[ale] [OT] Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnipresent or Not.

[da Black Baron]

On Monday 25 August 2003 10:57 pm, ChangingLINKS.com scratched their ass, 
sniffed their finger and quoth:

> 1. You cannot prove that there is randomness in effect in our system.

DUDE!   The way your DNA was spliced together was basically random, within the 
given set of parameters- there was basically a 1/16 chance that you would end 
up exactly as you are (given that each sperm and ova contains half a set of 
genes, and the odds of the hormones in your mother causing you to have that 
extra chromasome)!  

> 2. I cannot find randomness as it applies to our system in the Bible.

You find the notion of free will there, and culpability for one's actions.  

To side-track a bit:

You also erroniously accredit me with a literal interpretation of Genesis (a 
la "scientific creationism") in your earlier missive, and this is *wrong*.  
If you read Genesis, you'll see there are 2 distinct creation myths told, 
back-to-back, in the first chapters.  In one, man is created on the 6th day, 
after all the other animals, male and female at the same time, and in the 
latter one (the one you alluded to), you have man created first, then the 
animals, them woman from his rib.  

Why would anyone trying to perpetuate a hoax tell you two versions of the same 
story in one breath?  An answer would be that there was no hoax involved, and 
that the stories given were meant as *allegory*, or "midrash" to use the 
hebrew term for such a fable.

I believe that we evolved over millenia, not that we were plunked down en situ 
as some would assert...  

Just thought I'd tell ya... ;-)


> > I don't see knowing the outcome of a random event takes away the random
> > factors which came together to cause the event.
>
> How can an event be "random" if you know the outcome?

Take a program which runs a fractal- it's an equation which incorporates 
random elements.  You run it, produce the fractal- however, you can then run 
it backwards, forwards, examine it at any point in it's development (assuming 
you've recorded it), so for all intents and purposes you know *exactly* how 
point "a" is going to interact with point "b", and what the result will be, 
yet the random seed which generated the fractal is just as random. 

> (If you flip a coin, and you *know* it is going to land on heads
> immediately - how is that random? 

It's as much random as the fractal in the previous equation.  Said fractal 
exists in it's own two-dimensional world on your screen, you simply have to 
ability as a being who exists in 4 dimensions to see this fractal in any 
state from it's inception to it's end, you *know* that blob "a" is going to 
spawn blob "b"- simularly, Deity, existing outside our realm of time, can 
know that the coin is going to land on heads, and yet the random seed which 
produced the result is still there.

> Can you use that as a defense in court?

I'm not God... ;-)

> ("Your honor, randomness happens in our system, so when I aim the gun and
> pulled the trigger I was not "responsible"). [Please do not reply to my
> hypothetical examples, or the thread will get lost taking about gun
> ownership and the 2nd Amendment :) ]

You're overlooking the fact that a fractal equation (and all the evidence 
points to our entire space-time continuum as being a massive fractal 
interaction) contains *some* ordered elements in terms of the rules for the 
interactions that can take place...  Hence, the world is random enough for me 
to be responsable for my own actions, yet ordered enough that my actions can 
have a usually predictable outcome.


-- 

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                    "Here's my family tree.  As far as I can tell, my                      
         relatives were carnival folk who were touring this place called 
Hiroshima in 
             the summer of 1945.  Because they lost most of their hair, they 
                      mostly married each other.  And here I am"

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                                                        (,,oBo,,)            
 Wylde Bill                                               ||||          
______________________________________________________________          
http://lyst.org           
                
http://mrpooter.sytes.net                 wyldechylde at geocities.com           

       Disempowering government means empowering people.
        http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/nlm/nlm.html  

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