1) 200,000 monkeys is considerably fewer than the trillions, nay, quadrillions of single celled organisms doing mutations through out biological history 2) They are not generating random ACTG strings ~3 billion pairs long, they are permuting a few at a time from a working starting point of the first tiny clump of self catalyzing chemicals.

> Until such questions are answered, a God is still quite reasonable.

I'm sorry, what is the monkey typewriter supposed to prove or disprove about God?

The original post isn't even about evolution, its related to textual and historical analysis, so I don't see how this is related.

Even worse, even if evolution disappeared as a theory, that wouldn't change the truthiness of specifically the claims / myths in the bible, and wouldn't in anyway make the existence of the Christian god any more likely.

> Now weigh the odds that, if the entire world population of monkeys hitting random letters can't even make Shakespeare within the amount of time from the Big Bang until the Heat Death, that we reached the level of human intelligence. Until such questions are answered, a God is still quite reasonable.

That's only an apt analogy if genetic mutations didn't include any kind of feedback mechanism. Natural selection makes them very different scenarios.

> Until such questions are answered, a God is still quite reasonable.

Agree to disagree. God as a theory, specifically a god from a manmade religion and not as an abstract concept, continues to be absurd.

Saying "God did it" only raises more questions around odds and reasons, it's not a solution when trying to rationalize something through statistics.

> Now weigh the odds that, if the entire world population of monkeys hitting random letters can't even make Shakespeare within the amount of time from the Big Bang until the Heat Death, that we reached the level of human intelligence.

Given that humans are around, it doesn't matter the odds. I have a 1/52 chance of drawing a specific card every time I draw from a deck, but every time I draw some specific card always gets drawn. It's a mistake to think that human intelligence was the end goal, and not an artifact of random chance and one of any multitude of other results.

I'd like to hear more about this Monkey-God, randomness-universe-age, cross-over theory.

If it had been proven opposite, that Monkeys could create Shakespeare, would that have disproven the existence of God?

The Shakespeare-typing monkeys are a terrible metaphor for evolution, because there’s no selection (also, of course, 200,000 monkeys is really very few monkeys; for instance there are estimated to be about 10^30 bacteria on earth at any given time).

Yes, exactly this. Shutting down faith based by replacing it with another faith does not even satisfy basic "rational-lens" observation.

We are dealing with something that needs our attention (i.e. the origin and meaning of existence) not something that needs to be shut down by what is essentially even more religious (than religion itself!) behaviour. We have come a long way since Galileo and few, if any, of the major religions are themselves "anti-science" at this point so it's almost humorous that now is the time that science starts becoming faith based when it should by all means stick to Karl Poppers fundamental falsification thesis.