Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

probable

2025-01-12 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
probable
Votey panel for probable
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic explores a philosophical argument about probability and the nature of existence.

In the first panel, a character stands before a door labeled "PROBABILITY" and states: "There are infinite possible ways to have something, and only one way to have nothing." Another character challenges this with a thought experiment: "Hey, let me do something. Let me generate a random number from an infinitely large set. Hey, why isn't there a god-sized hole in the sky?"

The response in the final panel is: "I mean, it's probable, so it doesn't." The other character then asks: "Then why did you eat the apple of knowledge, edge case?" (partially cut off text).

The comic is satirizing a type of probabilistic argument for the existence of God (or something rather than nothing) -- the idea that since there are infinitely many possible ways for "something" to exist and only one way for "nothing" to exist, the existence of something is infinitely more probable than nothing, and therefore the universe (or God) must exist. The skeptic points out the flaw by analogy: if you randomly pick from an infinite set, any specific outcome (like a "god-sized hole in the sky") is infinitely improbable, yet the defender simply dismisses counterexamples as edge cases. The humor lies in exposing how this style of probabilistic reasoning can be used to "prove" almost anything, and how its proponents tend to hand-wave away inconvenient counterarguments.

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