Evolutionary (pure chance) Odds
by Sherwood R. Kaip, MD; skaip799@gmail.com
The Theory of Creation has an intellectual problem. It is the non-disprovability of the concept of God. Any new information that comes along that changes any of the evidence we know about the world can simply be countered with, "OK, so God did it this new way instead of the old way we thought He used." In other words, you can't (probably) come up with any evidence that would disprove there is a God. This is intellectually very dissatisfying. It can even be carried to the point of assuming that God created the world and what's in it through the processes expressed in the Theory of Evolution.
The point of the Theory of Evolution, as practiced by most dedicated devotees, is to claim that if the Theory of Evolution is true, there need be no Creator (God) and therefore presumably there is no God.
However, the Theory of Evolution, the alternative to the Theory of Creation, has its own intellectual problem. Anything said against the probability or possibility of Evolution is countered with, "It could have evolved over billions and billions of years." This is the same kind of non-disprovable statement as in the first paragraph. No matter what evidence you bring up, "Anything could happen over billions and billions of years." Time is the God of the Theory of Evolution.
The Theory of Evolution is the process of random chance acting over (a very long) time. It has to be random chance or you are dealing with intelligence (God?). So let's look at what can be accomplished through random chance.
Let's create a word generator in English on a computer. This is rather easily done. The length of the next word is randomly picked based on the frequency of 1 letter, 2 letter, 3 letter, etc. words in the language as determined by a word count. The next letter to be randomly chosen is determined by the frequency of the various letters appearing in English prose, such as a newspaper. This means simply that e' and a' will be chosen much more often than x' and z'.
I created such a random generator and found that the likelihood of the next wordlet' generated being a valid English word_no proper names and no acronyms (like EPA or OSHA), just words that could be found in a dictionary_is substantially under 5%. What I want to accomplish is to generate 20 wordlets at a time and determine how often, by random chance alone, I will get all 20 wordlets in one of my sets to be valid English words.
Let's be generous and assume that the likelihood of the next wordlet generated being a valid English word is 5%, even though I found it to be less than that. Then the likehood of the 2nd wordlet also being valid is 5% of 5%. The likelihood of three words in a row being valid English words is 5% of 5% of 5%. You get the idea.
So the likelihood of getting all 20 wordlets in a set to be valid English words is (0.05)^20. That's 0.05 multiplied by itself 20 times. If we take the inverse of this number (divide it into 1.0), we get, 1 in every so many 20 wordlet sets will consist of 20 valid English words'. How many is this so many'? If we generate these sets at a certain rate per second, how long, on average, will it take to get a set of all 20 wordlets being valid English words?
Brace yourself. It will take on average over 3 billion years to get a wordlet set with all 20 wordlets being valid English words_if you generate the sets at a rate of one billion per second!!! For those who are not used to American math, that's 3,000 million years. And then all you have is 20 words which will almost for sure make no sense whatever.
While it may be nice to say, "Since evolution occurs over billions of years, almost anything is possible", the practical, actual, probability is that it will take you on average over 3 billion years to get a nonsense phrase of 20 valid English words when generating sets at one billion per second using random chance. What would it take to get something like the Creation by chance? Perhaps a Creator makes more sense.
Here's the math. (0.05)^20 = 9.5*10^(-27). Dividing this number into one = 1.05*10^26. That means all valid English words once for every 1.05*10^26 sets generated. At one billion sets per second, that's 1.05*10^17 seconds = 1.2*10^12 days = 3.3 billion years!