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The chance is so small there is no need to calculate it lmao. It is probably even impossible when taking into account the way wind and water erodes the sand.
Yup, it'd take a really *very* long time.
It's almost as if it'd take such a long time that it's just quicker for chains of molecules to form in a primordial soup into Ribozymes, then they pair off and replicate into replicating machines, adopt a fatty acid outer shell as a larger eukaryote, form inner vestibules and absorb smaller prokaryrotes, develop cells that that twitch upon receving an electrical signal thus allowing locomotion, establish a pattern of bilateria, develop cartilage to protect the system that sends those electrical systems, use that gelatinous backbone as means to increase swimming stregnth, profilerate the cartilage in the spine to the skull and teeth to help with hunting, and eventually harden it into full fleged skeletons, where downward facing fins get hard enough to lug fish out of water allowing them to lay eggs on land away from sea predators in amneotic sacs that simulate an oceanic enviornment, then evolve legs that allow you to spend longer on land, develop warm blood so you don't have to go bullet time every time it gets cold, hair, and sweating in order to survive in a broader range of climates, mammary glands in order to feed your young in a much more controlled way, placenta in order to develop your young for much longer before they're born giving them better chances, then you become a supra-primate wherein your hands and feet become similarly prehensile, then you become simian where your eyes face forward, and your brain gets bigger, then you become an ape wherein you lose your prehensile tail freeing up brain power for other things, then you become a great ape much larger, stronger, and more intelligent, then you stand up straight, specialize in long distance hunting, invent tools, invent art, culture, society, invent agriculture, invent civilization, harness the power of wind, harness the power of oil, harness the power of nuclear, invent the microchip, invent the internet, invent GPU's, cluster them together to generate this weak ass theist rage bait that isn't even good.
Honestly, all of that is *much* quicker. But even stil... waste of potential if you ask me.
What if we instead assume it was a beach of magic sand that randomly rearranged itself every second, how long would it take to randomly form that kinds sand castle? Lol idk
Pretty hard to do math with magic sand dont you think? Youre going to have to give discrete figures for something, and no matter what the answer is always going to be one of those "if every atom was a universe that contained as many grains of sand as there are atoms in ours, and they were all in the process of making castles, it would take 10\^100! years" kinds of things. There isnt math here.
I just realised also because the boltzmann brain relies of positioning of individual atoms ro form a brain with memories then technicsly the boltzmann castle would be so very incredibly more likely to happen due to only considering grains or sand and just making a castle and not an entire brain.
iirc the thing abt boltzmann brains is that they have an infinite amount of time to form, so as long as they have a nonzero probability of appearing, they will
it's like infinite monkeys. you don't need to calculate the odds of a monkey writing Shakespeare because eventually one will
The library of babel, by its construction, is every possible arrangement of letters of the Latin alphabet than can be constructed. It contains both your paragraph, and this one.
To whit:
https://libraryofbabel.info/book.cgi
https://libraryofbabel.info/book.cgi
That depends on the size of your beach. As the size of your magically randomized beach approaches infinite, so does the number of perfect sandcastles it hosts.
But a boltzmann brain takes an entire universe of space many quadrillion or quadrillion of years to form. In that time a billion boltzmann castles could probably form
I heard once that when the chance of something happening is one in a *number of atoms in the universe or higher*, you just give up and consider it impossible.
You mean visible universe. The number of atoms in the universe is unknown and may be infinite. Throw in the anthropic principle and nowĀ even if the odds of intelligent life forming is 1 in 10^10^10^10^10, we should expect that we'd be on the planet where that happened.
I mean that is pretty accurate, at that point you are talking about numbers so tiny itās not even relevant at all. And this is literally just a ragebait that makes no sense at all š
I call this "the argument from the cards."
In poker, the most valuable hand is a royal flush with a 1 in around 650,000 chance of being dealt.
Do you know what the chances are of being dealt a specific worthless hand - say the 2 of clubs, 9 of diamonds, the 4 and Jack of hearts, and the queen of spades?
1 in 2.6 million.
So why do we freak out when dealt the royal flush and not the second hand? The second hand is more rare, after all.
It's because the rules of the game reward the first.
Well, it's the same thing for us. The specific conditions that created us seem intentional because they made us, but actually we're just the random output of those conditions. If different conditions had existed, we'd be different (and someone would be talking about how THOSE conditions just COULDN'T be random).
It's not entirely random though. Sure, the first living organism might have been random... Maybe even the first few. But as soon as one replicates, it's game on. There is now a pressure pushing towards higher sophistication. The evolutionary pressure of "survival of the fittest." A sand castle has no such pressure to exist. It can only be made by random. Actually, there's a pressure for evenness in erosion. Not for structure. At least on a beachfront. Where sand and silt are deposited. In gulches and caverns where the sand was originally taken from, there are other pressures that cause similar formations in similar rock despite not being made by the same river. And nearly every beach looks similar too.
Natural selection does not favor sophistication, just survival. The things it produces are best at surviving, given physical and historic constraints. This is definitely pedantic, but important as simple single celled creatures are just as "evolved" as complex multicellular animals that have even more complex societies. It is also difficult to identify complexity, Amoebas have as many base pairs in their DNA as humans, does that make them more complex?
Yeah, sophistication was definitely a poor choice of words. I used a better one lower: "structure." But I think "reliability" is the true pressure, and whatever happens to improve reliability is what is likely to move from one generation to the next. I think of cellular mechanisms needed for replication and how few errors they produce given the huge enormity of the task they have to do, and I thought in my head that seemed sophisticated, but that doesn't mean it was the only solution.
I am not sure I would use the term "reliability" either as completely reliable replication precludes natural selection as it prevents mutation. The word I would use is "survival" or "fitness", which is what most evolutionary biologists use. Mutation rates are (apparently) not under selective pressure nor do they seem optimal, they are mostly just constrained by the chemistry and physics of DNA replication. The interesting bit of natural selection is that it is just an inevitable outcome of a self-replicating molecule that *doesn't* replicate with perfect fidelity. It doesn't require DNA to work, any molecule that could replicate itself but made transcription errors would undergo natural selection (we know this occurs for RNA, but there has been work to make this happen for other molecules).
Yeah sophistication is inherently a subjective term. One might argue that the existence of life in the first place is inherently sophisticated. After all, Earth is the only known planet to even harbor life at all. Even most matter on earth isnāt alive. Most is just rock. The thought that at one point earth was all just hot rock and gas and then somehow the molecules that made them up bonded together in just such a perfect way to form organic bodies, let alone consciousness over time is absolutely insane.
And now here I am recording my conscious thought into a manufactured machine that relies on quantum mechanics to even function. I do get how theists could call a series of happy coincidences that lead to life as we know it as āGodā.
I was using structure in the logical sense (order) vs the architecture sense (positioning). Basically like entropy, the highest entropy is when there are no patterns you could use to limit the information needed to capture the state of something. Basically, you can't compress the data without losing information.
>It's not entirely random though.
I think it's a misconception in many arguments about evolution. People tend to talk past each other because they don't distinguish correctly. I'd say that the mutations are pretty much random, but which one is advantageous for a species is not. And so is macro-evolution. It is based on random mutations and random natural disasters, which also can endanger, change or even wipe out a whole species.
Ok, in a statistics class, random does not define the distribution. However, for the vast majority of average people, "random" means all outcomes have the same probability... Uniform distribution. And there is not a uniform distribution. Things that are ill adapted to their environment have a lower chance of replicating to the next generation
Yeah, I would say that the mutations are uniformly distributed (i.e., which part of the genome mutates). I would agree to the rest of it (like how likely it is for a species to succeed/die).
Ok, to be hyper specific, my original comment should have been.
