[asa] CSI Forensics WAS Staggering drunk WAS Romans 1:20

> The absence of being "fully" random is not the sign of divine guidance.

I have this one last niggling ID doubt. I have trouble accepting the above.
This is where the ID forensic argument comes in and I have to admit it is
somewhat convincing.

For instance, in our RTB Chapter in Atlanta, one of our scientists is a
Forensic Toxicologist that works for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He
analyzes tissue samples for the presence of certain drugs and testifies as
an expert witness for the state in court cases. His work involves mostly
DUI, cocaine and methamphetamine, but occasionally he gets the bizarre and
recently got some local black widow type woman that had a penchant for
poisoning her husbands and he had to find the trace evidence of whatever it
was that she used in order for the state to prosecute her. Since a couple of
her previous husbands had died as well now they suspect she poisoned them
too.

This is the real CSI stuff. He took me down to the GBI lab one time and gave
me a tour of all the departments and I met all the people and it was really
fascinating. In addition to his toxicology lab they have a ballistics dept
where they analyze all the different types of guns and bullets and a
document and forgery dept that analyzes all the different kinds of document
fraud several other depts and a DNA lab. In fact I met the two girls that
run the DNA lab and their work was recently in the news that you may have
seen since the GBI just did a paternity test on Atlanta megachurch pastor
Earl Paulk and determined that his 34 year old nephew who had replaced him
as pastor was really his son through an illicit affair with his brother's
wife. Talk about bizarre.

They also have a synthetic fiber analysis dept and I met the guy that was
one of the ones that actually analyzed the carpet fibers in the famed Wayne
Williams serial murder case in Atlanta back in the 70's. The guy I met was
retiring that week and he had come on as an intern almost 30 years ago when
the GBI was conducting that investigation.

Anyway my friend is a strong ID advocate and he uses his knowledge and
experience of forensics in his presentation on ID and last I heard he was
even writing a book about it. One example he uses is the Wayne Williams case
mentioned above. In fact Wayne Williams was the first capital murder case
conviction ever won on the basis of forensic evidence. They basically
identified carpet fibers found on several of the bodies to the carpet in
Wayne Williams' house and car and it turns out the particular carpet found
in his home was a certain type from a certain small manufacturer of a
certain odd color that was made in a certain small lot size and only sold in
the Atlanta area be a few retailers for a certain small period of time. The
prosecution's case was basically massive circumstantial evidence and came
down to what are the chances that all these victims would have that carpet
fiber on them if they hadn't all been in Wayne Williams house before they
were murdered?

This is far from being an airtight case but they won the conviction. It has
been contested though from the beginning because Atlanta was sharply
polarized along racial lines at the time (Wayne Williams is African
American) and his defense attorney at the time (who happened to be my scout
master) released a famous quote that "Wayne Williams was convicted on the
law of averages instead of the law of the land". And still today there are
efforts underway to get his conviction overturned and prominent local
politicians continually call for that.

My friends point in his presentation is that here is an example of how the
govt uses science and probability arguments to convict a man of a capital
murder charge for which he could have been executed, so it is therefore
disingenuous for Dawkins and others in academia to deny design in the
universe in the face of the same massive amounts of circumstantial evidence.
Granted neither case is totally airtight and they both come down to whether
or not we can rationally infer a cause beyond a reasonable doubt but we seem
to have different criteria in play here. It seems like Dawkins gets away
with what Wayne Williams couldn't.

To me this has always seemed like a very reasonable argument. So Dawkins
want to make the metaphysical claim that evolution has no distant targets so
therefore he gets to throw out all the complexity and probability evidence
against him. How is this different than Wayne Williams attempting to come up
with some claim to get all the carpet evidence against him thrown out that
we would never buy? Why do we seem to allow this theoretical scientific
ideal in academia but in the real world of the courts where people's lives
are on the line, we don't?

