Peanut butter, a turtle, a caveman, and chimps with typewriters..What do they have in common?

August 29, 2011 at 8:50 am | Posted in creationism, evolution, intelligent design, stupidity | 1 Comment
Tags: Chimpanzee, Creationism, Evolution, intelligent design

Answer:  They have all been used in arguments to disprove evolution.  Here is the latest from Robert Ringer, at World Net Daily (discovered thanks to Ed Brayton) who bills himself as the voice of sanity.  You decide.

As Guy Murchie pointed out in his book “The Seven Mysteries of Life,” an intellectual, long-standing argument for a random universe wherein a seeming miracle such as evolution could take place on its own is that, given enough time, anything – including the evolution of human beings from inanimate matter – is possible.

This argument, said Murchie, is based on the premise that if you could sit enough billions of chimpanzees in front of computers for enough billions of years, random chance would allow them to write all the great works of literature.

Which is a fascinating thought until you consider the mathematics involved. There are approximately 50 possible letters, numbers and punctuation marks on a computer keyboard, and there are 65 character spaces per line in the average book. A chimp would therefore have one in 50 chances of getting the first space on the first line correct.

Since the same is true of the second space on that line, the chimp would have one chance in 50 x 50, or 50², of getting both spaces right (meaning just the first two letters of the first word of just one of the great works of literature). For all 65 spaces on the first line, the figure would jump to 50⁶⁵, which is equal to 10¹¹⁰.

How big is 10¹¹⁰? According to physicist George Gamow, said Murchie, it is a thousand times greater than the total number of vibrations made by all of the atoms in the universe since the Big Bang!

Conclusion: It doesn’t matter how many chimpanzees or how much time you allow, not even one line of one great work could come into existence through pure chance. Given that you are infinitely more complex than a single line in a book, what are the odds that you, with all of your billions of precise, specialized cells, accidentally evolved from “primordial soup” over a period of a few billion years?

Thus, evolution in a random universe – i.e., a universe without a Supreme Power Source – would appear to be a mathematical impossibility. As with such phenomena as wind and gravity, it would seem that the only way evolution could have come into existence is through the work of a Higher Power that is beyond human understanding. Not an old man in the sky, as atheists like to mockingly portray this Power, but an invisible, conscious source of power that man can never hope to comprehend.

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