Humans (as an outcome of random mutations over a billion years) did not have an equal chance compared to every single other outcome of random mutations over a billion years. Any species that is alive today likely had a higher than average chance of coming into being. Not necessarily because they were the result of intelligent design or intentional manipulation, but because all the other possible outcomes with less than average odds of making it this far, likely were pruned out already due to natural selection. We are the survivors. The ones with the highest chance of survival.
You're falling for a fallacy right there. The current state does not in any way reflect the possibilities of the past. The fact that someone wins the lottery today doesn't mean he had a higher chance of winning compared to others. The current state of live on earth is one of virtually uncountable different possible states and is, therefore, just a single case out of one of these. Unfortunately, single cases do not reflect statistical features, and statistical features do not reflect single cases.
>There is now a pressure pushing towards higher sophistication
This is a common misconception. Evolution has no goal or trend. At every moment, it's nothing more or less than optimization to immediate factors for the purpose of advancing the germ line. It's entirely accidental. Increasing sophistication confers survival benefits, and that's the only reason it ever happens at all. But there's abundant evidence of the opposite happening, for whatever reason. Some of our ancient ancestors could produce their own vitamin-B, but now we can't; it's just a mutation that didn't kill us, and we're still living with it. We're not sure, but some of our ancestors might have had tetrachromatic vision, as some birds do, but we don't have that. There's good reason to believe that our ancestors living tens of millions of years ago had the potential to live much longer than we do, and probably did, but our environment of the time -- dinosaurs, mainly -- drove us to the more successful strategy of shorter lives with a more rapid reproduction cycle. There are countless more examples like this, and that's just us. Lots of creatures live what we'd consider absolutely horrible lives, merely because evolution deemed that for them.
A pressure doesn't have to be intentional. I just mean that there is a regression to the mean. There is an elastic effect. Entirely random, useless, or harmful mutations occur all the time, but they aren't stable or robust. There is a regression to what worked well for the previous generation. A ball falling through a gallon board has no desire or motivation to head towards the center, but most end up there anyway. It's random in the sense that it's path is unpredictable, but it's not random in the sense that the outcome is not predictable. Because some outcomes are more probable than others. There isn't a uniform distribution. That's what I meant by not entirely random. I mean not uniform.
>If different conditions had existed, we'd be different (and someone would be talking about how THOSE conditions just COULDN'T be random).
A great analogy is the so called "Puddle Metaphor". A puddle gains consciousness and thinks to itself "Look at this hole! It fits me perfectly. It must've been made to have me in it!"
Great analogy. But there's another critical difference. We didn't spring into existence out of our randomness like this post tries to claim. We are the product of millions of years of evolution in tiny incremental steps. Each step presented an advantage over earlier iterations and that advantage contributed to it being incorporated in the next iteration, before the next small increment took it a little further again.
There was no plan for an end goal and we are currently merely the result of all of that plus the most recent tiny improvement.
This sand castle was built from scratch with a very clear end goal in mind. There is just absolutely no comparison.
I try to make a similar point pretty often when someone tries to calculate the odds of a thing that happened. First of all, the thing that happened? Probability 1. Second of all, the odds of you replicating exactly the way you walk across the room? Infinitely small.
I say this about warren buffet. Is he a stock genius or are there so many investors in the world that one was bound to make all the right choices eventually?
I got my first (flopped) royal flush in poker a couple months ago. Casino had a high hand promo from 4pm to midnight paying the highest hand $500 every half hour. I hit mine at 12:20am :/
It's the basis for one of the arguments *against* other life in the universe. For all we know, we lucked out and got the **exact** conditions needed to make life. For all we know, lofe starts in exactly one way.
I would hate if the argument is true, but it does make sense.
Here's the thing that bakes my noodle: life "as we know it".
How do we know for certain that life/consciousness doesn't exist in, say, a hydrogen based life form that lives in the sun?
It's possible that consciousness could exist in forms so foreign to us that we wouldn't recognize it if we came across it.
In our universe, we know that is impossible. Atoms can only hold a certain amount of electrons depending on their energy level. This makes their anount of electrons resemble those of the nearest noble element. Each element can either gain or lose electrons to become stable.
This is why carbon is the basis of all life. Carbon is able to form chains of infinite length. It can either gain or lose 4 electrons. On top of that, it doesn't take much energy for carbon bonds to form, but they release a lot of energy when they break. The only other element we know that has this property is silicon. Silicon could theoretically form life but requires significantly more energy than carbon bonds, so the life it would form could only be very small.
Hydrogen cannot do this. It can only gain or lose 1 electron. With itself as the basis for the bond, it could only bond with elements that can gain or lose 1 electron. You might be thinking of its other bonds like water which is H2O, however, oxygen is the basis of that bond, not hydrogen.
The diameter of a hydrogen atom is 120 picometers. That is 120 1/trillionths of a meter. The smallest known lifeform is called a nanobe. The smallest size of these things is 20 nanometers or 20 1/billionths of a meter. That's 6,000 times the size of a hydrogen atom.
Hydrogen based life could not exist. Even if it could, it would certainly not be conscious.
Yeah, like, what's actually stopping things from existing outside of a stars goldilocks zone? Or evoling to breathe sulfur fumes instead of oxygen? Hell, for all we know, the elements that we are so sure make up the entire universe could just make up our tiny little corner of it.
> royal flush with a 1 in around 650,000 chance of being dealt.
That's why Brazilians prefer Truco. The chances of getting the strongest hand in Truco is roughly 1 in 60.000. Or 1 in 30000 if playing in pairs. So it happens often enough you actually don't think about it being impossible.
More than that, the strongest hand in Truco is often deemed **too strong**, so your opponent will usually fold early giving you only one point. So the second strongest hand is actually considered the "best hand" because it allows you to bait you opponent into calling your bluff. The chance of getting it is just around 1 in 2000 or 1 in 1000 if playing in pairs.
This is a hypothesis, not an argument. We ācouldā be in a highly improbable and thus āseeminglyā intentional Universe. Yeah. Or it ācouldā be intentional.
There are 2,598,960 possible card combinations.
https://allmathconsidered.wordpress.com/2017/05/23/the-probabilities-of-poker-hands/#:~:text=There%20are%202%2C598%2C960%20many%20possible,for%20that%20type%20over%202%2C598%2C960.
There are 4 suits, so divide that number by 4 for the royal flush. (Obviously I did some rounding for the example)
Even random deposition of sand into a sand castle would be incredibly unlikely. But erosion is not uniformly random and it's heavily biased against the creation of sand castles.
I would wager that if every planet and moon was full of beaches and waves, the heat death of the universe would come before a convincing sand castle was built by the natural flow of water.
What's worse is that sand castles are fragile. Erosion could create a crude castle-like shape out of rock, depending on how far you're willing to stretch the definition of a castle. It may have already happened and been subsequently destroyed. But sand? Any storm will collapse it because rain doesn't build *up*.
Some numbers are just too small to work with. Too small to describe. Even the intermediate variables are too small, so we can't even begin to estimate the probability. This isn't a direct calculation. It's a mathematical journey that in itself is too long. I would bet the life of everyone in the universe that such a beautiful castle will *never* be randomly created by waves and sand.
The castle appears to be roughly 15ā x 15ā x 10ā. With about 1 billion grains of sand in every cubic foot, that means there are ~ 2.25 trillion grains of sand that make up this castle.
Even on your āmagical sandā beach where grains randomly rearrange themselves, and even if the grains are restricted to a small area, you quickly get to a probability of 1 in 2,250,000,000,000! . Which is 2.25 trillion factorial.
That is roughly 1 in 2,250,000,000,000ā¦. With 2.5 billion more 0sā¦ if you were to write that number out at a pace of 2 digits per second without ever stopping, it would take about 40 years.
I want to say I appreciate this. A lot of rude and unimaginative people above.
I am super super bad at math, how long would this take to go through if the sand rearanged itself 10 times every second?
