Random (Agnosticism)

by dhw, Sunday, January 03, 2016, 13:49 (3007 days ago) @ romansh

QUOTE: When it comes down to it, I think the most meaningful definition of randomness is that which cannot be predicted by humans. 
Dhw: An excellent definition, which leaves the whole question wide open. We have no idea what discoveries science might make in a hundred/thousand/ten thousand years, and so currently we can only theorize.-dhw: ...the argument that life and the mechanism for evolution are too complex to have arisen by chance.
ROMANSH: So assuming the you actually agree with the definition of random and assuming for you chance is more or less equivalent to random ... then your position that you must take seriously is this:
... the argument that life and the mechanism for evolution are too complex to be predicted by humans.
But I don't think you mean that predictability is a requirement for evolution.-What I meant is what I said: namely, that I take the complexity argument very seriously because I have difficulty believing that the mechanism for life and evolution could have arisen by chance. The statement could hardly be clearer, so I don't know why you think it needs to be rephrased in terms of prediction. A human cannot predict what is already past, and so “are too complex to be predicted” is quite different from “are too complex to have arisen by chance” Once you start twisting my statement, you can end up arguing that there were no humans around 3.8 billion years ago, therefore the mechanism for life and evolution could not have been predicted by humans, therefore the mechanism for life and evolution must have been random, and therefore there is no God. This, of course, would be a travesty of what I meant.-Initially I liked the above definition because it allows for the fact that human beings might one day in the future discover that what seems random or unpredictable to us now may not seem so then. However, on reflection I will now unreservedly withdraw my enthusiastic support, not only because it opens the path to silly word games (the above is my invention, though - you may have had a different motive), but also because there are events, such as the weather, which I do not regard as being governed by intentionality and which even now are sometimes predicted with a fair degree of accuracy by humans. I will henceforth stick to the conventional definition of “random”: lacking any definite plan, purpose or prearranged order, as in Darwin's concept of ”random mutations”.


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