The Irony Of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Ben Stein’s movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed did happen to have some interesting points. But one that I found glaringly annoying was the point about the possibility of the spontaneous emergence of life on Earth.

About a third of the way in, Ben Stein talks to a few different experts in the field of bioligical evolution who make the point that the chance of life spontaneously emerging from the chemicals and gasses present on Earth is 1 in trillions and trillions and trillions. A very very rare possibility indeed.

Stein then goes on to joke that this proves that there is a much better chance that a designer put things into motion rather than life randomly beginning on Earth. He even points to the fact that a scientist in the 1950’s put together an experiment where he put the essential elements of life in an apparatus and subjected them to an electrical shock (see: lightning) and no life appeared. This experiment, to Stein, proves that there is just too low of a chance of low spontaneously emerging even when all of the ingredients are present.

That makes sense when performing an experiment in a petri dish.

But Stein’s error in all of this was saying that the chances of life spontaneously emerging are so low that they are impractical and that that is evidence enough to prove that there must be a designer who started everything. When performing petri dish experiments, this is justifiable. But let’s think about the universe as a whole.

Scientists have concluded that there are 200 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. And these same scientists have discovered that there are upwards of 125 billion of galaxies this size in the known universe, with the number of discoveries increasing every day.

Each of these galaxies with all of their stars has the capability of housing billions upon billions upon billions of planets of every shape and variety.

Our Earth alone has over a trillion square feet of surface area. A trillion.

Finally, most scientists agree that the universe is somewhere near 13.5 billion years old.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a calculator capable of multiplying all of these numbers together.

But if one were to think of multiplying all of those stars and galaxies together, with all of those planets, with all of that surface area, over that course of time, one would realize that the potential for the conditions for life to spontaneously emerge somewhere in the universe is much much higher than what is presented in the movie.

But none of this was presented in the movie. The facts that were presented were taken out of context and put into a new context that leaves one to think that a designer is a much more logical solution than the spontaneous emergence of life.

And this is what bothers me so much about people placing God as the reason for so many things. It takes away from how lucky we are as humans here on Earth for happening to be one of the organisms able to emerge so “miraculously.” By giving God the credit for such special and lucky instances of statistical chance truly takes away from how special our days on Earth really are.

Stein fell victim to a situation where Occam’s Razor (that which is the simplest solution is most likely correct) led him in the wrong direction, for he didn’t take the vast scope of the universe into consideration when making his outlandish claims.