In a nutshell, the argument goes something like this: ″[variable or infinite] number of monkeys banging at typewriters for [variable or infinite] years could or could not (depending on the standpoint) produce psalm 23 or Shakespeare's Hamlet.″

For instance: "A human being could not evolve by random chance because even if a million monkeys hammered at a million typewriters for a million years, they could not recreate psalm 23 by random chance." For statistical reasons, not just because it's hard to type in Hebrew.

Or, as with the other version I mentioned: ″[mathety math math] ...all this means that the chance that any kind of a 200-component integrated functioning organism could be developed by mutation and natural selection just once, anywhere in the world, in all the assumed expanse of geologic time, is less than one chance out of a billion trillion. What possible conclusion, therefore, can we derive from such considerations as this except that evolution by mutation and natural selection is mathematically and logically indefensible!″  -  Morris

The article that quote came from is an attempt to mathematically disprove evolution by showing that it is prohibitively unlikely that system (A) could accomplish goal (B). In this case (A) embodies a set of rules and limits of the author's choosing, and (B) is a goal, also of the author's choosing. Of course, if you control both sides of the equation you can make it do whatever you want. This is a form of straw man argument.  For instance, Morris sets the goal as a "200-part system", but then doesn't really explain how he arrived at this number. His only statement regarding the choice is, "Lest anyone think that a 200-part system is unreasonably complex, it should be noted that even a one-celled plant or animal may have millions of molecular 'parts'." This is arguably the most important number in the article, and his only justification for it is that it could have been more. Jack Szostak, a professor at Harvard, says that two components would be the minimum necessary to evolve. So right off the bat we get the feeling thse numbers are arbitrary.

Morris' article proposes the conditions of one billion ″mutating systems″ per square foot of Earth's surface of 10^14... Which appears to be a a good deal less than the actual surface area of the planet according to The Internet, (10^15 seems to be the general consensus) but that's nothing, because when you consider that the entire volume of Earth's oceans, lakes, rivers and such are teeming with organisms, as are clouds and, well, the entirety of Earth's atmosphere as high as 13 miles above the Earth's surface, and in some cases two miles below, 10^15 is really an inadequate stating of the case.  But it gets worse.

Morris' article goes on to propose one billion "mutating systems", which I'm assuming are analogous to organisms, per square foot. That figure is about right for a teaspoon of soil, but for a square foot it's woefully inadequate. A one inch deep layer of soil a square foot in area could be assumed to have 475 billion bacteria roaming freely through it. That's not including insects, worms, plants, fungi, and the bacteria that those organisms harbor. The human body is estimated to harbor about 90 trillion bacteria, which is about 10 times more bacterial cells than actual part-of-the-human cells. But we're not including any of that. We just have the 475 billion bacteria in the soil. Sure, why not?

At this point I'd love to give a revised breakdown of the math with some more reasonable numbers, but, unfortunately,  I'm not a mathematician. Morris isn't a biologist, so I figure that's fair. It's also fairly irrelevant, because this case assumes that there is one possible planet in the universe capable of harboring life. The most conservative estimates put the number of planets with the right conditions to support life at "billions and billions". The high end is in the range of pretty much infinite. That simple fact pretty much invalidates this whole line of reasoning. Even if Morris had the right numbers and an understanding of the mechanism of evolution and a grasp of the significance of statistics, the number of planets on which this scenario could take place is far greater than "a billion trillion".

Finally - and this is my favorite part - Morris says, "But let us give the evolutionist the benefit of every consideration. Assume that, at each mutational step, there is equally as much chance for it to be good as bad. Thus, the probability for the success of each mutation is assumed to be one out of two, or one-half."  He sets the condition, "If, at any step in the chain, the system mutates 'downward,' then it is either destroyed altogether or else moves backward, in an evolutionary sense." So, essentially, if the mutation coin toss comes up tails, even at step 199, the counter goes back to zero. If the monkey types the wrong letter, the monkey has to start over from scratch. This is true to the typewriter analogy, assuming your monkeys haven't been trained to use correction fluid. This not evolution.

At no point has an evolutionary biologist said that even a bad mutation would wipe out all progress up to that point. Good mutations replicate, bad mutations fade out, and indifferent mutations, well, they just kinda sit there and do nothing, sometimes interacting with other mutations later on, but no kind of mutation wipes out the species. The key mistake being made by Morris is the assumption that evolution is proceeding according to a plan. Well, actually, the wildly inaccurate numbers, ignoring the fact that there are a breathtakingly vast number of planets on which life could have evolved, and the idea that even a statistical long shot could ever represent an impossibility are all key mistakes, but I want to concentrate on the part where he assumes there is only one right answer.  Creationists frequently make the mistake of defining 'Darwinism' as random chance, which it isn't, and then declaring it can't be true because one could never arrive at a specific goal by random chance, when there was never a specific goal at which to arrive. Which leads to my refutation for this week.

