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

 Once again, we're trying to
judge possibility issues that are infinitely beyond our rational
capability.  I feel a better way to couch the issue is to say that our
instinctive faith tell us (86% of the world pop believes) that
something we verbally symbolized (and thus trivialize) as "God" is
behind it all.  But the truth is that we have no more a comprehensive
view of God than we do of the universe.  It is the human hubris on both
sides of this pointless debate that needs to be examined and qualified,
not the veracity of either our unshakable faith or our scientific
understanding of local affairs in the infinite universe. 

-Mike (Friend of ASA -- www.thegodofreason.com)
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Dick Fischer <dickfischer@verizon.net>
To: ASA <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Thu, 22 Nov 2007 5:34 pm
Subject: 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

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

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 Fri Nov 23 14:58:26 2007