Statistical chimps¶

Mark O'Brien has the following to say

coming from a science background in my previous life, i find the whole business of evolutionary theory the most faith-filled exercise in all the world. under the guise of rationalistic scientific endeavour, you have otherwise intelligent people making huge leaps of faith to create acceptable human history, involving all sorts of gaps, lack of evidence, etc., but credible simply because they exclude God and the concept of creation. and all this faith is taught as fact... scientific fact at that, when in fact it is more like scientific faith.

Somehow the word "evolution" dropped somewhere in the coffee-table discussion yesterday and one of them looked at me and said something like "I shouldn't say that with you around" (he knows I'm a christian). I didn't have any problems with the discussion, btw.

Funny, in that perspective, to read above quote one day later. What I told that collegue boiled down to two points:

• No, I'm not in the "6x24 hours, 4000 years ago" camp.
• And, no, I don't believe in evolution-as-it-is-normally-understood either. That's one big statistical impossibility.

It is not binary EITHER evolution believer OR 6x24 believer.

No 6x24 hours (and I mean real, current-day 24 hours)? Of course, the scientific evidence is so big that the two opening chapters of Genesis just can't be taken in some specific literal fashion. When you want to disprove all that evidence, you end up doing some pretty idiotic reasoning.

No evolution? Not as commonly understood and thought, at least. That's such a complete and utter statistical impossibility. When you want to discount all statistical theory, you end up doing some pretty idiotic reasoning.

The final answer? Not one of these two idiotic reasonings. It is OK to research them both further, of course. In all scientific honesty. For me? Once you get used to the idea, a God that wilfully created all sorts of animals, developing partly upon his earlier work, seems pretty workable. With some some very special new projects, like human beings. With their own will and the build-in possibility of discarding the God that made them. After all, making the human equivalent of the following program isn't much fun after 200 years or so:

 repeat until age == 394:
     print "God, I like you!"

Real people with a real free will making that choice themselves... That's what he's after :-)