Why Richard Dawkins’ typing monkey theorem is a load of nonsense

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins employs the typing monkey concept in his book The Blind Watchmaker to demonstrate the ability of natural selection to produce biological complexity out of random mutations.

I have often heard this argument advanced by atheists in debates but in fact it does not survive deeper scrutiny.

Philosopher and former atheist Antony Flew, who became a theist in later life, explains how he changed his mind on whether the origin of life pointed to the activity of a creative Intelligence. It was in a debate in 2004 at New York University with Israeli scientist Gerald Schroeder that he announced he now accepted the existence of a God.

Flew explains his thinking in his book ‘There is a God’, which I finally got around to reading earlier this year. He argues on pp75-8 as follows:

‘I have embraced since the beginning of my philosophical life of following the argument no matter where it leads.

I was particularly impressed with Gerry Schroeders'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 Shakesparearean 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 monkeys produced fifty typed pages - but no a single word. Schroeder noted that this was the case even though the shortest work 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 thirty characters (the 26 letters and other symbols), then the likelihood of getting a one-letter world is 30 x 30 x 30, which is 27,000. The likelihood of a getting a one-letter word is one chance 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 line for, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" I counted the number of letters; there are 488 letters in the sonnet. What's the likelihood of hammering away and getting 488 letters in exact sequence as in "Shall I campare 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. Ten to 690th is 1 with 690 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 the monkeys - each one weighing a millionth of a gram and had each computer chip able to spin out 288 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 time larger. Yet the world just thinks monkeys can do it every time.

After hearing Schroeder's presentation, I told him that he had very satisfactorily and decisively established that the 'monkey theorem' was a load of rubbish, and that it was particularly good to do it with just a sonnet; the theorem is sometimes proposed using the works of Shakespeare or a single play, such as Hamlet. If the theorem won't work for a single sonnet, then of course it's simply absurd to suggest that the more elaborate feat of the origin of life could have been achieved by chance.’

Dawkins’ ill-gotten inheritance and misrepresentation of Scripture

It’s been a difficult few days for Richard Dawkins.

On Tuesday 14 February, some critics branded him ‘an embarrassment to atheism’ after what many listeners considered a humiliation in a Radio 4 debate with Giles Fraser, formerly Canon Chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral.

Dawkins boasted that he could recite the full title of Charles Darwin's ‘The Origin of Species’, then when challenged, dithered and said: ‘Oh God.’

In today’s Sunday Telegraph there is an interesting article linking his family with the slave trade.

One of his direct ancestors, Henry Dawkins (pictured), amassed such wealth that his family owned 1,013 slaves in Jamaica by the time of his death in 1744.

And the Dawkins family estate, consisting of 400 acres near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, was bought at least in part with wealth amassed through sugar plantation and slave ownership.

One of his other relatives, James Dawkins, was an MP who voted in 1796 against Wilberforce's proposal to abolish the slave trade, helping to defeat it by just four votes. He is also believed to have been among just 18 MPs who supported an amendment to postpone the act's implementation by five years.

Dawkins is now facing calls to apologise and make reparations for his family’s past.

He has responded predictably, and with some justification, that he is not personally responsible.

But he has also taken the opportunity to lash out again against Christianity:

‘I condemn slavery with the utmost vehemence, but the fact that my remote ancestors may have been involved in it is nothing to do with me… For goodness sake, William Wilberforce may have been a devout Christian, but slavery is sanctioned throughout the Bible.’

The charge that the Bible sanctions slavery is a common one from Dawkins and his New Atheist colleagues but is actually groundless.

Contrary to what Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris have said, the keeping of servants in ancient Israel can hardly be called ‘a warrant for trafficking in humans’ or a means of treating people ‘like farm equipment’.

As Paul Copan cogently argues in his recent book ‘Is God a moral monster?’, a mistake critics (like Dawkins and his friends) make is to equate ‘servanthood’ in the Old Testament with ‘prewar slavery’ in the US South.

An Israelite strapped for shekels could choose to become an indentured servant to pay off his ‘debt’ to a ‘boss’ or ‘employer’ (adon). But calling him a master is way too strong a term just as the term ‘ebed’ (servant, employee) should not be translated ‘slave’.

Servanthood in Israel was a voluntary (poverty-induced) arrangement used to ensure that indebted people’s welfare was provided for whilst debts were paid off. Once a servant was released, he was free to pursue his own livelihood without any further obligations, and under the sabbatical year arrangement all ‘servants’ were freed and forgiven their debts after seven years anyway.

In fact one scholar, JA Motyer, has written, ‘Hebrew has no vocabulary of slavery, only servanthood.’

In fact one might suggest that this system was far more just than our present one where people can declare themselves bankrupt, or waste millions as a banker gambling with other people’s money, and get off scot-free!

