> But he has a point here. > Our congressman are editing their own bios in wikipedia... > Bush is requesting personal data from Google and the likes... > And quite some people are getting fired for blogging...
The US is not perfect. But if congress has a law/Constitutional amendment pending that went something like "Our censorship laws will now be like those of China", I know for one that I would care a great deal that the law NOT pass. I assume you feel the same way.
> US principle are not universal principles. I do not believe in censorship, I think it's wrong, but the > 'great firewall' in China is not something *wrong*.
I do think that the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is universal. I'm curious, do you think we have ANY inalienable rights? Censorship can prevent us from access to important ideas, and from communicating with each other. Having access to these is essential to having any control at all in our lives, and defines who we are. From what I can tell, China is censoring access to info on, eg, tieneman square because it knows that if it can completely control the communication between its citizens, it can control those citizens' very identity. When a government has this sort of control, I don't see how its citizens can be said to have ANY rights. I also think that this is fundamentally different from, say, society requiring you to call someone "african-american" rather than "black", or an NC-17 rating guaranteeing a movie will make less money.
> Must absolute freedom be preserved in all these cases? In my opinion, no. I believe a government should balance > the right of freedom with the impact of destruction. Freedom is not synonomous with choice. I am pretty sure that forcibly evacuating people from the coastline in the face of a tsunami, or your implicit suggestion that the US prevent default-urls from pointing to pornography (which I've never experienced, but that is beside the point) does not impede on a person's freedom. Freedom is a complicated concept, but I think the ability to think freely and pursue new ideas is a necessary component. When I hear about China restricting access to, eg, web sites that discuss tiananmen square, this tells me that the Chinese government is trying to control the thoughts of its population by controlling access to ideas, and presumably it is doing so to help guarantee it stays in power. I also think that a necessary component of freedom is democratic self government. Again, what consitutes a democratic self government is complicated, but it is safe to say that a democratic self government does NOT prevent its population from access to ideas simply because those ideas might cause it to lose power.
I don't know my math history well enough to know for sure, but my guess is that people 3000 years ago could not even conceive or write the number 1 billion. So to me, a better comparison is to compare the Bible's 7 day accuracy to, say, Newton and Leibniz's use of infinitesimals in their calculus. Roughly speaking, "infinitesimals" are zero all the time, except that you can divide by them (you can never divide anything by zero; 1/0 = ? has no answer.) As a mathematical foundation, this was wrong. Calculus wasn't actually "done right" until the 19th century. But we don't say that Newton and Leibniz's calculus was wrong, because in a very real sense it was completely right. It gave the right answer. But in another sense, it was very wrong. Similarly, I would answer that Genesis uses its account of 7 days to get the right answer. It is very different from 1 billion years, but it is sufficient.
I see the difference to be sure. And I can certainly pick things in the Bible that, if different, would constitute a lie. For example, if we assume original sin, then if the Bible read that God kicked Adam and Eve from the garden for no reason, this would constitute a lie, and be truly analogous to your "cabbage patch kid" example. As for the universe being created in 7 days- I'm not sure this is analogous. On my 16th birthday, I quite clearly remember my parents saying "You were born 16 years ago", when of course I wasn't. By then, at dinner, I had been born, I don't know, 16 years and 4 hours ago. I don't think they were lying though.
I think you missed the results of the last national science survey (or whatever its called) where 1/2 of those polled did not believe that the earth revolves around the sun, and does so in one year:-(
The problem with this from religion's perspective is that God seems to lose all imminence. Also, its not clear to me that when science and religion go head to head, science wins. Rather, I think its the scientists who win. Lately, all the head-to-head-ness has been instigated by a particular wing of religion that I think doesn't have a particularly well thought out position. Social darwinism, for example, didn't work out all that well for science, if you want to look at it that way
> If "mathematics is no longer considered the standard for philosophical Truth as it once was"...
I don't think many mathematicians do. I think its the philosophers who always sort of looked towards mathematics as the model of how to come up with necessarily true statements.
Yes, but at least then it is clear what we are referring to. What the heck does "Intelligent design" refer to? As far as I can tell, nobody can really give an answer. I suppose its like God Himself- nobody really knows what it is, only what its NOT. And its NOT Darwin's natural selection ( see, you know exactly what I'm referring to;-).)
