Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

by Stephen C. Meyer

Now imagine a new kind of lock with three crucial differences from an ordinary lock. First, with this new alternative lock, there are four positions on every dial that may—in combination with other positions on other dials—open the lock. My bike thief would like this feature of this kind of lock, since it seems to allow more wiggle room at each dial. But he doesn’t like the two other features of this lock. For one, each dial displays one of 20 letters rather than one of 10 numeric digits. Second, instead of 5 dials, there are 100 dials. On the upside, because 4 of the 20 letters on each of the 100 dials might work, there are 4100, or a whopping 1060, correct combinations that will open the lock. That’s an astronomically large number of correct combinations. But, on the downside, there are 20 possible settings at each of 100 dials, which computes to 20100, or 10130, possible combinations, a number that totally dwarfs the number of correct combinations of dial settings.