This excellent website [1] describes yet another flaw in the creationist argument. Creationists like to argue that evolution could not have created the enormous complexity we see today, because the odds are miniscule that all we see today could have happened by chance. That’s true. However, it misstates the problem, because the complexity we see today is not the only possible future that evolution could have created.
Think of dealing a hand of bridge (fifty-two cards dealt into four hands of thirteen cards each). The odds of dealing any particular hand are miniscule, yet we don’t consider any particular hand to be a miracle of divine creation. It’s just the hands that happened to have been dealt.
Evolution works the same way. A billion years ago, evolution could have produced many different possible outcomes, any of them potentially just as complex and beautiful as the one we live in. It produced the outcome we see today, but this is just one of many it could have produced. Had it produced some other outcome, then perhaps some other intelligent beings would be asking the questions that we are asking: they would look at their blue skin and purple fur and say, “There must be a god, because the odds are miniscule that the world we see today could have happened by chance.” And they’d be just as right, and just as wrong.
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