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/**