This week we look at the “Infinite Monkey Theorem” and whether naturalism’s overreliance on luck can actually explain how we got here.  Don’t ever forget as we see the fingerprint of a Creator how much He loves you! “The [anthropic-design argument] and what it points to is of such an order of certainty that in any other sphere of science, it would be regarded as settled.  To insist otherwise is like insisting that Shakespeare was not written by Shakespeare because it might have been written by a billion monkeys sitting at a billion keyboards typing for a billion years.  So it might.  But the sight of scientific atheists clutching at such desperate straws has put new spring in the step of theists.”  Longley, C. (1989). Focusing on Theism. London Times, 10. “In its most popular form, the Infinite Monkeys Theorem states that if you had an infinite number of monkeys and/or an infinitely long-time period, then a monkey pressing keys at random on a typewriter would eventually be certain to reproduce the works of William Shakespeare…”  A numerical evaluation of the Finite Monkeys Theorem,  Stephen Woodcock, Jay Falletta, University of Technology Sydney in Australia, 2025 “We take a chimpanzee's working lifespan to be 109 s (just over 30 years) and the heat death of the universe to occur 10100 years after the experiment begins. Assuming that the current population of around 200,000 chimpanzees remains constant until the end of the universe...”  A numerical evaluation of the Finite Monkeys Theorem,  Stephen Woodcock, Jay Falletta, University of Technology Sydney in Australia, 2025 “It is not plausible that, even with possible improved typing speeds or an increase in chimpanzee populations, these orders of magnitude can be spanned to the point that monkey labor will ever be a viable tool for developing written works of anything beyond the trivial. As such, we reject the conclusions from the Infinite Monkeys Theorem as potentially misleading within our finite universe.”  A numerical evaluation of the Finite Monkeys Theorem,  Stephen Woodcock, Jay Falletta, University of Technology Sydney in Australia, 2025 “Once the initial stroke of luck has been granted – and the anthropic principle most decisively grants it to us – natural selection takes over: and natural selection is emphatically not a matter of luck.  Nevertheless, it may be that the origin of life is not the only major gap in the evolutionary story that is bridged by sheer luck, anthropically justified.  For example, my colleague, Mark Ridley in Mendel’s Demon…has suggested that the origin of the eukaryotic cell (our kind of cell, with a nucleus and various other complicated features such as mitochondria, which are not present in bacteria) was an even more momentous, difficult and statistically improbable step than the origin of life.  The origin of consciousness might be another major gap whose bridging was of the same order of improbability.”  Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2006 “Life is one of the strangest phenomena known.  In my opinion it shows that the universe is capable of almost anything.  Yet it amazes me that we know so much about how the universe began many billions of years ago, but we have yet to discover how life itself began.  The most likely explanation is probably that we are an accident.  Just by chance, some molecules bumped into each other at random, until finally one formed that could copy itself.  Then began the slow process of evolution that led to all the extraordinary diversity of life on earth.  Life seems to be simply what matter does given the right conditions and enough time.” Stephen Hawking, Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking: The Story of Everything, 2011               

Ver todos los episodios