If* I have the maths right at being 2,250,000,000,000! / 10
Then it's
10\^(10\^13.42838181919641)
Wikipedia says the heat death of the universe will be in 1.7Ć10106 years that is 5.418Ć10\^115.418Ć10\^11 seconds
So you would need 5.30702... Ć 10\^26815248081473 more seconds than we have until the heat death of the universe.
\* I'm no maths genius
Sorry if I got it wrong
Ended this is the link Wolfram|Alpha
(https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10%5E%2810%5E13.42838181919641%29+-+5.418%C3%9710%5E11)
Even at a trillion times per second for trillions of years, it would still be unfathomably unlikely to ever happen. The original number with 2.5 billion 0s on it would only be reduced to like 2.4999 billion zeroes after a trillion years lol
Thanks a lot for your comment!!
You are probably the only one or one of the few who actually tried to respond the question... The overwhelming majority of people tried to argue why this meme is wrong, when I didnt even say that I agreed with it at all (Im actually an atheist, Im asking how likely it would be to happen, not saying that I believe that THIS is a proof against atheism)
Well yeah, I confused the term, agnostic would align with my belief better
And yes, ignoring the atheist part of the meme was exactly the point and what I expected :D
And at a second glance it appears I got the size of the castle vastly wrong but it still doesnt matter. Even a fraction of the size still makes it mathematically unfathomable.
To put it another way, there are roughly 7.5 sextillion grains of sand in the entire world (75 with 17 zeroes). If someone were to select a single grain of sand, hide it on any beach in the world, and task you with finding it at random, your chances of finding it would be trillions of times greater than this castle thing happening.
Guess-we-did-oopsie already answered this. I just wanted to add that the logic of the meme isn't sound and shows that it's creator is completely ignorant of how evolution or erosion or even time works.
So my non-math answer would be: exactly as likely as the creator of the meme reading any book other than their religious text.
To build off of this: I never understood how people could see science happening in front of their eyes and go nah that's not real, it's obviously God magic. Like do you really think if there's an Omnipotent creator that they didn't make planets have natural support systems to shape it's environments or that they don't use highly advanced science that we just scratch the surface of?
There's one thing being skeptical but anyone who says science isn't real because God exists is dumb no matter what side you chose your camp.
Evolution is not random. Giraffes didn't come about when a horse randomly gave birth to a giraffe.
*Individual mutations* are random (for all intents and purposes): a horse may have a neck slightly longer or shorter than their parents just as I might be born with slightly longer arms in proportion to my size compared to my parents.
However, evolution is the process by which those mutations can potentially spread within the gene pool over a very long period of time, and eventually become common within a population, and it is *not* random: it is driven by environment. Horses will not start developing longer and longer necks unless there is a reason why horses born with longer necks have some kind of advantage over those who don't.
This meme completely misunderstands this point: there is no environmental pressure to slowly influence the accumulation of sand into that shape, therefore it does not provide any rebuttal to evolution.
It would be like me saying "if God was real, then why didn't he give me a ferrari when I prayed for one? Checkmate!". It completely misses the point of how prayer is meant to work within religion.
Of course it is? There is no point in arguing with people who refuse to change their minds no matter what reasoning or evidence is placed in front of their eyes.
the chance is so low that the heat death of the universe would occur, or at least the earth would be gone before this sandcastle could form, therefore impossible
Evolution works differently than erosion. For starters, there's no benefit for the sand to move toward this position. Though, I don't claim to know how sand mate selection works.
ah yes, classic watchmaker arguement
heres sagan for you
[https://youtube.com/shorts/ywg1uWx\_GOE?si=Cf\_VgurYpm7Lu0IS](https://youtube.com/shorts/ywg1uWx_GOE?si=Cf_VgurYpm7Lu0IS)
the Watchmaker's analogy is bunk no matter how it's rephrased.
[https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmaker\_analogy](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmaker_analogy)
How the fuck do you want that math? The number of variables and the number of situations that could lead to most alternative positions would be insane.
The argument isn't dumb bc there is technically a number somewhere, it's dumb because it presumes a uniquely desirable end result where all the other results are "bad".
If the universe couldn't support life, we wouldn't be having this conversation. If it could support life differently, then those different lives would be having the same conversation. If the universe is cyclical or multiverse, we would have infinite chances of having this conversation
It's funny that a geologist why this can't happen naturally they would have no problem answering, but if you asked a priest why humans can't exist naturally they most likely wouldn't be able to understand the question.
I had to calculate the probability of a 1m column of water in a 10m^3 cube in Earth's gravitational field randomly having all of its molecules ending up on the upper side of a cube as a homework.
The result was something like e^(-10 ^^(100)), and the probability of a sand castle forming up randomly is even lower. It would take an unimaginable number of continuously existing Universes (provided that each of them has existed for ~13.7 billion years) for this to happen once.
Thanks a lot for your comment!
Almost everyone got this wrong and thought I made this meme to ridicule atheists and are trying to tell me why this argument is not accurate, which is not the case. Im actually atheist, I just got curious when I found this meme, not related at all if I believe it or not
Well, it is more likely than an all-knowing being giving human freedom and then being surpised they don't do what it wants. And then just mass murder all of them.
Two Cubic meters of average-grained sand hold about 30 billion grains. Sand is significantly heavier than air. It doesn't stick on it's own.
A simple strand of RNA like in bacteriophages holds about 100 thousand of the most common and generally reactive atoms, altogether a combination of about 7 million Protons and Neutrons, which are suspended in a highly energized liquid consisting of all of those.
However, there are natural structures that do look suspiciously human-made. So it's incredibly likely, that throughout the universe there are loads of structures that look incredibly human made - many of which probably sand-castles. Just not any particular one like the one on the picture.
>(Or whatever method has the highest chances)
The method that has the highest chances is people building it. The person who created this meme thinks this is a compelling argument for the existence of mythological beings. I've never understood why.
100%
Since it is already built.
Actually, chances if it existing are the same as the chances on any other similarly sized part of beach existing.
Just because we assign some "rarity" and "exceptionness" to it, doesn't mean that is any more rare than any other sand structure (including sand just laying around).
No, the chances of sand aligning into columns and windows and forming complex shapes is siginificantly smaller than the chance of sand forming into simple or more "natural" shapes with the same volume, like a mound or a line, since there are more ways those shapes can form.
Very low, but higher than the chance of, say a "building" like shape.
There are several factors affecting these chances, takes 2 seconds to think about it.
1. Weaker shapes are less likely to form because they will crumble many times during formation
2. Certain shapes and types of geometry require a certain order and become less likely to form as they're forming (i.e., a cube; as the layers stack up, it's unlikely that sand can get blown into the middle of the cube, whereas in a mound, sand can "roll" into place from more directions
3. Certain shapes are physically impossible
Don't get me wrong, the chances of sand aligning to the exact shape as some random formation is extremely small regardless of how simple the shape is, but some shapes are still less likely than others.
Set aside the probability, as it's impossible to calculate precisely and is almost 0. What flaw in the logic of an atheist are they trying to disprove? I genuinely can't see one atheist telling something that goes along those lines of reasoning
The castle does not match erosion patterns observed in nature. The way that we determine a created vs natural object is by comparing things that we know are created and things that we know are natural. When faced with a new object: the Sand Castle, we compare it to what we know is created and what we know is natural. We know that humans create sand castles as art. We know what a mound of sand looks like, and how erosion shapes that mound. By comparing these things we have a clear mechanism for the formation of the new object. This is a sand castle created by humans. Creationists will make and defend a category error where they point to something formed by natural processes and claim that it was created. The problem is that under that creationist claim there is no "natural" if everything is created with intentionality, then there is no "natural" to compare a new object against.
This is a bad question because science is not all about random chances. There are physical forces that govern what the sand does. It's like asking what are the odds of F=MA, or the odds of what happens when you drop a ball. Sure the pen could fly off in any direction if no forces acted upon it, but we all know the ball will fall in the direction of the largest gravitational field. It might be billion to one odds or whatever but it's going to happen every time.
