How a Dice can show that God exists

Is the universe that produced us just a result of a chance roll of the cosmic dice? Justin Brierley, presenter of the apologetics debate show Unbelievable? explains why his dice (yes we know it should be 'die' really) proves otherwise.

With thanks to Peter Ould for help with the maths.

Responding to Cosmic Skeptic debate

Four years on, Why I still think a dice can show that God exists

Some footage was sourced from Vimeo under the creative commons attribution license:

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[erikpoephoofd]

Okay hear me out.
What if the dices weren't rolled perfectly and life did not come into existance?
We wouldn't be here.
Imagine that there are more universes other than this one, where the dice is rolled.
The large large majority of them not developing right.
The only reason you can think of this concept right now, is because you live in a universe where life is supported.
There are no people in failed universes, because they don't support life. The only places where organisms can be able to contemplate why they live in a perfect universe, is if they live in one.

The only reason why the presenter didn't come up with the same conclusion as I did, is because he is not open minded.

[TeacherNeillKEnglish]

What if the dice were 'rickrolled' 70000 times? The Universe would never let us down like it does now

[Czar_Moss]

a big problem with this kind of thinking is assuming that we are the perfect odds and life can only exist the way it does now

[craze]

This is all assuming we were meant to be alive, like we are. There is no proof that our way of life is the only way life can happen.

Who's to say there is any other type of of life?

[suleiman]

I don’t even know what he said in the video I just came for the comments section

[kevinmlevites]

There are so many fallacies in this video that I have trouble deciding where to begin.

1) If the Universe is "fine-tuned" for life, then why is more than 99.999% of the Universe inhospitable to it? We can't exist (yet) in the middle of stars, or in the vast vacuum that fills the voids between the galaxies.
2) There is the assumption that his "70 rolls of sixes" is the only way that permits life, and we don't know this. As an example, a royal flush in cards is very lucky, but we could say that a duce, four, five, and nine of the same suit has the same odds of coming up. So, the arbitrary rules we assign to poker hands is what's important. We have no other examples of life beyond Earrh, so he makes sweeping assumptions from one example.
3) If God exists, then where does God come from? If God has always existed, then why not save a step and decide that the Universe has always existed? If the origin of God is an unanswerable question, then why not skip a step and decide that the origin of the Universe is an unanswerable question?
4) We may not understand many of the details about the origin of the Universe . . . but that doesn't mean that we should automatically invoke God just because we're unhappy that we don't know everything. To say that only God understands things that we don't know is very arrogant.
5) Even if I choose to be very pious and deeply religious . . . I would still be screwed out of Eternity when I die. There are--perhaps--over a hundred different sects in Christianity alone. While I'm sure that there are a few exceptions, each sect claims to have the correct way to worship God, while the competing sects are leading their flock astray . . . and their congregants are destined for Hell or eternal death. This means that out of the hundred or so sects, I have overwhelming odds of choosing the wrong one and going to Hell. The situation becomes much worse if I consider Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism (among many other religions). Atheism is a perfectly reasonable (and even comforting) choice under these circumstances.
6) Creationists and Biblical literalists hold up The Bible for answers about the origin of the Universe, and so forth . . . because it's true.

In 2 Chronicles 4:2 we find the Biblical view is that pi (the circumference of a circle divided by it's diameter) is exactly equal to 3 . . . except we know that pi is equal to 3.1415926 . . ., and that this an irrational number. Even if The Bible only sees the first digit as being important, then at least the irrational and transcendental nature of pi might have been alluded to.

The Biblical literalist will get irritated with this point, and claim that The Bible isn't a mathematical textbook, and I quite agree. However, this also means that The Bible isn't a textbook on geology, biology, anthropology, medicine, and/or physics either.
7) Biblical literalism can kill. Lightning was seen as being from God, so it was sacreligious and heretical to put lightning rods on church steeples (often the highest building in town). So--because God would never strike a church with lightning--this was the safest place to store gunpowder.

The Catholic church in Brescia, Italy, exploded and killed 2, 000 people when lightning hit the steeple, and the 90 metric tons of gunpowder detonated and blew up 1/6 of the town. This happened on August 18, 1769, well after Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod and was pressuring society to put them on church steeples (to protect the bell ringers).
8) If religion can modify Biblical literalism to accommodate lightning rods, then why not accommodate physics, Big Bang comology, evolution, and LGBTQ people?

In any case, I've tried to give a civil, reasoned response to this video, and I hope people reply.

Thank you for your time and consideration in reviewing this lengthy post.

I wish everyone peace.

[dr]

Theist: Dear God, I am not able to convince people with a bible. What should I do?
God: Why don't you try with a dice?

[mrdarkevilme]

the odds against winning the lottery are millions to one, therefore no one has won the lottery.

[jacklawrence]

You say here that when the Big Bang occurred it was JUST RIGHT. Any faster and life couldn't form, any slower and it would collapse back on itself.
But you're forgetting one important theory... who says that the Big Bang that started our universe that we live in currently was the first ever Big Bang?
Who is to say that many times before this universe there weren't other universes that didn't quite get the expansion rate correct, thus collapsing back in on itself and then exploding billions of times over until it finally got the correct combination to harbour a universe that could sustain life (us).
Maybe it did take 70 trillion rolls of the dice and we just don't realise we aren't roll number one...

[olofgardell]

Try this experiment:
Roll the dice 70 times and write down the numbers you get.
Now do multiple series of rolls until you get the exact same numbers in the same order as the first time.
That will also take you quite some time.

Question, how unlikely was it that you got those exact numbers the first time?
Probability is tricky.

[stevenhahn]

He needs a better argument, this one doesn't hold up. Two reasons, for one, even with his argument there's still just as much evidence for God doing it as there is for Yahweh, Jehovah, Satan creating the universe, some alien, nothing explains specifically who did it, and secondly we really have no clue what the odds of this universe being here are, we aren't advanced enough as a civilization to claim we know the odds.

[slothfromthegoonies]

You're going to have to try harder than that buddy.

[tf]

So basically, just because something is improbable means that an impossible answer is more viable.

[togoth]

This essentially comes down to a common misunderstanding of probability ... what these people forget is that, whist there is a 1 in a zillion chance of getting x 6s in a row, there is the same chance for literally every conceivable specific combination of rolls. Kind of removes the mystery if you ask me.

[noahbodycares]

How unlikely does an event have to be before you can round down to “it’s impossible”? One specific sperm fertilizing an egg on a specific day and combining dna in exactly the right way to create me is statistically unlikely, but it happened.

Also, how do you make the leap from x is impossible to x is caused by a god? What if the unlikely event is caused by something else we don’t know about or simply occurs without any intent or forethought.

[CharlesDaniel]

What if you roll 6 three times in a row? Then it proves Satan.

[safirouhi]

Ok so basically god exists because you can't accept the arbitrarity of your own existence?

[YellowJacket]

I love this analogy, well done! In one of my undergrad engineering courses at Georgia Tech, the professor told us that at a point, when odds are sufficiently low, it is impossible. We like to say, “no, it could happen” but we fail to understand the enormity of the odds.

[shelbyvillerules]

2:32 "It hit 70 rolls of the number 6 in a row, first time"


How do you know it was the first time?

[manuellopez]

Apparently there is this almighty "creator" who can summon up an entire Universe but is unable to communicate with humans, at all.