Furthermore, under Old Testament Law, injured servants had to be released (Exodus 21:26, 27), kidnapping a person to sell as a slave was punishable by death (Exodus 21:16, Deuteronomy 24:7) and Israelites were obliged to offer safe harbour to foreign runaway slaves (Deuteronomy 23:15, 16).

Contrary to Dawkins’ claims, these arrangements were far more protective of slaves than his own ancestors were. Stones? Glass houses?

But lest we are too quick to judge Dawkins for his ill-gotten inheritance and misrepresentation of the Bible, we should remind ourselves that the author of the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’, John Newton, was once a slave-trader... who repented.

And we all fall short of God’s grace... and all have ancestors and relatives who have done questionable things.

Perhaps there is hope for Dawkins yet!

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind but now I see.

Richard Dawkins moral agenda

Much ink has already been spilt on Richard Dawkins' reaction to Baroness Warsi’s warning about the rising tide of ‘militant secularization’ and his forgetting the name of Darwin’s classic work on evolution in a radio four debate.

Dawkins' Foundation for Reason and Science (UK) found in a poll published today that almost three quarters (74 per cent) of 'Christians' polled agreed that religion should not influence public policy, while only about one in eight (12 per cent) thought that it should.

It also found that 92 per cent of 'Christians' agreed that the law should apply to everyone equally, regardless of their personal religious beliefs.

Other interesting findings in Dawkins' survey of a sample of the 54% who called themselves ‘Christian’ in a recent census included the following:

•62% favoured a woman's right to have an abortion within the legal time limit
•61% agreed that homosexuals should have the same legal rights in all aspects of their lives as heterosexuals
•46% did not disapprove of sexual relations between two adults of the same sex
•23% believed that sex between a man and a woman was only acceptable within marriage

None of these findings will surprise evangelicals as it has long been evident that most people in Britain who call themselves ‘Christian’ neither have a Christian worldview nor accept biblical authority.

But I was more interested in Dawkins' statements about his own ethical values.

The Telegraph reports him as saying that ‘Britain is a secular society, with secular, humane values’.

He then goes on to complain about ‘Christian campaign groups’ which have ‘become increasingly vocal’ and are ‘demanding special rights for Christians to be exempted from equalities legislation, strenuously opposing all attempts to review the law on assisted suicide, (and) campaigning against further social advances such as equal rights for gay people to marry.’

So, either explicitly or implicitly, it seems that Dawkins ‘secular human values’ include the promotion of abortion, euthanasia, sex outside marriage and same sex marriage. No wonder he dislikes Christianity so much.

On the home page of his website there is a link to the The Appignani Foundation on the website of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU)

The Appignani Foundation was set up in 2001 by Louis Appignani with an endowment of US$2,500,000 to support ‘secular activities that will address significant, viable and long term human goals on our planet’.

These goals, we are told, ‘can be accomplished by encouraging creative free thought that spreads humanistic values and through a commitment to the belief that scientific research is the most reliable path to truth’.

IHEU is the ‘world union of more than 100 Humanist, rationalist, ethical culture, atheist and freethought organisations in over 40 countries’ with a mission ‘to build and represent the global Humanist movement that defends human rights and promotes Humanist values world-wide’.

Its ‘resolution’ page includes statements supporting abortion, euthanasia, population control and lesbian and gay rights.

Amongst the organizations under its umbrella is the British Humanist Association which embraces similar values on its website as follows:

•The British Humanist Association has long supported attempts to legalise assisted dying for the terminally ill.
•The British Humanist Association’s position in regard to abortion is ‘pro-choice’.
•We campaign for stronger equality laws against irrelevant discrimination, particularly in the context of the 'religion or belief' and 'sexual orientation' equality strands.

Now none of this is surprising and I have previously blogged on the Secular Medical Forum’s agenda to attack Christianity and promote abortion, physician assisted suicide and embryonic stem cell research.

But it is worth noting that Dawkins anti-Christian crusade is not just an intellectual attack on Christian belief. It is perhaps even more an attack on fundamental Christian values such as the sanctity of life and sexual purity. And, as the Apostle Paul reminds us in Romans 1, unbelief in the creator is inextricably linked to a rejection of the creator’s character and morality.

It is said that you can't derive an ought from an is. But this is exactly what Dawkins has done. On the one hand he tells us that 'DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music'.

On the other hand he builds a profoundly anti-Christian set of ethics seemingly out of a vacuum.

Jesus said, 'the world hates me because I testify that what it does it evil' (John 7:7)

Well isn't that interesting! I wonder if it explains some of Dawkins' anti-Christian passion.

Is his problem with the idea of a creator who holds us to account in fact more moral than intellectual?

'For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse...Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools… Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator...Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practise them.'