Aug 31 2008
The Infinite Monkey Theorem
This teaching is an excerpt from our Radio Antioch Podcast, Episode 2.
Have you ever heard something in the office, or in the checkout line at the store, or maybe on television, and inside you you say, “that’s just not right”! Perhaps you have an experience in your past that tells you that that person’s point of view is not correct. Maybe you are a Christian, and something in the scripture gives you a viewpoint that contradicts what you are hearing….And yet if you hear it often enough, pretty soon you start to believe it. Maybe you don’t believe it when you think about it, but these foreign ideas start to subtly work their ways into your consciousness. Have you ever had a thought, and suddenly you realize that you really don’t believe what you are thinking?
Now, you can find these contradictions in a lot of places, from political correctness to political agendas. Our news casts and televisions are constantly spitting out ideas as how our society defines the world we live in. The framework of ideas that we use to define our world is called a world view. One prevalent world view is this: Our schools teach that life evolved from simple chemical chains and became complex, living single cell creatures. In trillions of worlds through an infinite galaxy, the conditions were not quite right, and no life evolved. But they teach that somehow, through endless worlds and endless years, life happened here. And simple single cell creatures grew to more complicated things, evolving. After countless chances and worlds where this happened, after almost infinite time, Man has evolved. They say he was not created by God but is just random chance, that just happened. This is in direct contradiction to the Christian world view, that God, who is beyond our universe and beyond time, created man.
By the way, this idea is similar to the Infinite monkey theorem, which says that if you had an infinite number of monkeys typing on a keyboard, ONE of them would by coincidence would type the entire works of Shakespeare. But forget Shakespeare. Let’s try a six letter word, banana. The typewriter keypad that I wrote this with has 50 keys. A monkey typing at random would have a one in 50 chance of typing b. To type “BA” the odds are one in 50 time 50, or 1 in 2500. If you multiply it out for six letters, the odds of a monkey randomly typing all six letters to spell banana is in to 1.56 BILLION! Forget Hamlet! The monkeys can’t even spell Banana! When you think of it this way, the odds of all of this just evolving from nothing are so ridiculous that it is easier to accept a God! In fact, that’s how a number of people of science have come to God, just pondering how unlikely their world view really is.
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Photo by Oliver Hammond, Used with Permission.
