Friday, March 06, 2009

Oh, dear God.


Who else?

P.S. I was going to leave a comment there, but what's the point? Justin is your typical Blogging Tory -- hideously, embarrassingly, gloriously, spectacularly ignorant, and proud of it.

And for those of you who want evidence for evolution, here you go. Enjoy.

AFTERSNARK: Not surprisingly, Justin's first scientifically illiterate commenter brings up the "junkyard 747" analogy, as if that's supposed to be devilishly clever:

I have more faith that a whirlwind swept through a junkyard at one end, and came out the other end with a 747 jumbo jet created and flying on path to Narita airport.

At which point we're all supposed to gasp in shock, and think, "Wow! That really is improbable!" Except for one awkward detail.

Wankers like Justin and their ignorant groupies love to bandy about analogies that involve wildly improbable events, such as tornadoes assembling airplanes, or entire amino acids magically forming in a single step. "Oh, man," they howl, "that sure is improbable, isn't it? Like, you know, 75 billion jillion skillion gazillion to one, har har!" But here's the problem.

If you really want to discredit something as wildly improbable, then you kind of have to be prepared to present a more probable alternative. As in, OK, if it didn't happen by what you call "chance," how did it happen? To which the ignorant wanker will start to mention "divine intervention" and that's where the roof caves in.

Because if you want to talk probabilities, then, by all means, feel free to calculate the probability of God. No, really. Because it's amusing to hear people laugh and laugh about the statistical unlikelihood of things like amino acids and proteins and single-celled organisms, and when you politely ask them what they propose instead, they casually answer, "Oh, an all-powerful divine being."

Uh huh.

So, my dear wankers, by all means, if you want to talk math, let's talk math. Specifically, I want to see your calculations regarding the probability of the existence of God. In detail. Show your work. Skip no steps. List all initial assumptions. Remember to carry the three.

You want to play with numbers, fine -- let's play with numbers. Because it's damned amusing to see people who profess absolute astonishment at the probability of simple biological processes turn around and, in the next sentence, quite off-handedly accept an ominscient, omnipotent, infinite Supreme Being as a statistically viable alternative. Yeah, that's logic.

So let's go, wanks. Especially you there with the junkyard and the 747. Let's see some legitimate analysis. Or, barring that, how about you just shut the hell up?

11 comments:

The Seer said...

Hasn't anyone in Canada ever heard of Gregor Mendal?

Rosie Redfield said...

The probabilities of random assembly don't matter, once natural selection kicks in. And we now know enough about the origin of life to know that it was able to kick in at a very early stage when only fairly simple molecules were present.

Ti-Guy said...

Hasn't anyone in Canada ever heard of Gregor Mendal?

Not likely. Gregor Mendel on the other hand...

The Artful Nudger said...

Thank you, Ti-Guy.

Frank Frink said...

Gregor Mendel on the other hand...

Who incidentally also happened to be a monk. Fairly certain they've never heard of Teilhard de Chardin either (incidentally a Jesuit priest).

spooky. wv = "luccide"

Sparky said...

I'm really starting to think that all these BT bloggers are there to keep 'sane' people busy refuting their erronous and perposterous claims. If we spend all this time refuting and pointing out their idiocy, we're distracted from doing other stuff.
I'ts a win-win for them--the bloggers play to the base (brownskins/socializm/THA GAYZ=bad) AND we spend all our time refuting the idiocy...

liberal supporter said...

They're just angry that they are on the outs with God. In my regular audience with the Almighty, He recently showed me His time lapsed video of a 747 being made from literally nothing.

It starts with a ball of hot gas 5 billion years ago, and moving forward at a rate of a billion years a minute you can see life arise literally from nothing, microscopic, then bugs, then higher forms develop. A few side tours with the nearly intelligent large reptiles, then on to the primates that get smarter with each passing million years, eventually acquiring the ability to speak and write.

Then the video slows down to about 1000 years a minute, and in the last 35 seconds it slows even more until you can see these intelligent primates making wheels, fires, then building forges to make more tools. Then balloons, then small aircraft, then building machines, and finally a Boeing factory from which is ejected a 747.


If they would just be better people, the Lord God might decide to let them see the video too, instead of letting them wallow in their ignorance.

Unknown said...

Man, this guy's basically a RSS feed from wingnut central, isn't he? A quick look at his main page you've got evolution denial/creationism, homophobia, attacking Obama for being popular, inability to understand taxes, trying to say raising minimum wage will destroy the economy, attacking Libs for doing the same thing the Cons are doing, blaming Obama for a financial crisis that started well before he even got elected, and bitching about universal healthcare. Quite a piece of work.

s said...

ei*pi + 1 = 0

Also known as Euler's formula.

Paladiea said...

I wasn't aware that 747's were able to reproduce with variation...

Fascinating!

Unknown said...

You haven't seen the awesome display of a 747 mating ritual. An unforgettable sight, to be sure.