Thanks

John

-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
Behalf Of Randy Isaac
Sent: Wednesday, November 21, 2007 5:46 PM
To: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: [asa] Romans 1:20 (disregard my last post)

Though the picture of a staggering drunk in a hallway isn't my favorite, it
does have somewhat of a crude picture of randomness with boundary
conditions. In a sense, we see that kind of bounded randomness at every
level of nature. At the microscopic level, it's definitely randomness
bounded by the distribution of the wavefunction. A little higher and it is
Brownian motion under the influence. Then random molecular collisions and
pressure. At the high end of the length scale it is galaxies colliding, or
not, and black holes forming, etc. And right in the middle of it all is the
development of living cells, a random process at the core with some kind of
bounded--or preferential--direction.

Note that Simon Conway Morris has been talking about the tendency for
convergence in evolution though no one knows what drives it. I think we need
to be careful to distinguish between bounds on randomness, environmental
factors that preferentially induce certain outcomes, selection that happens
at the molecular level instead of the organism level, and the divine hand of
the creator. The extent to which Dawkins doesn't believe evolution is fully
random, he does not refer to the last option. We should not be induced to
find divine guidance under the guise of bounded or constrained randomness.
The absence of being "fully" random is not the sign of divine guidance.

A key point of "randomness" that Gould was famous for pointing out was the
observation that if you run the tape again, you wouldn't get human beings
with the specific genome that we currently have. You might get a sentient
species but with quite a different set. Morris thinks maybe you would get
the same. We really don't know. Rich's point, I think, is that God can carry
out his will through whatever process he chooses, be it "purely" random or
determistic or "miraculous" or whatever label we can think of. At the moment
it looks like he chose a process that is an intriguing mixture of somewhat
random mutations with natural selection. How this led to a 'predestined'
group of human beings is a mystery indeed.

Randy

----- Original Message -----

From: John Walley <mailto:john_walley@yahoo.com>

To: 'Rich Blinne' <mailto:rich.blinne@gmail.com>

Cc: 'asa' <mailto:asa@calvin.edu>

Sent: Wednesday, November 21, 2007 11:00 AM

Subject: RE: [asa] Romans 1:20 (disregard my last post)

>BTW, no one including Richard Dawkins believes that evolution is fully
random.

Ok, now it is getting interesting. Another Eureka moment for me.

If Dawkins doesn't believe that evolution is fully random then does that
mean he concedes some kind of guiding process or law embedded in life?
Remember we discussed on this list Gould's analogy of a staggering drunk in
a hallway making forward progress but by the hardest? Would Dawkins accept
this thought as well?

If so, then the question turns on the existence of the analog of the hallway
in nature that constrains life to make forward progress. What would that be?
Maybe if that is ever understood then it would not be as easy for Dawkins to
consider it as being self-existent.

To me this "hallway" is some divinely embedded algorithm in the primordial
epigenome that guided it ultimately to where we are today. I guess that is
subjective and the same philosophical impasse we have with Dawkins on the
source of evolution today. But if you tell me he at least acknowledges its
possible existence that is news to me but I am glad to hear that.

I have long thought that the best way to defend the faith was by falling
back to line of defense of an embedded algorithm because it seems most
consistent with what we see in cosmological ID and less likely to be
disproven like the bacterial flagellum and junk DNA arguments.

But now we are back full circle to the thorny question that started this. If
evolution was guided by a divine embedded algorithm then you can almost
understand ID's assertion that it was not random. Maybe we could bridge this
gap between ID and TE if they instead argued it was not self-existent
instead of not random? They like me have a hard time distinguishing the
difference in these terms. And this embedded algorithm is what I mean by ID
in biology.

If ID, TE and Dawkins all agree on Gould's hallway analogy then I don't see
what all the fuss is about other than language and miscommunication. Dawkins
will look at it and conclude self-existence and we will look at it and
conclude God but if the impasse is purely philosophical then all the science
gets factored out and this becomes real simple.

Thanks again,

John

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Received on Thu Nov 22 05:46:09 2007