Dice, Probability, Proteins, Infinity, & Eternity
Dice, Probability, Proteins, Infinity, & Eternity
How long would it take if I gave you three standard, six-sided dice, to line them up in a row and show a 1, 2, and 3, facing up, and in order? We'd probably budget about 10 seconds. Then how long would we need to budget to randomly role a 1, 2, and 3, in order, using one of those same standard, six-sided dice? This is a slightly more complicated question, but we can estimate the time we'll need with simple math. The odds of getting each number is 1 in 6 (or 1/6th). To calculate the probability when rolling a six-sided die that we'd get any specific sequence in order is 1/6 multiplied by 1/6 for as many specific results as we want. So for a sequence of 3, we raise the fraction to the 3rd power, and the formula is:
1/6 × 1/6 × 1/6 =
(1/6)3 =
1/216
This means we'd have a 1 in 216 chance of rolling the prespecified sequence we're looking for. So we should budget having to roll the die up to 216 times to get what we're after. If it takes 5 seconds on average to roll the die each time (one trial) then we would have to budget:
216 trials ×
5 seconds/trial =
1,080 seconds =
18 minutes
So we'd need 18 minutes to perform the whole experiment. If someone were to force you to arbitrarily perform this experiment on a random busy day, chances are high that you would perceive those 18 minutes as infinitely longer than 10 seconds. Especially if you were made to do it multiple times. Even if you had not one but a handful of dice, and could do multiple trials at once, you'd still have to budget running the same number of total trials to get the desired outcome. If we had four dice, we could run 4 concurrent trials every 5 seconds. We'd still have to budget running all the trials, but the complete experiment would take far less time:
216 trials total ÷
4 trial at once =
54 units of time ×
5 seconds/unit =
270 seconds =
4.5 minutes
Now what if we have a 20 sided die, and want to get a specific sequence of 400 numbers in a row? Sound ludicrous? Let's switch gears...
Proteins are long strings of amino acids and are the building blocks of cells, which are the building blocks of life. Proteins are what they told you in high school biology were the "workhorses of the cell." All the proteins in our body are made of the same 20 amino acids.1 Proteins can be made of sequences that are anywhere from 50 to 1,000 amino acids long, and an average sized protein has a sequence length of about 400 amino acids.2 (All still those same 20 kinds.)
The math of probability is the same whether we're dealing with dice, proteins, or anything else. So how long would we need to budget to randomly role a standard, 20-sided die, and perfectly get a sequence of 400 numbers we agree to in advance? We'd start to answer this question with a formula of (1/20)400. If we put this equation into Excel, the number is so small it returns an error.3 So we have to do this math by hand, and it'll be easier to do with powers of ten. We'll start by converting the fraction and raising it to the 400th power. The formula looks like this:
(1/20)400 =
(10-1 ÷ 2)400 =
10-400 ÷ 2400 =
10-400 × 0.5400 =
10-400 × 10-120 =
10-520
So we'd have to budget running the experiment 10520 times to get the specific result we're looking for. That sounds like a lot. Let's see if it is. With a die, we can estimate how long each trial will take because we can attempt it at will. But we've never seen how fast evolution supposedly works, other than we've been told it's a very slow process.4 This is one reason why we're told we've never directly observed it in over a century since Darwin published his book. (People differ on what "evolution" means. For the purpose of this article, I mean the process that causes new, beneficial information to exist which did not exist previously in DNA. Similarly, it is the process by which new proteins that never existed previously self-organize, add value, and last.5 And most significantly, it is the process some claim is responsible for the origin of all life. 'Evolution' is different from 'natural selection' because the later does not involve an increase in biological information.) Evolutionists say the universe is unimaginably old, a whopping 13 billion years,6 and it's because of our relatively short life spans that there is no observational evidence in biology to support the evolutionary theory.7 Math is the language of science, so let's use math to calculate the minimum time we have to budget for the amino acids (the molecules) in a protein to self organize. ("Minimum" time because we'll skew all estimates in favor of evolution.) In other words, let's see how short of a time it might take to evolve just one protein by random chance.
