infinite monkey theorem

[joshua 1 9]

Schroeder's explanation requires a leap of faith.

Not at all, it just takes a simple and a basic understanding of math and a little science to understand what he is saying. Even though a lot of his understanding came from what was considered to be hidden teachings.

The article was ok, but in general I do not have much regard for Talk Origins. As Schroeder points out, atheists have a lot of opinions about a God that they do not believe in. It looks like they have little or nothing to add to the conversation about God. I read Schroeder because I am learning something and there are very few creationists that have much of anything to offer now a days. Esp the ones that spend most of their time to study Science. Schroeder has studied the Bible or learned from teachers of the Bible so I feel he has something to offer.

Mostly he critiques Schroeder's ignorance of science

Schroeder has a phd from MIT. He knows and understands physics. He knows and he understands the math that most of science depends on. Like Fred Hoyle their high level of understanding of math shows them that a random theory of creation just could not have happened. The universe has to have a plan and a purpose. It did not come about through random events.

 

[Paul of Eugene OR]

That is what Schroeder did was work out the math for doing it just like that. There are 50 keys on the keyboard so for every letter and space you have to count that as 50. So it's 50 times 50 times 50 for every letter and space.

Still the Bible says that: "By wisdom the LORD laid the earth's foundations, by understanding he set the heavens in place;" All of science is a study of the wisdom and knowledge that we find in Creation. So there is simply no evidence that the world was formed by a random process of any kind. The real question is what sets us apart from all the other species that we have this wisdom, knowledge and understanding that they do not seem to have.

There is such a thing as wise use of random processes. You make a false dichotomy between using random processes and wisdom. Every computer program language provides for random number generation . . . it is simply to useful in to many situations.

 

[joshua 1 9]

Mostly he critiques Schroeder's ignorance of science,

It is to bad that YOU are not able to critique Schroeder that you just have to parrot someone else in their attempt to critique. In general you should NOT copy others in that you will copy their errors and add your own error to that.

 

[joshua 1 9]

There is such a thing as wise use of random processes.

That is exactly the point: the universe is NOT a product of random process. The universe is a product of wisdom, knowledge and understanding. We live in a time of apostasy where there is a great deception.

 

[Paul of Eugene OR]

That is exactly the point: the universe is NOT a product of random process. The universe is a product of wisdom, knowledge and understanding. We live in a time of apostasy where there is a great deception.

There are random processes in our universe. And there are processes that are so far beyond our ability to compute that they might as well be random. Such as every time you toss a coin or roll a die.

 

[EverettInterpretation]

We are talking about physics and in that regard there is classic physics and quantum physics. I remember one friend of mine that was working on his Phd in classic physics and when I tried to talk to him about quantum physics he did not know anything about it and he did not want to know anything about it. Yet if you know anything at all about PBS they have a lot of programs that talk about Quantum physics. So it tends to be a popular subject in the media even if people who study classic physics are very uncomfortable with it.

That's not really what I meant, Joshua.

Both classical and quantum physics are part of the discipline of science.
However, science itself has a number of ground rules which must be followed at all times. For instance, science investigates only the natural universe and only ever attributes causes of the natural phenomenon it observes to natural causes. There is no place for the supernatural in science. This is because the scientific method is based upon Methodological Naturalism.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Methodological_naturalism

So you see, I can only explain these 'failed attempts' to you within that specific context.
I cannot introduce anything supernatural into my explanations because there is no room in naturalistic science for anything supernatural. If this is unacceptable to you, then our dialog on your initial question can go no further. I hope you can see this and I also hope that there is no ill-feeling generated between us by this deadlock.

Thanks,

E.I.

 

[quatona]

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. The chance of this happening is one in 10:500. So there would be 500 zeros. If this were the case then there would be many many many failed attempts.

Does not really follow - but we´ll let that pass for the time being.

What happened to all the failed attempts at making a universe?

