[MD] are theism and mysticism mutually exclusive notions?

[Case]

[Platt]
Well, I don't know what you mean by primordial chaos or pure randomenss
other than what I said. In other words, I think it is our lack of knowledge
that prevents us from knowing how a pair of dice will come up, or what horse
will win a race. If we were omniscient, chaos and chance wouldn't exist. So
if science ascribes power to the unknown as they seem to in explaining
evolution, I see little difference between that and belief in a creative
God. 

[Case]
Primordial would be the kind of ooze that the ancient Greeks, Jews and
Mayans thought the Gods came out of. Pure randomness would be, just anything
could happen without constraint. This can't exist because there are always
constraints. Even tossing a coin involves constraints like temperature and
wind velocity...

With regards to prediction of the future it just doesn't work that way. It
is so much that we don't know what will happen as we can't know we have to
wait and see. The future is not as fixed as people once thought. On the
weirder end of the spectrum Wheeler and associates think there are infinite
worlds splitting off from each other at each quantum decision point so that
all the possibilities actually take place. Thus even a fifth dimensional
creature looking backward and forward through time would see different
things happening every time she rewound.

Evolution is not the kind of creative process you are imagining here. It
more like what is left over when everything else dies or is discarded. 

[Platt]
If you don't buy Chapter 11 I don't see how you buy the MOQ. Perhaps you
grab the parts of it that happen to agree with your previous metaphysical
assumptions, not that there is anything wrong with that. 
It's human nature to look for confirmation of what we already believe. 

[Case]
What I detest about it is that in over simplifying and anthropomorphizing,
Pirsig leaves himself open to the kind of mistakes you are making with
guards to purpose. I do a bit of work on computers and I have no problem
talking about how they think and act and break down on purpose. But it is
just a way of speaking. This is the problem we run into when we take our
metaphors literally. 

[Platt]
I wasn't an actuary so didn't work with mortality tables. But it's my
understanding that the tables they used were a combination of standard
tables reflecting the American population as well as records of their own
customers and those of other companies. A hazardous occupation like a jockey
would be charged a higher premium than normal. Or, if you had a history of a
killer disease, your rate would go up. Can't tell you much more except that
insurance companies, using the law of large numbers and investing premium
dollars they collected into stocks, bonds and mortgages usually made money.

[Case]
This is exactly how evolution works though. It is all about the law of large
numbers. A organism is essential a collect of traits like hair, feathers,
eyes, skin... A species is a collection of similar organisms. The similarity
is determined by the probability that any individual has the right mix of
traits. Within the species you can build actuarial tables with the
distribution of these traits. So for example all most swans are white. Over
time the distribution of traits in a population shifts. If it's cold out the
hairiest are more like to breed and the population gets hairier.

You could see the same process looking at insurance tables over time as the
insurance company tries to lower risk certain traits get selected out. Like
jockies and people with chronic illness.

But I am usually wrong.

Case