Events of high improbability can still take place

The video below argues that highly improbable events take place all the time. The implications of this is that we should not conclude that spontaneous generation, which are considered highly improbable events, cannot take place.

There is a fundamental flaw to this logic. We are not looking at an event that took place and asking “Did it happen?” Of course it is 100% certain it did happen, once it has happened. What are are doing is putting ourselves at the time of the event, before it happened, and asking. What is the likelihood of this event occurring? Lets say there is a one-in-a-million chance of winning the lottery. Not knowing which is the winning ticket, we can only conclude that each ticket has a one-in-a-million chance of winning. We can’t say every ticket has a 100% chance of winning. Saying all the tickets combined have a 100% chance of winning would be a correct, but useless statement.

Likewise, none of us was alive when life began. Therefore, not knowing how life began, we need to ask ourselves “What are the odds life could have occurred spontaneously?” And the probability we derived would be the result of asking this second question.