Creationists' monkey business
Sometimes, very rarely, American right-wingers dare to tell their readers what atheists believe (or, rather, don't believe). And when they do so, their arguments serve as little more than a naive straw man attack. Either they are pitifully ignorant about atheist arguments as well as natural science, or they carefully avoid the stronger arguments as to not inform their readers that these arguments exist.
Charitably, I will assume that Dennis Prager is just extremely ignorant, and that he has chosen to reveal this ignorance to a no doubt mostly sympathetic audience, when he argues that the recent "experiment" with monkeys and typewriters have anything at all to say about evolution. He first mentions an argument Thomas Huxley allegedly made in an evolution debate, that given enough typewriters and monkeys, sooner or later they would produce Psalm 23, a Shakespearean Sonnet or even Shakespeare's complete works.
Now, if Huxley made the argument at all (and today this story seems to exist merely in creationist writings, one copying the other, none giving any credible original source), the point would be that you can't just look at the probability of a single experiment. If you have a lot of time, and a lot of attempts, events of very low probability will eventually occur.
This, while a true and important fact, is only tangentiably relevant to evolution and atheism.
Not all atheists use this argument, but it accurately represents the atheist belief that with enough time and enough solar systems, you'll get you, me, and Bach's cello suites.
This belief has always struck me as implausible. The argument that infinitely complex intelligence came about by itself, unguided by any intelligence, can only be deemed convincing by those who have a vested interest (intellectual, emotional, psychological) in atheism..
It doesn't all surprise me that Prager finds this argument implausible. It is. And it's not an argument ever put forth by any evolutionist, atheist or not.
What Prager and many other creationists totally overlook is natural selection. The whole point of Darwin's theory of evolution is that chance plays but a minor role in the evolution of species. Natural selection, and thus evolution, is a cumulative process where 'randomness' plays no larger role than in any other chemical process.
A more relevant experiment would be to make a mechanism that, every time a monkey types a correct sequence of characters, saves this sequence and preserves it. Monkeys can, as we now know, make a mess of any experiment, but computers are very suitable for experimenting with how natural selection is way superiour to random processes.
Such an experiment has actually been carried out, as explained in a brilliant article debunking creationist misconceptions in the Scientific American:
As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence "TOBEORNOTTOBE." Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613 sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet's). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in just four and a half days.
Prager's article is thus built on misconceptions and ignorance on practically every level, yet he argues that it is atheists, not believers, who are emotionally indulged to hold their beliefs. This is pretty obviously asburd, considering the importance afterlife beliefs have in explaining why religious ideas appeal to people.
But neither math nor science argues that all came about randomly, without a Creator. Only a keen desire to deny God explains such a belief, a belief that should be laid to rest beneath a large pile of monkey doo-doo at Plymouth University, England.
Depending on how you look at it, the article is either an amusingly naive act of rationalisation from a man clinging to his unsupported fantasies, or a series of insults to cover up his own lack of arguments and knowledge of basic science.
It is rather amusing that creationists argue that it is impossible to believe that molecular life could have originated by chance, and yet they postulate as a substitute an enormously complex entity, way more improbable than even the idea of a fully-formed human originating by pure chance (which, again, no scientist could believe), namely that God has always existed and is uncreated. The child's question, "but who created God?," is as yet unanswered by theists and singularily demolishes their hypocritical appeal to "chance."
Natural selection reduces the need for naturalists to appeal to highly improbable random events. Alas for theists, there is no scientific explanation that could explain their culturally postulated deity, which is such an extremely impossible being that the only rational conclusion is that it doesn't exist.
11:18:24 PM 
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