Randomness and Theology

Conversation
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Yes, he could. But most of the BioLogos people, at least the ones that have commented on such suggestions, don’t like that idea. They want God to be somehow, in some indefinable way, responsible for evolution, but they don’t want him directly interacting with nature at any point. So their conception of how God guarantees specific outcomes remains difficult to understand.

I’m not concerned here with what people feel. I’m concerned with what Christian doctrine apparently teaches. It appears to teach that God is sovereign and that nothing that happens in nature happens without his consent. If elephants were a product of evolution, then God must have wanted elephants to appear. The question is how God made sure that only the precise species which he willed to evolve, did in fact evolve.

He might have front-loaded all evolutionary change such that his initial cosmic pool shot necessitated all that we see. No one at BioLogos appears to believe that. He might have tweaked mutations here and there. Almost no one at BioLogos appears to believe that. Is there a third option? Perhaps, but no one at BioLogos has presented it. So theologians trying to figure out how God’s will is worked into evolution are left scratching their heads.

The creationist does not have this problem, because for him creation is direct, unmediated by evolutionary processes. It is only the evolutionist, who insists on a particular process of change, driven by natural causes, that has the reconciliation problem. And I don’t say it can’t be dealt with. Maybe it can be. But no one at BioLogos is interested in doing so. So the theological soundness of the BioLogos position on God and evolution remains unsettled.

That question (Why does God allow evil, if he has the power and knowledge to stop it, and if he is loving?) is important in theology and has to be dealt with, but it’s a set of questions that arises on any view of God as omnipotent and omniscient, and has nothing to do with evolution in particular. So BioLogos Christians have to have their own theological answers to that question, regardless of what they think about how God relates to evolution. The difference then, between someone like Dennis Venema and someone like Mike Behe (both Christians) is that both Venema and Behe have to explain why an omnipotent, loving God permits evil and suffering, whereas Venema, unlike Behe, also has to explain how God can achieve designed results using a process that seems to exclude any role for design.

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For your argument to work the species would have had to start with identical genomes. In YEC, did humans and chimps have identical genomes at some point in the past? If not, your explanation doesn’t work. It works even less when we look at multiple species. For example, why are there more differences between the human and orangutan genomes than there is between the chimp and human genomes?

From where I sit, the evidence is completely inconsistent with YEC.

There are currently 7 billion different human genomes kicking around on this planet. What do you mean by precise sequences and exactly correct?

You seem to be committing the Sharpshooter fallacy once again.

Let’s look at the human and chimp genomes. There are about 40 million mutations that separate the species. If half of those mutations happened in each lineage, that would mean we need 20 million mutations in the human genome over the last 5 million years, or so.

Each human is born with about 50 mutations. In a population of 100,000 people that would be 5 million mutations per generation. With a generation time of 25 years, that would be 200,000 generations over that time span. This means that there were 1 trillion mutations that happened in the human lineage over that time span. We only need 20 million to get the differences we see today which is just a tiny fraction of the mutations that did happen. How is that not sufficient?

If God is actively guiding mutations, as some people suggest, then God is directly causing cancer. It isn’t a case of God allowing evil to occur, but God actively causing evil.

It would be interesting to hear why God can’t achieve an outcome using the natural processes God supposedly created.

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There’s a big gap between consent and wanting that you seem to pass over effortlessly. Please be more careful to say what you mean. What do you mean?

Yes, and fourth, fifth, etc., I imagine. God could for example have consented to whatever happened after his initial setup without wanting a particular result. He may not have cared whether elephants existed or not so long as he got complex, multicellular, intelligent life.

That’s not the question. The actual question is “Why does God create evil?” Again, your tendency to cross big logical gaps without seeming to notice really gets in the way of communication.

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Does the person who suggests guided mutations to produce giraffes assert that God guides all mutations? Why can’t God leave most mutations on their own, and twig only certain ones?

However, I take your point about God actively causing evil if he induces cancer mutations. See my reply to Harshman on this point above (or below, depending on when the post is accepted).

No one made the general claim that he couldn’t. The question is whether, if the specific natural processes involved were inherently incompatible with design, he could use them to achieve designed outcomes.

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You’re quite right, but I don’t see how it affects the case we’re talking about, i.e., specific outcomes in evolution. Suppose God really wished for elephants to evolve, and evolution produced them in accord with his wish. Now suppose that God really wanted unicorns instead, but evolution (we’ll assume for this scenario that God isn’t tinkering, and just relies on whatever mechanisms are already in place, mutation, selection, etc.) could only spit out elephants, and God grumbled, but said, “Oh, well, I can live with that…”. In both cases the result has God’s consent. (If it didn’t, he would have done something to change the result, either by breaking in with some tinkering or by setting up the whole process differently at the beginning.)

