God Necessary For Evolution?

He might be; if he has said so, then I bow to his own statement.

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The observation of the transcription splicing translation mechanism in eukaryotes is evidence evolution (if there is such a thing in this case) is directed.

The observation of the ubiquitin system in multicellular eukaryotes is evidence that evolution (if there is such a thing in this case) is directed.

Both these cases show enormous jumps in FI.

The claim of common descent creating life’s diversity is a claim of knowing God’s mechanism of causing diversity if you believe we are in a created universe.

How can one say you believe we are in a created universe, believe in common descent and then claim Gods involvement is undetectable?

Why are these systems evidence for directed evolution?

First, common descent alone is not the explanation for life’s diversity. There are a whole host of mechanisms that goes into this process, such as mutations, genetic drift, selection, speciation, and the like.

If you think God’s involvement can be detected outside of natural processes then please present that evidence. I suspect that people claim God’s involvement outside of natural process is undetectable because no one can demonstrate that they have detected it.

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You are correct.

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Evolution produced a human being without God’s guidance? I don’t think so.

@Mung

Science is unable to make a definitive claim either way!

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There’s an old joke, which I remember badly, to the effect that a hubristic biochemist tells God that he’s not necessary to create life, and that he could easily do it himself. “OK, says God, let’s see you do it.”
“I start with a few molecules of ammonia…”
“Hold on there,” says God, “You have to supply your own molecules.”

So any claim that God is unnecessary for evolution has to take for granted, minimally, the existance of matter as we have it, the laws of nature as we have them, and the contingent circumstances of our world. And if those (as some BioLogos ECs believe) have been created and set up by God in specific manner that gives us evolutionary outcomes, then those are factors for which science has no good alternative explanation.

Contingency is rampant in biology. One hears it said that given reproduction, variation and an environment evolution will happen. Or riffs on that theme. But apart from begging the question of where the facility of reproduction, the capacity for variation and the environment came from, it’s manifestly a contingent, not a necessary truth - for all species eventually go extinct, and there is no entailment in nature that, at some stage in the process, some event might not have rendered extinction total.

Historically, Christian doctrine has always been that God directs all contingent events by special providence, as well as all lawlike events by general providence, and that that is why we have a cosmos rather than a chaos. So in order to exclude the necessity of God from evolution, you have to provide an alternative explanation of both natural laws and contingency… even within a scientifically demonstrated theory of evolution.

And the only one commonly available, as far as I know, is some variation on ontological chance, which can, of course, “explain” any event in principle, but pushes its luck in explaining the totality of cosmos.

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A couple of scientists get together and agree that they don’t need God anymore so one of them goes to Him and says: “We have evolved and learned a lot about world, we don’t need you anymore, you can go.”

On that, God says: “Really? Well, you know, I created humanity from molecules can you do that too?”

“Sure, I can” answers scientis “I start with a few molecules od ammonia…”

“No, no, no” God stops him “you go create your own molecules.”

Is that it?

But to continue the theme, John’s statement is true - and possibly more true than he thinks. For since most of the contingencies in evolution, numerically speaking, are unknown, then they are definitionally “random” (even where there may be suppositional reasons for their being lawlike, and even when they generate a probability distribution).

If much of that randomness is, ontologically, the result of divine choice (which is only what traditional theology has always said), then it is God’s process. Whereas if that randomness is successfully reduced to laws of nature, then they are God’s laws. The only grounds for denial of his necessity are either arbitrarily defining “natural” in a secular way, or resorting to theological arguments that God wouldn’t do certain things.

In neither case has science found God unnecessary - it has just defined his actions as something else unexplained.

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Yeah - something like that.

In my case, since my theological view of God is theistic rather than deistic, I expect it more likely that random events will not prove to be resolveable to laws of nature, and I have little anxiety that I will be shown wrong. God’s ongoing care over nature is likely to be comparable to his ongoing care of human affairs, of which I have first-hand experience in Christ.

But the point is that God is not in the “gaps” - he is in plain sight as the author of law (general providence) and contingency (special providence). And those two explain the whole process of evolution.

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Science has found the god hypothesis unnecessary for understanding nature. That’s an entirely different question from whether god is a necessary prerequisite for the existence of nature.

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Not so - science has simply pursued an epicurean approach to reality that was available over 2,000 years ago as an alternative hypothesis. Whether it is adequate is a matter of individual judgement.

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Wow - science has simply pursued an epicurean approach to reality that was available over 2,000 years ago. Wow, let me tell that to the thousands of scientists of the 20th and 21st century! All those Nobel Prizes could have been found 2,000 years if scientists just had a better approach to reality. :rofl:

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Those with any knowledge of philosophy already know that. Epicureanism, like theism, needed experimental empiricism to make the progress it has. Bacon and Descartes started theistic empiricism - the Deists paved the way for the Epicureans in the 18th century.

I should add that the accleration of progress from Theists like Boyle, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell has most to do with professional organisation and government funding, not metaphysical assumptions.

This sums up my own view rather nicely. God is necessary, therefore Occam’s Razor doesn’t get rid of God.

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Now just drop all the bad scientific arguements to justify this and you are good to go.

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It would help me immensely if you could be more specific. Feel free to start a thread listing my bad scientific arguments. I honestly do not wish to be making any bad scientific arguments. Or any bad arguments at all for that matter. :slight_smile:

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Thanks? What follows makes no sense to me. I don’t know what “definitionally random” means. I don’t understand the Catch-22 reasoning that makes God responsible for everything whether we consider it random or non-random.

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What? How’s that going for us?

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