The truth is odds over 1 in 10 to the 50th power are considered "impossible" by statisticians. The Odds of single bacterium forming from "pre-existing soup" have been estimated to be at least 1 in 10 to the 100,000,000,000th power!
Evolutionist/Materialist:
"1 in 10 to the 100,000,000,000th power??? So you're telling me there's a chance!"
I must admit...I got this from here: link, but thought it was hilarious and had to share.
It is worse than that. Chemistry has a habit of producing compounds that are not desired. That is the reason specific reagents, conditions, and reaction times are required in chemical syntheses for specific compounds. Now imagine what a chemical "soup" would contain, certainly nothing desirable for the formation of polymeric amino acid compounds. IOW, you don't even get the soup you need in order to make proteins.
No supper for YOU, too!!!
You KNOW that ALL websites that have even a HINT of anti-E bias have been thoroughly, soundly, repeatedly, scientifically and logically proven to be tubs of so much bull hocky by our learned associates.
Only a troglodyte would find the slightest bit of humor (hah!) in them.
The odds of shuffling a deck of cards and getting a particular sequence is actually far longer odds than that. Is shuffling a deck of cards "considered 'impossible' by statisticians"? Or are you just really confused about this "math" thing you heard about in passing? Obviously, you've made an error in your so-called "reasoning" somewhere.
Furthermore, you're vastly confused about both the source and the application of the "1 in 10 to the 50th power" rule of thumb. If you care to, you know, actually learn something for change, read on -- here's a reply I made to yet another clueless person making the same false claim:
So the odds against this organelle forming are are very much less than the inverse of 1x10 to the 100th power.
Correct even after your errors have been corrected. But again, one must realize that these are only "the odds against this organelle forming" *totally at random all at once" by sheer chance of jostling amino acids in a bucket. It is *not* the odds against the organelle forming by evolutionary processes.
Physicists call anything less likely than 1x10 to the 50th power "impossible".
Funny you should mention that... First, "physicists" don't say that, since events less likely than that easily occur. For example, shuffle a deck of cards, then spread the deck face-up on a tabletop. Congratulations, the odds of that particular arrangement of cards occurring as a result of a shuffle is less than 1.24x10-68, which is far less than 1x10-50 -- it's a miracle!
Second, even rare events chosen a priori occur easily enough when the number of trials is large enough. For example an atomic state which occurs in less than 1x10-50 atoms is a near certainty to occur in the Earth alone, which contains far more than 1x1050 atoms.
So the "law" you mention is incorrect as stated.
But what's really funny about you mentioning it is that it's an informal rule of thumb (for *human* watchable events, not meant to be applied universally), originated by Emil Borel in a couple of books he wrote in 1943 and 1950 to popularize science. It's sometimes affectionately known as "Borel's Law". And ironically, Borel himself wrote on the topic of biological probability calculations:
In conclusion, I feel it is necessary to say a few words regarding a question that does not really come within the scope of this book, but that certain readers might nevertheless reproach me for having entirely neglected. I mean the problem of the appearance of life on our planet (and eventually on other planets in the universe) and the probability that this appearance may have been due to chance. If this problem seems to me to lie outside our subject, this is because the probability in question is too complex for us to be able to calculate its order of magnitude. It is on this point that I wish to make several explanatory comments.So there.When we calculated the probability of reproducing by mere chance a work of literature, in one or more volumes, we certainly observed that, if this work was printed, it must have emanated from a human brain. Now the complexity of that brain must therefore have been even richer than the particular work to which it gave birth. Is it not possible to infer that the probability that this brain may have been produced by the blind forces of chance is even slighter than the probability of the typewriting miracle?
It is obviously the same as if we asked ourselves whether we could know if it was possible actually to create a human being by combining at random a certain number of simple bodies. But this is not the way that the problem of the origin of life presents itself: it is generally held that living beings are the result of a slow process of evolution, beginning with elementary organisms, and that this process of evolution involves certain properties of living matter that prevent us from asserting that the process was accomplished in accordance with the laws of chance.
Moreover, certain of these properties of living matter also belong to inanimate matter, when it takes certain forms, such as that of crystals. It does not seem possible to apply the laws of probability calculus to the phenomenon of the formation of a crystal in a more or less supersaturated solution. At least, it would not be possible to treat this as a problem of probability without taking account of certain properties of matter, properties that facilitate the formation of crystals and that we are certainly obliged to verify. We ought, it seems to me, to consider it likely that the formation of elementary living organisms, and the evolution of those organisms, are also governed by elementary properties of matter that we do not understand perfectly but whose existence we ought nevertheless admit.
Similar observations could be made regarding possible attempts to apply the probability calculus to cosmogonical problems. In this field, too, it does not seem that the conclusions we have could really be of great assistance.
-- Emil Borel, "Probability and Certainty", p. 124-126
The Odds of single bacterium forming from "pre-existing soup" have been estimated to be at least 1 in 10 to the 100,000,000,000th power!
Totally at random maybe, sure, but since no one who actually knows anything about biology suggests that it *did* happen that way, you're just being goofy. You're modeling the wrong process, so your "results" say absolutely nothing about the odds of anything in the real world. Nice try.
Would it be too much to ask that you go *learn* something about these topics, so that you can evaluate for yourself whether the twaddle you find on various creationist sites is a complete waste of everyone's time or not before you parrot them endlessly? Spreading misinformation does FreeRepublic no service whatsoever, and only helps to "dumb down" discussions. Leave that to the liberals.