I should point out that I went on wikipedia, and found out that my memory of this stuff was, well, quite wrong. I should have stuck with philosophy of physics, which I am a little better grounded in:-). Sorry if I came off a bit strong in my post. I have had people ask me why I don't study something useful, so I understand your frustration as well. It seems like if its not going to make money in the next 10 years, a lot of people think it is useless. I don't know if you have studies philosophy of math, but you might find it interesting. Major figures included, eg, Goedel and Hilbert, so these are certainly people who understand math. I'm not sure, though, that the philosophers couldn't understand enough of Feynman if they tried. I think part of the problem is that they are still stuck trying to figure out the meaning of Heisenberg.
Only hidden variables that are observable are out of the question (and even then, only those subject to Bell's assumptions.) This is a metaphysical statement.
I think your cut-and-paste is more or less what happens in science. Old ideas are proved false, new ones replace them. You have entire scientific revolutions where everything we thought we knew turns out to be wrong (or at least limited.)
Yes, in religion we speak of the "Word" of God. You fundamentally must hear it from others. Science is more like mathematics, in that in principle you can always (if you have the time and expertise) verify the truth for yourself. Science does involve certain assumptions, but it is supposed to be rigorous in that your assumptions are clearly stated.
I remember now that the effort to derive mathematics from logic was to prove it consistent. This is Goedel proved it was doomed to fail. In any case, mathematics is no longer considered the standard for philosophical Truth as it once was.
Well, I'm only an experimental physicist, so I'm sure that I don't understand math to the extent that you do, but I have studied higher math, and I think it is basically impossible for anyone who really appreciates the beauty of mathematics to believe, deep down in their soul, that it is all simply a logic game. I know I don't. And yes, it is nothing short of a miracle that mathematics is able to somehow allow us to birth physics. However, it is interesting to me that you bring up physics, since most physicists I know, myself included, have a strong bent towards instrumentalism, namely the idea that mathematics is simply a tool or language to describe the world. To me, this is much more consistent with the idea that mathematics is a logic game, rather than Plato's or Kan't mathematics.
"failed to derive mathematics from logic" I'm sorry, but do you have any idea what I am referring to here? There was an effort in the early 20th century to derive the real numbers from logic alone. I don't remember much about it, but I assume it was an attempt to return to Kant. Kant of course believed that mathematics could be derived from our intuition, which essentially operated on euclidian geometry, and since this intuition was needed for any kind of knowledge we might have, it could essentially be regarded as True. However, the differential geometry you referred me to (and which I have studied) kind of shattered this belief, and so a new attempt was made to derive a theory of numbers from the postulates of logic, which were themselves regarded as necessary for thought. Set theory was born as part of all this. However, Goedel proved it was doomed to failure.
> I don't want to sound snobbish, but I really think it's just that the lay person cannot understand the logic > arguments being discussed I do think this was a little snobby. I think that you are fundamentally missing what the argument is about. Nobody is trying to reduce mathematics to a parlor game. However, for the Greeks at least, philosophy, religion, and mathematics were all once the same. They have been split apart forever. I think THIS is what I meant by "Truth value."
> I really was referring to the 'Big Bang' idea that pervades evolution: that everything exploded into existance.
I think that this is what I understood you meant by "simple chance", in other words that the world is devoid of God's rhyme and reason, that we are simply combinations of mechanical molecules, devoid of the divine breath. I want to say again this is NOT what Darwin's evolution says. You may decide that the assertion that your great-great-great... incomrehensible amount of greats...-great grandfather was not human DOES imply this (and I admit, this view does have some appeal), but that is your or someone else's philosophical or theological conclusion, not a scientific one.
Just to be clear, my point was that it is very define whether a story is "true" without defining the context in which it is to be understood. I don't know if I communicated that effectively. So this is why I don't understand what people mean when they talk about reading the Bible "literally". What do you mean by literally? When I read, say, a scientific theory, I know that theory is true only because I know its limitations. So I would say in a very real way, Newton's gravity is "true", even though Einstein's in a sense superseeds it, because inherent to saying that Newton's gravity is "true" is the understanding that it is an approximation. It is such a powerful theory because of what it chooses to ignore. So if by saying you should read the Bible "literally", you mean to read it as a scientific theory (which I think is more or less what most evangelicals mean), NASA uses Newton, not Einstein, to plot the paths of its space ships. This is because Newton's simplicity is power. Now, there is still a large difference between that example, and trying to connect somethign like Genesis and Darwin, but the phrase "literal" is problematic one.
