About statistics and probability in this context:
Current theories about the age of the Universe say that it's between 13 and 14 billion years old. Steve mentioned 13.8 billion years so let's use that figure.
Let's build a scale where 1000 years is represented by 1mm on aline going left to right and the rightmost end is the presence.
2mm left of now is roughly where they say Jesus walked around. Roughly 2mm.
On the same scale, according to the theories, Earth and the rest of this solar system formed 4.5 kilometer to the left of now.
Compare 2mm to 4.5km.
Lifeforms formed, according to the most popular theories now, some 300 million years after Earth was formed. That's 300 meters on our scale. 4.2km left of now where 5mm represent 5000 years. The Cambrian explosion happended somewhere in the vicinity of 500 million years ago, or 500 meters left of now, 3.7km to the right of the beginning of what one can call life in its simplest, most unevolved form.
3.7km on a scale where 1mm represents 1000 years.
Chemical reactions, including mutations, in a living organism happen real fast. Like really really fast. A single reaction can happen in a matter of femtoseconds or even attoseconds. Let's go with femtoseconds.
Let's make 1 femtosecond 1mm on our scale
0.000000000000001 second is 1mm. 0.000000000001 second is 1 meter.
0.000000001 second is 1km
1 second is 1,000,000,000 km.
1 year is approx. 31,556,000,000,000,000 km or about 3335 light years.
500,000,000 years (the time since the Cambrian explosion) is about 1.7 trillion light years away from now where a single chemical/biological reaction can happen over a "distance" of a dozen or so mm.
The probability of an evolution ruled solely by physics (and in extension of that, chemistry then biology) is far from zero.
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