Q&A: Probability of the Development of Life
Probability of the Development of Life
Question
Hello, and have a good week,
I happened to hear atheist arguments against the claim in favor of God’s existence, namely that it is not likely for life to develop without a creator / designer, etc.
The arguments are that there are so many stars and so many galaxies, so somewhere on some star there must be suitable conditions for the development of life. So when you look at it that way, it no longer seems like such a low probability. Also, they say that we do not see that there is necessarily any direction toward creating life, because many of the creatures that ever existed went extinct, and whoever remained is simply whoever somehow survived. We human beings too are not adapted to live everywhere in the world (for example, Antarctica).
They also illustrate this with a person who wins the lottery out of millions of people: that too is a low probability, but someone has to win, right?
What does the Rabbi think about this?
Answer
First, despite all the stars, the probability is still negligible. Beyond that, the probability of life exists thanks to our laws of nature. Any other system of laws would not have allowed life, or the formation of complex and stable creatures. One should remember that the laws of nature are the same on all stars, meaning that here there is no large number of attempts. Therefore, the stronger argument comes from the laws of nature themselves: who caused them to be so special?
Discussion on Answer
You didn’t understand my claim. When I wrote that the laws of nature operate the same way everywhere, I did not mean to ask why life developed דווקא with us. I meant to say that regarding the laws of nature, one cannot argue that many systems of laws were created and ours just happened, by chance, to produce life. There is only one system.
Okay, there is one system of laws. Within that system, billions of stars were created, and only on very few of them is there life. In your view, does that still require an explanation? I also understand from your words that basically anything mechanical must have an external explanation, and therefore one should ask who created, not what created, because otherwise we just return again to infinite regress, since a mechanism does not create itself.
A system of laws that allows life is very unique. Of course, even within it special conditions are also required, and that happens on our planet.
Indeed.
Have you ever addressed “The Heretical Monkey”‘s response to your book on evolution?
I don’t remember such a response or any response of mine to it. Maybe there was one in the past.
Actually, the fact that the laws of nature operate the same way on all stars, and yet life developed on our planet, strengthens the argument for the existence of a creator. But just for fun, I’ll add another difficulty:
It’s true that the laws of nature operate uniformly, but not all star locations are suitable for life to arise there (say, the distance of the sun from the star). And in general, many people talk about how it’s probably quite plausible that out of all the billions of stars there is life, so maybe we aren’t all that special… We simply have no access to them because of the enormous distance.