The Monkey Theorem

I recently read a very good book by Antony Flew (who passed away this April) called "There Is A God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind."

Flew was a foundational thinker for modern atheism but in 2004 became a deist. His book is an excellent overview of atheism and even philosophy for a non-philosophy student like myself, I thought. There were some new angles to the argument for the existence of God that I hadn't thought of before. Some criticized the book saying Flew was too old when he wrote it (81) and therefore his mind was molded by Christian thinkers. Perhaps, but Flew acknowledged those arguments as mere ad hominem, and I think the same.

One of the highlights of the book for me was an expounding on the "monkey theorem." You know, that famous hypothetical situation that if you left a roomful of monkeys with a typewriter, eventually the works of Shakespeare would show up, thus emphasizing the point that given enough time and random events, order can come from chaos. Like, the universe and us for example.

In Flew's book, he tells of this situation being experimented by the British National Council of Arts. Six monkeys were left in a room for a month with a typewriter and produced 50 pages but not one word. Words even include "a" and "I", which need spaces on either side of them to be considered words. In another example, the Israeli scientist Gerald Schroeder crunches the numbers for the odds of monkeys typing out "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" and it comes out to 26^488th power or 10 to the 690th. As a matter of scale, there are 1 to the 80th particles in the universe-electrons, protons, neutrons. 1 to the 80th has 80 zeros after the 1 and 1 to the 690th has 690 zeroes after the 1. Huge numbers. Imagine picking the right particle out of the universe at random. What are the odds you'll get the right one? 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00

Those numbers right there got me. Of course, to read the whole explanation, get the book. Or find Schroeder's numbers online regarding the monkey theorem. It goes to show, random chance is not on the side of created order, let alone conscious life.