How do you argue the point that creationists have where they shake a broken watch in a bag and say that the chances of it fixing itself are the same as the big bang happening?

Answer 1

How does a hurricane featuring in a rubbish heap blow around and gather all the rubbish particles into an aeroplane? The chances are astronomical against! That is my effort at 'quoting' (it isn't exact - word for word - but the idea is there) a similar argument, one mentioned by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion. The watch-in-a-bag reminds me of Paley's 19th century watch lying around waiting to be discovered and used to back an argument from design. The ideas above focus on a creationistic attitude to biological evolution. The question asked about a cosmological likelihood and I want to emphasise the distinction between cosmology and Biology - that the theory of evolution is biology, not cosmology. I defend my insertion of the above in that anti-evolution design arguments like Paley's watch play with probability as does the watch-in-a-bag. What are the chances of a watch without a designer? What are the chances of life without a designer? What on Earth are the chances of the Universe without a designer? It must also be stressed that probability is (probably) a very tricky point to argue.

Life changes by chance mutation that is acted upon by non-random selection. That does away with the aeroplane and Paley's watch. What of the Universe?

At each point of biological evolution, the situation has to be at point x for selection to act. There has to be something to act on. There has to be matter. There was no matter at he time t = 0, the point of the big bang and thus it doesn't matter what state particles were in at the point of the big bang. What particles? There weren't any particles until after the big bang, the initial expansion of space-time. Thus the watch-in-a-bag argument is backwards. If you shake all the particles in the Universe up after the big bang, what has that got to do with the chances of the big bang? You have to shake everything up before the big bang to affect its chances of happening. Which is impossible of course, as t = 0 at the point of the big bang. You can't prevent a car crash after it has happened and nor can you fail to have given birth moments after the doctor cries "It's a boy!".

Perhaps the creationist giving the argument thinks, by their argument, that they mean the difficulty of the Universe arranging itself into its marvellous atoms and magnificent galaxies and planets after the big bang was too difficult without a creative hand. Moments after the big bang, the Universe was boiling hot and a seething mass of particles and antiparticles. When the Universe coolled, atoms formed and electrons took up their space-filling arrangements around atoms. And since there were atoms, why not nebulae and then stars and galaxies. At this point, ask what the creationist knows of particles and the 4 forces of nature(gravity, the strong force, the weak force etc) anyway! It may be that no particle (due to interactions with other nearby particles) could have ever been in any other place other than where it actually was. There is a peculiar habit of electrons to fill up space, to move apart, to only fill an electron shell in a pattern of two electrons per orbital. This is called the Pauli exclusion principle. Matter spreads out and fills up space. Planets can thus form, taking up space. And stars are so hot that elements up to iron can be produced, and in supernovae and through radioactive decay, all elements can be formed. It appears quite a lot can happen all by itself without the need of a creator. And even things many creationists and scientists alike may take for granted - the fact that matter takes up space - can exist by quantum principles like Pauli exclusion.

It may be that there is an analogy of natural selection in the cosmos. All that exists, can exist. That which tries to exist but can't, doesn't. Atoms in a state all mixed up and unassembled like a shattered watch could not be in any better state moments after the big bang as it was too hot. Stars can only form without a narrow range of masses. There is no magic, only what can or cannot be. The best way forward for all (creationists included) is to study and learn.

The shaking of a broken watch does not disprove the big bang at point t = 0, nor shower doubt upon the post-big bang formation of atoms and stars and galaxies. Besides, the concept of 'fixing' itself is a bit naive. If it could, it would. If it couldn't, it wouldn't. The question also assumes that a 'fixed' watch is an ideal, that the random movement of particles immediately after the big bang was not ideal, not a Universe. At any point, consider this, what could be, may be and what could not be, would not be. So a watch is not fixed! So what? Whatever is 'fixed' should be perfectly explicable within the laws of physics and logic and this possibly analogy of natural selection.