Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

by Stephen C. Meyer

In English there are vastly more ways “to go wrong than to go right”—that is, for any sequence of any given length, there are more combinations of English letters that will not produce a meaningful phrase or sentence than combinations of those same 26 letters that will generate a meaningful sentence. Indeed, the number of nonfunctional gibberish sequences dwarfs the number of functional combinations. Consequently, random changes in letters are overwhelmingly more likely to “find the gibberish,” or degrade meaning, than to generate a new meaningful sentence, especially as the number of changes to the original meaningful sequence increases. Moreover, as the length of the required phrase or sentence grows, the number of possible letter sequences of that length grows exponentially, and grows much faster than the number of possible meaningful sequences, so that the probability of finding a functional sequence via a random search diminishes precipitously with necessary sequence length. Denton noted that whereas for every meaningful sequence of English letters 12 letters long there are one hundred trillion (or 1014) corresponding gibberish sequences, for every meaningful sequence of English letters 100 letters long there are 10100 corresponding gibberish sequences, an unimaginably large number. Mathematician David Berlinski (Fig. 10.6) has dubbed this the problem of “combinatorial inflation” in his seminal 1996 essay titled “The Deniable Darwin.”16