Evolution: The Numbers Don't Add Up

One reason many people refuse to respond to God is evolution.

They think that over millions of years, anything is possible.

Anything but God, of course.

On the surface this doesn't make sense. Think about it, if "anything is possible" then the universe would be chaos, not order. Anything happening, including random mutations, would lead to shortened lifespans and life-forms that die out due to useless mutations. It certainly would not lead to order and stable life forms.

Oh, and there's that little problem of where did all the stuff come from, and how did life begin?

Yet, people still put blind faith into the billions of years = life theory.

Of course, they also believe in Shakespearean Monkeys.

You've heard the theory... if you put enough monkeys into a room full of typewriters, eventually they would reproduce Shakespeare's Sonnet 18.

SIDEBAR: These days the monkeys would use computers, not typewriters. No monkey worth his salt would be caught dead with an out of date Selectric.

Interestingly, the British National Council of the Arts decided to waste taxpayer money to test this theory. They placed a computer into a cage with six monkeys, then waited to see what they produced.

They waited for a month. The monkeys produced 50 pages of typed characters.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 contains only 114 words (488 letters).

Guess how many words the monkeys typed?

Have an answer? Don't look ahead until you do. Go ahead, get an answer in your head.

Don't cheat.

Ready?

None. Nada. Zero. Zilch. The monkeys typed no words. Not even the shortest words in the English language: A and I. (To be the word 'a' or 'I', a space is required before and after. They failed to do this.)

When probability theory is applied to this problem, you'll find that the chance of the monkeys randomly typing Sonnet 18 is: 26 raised to the 488th power (26 letters in the English language, 488 letters in the Sonnet). That's the same as 10 raised to the 690th power.

That's a big number.

How big?

Many of you realize that it's the number 10, followed by 690 zeroes. But, people have no grasp of how big that is.

Here's one way to think of it. The number of particles in the entire universe (protons, electrons, and neutrons) is a mere 10 raised to the 80th power. So, if you tried to track the progress of the monkeys, and you kept count by marking particles in the universe, you'd run out of particles eight times before they produced the Sonnet.

Here's another way to think of it. Suppose you turned each particle in the universe into a computer chip, and you programmed that computer chip to spit out random letters at the rate of one million per second. Suppose also that you were able to send them back to the beginning of time itself (as science calculates it). As of today, you still would not have produced the Sonnet! Enough time hasn't elapsed.

And that's to produce one Sonnet containing 488 letters.

Do you have any idea how many parts there are to DNA?

Three Billion.

That's six million, one-hundred forty-seven, five-hundred forty Sonnets (6,147,540).

Without those three billion individual parts, all arranged in exactly the right order, life would not exist.

There is absolutely no chance that monkeys can produce a Shakespearean Sonnet with only 488 letters.

What's the chance that the universe came into existence, then organized itself, then formed planets and suns, and all the stuff out there, followed by that life organizing itself, later branching out into new life forms by random mutation?

Not a chance.