Challenge to those who believe there is adequate reason to be live the theory of evolution is true

 Many people believe there is adequate reason to accept the theory of evolution as true. I am arguing against that proposition. Notice that I am not arguing that it's false — my position here is that there isn't enough evidence to accept it as true, and therefore we should be agnostic about it.

Consider the following scenario. I have an object, and on one side of the object there's an X. I tell you that I threw the object into the air three times, and three times in a row, purely by accident, it landed on the X. It's not weighted on one side, it's symmetrically shaped, there are no ridges to catch the wind — the landing was purely accidental. Do you believe me?

The correct answer is that I haven't given you enough information to make up your mind. I didn't tell you how many sides the object has. If it's a coin, the probability of landing on the X three times in a row by accident is 12.5%, which would certainly justify believing me. But if it's a die with a thousand sides, the probability is one in a billion, and then you certainly shouldn't believe me. If I don't tell you how many sides it has, the right answer is that you haven't been given enough information to decide — so you neither believe nor disbelieve me.

I claim the theory of evolution is in exactly the same position. Evolution holds that the development of new life forms is due to a non-directed, non-managed, non-intelligent process — essentially what we would call an accidental process. (I don't use the word "random" because it has several different definitions. Yes, the word "accidental" is vague too, and all these arguments are subject to that vagueness.)

So I ask those who believe in evolution: what is the probability that the process you recognize as responsible for the development of new life forms produced the life forms we see within 13.8 billion years — taking into account the thousands or tens of thousands of individual mutations that would have to take place, each one at a specific place in the DNA with its own probability of being affected by outside forces, and each one occurring at a time when those outside forces varied?

I claim there is no way for us to establish a probability that the forces producing changes in DNA produced those changes within the lifespan of the universe. If that's correct, then believers in the theory of evolution are asking us to accept as verified, credible, or reasonable a theory that life developed through an accidental process — without providing us with a probability that this is true.

By the way there is one attempt to calculate the probability of one transition finding that the probability so Infinitely small  it is not credible to believe that it occurred within the entire lifetime  of the universe. That indeed would be a disproof of evolution. See "Giving Up Darwin: A Fond Farewell to a Brilliant and Beautiful Theory," published in the Claremont Review of Books in 2019.Link: **https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/giving-up-darwin/** 

Here is a direct application of my logic to an evolutionary context, greatly simplified.

Suppose I am monitoring a bacterium in a room for DNA mutations, and I record about one mutation per day. I ask a scientist to explain them, and he says they result from gamma rays. I ask: what is the recorded incidence of gamma rays entering the Earth’s atmosphere?

• He says one per year. But there are 365 mutations per year and only one gamma ray, so that cannot be the explanation.
• He revises: 365 per year. But the vast majority, if not all, will never enter my room, so that is still the wrong explanation.
• He revises again: one gamma ray per day enters the room. If gamma ray activity is unguided, the probability that each ray hits the bacterium’s DNA is far too small to take seriously. Some mechanism would have to direct the rays to the bacterium.
• He revises once more: a trillion gamma rays enter the room each day. Now the hypothesis is worth considering, since the probability of hits may be high enough.

Now return to the beginning. Suppose that when I ask for the incidence of gamma rays, he says we have no observations and no numbers whatsoever. Isn’t it obvious that I have no reason to take a position on his hypothesis?

In real evolution there are many causes of mutation, including heat and transcription errors, and they change the probabilities in various ways. But that is irrelevant to the question at issue: absent any estimate of the probability that the proposed causes produce the observed results, is there enough information to rationally accept the theory?

In the evolutionary case, each mutation needs some estimate of the probability that it occurred through the factors evolution cites. Without such an estimate, there is no justification for accepting evolution. Finding one also seems unfeasible, since it would require knowing the conditions under which every mutation in the history of life occurred, the size of the population available for each, and the time available, all fitting within the age of the universe. Until some estimate covers that ground, the theory of evolution is not complete enough to be credible.

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