Just trying to light off some fireworks here! :^)
Rocks collected on the Moon - not subject to wind, rain, and erosion - tell us that it's been 4.6 billion years since "... the Earth was spun from dust and rock around the sun." Ref: "Darwin's Ghost," Steve Jones, pg 195
Thanks for the article.
DAWKINS: (snip)"…But yet we have this gathering together of genes into individual organisms. And that reminds me of the illusion of one mind, when actually there are lots of little mindlets in there, and the illusion of the soul of the white ant in the termite mound, where you have lots of little entities all pulling together to create an illusion of one. Am I right to think that the feeling that I have that I'm a single entity, who makes decisions, and loves and hates and has political views and things, that this is a kind of illusion that has come about because Darwinian selection found it expedient to create that illusion of unitariness rather than let us be a kind of society of mind?"http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dawkins_pinker/debate_p10.htmlPINKER: "It's a very interesting question. Yes, there is a sense in which the whole brain has interests in common in the way that say a whole body composed of genes with their own selfish motives has a single agenda. In the case of the genes the fact that their fates all depend on the survival of the body forces them to cooperate. In the case of the different parts of the brain, the fact that the brain ultimately controls a body that has to be in one place at one time may impose the need for some kind of circuit, presumably in the frontal lobes, that coordinates the different agendas of the different parts of the brain to ensure that the whole body goes in one direction. In How the Mind Works I alluded to a scene in the comedy movie All of Me in which Lily Tomlin's soul inhabits the left half of Steve Martin's body and he takes a few steps in one direction under his own control and then lurches in another direction with his pinkie extended while under the control of Lily Tomlin's spirit. That is what would happen if you had nothing but completely autonomous modules of the brain, each with its own goal. Since the body has to be in one place at one time, there might be a circuit that suppresses the conflicting motives…"(end snip)
The first time a humans unique DNA structure was formed was when their parents DNA was randomly shuffled together.
Radio-atomic decay is calculated as a chance that an atom will randomly spit out some radiation.
Our immune system antibodies can bind to any foreign 3-D structure because they randomly shuffled the DNA that codes for their variable regions to “explore” almost all possible combinations (self binding ones are eliminated).
Obviously what we see as “random” is everywhere we care to look in the universe and part and parcel of the reality that God created.
Prov 16:33 “The dice are cast into the lap, but every result is from the Lord”
So was it Calvin’s theological determinism (rehashed Augustinian determinism as rehashed Manichaeism) that led to the development of the biological, political, and psychological determinism of Darwin, Marx, and Freud?