An Unfortunate Relapse; More Dissent from Darwin

However, theologicall, do we dare draw this line? Altenburg suggests we are bad at drawing that line. Much of the jury is still out, but I thing this is a reasonable extrapolation.

However, just think about what you are saying. If a random process is delimited by purpose, can it still be random?

True, but as suggested above, are we talking about ways that people express what they don't understand, or are we talking about real randomness?

Now your self-organizing concept starts again down that interminable road. Why do we have the physical laws we have, which could possibly have been different if Big Bang had happened a bit differently?

All we ever get is a part of the "organizing." Do you see why this phrase betrays such enormous philosophical weakness (a problem special to all human, not just scientists)?

Once the scientist gets out of the origins business and does not presume to have a conclusion on such matters, all of his Altenburg problems disappear. That should reduce his workload by about one seventh, giving him time to get to Church for some real answers.

{singing} Some say love it is a ..... (Get the hook out)

I think scientists should draw a better boundary that keeps them out of the philosophy business unless they are willing to be explicit and let the rest of us join in.

Origins is a philosophy problem.

As an evolutionist, would you think they would be better off by saying, "We seem to be lead to an idea of "self-organizing" by issues in the data, but we know that nothing can create itself, so the principle at work must be God.

Lets pray that He shows us how He did it."

A bit sentimental and non-scientific, but it does acknowledge the philosophical limit of science at least.

However, experience does a poor job of explaining where this boundary between the non-random and random lies.

Experience says that we should not expect God to heal us. That luck, positive thinking and sensible treatment is the appropriate boundary. The Word says otherwise. God is Jehova-Raffa, the God who heals you.

That is probably true. But, is there a presumptive boundary?

I think you are extrapolating a lot more about the Altenburg conference than the news articles suggest. After all, it hasn't even happened yet and the reports won't be out till next year.

I suspect that most of the time we are talking about the first. We are speaking, as Tinker Grey says, of random distribution, in which we cannot foresee the next value, but can determine with some certainty the range in which it will probably fall.

It seems to me this is half the problem with creationism, is that it wants to draw boundaries between God and nature and exclude God from his own creation.

And in my course on statistical physics the lecturer has been repeating, over and over again, the "fundamental assumption": All states of a system are equally likely. Fullstop. Nothing chooses or sorts or selects between them. No higher power, no force, not even a physical kind of criterion for what is better or worse. You thought evolution was a bastion of godlessness? (Learning things like these reinforces my conviction that creationism is essentially cultural, not Scriptural. People diss Darwin; do they even know who Boltzmann is?)

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So again, self-organization is just a physical property of the system, something that can be described mathematically in many cases. It's the tendency of a system to stay away from its equilibrium state by means of self-interactions. Life is self-organization.

Tautology.

You do agree that there is a heated debate over whether this view of statistics is at sensible?

I am trying to think of whether a creationist ever agreed with me. Nonetheless, every time you put your finger on this epistemological wound, I think to myself, here we are again in Genesis 3. God understood the problem well before we did and put it in Holy Scripture. More proof of inerrancy. Knowledge of good and evil as the fundamental problem for man. If it were not so, you wouldn't be arguing with me on the basis of because-it-just-is-ism.

I already know you disagree, by the way. I know the arguments against.

Then why bother?

"Oh, Benson, dear Benson, you are so mercifully free of the ravages of intelligence."

You can embrace the Scriptures as redemptive history or you can embrace Darwinism as a substitute, you can't have it both ways because Darwinians won't have it. Just don't expect me to believe this is based on science or a valid theory from empirical testing or observation. Darwinian a priori naturalistic assumptions precede, follow and permeate the entire spectrum of secular academics and scientific thought.

I have seen entirely too many propaganda parades to think of Darwinism as benign or remotely compatable with Christian theism.

Your neat categorical theory is falling to pieces. I firmly accept evolution as the best explanation for the generation of currently observable biodiversity. I also accept Biblical theism in its every nuance (even more than some creationists who, say, think God would not use evolution because He would get impatient waiting - what a strange conception!). What explanation do you have for me, a Darwinist Biblical theist? I am either a flagrant liar, hopelessly deluded, or simply nonexistent, and I am waiting impatiently for you to tell me which I am.

As for being a Biblical literalist and fundamentalist from Genesis 12 to Revelations 22 - by no means! I am quite ironically in the same boat as vossler who endlessly has to elaborate on the meaning of "literalism" as it is applied to him. I simply read the Bible, and I read it with the knowledge that the same God who wrote it created creation, and thus everything I know to be true about creation can be brought to bear on everything I know to be true about the Bible and vice versa. Even YECs have to stretch Genesis 7-8 when they are faced with geological facts that they don't have the guts to deny. Why should I be ashamed about bringing everything I know about God's creation to the table when thinking about God's Bible?

What am I, mark? A flagrant liar, hopelessly deluded, or simply nonexistent? You haven't answered; I doubt you will.