The main conclusion in this section is that, even under the most optimistic conditions, the probability of life originating by chance is so low that we can confidently infer chance was not the cause.
This is really brilliant. It's called the "Anything can be zero if small enough" argument. It works like this:
- X = 0.0001
- WOW! That's really small. Nothing can be that small.
- so X = 0
Some of you are bristling. Engineers and scientists do this in equations all the time in order to simplify the calculations. But in these instances, the answer is valid within a range of uncertainty introduced by this technique.
In your example, the answer is the uncertainty and you can't arbitrarily set a non-zero answer to zero and expect it to be correct.