Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

202 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
Thus the universe is only 4.725x10 17 seconds old. The number of possible
combinations of seventy-nine letters is then more than 10 99 or several trillion
trillion times the number of seconds in the present age of the universe.
Another point of comparison: it is estimated that there are only about 10 70
atoms in the entire universe.
A random search among all possibilities for this particular sentence, although
short and simple, is clearly out of the question. But what if we were
not looking for a particular sentence but merely wanted to find a meaningful
English sentence. The number of meaningful sentences seventy-nine
letters long is enormous. Linguists have calculated an estimate of 10 25 possible
English sentences that are one hundred letters in length, but since the
total possible combinations of one hundred letters (counting only the
twenty-six letters) is 3.143x10 141 , you have a ratio of one in 3.143x10 116
(Denton 310). 3 Looking for a needle in a haystack would be simple in comparison.
Probability can be expressed as the number of “right ways” divided
by the number of all possible “ways.” Those who are not intimate or
comfortable with mathematics are apt to imagine that if the number of
right ways is huge (as in the case of short, meaningful English sentences)
the probabilities must be good, but that is true only if the total number of
possible ways is not much larger. In this case it is vastly larger. It is also
true of much more complex things such as novels in the English language.
The number of such possible intelligible novels of less than four million
characters (enough to accommodate War and Peace) would seem to be infinite,
but it is not. It merely is unimaginably huge. But the number of
random strings of four million characters is so enormous that if you divided
it by the number of conceivable English novels you would still have
an inconceivably large number.
But does this premise apply to living things? Certainly the number of
possible species is unimaginably large. But surely the number of ways of
arranging a large number of atoms and molecules is much larger, something
comparable to the ratio of possible combinations of seventy-nine
letters and possible English sentences that could be constructed from them.
With living things there are so many unknowns that no one knows what
the real ratio would be. We do know that at every level, right down to the
contents of the individual cell, biological systems appear to be extremely
complex. A single cell, invisible to the naked eye, has the complexity of a
small factory. Over and over, biologists are forced, much to their chagrin,
to explain these systems in teleological terms. They are forced to describe
them in terms of their functions. They would like to say such and such a