Greta Christina has been writing professionally since 1989, on topics including atheism, sexuality and sex-positivity, LGBT issues, politics, culture, and whatever crosses her mind. She is author of
The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life, of
Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God, of
Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why, of
Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and of
Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More, and is editor of
Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients. She has been a public speaker for many years, and many of her talks can be seen on YouTube. Her writing has appeared in multiple magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, Chicago Sun-Times, On Our Backs, and Skeptical Inquirer, and numerous anthologies, including
Everything You Know About God Is Wrong and three volumes of
Best American Erotica. (Any views she expresses in this blog are solely hers, and do not necessarily represent this organizations.) She lives in San Francisco with her wife, Ingrid. You can email her at gretachristina (at) gmail (dot) com, or follow her on
Facebook.
Today in a week, on June 21st, is Atheist Solidarity Day. More info is here: http://www.atheistsolidarity.com/
I have no idea who started it but it might be a good meme to spread…
No. No. NO! It’s true that some things attributed to good happened at random (abiogenesis is probably an example). But you’re feeding a misconception here. The usual claim is “Modern lifeforms are too complicated to be random.”
Don’t try to disprove that. It’s true. It’s what the theory of evolution exists to explain in the first place! We just need to deny the “Therefore, God did it” that follows every “I don’t know”.
Now, for the universe, we don’t have clear-cut data, but there are in fact people who suspect a selection process among universes, and there certainly is anthropic stuff going on.
But you know better that to say “Yes, complicated things can happen by chance”. If they could, we wouldn’t be explaining them.
Leo, I don’t think those two situations are parallel.
The fact that life is so complex is noteworthy because we know that most randomly formed arrangements of matter are not alive. Comparing these two classes of things, we see that their relative quantities aren’t in line with what we’d expect from randomness alone. Therefore, another explanation is required.
Our universe being capable of having life is not a comparable situation. We don’t have a set of universes, some of which are capable of bearing life and some not, and a known random process which that distribution defies.
All we have is our one particular universe, with no real reason to think it’s any more special than any other possible universe other than the fact that it’s the one we have.
(By the way, Leo, I’d like to say thanks for making your comment; before you made that comparison, I hadn’t had to think as rigorously about why I don’t think anthropic arguments hold water.)
Like Leo I want to shout “No. No. NO!”, but for a different reason: Life and the Universe are NOT extraordinarily unlikely. I won’t say they are likely, either — just that we can’t say anything about their likelihood.
Our intuitive sense of probabilities won’t help us here: experiments have shown that human intuition is very poor when it comes to rare events. That holds for plane crashes and nuclear accidents, and even more so for universes originating.
Statistics won’t help either: as far as we know, both abiogenesis and universes have only occured once, and you can’t do any calculations on samples of size 1.
Don’t concede to theists that Life or the Universe is unlikely. They don’t know what the probability is. Nobody does.