The Case Against a Random Universe
By Daniel C. Peterson and William J. Hamblin

If enough monkeys pound away at enough typewriters, they’ll eventually produce Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  This picturesque claim has long served to make the point that, in a universe infinitely large and infinitely old, sheer random chance guaranteed that life would appear somewhere, sometime, somehow.  No outside intervention was required.

However, a rather difficult but fascinating book entitled A Case against Accident and Self-Organization argues powerfully that such a scenario is impossible.  Dean Overman, a prominent lawyer with a sophisticated understanding of contemporary science and, especially, of mathematics, critiques naturalistic theories of the universe from several angles, showing that they are essentially statements of faith, not only unsupported by the evidence but flying in its face.

Would chimpanzees ever really type out “Hamlet”?  Overman chooses a brief passage from Shakespeare’s Macbeth -- on the supposed meaninglessness of life -- to make his point.  With only 379 letters, it is far shorter than Hamlet.  Yet the probability of even so short a passage appearing by chance is easily shown to be one in 10⁵³⁶ (that is, one followed by 536 zeros).  In order to understand how poor those odds are, it might help to know that there are only 10⁸⁰ atoms in the observable universe, and that, as Overman notes elsewhere, one in 10⁶⁰ represents your chance of hitting a one-inch target with a random bullet at a distance of twenty million light years.  Scientists typically consider anything whose odds are less than one in 10⁵⁰ to be a mathematical impossibility.

In that spirit, Overman argues that the notion that the universe arose and that life originated by chance is less reasonable than expecting a Boeing 747 to emerge coincidentally when a typhoon hits a junkyard.  The universe is much more complex than a few lines of Shakespeare.  Indeed, its precision is so improbable and the number expressing its improbability is so large that, if we wanted to write each one of that number’s digits on a subatomic particle, the universe contains too few such particles to do so.  Even the ordered assembling of the 2000 enzymes required to form a single bacterium like E. coli has a probability of no more than one in 10^40,000 -- a number far, far below mathematical impossibility.

Overman’s book is a fascinating romp through current science.  He explains the four fundamental forces in the universe -- gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces -- and points out that even an inconceivably tiny change in any one of them would have resulted in a universe without galaxies, stars, atoms, or even nuclei -- and, thus, obviously without life.  He comments on the remarkable fact that our higher mathematics actually fits the cosmos, and does so in ways that cannot have arisen from evolution or survival advantage.  (He is careful to say, incidentally, that he is not arguing against evolution as such, or against the gradual emergence of life -- merely against its happening by chance.)

Overman looks at the famous experiments of Miller and Urey in the 1950s, which attempted to duplicate the conditions under which life supposedly emerged from inert matter.  The experiments seemed promising, but have not delivered on their promise.  They assumed that the earth’s early atmosphere contained no oxygen, because the organic compounds they sought could not have arisen in its presence.  But scientists now believe that oxygen was indeed present.  Without oxygen, no protective ozone layer would have existed to save organic compounds from lethal ultraviolet radiation.  What is more, although Urey and Miller’s theory of the origins of life required a “prebiotic soup” from which life was to develop, there is no evidence, anywhere, that it ever existed.

With the general acceptance of the Big Bang as the origin of the cosmos, and with better knowledge of geology and geophysics, scientists no longer have an infinitely old universe to play with.  Life arose within a relatively short time period, which makes the odds against its happening by chance even more impressive.  Although randomness and naturalism are the reigning dogmas in high school and college textbooks, Overman says, they have no support in the numbers.  Just go figure.