Iain Strachan wrote:
> I wrote on the ideas of a "deceptive God"
>
> [snipped for brevity]
>
> George replied:
.................................
> > The apparent age
> argument
> > requires God to have filled the universe with false information - i.e.,
> apparent
> > evidence for billions of years of evolution which never happened.
> Acceptance
> > of revelation then requires us to "see through" this pseudo-evidence &
> realize
> > that the history which it seems to point to is unreal. Creation through
> > evolution OTOH doesn't require false evidence: The billions of years of
> > evolution really happened. Revelation requires us to "see beyond" - not
> "see
> > through" this evidence to believe that God has been at work in what has
> been
> > happening.
>
> That is of course a very valid point; perhaps the one kind of deception is
> "worse" than the other kind. But what we have to do is to be absolutely
> sure that the "evidence" really proves evolution.
>
> I'll come clean and say I'm extremely skeptical about evolution, though I
> wouldn't go as far as to say I could wholly support the YEC scenario -
> though recently it's seemed more plausible than it has before.
The discussion to this point has been primarily theological. My points
have been that (a) creation _via_ evolution provides a _possible_ (N.B.) way
for God to create without giving artifacts with apparent age, & (b) that the
hiding of God which this process produces is, while in a sense "deceptive", of a
different nature from the fabrication of false evidence required by the apparent
age theory, and is consistent with the character of God revealed in the cross.
Of course the evidence needs to be examined. It shows pretty clearly
(if there is no apparent age escape clause) is that the universe and the earth
are old and that there has been a succession of terrestrial life forms. There
are some questions about the adequacy of natural processes to explain that
succession entirely in terms of natural processes, presently known or unknown,
but the reality of an overall evolutionary history should be regarded as well
established.
> But my
> reasons for skepticism towards evolution have to do with my own experiences
> using "genetic algorithms" (GA's), a form of machine learning "inspired" by
> evolution. While this area of work has proved useful in a few niche areas,
> I think there are sound theoretical reasons supporting what I found
> empirically; that the algorithms only solve small scale problems, but cannot
> solve problems involving more than a few dozen variables. I won't go into
> intricate details here, but it has to do with what is known as the "curse of
> dimension", a term coined by the control theorist Bellman in 1961.
> Essentially it shows that certain types of problem in high dimensional space
> have a computational complexity (i.e. run time) that scales exponentially
> with the problem dimension. As no-one (to my knowledge) has managed to get
> a genetic algorithm to train up a simple neural network with a few dozen
> parameters, it seems likely to me that even billions of years isn't going to
> be long enough to develop complex specific protein codes. That's all I'll
> say on GA's for the moment; maybe later it's a possible thread of
> discussion.
>
> However, returning to what we take as "evidence" and what we take as
> "proof", let me quote from the UK "Daily Telegraph" two days ago, describing
> the results of the genome project:
>
> "Equally the discovery that we share great chunks of genetic code with
> creatures such as worms, flies, weeds and mice, shows how we are all
> descendents of a single organism that emerged four billion years ago: this
> is FIRM PROOF [emphasis mine] for the theories of Charles Darwin, said Sir
> John Sulston, of the Sanger Centre, near Cambridge."
>
> Now, first of all, as this is reported, rather than direct speech, I'll say
> that I don't know if this was what Sulston actually said, or if it was an
> extrapolation made by the Science Editor of The Daily Telegraph, who wrote
> the article. However, I think it's patently a non sequitur, and doesn't
> constitute "firm proof" at all. The best that can be said is that the
> evidence doesn't contradict the notion. Neither does it contratict the
> standard Creationist principle that all the diverse life forms were created
> in the beginning by God. Both assertions are untestable (no one was around
> to see what happened), so both are, to that extent statements of belief
> rather than scientific theories.
1) The "nobody was around to see what happened" argument is valueless.
We receive signals from the past - light, radio &c for astronomers, fossils for
paleontologists, &c. Some theorizing is needed in order to get information from
these signals about their sources - as is the case with _all_
observations. Of course we have fewer signals from events 10^9 years ago than
for comparable events today & the required inferences are more complex, but
that's a matter of degree.
2) "The standard Creationist position" makes no predictions about the
degrees of relationship between different living things. When there seem to be
big differences, "creationists" can say that that's because God created them
that way. When continuity is found, they can say that God created them that
way. "Creationism" is worthless as a scientific theory because it can explain
whatever observations are made by saying that that's how God did it. Apparent
age arguments are just the most extreme case of such "explanations".
3) Having said all that, the claim that the genetic results provide
"firm proof" of Darwin's theory is of course hyperbole. What these results do
is provide support (in addition to a great deal of support which we already had)
for evolutionary theories.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
"The Science-Theology Dialogue"
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Feb 15 2001 - 07:45:19 EST