What are the odds?

 

Tonight I was watching our local news and before going to a commercial break they announced the winning Powerball numbers. I couldn’t believe what I heard;

7 – 15 – 28 – 43 – 44 powerball 20.

Do you have any idea the chances of them calling these exact numbers? What an incredible, beyond belief, never happen again in a million years chance that they pick these numbers. Wow. Have you ever just sat and let it settle in for a minute. Unless you’ve won then of course you haven’t. Because although the odds of winning the jackpot is only 1 in 195,249,054, the odds of powerball picking 6 random numbers is 100%. Again we don’t get to excited about it unless we have hit a number or two and will be getting some cash. Can you imagine what would happen if they ever drew 1,2,3,4,5,6? I guess it could happen. The odds of drawing 1-6 are exactly the same as drawing any other numbers. But just the fact that there is pattern or order to the numbers would make it a huge news story. Even better yet, what if the very next drawing was 7,8,9,10,11,12. Not only would this ignite a 24/7 global coverage from every network, cable news channel, and newspapers.  There would likely be hundreds of class action lawsuits filed within days. Congress would issue an injunction and establish a full investigation. Accusations of corruption and scandal would forever plague the reputation of Powerball. Never again would they be allowed to sell another ticket, without even one shred of evidence of any wrongdoing. What kind of evidence would you need other that the fact that two consecutive drawings produced 1-6 and 7-12. The odds themselves prove that there must be an outside influence or tampering that goes well beyond a reasonable doubt.

 

Reasonable people would agree that these odds are proof enough that this wasn’t random.

 

Let’s do our own lottery and instead of 59 white balls and 39 red balls as in the Powerball lottery we are going to use 1000 white and 1000 red. We also draw 1-6 our very first drawing 7-12 on our second and 13-18 for our third. This continues drawing after drawing until we have successfully gone through every number up to 1000 without ever drawing even one ball out of turn. I have no idea what the mathematic odds would be for this to happen but lets assume they are unbelievably high. Impossible? Yes this would be impossible unless you have and intelligent designer orchestrating every draw of every ball. Take out the “chance” and now what was “never in a billion years” is easy. Amazingly Darin has sold us a similar story of evolution. The odds and the evidence for life evolving out of nothing are just as unrealistic as my new lottery. Add God as the creator and all things are possible. God is our creator, He is infinitely wise, He has ultimate power and yet he has done great things to have a personal relationship with each one of us.