Believing, Whatever

THERE ARE billions of religions, thousands of organized religions, and hundreds of varieties of the christian religion. None of them are true. Or maybe one of them is, or maybe all of them. If the Methodists are correct in their description of the universe, the Baptists are not. Evolution, it has been asserted by many ministers, is so unlikely as to be impossible. the chances of amino acids combining to form protein molecules are less than the number "one" divided by the number of atoms in the universe, which is somewhere between ten to the seventy eighth and ten to the eighty second. This reasoning seems impressive; the universe cannot exist by chance. This argument fails to mention that the universe seems highly unlikely whether it happened by random chance, or by some anthropomorphic deity ordering it into existence, then making humans out of wet dirt. Whether the univerrse and Darwinian evolution have a one in two, a one in twenty, or a one in twenty trillion chance of happening, of being true it is most unlikely,but given an infinity of space and time, given an infinity of opportunity, both will eventually exist, as they have and do. The salient number is the numerator, the number "one". the number twenty trillion is meaningless. Given infinite and infinite opportunity, the monkey will eventually write hamlet, and the universe and evolution will eventually exist, as they do, as do we, merely by chance. There is, after all, overwhelming proof for both, all around us. So when your minister, with supreme confidence, starts spouting numbers which seem to indicate that the chances of atoms combining by random chance into complex proteins and into even more complex life forms, and then claiming that these enormous odds against such an event proof that it cannot be so, that the universe and evolution simply cannot be the result of random events, he is in reality proving exactly the opposite; that in fact these very existence of any odds at all, enormous or otherwise, proves that the not only the universe, but evolution within it evolution of life, of us, is absolutely inevitable. Christian science proves that evolution is real, is true, is happening, just as much as does science, and it doesn't even intend to do so.