Has Science Buried God… because if monkeys could type…?
In chapter 10, Lennox critiques Dawkins view that unguided natural processes can account for the origin of biological information. The idea put forward by Dawkins (a variant allegedly dating back to T.H. Huxley) is that a bunch of monkeys typing on type writers, if given enough time, paper, and energy, would eventually come up with a poem or even a whole book of Shakespeare’s. Now the odds of this happening randomly are astounding which is admitted by Dawkins as well. The solution for Dawkins is then to break the problem down into small manageable parts. The origin of life was not from purely chance processes, it must have started from something simple enough to arise by chance, but then there was a “cumulative sieving or selection process in which the results of one sieving process are fed into the next.” In other words, it is a combination of chance and necessity. In Dawkins example, there is a target phrase the monkeys are shooting for (“Methinks it is like a weasel” – from Hamlet), 28 monkeys in a row typing away, and one letter that each monkey has to get in the right sequence. When the monkey gets the required letter he’s done. Now if this were completely random (monkeys not knowing what letter they were shooting for) the odds of this happening are about 1 in 10 to the 31 power (1 followed by 31 zeros), i.e., extremely small. But with the qualifications that the monkeys know their target and stop, it would take about 43 tries to get the right answer.
Now remember that Dawkins is trying to prove that natural selection (a blind, mindless, unguided process) has the power to produce biological information. But what Dawkins introduces is a target phrase, a precise goal, and profoundly un-Darwinian as Dawkins admits. How could blind evolution see the target and compare what is generated with it? How could mindless evolution require inputs which bear all the marks of an intelligent mind? And Lennox concludes, “And ironically, the very information that the mechanisms are supposed to produce is apparently already contained somewhere within the organism, whose genesis he claims to be simulating by his process. The argument is entirely circular.”
Lennox astutely points out what is going on with Dawkins argument. Dawkins (and others) intelligently program their scenario “to remove the real problem they set out to solve”. There is no new information generated. All the information used to set up the problem dictates the outcome in a very simple and expected way. To increase the probability of getting the right answer (Methinks it is a weasel), Dawkins had to reduce the complexity of the problem. But evolution is supposed to be able to create greater complexity out of something less complex? Lennox is right, “Dawkins’ whole proposal thus turns out to be nothing but a further example of assuming what you claim to be proving”. Actually, the whole scenario put forward by Dawkins, as well as the others highlighted by Lennox, if anything, increases the “plausibility for intelligent design”.
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