As a poker player, I have taken my fair share of what we like to call "bad beats". I can just see my fellow players rolling their eyes; imagining that this blog is a bad beat story. Well, not exactly. But, for those who do not play, a "bad beat" is when the odds of winning are in your favor, and you lose anyway. This can be the most frustrating part of the game. Particularly, when you realize that your opponent played badly, and won anyway. It just doesn't seem fair. But, most poker players learn to take these things in stride. And, they realize that over the long term, the odds will be in their favor.
Now, if a player was consistently losing when the odds were in their favor, one might start to wonder what was going on. After all, you would think that if your probability to win was 80%, then you should win 80% over a period of time - right? Well, so, if you lose 10 straight times in a row, when you had an 80% chance of winning each time, what would you think? Isn't it logical that if you have an 80% chance of winning for each hand that you should win 80% of those hands? At least, isn't it logical that you should not lose all 10 of those hands?
Let's look at this from a different angle. Let's say you have a 20% chance of winning each of ten different hands. What percentage of the hands would you expect to win? For me, I would expect to win at most 40% of those hands. And, I would consider myself really lucky to win those, because I really only had a 20% chance of winning any one of those hands.
Let me switch gears here for just minute.
I was in Mumbai having dinner with friends and colleagues, and the subject of "intelligent design" came up. And, in the discussion, it was established that only two people out of the eight at the table believed in intelligent design. At the time, I remember being surprised by this statistic. But, I filed that away for later consideration, and we finished our dinner.
Later, I started to think about the Mumbai conversation. And, as my beloved wife will tell you, when I get stuck on something, I tend to dig until I find an answer. To be honest, I was surprised that 75% of the people at the table did not believe that God had created the Universe. So, I started my investigation. And, the more I read, the more disturbed I became. There were theories for everything - everything could be explained. I started to read more, and got even more disturbed. I started to have trouble sleeping. My mind was going crazy processing everything I had read.
Then one night I had a dream. In the dream, I saw probabilities; just like when I am sitting at the poker table trying to calculate the probabilities of my opponent's hand. Then I saw the probabilities lining up, and getting smaller and smaller. It occurred to me that this is the way probabilities work: If something has multiple things which must happen in sequence (in order to occur) the probabilities are multiplied with one another - making them smaller. And as the list of items grew in length, I saw the probabilities going to zero.
The human body is very complex. Clearly, if we knew everything about the human body, there would be no disease or illness. People would live forever, because we would know how to make replacement parts. The point here is that we do not know everything about life. So, we cannot possibly know how long it would take to create life.
We do know, through science, that the universe has rules. There are rules that govern math. And there are rules that govern physics. Of course we really don't know if there are any other rules out there that we haven't discovered yet. Nor do we know if there are conditions under which the rules will change. The age of enlightenment has helped us (man kind) to work within the confines of the rules that we know and understand. But, what about what we do not know? What is the probability that we know everything? Well, we certainly still have a lot to learn in the medical field. And, we still cannot explain division by zero. I think it's one thing to work within the boundaries of what we know, in order to improve ourselves. I think it is something all together different to assume that we know everything, and to ignore the other possibilities simply because we cannot explain them. That seems to be arrogant - or ignorant - I am not sure which.
If you take a minute to think about cause and effect. That is, think about things that have to happen, in order for other things to happen. Now, take a minute to think about all the things that would have to happen in a precise sequence, in order to do something like, say, create the universe. I think that is a very complex thing to do; particularly since as far as I know, we still don't really know what happened. We have theories, stacked on top of theories. We cannot have facts, because we were not there. We cannot know precisely what happened. Yes, in the last 200+ years we have made fantastic technological advances. So, what does that prove? Does it prove we are suddenly smart enough that our theories become facts? What if we are wrong? We were certainly wrong about Pluto.
It's just like at the poker table: you are trying to make the right decision based on the information you have at that particular moment in time. There is a probability that you are right, and there is a probability that you are wrong. But, if you think someone has a hand, and when you fold the other player shows you a bluff, you have just lost out because the other player convinced you that they had a hand.
So, what is the probability that all the evolution theories are correct; as opposed to believing that God created the universe? Well, you have a number of things that would have to happen very precisely. And, according to what I was told, evolution says that life evolved based on defects becoming the new normal. And, that defects enabled the various species to adapt over time. I'm sure someone more enlightened than I has already thought about this; but, let me take a simple poker player's point of view. What is the probability that a specific defect occurred at the precise time that was necessary to survive? And, even if it happened, what is the probability that it continued to happen? And, even if it continued to continue to happen, how much time would it take? I know if time is not an object, anything can happen. But, the Earth has only been around a certain amount of time.
Evolution, is like thinking that a 1963 Chevrolet corvette would spontaneously manufacture itself. Yes, this car was manufactured. But, it was manufactured from parts. Those parts were also manufactured. How? Well, if you go back far enough in the chain, you are gonna get to a point where you either assume something (aka guess), or you take a leap of faith.
The odds are against evolution. For me, it makes more sense that the universe was created by someone (God) that knew what they were doing, and that was acting in a deliberate fashion (had a plan). To me, that makes more sense than a bunch of theories that could have accidentally occurred in a precise sequence, at a precise time, to create the universe. Think about it. Do you want to make a leap of faith based on theories from men who think they are enlightened, yet admit they don't know all the rules of the universe?
As a poker player, I would call to see the other player's hand - particularly if I was betting my eternal soul.
Note: This is a re-post from http://www.yet-another-opinion.com