The monkeys at keyboards (typewriters are so last century) wouldn't have to produce Shakespeare or psalm 23, they would just have to produce something, anything, that works. Essentially, the appeal to overwhelming odds as an argument against evolution has a fatal flaw, and that is that there is no one right answer, but rather an infinite number of right answers.

Humans are, undoubtedly, the dominant form of life on this planet. Okay, well, not numerically. Clearly several other forms of life have us beat there. As far as the likelihood of surviving some sort of catastrophic... Uh... Yeah, we're not really the top of that heap, either. Well, humans have an undisputed ability to tell other humans that we're the dominant form of life on the planet.  If humans had green skin, five eyes, beaks and webbed feet, we would probably still have that job locked down. Endoskeletons are over-rated. Lungs? Who needs 'em? Air sacs are the way to go. Just within the forms of life that have evolved on earth there are numerous alternatives to the anatomy seen in humans, and many of them are more effective than what humans now employ. Even if the organism at the top of the "evolutionary ladder" were grossly defective, it would only have to be more suited to its environment than the other organisms in its immediate environment to be at the top of that ladder.  Another analogy can be found in conception. Sure, the odds against the specific sperm and egg combination that created you occurring are something like 400 million to one, but the odds of any sperm and egg combination in that same environment are pretty much 1:1. If things had gone a little differently, it might not be you sitting in your chair, but it's a safe bet somebody would be sitting there.

Now, bear in mind that this is just one refutation to one specific argument. This is not a catch all proof of evolution, nor is it even the only argument for this specific topic. Also, this refutation, like so many, is just a rehashing of old arguments. One could easily point to the numerous computer models of evolution which, in a perfect world, would allow us to immediately move past this argument. Well, the type of people who are likely to trot out monkeys and typewriters also tend to scoff at computer models. Hopefully this refutation will allow you to make the same point in just a few words.

After writing the bulk of this article, I encountered William Dembski's Specified Complexity argument. This appears to be an increasingly popular 'proof' that the development of complex life requires a designer. The basic idea is that all living organisms display "specified complexity", which is a type of complexity that evolutionary algorithms cannot create. At first, I'll admit, it looks fairly daunting. At first. Imagine my delight when I realized that Dembski's celebrated and ironclad disproof of evolution was just a dressed up version of Morris' argument, which, in turn, is a variation on the monkeys and typewriters. I figured surely after 35 years Dembski must have found some way to make the argument work, right? Maybe he cleaned up some of Morris' numbers, or perhaps presented and accurate model of evolution. Nope! If anything, Dembski added errors. The only thing he "improved" was the number of coin tosses. Dembski went with 1000 rather than Morris' 200. But what happens if one comes up tails? It all starts over. Dembski makes the same mistake of assigning a probability to a one-time event which has already occurred. Dembski does the same strawman trick where he sets up an unworkable system that looks nothing like evolution, fabricates some numbers that ensure the system doesn't work, and then declares that evolution is false because the system he made up didn't work.

What's better is that William Dembski appears to be one of the prime movers and shakers on the ID front, largely because of this Specified Complexity argument.

Well, the second element is the easiest to refute, and in fact it should be pretty fairly obvious to anyone that it's wrong. There is no component of atheism that directly relates to morality. At all. The user's manual for a DVD player says as much about murder as atheism does. If an atheistic philosophy has anything to say about these atrocities, it's that we all came from the same place and nobody is more special than anyone else. That's sort of anti-genocide, but then, that might be stretching the tenets of atheism a bit. The doctrine just isn't there. But that doesn't deter O'Reilly. When Dawkins brings this point up, O'Reilly deflects. He talks about the "constraining influence" of religion. O'Reilly seems to feel that belief in God will prevent people from committing murder. He even points out that Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot all had one thing in common, they didn't believe in God. Well, they had a lot more than that one thing in common. All three were Asian (geographically), male, mass murderers, and... Wait for it... Communists! Every major Communist government has committed atrocities on a grand scale. Every Communist leader has worn pants at some point. Pants have as much relevance to mass murder as atheism, and a much stronger correlation to both religious and nonreligious mass murderers.

So, according to Bill O'Reilly, Christian governments wouldn't engage in mass murder. Clearly that's not the case. Let's take a look at how Christianity prevents mass murder. Kirk Durston offers this breakdown of the number of people Christendom has killed.

