Similarly, that is what I think God did when he set up the biological
system. He rigged the odds so that when mutations occured they would still
lead to us. This is a union of chance and determinism. One can see this in
the marvelous nonlinear equations like Duffy's equation, the Henon-Heiles
potential, quantum mechanical wave functions etc. Each of those use chance
but the outcome is deterministic! God can use the mathematical laws that he
set up to create us--using chance but with the outcome entirely
deterministic. And besides that God designed the biological world to be
able to pump info out of the environment and change when the environment
changed. That is truly ingenious. What anti-evolutionists seem to want is
a God who can't seem to foresee the future and create an ADAPTIVE
biological system. If life can't adapt then when the environment changes
there is no way to pump that info into the genome. In such cases where the
info isn't pumped quickly enough, species go extinct.
I think what God has done is more wonderful than what my YEC friends seem
to want. They want a static God who is incapable of many things. Incapable
of foreseeing that the environment would change. Incapable of mastering
chance! This of course means that God is not omnipotent. THe YECs want a
impotent God when he faces Chance! Chance is more powerful than God. I have
never understood that. It flies in the face of what we know about God. And
imo it flies in the face of what the Bible says about God. If chance is
more powerful than God, maybe we should worship chance. But of course, God
is supreme.
Hi Glenn,
Please believe me when I say I am not out to belittle anyone's sincere
beliefs. I am sincerely trying to understand yours. You say there is
something other than chance behind the universe. If so, it isn't chance is
it? Mutations might not be random, right? Are you saying God "set up"
(that could mean the same as "designed", couldn't it) the universe to
achieve his purpose by random processes? If he knew the end result (his
purpose) how could the process be random without the result being random?
Bertvan