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

Following on from Merv's comments.

As someone who works in probability distributions and random
variables, I get somewhat irritated by the loose uses of the word
"random". Any measurement that has a variety of outcomes, each of
which has a finite probability is termed a "random variable". Merv's
coin dropped from 1cm has a probability of 0.95 of heads and 0.05 of
tails. It is therefore a random variable. Most people would _think_
that it's only "truly random" if the probability is 0.5. But "truly
random" seems a meaningless term. What about something that follows
the bell-shaped Normal curve (aka the Gaussian distribution), like the
length of a banana? The distribution is defined by two parameters,
the mean (mu) and the standard deviation (sigma). One distribution
has a mean 1 and a sigma of 1e-6. Another has a mean of 10 and a
sigma of 100. Which is "more random?" It depends on perspective.
They are both random variables.

I think this persists into thinking about how evolution and mutations
work. Most people think of mutations as "random events", and I think
many who argue for creation or ID are tempted to think of mutations
being equally likely on any nucleotide, and they then have enormous
problems understanding how it could produce anything interesting. (
Many "evolutionary algorithms" work this way, having a constant
mutation probability over any of the alleles). However, in practice,
the mutation probabilities are anything but equal, and can be
concentrated into "hot spots" where many mutations occur and places
where very few happen. Does this mean they are not "random"? No,
they are still "random events" that might or might not happen, but it
does illustrate that this notion of randomness is much more subtle
than you might think.

Iain

On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 1:07 PM, Merv <mrb22667@kansas.net> wrote:
>
> 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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