> From: "Howard J. Van Till" <hvantill@novagate.com>
> To: bivalve@mail.davidson.alumlink.com, asa@calvin.edu
> Subject: Re: What does the creation lack?
> Date: Fri, Oct 26, 2001, 12:20 PM
>
> >From: "bivalve" <bivalve@mail.davidson.alumlink.com>
>
> > Is there any particular reason to assume that God made these choices and
> > injected new information in the course of creation history, rather than
> > having created everything so as to bring about these events? Is there a
> > way to tell the difference? How much difference is there, with God
> > sustaining, maintaining, cooperating with, etc. all that happens?
>
> Ruest asserts that such "informing" action was essential because of the
> "transastronomical improbability" of the creation doing it without divine
> assistance. In the spirit of the ID movement, he judges that there must be
> some non-natural way for information to be introduced from the outside.
Re. "non-natural way": not in the sense of divine "coercion".
> I'm wondering how others on this list might evaluate that proposition. Do
> we, for example, have any right to claim that we are able to compute the
> actual values of the relevant probabilities?
Looking at biology: of course, in most cases, relevant probabilities are
inaccessible because we don't have the required data. In a few
exceptionally simple cases, raw probability estimates are possible, cf.
my paper "How has life and its diversity been produced?", PSCF 44/2
(June 1992), 80.
Looking at cosmology: where should biological information have been
stored between the big bang and the origin of life? You explicitly
included "biological systems" among the "basic entities" which God "from
the beginning, when the creation was brought into being from nothing,"
gifted with all of the capacities needed (H.J. Van Till, "Special
Creationism in Designer Clothing: A Response to 'The Creation
Hypothesis'", PSCF 47 (1995): 123). The alternative option, that the
information emerged spontaneously whenever needed, a concept for which
there is no evidence whatsoever, is extremely unlikely.
> > The former would require something similar to the hidden variable
> > interpretation of quantum events, if I have the terminology correct.
> > However, the hidden variable determining the outcome of the event could be
> > God's foreordination rather than anything theoretically accessible by physics.
>
> If I understand Ruest correctly, he would put "on site action" in place of
> "foreordination."
Yes.
> > There is also some correlation with the Calvinist-Arminian spectrum, an
> > issue that we probably are not predestined to settle here.
>
> Right. Given the difficulty of settling small issues, really big puzzles are
> not likely to be solved.
No connection with predestination.
> Howard
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