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| I think this clever cartoon originates from the Faraday Institute, an organisation I would support and certainly recommend to those who are interested in the relation of science and religion. |
I must prefix this post with one of my usual disclaimers: Like the late Sir John Polkinghorme I can confess to the label of being an intelligent design creationist. (Although Polkinghorne was a Christian evolutionist and I'm not so sure I can claim that label in terms of evolution's internal driving mechanisms). Also, along with Polkinghorne I have to distance myself from the North American de facto Intelligent Design and creationist movements whose concepts are bound up with and influenced by the political drift to the far-right. I refer to right-wing Intelligent Design creationism with terms like "IDist", "IDism" and "de facto ID".
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This post on the de facto ID web site Uncommon Descent quotes another ID blog post entitled "Randomness is not a scientific explanation: We can never know if anything is truly random". I'll refer to this blogger as "Eric" and I will interleave my comments with Eric's content as below. In the following I will be implicitly drawing from the understanding I gained in compiling my work Disorder and Randomness.
ERIC: It is common in the sciences to claim aspects of our universe are random:
In evolution, mutations are random.
In quantum physics, the wave collapse is random.
In biology, much of the genome is random.
In business theory, organizational ecologists state new ideas are random.
MY COMMENT: Although randomness can be defined in a mathematically ideal way and this involves configurations of infinite size, there is such a thing as effective randomness (usually called pseudo randomness) and this does not involve the mathematical ideal: The use of randomness in practical statistics need not necessarily make an assumption of the mathematical ideal; if the "random" configurations used in practical statistics are a result of some underlying obscure and perhaps complex algorithm the statistician is unlikely to discover that algorithm and as long as the configurations under study are sufficiently disordered the overwhelming majority of statistical tests will return the expected statistics.
An example of the practical use of configurations that don't fit the mathematical ideal of randomness are random number tables that have been generated by some known algorithm of sufficient memory space and/or execution time complexity to return relatively disordered configurations. A statistician fully aware that these tables are algorithmically generated can nevertheless still use them to test his statistical methods simply because the statistician's selection methods are very unlikely to recapitulate the generating algorithm.
However, like the good de facto IDist that he is I can safely assume that Eric is going think in dichotomies and will only see the choice being between ideal randomness and what he and other de facto IDists refer to as "necessity" (sic). For them the natural sciences are all about "chance & necessity" (sic); they see no gradation from high order to high disorder with much statistics still practical for a broad class of configurations that are not the mathematical ideal of disorder. The North American ID mind has been tempered in the fires of US political polarization & rejection by academia and that has a bearing on so much of IDist thinking as we shall see.
ERIC: There is a general idea that everything new has its origins in randomness. This is because within our current philosophy of science, the two fundamental causes in our universe boil down to randomness and necessity. Since necessity never creates anything new, then by process of elimination the source of newness must be randomness. Similar to how the ancient Greeks believed the universe originated from chaos.
MY COMMENT: I'm not quite sure who Eric is referring to in his first sentence, but it's probably true that randomness is an overworked concept among some atheists.
In the above quote we see reference to the so-called "randomness and necessity" (sic) dichotomy, more usually expressed by IDists as "chance and necessity" (sic). I've seen IDists claim that because algorithms generate outputs with "certainty" (or with "necessity" (sic)) then the information value of this output, which is given by -log(P) where P = 1, must be zero! One fault with this reasoning is that it confuses randomness and probability, which are in fact two different things: A high order configuration may be a big unknown to an observer and therefore probabilistic up to the point it becomes known. And yet a truly random configuration, once it is recorded and known, no longer has a surprisal value and therefore its information content becomes zero. The term "information" is observer relative. Moreover, so-called "newness" is also relative to the observer: Let me repeat: A recorded random output is no longer new and surprising. In contrast an algorithm yet to operate may produce a new configuration never seen in the life time of the universe. Eric is simply parroting his cultural line about there being a dichotomy between "chance & necessity" (sic). Whether "necessity" (sic) generates anything "new" is a question whose answer depends on relative perspective. Moreover, what IDists call "necessity" isn't necessity at all, because the laws (or algorithms) governing our universe look to be very contingent.
In one sense the Greeks were right: Order emerged out of primeval chaos, but not of its own will, but did so because God created order in a series of organising separations as attested by Genesis 1.
The following statement by Eric reveals a very common & habitual way of thinking about the discoveries of science; it is a way of thinking common to both IDists and atheists:
Within our current philosophy of science, the two fundamental causes in our universe boil down to randomness and necessity.
Eric is trying to get past us the oft taken for granted concept that somehow "randomness and necessity" (sic) are "fundamental causes" No, they are not fundamental causes; rather they are ways of describing the patterns of behavior that God impresses on the cosmos. In fact the notion of "cause" is itself descriptive of patterns of behavior that only hold for some cases; for example in the dynamical patterns we see in Newtonian mechanics "causation" is a fairly clear cut notion, but in quantum mechanics with its widely distributed entanglements and random collapses physical causation becomes a problematic category.
