Posted on 11/12/2010 4:10:37 AM PST by mattstat
Caution! The experiment I’m about to explain might increase your belief in God. It should only be attempted by academics who are immune to such deleterious effects.
Got a pair of dice? Before you throw them, guess what numbers will show. Obviously, what will happen is random, you have no control over the dice, and chances are you will guess wrongly. This is bad news. Because when you experience the dice’s randomness, you now are more likely to believe in God. Even worse, you might even toss your copy of The Descent of Man into the bin!
The result of this experiment really do appear to follow from the work of Bastiaan Rutjens, Joop van der Pligt, Frenk van Harreveld who wrote the paper “Deus or Darwin: Randomness and belief in theories about the origin of life” in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
These eminences hope that, “belief in God and other supernatural agents can increase as a result of psychological threats such as existential uncertainty…and lack of control.” They “hypothesize that a threat to personal control (which poses a threat to perceiving the world as orderly and structured…) only increases belief in an external agent (i.e., God) when no notion of an orderly world is available.” [Citations are removed from all quotations.]
Even stronger:...
(Excerpt) Read more at wmbriggs.com ...
Is the author mocking what he doesn’t understand, or does he understand the results and is just trying to lead the reader astray? Yes, I get his sarcasm, but the research results aren’t terribly surprising, and the weak nature of the study undermines his point, too.
Not sure I buy into this premise. I don’t think I’ve ever heard secularists or athiests say that randomness doesn’t exist. Many of the more religious people I know seem to believe that G-d controls everything, so nothing is really random. It is all part of G-d plan, even to the minutest detail.
The modern idea that God only rules over deterministic outcomes is an idea that makes God into some Calvinist caricature, smaller than He really is.
There’s more to it then that. It is more then randomness. It is universal free will which is not just in human decision, but in how the world works. God could control it all, how boring for God and apathetic for us. For there would only be the constant, the static. There would not be any probability or possibility just sameness.
Free will should not be confused with free rule for there is no free rule except God’s. God rules and sets the rules. God speaks. Do we hear? Do we listen? God puts opportunities before us and allows us to make choices. Some times God rescues us from our decisions by divine intervention or guiding someone else to lend us a hand.
God rules with love and hopeful expectation, rather then with violent, hateful domination.
This is why I call the “Heiseberg Uncertainty Principle” the “God Certainty Principle”.
God DOES play dice and the dice are loaded.
This is why I call the “Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle” the “God Certainty Principle”.
God DOES play dice and the dice are loaded.
Ain’t nothing random in throwing dice it is just that the laws of physics and the equations that govern what will happen are so many faceted it would take a computer program to figure the result
I had a preacher tell me once that we have free will, but G-d (being omniscient) knows exactly what we’re going to do. On the surface, that seems like a contradiction, but its not—as long as the choice is ours. But if G-d knows what is going to happen, how could it be truely random?
Being human, we could debate this for our whole lives and never find the answer. And...maybe its better that way. Best that we mortals never figure out how to game G-d’s system.
That was the end result of Chaos Theory, that's why you don't hear much about it anymore.
As Augustine puts it, predestination is God’s foreknowledge of His gift giving. The gift is still freely given, and the players are free to choose.
Einstein wasn’t a very good philosopher.
I usually see Creationists using randomness in the random mutations observed to create genetic variation as a means of claiming that either you think it is “all random” or they offer as the only alternative “controlled by God”.
As if what we see as random is not also controlled by God! As if God's power stops at the casino door!
The reality that God created LOVES randomly created variation. It happens in our immune systems to create variation and select from it only those variations that do not bind to self, while creating such awesome variation that our immune system can recognize just about every 3-D structure that is NOT self.
I usually see Creationists using randomness in the random mutations observed to create genetic variation as a means of claiming that either you think it is “all random” or they offer as the only alternative “controlled by God”.
As if what we see as random is not also controlled by God! As if God's power stops at the casino door!
The reality that God created LOVES randomly created variation. It happens in our immune systems to create variation and select from it only those variations that do not bind to self, while creating such awesome variation that our immune system can recognize just about every 3-D structure that is NOT self.
However, God gives up free will therefore fate cannot exist. Pre-destination (i.e. God knows everything that is going to happen from the begging of time to the end of time) is not the same thing. Just because God KNOWS you are going to knock over that store, God does not force you to do so. You do that of your own free will.
Think of it like God has the universe on DVR and watched everything live while we are watching the universe later from the recording. Say you DVR the super bowl but watch it live. Your buddy comes home and you then watch the recording together. Even though you know EVERYTHING that happened in the game and your buddy does not, does not mean you effect the outcome even one iota. You just have pre-knowledge of the events of the game.
Are you claiming that he's not at all advocating against TE?
Paging Henri Poincaré...
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