ballewski responds to me:
quote:
Well if God created everything then because of God everything exists so everything does need God.
That doesn't answer the question.
My computer needs me to turn it on, but once I do that, I become pretty much irrelevant to its boot process. I don't make the electrons move through the circuits, I don't power up the hard drives, I don't send signals through the cables.
Whether or not god got everything started doesn't answer the question of whether or not there is anything that happens on its own.
If I were to take a handful of change and toss it on the ground, do the coins land the way they do all on their own or does god come down and personally, deliberately, and consciously make the coins land that way?
quote:
Drawing a royal flush and the ability to teleport are completely different things.
No, they're not. The only difference between them is the specific probability.
There's a common problem in probability theory that can help:
Suppose you have
n darts, each of which has a 1/
n chance of hitting the target. That is, if you have 10 darts, there is a 1/10 chance of hitting the target for each individual dart. If you had 20 darts, they'd each have a 1/20 chance.
For any given
n, what are the odds of hitting the target at least once?
One of things about this problem is to make you look at the problem from the other side. That is, rather than try to count the number of ways at least one dart hit the target (because as
n gets large, that becomes tedious to calculate), we recognize that it is easier to solve the opposite problem: Find the probability of not hitting the target at all. If we know how likely it is that you didn't hit the target, then the converse probability tells us how likely it is that you hit the target at least once.
So, if the dart has a 1/
n chance of hitting the target, it has a 1 - 1/
n chance of not hitting it. That is, if the dart has a 1/10 chance of hitting, it has a 9/10 chance of not hitting.
Now, there's only one way to miss the target completely: Every dart must miss. Since each dart is independent, that means we multiply their miss chances together. Thus, if each dart has a (1 - 1/
n) chance of missing, then the chance of them all missing is:
(1 - 1/
n)
n
And thus, if we subtract this number from 1, we get the probability of hitting at least once. Thus, from our examples, if we had 10 darts, the chance of missing completely is:
(1 - 1/10)
10 = 0.35
This means that the chance of hitting the target at least once is 0.65...almost two-thirds.
Now, here's where things get interesting: What if we had an infinite number of darts? Each dart would have an infinitesimal chance of hitting the target, but what is the probability of hitting at least once?
Well, we just need to use the same formula we used above and let
n go out to infinity. It turns out that (1 - 1/
n)
n happens to equal 1/
e where
e is Euler's number, 2.71828182845904523536....
This means that the chance of hitting the target at least once is 1 - 1/
e which is about 0.63, or slightly less than two-thirds.
So the scenario of drawing a royal flush and the scenario of an object quantum mechanically teleporting one foot to the left are essentially the same...one is just more likely than the other. The concept is the same: Given enough chances, it becomes pretty likely to happen.
So in a space the size of the universe, what do you think the chances are of having something astronomical happening?
quote:
If it is true when you say one person a month can draw a royal flush at a casino then that would mean over thousands of people have done it already, and I don’t think that I recall anyone having the ability to teleport from one room to another or be at the same place at the same time.
You're not looking in the right place.
You need to search the universe, not the earth.
quote:
There was however an incident in the Bible that after Jesus had been crucified and laid to rest in his tomb he rose from the dead and appeared to all the disciples and then 500 other people
No, there wasn't. We have no evidence that this ever happened. Oh, we have a few people who weren't even alive at the time and who never met anybody from the time period when it was supposed to have happened
claiming that it happened, but we don't have a single eyewitness or even any contemporary second-hand sources.
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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!
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