Making? Are you presupposing that someone made it?
How exactly is a universe comparable to creating something that happens to be identical with something already existing, anyway?
Not sure how you´d even calculate the chances, to begin with.

 

[AnotherAtheist]

The God, by definition, is eternal being thus has no beginning or end, being outside of what you think of as time (which is a function of space thus less than the Universe), and therefore was not made, or built, or subject to such terms.

How do you know this to be true? Where is the strong objective evidence for the existence of God or anything that is outside of time?

 

[EverettInterpretation]

Hello again pshun2404.

As a follow-up to my question about Sagittarius A*, please answer me this.

Who was first to determine that the Earth is a sphere?

Did Erastothenes do it by logical inference in ancient times, without leaving Egypt?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erastothenes

Or was it done by the ships of Ferdinand Magellan, who were the first to circumnavigate the world?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Magellan

Thanks,

E.I.

 

[Freodin]

The universe is a product of [...] knowledge and understanding.

Knowledge and understanding of what?

 

[AnotherAtheist]

If your an atheist you do not believe in God so you can not very well question something you do not believe exists.

Maybe you can explain just who cleaned up the mess the ransom creation process would have made through all the many many failed attempts at the creation of a universe and the life in the universe. Someone or something has to deal with all the clutter and decide what to keep, what to throw away and what to sell or donate. Maybe there is a furnace somewhere to clean up all the clutter and the failed attempts.

Your theory that 'there is a God' exists, and I can question the soundness, completeness, and accuracy of your thoery.

We don't need to ask who woud have cleaned up the mess any random creation process would have made through 'failed attempts' unless we have any reason to believe that these failed attempts occurred. I don't see any such evidence, so why should we consider this possibility?

The current best theory for the start of the universe is the big bang theory. That suggests that the universe we know came from a single big bang, with no retakes.

 

[ecco]

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text ... Still with so many failed attempts then the mess to clean up must be huge.

Reposted for a response from joshua

Common christian belief is that "God is Eternal"
Common christian belief is that "God created the universe between 6000 years ago and 13+ billion years ago"

For the sake of discussion let's use the max...13+ Billion.
For the sake of discussion let's say that Eternity = Infinity.

For ease of discussion let's represent:
EternityInfinity as EI
Maximum age of our Universe as AU

Therefore, God created the (known) universe no more than AU years ago.

Apparently God did other things or no things for EI - AU (EI minus AU) years.

That's a verrrrrrrry long time. Almost as long as Eternity.

I'll leave it to you to decide if god just did nothing or if god made other universes, failed, successful or otherwise.​

 

[joshua 1 9]

Does not really follow - but we´ll let that pass for the time being.

Making? Are you presupposing that someone made it? How exactly is a universe comparable to creating something that happens to be identical with something already existing, anyway? Not sure how you´d even calculate the chances, to begin with.

IF the universe was not a product of wisdom, knowledge and understanding then the next best theory is that the universe is product of a random process. That means a HUGE number of failed attempts. WE know the universe is very fine tuned. In order to sustain carbon based life as we find here on earth there are a lot of requirements. The sun has to be the size of our sun, the Earth has to be the size of our earth. In fact the whole solar system would need to be identical to ours in order to support life as we find it here on earth. The chance of that happening are very slim. Not impossible but very unlikely that there is a planet anywhere in our Universe that could support life like we find here on Earth. In fact there are quite a few very special things about our planet. The high amount of minerals and the high amount water is just a start. Even as has been pointed out living in a spiral galaxy only has a frequency of .1%. A star like our sun is .05%. A planet with a mass the size of Earth needed to maintain our atmosphere is .2% So I would say it is impossible to have a sun like our sun with a Earth the size of our earth the distance our earth is from the sun with a moon like our moon the same distance the moon is from our earth. So there is very little chance you will find life anywhere in our Universe similar to life here on Earth that functions in the limited part of the wave length that we function in. Although we do have instruments that can detect a lot more then we are able to detect with our five senses. Just like we have telescopes and microscopes to look deeper into the macro and micro worlds that we seem to be a part of.

