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

Hi John:

It's simply smoke and mirrors, John. All the particles that composite
you and me emanated ultimately from the Big Bang. The sheer likelihood
that the specific particles that ended up being you and the specific
particles that would wind up being me is so low that it is nearly
impossible that you and I exist and are having this conversation.
Therefore, God? Where is the leap from likelihood of events to the
conclusion that God has to do it all? Please send this on to your
forensic specialist. Maybe he has some evidence we don't know about.

Dick Fischer

Dick Fischer, Genesis Proclaimed Association

Finding Harmony in Bible, Science, and History

 <http://www.genesisproclaimed.org/> www.genesisproclaimed.org

-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
Behalf Of John Walley
Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2007 5:45 AM
To: 'Randy Isaac'; asa@calvin.edu
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 <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 19:46:31 2007