I have a feeling sometime that we are talking past each other :).
So, let me start by asking what you mean by the word determinism?
Perhaps its useful to use a well known metaphor in order to discuss
determinism/chance. We'll use Gould's metaphor of the tape of life.
What would happen if tape were re-wound and played again? Would
you get the same thing? The "old school" of mechanistic materialists
to which I was referring would have answered that the tape play out
again exactly as before. Would anyone say this today? I sincerely
doubt it. Thus my conviction that this extreme deterministic view
is dead. I could be wrong. Does anyone here think that there are
some today that would say that the tape would play out again precisely
as before?
Above you lump Gould and Dawkins together but actually they are
very much opposed on this issue. Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and
others would be leaning towards the deterministic, but not to
the extreme degree of the "old school". They would say that the
tape would play much like before with a few changes of no real
significance. Gould's view is the opposite. He emphasizes the
role of contingency (chance) and thus argues that the tape would
run again very very differently. This is actually kind of
interesting in that past discussions on this group seem to have
assumed that Gould's view was somehow axiomatic among evolutionists.
For Christians this represents an interesting dilemma that is,
I believe, very analogous to the old theological debate balancing
God's sovereignty versus free will.
Bertvan:==
>Are you saying this:
>
>Freedom, free will, and the ability of organisms to affect the physical
>universe exist, and are random, in that they are spontaneous and not
>predictable? That the existence of free will precludes any "cause" or "law
>of nature" from being absolute and deterministic?
>
Yes, I think that's a pretty fair assessment. Except that I think
I would argue it in reverse. The apparent absence of a deterministic
world, i.e. a world in which indeterminacy seems to be built into
the fabric of things, gives us good reason to think that we are
free. Chance gives the hope of freedom, not the proof of it.
Perhaps I better put a disclaimer lest I'm misunderstood.
As a matter of faith and based on personal experience and
observation, I am fully convinced that there is freedom. What
I'm trying to do here is put these things aside for the moment
and try to see if we can see hints of freedom by observing the
way the world is, independent of my personal faith and subjective
beliefs. And I believe we do see hints of this, even though they
may be seen "as through a glass darkly".
Brian Harper
Applied Mechanics
Ohio State University
214 Boyd Lab
155 W. Woodruff Ave
Columbus, OH 43210
"God forbid that we should give out a dream of
our own imagination for a pattern of the world"
-- Francis Bacon