Last year I wrote a post about a
hypothesis of mine. I went back and
re-wrote the post about 4 or 5 times and still wasn’t satisfied. So I will start over and try to explain it
here in better form.
The name of my hypothesis: Gain Application Probability Supposition
(GAPS).
If you have a fair coin and toss
it, you have an equal chance for it to land heads or tails. If you are in a situation where you toss a
coin for a type of prize, such as for choice of starting position at the
beginning of a football game, the result comes with a certain gain or loss. When you win and associate the outcome with
gain, you have Gain Application Probability (GAP).
If you are going to toss a coin one
time and I tell you I will give you a prize, say $100, if you get heads, you
will perceive the difference in the outcome even though heads and tails are of
equal chance. (This example isn’t gambling because you don't lose your own money if you don’t win the prize.)
If I give you a prize for one
toss of a dice if it comes out as a 5 and no other number, you will feel a
difference if the 5 comes up. But before
you tossed, you only had one chance in six to get that prize, whereas with the
coin it was one in two.
If I say I will give you $100 if
you draw an Ace of Diamonds off the top of a regular, fairly shuffled deck of
cards, you know that your chances of the prize are getting smaller (1 in 52)
from the coin and dice tosses. Which
situation would you choose to take the chance for the prize?
Some regard the probabilities in
dealt card hands no different if you have a good hand or bad. But if you have cards that can win in a game
(if played well), you may win a pot of money.
So I would call the good hand a gain.
Then there are situations based on probability where you lose. If your football team
loses the toss, you have a Loss Application Probability, or LAP. And there are many probability outcomes that
don’t affect us much one way or the other, such when we toss coins just to see what comes up. I call these Neutral
Application Probabilities (NAP).
And, I suppose, zero times GAP
is ZAP.
Now say I offered to let you
choose between two possibilities. I will
give you a prize of $1,000 if you pick the Ace of Diamonds off the top of a
fairly shuffled deck of cards or $100 if you get heads from a fairly tossed
coin. You might think about that for a
while. With the cards the prize is bigger, but the chance of winning is
smaller. According to my theory, the GAP increases when the gain of an event is
larger and the probability is smaller.
Scientists have discovered that
the proportion of biologically functional proteins is extremely tiny, as reported by Douglas Axe, "The case against a Darwinian origin of protein folds," BIO-Complexity (2010). Proteins are the molecules (made of atoms)
which do the work in all living cells, from single-celled bacteria to trillions-celled
humans. Proteins consist of smaller
molecules called “amino acids” which as sub-units attach to each other to make
long strings. The twenty different kinds
of biological amino acids have to line up in close to exact sequence so they
can form into folds. They have
cross-connections that hold the protein together and the resulting shape and position
of charges can perform specialized activities.
There is little leeway in the combinations. Think if you had a list of business
deliveries with addresses and phone numbers.
How many random changes to that list would make it impossible to
complete all the deliveries in the required time?
The average protein consists of
about 300 amino acids, but often has many more. There can be over 1000 in one
specific protein. In evolution theory
(neo-Darwinism), random mutations of the DNA molecule during reproduction are
supposed to provide the changes in proteins, since it is from DNA code that
they are made. Even natural selection
(survival of the fittest), which is the other part of neo-Darwinism, depends on
these DNA changes to provide the improved proteins so the organism has
something to give it an advantage for reproduction and thereby be selected for
the next generation. Therefore we can
say that totally materialistic evolution is theorized to happen entirely by
chance. The probability for proteins in general is estimated by Axe to be 1 in 10^77, which is a 1 with 77 zeroes after it (10 to the
power of 77). Compare this to the number
of atoms in our galaxy: 10^65. Though
this probability is so minuscule, the gain for us is great. Without functional proteins, we would not
have life at all. And humans have thousands and thousands of proteins.
In my experience, people have
trouble comprehending really big or small numbers. My husband worked out a probability problem
for me a while ago. He used an example
with one million monkeys with one million typewriters with the target sentence:
“It was a dark and stormy night.” They
would be typing continuously (24/7/365), 60 words per minute, with 5 letters
per word. The probability for each unit
was 1 in 28 (26 letters, a space and a period).
He didn’t worry about a capital for the first letter. How much time do you think the monkeys would
need to type out that exact sentence by chance?
On average, it takes them about 7 thousand trillion trillion trillion
years.
A trillion (10^12) is a thousand
times a billion (10^9) and the number above is trillions of times more than a
trillion. Yet we have been told by
experts that 3 billion years are long enough to form humans by random movement
of molecules, starting with small organisms which changed in kind through
reproduction. Though our Earth contains
a great number of atoms to work with, there are still limits. It would take a very long time indeed for
random combinations to form the specialized molecules necessary for life and
the ever-increasing complexity of evolution.
By now you may have realized
that my hypothesis “GAPS” is a play on the common criticism concerning Creationists. Many say Christians don’t really want to
think about science, but resort to “God of the Gaps.” In other words, if Creationists can’t figure
something out we say, “God did it.” It
is true that we believe God made life.
Then when we learn the emerging facts about biology, our reason combines
with our faith. We use judgment to
conclude that the presence and diversity of living beings is not by chance but by
God’s direct formation in some way.
In our culture, many people
think science either does or will explain everything. Critics often insist that
if we say God made Creation then we must give exact details of how He did it,
preferably in a scientific formula. But they are putting the demands in their
own terms. The supernatural realm is
different from this one, and God’s ways are not our ways and His thoughts are
higher than we can imagine above our thoughts (cf. Isaiah 55:8-9 NABRE).
As for the GAP of biological life, it is
immeasurable because the gain is priceless.
