From: Glenn Morton (glennmorton@entouch.net)
Date: Wed Jul 02 2003 - 17:00:55 EDT
Debbie wrote:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu]On
>Behalf Of Debbie Mann
>Sent: Wednesday, July 02, 2003 10:25 AM
>
>I am bothered by:
>
>Total randomness. It seem to violate not only that God is involved in our
>lives in a personal way, is all-powerful and additionally total randomness
>appears to violate free will.
au contraire. I would argue that only with randomness can we actually have
free will. The view in physics when Newtonian physics was thought to be the
reality was that the future was absolutely predictable. They thought they
could predict the future with absolute accuracy and that view, when applied
to humans, leads to the nature/nurture debate. Are we determined by our
genes or are we products of chance--i.e.,our environment. What they didn't
know was that even Newtonian dynamics is not predictable due to nonlinearity
in the equations. Thus the inability to predict the future is not limited to
quantum. Even in Newtonian physics, objects behave randomly.
The law of entropy says that left to
>themselves things will become more and more random. We, as human beings in
>our world, continually fight randomness.
No, the 2nd law of thermodynamics says that every reaction increases the
entropy of the universe. It does not say, as I think you are saying, that
things become more random. The growth of a plant increases the entropy of
the universe but the plant itself becomes more organized (not ordered,
organized). Indeed, information and randomness are related. Consider the
sequence of characters:
*he33en8hr94jq589hnqhen4qhe9jh3wwnq43n43oq53el
This sequence appears rather randomized. It is an informative, information
bearing sentence which has been coded. Without randomness or at least
things which lie in the same end of the spectrum with randomness, we
couldn't communicate.
>
>The uniqueness of ourselves and our souls. Would the other me be as unlike
>spritually as a twin?
Good question, I don't know. If we are mechanistic, then the other
individual would be identical to you in every respect. Their brain would be
wired the same etc. See my note to Howard.
>
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