Our Nonrandom Universe

In science, if something is caused by chance, we say that something happened randomly. The word “random” to me possesses such a magic power that anything happened in the world if we don’t know how it happened, we attribute it to random chance.

Yet randomness can be easily calculated out using simple math. It was told by mathematicians that the randomness of large, complex numbers, generally speaking, is not provable. There, any process involving as many billions of creatures for as many billions of years as is the case in earthly evolution as liable to be influenced by something besides blind chance. Of course we have all heard the old suggestion that if enough billions of chimpanzees were somehow set to typing manuscripts for enough billions of years, chance alone would ultimately enable them to write all the great works of literature. But it is easy to show the absurdity of the notion, for, if there are 50 possible letters, numbers or punctuation marks that might be put in any of the 65 spaces in the average line of the average book, a chimp would have one chance in 50 of getting the first one right. Then, for each of the 50 possible symbols, there would be 50 different possibilities for the second space, giving him one chance in 50 times 50 or 50^2 of getting both spaces right. Thus his chance of getting all of the first three spaces right would be one in 50^3 , and of getting all 65 spaces right: one in 50^65.

But 50^65 works out to be equal to 10^110. If we suppose that chimpanzees type out one letter per second, and we know there are less than 10^8 seconds in a year. It would take a billion chimpanzees for 10^84 billion years to type out just one line of book in right order. To compare, it only took about 600 million years (less than one billion) for a single cell organism to evolve into a current form of human being. 10^110 is an unimaginably big number. In fact it demonstrates conclusively, I’d say, that not even one line of any book or speech can originate purely by chance in this finite universe. There just isn’t space or time enough. So something else has to be behind things, somehow guiding them. And that, one might say, is a kind of mathematical proof of divinity – depending of course on your definition.

Ref.: "The Seven Mysteries of Life" by Guy Murchie