Talk:Objections to evolution/random

Stochastic effects in nature
Chaos theory Turbulence Brownian motion Heisenberg uncertainty principle Electron shells Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox

One of the principles that creationists forcefully assert is that evidence of the creator is written in the "book of nature" as well as in the scriptures. This was one of the assumptions that dominated the thinking of naturalists for centuries. If we accept this precept, what can we learn about the nature of God and his creation? Evidence of random processes throughout nature are rampant. One of the incredible surprises of the last century of science is that our deterministic view of the universe is inadequate for describing all natural phenomena when they are examined at small scales. Electrons do not describe regular orbits about a nucleus. Particles materialize and disappear randomly in empty space. Schrodinger's cat is alive and dead at the same time, and only probabilistic statements about the cat's state are possible. Einstein objected to this, stating "God does not play dice with the universe" and set out to disprove it, and only ended up strengthening the arguments for a stochastic nonmechanistic nondeterministic universe. These laws of physics underly all natural systems, including chemistry and biology and every other science to the best of our current understanding. The processes that produce light from the sun and energy for living things including our bodies are at their base random. The process responsible for colors and vision is random. Systems that create clouds and storms are random. Radioactive decay is a random phenomenon. Stochastic descriptions even apply to nonquantum phenomenon. This includes all matter of chaotic systems, including turbulence in fluids, in classical mechanics. What appeared at first as just a convenient description of a complicated system now appears to be an intrinsic component of reality.

Mutations also appear to be random phenomena, completely in accord with all the other laws of the universe that we observe. It would be surprising indeed if mutations were an exception.