> I can certainly understand loosing track. There is a lot going on.
>
> You wrote:
> >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? <
>
> I replied:
> >This is where I differ. A study of simple phase spaces of non-linear
> differential equations shows that in the plane of solution, different areas
> have the same solution. Look at the letters in this note. The same letter
> is placed at different sites. Thus if you randomly walk around the page(move
> up,down, left right but always stay on the page) it will be rather likely
> that you will find your self on an 'a' at some time. Similarly, complex
> systems have similar phase spaces. Essentially the same solution is spread
> throughout the space. Thus if 'y' on this page represents the solution of
> the DNA permutation for man, then it is not that unlikely that you can
> randomly walk across the page and create a man-like creature. In this
> fashion, God can control the probabilities and a theist can hold to
> evolution. Even if God were to self limit himself to never knowing whether
> you would randomly move up or down a row or left or right on the same line,
> He could assure himself that as long as you randomly move, mankind would
> arise!!! Eventually you will land on a 'y'.
>
> My programs illustrate this behavior, especially the one CAMBEXPL. It runs
> 32? separate lineages. If you watch this for a while you will see very
> similar but not identical solutions. If you printed the 'genomes' for those
> solutions, you would find that the similar solutions had a very different
> genome.
>
> You wrote:
> " If the program were run
> again, would it develop in the same way or differently? "
>
> If you run my program again, it develops differently but then once again
> eventually you will run into some picture shape (morphology) which you are
> looking for which will not be absolutely identical but quite similar. The
> difference will be of the order of the differences between human races. Run
> the program and look for those similar forms. They can better be seen in
> EVOLVE.EXE which follows one lineage.
>
> You wrote:
> >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.<
>
> In the way I described, I can hold to teleological goals. It is perfectly
> compatible with the mathematics of the phase spaces, if you are the DESIGNER
> of the phase spaces. While you and I can not design such spaces, presumably
> God can.
I think you've made a good case that your notion of movement through phase
spaces may satisfy the theist's requirement (presumably, anyway, all
theists would require this) that biological development be directed
toward a divinely-ordered telos or goal.
Whether you've solved all the problems may be left for others to assess. I
seem to remember other respondents offering what seemed to me at the time
to be other good reasons why the analogy between your computer programs
and biological development should not be accepted. But, for now at least,
I have to regard this as an open (unsolved) question because the details
of both computer systems and biological systems are beyond my knowledge or
expertise.
Thanks for your thoughtful responses.
Lloyd Eby
leby@nova.umuc.edu