Gordon,
I found your response most interesting. Nothing that I know about is more
rigorously determined than the decimal value of pi, yet I understand that
the sequence passes all known tests for randomness. It looks as though we
cannot tell the difference between random and determinate sequences
without knowing how they were arrived at. If this observation expresses a
valid principle, then what we take to be a series of random events may be
determined by "forces" of which we are not aware. It follows that God
cannot be lying about "accidents" just because we think we've discovered
randomness.
Dave
On Wed, 14 Feb 2001 17:41:51 -0700 (MST) gordon brown
<gbrown@euclid.colorado.edu> writes:
>
>
> On Tue, 13 Feb 2001, Iain Strachan wrote:
>
> > So now what you have
> is the
> > appearance of a random process, but which is not random, but
> guided subtly
> > by God in a manner so it appears to be random. To parody
> Einstein's famous
> > quote "God does not play at dice", we find that "God plays dice
> most of the
> > time, but sometimes He cheats and gets aways with it". To me,
> that also
> > seems deceptive.
> >
>
> Iain,
>
> You have posed a very interesting question: If some happenings
> appear to
> us to be random, is God being deceptive?
>
> Apparent nonrandomness exists in the world; otherwise science would
> be
> impossible since it is concerned with detecting patterns. It seems
> that
> the problem for atheists is to explain how seemingly nonrandom
> events or
> processes are ultimately the result of random ones. We theists, on
> the
> other hand, trust that our sovereign Lord is behind seemingly
> random
> events even though we don't know exactly what to expect.
>
> If I calculated the decimal expansion of the cube root of pi and
> wrote
> down every seventh digit of that expansion for the first few
> thousand
> digits, and if in my absence you found the piece of paper on my desk
> with
> that sequence of numbers and assumed that they were the result of
> some
> process involving only throwing dice, flipping coins, etc., would
> you be
> justified in considering me to be deceptive because the numbers
> appeared
> to be random but in fact weren't chosen at random? If you knew me
> well
> enough and found my sequence of numbers, you would probably conclude
> that
> there was some sensible reason for that particular sequence, even
> though
> you hadn't figured out what it was. Your not being able to detect a
> pattern doesn't mean that you should assume that there is none and
> claim
> that you were deceived if that is not the case.
>
> That is my reaction to your interesting question.
>
> Gordon Brown
> Department of Mathematics
> University of Colorado
> Boulder, CO 80309-0395
>
>
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