Another point perhaps worth making. The odds of me jumping off a 30-story building and surviving are slim. Really, really slim. Something phenomenally unlikely would have to happen, like, say, me hitting a flock of very large birds on the way down that slowed my fall, or landing on a pillow truck. The odds of an entity whose existence cannot be established in the first place saving me from that 30-story fall… Does that have better odds? Well, no. Because we’ve replaced something natural saving me, which was unlikely as hell but still totally possible, with something supernatural saving me. The odds of miracles are simply incalculable, as we cannot establish their existence in the first place. They are virtually by definition the least likely scenario.
So is it unlikely that life arose by chance? Yes. But the idea that some supernatural creator willed it into existence is almost infinitely less likely. It’s a particularly poor solution to the problem, which, as others have pointed out, isn’t really as much of a problem as you might think. It really boils down to the anthropic fallacy - the puddle thinking “oh, this hole I’m in fits me so perfectly” when in fact it is the other way around, and if conditions were different we’d either be different to match them, or not be around to think about it.
It’s been proposed that Earth may not even be that good at supporting life in the grand scheme of things – try looking up “super habitable worlds.” A number of candidates exist.
If a gas giant is needed to sweep away asteroids I’m not sure why that’s a problem. Gas giants have been discovered in other systems. They’re fairly common.
Most meteorites come from from the asteroid belt. The asteroid belt exists because Jupiter’s gravity wouldn’t allow a planet to form there, so one could just as well blame Jupiter for the impacts. Jupiter’s gravity can draw asteroids away, but it also perturbs their orbit and lets them fall towards us. How much life would be harmed by a proposed 1000x increase in impacts is speculative. Life seems particularly resilient, having survived a number of catastrophes. Absent a sterilizing event like the Theia impact I’m not sure if life would care much. There seems to be a controversy over whether life could have actually originated and survived during the Late Heavy Bombardment period.
Here’s (PDF) a study where they play around with Jupiter’s size to test the vacuum cleaner hypothesis.
I don’t have access to the article, so I’m just going off the OP’s quotes:
What is this dude talking about? We keep finding life forms living in all sorts of bizarre places here on Earth (e.g., extremophiles). What are these 200 known parameters and how do they apply only to Earth? Scientists are still speculating about life on various moons or planets.
Apparently, you can get to the article from a Google search, so I read it. The author, Eric Metaxas, is a lying buffoon. This is early in the article:
I believe (but I’ll qualify with a “not entirely sure”) this was before we discovered whole ecosystems which do not rely on photosynthesis as part of their food chain. And if we now know that you can have life without photosynthesis in the mix, then there’s a wide range of places that can support life outside the parameters Sagan was probably thinking of.
But, there’s something a lot more dishonest in this article, which is a bait-and-switch. Metaxas seamlessly moves from whether planets can support to life to discussions about intelligent life without clearly making the distinction. And while it’s true that we don’t have any evidence that there’s off-planet intelligent life (although we do have some evidence that intelligence may have evolved a few times here on Earth), this blurring is simply a way to obscure the issue for people who may be uninformed on the topic.
I don’t believe this is true at all – not for a planet to support life, although I can’t find a list of these supposed 200 parameters. The partial lists I’ve found all have crap items on them that are easily shown not to be necessary to support life.
Of course, “supporting life” is not the same thing as “supporting intelligent life” nor are they the same thing as abiogenesis. This sort of blurring is typical of creationist liars.
The idea of a supernatural creator is non-scientific, and any assignment of likelihood is unknowable and arbitrary. You can’t weigh that against something which operates by known and measurable scientific principles.
It was. Chemosynthesis was theorized in the 19th century but not actually confirmed until 1977.
You are assuming that this Metaxas guy actually understands what he’s talking about. He’s a dilettante who apparently has no formal scientific training.
As a general rule of thumb, any time someone starts throwing around huge numbers and talking about improbability, they are either just pulling the numbers out of their ass, or they’re making fundamentally flawed assumptions. The most common that I’ve seen is pretending that processes (like evolution, typically) are random, when of course they are not.
I’d say making definitive statements about a topic one hasn’t studied constitutes lying. I don’t go around spouting nonsense about 15th Century Chinese poetry or that obscure baseball rule that everyone argues about, because I’ve never studied those topics.
And it’s not 30 years ago where you had to trudge down to the central library and pour through obscure books to find out this info. All the dude has to do is go read Wikipedia.
I can’t find any info on the author’s scientific bona fides, just that he graduated from Yale, but it appears his background is literary and religious., not scientific. Not really interested in the scientific musings of a literature guy.
If the supernatural is held to act on matters which do have scientifically measurable effects, then likelihood can even become zero depending on the definition of the god or gods in question.
But you’re right, there’s certainly deities we can postulate that we can make no guess at the chances of. The usual deist non-involved god comes to mind.
The Powerball Lottery Association could save a lot of money if instead of sending an offical to the winner’s house with a big check they sent Metaxas to explain to the winner that they really didn’t win because probability wise it just wasn’t possible.
I’m not sure I understand precisely what you’re saying.
To the extent that the properties of the god would involve some physical manifestation which contradicts laws of nature, then you could set the likelihood to zero based on the observed contradiction. But if you were just postulating a god who created laws on nature in a miraculous way - as is the suggestion here - then there’s no scientific way to measure that.