Probabilities

You may have seen this article on the probability of your existence written by a student at Havard.  (H/t Instapundit).

So what’s the probability of your existing?  It’s the probability of 2 million people getting together – about the population of San Diego – each to play a game of dice with trillion-sided dice. They each roll the dice – and they all come up the exact same number – say, 550,343,279,001.

A miracle is an event so unlikely as to be almost impossible.  By that definition, I’ve just proven that you are a miracle.

With all due respect to our friend at Harvard, that's wrong in two ways.

First, since you're reading the article, the probability of your existence is 1.

Second, though, what is the probability of existence itself existing?  1, by the same principle:  but if you're going to run the regress, and try to figure out what the probability-of-coming-to-exist was before it happened, you need to know something that in fact you do not and cannot know.  Heidegger said that the great question of metaphysics is "Why is there something rather than nothing?"  That isn't a question that admits of mathematical proofs, since mathematics doesn't exist until the universe and its laws exist.