I don't post often, and haven't at all for quite some time, but I thought this was worthy of cranking up Blogspot not once, but twice.
Neil Degrasse Tyson just posted an incredible argument for Intelligent Design on TikTok.
He didn’t think it was an argument for Intelligent Design, but it is.
Here’s how it goes, he starts talking about shuffling playing cards, and gets to the fact that there are 52! (52 factorial) different possible sequences of cards after a proper shuffle. For those who don’t remember that part of math, 52! is:
52 x 51 x 50 x 49 x 48 x 47 x 46 x 45 x 44 x … x10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1
which works out to 8 x 1067. 8 with 67 zeroes after it. A really big number.
To put that into context, he explains that if you took a trillion people, in each of a trillion civilizations, in a trillion different universes, handed each a deck of playing cards, and gave each person instructions to shuffle their deck a trillion times a second, and had that go on for a trillion years, you would only have a 40% chance of one of those shufflings giving the same order as a deck you just shuffled.
So how is that an argument for Intelligent Design?
How old does Science say the Universe is? The longest time that I have found in scientific research is 26.7 Billion years.
Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that the development of intelligent life only requires 52 steps3, in the correct order. Each step is represented in our thought experiment by a playing card. Only one sequence out of all the possible sequences results in life as we know it. Neil argues that hitting the correct sequence would take;
- a trillion universes,
- times a trillion civilizations,
- times a trillion people,
- times a trillion shuffles per second,
- times 31,536,000 seconds per year,
- for a trillion years,
- with only a 40% chance of success at hitting the correct sequence.
Here we are having this (presumably) intelligent conversation in (at most) 2.67% of the time, in just one universe!
The counter argument is that this isn’t the only cycle the universe (or multiverse) has taken.
If all that is, is on infinite repeat, anything could happen.
Even a famous atheist accidentally posting an argument for Intelligent Design on TikTok.
