Can Random Events Create Order?

by Michael Talbot, "Mathematical Evidence of the Existence of God," p. 195
via Sentry Magazine, Vol. 22 No. 1, March 1996

From Beyond the Quantum:

"David Ossekon chided his fellow mathematicians for ever popularizing the issue of monkeys and typewriters. The basic mathematics behind the notion that, given enough time, a group of monkeys would eventually type the works of Shakespeare may be simple, but the sheer enormity of such a task makes it meaningless as an explanatory principle. According to Osselton's calculations, it would take a million million monkeys roughly a million million years to type out only the name of William Shakespeare. And to obtain a paltry two lines from one of Shakespeare’s plays would require 10¹⁵⁰ strokes on a simplified fifty-two-character typewriter, or billions and billions of times more than the number of atoms in the whole universe. Ossekon concludes, ’The idea that in the fullness of time random events will ineluctably come up with the right combination is less potent than has commonly been supposed.'"