How could I exist? The odds against it are so amazingly huge!!!I've been struggling for a term to apply to this fallacy. The fallacy involves looking back to some earlier and arbitrarily chosen initial state, then speculating on all the nearly infinite events that might have happened (but which didn't happen), and concluding that the present state has such a low degree of probability that it must have been impossible to achieve by natural means. This "reasoning" makes literally everything impossible (and thus miraculous), and it is therefore an absurdity.
The explanation is that if each event in the chain was a natural event, then the whole chain of events was also natural. It only seems improbable in retrospect.
Improbability works in the other direction too -- it is unlikely that in the beginning, with all the intervening variables, the final state could have been accurately predicted. (This does make sense, which is why accurate predictions, if unambiguous, are so highly regarded.)
I'm onto something here, but I wish I knew what to call it. longshadow, who is lurking here, has suggested The Fallacy of Probabilistic Illiteracy, which is accurate but too cumbersome. I'm still working on it. Perhaps "The fallacy of retrospective astonishment."
Damn.
That's mine now. :-)
I like this expression for the fallacy. It has been termed the inverse gambler's fallacy (pdf file.)