From: Terry M. Gray <grayt@lamar.colostate.edu>
>Second, I think that Stephen's "canvas as a whole" doesn't refer to what
>I'm talking about. I think that the ID crowd's "canvas as a whole" refers
>to order in the universe, the laws of nature, etc. and not to particular
>instantiations. My position is that even things that appear to be random
>(from our perspective and from the perspective of our science) ARE NOT from
>God's perspective. So a random mutation is only random from our perspective
>and our science would detect it as random. But it is not random, it is
>highly purposeful in God's maintenance of the universe and it accomplishes
>exactly what he wants it to accomplish. Personally, I think that Mike Behe
>is comfortable with this sort of divine action--he just wants to argue that
>it is detectable, i.e. that we can tell the difference between this sort of
>divinely controlled randomness and the kind of randomness that science
>talks about (as if there is a difference).
Terry, I'm interested in your idea of apparent randomness. Could you clarify
it for me, please.
Try this thought experiment. Suppose that
(a) we perfectly undertood the physical laws underlying the mechanisms of
mutation;
(b) we could calculate precisely the probability of any given mutation in
any given set of circumstances;
(c) we could go back in time and examine every single mutation that ever
occurred.
Suppose that we then applied to these observations the full battery of
statistical tests for randomness. Would we find, according to your belief,
that the mutations were perfectly random, in accordance with the physical
laws, or would we find some deviation from the expected random distribution?
Richard Wein (Tich)
See my web pages for various games at http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~tich/
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