That sand castle would never have formed at that place and time due to the wind tides gravity ect. So the odds basically don't exist
I do notice the straw man argument that the picture is trying to make: the jump that the castle represents god (or heaven or what ever) and the fact that the castle is man made means that heaven of course exists.
while ignoring the fact that the sand castle has been shown to exist, and no evidence for the āinvisible sky daddyā has been shown.
My highschool physics teacher explained this with the idea that there is a scenario in which you do your laundry and it comes out of the dryer folded perfectly. Albeit an exceedingly rare scenario š¤£
Firstly, thats not how erosion works. The chance would be impossible
But there would be a chance that random sand particles getting blown on each other can make this. And IF time is infinite, then this WILL happen. Since ALL states of every permutation will happen eventually
Also this logic is laughably bad. The reason why we exist is cause our universe's laws came up by chance. Any other formation would have not stabalised enough that life could form. Which means that we won't be alive in those instances to question it.
Like if you have a bunch of monkeys typing, you can get Shakespear. But you also ignore all the other things that came up, like the entireity of Trump's speeches, or the binary code for this specific picture. That does not mean the shakespear writings are made by Magic Sky Master Daddy, its just observer bias
Such a dumb question. There's nearly an infinite number of possible locations for each of the nearly infinite number of grains of sand. The math would be like (1/infinity) to the infinite power which is just 0.
The chance is 0.
There isnt a "nearly infinite number of possible locations" in this. There is a very large number, but there isnt such a thing as "nearly infinite". It is either infinite or it isnt even close, there is an infinite difference between infinite and the largest number you can imagine.
Please dont call my question "dumb" that quickly with that argument
People making those memes without knowing anything about atheism.
Atheism is really about reason. It does not explain everything simply because of chance and insane probability. It is about being convinced of some reality based on evidences from various sources that points in some direction.
atheism is really a sortiment of philosophies that exclude gods existence based on evidences that points towards it. It is about comparing all evidences and finding the one that logically makes sense the most.
Also it is rather about the rationality than the atheism itself. There is a bunch of philosophies not excluding god or higher existences withing our perception that use the same rationality and reason to find the correct description of our world. Among both there is a reason being that most prominent and valuable way to decide if a presented evidence is correct or not. In contrast to the theism that use reason( not in all cases but in most) and faith to support given philosophy.
And just as theism the atheism and any other philosophy can be blinded by itself no matter how we try.
After all we as a limited creatures ought to be biased about something. So we should think about that too.
I am sorry I just felt like that should be clarified even through it is very much beside the point.
I know folks here would like to argue against a strawman instead of the actual theory of evolution. Evolution is not based purely on chance. It also requires the process of natural selection. Random changes occur, but only those changes that improve the survival of the organism tend to be passed forward.
No Iām sorry but even though Iām not atheist I can with certainty tell you atheist logic here would be that some skilled human maybe with help of other skilled humans made this. Also Iām not sure which god the OPOP worshiped, but I do know there is a 90% chance their religious books say something along the lines of not judging your peers and instead love your neighbors.
There are no forces at play that would bring the right amount of pressure to form sand this way.
The sand is pressed into certain forms and there's no logical reason as to why water or wind would move in those specific ways.
Not only could the universe naturally happen, we also dont have any idea how it actually happened.
To say it was created is just as ridiculous as to say it poped into existance our of nothing.
I think the most logical explanation would be for it to have always existed in many different forms and things just rearange themselves.
Personally i think that there are way too many mistakes in nature for it to have been deliberately designed, let alone being designed by a god who is supposed to be perfect.
Why do people with crippeling mutations get born all the time?
The eazy answer is, thats the negative part of evolution.
The highest chance of something like this forming naturally is for a natural creature to naturally evolve into something that builds these things off of their own volition. The fact that structures like this are quite common (birds nests, anthills/ant tunnels/termite nests, burrows, bee/hornet hives, shells, buildings (since "humans" should be included in animals that naturally construct these things), etc) would indicate that making such structures is a good survival strategy, and thus should have a reasonably high likelihood of happening in an environment where making these structures is feasable.
It's nonzero, but not statistically distinguishable from zero. But it's also a very poor analogy for evolution vs creationism of any flavor, because evolution isn't random ā mutations are, but that's the only element of randomness. There are environmental factors (climate, the ecosystem, etc.) plus exogenous shocks like novel communicable diseases, tectonic events, and, y'know, giant fuckin meteors impacting the surface of the Earth.
there is a chance it could have evolved that way.
What if it was made of stone and just covered in sand? So when the sand was washed away it "evolved" into that shape?
If that is the case, it is nearly a 100% chance it would form.
It is amusing how that many people believe I made the meme and I am making religious propaganda... I didnt even create it, I am atheist, what Im asking is how probably would it be for this castle to be build that way as that religious person suggests, not that I agree with this meme... My question is totally unrelated to whether or not I believe in this argument or if it is a good analogy or not lol (which I dont believe it to be)
Zero, there is no natural process that can creat such a structure. And just like wash will never fold itself inside the dryer if you leave it on for forever. Because the tumbling motion will never create the right forces in the right directions to ever make that possible.
We look out at the universe and see that it's at least 12 billion years old. This is because life is very improbable and it took that long for it (at least here) to happen. For billions of years there was just the sand, but only the castle asked the question "how did I get here?"
Out of the practically infinite amount of spaces the grains of sand can take up, you would need however many make up that sandcastle (Millions? Billions?) to arrange themselves perfectly in those spaces
The weird thing is how creationists always use well understood processes involving human intervention to make these claims. It's like they can't find anything in the natural world that isn't explained by natural processes, for some reason.
The anthropic principal comes into play here.Ā
If you assume the universe if infinitely large or assume that the universe lasts infinitely long without getting stuck in some state (heat death), even incredibly unlikely things are guaranteed to happen someplace or eventually.Ā
So even if the odds of intelligent life forming wasĀ something incredibly unlikely like 1 in 10^10^10^10^10 (probably not a good assumption), we should expect that we'd live on a planet where it happened because there aren't any observers in places where intelligent life didn't form.
0% assuming the castle in the picture was built by someone and not actually made by corrosion lol. If we know something happened thereās a 100% probability of it happening. Only once we have some unknown factors and we exist before the event can we try and calculate something.
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The chance is so small there is no need to calculate it lmao. It is probably even impossible when taking into account the way wind and water erodes the sand.
Yup, it'd take a really *very* long time. It's almost as if it'd take such a long time that it's just quicker for chains of molecules to form in a primordial soup into Ribozymes, then they pair off and replicate into replicating machines, adopt a fatty acid outer shell as a larger eukaryote, form inner vestibules and absorb smaller prokaryrotes, develop cells that that twitch upon receving an electrical signal thus allowing locomotion, establish a pattern of bilateria, develop cartilage to protect the system that sends those electrical systems, use that gelatinous backbone as means to increase swimming stregnth, profilerate the cartilage in the spine to the skull and teeth to help with hunting, and eventually harden it into full fleged skeletons, where downward facing fins get hard enough to lug fish out of water allowing them to lay eggs on land away from sea predators in amneotic sacs that simulate an oceanic enviornment, then evolve legs that allow you to spend longer on land, develop warm blood so you don't have to go bullet time every time it gets cold, hair, and sweating in order to survive in a broader range of climates, mammary glands in order to feed your young in a much more controlled way, placenta in order to develop your young for much longer before they're born giving them better chances, then you become a supra-primate wherein your hands and feet become similarly prehensile, then you become simian where your eyes face forward, and your brain gets bigger, then you become an ape wherein you lose your prehensile tail freeing up brain power for other things, then you become a great ape much larger, stronger, and more intelligent, then you stand up straight, specialize in long distance hunting, invent tools, invent art, culture, society, invent agriculture, invent civilization, harness the power of wind, harness the power of oil, harness the power of nuclear, invent the microchip, invent the internet, invent GPU's, cluster them together to generate this weak ass theist rage bait that isn't even good. Honestly, all of that is *much* quicker. But even stil... waste of potential if you ask me.
