Could monkeys type the 23rd Psalm? at 11:29 AM

I’m running through a book we picked up recently put out by Answers in Genesis called Evolution Exposed by Roger Patterson, and I just finished reading this article which was in Chapter 5.

Could monkeys type the 23rd Psalm?

In 1860 a debate between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce turned the tide in the public’s acceptance of evolution. Bishop Wilberforce had published a review of Darwin’s book of which Darwin commented, “It is uncommonly clever; it picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts, and brings forward well all the difficulties.” Bishop Wilberforce presented several scientific arguments, and Huxley suggested that, given enough time and material, six monkeys could type the 23rd Psalm simply by randomly punching the keys. It is reported that the bishop had no response, despite his training in mathematics. So what is the answer to Huxley’s argument of time and chance?

 

Assuming a 50-key typewriter to accommodate letters, numbers, and punctuation, the chance of typing “THE” is one in 50 x 50 x 50 (50^-3), or one in 125,000. At a rate of one strike per second this would take 34.72 hours. For the phrase “THE LORD” the chance becomes 50^-8 and requires 1,238,663.7 years. The entire Psalm requires 9.552 x 10¹⁰¹⁶years to complete on average. The age of the universe is only 15 billion years according to evolutionists, so the probability is clearly outside of the realm of possibility. (It is possible that the event can happen at any given point in the trials, but the difference in time needed and time allowed is unreasonable.)

 

When considering the probability of the assembly of a DNA molecule, the same problems arise. Harold J. Morowitz, professor of biophysics at Yale, has calculated that the formation of one E. coli bacteria in the universe at 10^{-100,000,000,000}, or one in 10 to the power of 100 billion. Sir Fred Hoyle has offered the analogy of a tornado passing through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747, “nonsense of a high order” in his words. Natural selection cannot be the mechanism that caused life to form from matter as it can only work on a complete living organism.

 

<-- Despite many different calculations that demonstrate the virtual impossibility of the formation of even a single piece of DNA, there are those who accept evolution as a fact of nature.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The idea of an eternal universe has been proposed to allow for enough time, but the second law of thermodynamics states that the universe would have reached “heat death” at some point in the infinite past. Alternate universes and dimensions have been suggested, but there is little evidence to support such claims.

 

Another major problem with the probability argument is that the chemical processes that supposedly formed life are also reversible at every step. As water is released in the formation of amino acids, the water is then available to break the bond in the reverse reaction, which is actually more favorable. Oceans are the last place amino acids would form. Huxley’s typewriters would have to include a delete key for each other key in order for the analogy to be complete. No matter how much time and matter was available or the rate of interactions of atoms, the probability remains zero for the reversible reactions involved. The many distinct interactions within living systems clearly point to the presence of a designer, the God of the Bible.

 

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Another article written on the same subject but written another way can be read here. Link leads to answersingenesis.org

 

-Graydon