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

Laws of probability neither prove nor disprove God's activity in nature.
That's my point. We humans cannot fathom what it would be like to be
God. We have to plan things, therefore we assume God has to plan
things. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe God just knows and doesn't have to
plan things out like we do. Many of us have had the opportunity to
experience God's involvement in our lives or in the lives of others. We
can "know" it but we can't prove it. Let me give you an example of a
recent event that doesn't prove anything.

Last week I attended a funeral service for my daughter's grandfather at
a Catholic church. A massive statue of Christ on the cross looks down
from the front of the sanctuary. One of the women attending the service
forgot her glasses and couldn't read any of the printed material. She
looked at the figure of Christ, contemplated the pain of the nails
driven through his hands and feet, and asked that her need for glasses
be removed. To this day she reads without glasses.

A marvelous benefit for believers? Maybe, but she's a Muslim. Was the
power of the Holy Spirit in that place? Nobody else felt anything. Was
there power in the statue? The woman involved considers such statues
brazen examples of idolatry. Psychosomatic? Who knows? The point is:
we don't know with absolute assurance whether, or how, or when God
operates. Get over it.

I know God pulled off the creation. I don't presume to know how He did
it. Neither do ID proponents and they aren't looking. At least
theistic evolutionists and even non-theistic evolutionists are looking
for answers.

Dick Fischer

Dick Fischer, Genesis Proclaimed Association

Finding Harmony in Bible, Science, and History

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

-----Original Message-----
From: Iain Strachan [mailto:igd.strachan@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, November 23, 2007 9:49 AM
To: George Murphy
Cc: Dick Fischer; ASA
Subject: Re: [asa] CSI Forensics WAS Staggering drunk WAS Romans 1:20

I think George's illustrations are very apt.

A point that occurred to me recently was that all possibilities are
equally likely for sure, but "interesting" possiblities are far less
likely than "uninteresting" possiblities. All the distributions of gas
that are evenly spread over the container are not interesting, but one
where all the molecules are in half the room is very interesting indeed.
It also boils down to the point I've made many times before about
description length. If the molecules are restricted to one half of the
room, then you need precisely one less bit per molecule to specify the
positions, so the description length is reduced by O(10^24) bits.

Likewise a Royal flush is much more interesting than the arbitrary hand
that George gave!

However, the key problem is that in ID, it seems to me, the proponents
seem to think that "interesting/unlikely" is equated with the action of
an Intelligent Designer, whereas it might be due to a physical process
whose details we haven't yet fully fathomed out, which makes what was
previously considered extremely unlikely, actually very likely.

I also had a thought on whether (non)-randomness implied design - what
started this thread. There are two examples:

(1) Imagine chucking a bucket of water down a water-slide of the type
you see at leisure centre swimming pools. Despite the randomness of the
motion of the water molecules, overwhelmingly many of them go down the
slide in a well-determined fashion. Now one might argue that this
points to the fact that someone designed the water-slide to be a
particular shape. Intelligent Design? No the analogy fails because:

(2) Consider water flowing in a river. It also follows a twisty course
in a deterministic fashion, but the processes of erosion and the laws of
physics carved out the best path through the terrain. No-one designed
the water slide - its shape arose naturally.

Iain

On Nov 23, 2007 1:59 PM, George Murphy <gmurphy@raex.com> wrote:

I won't get into the debate on ID, Rom.1:20 &c here but want to
contribute something that may help to elucidate the point about
statistics that Iain is making below. When I 1st studied statistical
mechanics from Sears I learned what I assumed then was - & still think
should be - standard terminology but apparetly isn't, the distinction
between a microstate and a macrostate. (Of course it's the concepts
rather than the words attached to them that are important, but having
distinctive words for different things can be helpful.) If we're
talking about a container of gas, e.g., one specifies a microstate by
giving the position and momentum of every molecule of the gas. A
macrostate, OTOH, is specified by giving just the numbers of molecules
with different positions and momenta (within limits specifying the
precision of measurements).

The basic assumption is that all microstates are equally probable. A
given microstate with each molecules in my study in the north half of
the room & travelling due north is as likely as a given microstate in
which the molecules are evenly distributed throughout the room and in
momentum space (i.e., moving in different directions with different
speeds). But all macrostates are not equally likely. In the example,
there are far more macrostates with the molecules evenly distributed
than there are macrostates with all the molecules in one half of the
room. The thermodynamic probability of a given macrostate is defined as
just the number of microstates corresponding to that macrostate. (&
entropy is then Boltsmann's constant times the log of that probability.)

In poker, a hand with 10, J, Q, K, A of diamonds is exactly as likely as
that with 2 & 6 of hearts, K of spades, and 6 & 9 of clubs. But a royal
flush is lots less likely than one with a pair because there are lots
more ways of getting the latter.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/ <http://web.raex.com/%7Egmurphy/>

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

From: Iain Strachan <mailto:igd.strachan@gmail.com>

To: Dick Fischer <mailto:dickfischer@verizon.net>

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

Sent: Friday, November 23, 2007 4:03 AM

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

Why oh why do certain members of this list keep on making the same
fallacious straw-man argument over and over again despite my many
attempts to explain it? It seems to me that any mention of the word
"probability" on this list results in yet another excuse to bash ID. I
believe the correct response to ID is to point out that events that seem
unlikely may well turn out to be highly likely once we've understood the
processes involved.

But this silly "low probability events happen all the time argument" is
completely vacuous. Sure, if four players sit down at a bridge table
and deal the cards, then the chance of them getting that set of four
hands is one in 5.36x10^28 (The impressive figure given by D.F. Siemens
in all its 67 digit glory in an earlier post turned out to be too big by
a whopping 39 orders of magnitude, because he failed to take into
account that the same bridge hands arise independent of the order in
which the 13 cards in each hand are dealt). Nonetheless the 5.36e28
number is pretty impressive, but it doesn't surprise us because any set
of hands has the same chance. But what if you shuffled the deck and
dealt out the cards again and got the same set of four hands? Then you
would be surprised, because it conforms to a specified target (it
matched the previous hand).

Likewise consider the case when two parents have a child by the usual
means. Each sperm has 23 chromosomes, each one chosen at random from
each chromosome pair. The same goes for each egg cell. Hence when I
was born, I was one of 2^46 possible individuals that could have been
conceived. Therefore God? as Dick would say. Of course that's a silly
statement, but the point is that no one in the ID camp would make that
claim. Dick's argument is just a straw man. But suppose my parents had
a second child after me by the usual means and it turned out to be an
identical twin genetically? At this point the 1 in 7x10^13 chance is
significant because it conforms to a target (ie it's the same as me).

Honestly, until you start to grasp this elementary point your arguments
look every bit as foolish as some of the stuff coming out of RATE. Are
you going to get it this time?

Iain

............................................

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