• Spanish Inquisiton: Up to 31,912 (The figure I keep coming up with is 3,000 - 10,000.)
• Witch Burnings: 30,000 to 100,000 (40,000 to 60,000. Pretty accurate.)
• The Crusades: 58,000 to 133,000 (The most conservative estimate I found was 1 million. High end was 20 million. I went with 9.)

Durston finishes with, "These three events, totaling over 264,000 killed, are thought to be the largest atrocities perpetrated by one or another form of Christendom." Well, they're certainly the most well-known, but far from the largest, and therein lies the problem with this claim that atheists killed more people than Christians. They didn't do it very recently. Also, for a large portion of history, the only records we have of the Church's wrongdoing are records kept by the Church. As Durston has illustrated, there's a potential for favoritism. Also, a lot of the records we do have are just shoddy. They give figures like "tens of thousands" when they give figures at all. In several cases figures are given in number of towns sacked or a notation that an entire population was destroyed, but no mention of how many people that might be. There just isn't an exact number. I did, however, find a site which has a wonderful list of what we do know about the blood on Christian hands. I have verified the larger numbers (over a million) on that list with secondary sources, and it seems to hold up fairly well, but bear in mind that a lot of this is gross estimation, and a lot of that was done by the people committing the atrocities.

The bulk of the mass murders in that list occurred over a stretch of about 750 years.

• 1 - 999 c.e. 7150 killed. Open season on pagans. The records are shoddy, of course. For death tolls listed as just "thousands" I estimated 2,000.
• 1000 - 1499 c.e. 10,244,266 killed. Biggest contributors are the Crusades.
• 1500 - 1649 c.e. 71,572,240 killed. Biggest contributors: 30 years war, Spanish Conquistadors.
• 1650 - 1749 c.e. 50,000,000 killed. Europeans arrived in North America and set about killing off the "heathens" who lived there.

The figures above do not include famine and disease as those statistics are, in most cases, not available, and in others, contentious. For this same reason I have omitted what few figures I was able to find for slavery, torture, mutilation and displacement. Although Adolph Hitler professed to be a Christian and clearly wasn't an atheist, I have omitted those statistics from this list, mostly because the subject is contentious. Also, it seems it was not fashionable to include women, children, or Jews in death toll calculations until fairly recently.

With those above figures and the deaths in World War 2 and Vietnam era Catholic concentration camps  (680 thousand) I have a total of 132,504,976.

The death toll for the Communists, again, was 102,648,000.

What I find most interesting is what you see when you consider the total population available at the time these atrocities occurred.

• Between 1900 and 1990 c.e. Communism killed an average of 3.18% of the world population.
• Between 1000 and 1750 c.e. Christianity killed an average of 10.76% of the people living at that time.

Which goes to show that Christians can really do more with less.

And overall, assuming that 106 billion people have been alive on Earth since people got their acts together and stopped being apes, Christianity has killed .13% of anyone who has ever lived.

Now, consider that the total number of human beings that Christianity has killed, 132 million, does not include things like the ostensibly Christian Nazi mass murders (20 mil), or Bible-sanctioned slavery (at least 60 mil), or the gift of small pox which the Christian settlers brought to the New World (100 mil). Consider that a large portion of these atrocities took place before literacy was commonplace, and those who were literate didn't generally consider women, children, and Jews to be people.

Finally, consider that these were just the statistics for Christianity. These mass murders were committed at the behest of the Christian Church and in the name of the Christian God. Christianity is just one religion among many.

If there is a "constraining influence" in religion, it is, much like the power of prayer and the existence of God Himself, completely undetectable.

Brian Dunning has an article which covers most of this, and I think he sums all this up nicely by saying, "Religion does not cause you to kill people, and it certainly doesn't prevent you from killing people. Let's stop pretending that it does either." Sometimes people are just plain bad. Name calling is never going to change that.

Author's style note: The word Communist should be capitalized if it refers to the Communist party, but lowercase if it refers to communist ideals not related to the party, or theoretical communism. Communism is generally lowercase when not at the beginning of a sentence or in a title, according to some sources. Others say to follow the same party affiliation rules as Communist. Examples: Stalin was a Communist, but Marx was a communist. Also, you have Communist communism, Communist Communism,  and communist communism. Because this article doesn't deal with Marxist communism, and because the conditionally capitalizing Communism game is frustrating and obnoxious, I decided to just go with a capital C in all instances.

According to Brad Hirshfield of the Washington Post, this constituted an insult to and abuse of people of faith. I would have to say that while the term 'insult' may be warranted, a claim of 'abuse' is really not justifiable by the scale and nature of the actual event.

