Replies

Thank you oh so very much for your outstanding essay-post, dearest sister in Christ! And thank you for the link and excerpt and introducing us to that debate.

Mackie's statement about the presupposition of randomness is very telling. It is a statement of faith - in his case, atheism.

Truly, a person cannot say something is random in the system if he does not know what the system "is."

Mathematicians know this. But oftentimes scientists like Mackie will use the term "random" as if to say they know what physical reality "is." They do not. For instance, they do not know and cannot know the number and types (temporal, spatial) of dimensions which exist or the existence of particles which have no observable effect. The word "unpredictable" would be more accurate when describing such phenomena in nature, but that word does not serve the activist atheist's agenda.

An example for the lurkers, if a person were to extract a series of numbers from the extension of pi, he might say the numbers are random. Indeed, he might be able to use stochastic methods in studying such extracted numbers.

But in reality, those numbers were highly determined by the calculation of the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter. The same numbers would appear in the same position regardless of how many times pi is calculated. So the scientist's declaration of "randomness" is only applicable to his methodology, it is not the truth of the matter.

The example can also be seen metaphorically, i.e. science is constrained to the right hand side of the formula by its own methodology, methodological naturalism. It is blind to the left hand side of the equation - for all intents and purposes, to science, the left hand side of the equation does not exist. Theology and philosophy, on the other hand, look at both sides.

For that reason, people greatly err when they practice theology/philosophy under the color of science.

Mackie's statement about the presupposition of randomness is very telling. It is a statement of faith -- in his case, atheism.

Indeed. And he can have his atheism preserved intact just so long as he can maintain the illusion that the whole of reality (natural, historical, social, and personal) can be reduced to what amounts to an unfounded and unexamined presupposition — that "everything supervenes on the physical," on "matter in its motions," which motions are essentially perfectly "random." (As Jacques Monod put it, it's all "pure chance" in the end — and evidently also at the beginning.)

Mackey's statement is, as you note dearest sister in Christ, nothing more than "a faith statement." (A recent correspondent of mine — who evidently doesn't want to talk to me any more — seems to think that this method is perfectly legitimate....)

On this "rule," human imagination itself is to be confined to whatever limits this dubious premise demands or allows. I can't shake the feeling that some of these people have willfully committed "self-lobotomy".....

Which brings to mind Richard Lewontin's statement:

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

Could the doctrine of sheer nihilism be more plainly stated?

To change the subject (slightly): I couldn't help but notice the correspondence between Swinburne's h1 and h2 probability domains; and your enlightening discussion of pi as it relates to the problem of randomness.

It is common in the scientific debate today to toss the word "random" around a lot. But I've never got a decent definition of "random" from any of the folks who routinely use such language. (But I continue to hope I may, some day.... )

Notwithstanding, it seems to me pi illuminates this problem pretty well. The fact that pi is an irrational number means that its digit series will appear to human observers as a random distribution. The proof of this is that any selection of consecutive digits you might care to make to the right of the decimal point, at any place in the series, and/or in any selection size, will show you that digits selected on the basis of these criteria are not apparently correlated at all, and so they could never display any pattern whatever.

Trial "Q.E.D.": All the selection sizes and locations report that, whatever selection size or spatiotemporal location, the observed rule has been validated: Since "patterns" don't appear, randomness "rules."

But then you remind us that it's silly to speak of randomness if we do not know "What the System Is" against which this so-called random behavior is supposed to occur. Unless we mean to totally deconstruct reality as human beings typically experience it, we need to ask questions like this. JMHO FWIW

And you also remind us that, as "random" as pi "looks" to us, it is the universal demonstration of a rule, a law of nature (or at the very least a law of mathematics...).

Pi always and everywhere is "inerrant" in stipulating the numerical value of the circumference of a circle divided by its radius. Evidently pi holds universally and everywhere that human beings have ever been around to notice such things.

And yet for all the "random noise" expectorated by the Kultursmog lately, I think most human beings understand what a circle is, and find it useful in their daily lives.

Dearest sister in Christ, thank you so very much for your splendid essay/posts!