many people, was the turning point for the public acceptance of the theory of evolution in its confrontation with Christianity. This event was the debate between the agnostic Thomas Huxley, who came to be known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, and the Anglican Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, son of the famous anti-slavery politician, William Wilberforce.
Wilberforce began the debate and, after making several scientific
points, concluded with Paley’s argument that a watch implies the
existence of a watchmaker, and similarly design in nature implies the
existence of a Designer.
Huxley then arose and is said to have put forward his now well-known argument that six eternal monkeys or apes
typing on six eternal typewriters with unlimited amounts of paper and
ink could, given enough time, produce a Psalm, a Shakespearean sonnet,
or even a whole book, purely by chance that is, by random striking of
the keys.
In the course of his presentation Huxley pretended to find the 23rd Psalm among the reams of written gibberish produced by his six imaginary apes at their typewriters.
Let us imagine a special typewriter, ‘user-friendly’ to apes, with
50 keys, comprised of 26 capital letters, 10 numbers, one space bar, and
13 symbols for punctuation, etc. For the sake of simplicity we shall
disregard lower-case letters and settle for typing all to be in
capitals, and we shall disregard leap years.
Q: How long would it take an operator, on the average, to correctly type the 23rd
Psalm, by randomly striking keys? To obtain the answer, let us first
consider the first verse of the Psalm, which reads: ‘THE LORD IS MY
SHEPHERD, I SHALL NOT WANT.’
According to the Multiplication Rule of Probability (in simplified form)
the chance of correctly typing the three designated letters ‘THE’ from
possibilities is 1 in 50 x 50 x 50, which equals 125,000. At a rate of
one strike per second, the average time taken to make 125,000 strikes is
34.72 hours.
The chance of randomly typing the eight keys (seven letters and one
space) in the right sequence for the two words THE LORD is 1 in 50 x 50 …
eight times (i.e. 508). This is 1 chance in 39,062 billion.
There are 31,536,000 seconds in a year, so the average time taken in
years to make 39,062 billion strikes at the rate of one strike per
second would be 1,238,663.7 years.
The time taken on the average to correctly type the whole of verse 1 of the 23rd Psalm, which contains 42 letters, punctuation, and spaces, would be 5042 divided by 31,536,000 (seconds in a year), which is 7.2 x 1063 years.
And the time taken on the average to correctly type the whole of the 23rd Psalm, made up of 603 letters, verse numbers, punctuation, and spaces, would be 50603 divided by 31,536,000 which is 9.552 x 101016 years.
If the letter ‘b’ stands for billion (109),
this could be written as about one
bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb
bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb years.
By comparison, the evolutionists’ age of the Earth is (only) 4.6
billion years, and the evolutionists’ age of the universe is (only)
almost 15 billion years." CMI