I’m aware of this. But when you put together all the various statements made on BioLogos about randomness, the trajectory is much less modest and innocent than what you state here. For example, when Falk and Venema were asked whether (not even how, just whether) God governed the specific outcomes of evolution, they would not affirm that he did. Yet you’ve just said that God in the Bible governs the outcome of probabilistic events. Well, if they can believe that God governs the specific outcomes of random drawings of lots, they should have no problem affirming that God governs random mutations and the outcomes of evolution. But they dodged, feinted, ducked, and would not answer. So it’s not as simple as “God could still be governing things even though randomness is involved”; there is sometimes real hesitation to say that God is governing everything.
Agreed! I believe that the existence of something we call “randomness” in nature is not in itself opposed to the existence of order, and that in fact randomness can be used within an overarching plan or design (which in itself is not random). But the overarching plan or design was never stressed by Falk, Applegate, Louis, etc. Maybe when they were talking piously they mentioned it. But when they were describing nature, and especially when conjecturing how systems, organs, species, and life came to be, the design language went out the window, and the randomness language became prominent.
I agree with you that not all TE/EC writers are like this. In fact, Loren Haarsma (interestingly, a Reformed person, as opposed to a Wesleyan like Falk) said something quite different about design and randomness. I wrote about this on Hump of the Camel:
http://potiphar.jongarvey.co.uk/2018/04/23/paging-dr-applegate-please-call-dr-haarsma/
The comments section there may be closed, because the post is old, but if you desire to comment there, I will ask Jon if he can re-open it for you, and in that case I would reply to any comments there.
As I’ve already said to others above, the purpose of ID is not to provide a robust defense of theistic belief. But it does attempt to show that, purely on the level of science, it has not been demonstrated that no design in nature exists, or that every event that has ever happened in the universe can be explained sufficiently without any recourse to design.
I certainly don’t turn to ID writers for theology. I turn to Aquinas and so on. But the ID writers have been very useful in challenging the New Atheists on their overclaims about what science has shown. They have been much stronger in this area than the BioLogos people have been.
Regarding opposition to mainstream science, you should be aware that ID leaders accept about 99.8% of what you are calling mainstream science (astronomy, chemistry, physics, geology, physical geography, oceanography, biochemistry, neurology, physiology, most areas of biology…), so it is not as if they are irrational reactionaries against science. The only parts of mainstream science they don’t accept are some parts concerning origins questions. And even there, there is a range of views within ID; Denton accepts most of mainstream science regarding even origins, and Behe accepts much of it, too. And all the Old Earth ID leaders accept mainstream science regarding the age of the earth. So be careful not to overstate what is actually a fairly limited and nuanced critique of mainstream science, and only of the claims of mainstream science that involve a much greater amount of speculation and extrapolation into a non-reproducible past than is typical in most mainstream science.
