...and that pretty much wraps it up for God

[by CH]

...and that pretty much wraps it up for God

When arguing about the existence or not of God, many believers will appeal to the notion of "Intelligent Design". That means, in short, that there is no way that a chaotic sequence of events could ever create the right conditions for life, let alone the right evolutionary mutations that led up to the existence of the species we know - especially the perfection of the human brain. Indeed, the perfection of elements existent and their layout in nature would lead one to conclude that some architect MUST have designed this. Pure chance and chaos could never brought us to this point.

Except if you consider the real odds. Let's imagine that the chances of the right conditions happening would be 1 to 10,000,000,000,000. That are 3,000 visible galaxies. A fair estimate says around 200 billion galaxies exist in the universe. Our binary system of galaxies (the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy) hold around 200 billion solar systems. That makes for an estimated 600,000,000,000,000 solar systems in the visible universe. If each solar system would be formed by an average 5 planets, that's 3,000,000,000,000,000 planets. I would say that the chances of the conditions happening in at least one OTHER planet in the visible universe are, at least, 100%. In the visible Universe.

Still! There must be a personality (Deity) behind such a grandious scheme! I'm not saying there isn't. I'm just saying it's not a "conditio sine qua non" to the existence of the Universe, life, intelligent life, and religious fanatics (completely different category). It all could have happened by sheer chance. You could argue that chance is just a name I give to God. But if you did, I guess you're too smart to be bothered by this whole discussion anyway.

In any case, Intelligent Design ir a circular argument. If intelligence is necessary to create intelligence we would end up in an endless spiral of creation, looking forever for the first being who designed all others, whereas chance doesn't need to be designed by an intelligent Deity. It just happens this way. Furthermore, the idea of a God that needs to be worshipped although it never clearly identifies itself makes a bad case for it's intelligence. God needs a new marketing campaign. Or to use it's omnipotency to unequivocally show itself to humankind. Or maybe we just need to learn to deal with the fact that we just happen to be here and enjoy it already.