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

I like this especially as it totally negates the so-called distinction of Origins and Operational science. Forensic Science is under that false definition as Origins science as it deals with past events and thus non-repeatable and thus not open to experiment. According to such luminaries as Henry Morris it is not science.

Having said that I do not hold to such false understandings of science and see forensic science as another historical science, which has rigorous principles of its own. At times it can only give an answer in probabilities.

Medical science often deals with probabilities and often, as happened to us recently, medical opinion can only give a probability and of course experimentation is not possible even if the patient is alive. The question is as Wayne Williams discovered, When do the probabilities tend to virtual certainty? It still is not proof which can perhaps only be done for maths! Pure but not applied!

Finally the ID forensic argument only holds water where there is enough evidence and where there are the right techniques. Before DNA was used forensically it was a different ballgame and people could get off. We have had a recent case of a 30 year old murder solved by DNA because the culprit had his DNA taken for another reason.

With ID we are back to Plantinga and Behe who seem to think that if we cant explain something then God did it and thus ID is demonstrated eg over blood clots

Michael

From: John Walley
  To: 'Randy Isaac' ; asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2007 10:44 AM
  Subject: [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

    To: 'Rich Blinne'

    Cc: 'asa'

    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 12:13:47 2007