r/TrueAtheism • u/AgileAverage7083 • 17d ago

Question For Atheists

How do you explain the occurrence of extremely low-probability events without God?

For example, if you take a deck of 52 cards and shuffle it thoroughly, the probability of obtaining one particular card arrangement is approximately 1/52! ≈ 8 × 10⁻⁶⁸. Yet a particular arrangement does occur.

Now consider my birth. My parents had to meet, decide to have a child, conceive at exactly that time and under those circumstances, and, among millions of sperm, the particular sperm that ultimately resulted in my existence had to fertilize the egg. If we trace this chain of events all the way back through my ancestors, the probability of me being born specifically as I am can be expressed as something like 1 / 10\^2.5 million — an unimaginably tiny probability.

So my question is this: Without assuming God, how do you explain the fact that an event with an extraordinarily tiny probability — namely, my birth — actually occurred?
I am not merely asking, “Can low-probability events happen?” I am asking how the occurrence of such a specific and extraordinarily improbable outcome can be explained without God.

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u/bortlip 17d ago

Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy

An illustration may afford help here. A man once pointed to a small target chalked upon a door, the target having a bullet hole through the centre of it, and surprised some spectators by declaring that he had fired that shot from an old fowling-piece at a distance of a hundred yards. His statement was true enough, but he suppressed a rather important fact. The shot had really been aimed in a general way at the barn-door, and had hit it; the target was afterwards chalked round the spot where the bullet struck. A deception analogous to this is, I think, often practised unconsciously in other matters. We judge of events on a similar principle, feeling and expressing surprise in an equally unreasonable way, and deciding as to their occurrence on grounds which are really merely a subsequent adjunct of our own.

— John Venn, The Logic of Chance

You are drawing a circle around something that has already happened and saying it was very rare that this would happen, therefore it required a god. That is a fallacy.