"no discernible pattern" Let me ask you, was there a time when the average person believe there was no discernible weather pattern? I think you will find if you study history and science, that it is progressive movement away from superstition of chance, to an understanding of a very ordered universe. It was practical for people thousands of years ago to believe what about earthquakes, weather patterns, etc? Bottom line, chance may appease the scientists atheistic bent, but that first assumption, unproved assumption, factually unknown assumption...is not scientifically derived. It may provide a warm stupid feeling to the atheists just as much as theism provides a warm stupid feeling to some theists, but neither is factually supported or known as a fact. Studying the facts, i.e. what we actually can observer, test, and know doesn't require a first assumption of chance or non chance. So why is it so necessary to teach chance? It is a political decision, not actually a scientific decision. The true starting place of "we as scientists don't know" is agnostic. It equally assumes that that chance or design are possible. It can't generate a probability of either chance or design...but make no mistake that the universe does look designed. So again, why is there such a bristling by the atheistic scientists to suggest the equal possibility of design as chance? Why indoctrinate children to believe in chance, when design is just as likely.
We can imagine whatever we like. Truth is that the universe looks designed, and we don't know that it isn't designed. So why teach and indoctrinate children into chance? Please, just answer that question.
The first reason that comes to my mind, for teaching kids about chance, is so that they don't try using martingale on a roulette table.
Imagine the possibility of some second entity generating in advance, for example, the outcome of all coin tosses the first entity will ever make... and a third entity and a forth.....
I oppose indoctrinating children into any religion, including atheism. So no teaching of non design or design to children in public schools.
Ricter you realize that De Duve the nobel prize winner in the field are saying that the roullete wheel is rigged... so you could go martingale on life and win.. I can quotes quotes from basically the discover of DNA saying there no way it happened by chance... The game of chance has been rigged.... Martingale would work..... read the last paragraph of the quote from De Duve... "If you equate the probability of the birth of a bacterial cell to that of the chance assembly of its component atoms," Dr. de Duve wrote in his textbook, "A Guided Tour of the Living Cell," "even eternity will not suffice to produce one for you. So you might as well accept, as do most scientists, that the process was completed in no more than one billion years and that it took place entirely on the surface of our planet." The hard part, he wrote, was getting from the simplest chemicals to the first specialized cells, after which "it took no more than 150,000 generations for an ape to develop into the inventor of calculus." As to whether some guiding hand was needed for the process, Dr. de Duve commented: "The answer of modern molecular biology to this much-debated question is categorical: chance, and chance alone, did it all, from primeval soup to man, with only natural selection to sift its effects. This affirmation now rests on overwhelming factual evidence." But the succession of chances that created life did not operate in a vacuum, he said. "It operated in a universe governed by orderly laws and made of matter endowed with specific properties. These laws and properties are the constraints that shape evolutionary roulette and restrict the numbers that can turn up. Among these numbers are life and all its wonders, including the conscious mind."
I can see that you have no intelligent response. Perhaps you should migrate back to the P part of P&R. Or are you subbing for LongShot?
I know the roulette wheel is rigged, (38 slots last I played, but heard a rumor they wanted to add '000', bastards) I've never felt the universe was chance alone, it is order/chance. I still don't understand what's wrong with the so called "weak anthropic principle", whatever it's called exactly.