Wow, this is quite skewed, but I suppose it would be...

Firstly, what I find very funny about relgious people, is when you use science and reason to point out the huge gaping holes in the bible, koran, et al. You are told, no, God is outside of time and therefore can break your silly rules, because he created them.

Then when it suits, they try and use science to back up their spurious claims...

With such spectacular odds, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a large, expensive collection of private and publicly funded projects launched in the 1960s, was sure to turn up something soon.

The statement above is reductionist beyond belief, it is basically looking at the problem from a weak, antrhopic view. How far can we look into space?

That's right, very far indeed, however, what we "see" is the light from distant stars and galaxies that in some cases have taken billions of years to reach us.

What we cannot see, beyond a certain distance, is exo planets, add to that little fact, that if the universe was a painting the size of the earth, then we have "explored" a size less than one of the blades of grass in your back garden (if you have one).

By the way Fred Hoyle use the term "Big Bang" disparagingly and he was pretty upset when people started to use it in popular lexicon.

Multiply that single parameter by all the other necessary conditions, and the odds against the universe existing are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all “just happened” defies common sense. It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really?

This is wrong on sooooooo many levels, first of all, nobody, let me say that again NOBODY, is claiming it "just happened", the claims, to summarise for brevity's sake are as follows:

The universe and all life-forms within it, progressed via a series of slight gradations over billions and billions of years. That is not saying it "just happened".

Also the multiverse theory claims that our universe is just one of countless, so this could be the Nth time it's happened and because we are here to witness it, it seems special.

Example, I once watched Derren Brown toss a coin and have it land heads 10 times in a row; amazing right? Yes it was, until he showed how he did it; he tossed a coin for 8 hours straight and then showed us the 10 times it worked. Of course during the 8 hours, there were many, many failures.

The point of that story is, our planet and indeed our universe, has been tossing coins for a long time, and we just happen to be around at this stage of the coin toss.

Final, final point.

We bandy about the number 1,000,000,000 (billion) around all the time these days, we talk of billionaires and national debts that are trillions, so we've become desensitzed to the word and what it means.

Let me remind you how big that number is, if someone were to deposit $1 in your account from the second you were born, every single day....

it would take 31.7 years before you had $1,000,000,000

So when we talk of an earth that has been here for 4.5 billion years, you start to get the picture, the average life span of a human being, living in the developed world, is less than 2.5 billion seconds.

Go figure :-)

CG