Just a brief note before I respond to Static: if you're going to quote multiple forum members in your response, it's less confusing if you include the name of the person in the quote block. You can do this as follows:
[quote author=Deus ex Machina]
Quoted text
[/quote]
Quoted text
If you're feeling particularly masochistic, you can even include the link and date:
[quote author=Deus ex Machina link=topic=1788.msg51978#msg51978 date=1356307199]
Quoted text
[/quote]
Quoted text
Anyway, back to the topic...
I do not see any assertion of the odds in the quotation from Dawkins here, only speculation. "Could be as low..." isn't an assertion of fact, and should not be mistaken for one. The fact is that we do not know the odds. So I stand by my point that it would be hubristic to declare any particular figure as accurate odds. Of course, since you haven't provided a complete citation for that particular quote, I have no way of verifying it, but that's by the by - what's there does not support the notion that he made a positive assertion about the odds. And even if he had done so, his field is ethology and zoology, if I remember correctly, not molecular biology.
Ok everybody has a problem with hypothetical odds. Which are of course hypothetical. He could have just said very very unlikely. Would that have made it better? Giving a hypothetical number to it shows how very very unlikely. People compare things better with numbers. If I would say very unlikely and not very likely how would we tell the difference between the two.
This is a misrepresentation of his statement. What he's saying is even
if the chances of Earth bearing life were so low, it's beside the point - the very fact that there
is life on Earth renders the odds meaningless, and in fact the Universe is so old and vast that the chances of life being
somewhere in the Universe are actually quite high. Dawkins is not making a positive assertion that the odds
are very low, and I'm sorry but you're not going to convince me otherwise by means of quote-mining. Tell me, have you actually read the book or did you just lift that quote-mine from a creationist Web site?
Plus, did you just call into question Dawkins credentials as an evolutionary thinker?
I'd certainly call into question his credentials as far as abiogenesis is concerned, because he is not a biochemist or a molecular biologist. I respect his breadth and depth of knowledge of the field of biology, but I would not lend as much credence to his views on the matter as I would to people who are actively researching in the field. I don't think that is an unreasonable position to take.
Dawkins was making a speculative comment about the odds, and in context, his point is that it doesn't matter how low the odds might be: we know it's happened because we're here.
This is again assuming that abiogenesis did indeed happen.
It's Dawkins' argument, as I recall.
Let me give you an example. Ive been on this forum long enough to know that you have argued with many theists.
Theist: I know god seems improbable to you, but he is real, I know he is. No we cant put him in a lab and prove it, but we have all this religious scripture to back it up. Someday we might be able to prove god is real. It may seem improbable but yet its true so no matter how low the odds we know it happened because “here we are”.
Deus: (insert your own argument against this in, but mine would go something like this) We don’t know its true so the very very unlikely exisitance of god is still, well very very unlikely(notice I didn’t use odds since being called full of myself
) SHOW ME PROOF. You cant because god doesn’t heal amputees ect..ect…
Actually, my argument would go nothing like that, but that's a subject for another day.

Also, I didn't call you "full of yourself", so please don't put words into my mouth; I said it was rather hubristic to make assertive declarations about the odds when they are unknown.
Lets flip the coin.
See my point.
Nope... the analogy doesn't work for me.
{...} WE DON’T KNOW abiogenesis happened. Come back with proof and Ill believe you until then the idea is highly suspect.
False dichotomy. Unless we have
proof (by which I assume you mean "extremely compelling evidence"), then an idea must be "highly suspect"? It's either proven or highly suspect, no in-between? Really?
The reality, however, is rather different; Nature doesn't take one giant leap from a single-celled organism to complex multicellular life, but rather progress happens in stages, and each of those individual stages isn't nearly so improbable at all.
But definitely still improbable, and why I am holding it in suspect.
On what grounds do you assert that those stages are "definitely" improbable?
Especially since the nothing has been proven and believe me there are a lot of things that have to be proven first. Improbable yes, impossible just about, but ill give you a tiny glimmer just to keep with Dawkins theoretical odds.
Enough of the quote-mining. He is not saying that the odds
are that low. What he is saying is that
even if they were that low, the chances of it happening
somewhere in the Universe are actually very high.
Allow me to illustrate (purely for the purposes of nailing this one down). The odds he speculated upon, after all, were one in a billion billion billion
per year, and that's just for one planet in one Solar System. The thing is, there are something like a
thousand billion billion stars in our observable Universe (that we know about) - which would mean even if Dawkins' speculation turned out to be accurate, you would have to accept that there's a fair chance of life arising from non-life
somewhere every million years or so. Given that the Universe is
much older than a million years, that's actually pretty good odds - by that token, there should be
thousands of life-bearing planets in the Universe!
This is why I don't like people bandying about hypothetical odds. All too often, people who do, don't understand them.
As for the odds? We simply do not know them yet. We still don't have the data. Not you, not me, not Dawkins, and not the molecular biologists.
And we never will because we can’t observe it happening to come up with odds. The odds could be 0. Still I think the best thing we have is to go with a professional opinion about likelihood, which is what I did.
Now you can see why I needed more time. Sorry if there wasnt a point in your post I responded two, I tried to get the main ones.
I think that maybe you needed to spend a little more time than you did on this last part, because your quote-mining and failure to respond to what has
actually been written don't do you justice. I make no assumption that abiogenesis is true. I simply say that there is some support for it.
When you say we "never will" and that we "can't observe it happening", that's another positive assertion. One what grounds do you make that assertion?
And Dues I expected a better rant from you and your wall of words
I know you are good for it.
It's "Deus", and I have no need to rant. Civilized discussion is more fruitful, is it not? Are you trying to bait me?

If you want to have a sensible discussion about this, you really will need to stop simply regurgitating creationist dren.