Yes, actually, I am a scientist. Of course scientific theories are only falsified. I was using sloppy language. And yes, this is a terrible disconnect in the conversation on intelligen design, and I was contributing to it. However, this just supports my assertion that mathematics proofs (which are proofs in, as far as I am aware, the only truly correct uses of the word) and scientific "proofs" (sloppy language, yes.) Also, I am beginning to see how the ID'ers feel, a little. Sheesh. Did you even bother to try to understand my post?
Well, I haven't studied this stuff since I was an undergrad, but prior to, well Gauss, yes, nobody would have agreed that mathematical proofs have no truth value. However, after the late 19th century, when it was shown that consistent non-euclidean geometries existed, and after Hilbert (as I recall) and the like failed to derive mathematics from logic, and Goedel proved this was impossible, mathematics is generally regarded as a logic game, philosophically speaking. So you make certain assumptions, and see what results you can get. (Goedel was a platonist, of course, and didn't agree with this.)
> Lastly, would any religious person be willing to consider God as an "axiom"? Sure..."assume God, and the rest follows..." -
> but that's not a very helpful theological position!
This is not too far from what Descartes did, I suppose:-). I'm not sure how helpful he was theologically, though.
Yes, but philosophically, a mathematical proof is of course completely different than a scientific one. After the 19th century, mathematical proofs have generally been considered as devoid of Truth content, except by mathematicians, on weekends, when nobody is looking, and they indulge their true Platonic selves:-).
You should calm down though. I wasn't suggesting ID should be taught in school. However, I think that to say that Christian theology, which has 2000 years of the some of the greatest Wester minds as its authors, shouldn't be considered "irrational" simply because its not empirically testable.
> You are saying that the bible can't be taken literally. This really means that the bible isn't truthful. Or even more harshly, > it would contain lies.
If your child asks you how he came to be, assuming he is old enough, you are probably going to say something like "your mother and I met, we fell in love, we married, we made love (always in that order, always...;-) ), we conceived you, you were born." But you are leaving so much out. Of course you are leaving out lots of biology involved, and are being terribly inspecific. But it is even more than that. Maybe you met your wife at a bar. Well, then your child is there because you decided to get a drink that night. And maybe you were only living in that town because you went to that particular school because you wanted to be a writer. This says nothing about the requirement that YOUR parents met. (Maybe even you are a woman, and don't have a wife!) But this doesn't mean you are being untruthful. In telling a history, there is some degree of story telling involved. It is inevitable. We read the Bible as trying to give the creation of human beings a moral context. It is inevitable that it leave some stuff out. This doesn't mean it is lying. Now, you may think it leaves so much stuff out it is no longer relevant, but that is another issue.
Yes, "Something Wallace IIRC." Can't forget ol' Something. He was a dapper fellow, he was! Ol' Something. Or was it "Someone?" Anyway, can't forget him...
True, but for that matter, I'm not sure that religion isn't testable within ITS axioms as well. Also, whenever we talk about testing pure mathematics, we have to acknowledge Godel as well, although I'm not sure we want to actually discuss him, because I don't really understand him, and a priori I'm guessing you don't either.:-) And I'm sure that if we asked pure mathematicians whether they needed the empirical success of applied math to justify the validity of their work, they would laugh at us, and then, well, do something horrible, or at least prove the COULD. Anyway, not to say that mathematics is religion (although it started out that way), but my point is that there is room for rational thought outside the empirically testable.
> Part of the reason I believe as I do is that I can see the complexity and the order in the world around me, and I > cannot force myself to accept that it was all by mere chance, as the evolutionary theory would have me believe.
I don't think that evolution says things happened by "mere chance" in the way that you mean. As far as I know, the only "chance" in Darwin's natural selection is that the changes in an individual animals phenotype (in other words, its genes) with respect to its parents are more or less uncorrelated (in essence, unrelated) to whether or not those changes make the animal more likely to survive. In this sense, then, the changes in the genes are "random." I don't think this corresponds to your "mere chance." Now, many philosophers and scientists-turned-amateur-philosophers argue Darwin's natural selection increases the plausibility that we are indeed here by your "mere chance", but you can't blame this on Darwin or science.
> Finally, it irritates me that people see and hear the ramblings of Pat Robertson... Yes, I can imagine...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
> But he has a point here.
> Our congressman are editing their own bios in wikipedia...
