The real question today is not the survival of the species, but rather the arrival of it. Three theories attempt to explain our origins.

A. Atheistic materialism.

This theory asserts that everything originated from nothing. In other words, if one gives enough mud enough time, it will, all by itself, produce the music of a Beethoven, the paintings of a Raphael, the writings of a Shakespeare, and the teachings of a Christ.

Question: If one million monkeys began typing day and night, each on its own typewriter, how long would it take for just one monkey to accidentally type the first ten words in the Bible (“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”)?

Answer: Imagine a rock stretching from the earth to the nearest star, some 26 trillion miles away. Once every million years a tiny bird flies to this massive rock and removes the smallest grain of sand from it. When four rocks this size have been completely carried away, then one of those monkeys will have accidentally typed out Genesis 1:1.

But this accomplishment would be absolutely nothing as compared to the probabilities that a living cell would be formed by random processes. Dr. Harold Morowitz of Yale estimated the theoretical limits for the smallest free-living thing which could duplicate [p. 1190] itself. It would require 239 individual protein molecules. What are the chances that the first protein molecule would form all its amino acids into left-handed chains? (For some unknown reason, all life consists only of these left-handed protein molecule chains.) Well, the minimum number of amino acids in a protein is 410. This then would be like flipping a coin 410 times and coming up with heads every time! The probability of one protein molecule forming with all left-handed amino acid chains is one chance in 10123. But then, even if this occurred in one protein, it would have to be repeated in at least 238 other proteins as well. The chances are now one in 1029345. This would be about twenty 81?2 x 11 pages of typed zeros!