The Atheist's Hope - Chance, Luck, Coincidence, Miracle

The paragraphs below are taken from Chapter 6 "Origins and Miracles" of "The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins:

QUOTE
Think about what this means. We go to a chemist and say: get out your textbooks and your calculating machine; sharpen your pencil and your wits; fill your head with formulae, and your flasks with methane and ammonia and hydrogen and carbon dioxide and all the other gases that a primeval nonliving planet can be expected to have; cook them all up together; pass strokes of lightning through your simulated atmospheres, and strokes of inspiration through your brain; bring all your clever chemist's methods to bear, and give us your best chemist's estimate of the probability that a typical planet will spontaneously generate a self-replicating molecule. or, to put it another way, how long would we have to wait before random chemical events on the planet, random thermal jostling of atoms and molecules, resulted in a self-replicating molecule?

Chemists don't know the answer to this question. Most modem chemists would probably say that we'd have to wait a long time by the standards of a human lifetime, but perhaps not all that long by the standards of cosmological time. The fossil history. of earth suggests that we have about a billion years - one 'aeon', to use a convenient modern definition - to play with, for this is roughly the time that elapsed between the origin of the Earth about 4.5 billion years ago and the era of the first fossil organisms. But the point of our 'numbers of planets' argument is that, even if the chemist said that we'd have to wait for a 'miracle', have to wait a billion billion years - far longer than the universe has existed, we can still accept this verdict with equanimity. There are probably more than a billion billion available planets in the universe. If each of them lasts as long as Earth, that gives us about a billion billion billion planet-years to play with. That will do nicely! A miracle is translated into practical politics by a multiplication sum.

There is a concealed assumption in this argument. Well, actually there are lots, but there's one in particular that I want to talk about. This is that, once life (i.e. replicators and cumulative selection) originates at all, it always advances to the point where its creatures evolve enough intelligence to speculate about their origins. If this is not so, our estimate of the amount of luck that we are allowed to postulate must be reduced accordingly. To be more precise, the maximum odds against the origin of life on any one planet that our theories are allowed to postulate, is the number of available planets in the universe divided by the odds that life, once started, will evolve sufficient intelligence to speculate about its own origins.

It may seem a little strange that 'sufficient intelligence to speculate about its own origins' is a relevant variable. To understand why it is, consider an alternative assumption. Suppose that the origin of life was quite a probable event, but the subsequent evolution of intelligence was exceedingly improbable, demanding a huge stroke of luck. Suppose the origin of intelligence is so improbable that it has happened on only one planet in the universe, even though life has started on many planets. Then, since we know we are intelligent enough to discuss the question, we know that Earth must be that one planet. Now suppose that the origin of life, and the origin of intelligence given that life is there, are both highly improbable events. Then the probability of any one planet, such as Earth, enjoying both strokes of luck is the product of the two low probabilities, and this is a far smaller probability.

It is as though, in our theory of how we came to exist, we are allowed to postulate a certain ration of luck. This ration has, as its upper limit, the number of eligible planets in the universe. Given our ration of luck, we can then 'spend' it as a limited commodity over the course of our explanation of our own existence. if we use up almost all our ration of luck in our theory of how life gets started on a planet in not by looking at lots of particular theories, but by looking at one as an example of how the basic problem - how cumulative selection got its start - might be solved.
UNQUOTE

This is the answer of the atheist, Richard Dawkins, to the question when and how a bunch of non-living of molecules become a living, self-replicating molecule, how the non-living gives life. It is a statement of faith, not of science. The "how", the "theory of how" and the "prediction of the how theory" is completely absent.

For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. (Romans 1:21 ESV)