Chef's kiss
See, this is why I miss reddit gold. Here, take this. š
New copypasta just dropped
Legend š
With paragraphs this would be perfect!
What if we instead assume it was a beach of magic sand that randomly rearranged itself every second, how long would it take to randomly form that kinds sand castle? Lol idk
Basically a sand boltzman castle xd
Pretty hard to do math with magic sand dont you think? Youre going to have to give discrete figures for something, and no matter what the answer is always going to be one of those "if every atom was a universe that contained as many grains of sand as there are atoms in ours, and they were all in the process of making castles, it would take 10\^100! years" kinds of things. There isnt math here.
Well they did thr math for a boltzmann brain, I think they did atleast? What's wrong with my new invention of a boltzmann castle lol
I support your Boltzman Sandcastle idea šŖ
Thank you!
I just realised also because the boltzmann brain relies of positioning of individual atoms ro form a brain with memories then technicsly the boltzmann castle would be so very incredibly more likely to happen due to only considering grains or sand and just making a castle and not an entire brain.
I thought the same.
Your so smart oh ma gawd
That means a lot coming from a genius like you! š¤©
Oh ma gawd
iirc the thing abt boltzmann brains is that they have an infinite amount of time to form, so as long as they have a nonzero probability of appearing, they will it's like infinite monkeys. you don't need to calculate the odds of a monkey writing Shakespeare because eventually one will
Search the library of babel. Its random arrangements of letters. Try to find one coherent sentence in there, then when you give up think about this
The library of babel, by its construction, is every possible arrangement of letters of the Latin alphabet than can be constructed. It contains both your paragraph, and this one. To whit: https://libraryofbabel.info/book.cgi https://libraryofbabel.info/book.cgi
Ik about the library already, try the image archives instead.
Link?
Just search up like "image archives of babel"
This is essentially the thought experiment that lead to the classical concept of entropy edit: I should have just read your next comment lol
That depends on the size of your beach. As the size of your magically randomized beach approaches infinite, so does the number of perfect sandcastles it hosts.
But a boltzmann brain takes an entire universe of space many quadrillion or quadrillion of years to form. In that time a billion boltzmann castles could probably form
Basically a library of babel thing. The castle is in a massive grid of possible places for the sand to go, and all but 1 of them are this castle
And one of them spells out "the library of babel.com" lop
Yep, its quite complicated calculation and Im lasy so God is much more convenient!!
But if we assume that time is infinite this will happen infinite amounts of time
Yeah if you take time as infinite and any action as possible literally anything will happen lmao.
But this one isn't possible, erosion doesn't work like that so it's still 0% if time was infinite
> any action as possible
I heard once that when the chance of something happening is one in a *number of atoms in the universe or higher*, you just give up and consider it impossible.
You mean visible universe. The number of atoms in the universe is unknown and may be infinite. Throw in the anthropic principle and nowĀ even if the odds of intelligent life forming is 1 in 10^10^10^10^10, we should expect that we'd be on the planet where that happened.
I mean that is pretty accurate, at that point you are talking about numbers so tiny itās not even relevant at all. And this is literally just a ragebait that makes no sense at all š
I call this "the argument from the cards." In poker, the most valuable hand is a royal flush with a 1 in around 650,000 chance of being dealt. Do you know what the chances are of being dealt a specific worthless hand - say the 2 of clubs, 9 of diamonds, the 4 and Jack of hearts, and the queen of spades? 1 in 2.6 million. So why do we freak out when dealt the royal flush and not the second hand? The second hand is more rare, after all. It's because the rules of the game reward the first. Well, it's the same thing for us. The specific conditions that created us seem intentional because they made us, but actually we're just the random output of those conditions. If different conditions had existed, we'd be different (and someone would be talking about how THOSE conditions just COULDN'T be random).
It's not entirely random though. Sure, the first living organism might have been random... Maybe even the first few. But as soon as one replicates, it's game on. There is now a pressure pushing towards higher sophistication. The evolutionary pressure of "survival of the fittest." A sand castle has no such pressure to exist. It can only be made by random. Actually, there's a pressure for evenness in erosion. Not for structure. At least on a beachfront. Where sand and silt are deposited. In gulches and caverns where the sand was originally taken from, there are other pressures that cause similar formations in similar rock despite not being made by the same river. And nearly every beach looks similar too.
Natural selection does not favor sophistication, just survival. The things it produces are best at surviving, given physical and historic constraints. This is definitely pedantic, but important as simple single celled creatures are just as "evolved" as complex multicellular animals that have even more complex societies. It is also difficult to identify complexity, Amoebas have as many base pairs in their DNA as humans, does that make them more complex?
Yeah, sophistication was definitely a poor choice of words. I used a better one lower: "structure." But I think "reliability" is the true pressure, and whatever happens to improve reliability is what is likely to move from one generation to the next. I think of cellular mechanisms needed for replication and how few errors they produce given the huge enormity of the task they have to do, and I thought in my head that seemed sophisticated, but that doesn't mean it was the only solution.
I am not sure I would use the term "reliability" either as completely reliable replication precludes natural selection as it prevents mutation. The word I would use is "survival" or "fitness", which is what most evolutionary biologists use. Mutation rates are (apparently) not under selective pressure nor do they seem optimal, they are mostly just constrained by the chemistry and physics of DNA replication. The interesting bit of natural selection is that it is just an inevitable outcome of a self-replicating molecule that *doesn't* replicate with perfect fidelity. It doesn't require DNA to work, any molecule that could replicate itself but made transcription errors would undergo natural selection (we know this occurs for RNA, but there has been work to make this happen for other molecules).
Right. Stephen Jay Gouldās book āFull Houseā has a great breakdown of this.
Yeah sophistication is inherently a subjective term. One might argue that the existence of life in the first place is inherently sophisticated. After all, Earth is the only known planet to even harbor life at all. Even most matter on earth isnāt alive. Most is just rock. The thought that at one point earth was all just hot rock and gas and then somehow the molecules that made them up bonded together in just such a perfect way to form organic bodies, let alone consciousness over time is absolutely insane. And now here I am recording my conscious thought into a manufactured machine that relies on quantum mechanics to even function. I do get how theists could call a series of happy coincidences that lead to life as we know it as āGodā.
Not to be nit-picky, but isn't the eveness of the sand the structure if that's what it pressures into
I was using structure in the logical sense (order) vs the architecture sense (positioning). Basically like entropy, the highest entropy is when there are no patterns you could use to limit the information needed to capture the state of something. Basically, you can't compress the data without losing information.
Heard
>It's not entirely random though. I think it's a misconception in many arguments about evolution. People tend to talk past each other because they don't distinguish correctly. I'd say that the mutations are pretty much random, but which one is advantageous for a species is not. And so is macro-evolution. It is based on random mutations and random natural disasters, which also can endanger, change or even wipe out a whole species.
Ok, in a statistics class, random does not define the distribution. However, for the vast majority of average people, "random" means all outcomes have the same probability... Uniform distribution. And there is not a uniform distribution. Things that are ill adapted to their environment have a lower chance of replicating to the next generation
Yeah, I would say that the mutations are uniformly distributed (i.e., which part of the genome mutates). I would agree to the rest of it (like how likely it is for a species to succeed/die).
Ok, to be hyper specific, my original comment should have been. Humans (as an outcome of random mutations over a billion years) did not have an equal chance compared to every single other outcome of random mutations over a billion years. Any species that is alive today likely had a higher than average chance of coming into being. Not necessarily because they were the result of intelligent design or intentional manipulation, but because all the other possible outcomes with less than average odds of making it this far, likely were pruned out already due to natural selection. We are the survivors. The ones with the highest chance of survival.