Now, which of those two Gods sounds more like the God of the Bible and of Christian tradition that you were taught about in Sunday school, the God who wants something to be created, and it’s created, or the God who wants something else to be created, but settles for something less? And if you perused the writings of Calvin, Luther, Augustine, etc., which of those two Gods do you think you would find in their pages?

Agreed that this is logically possible. However, does it sound like the God of traditional theology? Remember, when we started this discussion we were discussing whether BioLogos theology was traditional/orthodox, not whether or not it was logically possible given the appropriate type of God.

Actually, the standard form of the question in most undergrad philosophy and religion courses is “Why does God allow evil?” But I take your point: Aquaticus is suggesting that if God wills things directly, then he doesn’t merely allow evil but creates it. Nonetheless, I don’t see a huge practical difference. Suppose that God causes certain specific people to die from cancer; then suppose that he merely allows the existence of cancer, not planning to kill anyone in particular with it, but it does kill some people, and because of his foreknowledge, he knows exactly who it will kill, but lets it proceed anyway. Isn’t he responsible for the specific outcomes in both cases – since he could have interceded in the process? And if he’s responsible, we will still want to know why he caused (whether willfully or only permissively, by non-intervention) those deaths – why he couldn’t have created a world without that sadness and pain. The theological problem is there no matter how we twist and turn, if God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and purportedly loving.

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If God leaves most mutations on their own, then what is the theological problem with all mutations occurring on their own?

That’s what many ID proponents claim. Their #1 argument is that life has to be designed because the natural process of evolution can’t produce what we see. How many times have we heard ID proponents claim that scientists are wrongly looking for natural processes and should instead be looking for supernatural causes?

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You’ve misunderstood the ID claims here. What you wrote was:

And now you’re saying ID proponents rule out natural processes as means to an end. But they don’t say that natural processes could never guarantee an end. For example, it is possible for astronomers to predict eclipses, conjunctions etc. centuries in advance. That’s because the movements of the planets, which are natural, follow a predictable course. And if human astronomers can predict where Jupiter will be 100 years from now, or where on the earth a total eclipse will be visible 40 years from now, God can surely do it, too. The very design of the laws of planetary motion allows God to be certain of certain outcomes.

The question is how the workings of the evolutionary process – as it is conceived of by most evolutionary theorists – allow for certainty regarding outcomes. I don’t know of any evolutionary biologist who says something like, “We can be certain that bats (rather than some other order of small mammals) had to appear, and had to appear exactly when and where they did.” So we can know not only that Jupiter will be at a certain point, but even when it will be at that point, with an error range of only minutes, but we can’t know when bats would appear, not even within an error range of a million years; we can’t even be sure they would appear at all.

If I’m wrong about this, then tell me how you (given enough power and infinite computing capacity – let’s shoot for the moon here) could design the first life on earth (and its entire environment) so that you could be certain that bats would appear within a certain narrow window (a year, a thousand years, a million years – you pick), on a certain continent – if the causes of evolutionary change are what you currently suppose them to be.

If you can provide a design for life on earth like that, then, given that God is at least as powerful and intelligent as you would be in our fantasy situation, I feel sure that most ID proponents would agree that the outcomes of evolutionary processes are just like the outcomes of planetary motions, and that God could guarantee them. But if the outcomes of evolutionary processes are inherently uncertain, because of the very way evolution works, then ID people would wonder how God could guarantee any results after he plopped down the first cell (or to guard against the pedants here, the first living thing) on the primordial earth.

And not just ID people, by the way, but anyone who thinks in traditional terms about God’s omnipotence, sovereignty, etc., would have the same question. It’s not an ID thing in particular. Long before I ever heard of ID I was wondering how God controlled the outcomes of evolution, if he in fact did so.

No theological problem with that in itself; God could create a world in which mutations occur and in which he would not tinker with them. The problem comes when we have to harmonize that with belief in specific outcomes decreed by God. Is there any reason to think that any particular outcome of evolution on earth was necessary, inescapable, etc.? Were aardvarks inevitable? Was the platypus? How about the Gila Monster? Or thorns on roses? If not, then in what sense is God in charge of evolution?

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At the very least you should try harder to say what you mean, not its second cousin.

Bad scenario again. You are assuming that God wanted something particular, when the correct scenario (for this line of reasoning) is that he is perfectly OK with elephants, unicorns, or whatever, and didn’t want anything in particular. You persist in presenting warped, strawman positions to oppose. It’s the sort of thing people like to do to give their arguments an edge, but I will charitably assumed you don’t notice that you’re doing it.

