What is the point of the firing squad example? Why invoke a firing squad rather than a lottery? Does it add any legitimate logical arguments, or does it (as I suspect) just amplify the emotional appeal?I vote for emotional appeal. It would require a suspension of the natural laws to prevent the bullets from reaching their target, unless they aimed elsewhere intentionally (They were described as marksmen so there accuracy should not be questioned). You might as well ask, whats the chance that they put the muzzle to his skin and missed? The chance is zero. So unless he argues that the chance of of the universe occurring naturally is zero, I don’t see it fit as an analogy.
However, with a lottery example, we know that there are winners, and they occur naturally, despite each outcome being so improbable. Despite the low odds, if you continually play, you will win the lottery. The problem is that we have not observed the times when the universe formed and failed to form intelligent life (collapsed into its original state, etc.) so we see the one successful attempt and people say “its so improbable, it must have been intentional.” It would be like if I could erase my memory every time I lost the lottery, and then when I win (even if its after billions of tries), I exclaim, “why the odds are so astronomically small that I would win on my first time, I think I have evidence that the gods are in my favor.” Would I be convincing?
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