The randomness of neo-Darwinian biology is nothing like that. It is simply random. The variation through genetic mutation is random. And natural selection is also random: The properties of the ever-changing environment that drive evolution through natural selection are also not correlated to anything, according to the Darwinists. Yet out of all that unconstrained, unintelligible mess emerges, deus ex machina, the precisely ordered and extraordinarily intelligible world of living organisms. And this is the heart of the neo-Darwinian science of biology.
Natural selection is not random - not even in his sense of uncorrelated, or not driving toward any very-long-term goal. As long as a species has time (enough generations) to react to the changes in its environment, it should evolve. Possibly into something recognizably different from the previous generations, in which case we come along afterwards & classify their fossils into two different species, families, etc.
Be that as it may, let us return to and extend Barr’s license plate example and see what we might learn. Suppose the Barr family sets out on a trip southward from their home in Delaware—and, while hearing a brief introductory lecture on the proper meaning of randomness, the children start writing down the state of each passing license plate. After hours have passed, the children, pausing at their work, provide the following report: While each individual car’s license plate does indeed seem uncorrelated to the previous and next, or to anything in the immediate environment, there may nevertheless be a pattern in the data. At first, almost all the license plates were from Delaware. A little later the majority shifted to Maryland. A few hours after that there was a big upswing of District of Columbia plates, mixing in near-equal proportion to the Maryland plates. A short time later the majority became Virginia plates. Now they see a dramatic shift to North Carolina plates. Is there a pattern here? Is there a reason one can think of for that pattern?
I think he's getting at this: People decided to found colonies (later states) in those places, and they purposely drew the borders in specific places instead of others. Fine. The problem is, the license plate game would produce similar patterns if the states had been laid down in a totally random fashion. So he's not proving anything.
Larry Arnhart has written about Aristotlean metaphysics and the meaning of the different kinds of causes. IIRC, the original terms could easily be translated as "explanations", not "causes". And that, to Aristotle, a final cause can be as mundane as a living organism's need to keep on living. (Or something like that. Like I say, much of philosophy reads like word-games to me & makes my mind drift. :-)
This is astonishing! Schoenborn's committing a textbook example of PatrickHenry's Fallacy of Retrospective Astonishment. Is he really basing his whole argument on this???The Darwinian biologist looking at the history of life faces a precisely analogous question. If he takes a very narrow view of the supposedly random variation that meets his gaze, it may well be impossible to correlate it to anything interesting, and thus variation remains simply unintelligible. He then summarizes his ignorance of any pattern in variation by means of the rather respectable term “random.” But if he steps back and looks at the sweep of life, he sees an obvious, indeed an overwhelming pattern. The variation that actually occurred in the history of life was exactly the sort needed to bring about the complete set of plants and animals that exist today. In particular, it was exactly the variation needed to give rise to an upward sweep of evolution resulting in human beings. If that is not a powerful and relevant correlation, then I don’t know what could count as evidence against actual randomness in the mind of an observer.
Some may object: This is a pure tautology, not scientific knowledge. I have assumed the conclusion, “rigged the game,” and so forth. But that is not true. I have simply related two indisputable facts: Evolution happened (or so we will presume, for purposes of this analysis), and our present biosphere is the result. The two sets of facts correlate perfectly. Facts are not tautologies simply because they are indisputably true. If the modern biologist chooses to ignore this indubitable correlation, I have no objection. He is free to define his special science on terms as narrow as he finds useful for gaining a certain kind of knowledge. But he may not then turn around and demand that the rest of us, unrestricted by his methodological self-limitation, ignore obvious truths about reality, such as the clearly teleological nature of evolution.
Thanks for your response. I personally think the license plate analogy is faulty but honest men and women for that matter should acknowledge that most logic no matter how well founded will always require a degree of faith. All thinking requires a net of assumptions in which to attempt to catch the truth. Causality is one of the things that one has to be careful with because many things that appear to be connected are not and many things that appear not to be are. Initial conditions are very important even with counting license plates because even events such as how many cars are on the road from a given state in a given area can indeed be correlated based upon something as simple as a football game or holiday travel. You make a very good point concerning where people chose to settle and such and are right about natural selection. The assumption that it is random is a mistatement but it is generally accepted that it is undirected or if it is directed it is indirectly directed meaning that it is not in any way purposeful. Personally I believe a much more radical idea.I believe that natural selection is a minor player in the game of evolution and that within each organism is an elaborate feedback mechanism that allows direct evolutionary response to environmental stressors. There have been some minor hints of this in some studies and I think once we really begin to understand the role of gene imprinting and expression the idea of evolution driven by natural selection will fall to the wayside.
Maybe I am wrong, but the cost is little either way because regardless of the grand stories we craft ourselves, scientist or theologian, utimately most of what we accept will be found lacking as has been the case with generations before us. It is the dogmatic inability to put aside our assumptions that in part makes us human but in the end our assumptions (our faith) is all we have.