> Bush is requesting personal data from Google and the likes...
> And quite some people are getting fired for blogging...
The US is not perfect. But if congress has a law/Constitutional amendment pending that went something like "Our censorship laws will now be like those of China", I know for one that I would care a great deal that the law NOT pass. I assume you feel the same way.
> US principle are not universal principles. I do not believe in censorship, I think it's wrong, but the
> 'great firewall' in China is not something *wrong*.
I do think that the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is universal. I'm curious, do you think we have ANY inalienable rights? Censorship can prevent us from access to important ideas, and from communicating with each other. Having access to these is essential to having any control at all in our lives, and defines who we are. From what I can tell, China is censoring access to info on, eg, tieneman square because it knows that if it can completely control the communication between its citizens, it can control those citizens' very identity. When a government has this sort of control, I don't see how its citizens can be said to have ANY rights. I also think that this is fundamentally different from, say, society requiring you to call someone "african-american" rather than "black", or an NC-17 rating guaranteeing a movie will make less money.
> Must absolute freedom be preserved in all these cases? In my opinion, no. I believe a government should balance
> the right of freedom with the impact of destruction.
Freedom is not synonomous with choice. I am pretty sure that forcibly evacuating people from the coastline in the face of a tsunami, or your implicit suggestion that the US prevent default-urls from pointing to pornography (which I've never experienced, but that is beside the point) does not impede on a person's freedom. Freedom is a complicated concept, but I think the ability to think freely and pursue new ideas is a necessary component. When I hear about China restricting access to, eg, web sites that discuss tiananmen square, this tells me that the Chinese government is trying to control the thoughts of its population by controlling access to ideas, and presumably it is doing so to help guarantee it stays in power. I also think that a necessary component of freedom is democratic self government. Again, what consitutes a democratic self government is complicated, but it is safe to say that a democratic self government does NOT prevent its population from access to ideas simply because those ideas might cause it to lose power.
I don't know my math history well enough to know for sure, but my guess is that people 3000 years ago could not even conceive or write the number 1 billion. So to me, a better comparison is to compare the Bible's 7 day accuracy to, say, Newton and Leibniz's use of infinitesimals in their calculus. Roughly speaking, "infinitesimals" are zero all the time, except that you can divide by them (you can never divide anything by zero; 1/0 = ? has no answer.) As a mathematical foundation, this was wrong. Calculus wasn't actually "done right" until the 19th century. But we don't say that Newton and Leibniz's calculus was wrong, because in a very real sense it was completely right. It gave the right answer. But in another sense, it was very wrong. Similarly, I would answer that Genesis uses its account of 7 days to get the right answer. It is very different from 1 billion years, but it is sufficient.
I see the difference to be sure. And I can certainly pick things in the Bible that, if different, would constitute a lie. For example, if we assume original sin, then if the Bible read that God kicked Adam and Eve from the garden for no reason, this would constitute a lie, and be truly analogous to your "cabbage patch kid" example. As for the universe being created in 7 days- I'm not sure this is analogous. On my 16th birthday, I quite clearly remember my parents saying "You were born 16 years ago", when of course I wasn't. By then, at dinner, I had been born, I don't know, 16 years and 4 hours ago. I don't think they were lying though.
I think you missed the results of the last national science survey (or whatever its called) where 1/2 of those polled did not believe that the earth revolves around the sun, and does so in one year :-(
The problem with this from religion's perspective is that God seems to lose all imminence. Also, its not clear to me that when science and religion go head to head, science wins. Rather, I think its the scientists who win. Lately, all the head-to-head-ness has been instigated by a particular wing of religion that I think doesn't have a particularly well thought out position. Social darwinism, for example, didn't work out all that well for science, if you want to look at it that way
> If "mathematics is no longer considered the standard for philosophical Truth as it once was"...
I don't think many mathematicians do. I think its the philosophers who always sort of looked towards mathematics as the model of how to come up with necessarily true statements.
Yes, but at least then it is clear what we are referring to. What the heck does "Intelligent design" refer to? As far as I can tell, nobody can really give an answer. I suppose its like God Himself- nobody really knows what it is, only what its NOT. And its NOT Darwin's natural selection ( see, you know exactly what I'm referring to ;-) .)
