Re: [asa] Neo-Darwinism and God's action

Or taking this point further... God could be immanent in every event,
and yet they would still appear random to us. Like David suggested, I
think this is just a language game. None of you could distinguish this
ordering of the first five cardinal numbers: 4 1 2 5 3 from any
truly random order, even though I ordered them myself; but they may as
well have been ordered by some quantum generator device as well as of
you are concerned. But to anyone else, they are indistinguishable from
a random order. The word only describes our ignorance of how small
sample sizes turn out, and the predictability of trends in large sample
sizes.

What if I drop a quarter heads up from 1 cm above a surface. I could
probably succeed in producing a heads landing better than 95% of the
time. Not random? What if I do it from 3 cm up. Now my contrived
heads-up landings might be reduced to, let's say, 75%. How high would
I need to do this from before everyone agreed it was random? Probably,
that would be the height from which a huge number of drops would produce
50% heads up. So does it cease to be random if my contrived drops are
from just below that height? I don't see a hard distinction anywhere in
that. If we can't even readily separate out what true random is out of
our own actions, how is anyone presumptuous enough to think God's
actions ought to be detectably non-random. The word is descriptive
from our perspective, and should not be inflated with some supreme
metaphysical meaning.

Does this muddy the waters?
--Merv

Don Winterstein wrote:
> "Logan seems to believe that if there is divine guidance there will
> necessarily be evidence of non-randomness."
>
> Yes, he believes it because he says, "...The agency is potentially
> detectable" if events are not random, and "When intelligent beings
> direct events, the events are not random..." Detecting an agency
> would be tantamount to detecting non-randomness.
>
> However, it's easy to come up with a model of divine activity that
> would involve guidance but be indistinguishable from purely random
> processes. One such model:
>
> Suppose the world is distinct from God in that it could continue
> functioning in God's absence. Its functions would be determined by
> properties built into its constituents--in other words, laws of
> nature. Suppose God most of the time actually allows such world to
> function on its own but closely monitors it to see how it is evolving
> and on occasion tweaks it to keep it going in a desired direction.
>
> God's guidance therefore would consist, first, of the initial creation
> of a robust world, and second, of these occasional tweaks. If such
> tweaks were rare and also at the quantum level, they could not
> necessarily be detected as departures from quantum randomness. A
> sequence for a random process can contain any point within its
> probability distribution and not be detectably nonrandom even if one
> or a few points had been divinely determined. Only if a point lay
> outside the allowed probability distribution could it be attributed to
> miracle (divine intervention). One can suppose that God with his
> foreknowledge could do his tweaking early enough to avoid such
> miracles and hence remain undetectable.
>
> Furthermore, God could do lots of miracles and still remain undetected
> if he restricted his miracles to times when no one was looking.
>
> Don

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Received on Fri Feb 15 08:09:05 2008