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To: Alamo-Girl
Milady, methinks ye be flexing your ego and gagging on semantics.

As far as we are able to measure, the behavior of the molecules in a volume of gas is predictably "random with a uniform distribution."

I submit that our God's use of such processes in His Creation was a brilliant way of establishing repeatable, self-controlling equilibria. You may not find the trustworthiness of the behavior of our atmosphere (despite the random motion of its individual molecules) to be worthy of admiration of Him who created it that way -- but I do.

29 posted on 03/14/2008 11:19:20 PM PDT by TXnMA (Don't vote for McCain. Vote AGAINST the Democrats!!!)
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To: TXnMA
[ As far as we are able to measure, the behavior of the molecules in a volume of gas is predictably "random with a uniform distribution." ]

You say semantics I say pedegogy she says unpredictable..
BUZZ... shes more accurate.. When you dont know the full system you're teaching is random observation..

31 posted on 03/15/2008 3:45:55 AM PDT by hosepipe (CAUTION: This propaganda is laced with hyperbole....)
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To: TXnMA; betty boop; IowaHawk; hosepipe; marron; metmom; curiosity
Milady, methinks ye be flexing your ego and gagging on semantics.

As Obama and his supporters are discovering in the Wright scandal - words have meaning. There is a price for carelessness even in a secular sense.

More importantly for us Christians, in a Spiritual sense, creating doubt in the minds of His little ones is a price no one can bear.

But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned. - Matthew 12:36-37

But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and [that] he were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh! - Matthew 18:6-7

You also said:

As far as we are able to measure, the behavior of the molecules in a volume of gas is predictably "random with a uniform distribution."

In your above statement "uniform distribution" is directly tied to "as far as we can measure." This is excellent because it suggests that science cannot measure the distribution of the molecules in the cosmos or across universes or dimensions - but for those volumes it can and has measured, the random distribution is uniform.

And your following paragraph praising God for it is a beautiful testimony for any who might otherwise be offended by such observations.

If other scientists would qualify their statements as you have, there would be no risk to the spiritually young and less contention with the spiritually mature. But obfuscation benefits the atheist agenda of Dawkins et al. So I will not hold my breath that they will speak as clearly as you - and instead will continue to counter their "spin" with the mantra:

One cannot say something is random in the system when he doesn't know what the system "is."

To God be the glory!

38 posted on 03/15/2008 9:25:48 AM PDT by Alamo-Girl
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To: TXnMA; Alamo-Girl; hosepipe; YHAOS; metmom
As far as we are able to measure, the behavior of the molecules in a volume of gas is predictably "random with a uniform distribution."

"As far as we are able to measure" is the operative clause here TXnMA. Alamo-Girl acknowledges this; you gloss right over it, seeming to suggest that the universe itself is somehow the product of Brownian motion. But this is the very point A-G gets to with her observation that we cannot know for certain what is "random" in a system if we don't know what the system "is."

The ability to "measure" is the ability to directly observe. This is the heart of "the observer problem": As spatio-temporally located parts of the system that we observe, we are never in a position to observe "all of it." We can only see from where we happen to stand. Thus we cannot know what the total system "is" on the basis of observation in principle. We therefore have no reason to conclude that "what is" can be reduced to what can be measured.

But if we assume that reduction, we foreclose the possibility that the randomness we perceive may be a physical process manifesting a higher-order cause that is not perceptible, detectable by sense perception.

Do we really want to reduce the universe (and human knowledge) to what sense perception can report? In effect, this is to say that Man, not God, is "the Measure" of all things. Or perhaps it's more correct to say that not Man, but his five sensory "windows" on the world, are the "measure" of reality.

It seems to me that the "randomness" that God uses as a tool in nature (so to speak) is indispensable to growth, change, development, evolution. Without it, the creation -- the universe -- would be wholly static. But this is not to say that randomness means "pure, blind chance," as Jacques Monod maintains (along with Dawkins, Pinker, Lewontin, Singer, et al.).

Ultimately, it seems to me that God's laws are guides to the system that operate on the random aspects of the system, in such a way as to constrain pure chance. Thus I think we need to see that the words "random" and "chance" are not synonyms, even though typically we speak of them as if they were.

Alamo-Girl is so right: We need to understand what "randomness" really means when we toss the word around in popular debates. In short, it seems to me before we start speaking about randomness and "chance," we ought to acknowledge that the observer problem is inextricably involved in whatever we say about the matter, and there is no single "privileged" human observer in the universe in a position to know the truth, because the sole observer of "all that there is" can only be God Himself.

In contrast, we humans see only partially, and "as if through a glass, darkly."

My two cents, FWIW.

41 posted on 03/15/2008 9:33:49 AM PDT by betty boop (This country was founded on religious principles. Without God, there is no America. -- Ben Stein)
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