Re: ASA News Releases (God-guided process looking purposeless)

Glenn Morton (grmorton@mail.isource.net)
Mon, 08 Sep 1997 20:00:36 -0500

At 10:20 AM 9/8/97 -0600, Don N Page wrote:
> Let me give give another illustration besides Glenn Morton's excellent
>example of Acts 1:26 for RDehaan237@aol.com's 06:50 AM 9/7/97 message
reading,
>in part,

> Take the second half of the first two million digits of pi. They are
>completely determined by any one of several fairly simple algorithms, but
yet I
>would expect that no ordinary statistical test could distinguish this sequence
>from a truly random sequence of a million digits. (Of course, here simple
>algorithmic determination is used merely as an analogy for God-guided purpose;
>I am not trying to imply that they are equivalent.)
>
> Thus it seems entirely possible that to any scientific observer,
>certain data could look purposeless and unguided, not because the scientist is
>blind to this data, but simply because it is not enough of the total picture
>for the purpose to be apparent. (Of course, it could be that the scientist is
>blind to other data that are available, such as historical evidence for the
>truth of Christianity.)

I might add that Christians are often blind to the randomness of the DNA
sequences we get from our parents. In the quotation below, organised means a
designed system, complex means a sequence requiring a long program to define
them, and a stochastic process is a random process. Hubert Yockey says,

"Thus both random sequences and highly organized sequences are complex because
a long algorithm is needed to describe each one. Information theory shows
that it is fundamentally undecidable whether a given sequence has been
generated by a stochastic process or by a highly organized process. This is
in contrast with the classical law of the excluded middle (tertium non datur),
that is, the doctrine that a statement or theorem must be either true or
false. Algorithmic information theory shows that truth or validity may also
be indeterminate or fundamentally undecidable."~Hubert Yockey, Information
Theory and Molecular Systems, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
p. 82.

This means that our DNA looks random because it contains much information.
A raandom process would look the same! To me this is the most profound thing
in the creation/evolution debate.

glenn

Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm