A basic thinking skill is what we may call improbability incredulity. Improbability incredulity is the skill of being able to recognize that some claimed event was too improbable to have ever happened. I can give an example of how such a skill may be useful in life.
Imagine you are a wife who comes home at 7:30 PM, walks upstairs, and finds your husband naked in bed with an unclothed woman. The woman (a stranger) puts on her clothes, and leaves. You say to your husband: "How could you have cheated on me so brazenly?"
But being a quick thinker, your husband has an explanation. He claims he wasn't actually cheating on you. He gives this story:
"It was all perfectly innocent, darling. Just before you came in to the bedroom, the woman explained why she had entered the bedroom. It seems that she accidentally entered our house, thinking that it was her own house. She went upstairs, entered our bedroom, and took off her clothes, failing to even see me in bed. When she noticed me in bed after entering the bed, she was surprised, and said, 'I must be in the wrong house.' Then you came in. It was all very innocent. Nothing happened."
"That's the most ridiculous story I've ever heard!" you say. "She never would have even been able to get into our house without the right key. And why would you have been naked in bed at 7:30 PM if you weren't having sex with her?"
"It must have been that I just forgot to lock the door," your husband claims. "And I feel very sick, so I went to bed very early."
At times like this a very good skill to have is the skill of improbability incredulity, the skill of being able to recognize when some account is too improbable to be believed. A wife using that skill would be able to do some quick math to estimate the odds. The claimed story requires a series of events that are each very improbable:
- Someone going up to a house that was not her own, and thinking it was her house (which would have a likelihood of maybe .001 or less).
- Someone walking upstairs in a stranger's house and entering a bedroom of the stranger's house, and also undressing, all the while failing to notice that the house she is in is not her house (which has a likelihood of maybe .00001 or less).
- Someone entering into a bed occupied by a man, failing to notice that the bed was occupied by a stranger (something with a likelihood of maybe .0001 or less).
- Your husband just coincidentally failing to lock the door on this day (something with a likelihood of maybe .001).
- Your husband coincidentally being very sick on the day all this was happening, with some weird sickness causing him to go to bed very early and be naked in bed (something with a likelihood of maybe .001).
To calculate the probability of these causally independent events happening at the same time, we multiply together all of these probabilities, giving a total likelihood of roughly 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. This means the event would be very unlikely to occur even once in the entire history of mankind.
Most people are not good at doing this kind of analysis in which you break down a hard-to-believe story into individual components and analyze the improbability of each component. But most people have a pretty good sense of improbability incredulity. Most people are pretty good at sensing when some story is just too far-fetched to believe.
But there is a theory that requires for you to again and again and again turn off such a basic thinking skill. That theory is the theory of Darwinism, the theory that all of the world's species arose from accidental unguided random processes of nature. What we see in living organisms are the most stratospheric heights of organization, purposeful fine-tuned arrangement, component interdependence and information-rich "just right" functional complexity. But the high priests of Darwinism ask us to believe that such wonders of fine-tuning and organization arose accidentally. Darwinism is like the theory a huge library of books arose merely because of accidental ink splashes.
Darwinism is constantly asking people to turn off their improbability incredulity, and to believe in the most far-fetched tall tales. On the day I am writing this post that will be scheduled for publication at a later date, I see another example of such a thing. It is the story below which is the lead story on the ScienceNews.org site.
An unbelievable "just-so" story
The story above is the most laughable nonsense, asserting that iguanas (a type of lizard) made a 5000-mile rafting trip across the Pacific Ocean millions of years ago. Such is the nonsense that Darwinists are forced to spout to maintain their doctrine of common descent, the dogma that all species came from a common ancestor.
In the article we read of the biological reality that was the seed of this nutty tale:
"All members of the iguana evolutionary family are found in the Americas, with one glaring exception: the Fijian iguanas (Brachylophus). The origins of the four living iguana species in Fiji have been a mystery for researchers, considering all the reptiles’ closest relatives are an ocean away."
The Fijis are a group of islands fairly close to Australia, so the distance between the Fijis and the Americas (North and South America) is roughly 5000 miles or 8000 kilometers. The article then tries to tell us this crazy tale of a 5000-mile journey by rafting iguanas:
"These genetic results, combined with the geography of where iguana fossils have previously been found, point to ancestral iguanas rafting across the ocean from the shores of North America. The team thinks the lizards set sail between 31 million and 34 million years ago, possibly causing the evolutionary split between Brachylophus and Dipsosaurus."
The source of this laughable nonsense is a scientific paper. The title of the paper is a perfect example of scientists matter-of-factly asserting the factual truth of the most unbelievable claims. The paper is entitled "Iguanas rafted more than 8,000 km from North America to Fiji." In the article we have this example of witless reasoning from an evolutionary biologist:
"For Gyllenhaal, the findings illustrate how an incredibly rare, chance event — like iguanas successfully floating across an ocean — are more likely to play out as long as millions of years of time are available. 'When you’re dealing with evolutionary time, you’ve got a lot of opportunity for these very small probability things to occur.' ”
It's the same old witless reasoning that Darwinist biologists keep making over and over again: the claim that the most gigantically improbable things would happen as long as there were millions of years to happen. The claim is false. Given sufficiently low improbabilities, you can confidently say: that would not happen in a million years; that would not happen in a billion years; and that would not happen in a trillion years. Such are the improbabilities that you get whenever you realistically calculate the chance of the Darwinian origin of most of the 20,000+ types of protein molecules in the human body. As discussed in my post here, each of the molecules has a very high functional threshold, requiring a special arrangement of hundreds of amino acid parts as unlikely to occur by chance as stones washed up by the waves producing a 100-word intelligible useful message.
Darwinists ask you to believe in quite a few "miracle raft journeys," not only the iguana tall tale told above, but also the absurd tale that monkeys millions of years ago rafted across the Atlantic ocean, and the almost equally absurd idea that dinosaurs swam 250 miles between continents.
If you do a Google image search for "oceanic dispersal," you can find maps depicting claims that plants or animals somehow crossed oceans long before there were any boats. The page here has one of those maps, which appeared in a scientific paper. The arrows in the map tell us a large set of vastly improbable tall tales of oceanic movements before the existence of boats, such as (1) the claim that eons ago monkeys and cotton plants traveled from Africa to South America; (2) the claim that eons ago some plant traveled from South America to Africa; (3) the claim that eons ago gecko lizards traveled from Africa to Cuba; (4) the claim that eons ago some plant traveled from North America and Africa to Australia; (5) the claim that eons ago some plant traveled from Australia to Hawaii; (6) the claim that eons ago chameleons and frogs traveled 200 miles between Madagascar and Africa; (7) the claim that eons ago some plant traveled from New Zealand to South America; (8) the claim that eons ago some plant traveled from India to New Zealand; and (9) the claim that eons ago some trees traveled between Africa and Australia.
But such tall tales are by no means the most unbelievable claims that Darwinists make. Every time they claim the accidental origin of any type of protein molecule or any type of organelle or any type of cell, they are making a claim as unbelievable as the iguanas rafting across the Pacific ocean story. What is required by Darwinism is endless turn-offs of the basic thinking skill of improbability incredulity.
For details on some of the items mentioned in the visual below, see my posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
A process occurring over decades
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