Intelligent Design

I wrote this a while ago, in response to a friend on the internets:

As far as Intelligent Design goes, I wouldn't be so sure about what can and cannot happen as a result of natural processes. Just because it seems like something has a low probability of happening doesn't mean there has to be a designer. It is a damn big universe, and as far as we know earth is the only planet with life on it. Creation “scientists” like to throw around figures about the vast unlikelihood of life to form at random as “evidence” for a designer. Sure our existence is unlikely, but there is a lot of room for error when a galaxy contains billions of stars, each with its own planetary systems. We're the lucky ones. To say that our unlikely existence must be the result of a designer is kin to saying that every time a man or woman is dealt a royal flush, the dealer must have stacked the deck. For every time a royal flush is dealt, there is something around 649,749 hands that aren't royal flushes. I don't know what the odds of life developing on a planet and evolving into human beings are, but it is very likely that there are enough dead planets to accommodate without the intervention of any sort of divine being. Let’s look at the facts: The Milky Way galaxy alone has 200-400 billion stars. We'll say the average number of planets around each star is nine, since that is how many there are around the Sun, which is an average sized star. That means there is something like 1.8-3.6 trillion planets. So the earth is one planet out of something like 1,800,000,000,000-3,600,000,000,000 planets all of which are part of one galaxy (and there are many, many more galaxies) that is 13.6 billion years old, and it happened to be one out of however many billion that had all the conditions necessary for life. Four some-odd billion years ago, the earliest life forms, or proto-life forms, devloped and there has been a snowballing effect ever since. Jackpot. One mustn't underestimate the power of a long time line and a whole lot of variables.

I'm no scientist, so lots of estimation. I think it gets the point across, though. I thought poker was a good analogy.