Unlike dice, where we can count them as we roll them, we don't know how many concurrent trials the universe could support, so we have to take a tangent and make an educated guess. When we have four hundred 20-sided dice, that's 8,000 numbers to deal with. In scientific notation that's 103.90309, and just to simplify the math let's round to 104. In 2021 it was reasonable to claim we estimate 1081 atoms are present in the entire universe.8 With that many atoms in the universe theoretically available, and we need 104 atoms per trial, then that means the universe could support:
1081 atoms ÷
104 atoms per trial =
1077 concurrent trials
Knowing how many trials we need to run and how many we can run at the same time, we can calculate the total time needed to budget for the experiment:
10520 trials ÷
1077 trials per time =
10443 units of time
But what is the unit? The shortest time recognized in physics is named Planck time, which is 10-44 seconds.9 It's so small it's not actually measurable, but is derived from physical constants. As a frame of reference, supposedly the fastest chemical reaction known to man is when ultraviolet light interferes with our DNA, the DNA molecules self correct in a quadrillionth of a second. That's 10-15 seconds.10 So a Plank unit of time is insanely small, but let's pretend each trial takes that little time anyway. This is completely unwarranted, but offers the best case scenario for the evolutionist. There are about 10 million (or 107) seconds per year.
107 seconds per year ÷
10-44 seconds per trial =
1051 trials per year
Then to make a single protein, assuming each experiment took no more than 1 Planck and there are zero interruptions in the experimentation process:
10443 units of time for all trials ÷
1051 trials per year =
10393 years
10393 years
If you thought 13 billion (or 1010.12) years old was a long time, you're going to love 10393. The closest we can get to relating to this is there are 1014 (a hundred trillion) atoms in a single typical human cell,11 and there are 1081 atoms in the entire universe. By any non-literal definition, the universe is infinitely bigger (more massive) than a human cell, and 10393 years are infinitely longer than 1010.12. And that's just how long we have to budget to make one protein with 400 amino acids, some are much bigger. But one protein by itself isn't enough for life, so we have to do this whole experiment multiple times to achieve even the very first lifeform. A conservative estimate says there are 100,000 distinct proteins in a human,12 and remember we used all atoms in the universe so you can't make more than one protein at a time with this formula. (So we'd need to budget 10393 × 105 = 10398 years to evolve all proteins in the human body.) And this still couldn't explain where life came from, it could only explain where the building blocks for life came from. But we'll refrain from going into the undisputed law of biogenesis, and where "life" would have come from, because high school math has burst the bubble of the evolutionary argument anyway.
So is 10393 a big number? Remember that funny named number "googol"? It's the number from which the name Google came from. It was coined as a number that was ludicrously large yet mathematically distinguishable from infinity. A googol is only 10100. So the 10393 years we need is truly ludicrous.13 This detail exposes a fatal flaw in Darwin's logic. I'm not necessarily blaming him, all scientists make mistakes because all humans do. The trick is to admit it, and improve the hypothesis, not double down on that which has been disproven. When Darwin formalized his version of evolutionary theory, he was thinking about 2 kidneys, 2 eyes, 10 fingers, 4 limbs, this beak or that beak. He wasn't thinking about 100,000 distinct proteins and 3 billion sequence DNA in every living cell.14 When all you have to evolve is an eye, as a discrete item, and not the genetic code to make up rods, cones, optic nerve, lense, lid, cornea, etc, it's easy to fall for the fallacy that random chance could result in your wishful thinking. Darwin died in 1882. He took his voyage on the Beagle from 1831-1836, and published his infamous book On the Origin of Species in 1859. The first cell was discovered in 1665 but cellular theory took until 1839.15 DNA wasn't discovered until a decade after Darwin published his book, then knowing what it was had to wait at least 84 more years when x-ray technology was brought to bear in 1953.16 Darwin and his contemporaries had no idea how complex biology was when they theorized evolution.
