Is chemical evolution reasonable, mathematically speaking?
Yes, that was an easy question.
Considering trillions of chemical reactions are occurring across 92 billion light years of the universe, and innumerable amount of planets and stars every millisecond, chemical evolution is indeed occurring. Atoms spontaneously combine together to form molecules and molecules form together to form even larger molecules including the building blocks of life, amino acids. With this plethora of the building blocks of life around the universe, it is not surprising that life would form. Once primitive self-duplicating RNA/DNA chains are formed, there is no end to the diversity of life that can come about.
So the odds of chemical evolution are so likely there is no other plausible explanation for the origin of life then?
The question really is where the data and evidence points. Besides, why couldn’t God use chemical/biological evolution to create life in the universe? It is not necessarily an exclusively either/or proposition.
But you just said that 10^118 is not impossible to achieve.
Let’s go back to see how you came up with this ludicrous #:
Borel's Law tells us that anything with a probability less than 1 in 10^50 is "mathematically impossible."
Actually, there is no such thing as Borel’s Law. A scientific ‘law’ has a specific meaning and definition which Borel’s offhanded remark in a non-scientific artlicle about the odds of 1 out 10^50 being ‘impossible’ does not meet. Emile Borel was using the number 10^50 loosely as a reference of implausibility of something occurring 1 out 10^50, nothing more, which in fact is true, it is rather implausible.
However, do you see what is left out of the above ‘equation’? Why, time of course. There is no time mentioned above. The 1 in 10^50 is a one time event. If biological evolution stated that all the diversity of life around us was created at one instance of time than of course this would fall be weeded out by Borel’s ‘10^50’ axiom. In fact it is spontaneous creation rather than slow, gradual biological evolution over billions of years that is prime for the ‘axe’ of this ‘axiom’.
There are 10^80 particles (electrons and protons) in the universe (best number I could find online) estimated.
This is totally speculative but let’s use that number.
Even if each particle in the universe performed (10^20) events per second, and the universe was 15 billion years old
(10^18 seconds), then 10^80 x 10^20 x 10^18 = 10^118.
Why are using time to decrease the odds of something is occurring?
Does not a series of events that could occur over a longer period of time vice a shorter period, INCREASE the chance that something will occur not DECREASE it?
Even in the most generous situation, the number far exceeds Borels Law.
Borel’s ‘law’ or odds of something occurring is talking about a single occurrence not one over time. If you want to use Borel’s number than you must divide the # of occurrences predicted over a series of time i.e. how many exact chemical reactions occur in a specific area of space-time over the total timeframe these reactions occur.
That is, all the particles in the universe divided by the total amount of time the universe has existed. However since particles can react in very small fractions of time than you have to reference time in fractions of seconds.
But even using this convoluted equation all that you are doing is predicting the frequency of chemical reactions that occur, which is a number we can and have already computer and extrapolate.
This says nothing about biological evolution. You would have to thrown in other factors such as the frequency that inorganic molecules form organic molecules needed to form life. This is a totally separate and much more complex calculation.
You have better odds of winning the lottery (1:13,983,816, 6/49), than convincing me that Borels Law does not apply to chemical evolution.
Not only are your calculations wrong but the odds for these two events as shown above are totally and completely unconnected. It really makes no sense to compare the two.
Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given.
"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
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