The Created Cosmos - No Monkey Business

In all likelihood you've all heard/read about evolutionists supporting the theory of evolution by comparing it to monkeys typing sonnets on a typewriter: random, purposeless, unguided chance (along with natural selection and mutations) + large quantities of time = evolution.
Well, given enough time, could monkeys compose sonnets?

It seems the British National Council of Arts actually tried it.

Here's what they did:

A computer was placed in a cage with six monkeys for one month. After one month of use (including as a bathroom), the monkeys produced 50 typed pages – but not a single word.

“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 twenty-six letters and other symbols), the likelihood of getting a one-letter word is 30 times 30 times 30, which is 27,000. The likelihood of getting a one-letter word is one change out of 27,000.

Gerry Schroeder (author of The Science of God) then asked,

‘What’s the chance of getting a Shakespearean sonnet?’…

“All 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 the exact sequence 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 488^th power. Or, in other words, in base 10, 10 to the 690^th.

"[Now] the number of particles in the universe – not grains of sand, I’m talking about protons, electrons, and neutrons – is 10 to the 80^th. Ten to the 80^th is 1 with 80 zeros after it. Then to the 690^th 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 690^th.

“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 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 90^th trials. It would be off again by a factor or 10 to the 600^th. You will never get a sonnet by chance. The universe would have to be 10 to the 600^th times larger. Yet the world just thinks monkeys can do it every time.”


Found in: "There Is A God" by Antony Flew


And what Flew and Schroeder fail to mention is that this is only one side of the coin. Composing the sonnet it one thing (one statistically impossible thing!). The other necessary component is the ability to recognize it. In other words, an entire language needs to be extant and the knowledge to understand it - add that to the monkey business and you'll feel like scratching your head!

The short of it is: life did not / can not evolve by chance (especially if you consider that the DNA in each cell contains three and a half billion nucleotide bases, is about two meters in length and has more information than three complete sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica). Life needs something/someone to order it and something/someone to create the ability to recognize the order.

Kind of only leaves one option doesn't it? And it ain't the monkeys.