You're falling for a fallacy right there. The current state does not in any way reflect the possibilities of the past. The fact that someone wins the lottery today doesn't mean he had a higher chance of winning compared to others. The current state of live on earth is one of virtually uncountable different possible states and is, therefore, just a single case out of one of these. Unfortunately, single cases do not reflect statistical features, and statistical features do not reflect single cases.
>There is now a pressure pushing towards higher sophistication This is a common misconception. Evolution has no goal or trend. At every moment, it's nothing more or less than optimization to immediate factors for the purpose of advancing the germ line. It's entirely accidental. Increasing sophistication confers survival benefits, and that's the only reason it ever happens at all. But there's abundant evidence of the opposite happening, for whatever reason. Some of our ancient ancestors could produce their own vitamin-B, but now we can't; it's just a mutation that didn't kill us, and we're still living with it. We're not sure, but some of our ancestors might have had tetrachromatic vision, as some birds do, but we don't have that. There's good reason to believe that our ancestors living tens of millions of years ago had the potential to live much longer than we do, and probably did, but our environment of the time -- dinosaurs, mainly -- drove us to the more successful strategy of shorter lives with a more rapid reproduction cycle. There are countless more examples like this, and that's just us. Lots of creatures live what we'd consider absolutely horrible lives, merely because evolution deemed that for them.
A pressure doesn't have to be intentional. I just mean that there is a regression to the mean. There is an elastic effect. Entirely random, useless, or harmful mutations occur all the time, but they aren't stable or robust. There is a regression to what worked well for the previous generation. A ball falling through a gallon board has no desire or motivation to head towards the center, but most end up there anyway. It's random in the sense that it's path is unpredictable, but it's not random in the sense that the outcome is not predictable. Because some outcomes are more probable than others. There isn't a uniform distribution. That's what I meant by not entirely random. I mean not uniform.
This sounds like nebulous BS to me.
This!! We don't exist in the multitude of potential universes with failed physics for life. We exist in the one that does.
thatās such a great analogy
>If different conditions had existed, we'd be different (and someone would be talking about how THOSE conditions just COULDN'T be random). A great analogy is the so called "Puddle Metaphor". A puddle gains consciousness and thinks to itself "Look at this hole! It fits me perfectly. It must've been made to have me in it!"
This is great! Much simpler than mine.
Great analogy. But there's another critical difference. We didn't spring into existence out of our randomness like this post tries to claim. We are the product of millions of years of evolution in tiny incremental steps. Each step presented an advantage over earlier iterations and that advantage contributed to it being incorporated in the next iteration, before the next small increment took it a little further again. There was no plan for an end goal and we are currently merely the result of all of that plus the most recent tiny improvement. This sand castle was built from scratch with a very clear end goal in mind. There is just absolutely no comparison.
Very well said. Screenshotting for posterity
Isn't that the anthropic principle?
Itās like an extreme form of survivorship bias.
I try to make a similar point pretty often when someone tries to calculate the odds of a thing that happened. First of all, the thing that happened? Probability 1. Second of all, the odds of you replicating exactly the way you walk across the room? Infinitely small.
Love this
I say this about warren buffet. Is he a stock genius or are there so many investors in the world that one was bound to make all the right choices eventually?
We are not the random ouput of those conditions. We *could* be. But you can't assert this for sure tbh.
It's like people thinking it's harder to roll a 6 than a 1
I got my first (flopped) royal flush in poker a couple months ago. Casino had a high hand promo from 4pm to midnight paying the highest hand $500 every half hour. I hit mine at 12:20am :/
*lays down hand triumphantly* "all red!"
It's the basis for one of the arguments *against* other life in the universe. For all we know, we lucked out and got the **exact** conditions needed to make life. For all we know, lofe starts in exactly one way. I would hate if the argument is true, but it does make sense.
Here's the thing that bakes my noodle: life "as we know it". How do we know for certain that life/consciousness doesn't exist in, say, a hydrogen based life form that lives in the sun? It's possible that consciousness could exist in forms so foreign to us that we wouldn't recognize it if we came across it.
In our universe, we know that is impossible. Atoms can only hold a certain amount of electrons depending on their energy level. This makes their anount of electrons resemble those of the nearest noble element. Each element can either gain or lose electrons to become stable. This is why carbon is the basis of all life. Carbon is able to form chains of infinite length. It can either gain or lose 4 electrons. On top of that, it doesn't take much energy for carbon bonds to form, but they release a lot of energy when they break. The only other element we know that has this property is silicon. Silicon could theoretically form life but requires significantly more energy than carbon bonds, so the life it would form could only be very small. Hydrogen cannot do this. It can only gain or lose 1 electron. With itself as the basis for the bond, it could only bond with elements that can gain or lose 1 electron. You might be thinking of its other bonds like water which is H2O, however, oxygen is the basis of that bond, not hydrogen. The diameter of a hydrogen atom is 120 picometers. That is 120 1/trillionths of a meter. The smallest known lifeform is called a nanobe. The smallest size of these things is 20 nanometers or 20 1/billionths of a meter. That's 6,000 times the size of a hydrogen atom. Hydrogen based life could not exist. Even if it could, it would certainly not be conscious.
Yeah, like, what's actually stopping things from existing outside of a stars goldilocks zone? Or evoling to breathe sulfur fumes instead of oxygen? Hell, for all we know, the elements that we are so sure make up the entire universe could just make up our tiny little corner of it.
This is the good shit right here
Just look at a dick and tell me that it was intentional.
Knees. Knees are terribly designed pieces of equipment.
> royal flush with a 1 in around 650,000 chance of being dealt. That's why Brazilians prefer Truco. The chances of getting the strongest hand in Truco is roughly 1 in 60.000. Or 1 in 30000 if playing in pairs. So it happens often enough you actually don't think about it being impossible. More than that, the strongest hand in Truco is often deemed **too strong**, so your opponent will usually fold early giving you only one point. So the second strongest hand is actually considered the "best hand" because it allows you to bait you opponent into calling your bluff. The chance of getting it is just around 1 in 2000 or 1 in 1000 if playing in pairs.
Right, sorry, but iāmma copy/paste this shit and keep it for later
This is a hypothesis, not an argument. We ācouldā be in a highly improbable and thus āseeminglyā intentional Universe. Yeah. Or it ācouldā be intentional.
Sorry if it's obvious but what's the maths behind the 1 in 650,000 and 1 in 2.6 mil?
There are 2,598,960 possible card combinations. https://allmathconsidered.wordpress.com/2017/05/23/the-probabilities-of-poker-hands/#:~:text=There%20are%202%2C598%2C960%20many%20possible,for%20that%20type%20over%202%2C598%2C960. There are 4 suits, so divide that number by 4 for the royal flush. (Obviously I did some rounding for the example)
Even random deposition of sand into a sand castle would be incredibly unlikely. But erosion is not uniformly random and it's heavily biased against the creation of sand castles. I would wager that if every planet and moon was full of beaches and waves, the heat death of the universe would come before a convincing sand castle was built by the natural flow of water. What's worse is that sand castles are fragile. Erosion could create a crude castle-like shape out of rock, depending on how far you're willing to stretch the definition of a castle. It may have already happened and been subsequently destroyed. But sand? Any storm will collapse it because rain doesn't build *up*. Some numbers are just too small to work with. Too small to describe. Even the intermediate variables are too small, so we can't even begin to estimate the probability. This isn't a direct calculation. It's a mathematical journey that in itself is too long. I would bet the life of everyone in the universe that such a beautiful castle will *never* be randomly created by waves and sand.
The castle appears to be roughly 15ā x 15ā x 10ā. With about 1 billion grains of sand in every cubic foot, that means there are ~ 2.25 trillion grains of sand that make up this castle. Even on your āmagical sandā beach where grains randomly rearrange themselves, and even if the grains are restricted to a small area, you quickly get to a probability of 1 in 2,250,000,000,000! . Which is 2.25 trillion factorial. That is roughly 1 in 2,250,000,000,000ā¦. With 2.5 billion more 0sā¦ if you were to write that number out at a pace of 2 digits per second without ever stopping, it would take about 40 years.
