Even if that were true, applied to evolutionary development, it would surely require not billions but surely trillions upon trillions of years.
I recently heard of a scientist likening the workings of a "simple" cell to that of a vast city, with all of the endless complexity. He concluded by admitting that we probably understand only about 1 percent of what goes on within a cell.
Given that the most basic building block of the unfathomable complexity of life is in itself infinitely more complex than a trifle such as "War and Peace," one would think that we are talking about - as I suggested - time requirements on an order vastly greater than imagined by evolutionists.
From my perspective, such complexity requires what the ancients via Thomas Aquinas called a "Prime Mover" - the formative cause behind all things. One classic argument for the existence of God used, e.g., with devastating force by Bishop Copleston against Bertrand Russel in their classic debate was the argument from contingency: the idea that everything must have a sufficient cause.
The only remaining question, in my mind, is whether God "used" evolutionary process to create the world, a question answered by the philosopher theologian Francis Schaeffer, who spoke of "the ghost in the machine."
According to Schaeffer, one may postulate that there exists a "ghost" that is actually making the "machine" (evolution) work. A scientist, however, will look bemusedly upon such superstition as totally unnecessary. Why? Because science can fully explicate how the machine works without recourse to any "ghost."
Similarly, a Christian who accepts evolution as God's creative "mechanism" has unwittingly made God superfluous.
You misunderstand. This probability example has *nothing* to say about evolution, that the monkeys would ever develop some kind of intelligence and finally begin typing out real words. The example assumes (in fact, it *requires*) that the monkeys remain just stupid mammals tying keys randomly, without any thought whatsoever. It is just a question of pure randomness.
If the typewriter in my example throws you off, then think of the monkeys (or better yet, a human) throwing a 26-sided die (each side representing one letter) four times in a row, for a purely random outcome of four letters.