I guess so. Just seems weird to me.
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Chance (including random events) is frankly a silly category. It implies that, for example, if one reacts hydrogen and oxygen, one will get a bewildering range of products (H7O3, H298O79, H6O4, H3O148,etc., etc. etc.). It is natural law that tells us that only H2O results. And it is natural law that dictates the chemistry in the cell. Not “chance”.
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I try to avoid speaking for “most people”. I expressed my own opinion.
How could you possibly think that was what I meant, after my statement contrasted God in eternity with the world of matter, space, and time?
Nobody in ID thinks anything of the sort. Why are you putting up this strawman?
Is your point that all chance events are ultimately law-bound events? That may or may not be the case. Many quantum theorists, perhaps most, would disagree with you.
In any case, it’s easy enough to understand what ID folks mean by chance. A primitive mammal with a crucial new mutation that, joined by other mutations later, will one day cause its line to become the primates, is picked off by an eagle and eaten before it reproduces. The genetic change is lost from the population, and the arrival of the primates is stopped, or a least deferred by many generations, possibly many thousand generations. Now most people would say that it was “chance” whether or not that particular eagle happened to turn its head to the right rather than to the left, and hence spotted the little mammal rather than missed it. It is this sort of event that people have in mind when they talk about “chance” in evolution. That is also what Gould has in mind when he says that if the tape of evolution were rewound, it would turn out differently the next time. A little chance nudge this way or that changes a whole sequence of future outcomes. The famous science fiction story about the time traveler who steps on a prehistoric butterfly and changes all of evolutionary history provides another example of how “chance” might influence evolutionary outcomes. In light of such examples, I think it would be wrong to say that “chance” plays no role in what happens in evolution.
Exactly. The lottery is designed in such a way that they get a single jackpot winner every few drawings, but the lottery is still random. If sales of lottery tickets increased they could change the rules so they hit that sweet spot of a single jackpot winner every few drawings.
So, just to make sure of the extent of your claim: Are you saying that random events could “easily guarantee” the particular faces we see on Mt. Rushmore? Or that random events could “easily guarantee” that eventually a million typing monkeys will produce a play of Shakespeare? Or that they could “easily guarantee” the appearance of the Great Pyramid on the sands of Egypt?
If you were God, and you were asked to make sure that by 2600 BC the Great Pyramid was erected in Egypt, would you say to yourself, “Well, I’ll just make sure that all across Egypt and the Sudan, there are millions of years of sandstorms and earthquakes and other things that can move rocks and sand, and the large number of random events of moving rocks and sand will “easily” ensure the appearance of a pyramid of those dimensions at that location by that date?” Or would you be more likely to create a race of intelligent beings who can build Pyramids?
I have no clue. But you seem to have the answer, so why not tell us which you think is more likely, and provide he mathematical calculations by which you determined this.
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I didn’t ask you. I asked T. aquaticus. I want him to clarify the limits of his lottery example.
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… is something you’ve misremembered. History is changed in that story, certainly, but not “all of evolutionary history”.
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I stand corrected. I hadn’t read the story in about 30 years. Anyhow, I think my general point is clear without an example from science fiction.
That is, indeed, an excellent description of what evolutionary theorists mean by “chance”. However, it is not an aspect of evolutionary theory that ID theorists generally appreciate or acknowledge. Rather, they argue against a strawman version of evolutionary that they often conflate with and refer to as “Darwinism.” Michael Denton, for instance, argues that because we can identify no selective advantage to the pentadactyl limb it must have arisen thru a mechanism he calls “structuralism.” He ignores, or is unaware of, the explanations from standard evolutionary theory that involve chance and are able to account for this.
When ID Creationists speak of “chance” they usually use it in the context of claiming the odds of a 150 amino acid protein arising thru evolution can be determined by multiplying the number different types of AA’s found in living cells to the 150th power. Which compounds the error be even ignoring natural selection and is childishly stupid.
There are many stories in which something like that happens, and in some of them all of evolutionary history is changed. It all depends on when the time traveller steps. Maybe Eddie is thinking of a different one from the one you’re thinking of.
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I don’t remember saying that.
What I would say is that God could have set up the natural laws in such a way that an intelligent species of some kind would evolve on some planet that God could interact with without needing to front load any mutations at the beginning. I’m not saying that this is what God did do, just that God could do it.
It’s not a strawman. It is an illustration as to why the extra category “chance” is absurd.
Yes.
Irrelevant for this discussion.
When Meyer, Behe, et al. speak about random mutations, this is not what they are talking about. They are referring to mutations that occur solely due to what we are calling here “natural law”.
This is somewhat beside the point. Which is that design implemented by front-loading (and the magical pool shot) are indistinguishable from the unfolding of events guided only by “natural law”. The question remains (although perhaps not for @gbrooks9) - how does this formal possibility impact ID theory, and the practice of ID as science?
Put another way - how might ID theorists empirically differentiate between these sorts of front-loading and other hybrid models? How does one rule out one or the other of these?
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From what I can see, front loading and the billiard shot may be two different concepts.
If we go old school, we could run a plate replica assay or fluctuation assay to determine if specific mutations are caused by specific environmental cues. For example, if bacteria only produce mutations conferring antibiotic resistance when exposed to antibiotics this may tip the balance towards front loaded mutations, from what I understand of the model. However, if a supernatural deity had the foresight to put a 14 billion year Rube Goldberg-esque string of events into place at the Big Bang that would produce a mutation conferring antibiotic resistance before the bacteria are exposed to antibiotics then it would look like the standard random mutations we are accustomed to. It would be akin to God planning the route of individual photons in a double slit experiment 14 billion years in advance, and plan their route so they fit in with the expected interference pattern.
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They could be. However, with enough momentum imparted the billiard balls, the pool shot starts to look like front-loading. (I know I know - that’s trying to do too much with a simplistic analogy …)
Isn’t it interesting how much more thought is going into Behe’s model in this one thread than in everything every ID Creationism theorist has ever written?
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God doesn’t have to “physically“ do anything to guarantee a universe of random events and free will produce the great pyramids and you.
Do you think God “forces” the choices of every single human coupling that eventually led to you? Then there is no free will. But if all those people freely chose their actions, then that’s one impossibly long chain of events God has no control over. That’s what your theology leads you to,
However, if God granted autonomy to his creations and can still foresee that the outcome is as he willed, then problem solved. Which makes your randomness objection pointless.
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And he completely ignores the much more powerful effect of selection acting on variation that already exists in every healthy population. This strategic omission leads laypeople to intuitively discount the ability of Darwinian evolution to act by more than a million-fold.
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