Just for fun, let's be a little less generous. Because evolution on Earth wouldn't have had every atom in the universe available for this experiment. It wouldn't even have had every atom in the Earth, it would only have had the atoms on the surface. Supposedly the Earth has about 1050 atoms,17 but only one percent of those are in the crust.18 That leaves more like 1048 available for our experiment.19 With only 1048 rather than 1081 atoms, and if each trial took a whole second rather than just a Planck, now we're looking at 10469 years. But both a Plank and a second were arbitrary. Proteins can last longer than either of those, anywhere from a quarter hour to a quarter year, or longer, depending on their function (their design). There seem to have been limited studies on the topic so far, but the most common protein lifespan may be around an hour.20 Lifetime isn't the same as experimentation time, but equating the two makes our calculation less arbitrary. If all the proto-proteins in our experiments lasted one hour then we'll now have to budget:
10472 years.
It's not an exaggeration that 10472 is infinitely longer than 10393, and 10393 was already infinitely longer than evolutionists had available. Remember, they think the universe is 13 billion (1010.12), the Earth is 4.5 billion, and the earliest single-cellular organisms are supposedly 3.5 billion years old. That means the first proteins only had a pathetically small one billion (109) years to evolve.21 But remember while proteins are required for life they aren't enough for it to either exist or thrive. We also need entire cells, and every one of those cells need to specialize, have, and turn into complex systems, including DNA, sensory organs, nervous systems, sexuality, etc. We also made a teeny assumption that all the amino acids needed to make our proteins had already evolved and were available, steady state, for the billions of trillions of quadrillions of millenia of our experiments. And if we thought a protein with a sequence of 400 amino acids was big, DNA has more than a billion base pairs. And nothing we theoretically evolved in any of the above experiments count for anything towards building DNA because we were using every atom available to speed up our experiment. Try computing the probability of rolling a 4-sided die three billion times and getting a predetermined sequence. If you thought a 1 with 472 zeros after it was big...22
Whether it was 10393 or 10472, exactly or specifically, is absolutely irrelevant. The point is basic math has proven the conventional big bang and evolutionary theory irrelevant too. Because both of those numbers assume the process continued ad nauseum without interruption for over a trillion trillion trillion years (actually, a trillion cubed would be child's play, it's actually more than a trillion raised to the 30th power). Add any form of interruptions, and the process only takes longer, which is not what the evolutionist wants to hear. If there was an intelligence at work, it could have manually formed our proteins radically faster. Just like with our dice analogy, and how we can line up three dice in a sequence in only a few seconds rather than rolling them and simply hoping to get that same sequence in less than 20 minutes. But evolution was designed as a philosophy that very specifically excludes the entire possibility of a guiding intelligence. Werner Gitt asserted in his book, In the Beginning Was Information:
Information is neither a physical nor a chemical principle like energy and matter, even though the latter are required as carriers. The central characteristic of all living beings is the "information" they contain, and this information regulates all life processes and procreative functions. There is no known law of nature, no known process, and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter.If there is no known way for information to self-originate, then biological evolution that can trace you back to goo is a joke. And a bad one. But if evolution is made up garbage, then what else is there? The insane complexity of biological life screams of the presence of an insanely (even infinitely) intelligent Creator. Because atheists have skin in the game, they refuse to believe in any God. But the God of the Bible (believed in by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, albeit with slightly different interpretations) has clearly revealed Himself to us in two ways. First through His general revelation, in that creation is proof of a creator, just as a book is proof of an author and masterful paintings are proof there was a paintor. Second, He spoke to us directly in His special revelation, the Bible. Give God and his word, the Bible, a chance (John 3:12), it will affect your eternity.23
Just for fun, let's look at this another way. Evolutionists think the universe had 109 years for the first proteins to self-organize on Earth. Here's what that looks like in standard form/notation:
1,000,000,000
And they think the universe is, in total, a supposedly impressive 1010.12 years old:
13,000,000,000
But we just calculated we would have to budget roughly 10472 years to form each protein [typical] in our bodies by random chance natural processes. Here's what that looks like:
10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
The going estimate is we have 1081 atoms in the entire universe (plus or minus a zero or two):
1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
We can't relate to the entire universe. The earth is closer to home, and we estimate has 1050 atoms, total:
100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
By the way, Wikipedia claims the observable universe is 93 billion light years in diameter, which is about 1030.15 millimeters. (For context, the Milky Way galaxy is less than 100,000 light years in diameter, and the farthest planet in our Solar System orbits at less than 1 light year in diameter.) So we can't switch from mass to length to gain a better context for the scale of numbers we're talking about here. Here's what 1030 looks like:
1000000000000000000000000000000
We have about 105 proteins in every cell in our bodies, so for random chance natural processes to explain their development we would need to start by assuming the amino acids already exist from which to build the proteins, and then start from 0 and budget performing 10520 experiments at least 105 times to explain ourselves by evolution:
100000
Evolutionists desperately want us to believe anthropologic history goes back at least 10,000 years. But no culture in the world has proof it's over 4,000 years old. Even the Chinese, Indians, and Myans, all of whom claim their cultures are older, don't have any evidence in their own museums they themselves claim is older than about four millennia. The Bible implies through the genealogic record the world (and the whole universe) is about 103.78 years old.
