Harmonizing Evolution and Guidance at BioLogos

[Ashwin_s]

@John_Harshman

I think so. It certainly doesn’t answer the question, since your answer to “what does it mean to say that God guides evolution” seems to be “I don’t know”.

I think you missed some things here. While @dga471 doesn’t commit to an exact description of how God guides, he acknowledges the following -

1. That the process was ordained- meaning God had a clear picture of what he wanted to happen and he caused it to happen.
   This adds teleology in the Historical aspects of evolution. Everything was according to God’s purpose. Nothing was “random” or beyond God’s control.
2. The process also invokes a meticulous knowledge of the future and about every mutation that has and will happen and an ability to control everything that happened.
3. Since, the end result was in God’s mind, it invokes design.

All these are theological commitments. So he is not avoiding the question, he is making specific commitments.

@dga471

Thus to “guide” something is to periodically introduce a discontinuity in nature like a Paleyan watchmaker.
My own answer, as a classical theist, CASE, and Calvinist: yes, God “guides” evolution, in the sense that he ordains it exactly to his divinely chosen purpose, but he also “guides” gravity, electromagnetism, chemical reactions, and all other natural processes in the universe

@dga471; Do you reject the possibility of God intervening directly (like Jesus intervened in a natural process by changing water into wine. We don’t know how he did it, perhaps he accelerated natural processes or created wine de novo) ?