So that chance that all of this came about through random process while not impossible is very unlikely. Hoyle and Schroeder show that the odds are very much against something like that happening by chance. That is why they have to have the multi universe theory with an infinite number of possible universes. Even then science at it's best can not begin to explain how a random process would create all the natural laws we find in our Universe. We do not even understand how gravity works so it is well beyond us to explain where gravity came from and how a random process could have created gravity.

Even on top of all of this we can not explain why we even want to know where the universe came from and why we are able to examine the universe the way we can. No other species gives it any consideration at all. So there clearly is a difference between brute beast and enlightened man. The other species do not go around denying that some sort of a God created them because they do not have the ability to conceptualize and imagine those sort of thought processes. So we can address these questions that Science can not begin to provide answers for. We have a lot of answers and solutions that Science could not begin to solve or resolve. Yet to really know God you have to know Science and your Bible. One or the other is not enough because God is revealed in Creation and in the study of Creation and in the Bible.

 

[joshua 1 9]

Common christian belief is that "God is Eternal"
Common christian belief is that "God created the universe between 6000 years ago and 13+ billion years ago"​

You have to be careful with the word Eternal, that said God is outside of time. Just like light is outside of time. Where there is no time then there is no decay. Even so God is not effected by time, He is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow; He does not change and He time has no effect on Him. He is can function in the past, present and in the future. A LOT of the Bible give us predictions about the future that are extremely accurate. Difficult to understand but still very accurate.

My belief is that Adam and Eve were real historical people that lived 6,000 years ago in the Garden of Eden in what is now known as Mesopotamia. There is no conflict between science and the Bible. Also Schroeder can show the age of the earth to be 13 to 14 Billion years old.

 

[ecco]

(ecco as quoted by joshua): Schroeder's explanation requires a leap of faith.

Not at all, it just takes a simple and a basic understanding of math and a little science to understand what he is saying. Even though a lot of his understanding came from what was considered to be hidden teachings.

You do have a habit of quoting out of context snippets:

Schroeder's explanation requires a leap of faith. It is fine as long as it is not suggested to be an explanation based on science. There is nothing scientific in the notion that God's frame of reference may be vastly different from men's frame of reference. As far as faith is considered, the above assertion is not a new one, and is simply beyond any discussion in rational, scientific terms. Schroeder, though, wants readers to believe that the described explanation is somehow based on the theory of relativity. It is not.​

The point Schroeder attempts to make is that science and christianity are compatible. As Mark Perakh's critique shows, Schroeder, despite his PhD, displays a lack of scientific knowledge and/or a disregard for it.

The article was ok, but in general I do not have much regard for Talk Origins.

Did you read the right article? The critique from Perakh is from a site titled TalkReasons.com. Not TalkOrigins. Are you letting your bias against TalkOrigins cloud your views?

As Schroeder points out, atheists have a lot of opinions about a God that they do not believe in. It looks like they have little or nothing to add to the conversation about God.

The point Schroeder attempts to make is that science and christianity are compatible. As Mark Perakh's critique shows, Schroeder, not only bends science but alters his own estimates of the times of biblical events from one of his books to another of his books - with no explanation.

Schroeder has studied the Bible or learned from teachers of the Bible so I feel he has something to offer.

Much of his biblical knowledge is also wrong.

Schroeder has a phd from MIT. He knows and understands physics. He knows and he understands the math that most of science depends on.

Obviously not...
From the critique:

"giving rise to suspicion that Schroeder may actually believe that mass is the same as weight. Such a statement made by an undergraduate student on an exam in general physics would result in an immediate F grade."​

Like Fred Hoyle their high level of understanding of math shows them that a random theory of creation just could not have happened. The universe has to have a plan and a purpose. It did not come about through random events.

