The Infinite Monkey Theorem

 When I was in college, studying to become an engineer, one of the courses I took was statistics.  But since I wasn't trying to become a theoretician, I took a course in the application of statistics.  But I did learn at least enough to know that the more data points you have, the better your statistics reflect reality.  One of these theorems was called the infinite monkey theorem. There are various versions, but it goes like this:

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

Of course, being young and quite full of myself, I thought this was quite clever. Actually, it points to both the power, and the limitations of statistics. The power, of course, is in the ability to tease out small signals from a great deal of data that looks like random noise. The limitation however is that there is never an infinite anything, especially time.

Of course, I thought that this was a proof that evolution was correct. Whether one believed in a god or thought that we came about through random mutations, the infinite monkey theorem seemed to prove evolution to be true. At the same time, however, I was training to become an engineer, a profession where one designed things which, we all hoped, would make people's lives better. In my defense, I didn't have a lot of time to contemplate things metaphysical as I was busy learning about the physical.

I have mentioned before that though I was raised in the Church, I was an agnostic, not sure that there was in fact a god, and in any case, I couldn't see that if He existed, that He had much sway over world affairs. Boy, was I stupid. The infinite monkey theorem may serve a useful purpose in statistics, but it bears no relation to the real world. In the real world, if I placed an infinite bunch of parts of a clock in a box and then shook it for an infinite amount of time, it would never become a clock. It is only when some craftsman specifically designs and constructs a clock that it becomes a clock.

God is the greatest mathematician, the greatest physicist, the greatest chemist, and so on. He is the Great Engineer of the Universe and the Creator of everything that is and everything that is not. Reading the Bible where Christ rebukes the Sadducees and Pharisees, people smarter than I am, it is only by His grace that my eyes have been partially opened.