I wrote on the ideas of a "deceptive God"
[snipped for brevity]
George replied:
> You make a very interesting point here. God does indeed work in a
> hidden way in evolution, & in a sense in everything God does (Is.45:15), &
> especially in the cross. So to the extent that hiddenness is deceptive,
yes,
> God is deceptive.
> Moreover, this deceptiveness has in common with the deceptiveness
of
> apparent age arguments
> the idea that we have to give revelation priority over scientific
investigation
> if we are to know the truth about God's relationship with the world.
> But there are also profound differences. The apparent age
argument
> requires God to have filled the universe with false information - i.e.,
apparent
> evidence for billions of years of evolution which never happened.
Acceptance
> of revelation then requires us to "see through" this pseudo-evidence &
realize
> that the history which it seems to point to is unreal. Creation through
> evolution OTOH doesn't require false evidence: The billions of years of
> evolution really happened. Revelation requires us to "see beyond" - not
"see
> through" this evidence to believe that God has been at work in what has
been
> happening.
That is of course a very valid point; perhaps the one kind of deception is
"worse" than the other kind. But what we have to do is to be absolutely
sure that the "evidence" really proves evolution.
I'll come clean and say I'm extremely skeptical about evolution, though I
wouldn't go as far as to say I could wholly support the YEC scenario -
though recently it's seemed more plausible than it has before. But my
reasons for skepticism towards evolution have to do with my own experiences
using "genetic algorithms" (GA's), a form of machine learning "inspired" by
evolution. While this area of work has proved useful in a few niche areas,
I think there are sound theoretical reasons supporting what I found
empirically; that the algorithms only solve small scale problems, but cannot
solve problems involving more than a few dozen variables. I won't go into
intricate details here, but it has to do with what is known as the "curse of
dimension", a term coined by the control theorist Bellman in 1961.
Essentially it shows that certain types of problem in high dimensional space
have a computational complexity (i.e. run time) that scales exponentially
with the problem dimension. As no-one (to my knowledge) has managed to get
a genetic algorithm to train up a simple neural network with a few dozen
parameters, it seems likely to me that even billions of years isn't going to
be long enough to develop complex specific protein codes. That's all I'll
say on GA's for the moment; maybe later it's a possible thread of
discussion.
However, returning to what we take as "evidence" and what we take as
"proof", let me quote from the UK "Daily Telegraph" two days ago, describing
the results of the genome project:
"Equally the discovery that we share great chunks of genetic code with
creatures such as worms, flies, weeds and mice, shows how we are all
descendents of a single organism that emerged four billion years ago: this
is FIRM PROOF [emphasis mine] for the theories of Charles Darwin, said Sir
John Sulston, of the Sanger Centre, near Cambridge."
Now, first of all, as this is reported, rather than direct speech, I'll say
that I don't know if this was what Sulston actually said, or if it was an
extrapolation made by the Science Editor of The Daily Telegraph, who wrote
the article. However, I think it's patently a non sequitur, and doesn't
constitute "firm proof" at all. The best that can be said is that the
evidence doesn't contradict the notion. Neither does it contratict the
standard Creationist principle that all the diverse life forms were created
in the beginning by God. Both assertions are untestable (no one was around
to see what happened), so both are, to that extent statements of belief
rather than scientific theories.
(1) First of all, it doesn't prove we are all descended from a single
ancestor, as the following argument shows. Most people today tend to use
PC's running one of Microsoft's operating systems (apologies for offending
any Mac or Unix users out there ;-). Such systems run a great diversity of
different programs; Word processors, Spreadsheets, E-mail clients, Browsers,
Graphics packages, etc. Furthermore almost all of these programs have a
menu-bar at the top, with such items as "File" , "Edit", etc. These menu
bars all function in the same way. You click on the word with your mouse
pointer, and up pops a list of options. All of these functions are produced
by the same bit of computer code. If one were to disassemble the machine
code, and figure out what happens when a menu pops up, you would find it was
always the same set of instructions being obeyed, no matter what the program
you tried it on. This is, of course not surprising; the functionality is all
contained in "library code" which is used in all programs. As I have
developed programs in to run under Microsoft Windows, I can tell you that in
any moderate sized program you develop, 80-90% of the code is in fact taken
up by such library code, that you didn't write. (A lot is needed; simple
things like formatting text, filling pixels on screens when you hit a
button, drawing lines and so forth). The new stuff that you wrote, to make
your own program with its own very specific function constitutes
approximately 10% of the code. I hope the analogy is clear from the above.
So on the basis of the "common Genetic code" argument, we are supposed to
draw the conclusion that all Microsoft Windows programs evolved from a
common ancestor? That there was one functioning program that did, we don't
know what; call it "ADAM.EXE". Then all programmers from there onwards took
copies of the source code of ADAM.EXE, and modified them slightly and passed
it on to others. Gradually there was a branching, and one branch led to
Word for Windows, and another led to Excel, and so forth. And that someone
at Corel pinched the source code of Word for Windows and evolved it into
Corel Draw.
Of course it didn't happen like that. What happened was that a clever
programmer at Microsoft designed a standard set of tools (known as the
"Windows Applications Programming Interface" (API) for short, without any
particular application in mind, but which would be of general use to other
developers, who then pick up the tools, and develop from scratch a word
processor, or a spreadsheet, or whatever they wanted.
What is going on here is similar, I suggest, to the Creationist model. God
creates a diverse variety of life forms, having first designed His own
"API", a set of genetic code sequences that perform basic functions for
cells in all different life forms (such as generating energy, assisting in
the replication of DNA, etc).
Later on in the Telegraph, Sulston is quoted directly "It is the unity of
life, or Nature being conservative, or the idea of the Blind Watchmaker -
the notion of evolution as a constant reworking or random recombining of
parts". But I don't think the alternative; that it is God, rather than
Nature being conservative; the Sighted Watchmaker, if you like, is any more
implausible or inconsistent with the "common code" evidence.
(2) Even if we accept the idea of a common ancestor then I think there are
serious problems implied by that. This common ancestor is a highly complex
piece of specified information. It has an entire "Windows API" encoded into
itself, all that apparently designed machinery. But evolution is supposed
to start from something very simple that comes together by chance, and then
add complexity via the process of copying errors and natural selection. In
the "Selfish Gene" Richard Dawkins writes, in biblical parody of which he is
so fond: "In the beginning was simplicity". So we are left to try and
explain how the primordial ancestor got all that complexity. It, too, must
have have evolved from something simpler, and once it appeared, it must have
wiped out everything else that didn't contain the common code that we see in
practicaly all life forms today. I for one find that hard to imagine;
perhaps it should be called "Microbial Noah"? I think I would prefer to
believe that it was put there by an Intelligent Designer (and one, IMHO,
who has a lot more intelligence than the average Microsoft programmer).
(Sorry about the last dig; I wouldn't want anyone to get the idea that I was
a "fan" of Mr. Gates's empire!)
Best regards,
Iain.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Feb 14 2001 - 14:52:40 EST