Joel,
The article seems to cover the bases is a way that I find inclusive of the major view (I like to call a deists a deist!). To quote your “general view”:
Our calculated odds would be very small but we might all agree that his particular set of features could have arisen via millions of small events, each of which we would attribute to normal providence. Are we to take the unlikely event of his exact genetic makeup as proof of God’s hand in making Mike Trout? If so, then we could attribute the same proof of God’s hand in making every single one of us. Furthermore, every single animal and plant has also experienced similar changes over time and thus would be evidence of God’s action.
This is the sense that some Christians have that the world is designed. Nothing is left to chance and yet the vast majority of events appear to be chance.
What you’ve shown is that Mike Trout, though arising from a reasonably well understood “natural” process of generation, is, in the sense you describe, “of very low calculated odds.” Which is clearly true, especially from the example of someone who, I assume, is considered exceptional ( we don’t do baseball over here, though I’m proud to say its first mention in history was in my home town!).
But parse “calculated odds” through a filter of the philosophy of statistics, and it actually means “of high uncertainty/unpredictability to us” rather than, in some substantial sense, “apparently by chance.”
If we start from the concept of a caring God working constantly through providence because he wants Mike Trout in his universe, then we expect a unique formative process that produces something (someone) equally surprising and unique. In that case, your last quoted sentence would read, “Nothing is left to chance and so the vast majority of events appear to be creatively contingent.”
What that adds is refinement to your phrase “normal providence” - suggesting that “normal providence” means God working in the world both regularly and contingently, or in other words using nature as his instrument.
What you say elsewhere about the zillions of overlapping and interlocking intended results from such providence - what we might call the “tapestry of creation,” was nicely summarised by an anecdote a friend told me yesterday. Apparently Tim Keller said (a little tongue in cheek) in his church that Redeemer Church was the providential result of Watergate. There was some long explanation about how a relative of Gerald Ford was able to facilitate a blocked visa for a speaker through which (in some way I forget) Tim Keller was called to form a church in NY. To summarise, somebody forgetting to shut a door in the Watergate Building was a necessary condition for a major ministry.
Now Keller’s whole point of that story was clearly not intended to show that God’s universe revolves round his ministry, but that it’s no less brilliant, and a lot more biblical, and considerably more logically plausible, for God to be somehow working with the grain of every event as governor and sustainer, than for him to design a universe-machine of such precision that all those necessary steps unfold algorithmically.
