Sorry it has taken me some time to get to this. I have been in England and
Scotland for the past week and a half.
At 08:21 PM 09/16/1999 EDT, Bertvan@aol.com wrote:
>
I wrote:
>I agree that something other than chance is behind the universe. I just
>think God set up the system where he chance would lead to the result he
>wanted. If I shoot craps with you and use a loaded set of dice, I am
>using chance to obtain the result I want, namely taking your money. Chance
>does not require mindlessness behind it. All the casino's in the world use
>this type of chance to get rich by taking the gambler's money. The casino
>owners are not mindless---they know exactly how and where they have rigged
>the odds.
>
>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?
>
That is exactly what I think. It has always struck me as odd that casino
owners use chance to make millions. They design their machines to win more
than they lose. This is design, yet it uses chance. Yet Christians say God
can't master chance; they say he can't use chance. So are casino owners
more powerful than God? I don't think so. I believe that God could
clearly use chance to attain his purpose. He designed the system to use
chance. It is the design of a stochastic system.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution