consider the probability of abiogenesis from one year to the next.
It doesn't make it more probable to presume by even one iota. Not one shred of a hand-up is offered towards the conclusion of life-by-accident by man -designing - life.
No it doesn't make it any more probable, it just allows us to more accurately guage what the probabilities are. It is the creationists who love to make up probabilities off the top of their heads based on bog all evidence and naive assumptions, the better approach is to gather a mounting body of data to allow you to make some reasonable estimates about probabilities involved.
The probability of any particular chemical reaction happening in a particular environment is not affected by whether that environment came about by chance or was created artificially, provided that the environment itself is the same, do you have any concievable reason to assume that it would be?
Nothing designed can be taken to indicate something by accident. That would be, I'm sure, a form of non-sequitur.
I would have thought then that a suitable corrolary would be that since nothing designed could be used to 'indicate', however you are using that term, something by 'accident' all intelligent design arguments must be based on the
a priori assumption that what they are looking at is designed, the very thing which they are supposed to be showing.
TTFN,
WK