KiwiTim:Rikkitic:KiwiTim:Why should it happen when we are here to observe it? When you multiply these probabilities by all the other tiny probabilities that came together to bring us into existence, it starts to stack up to the point where random chance for all of this looks increasingly absurd and illogical.
How can you state random chance for it is absurd and illogical? On what basis do you make that judgement? What do you have to compare it to? Are you the universal arbiter of how random chance is allowed to work? This doesn't make sense. The Universe couldn't care less whether we are here to observe it or not. It would still carry on the same without us. If it actually is infinite, or even close, every random chance there is will occur regardless of how you feel about it.
I go back to my silly example of a planet with oceans of Coca-cola and continents of marshmallow. Given an infinite amount of time and all the matter in the universe, this perhaps could happen, but I imagine nobody here would ever think it would happen. Why is that? Why do we think this is an absurd improbability (one that will never happen by random processes)? Because we each have a personal perception of how things happen in the natural world, or have knowledge from others to explain why things happen as they do. We simply do not expect oceans of Coke to form based on what we know about chemistry.
We know how probabilities multiply, we know something about thermodynamics, chemistry and biology. You have to follow the evidence or the lack of evidence. Of course, how an individual human perceives reality, the universe, the processes that drive the universe, has no effect on those realities/physical laws/processes. That is a given, but we have to follow the evidence, or lack of evidence where it leads, and absurdly improbable events are not likely to happen. If we wish to assume that everything is possible just because of the size and age of the universe, then we have to include really crazy ideas like the coke ocean, or raining cats and dogs, or moons made of cheese. As far as we know,everything is not possible; physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology constrain events within certain parameters. We have nothing suggesting abiogenesis is within those parameters.
If I dump a load of building supplies on some land, nobody would expect them to self assemble into a house. Why is that? What we know about thermodynamics and entropy suggest it would not happen. I could repeatedly dump those materials onto the site, and maybe they could form some rough hollow structure by chance, but it won't be stable and it won't be a house as we know it. You can take practical examples from the natural world to understand whether something is practically probable or improbable. Of course I'm not a universal arbiter of how random chance works, but everything absurdly improbable is not possible. Find me a moon made of cheese and you might change my mind.
Nevermind that I'm still waiting for my sewage pond which has all the ingredients to form coca cola, to become coca cola, but I would like to point out a popular theory on where ingredients for matter came from. Check out the quantum something from nothing theory. One explanation of what happened before the big bang.