It's laughable, but understandable, that you would use Hoyle as an example. Hoyle argued against the Big Bang and an expanding universe long after science proved him and his mathematics wrong.

"the definitive refutation of the steady-state theory came with the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965, which was predicted by the Big Bang theory. Stephen Hawking described this discovery as "the final nail in the coffin of the steady-state theory."
​

And again...

http://www.talkreason.org/articles/reply_to_Schroeder.cfm (my emphasis)
Until Schroeder provides some reasonable answers to my critique, my assertions regarding his errors, amazing for a PhD in physics, remain in force and Schroeder's output, for all its popularity among gullible readers, has to be construed as pseudo-scientific piffle.
​

If the shoe fits...

​

 

[EverettInterpretation]

IF the universe was not a product of wisdom, knowledge and understanding then the next best theory is that the universe is product of a random process.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joshua,

I won't be taking part in any further dialog with you, for the reason I gave earlier.

However, I sincerely believe that you should ask yourself why almost all the information you give in the paragraph below is not supported by NASA and by those astronomers actually involved in the searches for Earth-like planets in this galaxy.

HEADLINE : 8.8 BILLION HABITABLE EARTH SIZE PLANETS EXIST IN THE MILKY WAY ALONE
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/spac...arth-size-planets-exist-milky-way-f8C11529186

http://www.pnas.org/content/110/48/19273.full.pdf


Why is there such a discrepancy between the information you cite and the information from the sources I've linked to?

(This is a rhetorical question, btw. You need not reply to me any further if you don't want to. I simply ask it to prompt you to examine and consider this discrepancy and to seek an honest answer to it.)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
That means a HUGE number of failed attempts. WE know the universe is very fine tuned. In order to sustain carbon based life as we find here on earth there are a lot of requirements. The sun has to be the size of our sun, the Earth has to be the size of our earth. In fact the whole solar system would need to be identical to ours in order to support life as we find it here on earth. The chance of that happening are very slim. Not impossible but very unlikely that there is a planet anywhere in our Universe that could support life like we find here on Earth. In fact there are quite a few very special things about our planet. The high amount of minerals and the high amount water is just a start. Even as has been pointed out living in a spiral galaxy only has a frequency of .1%. A star like our sun is .05%. A planet with a mass the size of Earth needed to maintain our atmosphere is .2% So I would say it is impossible to have a sun like our sun with a Earth the size of our earth the distance our earth is from the sun with a moon like our moon the same distance the moon is from our earth. So there is very little chance you will find life anywhere in our Universe similar to life here on Earth that functions in the limited part of the wave length that we function in. Although we do have instruments that can detect a lot more then we are able to detect with our five senses. Just like we have telescopes and microscopes to look deeper into the macro and micro worlds that we seem to be a part of.

So that chance that all of this came about through random process while not impossible is very unlikely. Hoyle and Schroeder show that the odds are very much against something like that happening by chance. That is why they have to have the multi universe theory with an infinite number of possible universes. Even then science at it's best can not begin to explain how a random process would create all the natural laws we find in our Universe. We do not even understand how gravity works so it is well beyond us to explain where gravity came from and how a random process could have created gravity.

Even on top of all of this we can not explain why we even want to know where the universe came from and why we are able to examine the universe the way we can. No other species gives it any consideration at all. So there clearly is a difference between brute beast and enlightened man. The other species do not go around denying that some sort of a God created them because they do not have the ability to conceptualize and imagine those sort of thought processes. So we can address these questions that Science can not begin to provide answers for. We have a lot of answers and solutions that Science could not begin to solve or resolve. Yet to really know God you have to know Science and your Bible. One or the other is not enough because God is revealed in Creation and in the study of Creation and in the Bible.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fyi,

I'm monitoring this thread in case pshun2404 decides to respond to me about the questions I've asked him.
Should he do so, I'll reply to him.

Thanks,

E.I.

