Greg;
This is just a tid-bit to wet your scientific interest. I will post you more in the future if you think them interesting enough to justify the typing. Perhaps you remember the news headlines that read "Famous Scientist Discovers God". I would never try to prove with science that God exists. That seems to nullify faith. However, as I have said before, if God created it, then true science would point to it and could not prove otherwise.
Sir Fred Hoyle, a professor at Cambridge and one of the leading astronomers and scientists of our time, decided to test the laws of probability even further. He wanted to find out the probability of just one cell-not just one strand of DNA-coming into existence by chance.
To be fair, he even started his calculation with the supposed age of the universe-15 to 20 billion years, give or take a billion or so-rather than the supposed age of the Earth, 4.5 billion. This was an enormous advantage to the side of chance. On the other hand, because it was based on the age of the universe, Hoyle could not resort to the theory of panspermia, simply because there could be no advanced race outside of the universe. This universe, for better or worse, is the only one we know of. If an advanced race existed, it would have to be within the "confines" of this universe.
Hoyle worked with another world-famous mathematician and astro-physicist, Chandra Wickramasinghe, to calculate the probabilities. These two great mathematical minds came up with this number of years for just one simple cell to come into existence by chance: 10x40,000 (10 to the 40,000th power) years.
Now, I'm sure most of us have no concept how large a number 10x40,000 really is. Let me try to give you some perspective. One noted Swiss mathematician, Lecomte duNouy, said that any number in which the probabilities were greater than 10x50 would simply never happen, even cosmically. Why did duNouy choose that particular figure? Because if we counted all the electrons in this universe-the thing we have the most of-the number of electrons would come to 10x52. That would be counting every electron in every planet, in every sun, in every galaxy. So duNouy assumed that, once something hit 10x50, it simply was not going to happen. That's 10x50, not 10x40,000. How big is 10x40,000? Well, take all of the electrons in the universe-10x52 power-and multiply it times ten, making 10x53. Multiply this by ten, making 10x54. Keep multiplying this way until you have reached 10x40,000. It's beyond our abilities to even imagine. That's how long it would take to produce one cell by chance. Can evolution scientifically account for the creation of life? It gives new meaning to the phrase "fat chance."
Wickramasinghe states, "Living systems could not have been generated by random processes, within a finite time-scale, in a finite universe." Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, in fact, rejected evolution as the source of life. Instead, they said that for any kind, of life to exist anywhere in the universe, it must be there by the hand of an eternally existent being of infinite power which, if you desire to, you may call God. These two scientists concluded that if life cannot spontaneously begin, it must have a creator. Hoyle, once an atheist, became a believer in God. What other logical conclusion could he have come to?
I took this from D. James Kennedy's book, SKEPTICS ANSWERED, pgs 63-64. I will answer your last post but feel a need to pray about it first. Thanks again for a challenging discussion.
In Yeshua's Love for all - DLL |
