bivalve wrote in part:
First I said
>
>
> >If there is an elegant way in which God can cause a given outcome it
> >could well be something as basic as this: Man is not an accident;
> >he is a natural and inevitable result of the environmental
> >conditions on this planet as they developed with time. The
> >environment and physical laws overrule the randomness,
> just as physical laws overpower randomness in other scientific fields.
Then you said
> <
>
> Certainly from Genesis we can see that the creation of mankind was
> God's intention and thus inevitable. Chaotic (in the mathematical
> sense, i.e. deterministic but extremely sensitive to initial
> conditions) aspects of the environment and evolution are compatible
> with the idea that God set things up just right so that we would
> evolve. However, their mathematical intractability probably makes it
> impossible to distinguish scientifically between such a model (closer
> to the robust formational approach)and a model of God frequently
> causing one of multiple possibilities to occur (sort of intermediate,
> if these possibilities are all in accord with natural law) or even
> subtle miraculous tweaking to bring about a result (an ID model).
Allow me to debate this a bit further.
I did my dissertation on the properties of fusion plasmas. In it I
demonstrated how the the EM fields completely overpowered the randomness
of
of the particles in space and velocity and led to organized coherent
behaviour. Initial conditions were random and the only environmental
factor
that caused the structure to take place was heat --- enough to ionize
the
particles. In fact, it is not unusual for an external source of energy
to
cause structure to exist. The final structure of the plasma was
independent
of the past history of the atoms.
Now Chaos theory is nothing more than non-linear feedback, instead of
linear feedback. It does not necessarily follow that the results would
depend on the initial conditions anymore than it necessarily follows in
a
linear system . It could happen either way and we have no way of
a-priori
knowing how it would come out.
So I maintain that it is quite possible for humans to be an absolutely
necessary consequence of certain environmental conditions and that those
conditions also may be relatively predictable if we were smart enough to
solve the problem. That does not even require that God set-up the
correct
initial conditions, but simply that he created the universe with the
appropriate physical laws. You know, that just sounds like the kind of
thing that I would expect that God with His elegant creation might do.
So I again say that the word "random" as an intrinstic part of
evolutionary
theory could well be wrong scientifically.
Just IMO
Walt
===================================
Walt Hicks <wallyshoes@mindspring.com>
In any consistent theory, there must
exist true but not provable statements.
(Godel's Theorem)
You can only find the truth with logic
If you have already found the truth
without it. (G.K. Chesterton)
===================================
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Jun 08 2002 - 02:27:25 EDT