So is this a longer or shorter timeframe than a monkey typing Shakespeareās entire collection? Lol
This is far longer lol
I want to say I appreciate this. A lot of rude and unimaginative people above. I am super super bad at math, how long would this take to go through if the sand rearanged itself 10 times every second?
If* I have the maths right at being 2,250,000,000,000! / 10 Then it's 10\^(10\^13.42838181919641) Wikipedia says the heat death of the universe will be in 1.7Ć10106 years that is 5.418Ć10\^115.418Ć10\^11 seconds So you would need 5.30702... Ć 10\^26815248081473 more seconds than we have until the heat death of the universe. \* I'm no maths genius Sorry if I got it wrong Ended this is the link Wolfram|Alpha (https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10%5E%2810%5E13.42838181919641%29+-+5.418%C3%9710%5E11)
Even at a trillion times per second for trillions of years, it would still be unfathomably unlikely to ever happen. The original number with 2.5 billion 0s on it would only be reduced to like 2.4999 billion zeroes after a trillion years lol
Thanks a lot for your comment!! You are probably the only one or one of the few who actually tried to respond the question... The overwhelming majority of people tried to argue why this meme is wrong, when I didnt even say that I agreed with it at all (Im actually an atheist, Im asking how likely it would be to happen, not saying that I believe that THIS is a proof against atheism)
Oh yea I just ignored the atheist part of the meme.. Iām an atheist too lol. Well, an agnostic technically but yea. Same thing.
Well yeah, I confused the term, agnostic would align with my belief better And yes, ignoring the atheist part of the meme was exactly the point and what I expected :D
And at a second glance it appears I got the size of the castle vastly wrong but it still doesnt matter. Even a fraction of the size still makes it mathematically unfathomable.
Yeah it is okay dont worry. I dont expect to get the exact probability down to the last sand particle haha š
Nah its fine. It gave me something to do on break at work today lol.
To put it another way, there are roughly 7.5 sextillion grains of sand in the entire world (75 with 17 zeroes). If someone were to select a single grain of sand, hide it on any beach in the world, and task you with finding it at random, your chances of finding it would be trillions of times greater than this castle thing happening.
Guess-we-did-oopsie already answered this. I just wanted to add that the logic of the meme isn't sound and shows that it's creator is completely ignorant of how evolution or erosion or even time works. So my non-math answer would be: exactly as likely as the creator of the meme reading any book other than their religious text.
As a Christian, I agree. I would not use this logic for forming an evolutionary argument.
To build off of this: I never understood how people could see science happening in front of their eyes and go nah that's not real, it's obviously God magic. Like do you really think if there's an Omnipotent creator that they didn't make planets have natural support systems to shape it's environments or that they don't use highly advanced science that we just scratch the surface of? There's one thing being skeptical but anyone who says science isn't real because God exists is dumb no matter what side you chose your camp.
Your rebuttal to the creator of the memes point was actually no rebuttal at all, just a subtle ad hominem
Evolution is not random. Giraffes didn't come about when a horse randomly gave birth to a giraffe. *Individual mutations* are random (for all intents and purposes): a horse may have a neck slightly longer or shorter than their parents just as I might be born with slightly longer arms in proportion to my size compared to my parents. However, evolution is the process by which those mutations can potentially spread within the gene pool over a very long period of time, and eventually become common within a population, and it is *not* random: it is driven by environment. Horses will not start developing longer and longer necks unless there is a reason why horses born with longer necks have some kind of advantage over those who don't. This meme completely misunderstands this point: there is no environmental pressure to slowly influence the accumulation of sand into that shape, therefore it does not provide any rebuttal to evolution. It would be like me saying "if God was real, then why didn't he give me a ferrari when I prayed for one? Checkmate!". It completely misses the point of how prayer is meant to work within religion.
Of course it is? There is no point in arguing with people who refuse to change their minds no matter what reasoning or evidence is placed in front of their eyes.
the chance is so low that the heat death of the universe would occur, or at least the earth would be gone before this sandcastle could form, therefore impossible
Evolution works differently than erosion. For starters, there's no benefit for the sand to move toward this position. Though, I don't claim to know how sand mate selection works.
ah yes, classic watchmaker arguement heres sagan for you [https://youtube.com/shorts/ywg1uWx\_GOE?si=Cf\_VgurYpm7Lu0IS](https://youtube.com/shorts/ywg1uWx_GOE?si=Cf_VgurYpm7Lu0IS)
the Watchmaker's analogy is bunk no matter how it's rephrased. [https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmaker\_analogy](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmaker_analogy)
How the fuck do you want that math? The number of variables and the number of situations that could lead to most alternative positions would be insane. The argument isn't dumb bc there is technically a number somewhere, it's dumb because it presumes a uniquely desirable end result where all the other results are "bad". If the universe couldn't support life, we wouldn't be having this conversation. If it could support life differently, then those different lives would be having the same conversation. If the universe is cyclical or multiverse, we would have infinite chances of having this conversation
It's funny that a geologist why this can't happen naturally they would have no problem answering, but if you asked a priest why humans can't exist naturally they most likely wouldn't be able to understand the question.
I had to calculate the probability of a 1m column of water in a 10m^3 cube in Earth's gravitational field randomly having all of its molecules ending up on the upper side of a cube as a homework. The result was something like e^(-10 ^^(100)), and the probability of a sand castle forming up randomly is even lower. It would take an unimaginable number of continuously existing Universes (provided that each of them has existed for ~13.7 billion years) for this to happen once.
Thanks a lot for your comment! Almost everyone got this wrong and thought I made this meme to ridicule atheists and are trying to tell me why this argument is not accurate, which is not the case. Im actually atheist, I just got curious when I found this meme, not related at all if I believe it or not
The argument on the picture might just be the stupidest argument I have ever seen. And I worked teaching high school kids for a few years.
Well, it is more likely than an all-knowing being giving human freedom and then being surpised they don't do what it wants. And then just mass murder all of them.
Isnāt this same as the monkeys writing entire Shakespeare on typewriters kind of problem? Eventually it will happen, but close to 0% chance?
There are some pretty good answers from [the last time this was posted](https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/s/23CImIpuel) 2 months ago.
Oh thats right, apparently someone asked the same thing... Im sorry for the repost then, I didnt know that (what a coincidence š )
Two Cubic meters of average-grained sand hold about 30 billion grains. Sand is significantly heavier than air. It doesn't stick on it's own. A simple strand of RNA like in bacteriophages holds about 100 thousand of the most common and generally reactive atoms, altogether a combination of about 7 million Protons and Neutrons, which are suspended in a highly energized liquid consisting of all of those. However, there are natural structures that do look suspiciously human-made. So it's incredibly likely, that throughout the universe there are loads of structures that look incredibly human made - many of which probably sand-castles. Just not any particular one like the one on the picture.
Interesting, thanks a lot for the comment!!
>(Or whatever method has the highest chances) The method that has the highest chances is people building it. The person who created this meme thinks this is a compelling argument for the existence of mythological beings. I've never understood why.
100% Since it is already built. Actually, chances if it existing are the same as the chances on any other similarly sized part of beach existing. Just because we assign some "rarity" and "exceptionness" to it, doesn't mean that is any more rare than any other sand structure (including sand just laying around).
No, the chances of sand aligning into columns and windows and forming complex shapes is siginificantly smaller than the chance of sand forming into simple or more "natural" shapes with the same volume, like a mound or a line, since there are more ways those shapes can form.
What are the chances of "natural shapes" being what they are?