I should point out that I went on wikipedia, and found out that my memory of this stuff was, well, quite wrong. I should have stuck with philosophy of physics, which I am a little better grounded in :-). Sorry if I came off a bit strong in my post. I have had people ask me why I don't study something useful, so I understand your frustration as well. It seems like if its not going to make money in the next 10 years, a lot of people think it is useless. I don't know if you have studies philosophy of math, but you might find it interesting. Major figures included, eg, Goedel and Hilbert, so these are certainly people who understand math. I'm not sure, though, that the philosophers couldn't understand enough of Feynman if they tried. I think part of the problem is that they are still stuck trying to figure out the meaning of Heisenberg.
> Hidden variables simply don't work.
Only hidden variables that are observable are out of the question (and even then, only those subject to Bell's assumptions.) This is a metaphysical statement.
I think your cut-and-paste is more or less what happens in science. Old ideas are proved false, new ones replace them. You have entire scientific revolutions where everything we thought we knew turns out to be wrong (or at least limited.)
Yes, in religion we speak of the "Word" of God. You fundamentally must hear it from others. Science is more like mathematics, in that in principle you can always (if you have the time and expertise) verify the truth for yourself. Science does involve certain assumptions, but it is supposed to be rigorous in that your assumptions are clearly stated.
I remember now that the effort to derive mathematics from logic was to prove it consistent. This is Goedel proved it was doomed to fail. In any case, mathematics is no longer considered the standard for philosophical Truth as it once was.
Well, I'm only an experimental physicist, so I'm sure that I don't understand math to the extent that you do, but I have studied higher math, and I think it is basically impossible for anyone who really appreciates the beauty of mathematics to believe, deep down in their soul, that it is all simply a logic game. I know I don't. And yes, it is nothing short of a miracle that mathematics is able to somehow allow us to birth physics. However, it is interesting to me that you bring up physics, since most physicists I know, myself included, have a strong bent towards instrumentalism, namely the idea that mathematics is simply a tool or language to describe the world. To me, this is much more consistent with the idea that mathematics is a logic game, rather than Plato's or Kan't mathematics.
"failed to derive mathematics from logic"
I'm sorry, but do you have any idea what I am referring to here? There was an effort in the early 20th century to derive the real numbers from logic alone. I don't remember much about it, but I assume it was an attempt to return to Kant. Kant of course believed that mathematics could be derived from our intuition, which essentially operated on euclidian geometry, and since this intuition was needed for any kind of knowledge we might have, it could essentially be regarded as True. However, the differential geometry you referred me to (and which I have studied) kind of shattered this belief, and so a new attempt was made to derive a theory of numbers from the postulates of logic, which were themselves regarded as necessary for thought. Set theory was born as part of all this. However, Goedel proved it was doomed to failure.
> I don't want to sound snobbish, but I really think it's just that the lay person cannot understand the logic
> arguments being discussed
I do think this was a little snobby. I think that you are fundamentally missing what the argument is about. Nobody is trying to reduce mathematics to a parlor game. However, for the Greeks at least, philosophy, religion, and mathematics were all once the same. They have been split apart forever. I think THIS is what I meant by "Truth value."
> I really was referring to the 'Big Bang' idea that pervades evolution: that everything exploded into existance.
I think that this is what I understood you meant by "simple chance", in other words that the world is devoid of God's rhyme and reason, that we are simply combinations of mechanical molecules, devoid of the divine breath. I want to say again this is NOT what Darwin's evolution says. You may decide that the assertion that your great-great-great... incomrehensible amount of greats...-great grandfather was not human DOES imply this (and I admit, this view does have some appeal), but that is your or someone else's philosophical or theological conclusion, not a scientific one.
> But they are presented as being true stories.
Just to be clear, my point was that it is very define whether a story is "true" without defining the context in which it is to be understood. I don't know if I communicated that effectively. So this is why I don't understand what people mean when they talk about reading the Bible "literally". What do you mean by literally? When I read, say, a scientific theory, I know that theory is true only because I know its limitations. So I would say in a very real way, Newton's gravity is "true", even though Einstein's in a sense superseeds it, because inherent to saying that Newton's gravity is "true" is the understanding that it is an approximation. It is such a powerful theory because of what it chooses to ignore. So if by saying you should read the Bible "literally", you mean to read it as a scientific theory (which I think is more or less what most evangelicals mean), NASA uses Newton, not Einstein, to plot the paths of its space ships. This is because Newton's simplicity is power. Now, there is still a large difference between that example, and trying to connect somethign like Genesis and Darwin, but the phrase "literal" is problematic one.
