Jew4Judaism
New Member
Atheists often say we shouldn't be impressed by evidence of design in the universe, because while we wouldn't expect a monkey to randomly type a Shakespearian sonnet, if you have billions of monkeys typing away for billions of years, we shouldn't be surprised if one of them gets it.
Rabbi Gerald Schroder, who teaches at Aish Hatorah in Jerusalem, takes the atheists' bull by the horns: what, indeed, are the odds of randomly typing a Shakespearian sonnet?
Rabbi Schroder picks "How Do I Love Thee?", the only sonnet he's familiar with. It has 489 letters. Ignoring capitalization & punctuation, there are 26^489 possible letter combinations, which is on the order of 10^690 (that's a 1 with 690 zeroes after it).
As for generating those combinations, he says, forget monkeys; they'll never get the job done. Picture the entire universe, with its 10^56 grams of mass, as composed entirely of nanocomputers, each weighing a billionth of a gram, each capable of producing a billion attempted sonnets per second. Over the 10^18 seconds since the Big Bang, these nanocomputers would have produced 10^92 attempted sonnets. That's a huge number - but it's a drop in the bucket compared to 10^690 possible letter combinations. We're off by a factor of 10^598. That's like hitting the lottery 57 times in a row.
That's to get the sonnet once, anywhere in the universe, in a universe composed entirely of nanocomputers, going nonstop since the Big Bang. And if those are the odds of getting the sonnet, just imagine the odds of getting Shakespeare.
Rabbi Gerald Schroder, who teaches at Aish Hatorah in Jerusalem, takes the atheists' bull by the horns: what, indeed, are the odds of randomly typing a Shakespearian sonnet?
Rabbi Schroder picks "How Do I Love Thee?", the only sonnet he's familiar with. It has 489 letters. Ignoring capitalization & punctuation, there are 26^489 possible letter combinations, which is on the order of 10^690 (that's a 1 with 690 zeroes after it).
As for generating those combinations, he says, forget monkeys; they'll never get the job done. Picture the entire universe, with its 10^56 grams of mass, as composed entirely of nanocomputers, each weighing a billionth of a gram, each capable of producing a billion attempted sonnets per second. Over the 10^18 seconds since the Big Bang, these nanocomputers would have produced 10^92 attempted sonnets. That's a huge number - but it's a drop in the bucket compared to 10^690 possible letter combinations. We're off by a factor of 10^598. That's like hitting the lottery 57 times in a row.
That's to get the sonnet once, anywhere in the universe, in a universe composed entirely of nanocomputers, going nonstop since the Big Bang. And if those are the odds of getting the sonnet, just imagine the odds of getting Shakespeare.