Dr. Aikman recounting one reason the noted atheist Anthony Flew (whose arguments against the existence of God I was subjected to when I was an undergraduate) changed his mind:

 The “Monkey Theorem,” in its popular form, holds that if you have an infinite number of monkeys banging away at an infinite number of keyboards, eventually you will get from one of them Shakespeare’s Sonnet Eighteen, the first four lines of which read:  

 “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? /Thou art more lovely and more temperate./ Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May/ And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.    

 Well, in  the 1990’s the British National Council of the Arts, in an inventive use of taxpayers’ money, placed six monkeys in a cage with a computer.  After banging away at the keyboard for a whole month – and using the computer as a bathroom at the same time – the monkeys had typed 50 pages but failed to produce a single word in the English language, not even the letter “a” by itself.   [Gerry] Schroeder applied probability theory to the “Monkey Theorem” and calculated that the chance of getting Sonnet Eighteen by chance was 26 multiplied by itself 488 times (488 is the number of letters in the sonnet) or, in base 10, 10 to the 690th.  If that number is written out, it is 1 with 690 zeroes following it.  But, as Schroeder showed, the number of particles in the entire universe –  protons, electrons and neutrons – is only ten to the 80th.  Thus, even if every particle in the universe were a computer chip that had been spinning out random letters a million times a second since the beginning of time, there would still be no Shakespeare’s Sonnet Eighteen by chance.  As Flew concluded, “if the theorem [the Monkey Theorem] won’t work for a single sonnet, then of course it’s simply absurd to suggest that the more elaborate feat of the origin of life could have been achieved by chance.

I love knowing that there are 10 to the 80th particles in the universe!  Is that all?  And a typing monkey couldn’t come up with one of them!

Just checking to see if people are so uneducated and unknowledgeable today about the lunar eclipse coming up that Columbus’s old gambit would still work:

An eclipse is credited with saving the life of Christopher Columbus and his crew in 1504. 

Stranded on the coast of Jamaica, the explorers were running out of food and faced with increasingly hostile local inhabitants who were refusing to provide them with any more supplies.

Columbus, looking at an astronomical almanac compiled by a German mathematician, realised that a total eclipse of the Moon would occur on February 29, 1504.

He called the native leaders and warned them if they did not cooperate, he would make the Moon disappear from the sky the following night.

The warning, of course, came true, prompting the terrified people to beg Columbus to restore the Moon — which he did, in return for as much food as his men needed. He and the crew were rescued on June 29, 1504.

Joe Carter tells about an interesting mathematical study proving that vampires cannot exist. If a vampire has to feed once a month and his victim becomes a vampire, and THOSE vampires drink people’s blood and turn THEM into vampires, the human race would DECREASE geometrically and the number of vampires would INCREASE geometrically. In two years, the human race would cease to exist. Since human beings DO exist, there must not be any vampires.

But look at the application. According to the authors of the paper, Costas J. Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi, “Another philosophical principal related to our argument is the truism given the elaborate title, the anthropic principle. This states that if something is necessary for human existence, then it must be true since we do exist. In the present case, the nonexistence of vampires is necessary for human existence.”

The anthropic principal–that conditions had to be just right in a statistically-improbable way for human life to exist–is a concept much used against the theory of random evolution by advocates of Intelligent Design. Here is how Mr. Carter applies the argument from vampires:

The anthropic principle is often stated in a positive way, assuming that certain conditions must be met before human life can exist. At least two dozen demandingly exact physical constants must be in place for carbon-based life to exist, the slightest variation in any of these conditions–even to a minuscule degree–would have rendered the universe unfit for the existence of any kind of life, much less for humans.

But I believe Efthimiou and Gandhi’s paper provides an example of how the anthropic principle can be stated in a negative way. Vampires are a prime example of a class of objects (let’s call them V-class objects) whose non-existence is necessary for the existence of humans. In other words, if humans exist, then it is necessary that V-class objects do not exist.

At first glance this seems so obvious as to be unworthy of notice. Since we humans do, in fact, continue to exist, it shouldn’t be surprising that vampires (and other V-class objects) do not exist. But this begs the question of why humans exist and V-class objects do not. Their existence is, after all, as probable (or improbable) as the existence of humans. And the non-existence of any V-class objects is as statistically improbable as the aligning of dozens of independent physical constants that give rise to life.

The anthropic principle could therefore be restated as claiming that the existence of human life requires both (a) the alignment of several cosmological, chemical, and physical constants and (b) the non-existence of all V-class objects. The probability that each of these stochastically independent events could align precisely as they have, without any intervention, is roughly 0 — in other words, it can’t happen. The evidence therefore points to “fine-tuning” of these conditions.

Having reduced the chance hypothesis to a virtual impossibility we are left with the obvious conclusion that the fine-tuning is not only apparent but actual. The fine-tuning implies the existence of a tuner, hence we can conclude that the scientific evidence supports the conclusion that God exists.

Thanks, Webmonk and others, for pointing out the howler in that article that alleges that scientific observation might destroy the universe: The scientist was quoted as denying that we was referring to causality, but the reporter ignored his own source and went on to assert causality all through the story! (Why didn’t I notice that?) Still, the truth remains that science is becoming far less materialistic, common-sensical, and reductionistic than it used to be.

Frank Sonnek points out a better article that illustrates that point, how the very concept of a scientific law is up for grabs. The writer says that the very notion that there are laws that govern nature derives from Christianity, which gave birth to modern science. He also gets tangled up himself, saying that we must not allow ourselves to invoke a divine providence, that we have to find a solution from within the system, even though that is proving impossible!

According to Quantum mechanics, observing a system changes it. Now scientists are worried that by observing “dark energy,” we may have shortened the lifespan of the universe.

Please read that linked article. And contemplate this sentence:

Some mathematical theories suggest that, in the very beginning, there was a void that possessed energy but was devoid of substance. Then the void changed, converting energy into the hot matter of the big bang.

Sound familiar? But what is most striking in this article is how contemporary science is no longer working with conventional logical categories, how it has become as mystical and as unbounded as any theology. It is also quite culture-bound: Postmodernists do believe “we create our own reality,” so why should we not be able to deconstruct reality through our perception? This may also herald the rise of a new worldview, with affinities to Hinduism, a new monism of mind and matter. But these scientists think intelligent design is beyond the pale.