Ben Cathey from Athenspatch.com feels that there should have been a public outcry over this, as there was when Pastor Terry Jones burned the Koran. While Jones was essentially just exercising his right to free speech in an attempt to call attention to a situation he felt was wrong, which he certainly did, in so doing he put the lives of innocent people at risk. That is something that warrants public outcry. The Backyard Skeptics ripped up some photocopied pages of questionable scripture. No lives were put in danger. Again, there's an issue of scale and severity here that Cathey seems to be missing. He also says, "It’s doubly ironic that the [Christians] have not staged massive protests of their own." Cathey attributes this to the generally accepting nature of Christians, saying, "the Christian record for tolerance of non-Christian behavior is absolutely astounding." Oh, I would have to agree. Now, if The Backyard Skeptics had been peddling something really objectionable, like science, or gay rights or something, there might have been trouble.

Others have commented that The Backyard Skeptics felt safe targeting the Bible because attacking the Koran could put them in danger. Well, this is half true. Look at what did happen after Terry Jones burned the Koran. 12 people were killed by a mob of religious nutjobs. 12 people who had nothing whatsoever to do with the protest. Is it morally defensible to incite Muslims if innocent people could die as a result of your actions? Sadly, we live in a world where some people feel that it's right and good to kill people over a book, and those people are allowed to mingle with the sane population. While freedom of speech is something I firmly believe is worth dying for, I don't think it's worthwhile to incite the crazies to kill innocents just to prove that they're crazy.

It's interesting to note that The Backyard Skeptics were not attempting to prevent people from reading the Bible. Their goal was actually the opposite. Cathey said, and I'm not making this up, "It’s ironic that these 'free thinkers' are choosing to squelch the thoughts of people who are broadly considered narrow minded in certain circles." The goal of The Backyard Skeptics was to encourage people to look at the actual content of the 'good' book with a critical eye. They weren't squelching thoughts, they were trying to make people think, which, as Hirschfield tells us, is the same as insulting and abusing them.

One thing Brad and Ben both have in common is that they feel freethinkers should just be quiet. You know, out of respect for other people's religious beliefs. If you've been an outspoken atheist for any length of time, you've probably heard some variation of that opinion. I've actually been told by someone who was proselytizing to passersby that I should be respectful of other people's beliefs. It's a socially acceptable way of saying, "I don't agree with what you have to say, so I want you to shut up."

But it's not just Christians who do this. As Terry Jones taught us, some Muslims have a very aggressive way of saying hushing the opposition. So it's a religious thing, right? Not hardly. The atheist version goes like this:

If I had a nickel for every time I've seen a free thinker quote Matt6 or 1Tim2 to tell a Christian to shut up, I'd have a solid handful of nickels. This is not a victory of logic. It's not even scripture relevant to debate or discussion. This is telling someone to be quiet and dressing it up like it's a clever feat of reasoning.

In my opinion, if we don't share our ideas and encourage others to share theirs, no matter how godawful some of those ideas are, we will never progress as a species. Free speech isn't just a right, it's an obligation and a necessity. Without dialogue and debate, gullibility and mental laxity will prevail. Unless your philosophy is so weak that your only hope for support is to create some sort of subhuman four-toed Nebbish who blindly accepts and agrees with everything your group has to say, you have no reason to prevent the opposition from speaking.

Now, when the bell rings, come out swinging, and may the best ideology win.

"I'm not avoiding the point that the coolness of atheism is very much in evidence. The problem is it's become a bit of a vicious circle. Atheism is cool, so books about atheism are cool,″ said Dr. Rowan Williams, "They get a high profile, and books that say Richard Dawkins is wrong don't get the same kind of publicity because atheism is the new cool thing.″

It was rather eye-opening to read this, because for some time I hadn't considered the importance many Christians place on popularity when choosing a system of values and beliefs. It is frequently the case that when asked why they believe as they do, the religious will either cite upbringing or some variation of ″Because it seems nice″. Wendy Wright, for instance, repeatedly cited the unpleasantness of evolution and the ″nice″, ″personal″ and ″special″ feeling of creationism in her interview with Richard Dawkins, despite the fact that how one feels about evolution doesn't have a shred of bearing on the validity of scientific fact. I have to wonder if this inability to differentiate between logic and emotion is just a rhetorical tool or if there actually is some physiological or developmental reason why religious people, especially the deeply religious, cannot separate fact from feeling.

In any event, if you're examining atheism because you've noticed that it is popular among the educated and intelligent, well done. Ask questions. Lots of them. Examine the facts with a critical eye. Atheists may not have all the answers, but the answers we have tend to be almost painfully correct and are generally backed by proof.

If you've decided to be an atheist because it's cool, the last person you're going to impress is an atheist.