Left: Cicero's 45BC "scattered letters argument" against Lucretius and his chance-based atomic theory origin of the world. Right Emile Borel's 1913 "typing monkey’s argument, a thermodynamic variant of the former; originating as a spin-off of the Maxwell’s demon argument, which asserts that a violation of the second law is less probable than a monkey every typing up a work of Shakespeare. |
“My object is to dispel the fear of the gods, which arises simply from the fact that there are so many things which men do not yet understand, and therefore imagine to be effected by divine power. In respect to the origin of the world, surely the atoms did not hold council, assigning order to each, flexing their keen minds with questions of place and motion and who goes where. But shuffled and jumbled in many ways, in the course of endless time they are buffeted, driven along, chancing upon all motions, combinations. At last they fall into such an arrangement as would create this universe.”
“If one believes such a thing possible, I cannot conceive why one would not believe as well that by haphazardly throwing a vast quantity of the twenty-one letters onto the ground, the result could be Ennius’ Annals, such that they could then be read. I doubt if chance could by itself complete even a single line.”
“Philosophers say, that man is a microcosm, or little world, resembling in miniature every part of the great; and, in my opinion, the body natural may be compared to the body politic; and if this be so how can the Epicurean's opinion be true, that the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms; which I will no more believe, than that the accidental jumbling of the letters of the alphabet could fall by chance [see: typing monkeys] into a most ingenious and learned treatise of philosophy. Risum tincatis amici? [hor] This false opinion must needs create many more; it is like an error in the first concoction, which cannot be corrected in the second; the foundation is weak, and whatever superstructure you raise upon it, must of necessity fall to the ground. Thus men are led from one error to another, until with Ixion they embrace a cloud instead of Juno; or, like the dog in the fable, lose the substance in gaping at the shadow: For such opinions cannot cohere; but like the iron and clay in the toes of Nebuchadnezzar's image, must separate and break in pieces. I have read in a certain author, that Alexander wept, because he had no more worlds to conquer; which he needed not have done, if the fortuitous concourse of atoms could create one; but this is an opinion fitter for that many headed beast the vulgar to entertain, than for so wise a man as Epicurus; the corrupt part of his sect only borrowed his name, as the monkey did the cat's claw to draw the chestnut out of the fire.”— Jonathan Swift (c.1720), “A Critical Essay on the Faculties of the Mind” (Ѻ)
Video stills from the 2014 video (Ѻ) of a Muslim ridiculing the “chance” based atheist explanation of evolution and the formation of complex things, such as helicopters, using a bag of Legos. |
“If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a type writer it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favorable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel.”
“The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”— Fred Hoyle (1981), “Hoyle on Evolution”, Nature, 294(5837):105, Nov 12 (Ѻ)
The following shows Stephen Mayer’s circa 2003 “scrabble pieces argument”, a variant of Cicero’s “letters onto the ground” argument against Lucretius, against blind random chance formation of “life” out of the chaos of the universe, randomly moving atoms, and random genetic mutation. [5] |
Strobel: “The idea of life forming by random chance is out of vogue right now among scientists.”
Meyer: “I agree, virtually all origin of life experts have rejected that approach.”
Strobel: “Even so, the idea is still very much alive at the popular level. For many college students who speculate about these things, chance is still the hero. They think if you let amino acids randomly interact over millions of years life is somehow going to emerge.”
Meyer: “Well, yes, it’s true that this scenario is still alive among people who don’t know the facts, but there’s no merit to it. Imagine trying to generate even a simple book by throwing Scrabble letters onto the floor. Or imagine closing and picking Scrabble letters out of a bag. Are you going to produce Hamlet in anything like the time of the known universe?”
Meyer: “Even a simple protein molecule, or the gene to build that molecule, is so rich in information that the entire time since the big bang would not give you, as my colleague Bill Dembski likes to say, the ‘probabilistic resources’ you would need to generate that molecule by chance.”