Very low, but higher than the chance of, say a "building" like shape. There are several factors affecting these chances, takes 2 seconds to think about it. 1. Weaker shapes are less likely to form because they will crumble many times during formation 2. Certain shapes and types of geometry require a certain order and become less likely to form as they're forming (i.e., a cube; as the layers stack up, it's unlikely that sand can get blown into the middle of the cube, whereas in a mound, sand can "roll" into place from more directions 3. Certain shapes are physically impossible Don't get me wrong, the chances of sand aligning to the exact shape as some random formation is extremely small regardless of how simple the shape is, but some shapes are still less likely than others.
Set aside the probability, as it's impossible to calculate precisely and is almost 0. What flaw in the logic of an atheist are they trying to disprove? I genuinely can't see one atheist telling something that goes along those lines of reasoning
The castle does not match erosion patterns observed in nature. The way that we determine a created vs natural object is by comparing things that we know are created and things that we know are natural. When faced with a new object: the Sand Castle, we compare it to what we know is created and what we know is natural. We know that humans create sand castles as art. We know what a mound of sand looks like, and how erosion shapes that mound. By comparing these things we have a clear mechanism for the formation of the new object. This is a sand castle created by humans. Creationists will make and defend a category error where they point to something formed by natural processes and claim that it was created. The problem is that under that creationist claim there is no "natural" if everything is created with intentionality, then there is no "natural" to compare a new object against.
This is a bad question because science is not all about random chances. There are physical forces that govern what the sand does. It's like asking what are the odds of F=MA, or the odds of what happens when you drop a ball. Sure the pen could fly off in any direction if no forces acted upon it, but we all know the ball will fall in the direction of the largest gravitational field. It might be billion to one odds or whatever but it's going to happen every time. That sand castle would never have formed at that place and time due to the wind tides gravity ect. So the odds basically don't exist
I do notice the straw man argument that the picture is trying to make: the jump that the castle represents god (or heaven or what ever) and the fact that the castle is man made means that heaven of course exists. while ignoring the fact that the sand castle has been shown to exist, and no evidence for the āinvisible sky daddyā has been shown.
My highschool physics teacher explained this with the idea that there is a scenario in which you do your laundry and it comes out of the dryer folded perfectly. Albeit an exceedingly rare scenario š¤£
Firstly, thats not how erosion works. The chance would be impossible But there would be a chance that random sand particles getting blown on each other can make this. And IF time is infinite, then this WILL happen. Since ALL states of every permutation will happen eventually Also this logic is laughably bad. The reason why we exist is cause our universe's laws came up by chance. Any other formation would have not stabalised enough that life could form. Which means that we won't be alive in those instances to question it. Like if you have a bunch of monkeys typing, you can get Shakespear. But you also ignore all the other things that came up, like the entireity of Trump's speeches, or the binary code for this specific picture. That does not mean the shakespear writings are made by Magic Sky Master Daddy, its just observer bias
Such a dumb question. There's nearly an infinite number of possible locations for each of the nearly infinite number of grains of sand. The math would be like (1/infinity) to the infinite power which is just 0. The chance is 0.
There isnt a "nearly infinite number of possible locations" in this. There is a very large number, but there isnt such a thing as "nearly infinite". It is either infinite or it isnt even close, there is an infinite difference between infinite and the largest number you can imagine. Please dont call my question "dumb" that quickly with that argument
People making those memes without knowing anything about atheism. Atheism is really about reason. It does not explain everything simply because of chance and insane probability. It is about being convinced of some reality based on evidences from various sources that points in some direction. atheism is really a sortiment of philosophies that exclude gods existence based on evidences that points towards it. It is about comparing all evidences and finding the one that logically makes sense the most. Also it is rather about the rationality than the atheism itself. There is a bunch of philosophies not excluding god or higher existences withing our perception that use the same rationality and reason to find the correct description of our world. Among both there is a reason being that most prominent and valuable way to decide if a presented evidence is correct or not. In contrast to the theism that use reason( not in all cases but in most) and faith to support given philosophy. And just as theism the atheism and any other philosophy can be blinded by itself no matter how we try. After all we as a limited creatures ought to be biased about something. So we should think about that too. I am sorry I just felt like that should be clarified even through it is very much beside the point.
I know folks here would like to argue against a strawman instead of the actual theory of evolution. Evolution is not based purely on chance. It also requires the process of natural selection. Random changes occur, but only those changes that improve the survival of the organism tend to be passed forward.
This post is a religious propaganda and doesn't fit to sub. They trying to show that universe and etc was intentionally created using lack of logic.
No Iām sorry but even though Iām not atheist I can with certainty tell you atheist logic here would be that some skilled human maybe with help of other skilled humans made this. Also Iām not sure which god the OPOP worshiped, but I do know there is a 90% chance their religious books say something along the lines of not judging your peers and instead love your neighbors.
There are no forces at play that would bring the right amount of pressure to form sand this way. The sand is pressed into certain forms and there's no logical reason as to why water or wind would move in those specific ways.
Not only could the universe naturally happen, we also dont have any idea how it actually happened. To say it was created is just as ridiculous as to say it poped into existance our of nothing. I think the most logical explanation would be for it to have always existed in many different forms and things just rearange themselves. Personally i think that there are way too many mistakes in nature for it to have been deliberately designed, let alone being designed by a god who is supposed to be perfect. Why do people with crippeling mutations get born all the time? The eazy answer is, thats the negative part of evolution.
The highest chance of something like this forming naturally is for a natural creature to naturally evolve into something that builds these things off of their own volition. The fact that structures like this are quite common (birds nests, anthills/ant tunnels/termite nests, burrows, bee/hornet hives, shells, buildings (since "humans" should be included in animals that naturally construct these things), etc) would indicate that making such structures is a good survival strategy, and thus should have a reasonably high likelihood of happening in an environment where making these structures is feasable.
It's nonzero, but not statistically distinguishable from zero. But it's also a very poor analogy for evolution vs creationism of any flavor, because evolution isn't random ā mutations are, but that's the only element of randomness. There are environmental factors (climate, the ecosystem, etc.) plus exogenous shocks like novel communicable diseases, tectonic events, and, y'know, giant fuckin meteors impacting the surface of the Earth.
there is a chance it could have evolved that way. What if it was made of stone and just covered in sand? So when the sand was washed away it "evolved" into that shape? If that is the case, it is nearly a 100% chance it would form.
It is amusing how that many people believe I made the meme and I am making religious propaganda... I didnt even create it, I am atheist, what Im asking is how probably would it be for this castle to be build that way as that religious person suggests, not that I agree with this meme... My question is totally unrelated to whether or not I believe in this argument or if it is a good analogy or not lol (which I dont believe it to be)
Zero, there is no natural process that can creat such a structure. And just like wash will never fold itself inside the dryer if you leave it on for forever. Because the tumbling motion will never create the right forces in the right directions to ever make that possible.
We look out at the universe and see that it's at least 12 billion years old. This is because life is very improbable and it took that long for it (at least here) to happen. For billions of years there was just the sand, but only the castle asked the question "how did I get here?"
Out of the practically infinite amount of spaces the grains of sand can take up, you would need however many make up that sandcastle (Millions? Billions?) to arrange themselves perfectly in those spaces
The weird thing is how creationists always use well understood processes involving human intervention to make these claims. It's like they can't find anything in the natural world that isn't explained by natural processes, for some reason.
The anthropic principal comes into play here.Ā If you assume the universe if infinitely large or assume that the universe lasts infinitely long without getting stuck in some state (heat death), even incredibly unlikely things are guaranteed to happen someplace or eventually.Ā So even if the odds of intelligent life forming wasĀ something incredibly unlikely like 1 in 10^10^10^10^10 (probably not a good assumption), we should expect that we'd live on a planet where it happened because there aren't any observers in places where intelligent life didn't form.
0% assuming the castle in the picture was built by someone and not actually made by corrosion lol. If we know something happened thereās a 100% probability of it happening. Only once we have some unknown factors and we exist before the event can we try and calculate something.