Against the IDist philosophical background where it is (unconsciously) assumed algorithms and randomness (what I refer to informally as law & disorder) are somehow fundamental sources of causation rather than methods of describing the patterns of creation, it becomes an easy next step to think of these "fundamental causes" (sic) as having their own animus, an animus which competes with the divine animus: God and the "natural" animus become mutually exclusive explanations for the state of the world. With this version of crypto-animism as an implicit background we begin to see why IDists, whose philosophical motivation is theism, are so determined to show that the so-called "natural forces of chance & necessity" (sic) do not have the efficacy to create life; for to concede this the IDists feel they are giving way to the kind of atheism which posits a world of "fundamental causes" (sic) that needs no divine input.
The IDists, then, have effectively swallowed a paradigm whereby they see "chance & necessity" (sic) competing with divine creativity. Accordingly, we have a situation where atheists want those fundamental forces of physical "causation" (sic) to work as the animus explaining the universe, but where IDists are determined to prove that "natural forces" (sic), that is "chance & necessity" (sic), don't work as an explanation of organic form and function. As I have documented in this blog before (see here and here) the de facto IDists are therefore committed to the idea that "intelligent agency" is a very different genus of "causation" and this makes itself felt in their so called "explanatory filter" (Another fine mess of their's). This has a further knock on effect for their understanding of human intelligence: Viz: They are unwilling to accept that human intelligence can be described in terms of natural law & disorder and believe that it transcends any attempt at algorithmic description. All in all this commits them to the idea that intelligence is an almost mystical and sacred form of causation, a form of causation they resort to as an when they are unable to find an explanation using the profanities of "chance & necessity" (sic).
ERIC: Here’s the irony of the view that whatever is unique in our universe is random: We can never know if anything is truly random. This is because randomness is unprovable, which was proven by three different computer scientists: Ray Solomonoff, Andrey Kolmogorov, and Gregory Chaitin. The only thing we can know is that something is not random. Hence, we can never know that something originated from randomness.
MY COMMENT: Regarding Eric's first sentence: As we have seen algorithms can be used to describe uniqueness and observer relative unknowns; I can't speak for those who, according to Eric, think that only pure randomness is a source of uniqueness. Eric's next two sentences are right: Like all physical patterns purported to be covered by a universal law, where humanly speaking a mere observational sampling is only possible, no absolute proof of randomness can be forth coming, especially as mathematically ideal randomness entails infinite patterns. In short Eric is saying nothing very profound here. He is simply stating that we can never absolutely prove universal patterns but can only test these putative laws, laws which are actually tendered not as causative but rather as descriptive of those patterns of behavior. I suspect that Eric, who has guru status among de facto ID followers, is name-dropping here and to ignorant followers it will look as though he's making a clever technical point. He isn't.
Eric's last two sentences are in the absolute sense, false. We cannot absolutely prove that something is not random: As Christians we may be feel sure that the high organisation and fine tuning we see in the cosmos is evidence of divine action, but let's recall that this is no proof for the atheistic multiverse aficionados who prefer to view cosmic order and fine tuning as just a statistically inevitable blip in a huge sea of randomness; these people are exploiting the fact that, contrary to Eric's statement, it is not possible to know with certainty that something isn't random. But I wouldn't expect theists who accept the idea of a God of providence to use multiverse notions to explain cosmic organisation and fine-tuning; for one's perspective is entirely different if one's epistemic corner stone is that behind the world of our senses is a rational God who creates order. The sample of organisation we see in our universe then makes sense, a lot of sense in my opinion. True, a belief in God is not amenable to test tube precipitating and spring extending science, rather theism is a sense making doctrine, just as the random multiverse is a sense making doctrine for some atheists.
Eric should have said: We can never (absolutely) know that something didn't originated from randomness. and we cannot know if something is not random . We walk by faith!
ERIC: What does this result mean for science? It means that randomness can never be a scientific explanation, since we can never know that something is random. At best, saying something is random is shorthand for “we don’t know.” So, when scientists state the origin of something in our universe is random, they do not know the origin.
MY COMMENT: Eric is wrong again: Randomness, even mathematically ideal randomness, is a scientific explanation in that it states testable conditions, statistically testable conditions. Saying something is random is NOT, repeat NOT, shorthand for "we don't know" because propositions about randomness are effectively telling us about the kind of configurations we are likely to encounter. True, we can't absolutely prove randomness any more than we can absolutely prove quantum mechanics. But we can sample and test purported patterns of behavior; that's what empirical science is about, and that's what the eyes of faith rejoice in: "All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all that I haven't seen" (Emerson).
I can't speak for atheist scientists who may use an infinite sea of randomness in their multiverse preferences. But Eric is wrong again: such preferences aren't a simple "don't know"; they have content, content about the ultimate context of pattern in which our universe is supposed to be placed.
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In the UD post that quotes Eric, by way of comment the writer of the post tells us:
Takehome: Three different computer scientists have proven that randomness is unprovable. The only thing we can know is that something is not random.
