Sir Frederic Hoyle

Sir Frederic Hoyle, British Astronomer & mathematician, when challenged by fellow scientists who were claiming that living particles could come together and create life, made the following response.

“Anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the Rubik cube will concede the near impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind person moving the cube faces at random. Now imagine 10 to the power of 50 (that is 10 followed by fifty zeroes) blind persons standing shoulder to shoulder, (these would more than fill our entire planetary system) each with a scrambled Rubik cube and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form.

You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling (random variation) of just one of the many bio-polymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the bio-polymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial soup here on Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order. Life must plainly be a cosmic phenomenon”. (Hoyle 1981) from The Big Bang in Astronomy, New Scientist magazine. Hoyle’s article has never been challenged to this day.

Hoyle was an agnostic, which basically means doubting, or not made my mind up. He tried to make up an argument that life came from outer space but gave up on the idea realizing that the same problem arises in a primordial pond on another planet, and would still be a 10 to the 50th power of chance.

This, along with many more of Hoyle’s quotes was taken from the book, In The Minds of Men by Ian Taylor.

Creation gives us the sunny side,

Henry Wiebe