Here is a passage from philosopher Antony Flew’s book “There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind” that illustrates the vast amount of faith required to believe life arose by chance.
“ I was particularly impressed by Gerry Schroeder’s point-by-point refutation of what I call the “monkey theorem”. This idea, which has been presented in a number of forms and variations, defends the possibility of life arising by chance using the analogy of a multitude of monkeys banging away on computer keyboards and eventually ending up writing a Shakespearean sonnet.
Schroeder first referred to an experiment conducted by the British National Council of Arts. A computer was placed in a cage with six monkeys. After one month of hammering away at it (as well as using it as a bathroom!) the monkey’s produced 50 typed pages---but not a single word. Schroeder noted that this was the case even though the shortest word in the English language is one letter (A or I). A is a word only if there is a space on either side of it. If we take it that the keyboard has 30 characters (the 26 letters and other symbols), then the likelihood of getting a one letter word is 30 x 30 x 30, which is 27,000. The likelihood of getting a one letter word is one chance out of 27,000.
Schroeder then applied the probabilities to the sonnet analogy. What’s the chance of getting a Shakespearean sonnet?” he asked? He continued: All the sonnets are the same length. They’re by definition fourteen lines long. I picked the one I knew the opening for, “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” I counted the number of letters; there are 488 letters in that sonnet. What’s the likelihood of hammering away and getting 488 letters in the exact sequence as in “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day”? What you end up with is 26 multiplied by itself 488 times----or 26 to the 488th power. Or, in other words, in base 10, 10 to the 690th. [Now] the number of particles in the universe---not grains of sand, I’m talking about protons, electrons and neutrons---is 10 to the 80th. Ten to the 80th is 1 with 80 zeros after it. There are not enough particles in the universe to write down the trials; you’d be off by a factor of 10 to the 600th. If you took the entire universe and converted it to computer chips---forget monkeys---each one weighing a millionth of a gram and had each computer chip able to spin out 488 trials at, say, a million times a second; if you turn the entire universe into these microcomputer chips and these chips were spinning a million times a second [producing] random letters, the number of trials you would get since the beginning of time would be 10 to the 90th trials. It would be off again by a factor of 10 to the 600th. You will never get a sonnet by chance. The universe would have to be 10 to the 600th times larger. Yet the world just things monkeys can do it every time.”
And the DNA coding of even a simple protein is far, far more complex than a mere Shakespearian sonnet.
Experiment just suggests that God is probably not six monkeys.
No. The experiment shows that the neo-Darwinian claim that time and chance can create life or even alter a life form is unlikely to be true.
Your conclusion is pretty much out over your skis.
