Sorry for the huge quote, but this is an important point of contention in this thread, and we still haven't got to the bottom of it.
BADecker - you accept simple change, adaptation and like-begets-like, yes? Your point is that 'random' mutations aren't really random because they have cause and effect, which you trhink suggests design. Is this right?
It's not just a mutation from 'A'->'B', though. 'A' mutates into 'C' through 'Z' as well. It's not that the mutation 'B' has been designed to succeed, it's that vast numbers of different mutations occur, the overwhelming are not beneficial and are (naturally) selected out of the gene pool. It's not that 'B' survives as a positive mutation because it has been designed that way, it's that of the 25 'B' through 'Z' variations, only one of them was beneficial to the animal's chances of survival. The 24 animals with the harmful 'C' through 'Z' mutations didn't reach adulthood to reproduce.
Take any one of your mutations and go deeper into it. The molecules all moved in every part of the mutation according to the way they were "bumped." What were they bumped by? Other molecules, atoms, heat energy, etc.
When they were bumped, why was it that they moved exactly as they did, and not in some other way? Because the way they were bumped, caused them to move, according to the laws of physics, which say that they must move this way, if they are bumped that way.
And the molecules, atoms, heat energy, etc., that bumped them, acted the ways that they did because other molecules, atoms, heat energy, etc., acted on them just exactly the way physics dictated they should act when bumped by whatever bumped them... back to the beginning. We don't have any example of anything acting outside the laws of physics. Everything had to act the way it did according to the laws of physics.
We call it random because we aren't even close to starting to track standard movements of individual molecules, atoms, heat energy waves/particles, etc., in nature. But none of it is really random. It all acts according to the laws of physics, right down to the tiniest subatomic particle.
Since simple random is simply our ignorance of details, evolution can be random in that way. But because everything acts according to the precise laws of physics, there is no pure random. If a time ever comes that we think we find something of pure randomness, it will only be because we haven't discovered the depths of its physics laws, yet.
