Thank you so much for your encouragements, dear BroJoeK, and for sharing your insights! And I do like the toolbox metaphor - somehow I missed it on my first reading of the thread.
Science itself should have little or nothing to say about those subjects...
Alas, some scientists cannot resist stepping into areas requiring a different discipline and making observations without delineating the difference. Since science derived from philosophy in the first place, some of that is understandable.
Beginning of Modern Science and Modern Philosophy The word "science" itself is simply the Latin word for knowledge: scientia. Until the 1840's what we now call science was "natural philosophy," so that even Isaac Newton's great book on motion and gravity, published in 1687, was The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis). Newton was, to himself and his contemporaries, a "philosopher." In a letter to the English chemist Joseph Priestley written in 1800, Thomas Jefferson lists the "sciences" that interest him as, "botany, chemistry, zoology, anatomy, surgery, medicine, natural philosophy [this probably means physics], agriculture, mathematics, astronomy, geography, politics, commerce, history, ethics, law, arts, fine arts." The list begins on familiar enough terms, but we hardly think of history, ethics, or the fine arts as "sciences" any more. Jefferson simply uses to the term to mean "disciplines of knowledge."
That, btw, is my peeve about the abuse of the word "random." Randomness originates as a Mathematics term. It has a specific meaning, to wit one cannot say something is random in the system when he doesn't know what the system "is." Quantum mechanics relies on statistics and it works, but that does not mean ipso facto that the physical universe is random at the root since we do not know, indeed cannot know, the full number and types of dimensions.
Jeepers, we cannot deny the existence of particles or fields which do not have a direct or indirect measurable effect.
"Information" is yet another term misappropriated by the Sciences from the discipline of Mathematics. Information Theory is a branch of Mathematics originating from Claude Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communications.
In Shannon's theory information is the reduction of uncertainty in the receiver (or molecular machine as applied to biology) in moving from a before state to an after state. The math is so much like thermodynamics, it is called "Shannon entropy."
In common parlance, the term which refers to the action is falsely used to describe the content of the message being sent or received. For instance, the letter in your mailbox is not information, information happens when the letter is read.
Worse, in science the term has been misappropriated to mean determinism, i.e. physical cause/effect.
In my view, mathematics is a more elegant and certain discipline for knowing than any of the science disciplines. And misappropriating its terms results in a false sense of elegance and certainty in the sciences.
Indeed, I very strongly agree with Wigner (the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences) and go further to observe theologically that mathematics is God's copyright notice on the cosmos.
"Alas, some scientists cannot resist stepping into areas requiring a different discipline and making observations without delineating the difference." Not scientists we know, I hope... '-)
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That, btw, is my peeve about the abuse of the word "random." Randomness originates as a Mathematics term. It has a specific meaning, to wit one cannot say something is random in the system when he doesn't know what the system "is."
So -- we're back to "randomness" again. (Hope I don't get "shouted down" again...)
I agree the term has mathematical rigor -- but what term would you use to determine and describe the directions and energies of gas molecules in an "ideal gas" closed system?
How about an arbitrary, "open" system such as the room (part of a set of interconnected rooms) in which you find yourself? Describe the air molecule motion there...
Example: if the molecules in your room moved "non-'random'ly", (PChem term) and headed in a single direction , one wall (or more) would disappear explosively. (And, if we could create and direct that "non-'random'ness", we could make some extremely efficient internal combustion engines...)
Why can we expect a tire to remain uniformly inflated, if not due to "random" molecular motion? Chaos?
"PV=NkT" has mathematical (and physical meaning. Upon what assumption of molecular motion (other than elasticity and non-reactivity) does it depend?
IOW, what form of molecular motion makes the Ideal Gas 'Law' work -- every time it's tested? What about real-world gases & mixtures thereof in non-closed systems?
Or, to move closer to the "creation" aspects of this conversation, it would appear to me that, unlike the gases in which we are now immersed, the motion of "stuff" at (or shortly after) the instant of "creation" had something definitely "non-random" imposed upon it:
Please, Dear Sister, share your preferred term, so that we "mere" scientists don't profane your love of "random" mathematical perfection -- even within our own minds... AND, so that we can discuss the above (the closest we've yet come to examining the conditions at "time=zero" so far) without offending your "peeve"... '-)