Yes, actually, I am a scientist. Of course scientific theories are only falsified. I was using sloppy language. And yes, this is a terrible disconnect in the conversation on intelligen design, and I was contributing to it. However, this just supports my assertion that mathematics proofs (which are proofs in, as far as I am aware, the only truly correct uses of the word) and scientific "proofs" (sloppy language, yes.) Also, I am beginning to see how the ID'ers feel, a little. Sheesh. Did you even bother to try to understand my post?
Well, I haven't studied this stuff since I was an undergrad, but prior to, well Gauss, yes, nobody would have agreed that mathematical proofs have no truth value. However, after the late 19th century, when it was shown that consistent non-euclidean geometries existed, and after Hilbert (as I recall) and the like failed to derive mathematics from logic, and Goedel proved this was impossible, mathematics is generally regarded as a logic game, philosophically speaking. So you make certain assumptions, and see what results you can get. (Goedel was a platonist, of course, and didn't agree with this.)
> Lastly, would any religious person be willing to consider God as an "axiom"? Sure..."assume God, and the rest follows..." - > but that's not a very helpful theological position! This is not too far from what Descartes did, I suppose :-). I'm not sure how helpful he was theologically, though.
Yes, but philosophically, a mathematical proof is of course completely different than a scientific one. After the 19th century, mathematical proofs have generally been considered as devoid of Truth content, except by mathematicians, on weekends, when nobody is looking, and they indulge their true Platonic selves :-).
You should calm down though. I wasn't suggesting ID should be taught in school. However, I think that to say that Christian theology, which has 2000 years of the some of the greatest Wester minds as its authors, shouldn't be considered "irrational" simply because its not empirically testable.
> You are saying that the bible can't be taken literally. This really means that the bible isn't truthful. Or even more harshly,
;-) ), we conceived you, you were born." But you are leaving so much out. Of course you are leaving out lots of biology involved, and are being terribly inspecific. But it is even more than that. Maybe you met your wife at a bar. Well, then your child is there because you decided to get a drink that night. And maybe you were only living in that town because you went to that particular school because you wanted to be a writer. This says nothing about the requirement that YOUR parents met. (Maybe even you are a woman, and don't have a wife!) But this doesn't mean you are being untruthful. In telling a history, there is some degree of story telling involved. It is inevitable. We read the Bible as trying to give the creation of human beings a moral context. It is inevitable that it leave some stuff out. This doesn't mean it is lying. Now, you may think it leaves so much stuff out it is no longer relevant, but that is another issue.
> it would contain lies.
If your child asks you how he came to be, assuming he is old enough, you are probably going to say something like "your mother and I met, we fell in love, we married, we made love (always in that order, always...
Yes, "Something Wallace IIRC." Can't forget ol' Something. He was a dapper fellow, he was! Ol' Something. Or was it "Someone?" Anyway, can't forget him...
True, but for that matter, I'm not sure that religion isn't testable within ITS axioms as well. Also, whenever we talk about testing pure mathematics, we have to acknowledge Godel as well, although I'm not sure we want to actually discuss him, because I don't really understand him, and a priori I'm guessing you don't either. :-) And I'm sure that if we asked pure mathematicians whether they needed the empirical success of applied math to justify the validity of their work, they would laugh at us, and then, well, do something horrible, or at least prove the COULD. Anyway, not to say that mathematics is religion (although it started out that way), but my point is that there is room for rational thought outside the empirically testable.
> Part of the reason I believe as I do is that I can see the complexity and the order in the world around me, and I
:-)
> cannot force myself to accept that it was all by mere chance, as the evolutionary theory would have me believe.
I don't think that evolution says things happened by "mere chance" in the way that you mean. As far as I know, the only "chance" in Darwin's natural selection is that the changes in an individual animals phenotype (in other words, its genes) with respect to its parents are more or less uncorrelated (in essence, unrelated) to whether or not those changes make the animal more likely to survive. In this sense, then, the changes in the genes are "random." I don't think this corresponds to your "mere chance." Now, many philosophers and scientists-turned-amateur-philosophers argue Darwin's natural selection increases the plausibility that we are indeed here by your "mere chance", but you can't blame this on Darwin or science.
> Finally, it irritates me that people see and hear the ramblings of Pat Robertson...
Yes, I can imagine...