Christian Worldview Concepts

A Case Against Naturalism

Probability and Origins

Consider the improbability of the universe having a non-supernatural cause by examining the probability that a purely mechanistic, impersonal universe would ever possess the conditions necessary for the origin of living things. Dembski argues:

Anyone who grapples with the improbabilities inherent in life's origin is quickly confounded. Indeed, the improbabilities are truly staggering. Fred Hoyle, for instance, computes that a single cell might on the basis of chance be expected every 1,040,000 years if the entire universe were filled with a prebiotic liquidation (that is incredibly generous). [Hoyle, Fred and Chandra Wickramasinghe. 1981 Evolution from Space. New York: Simon & Schuster, pp. 1-33; Bernd-Olaf Küppers, a pupil of Manfred Eigen, commenting on merely a certain subunit of a virus, writes: The RNA sequence that codes for the virus-speciftc subunit of the replicase complex consists of approximately a thousand nucleotides, . . . so that it already possess ln = 41000 » 10600 alternative sequences .... The spontaneous synthesis [of this system] . . . is therefore extremely improbable. [Küppers, Bernd-Olaf. 1990 Information and the Origin of Life. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, p. 68]

He concludes that probability theory "does not bring us a single step further as regards the statistical aspect of the origin of life."⁵ Lecomte du Noüy found similarly wild improbabilities back in the 1940s.

Dembski's conclusions, based upon the primary scientific work of multiple researchers and mathematicians, is that the spontaneous emergence of life is very nearly a statistical impossibility if Naturalism is correct that the universe is entirely material. The science upon which the Naturalist worldview is so dependent does not support Naturalism's conclusions. This means that we must look for explanations other than Naturalism to understand the basic make up of the world around us.

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⁵ [See du Noüy, Lecomte. 1947 Human Destiny. New York: Longmans, Green and Company, Chapter 3.]