6000
The worldwide flood of Genesis 6-8 happened about 2350 BC (about 4,370 years ago), lasted about a year, and the segregation of the people at the tower of Babel (Genesis 11) happened about a century after that.24 The Bible also claims God cares about something specific. He cares about getting credit for what He's done:
- Deuteronomy 8:17b-18a WEB "lest you say in your heart, 'My power and the might of my hand has gotten me this wealth.' But you shall remember Yahweh your God, for it is He who gives you power to get wealth"
- Isaiah 42:8 WEB "I am Yahweh. That is my name. I will not give my glory to another, nor my praise to [idols]."
- Isaiah 45:12 WEB "I have made the earth, and created man on it. I, [with my bare] hands, have stretched out the heavens; and I have commanded all their army."
- Judges 7:2 MSG "God said to Gideon, "You have too large an army with you. I can't turn Midian over to them like this—they'll take all the credit, saying, 'I did it all myself,' and forget about me.""
- Job 38:3-5 WEB "Brace yourself like a man, for I will question you, then you answer me! 'Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if you have understanding. Who determined its measures, if you know? Or who stretched the line on it?"
- Malachi 1:6,11 WEB "A son honors his father, and a servant his master. If I am a father, then where is my honor? And if I am a master, where is the respect due me? Says Yahweh of Armies to you... For from the rising of the sun even to its going down, my name is great among the nations..." says Yahweh of Armies.
- 1 Kings 18:21 WEB "Elijah came near to all the people, and said, 'How long will you waver between the two sides? If Yahweh is God, follow Him; but if Baal, then follow him.'"
- the earth initially all water (not molten),
- the earth before light,
- universal light before any stars,
- the atmosphere before the land,
- plants before the sun,
- planet Earth was finished before the Sun was started,
- flying animals before land animals,
- the many kinds of creatures independently,
- man from dust (not apes), and
- woman from man.
Since God is real, He deserves our respect, and about all He asks for is a relationship with us and for us to take Him seriously. That begins with reading the Bible and not just believing in Him, but also believing Him (James 2:19). And when you believe someone, you act as if they're right. So when He gives us commands we obey, whether they align with our preconceived notions of human norms or not (Acts 5:29). When we read the Bible and take it seriously, the most important takeaway is our relationship with Jesus Christ. The first few chapters of Genesis tell us where we came from and why we have such a problem with sin. While we are all good in our own eyes, none of us are good enough to be right with God (Romans 3:23). That's where Jesus comes in. Even while being God, He took the punishment our sins deserved so we could have a mended relationship with God (Ephesians 2:8-9, Philippians 2:6-8). He proved He is who He said He was by resurrecting how and when He said He would (Matthew 16:21, Luke 24:20-21, Matthew 28:5-6). Our responsibility is to take Him at His word (Romans 10:9), and obey His teaching (Matthew 7:21). Give God and His Word, the Bible, a chance (Proverbs 16:33 NLT, Job 11:7-9).
This article was taken out of my original article, Genesis is Scientifically Superior, and expanded on. If you have feedback on my math, or have a cool idea to add, email it to me at dice`at`jayden12`dot`com and include the word "dice" in the subject.
