At 09:59 AM 4/28/98 -0600, Garry DeWeese wrote:
>If the tracks are truly random, *how* could God use that to guarantee
>anything? Isn't it far more likely that life would become extinct sometime
>during those first 3 billion years than it is that a particular
>phylogenetic branch would survive, eventually producing us? Or are you
>suggesting that the entire process is so thoroughly teleological that it is
>not truly random?
>
I think there might be a miscommunication here. The tracks may not be
random, the mutations are though. In a 3 dimensional cavern system, if you
are in a cavern of 16 feet diameter by 100 feet long with one small opening
at each end, you can only move 16 feet up or sideways before motion becomes
impossible. If you are moving in a random fashion, you will bump into the
wall. You path is only random within the cavern itself, not in the entire
limestone bed. Eventually your random path will take you to one of the
small exits. Once in that exit you are constrained to either move down the
exit into the next cavern or back into the one you left. Movement is
random, not the cavern!
>>This problem to me is the biggest problem I see for progressive creation.
>>The difference between the YECs and PCs in this regard is nothing but the
>>speed that God pushes things.
>
>I don't think the issue is speed; rather, it is direction.
in the above analogy, the walls represent the genomes that die! One cannot
move in those directions so since the population can grow to fill the
cavern, they can't occupy niches inside the "dna phase space cavern
walls". But as the population fills the phase space of the cavern, some
will eventually lie near the exits and if isolated, will speciate (go into
the next cavern).
>
>To say it a bit differently, the natural sciences tell us a lot which leads
>us to accept an old universe. And contemporary evolutionary theory tells
>us a lot which leads us to believe that the evolutionary process is
>governed by chance. My objection is that even God could not initiate a
>truly random process and be assured of the outcome.
Once again, it is not the trackways that are random. This is what you
miss. motion is random, trackways or caverns are constrained.
We should expect that
>God would intervene in the process, if indeed it is truly random, so as to
>guarantee the outcome. So God is the intelligent conceptualizer as well as
>the skilled artisan.
In this way I avoid the issue you raise.
glenn
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
Foundation, Fall and Flood
& lots of creation/evolution information
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm