Science doesn’t make ontological claims like this, so it unsurprising you need clarification. Note that your unfamiliarity with the term supports my point.
Ontological randomness or “epicurean” chance are events that are fundamentally random from God’s perspective. We do not know how a dice will fall, but the doctrine of providence teaches that God in fact does know. The claim of ontological randomness, in contrast, argues that God himself does not know how the the die will fall.
So “random” mutation is no more a threat to Gods providence than is a random number generator.
It is common theological critique of evolution to conflate these two types of randomness. However, that conflation has been also pushed by popular atheists. Evolutionary creationists a decade ago forefronted “Open Theism”, which was also conflating these two things. So it is a lot of people collaborating together to push this conflation for, essentially, different sorts of theological agendas.
The far more difficult to grapple challenge isn’t from randomness, but from free will. This challenge has been resolved quite convincingly in Plantinga’s work.
Thanks for the clarification. That’s a strange definition because it seems to me ontological randomness is impossible on theism, given God’s omniscience. God by definition knows everything, and if God exists(theism), then ontological randomness must be impossible. Otherwise we have a contradiction.
@John_Harshman, if you are the first author of this paper, maybe you have some questions for Bechly about his criticisms of the paper, as the criticisms relate to the biogeography of ratite birds.
Of course, if you are not the same John Harshman, then never mind. Or if this has been rehashed elsewhere, then no need to do so here.
If evolution is equivocated with ontological randomness, the you can claim it is in contradiction with Christian orthodoxy. If that is the conclusion you are trying to force (as a YEC, an atheist, or an EC) then this equivocation is very useful.
I hadn’t seen that. It certainly was snide, and his contempt for phylogenetic analysis in general seems oddly in conflict with his claims elsewhere to accept universal common descent. Also, oddly, he doesn’t seem to understand the papers he cites, trumpeting the strength of support for certain nodes while ignoring the weakness of support for others. I’m at al loss. Now in reality, all the molecular (and some of the morphological) results are in mutual agreement. We even did an analysis (which we decided at the last minute not to include in the paper, which I regret) combining the nuclear and mitochondrial data, and the moas came out as sister to tinamous, otherwise with the same tree we published.
It seems that the main question to ask him is why he constantly attacks common descent while simultaneously affirming it. How does he resolve the contradiction in his head?
Maybe Richard Buggs will take him to task for his attacks on phylogenetic analysis, given how concerned he was with correcting some offhand remarks by Richard Dawkins.
Yet one more suggestion. Given that the ID community is up in arms about being excluded from the scientific discourse, would Bechly be willing to accept an invitation to discuss his science on PS, a forum that allows for discourse and debate with trained scientists, specialists in a number of fields that are relevant to ID?
@swamidass, if you extend the invite, don’t take no for an answer, or, at least, if Bechly is persistent in declining the invitation, at least point out how disingenuous the decline makes ID proponents look.
Is there a single ID proponent who has demonstrated they understand how phylogenetics works? Honest question. It seems to me to be a particularly common blind spot for them.
I do think phylogenetic analysis works, I was just wondering if you consider this paper to have fully resolved the phylogeny, since you’ve published on this subject in the past.
Well, I don’t think anything in it comes as a big surprise. I’m not extremely enamored of gene tree/species tree methods, but the CR1 elements seem decisive enough.
If that’s the definition of ontological randomness you want to use, then we should distinguish at least three senses of ‘randomness’:
ontological randomness
nondeterministic randomness, in which the current state of the system does not determine the future of the system. This is consistent with (1) but does not require it. Some views of QM incorporate this kind of randomness.
unpredictable randomness, which is the usual scientific meaning. We can’t (or choose not to) predict specific outcomes, even if they are deterministic.
The kicker is that the ‘random mutations’ of evolutionary biology require none of these definitions. Here, ‘random’ means that the organism (usually) has no mechanism for predicting the fitness of mutations or choosing fitter ones, except perhaps in statistical terms. Even if a mutation were fully deterministic and we knew enough about the system to predict it, it could still be random in the evolutionary biology sense.