However, this is not an accurate picture. According to geologists, the Earth has not existed for an infinity of time; they tell us that it is a mere 4,600 million years old. An enormous figure, but just a drop in the ocean when compared with timeless infinity. Just as the number six may not come up within six rolls of the die, so it is possible, perhaps even likely, that insufficient time has elapsed for random processes to have produced DNA; assuming, of course, that random processes are all that is necessary. In fact, says Kitty Ferguson, in her book The Fire in the Equations, ‘we’d actually need more monkeys than have ever existed in the universe and far more than the ten to twenty billion years since the universe began to give us anything like good odds30’.

It has been calculated that the chance of producing just one protein from the twenty necessary amino acids - amino acids are recognised as being the building blocks of life - by random processes is just one in 10130. This number31 is so great that it is almost beyond our imagination to comprehend. Expressed in English billions, (one million million) it is one chance in one hundred thousand million billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion; and in American billions, (one thousand million) the number looks even larger. But that is not the end of the story because even the simplest single-cell animals are much more complex than this simple protein. It takes about two thousand different proteins to make a single cell - the mathematical odds against this happening by chance are truly astronomical.

It turns out that the odds of producing our universe from the material which exploded in the Big Bang are also very long indeed: ‘if the expansive energy (resulting from the Big Bang) and the force of gravity had differed from equality by more than 1 in 1060 at a time less than 10-43 seconds after the Big Bang (about the earliest moment at which time and space have any meaning), the universe either long ago would have collapsed again to a big crunch, or else there would have been such runaway inflation that gravity wouldn’t have been able to pull any matter together to form stars32’.

This infinitesimal chance for the production of the universe and also for the generation of life from random processes does not, of course, prove that the universe did not just happen, and that life did not spontaneously evolve; but it may help us to understand exactly how unlikely is that proposition. Even when the odds are considerably shorter, there is always the prospect of backing the wrong horse. Any proposal based on grounds of probability alone, is inherently dubious. Because the scientifically acceptable answer to the question of the emergence of life is based upon probability, there is no guarantee that the answer is right. The element of uncertainty which is necessarily incorporated within the calculation indicates that we must question the proposal that life evolved spontaneously; and therefore we must consider the possibility that some other interpretation of the evidence may actually be the truth.