clipped from: www.lhup.edu   

Random thoughts on randomness and order.


The "Game of Life" shows that order can arise from disorderly arrangements of objects if there are some rules of interaction in place. Those rules can be chosen without forethought as to the outcome. The kind of order that results certainly exhibits the kind of structure, pattern and lawfulness we find in nature, but it arose without purposeful design.


Creationists and ID advocates like to choose "loaded" words to suggest the kind of conclusion they wish to draw from them. So instead of the neutral words "pattern, structure, complexity and lawfulness", they speak of these as "design", which suggests that some intelligence intended this result.


They use the word "disorder" to mean total absence of order, and then invoke the slogan "order cannot arise from disorder" as if it were a law of nature. It isn't, for the order of an open system can increase if there's energy input, and complete disorder is not to be found anywhere in nature