(Snip)
> I think God didn't need to get involved in biological life regularly. I
> think he was smart enough to program the information into the fabric of the
> universe from the start. Those programs I posted can create an infinity of
> unique pictures from a few lines of code. All that information is in the
> phase spaces of the nonlinear systems. Similarly, God could easily put all
> the information necessary for the evolution of life into the DNA phase
> spaces. All it would take is for God to start a reproductive system and the
> rest could happen according to His design.
As I understand your programs, *no one* can predict what will fall out
from them as they run. Presumably, even God cannot predict what will occur
as those programs are run and as they develop. What about biological
systems and their developmental phenomena? Assuming that they are
programs, analogous to your computer programs, can or cannot God predict
what will occur from the running of these "nonlinear, reproductive
systems"? If God can, by what means can he do so? If the program were run
again, would it develop in the same way or differently? If differently,
then how much so? If it would develop exactly the same way were it run
again, doesn't that imply a rigid biological (and chemical and possibly
quantum-mechanical) determinism? If God can fully predict what will occur
from the development of such a program, doesn't this imply that the
program is determinisic. (I know, this takes us into the swamp of freewill
vs. divine foreknowledge. But that swamp can be avoided, I think, for
human beings by asserting a genuine human freewill, such that God really
doesn't foreknow compleely just what humans will decide. In other words, I
do not believe in complete divine omniscience. Anyway, this problem
needn't detain us here for purposes of the presentdiscussion.) And if
there is this rigid determinism to biological systems, doesn't this show
that they are, in principle, different from your computer programs?
As I understand things, all forms of Nauralistic (i.e., atheistic)
evolutionism eschew the notion of a telos or goal to evolutionary
processes (although Dawkins and others frequently use terminology that
implies or suggests that theprocess of biological change is directed
toward a goal), except the goal of survival. All forms of theism, however,
subscribe to some form of "hard" teleology -- to the view that there is a
divinely-given goal or telos to the biological-developmental process,
whether that process is understood as occurring by YEC or PC or TE or
whatever.
If that difference does indeed hold, doesn't that imply that the analogy
between your computer programs and biological development cannot be held
to by theists?
Lloyd Eby
leby@nova.umuc.edu