Interesting - your own statement indicates that (if only on a subconscious level) you do not believe in the Absolute Truth of probability theory:
"...will produce War and Peace or some other recognizable piece of literature."
What is this "or some other recognizable piece..." nonsense? As I understand it, probability theory (I am here taking your word for it) would of necessity DEMAND that the monkeys eventually not only type out a PRECISE copy of War and Peace, but (given enough time, of course) EVERY OTHER great book of Western, or Eastern, or whatever literature. This will, it is understood, require quite a lot of time.
But of course I can't imagine that anyone has ever bothered to demonstrate through empirical investigation whether or not monkeys can put together more than a few letters?
Forget about the monkeys. Just use a random letter generator computer program. Much more efficient and less smelly. And we don't have to start with War and Peace - let's see if a random letter computer program can compose something much simpler, such as a chapter out of a Nancy Drew mystery (any one will do) or even a paragraph or two out of a Berenstein Bears story?
Now you know well and good in your heart that such things cannot be randomly generated, even by a super computer working at warp speed to approximate millions and even billions of years. But are you honest enough to put aside your absolute faith in fallible and (let's face it) ever-changing scientific theory and the "experts" (scholars, textbooks, teachers - as a former professor I know all about it...) to admit it? I hope so!
That is exactly what the theory states. And yes, for a precise copy of just *one* piece of literature to be produced, would take an amount of time much closer to infinity than to any number our minds can even begin to comprehend.
Now you know well and good in your heart that such things cannot be randomly generated
That is incorrect.
even by a super computer working at warp speed to approximate millions and even billions of years.
This is correct. We don't have nearly the computing power yet. The numbers are HUGE. Take a very simple case:
Just to randomly generate a four-letter word like "LOVE". The number of four-letter permutations using our 26-letter alphabet is already huge:
26 possibilities for the first letter, 26 for the second, 26 for the third and 26 for the fourth. Or 26 x 26 x 26 x 26, giving 456,976 permutations, only one of which is "LOVE."
Simple enough for our computers today. But extrapolating that out to even a short children's book would make the number of permutations astronomical.
The whole point of the "monkey-literature" example isn't to say, as apparently some people hear are thinking, that something like this is likely to happen in our lifetime.
It is simply a curious fact, and a mathematical certainty, that given enough time (and yes, this means something approaching infinity) all possible permutations of a given set will occur.
Keep in mind, my whole point was that the "monkey" thing did not come from evolutionary theory, but rather from probability theory. Speaking of which, let me throw another one on:
If it were possible to sit 456,976 monkeys down in front their own keyboards, consisting of just 26 keys representing our English alphabet, and have each monkey type out four purely random letters, it is highly probable that one of them would just by chance type "LOVE".