Why "mysterious ways" don't matter.

[Esquilax]

Oh, and just for fun: how did you derive those calculations of probability, anyway?

I was wondering if someone would ask that. Most of those "improbability odds" figures are pulled out of thin air. I really would like to see an explanation of how they determine the probability of something as vague as "a single cell."

Precisely why I asked: it's relatively easy to bandy numbers around. Here:

Odds of god: 1 in 10 to the twenty billionth trillionth power. That's 1 followed by, like, a kabillion zeroes!

Is my argument any more true because I cavalierly tossed around some big numbers without explaining a methodology? To Alex, I suppose it must be, if he weren't expecting special pleading to cause us to accept the same argument from him that he'd reject if it disagreed with his own predrawn conclusion.

It's even more ridiculous in cases like this one where, even if he actually did have a calculation of probability, it wouldn't be working with anywhere near a complete set of data. A sample size of one, where the genesis of cells isn't even completely understood, and all possible permutations of life origins aren't known, and the set of conditions everywhere in the universe isn't known, and the set of conditions of a prebiotic Earth aren't entirely known, and the interference those conditions had isn't entirely known? That's what you're working on to get the probability of this stuff?

Yeah, that's a calculation I'm definitely going to take seriously, given that literally all the pertinent data points are incomplete...