Yes it seems to me @swamidass said it himself in when he was recently interviewed on some apologetics channel, (paraphrasing here) the randomness in evolution could be merely apparent from our point of view, yet God would know and govern the outcomes. But I could see how some creationist might not be comfortable with even with merely apparent randomness, because it would allow someone like me to ask, since the randomness is apparent, why one would multiply entities beyond requirements by putting divine beings behind(for example) mutational events?
Sure, but it seems like most Christians are perfectly content with any number of phenomena being modeled probabilistically without this being seen as an inherent challenge to the sovereignty of God. I guess I just don’t understand why evolution needs to be any different.
Edit: I should add that many Christians probably don’t draw this distinction between evolution and other phenomena.
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Especially since design can use randomness to achieve predetermined goals. Casinos. The chaos game and Barnsly ferns. I never understood the discomfort with randomness. Cool video on the chaos game and randomness:
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Pew surveys show that the largest position (but not the majority) is that God used Evolution to produce humans.
I don’t think it is asking a lot for Peaceful Science to get “in sync” with America on a religious interpretation of Evolution.
We are in sync. We are also a big tent.
And yet we spend almost all our bandwidth on arguing that Evolution can happen without God’s involvement.
Joshua, you are leaving a giant hole in your position… that nobody can fill up. Maybe if you augmented your Mission Statement you could go ahead ignoring this basic stance. But your current Mission Statement doesn’t seem to defend the idea that God uses Evolution. Or have I missed something?
As a Christian I spent some time thinking about this, and even co-led a reading group of fellow professors about concepts of chance and randomness in the context of Christian faith. @swamidass (informally quoted above) mentions one approach, which is that things can appear to be “random” from a human point of view but nevertheless “caused” or controlled by a deity or superintelligence. Much of what is called “random” in biology involves events and outcomes that could not have been predicted in advance. This isn’t even a proper rigorous understanding of “random,” since truly random phenomena are in fact predictable in aggregate but not predictable individually. But my point is that when we say that X inactivation is “random” we are not making a strong principled claim that the process is truly random (a la nuclear decay) but that it appears random and occurs without human ability to predict. Such a process could certainly be guided or manipulated, without detection by humans.
IMO these are pretty basic concepts, and it is a silly error to suggest that a “random” process such as X inactivation or mutation or axon outgrowth or meteor impact is therefore somehow out of the realm of supernatural causation. This is a childish non sequitur.
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Is that really true? Somehow, I must have missed it.
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What I see are discussions where people argue that Evolution can happen without God’s involvement being detectable by science.
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… and hence superfluous to requirements for a scientific theory. Does that mean there is no divine involvement, can anyone claim to know that? No, it doesn’t mean that.
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Food for thought:
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