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4/5/05 Is Chance the Engine of Change? Creationists and proponents of Intelligent Design theory (between whom there is no clear distinction) rely heavily for their attempts at persuasion on a certain use of probability: They point to arguments or claims that certain events or characteristics of life, the universe, and everything are so improbable that they can only reasonably be explained by the action of an Intelligent Designer (who always resembles the Judaeo-Christian God). There are many flaws with this approach, some of which SoothSeeker has already discussed. But a very simple problem with the foundation of their thinking is becoming apparent to me. They scoff at "randomness" as being thought by atheists or agnostics or scientists as being capable of producing the self-replicating order that is life. But what we mean when we say "random" does not describe the nature of the universe, but the nature of our understanding. Albert Einstein famously objected to Quantum Theory that "God does not play dice with the Universe." He disputed Niels Bohr and others in their apparent claim that not only was it impossible to know both the position and velocity of a particle, but that the particle itself did not have a fixed position or velocity at any point in time--that waveforms describing probabilities of their position at given times were measuring random reality. The controversy has raged ever since. It is quite clear, and virtually no physicist disputes, that we can never know enough about a particle (much less a mass of particles) to be able to predict its exact position or any other characteristic at any future time. We describe its position as being "random" within the boundaries of the waveforms that describe the probabilities of its position. What this word "random" means is "unpredictable". Let me illustrate by pointing out with two examples that things we typically view as "random" are actually clearly determined, but since we don't know enough about them, we cannot predict them. Let us shuffle a deck of cards, cut it, and set it on the table, faces down. We do not know the identity of the top card on the deck, but there is one and only one card at the top of the deck, and turning it over at any point in time will reveal only that one card. The card is not "random" because it is clearly a particular card. But since we don't know what card it is, we think of it as being "random." It is more accurate to say that, until we look, the identity of the card is unknown or mysterious. The position of that card was determined by the sequence of shuffles and cuts that put the deck into the current configuration. Those sequences were not random, but we deliberately used techniques designed to ensure that our eyes, hands and/or minds would have great difficulty following the sequence and thus predicting the position of any card in the deck, since (aside from card tricks, which prove my case by their very existence) the goal of shuffling is to make the game interesting; if every outcome were easily predicted there would be no point to playing the game. A flip of a coin is the same. We throw the coin in the air, deliberately imparting to it a rotation that will prevent us from having much prospect either to predict or affect the outcome, then we catch the coin and prepare to reveal it. Once we have caught it, the outcome has been determined by the rotation and by its orientation at the exact moment that we caught it. But because we do not know what the orientation is, we cannot predict the outcome. It is determined, but we call it "random" because we do not know. Since we throw and catch the coin differently every time, measurements over time will show approximately a 50% probability of either outcome. The shuffling of the cards, which is also different every time, and starts each time from a different initial ordering, will also show approximately an equal probability of any card in the deck coming out on top. But in no case is the outcome anything but a result of the train of cause and effect which, if we knew everything about it, would allow us to predict the result with 100% accuracy. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle applies even on this scale: we cannot know everything, so we can never predict results with 100% accuracy, but can only discuss the probabilities of the outcomes. Nothing else about the universe is clearly random. What is random is our ability to predict the outcome. When we know neither the initial condition nor the probabilities of actual outcomes, we cannot say how likely any event was to happen as it did, so we cannot say it is so improbable as to be attributable only to a conscious intervention. There is no basis for the Creationist to argue that random events cannot create an ordered reality. Since this means "unpredictable" events, they unequivocally can. Modified: 04/05/2005 |
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