 

[pshun2404]

The point Schroeder attempts to make is that science and christianity are compatible. As Mark Perakh's critique shows, Schroeder, despite his PhD, displays a lack of scientific knowledge and/or a disregard for it.

Ah hah hah hah!!!! First off Schroeder is a Jew, and what he has tried to demonstrate is that theoretically both Genesis and science can be shown to be true simultaneously, and not contradict one another (for the religionist it only depends on one's interpretation of the word "yom")...secondly he is greatly respected among his peers at MIT, from many different fields of science (each having their own "opinion" on many subjects)....thirdly just because one or even ten people give their opinion, professor Schroeder OBVIOUSLY does NOT lack knowledge in his field (Ph.D) nor does he have a disregard for science. Those are opinionated assumptions.

And many people knew of the roundness of the earth and made this assumption based on the curved appearance of the shadow of the earth against the moon long before our Egyptian friend....and others like some Hindus believed it to be a 7 tier triangle supported by three giant invisible Elephants...many Greeks (though maybe never putting it down in writing) believed in a spherical earth, but some saw it as supported on the back of a giant invisible man...I do not get your point in the who was first question....and who cares....

 

[pshun2404]

Pshun,

Thanks for the input.

So the use of extrapolation, deduction and inference in science are things you have a problem with?

Like this, perhaps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A*

E.I.

Absolutely not! Extrapolation, deduction, and inference are all fine tools of the imagination and I have no problem with them whatsoever....and sometimes, on occasion, these lead us to valuable provable fact.

This object cannot be seen or directly investigated, yet it's nature can be inferred by it's effects on it's surroundings.

You object?

Absolutely not! SOME THINGS about it CAN BE inferred (synonymous with supposition, deduction, conjecture, speculation, guess, hypothesis, presumption)....

Anything else? And what does this have to do with the absurdity or illogical nature of the example alleged by the Monkey Theorem? By all means take the actual mathematical evidence and feel free to further extrapolate, deduce, and infer what this factual data implies about the problem...You are an intelligent person so really think it through and do not try to simply ignore the implication. Based on mathematics and probabilities (two tools the scientists in your Wiki article use to infer) the monkey theorem is NOT a feasible possibility in a Universe only 13.5 billion years old....

Can you produce an equal and adequate set of evidence that negates the math? Great lets see it here...(not just conjecture or opinion that only allows these tools where they support your hypothesis and then necessarily negated or disregarded when it crowds your comfort zone)

 

[EverettInterpretation]

Ok, I'm outta here.

Pshun,

Thanks for the input.

So the use of extrapolation, deduction and inference in science are things you have a problem with?

Like this, perhaps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A*

E.I.

Absolutely not! Extrapolation, deduction, and inference are all fine tools of the imagination and I have no problem with them whatsoever....and sometimes, on occasion, these lead us to valuable provable fact.

This object cannot be seen or directly investigated, yet it's nature can be inferred by it's effects on it's surroundings.

You object?

Absolutely not! SOME THINGS about it CAN BE inferred (synonymous with supposition, deduction, conjecture, speculation, guess, hypothesis, presumption)....

---------------------------------------------------------------

What things are these?

Please specify.

 

[Theodore A. Jones]

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. The chance of this happening is one in 10:500. So there would be 500 zeros. If this were the case then there would be many many many failed attempts. What happened to all the failed attempts at making a universe? Are they in the failed attempt bucket in the sky somewhere? The universe is filled with natural laws that makes it all work and nothing seems to be a failed attempt, at least on that level. Nothing failed until self awareness came along. Then people began to question if there is a God then how could he make such a mess. Even though they do not believe in God they feel this God that they do not believe in made a mess out of the universe that He created. But the same people feel that random process is doing a fine job of creation and does not make a mess at all or if it does it cleans up after itself. Still with so many failed attempts then the mess to clean up must be huge.

God isn't a monkey. Look into a mirror to see one of those.