Odds of being born

Serieously, computing the odds after the event is meaningless. The probability of being born is 1 for every one of us.
 
JP1283 said:
A psychic I once visited (I've posted about her before) told me that God exists, and she followed up with "the odds of being born are 1 in 400,000,000...better chances of winning the lottery." I just wanted to know if there is any truth to that and if anyone has heard anything like that before.
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I started a thread 2 years ago asking what was the chance of me being born. Everyone said it was 1.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26287&highlight=chances+born
 
delphi_ote said:
Another view on this statistic could be the odds of being born once conceived. In the U.S., the odds are roughly 99.39% that you'll survive (using the CIA factbook.)
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A 0.61% rate of spontaneous or deliberate abortion? What's all the fuss about then?
 
The psychic probably thinks there is a pool of unused souls queuing up to be incarnated into a body. If a western psychic, this may come from a shallow knowledge of Christian theology.

But think about the opportunities. You are not limited to pretending to talk with your victims' dead relatives, but can summon relatives they even don't know they have. The possibilities are endless. Messed up talking to a dead child? Claim you had by mistake contacted one not yet conceived. Brilliant!
 
DrKyle said:
Depending on the profiency of your father, when he did the naughty-noogie-naughty on your mother, it would be an average of about 20 Million spermatozoa "injected" (I love that word, don't you?).
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Yeah, I'm going to go the other way here. The odds of someone being born are pretty close to one. The odds of you, i.e., the "you" who is asking the question, are infintessimal. Not only are there all those little swimmers, only one of which succeeded to produce "you," there's also the odds of your parents meeting, of your mom letting your dad score, of the parents even existing at all, or humans evolving and creating the society into which "you" were born and from which "you" got your values, etc.

This isn't proof of God, of course. In fact, it might be some small evidence the other way. The universe is large enough that things which are mathematically nearly impossible happen all the time.
 
strathmeyer said:
Wow, how many biased statistical sources do you have?
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I haven't looked yet. I figure I'll be swamped in "abortion is the holocaust" sites as soon as I started Googling. After dealing with that on campus a couple days ago, I'd just as soon try to think of a proper source first.
 
manny said:
Yeah, I'm going to go the other way here. The odds of someone being born are pretty close to one. The odds of you, i.e., the "you" who is asking the question, are infintessimal. Not only are there all those little swimmers, only one of which succeeded to produce "you," there's also the odds of your parents meeting, of your mom letting your dad score, of the parents even existing at all, or humans evolving and creating the society into which "you" were born and from which "you" got your values, etc.

This isn't proof of God, of course. In fact, it might be some small evidence the other way. The universe is large enough that things which are mathematically nearly impossible happen all the time.
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You're contradicting yourself. When it is asked what were the odds of you being born it is meant specifically you, not someone else.

And something definitely fishy is going on here. I don't think it proves the existence of God, but it does strongly indicate that something is seriously wrong with accepted ideas on our genesis.
 
JP1283 said:
A psychic I once visited (I've posted about her before) told me that God exists, and she followed up with "the odds of being born are 1 in 400,000,000
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1 in 400 million??? The odds are surely vastly smaller than that if we take it from the Big Bang??
 
Interesting Ian said:
And something definitely fishy is going on here. I don't think it proves the existence of God, but it does strongly indicate that something is seriously wrong with accepted ideas on our genesis.
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In what way? There has got to be some situation resulting from the big bang. All you're doing by saying that the particular result we see is really unlikely is the old trick of throwing a dart at random and drawing a bullseye where it hits. The question of whether the situation we see is unlikely only arises if we assume that there was some sort of preordained target.
 
Mojo said:
In what way? There has got to be some situation resulting from the big bang. All you're doing by saying that the particular result we see is really unlikely is the old trick of throwing a dart at random and drawing a bullseye where it hits.
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No, it's the old trick of throwing a dart and it hitting the bulls eye dead centre. One chance in a googolplex or whatever.
 
Interesting Ian said:
No, it's the old trick of throwing a dart and it hitting the bulls eye dead centre. One chance in a googolplex or whatever.
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But if the bullseye didn't exist, if there was no preordained target, you haven't arrived at a result that is any more or less likely than any other particular result.

To make the odds matter, you have to presuppose that there is some plan behind the whole thing.
 
Well I assume they calculated the odds basically like this:

1 : (Number of men on the planet * number of sperm a man produces in his lifetime * number of women on planet * number of eggs produced in lifetime)

And sure you get some huge number with this method, but at best this would be the chance that someone identical to you would be born.

It’s like throwing a handful of toothpicks into a box. You throw them in and look at where they land. The chance of getting that exact outcome is astronomically small, but the chance of getting any outcome is probably 1:1

LLH
 
This question has always bothered me some, but I don't have the tools to address it so I've just pushed it aside. It gets down to this - what is it that makes me, me? I am not anyone else who has ever lived or is alive now, and when I die my time will be over. I used to think along the lines that a particular sperm cell had to find a particular egg cell to make me, but since those are just arrangements of chemicals, I no longer think that's it. This psychic was thinking along those lines. After all, if those exact same chemicals were reproduced and joined again, would that new person also be me? I don't think so.

I can see that, looking at the evolution of our world from an outside perspective, that each of those creatures alive would be interested in its own survival, and be self-aware. But this doesn't seem to do an adequate job of explaining how I feel, being me. Why is my consciousness in my brain, and not in anyone else's, ever? What if that particular sperm and egg didn't come together, but instead was the next sperm cell that almost made it, would my consciousness be here?

I've never heard a satisfactory explanation of that.
 
Mojo said:
But if the bullseye didn't exist, if there was no preordained target, you haven't arrived at a result that is any more or less likely than any other particular result.

To make the odds matter, you have to presuppose that there is some plan behind the whole thing.
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I think it's more like seeing a dart sticking out of a wall, drawing a bullseye around it, and exclaiming, "Look! Look! What are the odds of that?!"
 
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