18Jun10 A Turtle on a Fence Post – Option 2

This is another installment in a series that has been adapted from my 11-part CD teaching series on A. W. Tozer’s spiritual classic, The Pursuit of God.

The second option is that it was chance. It just happened to be this way. This is the option held by most scientists: given enough time, even the most improbable things can happen. But if you put some actual numbers to this position, they never add up. I think it was George Bernard Shaw who hypothesized that if you gave him a million monkeys, all typing on a million typewriters, eventually one of them would type out a play of Shakespeare. At first it sounds plausible, given enough time. After all, with enough time many unlikely have happened. But let’s put some real numbers to this hypothetical scenario. If we assume there are forty keys on the typewriters, that spaces and upper and lower case do not count, that the monkeys are typing at the equivalent of a hundred words a minute 24 hours a day, that you have a million monkeys typing, and that there are only four letters in every word, how long would it take one of the monkeys to correctly type the first word? The mathematics of probability predicts that it would be a matter of a few seconds. To get the second word, meaning that any one of the monkeys would have to get all eight letters of both the first word and the second word in sequence, it would take about five days. To get the third word, i.e., twelve consecutive letters in sequence, it would take approximately 100 years. To get the fourth word, i.e., 16 letters in the correct sequence, it would take about a 100 billion years (most astronomers estimate the age of the universe to be 13.7 billion years). Yet the information contained in one strand of human DNA is far greater than all the combined plays of Shakespeare. If you do the math honestly, you soon realize that the first sentence of the play would never be written.