SCIENCE & THE BIBLE by Bolton Davidheiser, Ph.D., Chairman o f the Science Division, Biola College 077to*t6e B R A I L L E BOOKS, PAMPHLETS, TRACTS Evangelistic — Devotional FREE to the Blind (as the Lord provides) "Th a t those who see not may see' Write: CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP FOR THE BLIND INTERNATIONAL, INC. Free In form a tion H ow you can study the Bible BIOLA EVENING SCHOOL 558 So. Hope St., Los Angeles 17, Calif. HONG KONG is the GATEWAY to Asia used by The Bible Institute of Los Angeles, Inc. GOSPEL PREACHING— Emmanuel Church holding regular services in English and Chinese in the heart of the colony and the Countryside. MED ICAL M IN ISTRY — Emmanuel Clinic with two doctors and a regular staff of nurses and evangelists, treating over 1,500 monthly. PRINTED PAGE — Biola Book Room, a large evangelical book store in downtown Kowloon distributing Bibles and literature in English and Chinese. YOUTH CENTER — Recently built in the New Territories. Primary and Evening Schools for factory workers and their chil dren. Summer and winter Bible Confer ences. Charles A. Roberts, D.D., Supt. The Bible Institute of Los Angeles, Inc. Hong Kong Department 558 South Hope St., Los Angeles 17, California For complete information and gifts, please write 558 South Hope Street Los Angeles 17, Calif. A FOUR FOLD M IN IST RY would take them still longer. IN THE BEGINNING GOD CREATED THE HEAVEN AND THE EARTH. The length of time it would take is indeed beyond our comprehension, but an illustration may help. Think of a large mountain which is solid rock. Once a year a bird comes and rubs its beak on the mountain, wearing away an amount equivalent to the finest grain of sand. (About .0025 inch in diameter.) At this rate of erosion the mountain would disappear very slow ly, but when completely gone the monkeys would still be just warming up. Think of a rock not the size of a mountain but a rock larger than the whole earth, larger than the whole solar system. Try to think of a rock so large that if the earth were at its center its surface would touch the nearest star. This star is so far away that light coming from it takes more than four years to get here, traveling 186,000 miles every second. If a bird came once every thousand years and removed an amount equivalent to the smallest grain of sand, more than 400 such rocks would be worn away before our champion super simians would be expected to type Genesis 1:1. If single spaced on one side of a page, the paper used in this typing would make a mass so large that something moving at the speed of light would take as long to penetrate it as all the time that the geology books allow since the fossil record began. Of course this is quite fantastic, but it is evident that a million monkeys would never type a Shakesperian play in a million years. Similarly we be lieve the idea that lifeless matter could evolve by chance into the life we know on earth in a billion years or in a couple of billion years is also fantastic. *For the basic formula, see: Feller, William. An Introduction to Prob ability Theory and Its Implications. Volume 1. Page 266. Wiley, 1950 Huxley to the effect that if a million monkeys were permitted to strike the keys of a million typewriters for a million years, they might by chance make a copy of a Shakesperian play. It is intended to show by analogy that if evolution is given enough time it may produce by chance all known forms of life starting from lifeless material. If we assume some facts about the typing ability of monkeys, we can treat these facts mathematically* and see how convincing the analogy real ly is. Actual monkeys would soon tire of typing and would pursue more pleasing simian sports while their typewriters stood idle through most of the million years. Therefore, if we assume that these primates work dili gently and find that they still are unable to produce anything of literary merit, the analogy will be shown to have no value. Indeed, the more ex treme or absurd the assumptions we make favorable to their success, the more thoroughly the analogy will be discredited. Instead of giving them standard typewriters let us give the monkeys simplified machines with only capital letters, seven punctuation marks, and a spacing key. Let us assume that each of the million monkeys types con stantly 24 hours a day at the speed which the world’s champion human typist was able to maintain for a few minutes — about 12^ keys per sec ond. The only other assumption is that the monkeys type purely by chance and are as likely to strike any key as any other key. To make their task simple, let us see how long it would be expected to take them to type just the first line of Hamlet: BER: WHO’S THERE? The answer is that if this experiment were repeated a number of times it would take them on the average 284,000,- 000,000 years. To type the first verse of Genesis The Card With a Red Border Fiction - 200 pages The author graduated from Moody Bible Institute, but in college his faith was severely tested. His experience is reflected in this book as a young man loses his faith in college and the girl goes to a Bible Institute. It ran as a serial for two years in a Christian magazine. Price 75c - Cloth $1.25 GET 41 OF HUMBERD'S BOOKS FOR $11.95 — Send for Catalogue — HUMBERD PRESS - Box K - Flora, Ind. JULY, 1959 31
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