In a previous post I addressed the “lottery” objection to the probabilistic argument against a naturalistic origin of life: “Just as the odds of winning the lottery are low, and yet people win the lottery all the time, so too the odds of forming life by chance may be low, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible.”  I argued that unlike a lottery, the probabilistic resources available to form life are so unfathomably low that there is no reason to expect a winner in chance’s game of life.  To prove my point, I compared the number of possible events in the whole history of the universe (10139)—the probabilistic resources—to the probability of a 250 gene organism forming by chance (1:1041,000).  The odds of life forming by chance came up trillions upon trillions upon trillions of times short, and thus there is no rational basis on which to affirm that life originated by chance.  What I didn’t realize then was that I had severely over-estimated the odds.

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