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!
The Lewontin statement is an astonishing admission.
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.
BTW, "infinity" is another term that is very useful in mathematics but does not translate well to the natural sciences because space/time is finite.