Not relevant, since that’s not the question that was asked here. You don’t get to change the question to something you feel more comfortable with.

Then you are not thinking clearly. And you missed the evolutionary connection. If, as you have supposed, God causes every mutation, and cancer results from mutations, then God causes every cancer. And of course he caused covid-19, malaria, every other viral, bacterial, fungal, or protist disease.

Yes, but his responsibility is less direct in the second case and it requires a different response. That there is no satisfactory response in either case doesn’t change that.

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You’re not reading with an open mind, but just looking for things to pick at. Try to control your now rather obvious emotional reaction against anything I write, and give my exposition a chance before you jump on it.

I didn’t assume anything. I sketched two hypothetical alternatives, so that you could see the difference between them. They depict two very different Gods, the one being the one that the vast majority of Christians have affirmed for two millennia, and the other (the God who is not fussy about what comes out of creation, as long as it’s a lively smorgasbord of something or other) which was never a conception of God until evolution came along and people started trying to square God with the idea (held apparently by most evolutionary theorists) that evolutionary outcomes aren’t determinate.

Could the second God be the real God? Sure, I’ve granted several times that the truth about God might not be the traditional view. But my point all along has been that the second notion of God isn’t the traditional one, and if someone – at BioLogos or anywhere else – promotes that notion of God, he has to defend that notion in the theological sphere, in a scholarly way. It’s not enough to say that it’s the notion that best fits with evolution, so it must be the truth about God. The theological traditionalist is not going to fold up and surrender centuries of tradition because Giberson, Falk, etc. have decided that a non-traditional view of God is the only one that evolution allows.

And if I were writing a scholarly article in theology I would break down the response into parts as you suggest. But we are on a blog site here, and so I cut to the chase.

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!

Nobody cares, because you are the only person to propose the second God. I’m changing my mind: your strawman arguments are not accidental or unconscious.

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You’re not even trying to hold an even-tempered, good-faith discussion, so I’m exiting.

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Good day, sir. I said “Good day!”

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Have you read ID literature??? How many times have we heard ID supporters claiming that natural processes can’t produce design, such as irreducibly complex systems?

Given the number of species that have existed through time we can be pretty confident that evolution doesn’t produce just one species.

Not if we project out to 1 million years in the future. Again, you are ignoring the three body problem.

You are assuming that bats were a specific goal of natural processes.

We can’t know if natural processes are inherently uncertain. All we can say is that we can’t predict them, and that they are consistent with a stochastic model.

Is that biblical? Is there a verse where God decreed that bats will exist 13.5 billion years after God started the universe?

There is no scientific reason to think that any of those outcomes were inevitable.

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Yes, I have a whole shelf of it here, and I’ve read all of it. Yes, some ID proponents contrast design with natural processes. Others are more careful, and contrast design with chance. I’m one of the careful ones. It would be better for conversational progress if you addressed my statements, rather than some generalized idea you have formed of ID, since it’s me, not “ID” that you are talking to.

No ID proponent would deny that God could design the solar system so that the appearance of Jupiter at a particular location at a particular was inevitable, and that would be entirely through what you call “natural” processes (gravity, laws of motion). No ID proponent denies that design can be carried out through natural processes in many cases. Some have even said in all cases, as the example of Denton shows.

That’s obvious, but doesn’t address my point.

Agreed. Which is exactly the point of contrast with purely mechanical systems like that of planetary motion.

I don’t ignore it; I insist on it. But while the physicists have found very accurate approximations that get around the three-body problem and allow for almost exact prediction of planetary motions, the biologists have not come with any equivalent approximations. They cannot predict whether something will evolve, or when. And I’m not faulting them for this – it’s just a limitation of evolutionary theory, that it cannot do this. The number of factors involved in evolution is vast, far more than the number of factors that have to be taken into account in computing planetary motion. So yes, the three-body problem is very relevant to understanding the limits of prediction in evolutionary theory.

It is not my assumption. It’s the assumption of the vast majority of Christians who have ever lived. Have you forgotten that this whole discussion was originally about whether BioLogos theology was compatible with traditional, orthodox Christian thought? The idea that God didn’t care much what sort of life was produced, as long as his world produced lots of life, is a modern adjustment of theology to the supposed requirements of evolutionary thought. It was no part of Christian thought until after Darwin.

But we can predict many of them with great accuracy, such as planetary motion. Others, we cannot predict at all, such as specific evolutionary outcomes. I grant your general point here, but it doesn’t erase the very obvious difference that you have conceded between the level of detail of predictions in the two very different sciences.

Christian theology is not exhausted by what is biblical. There is stuff in the Creeds that is not Biblical, at least, not directly stated in the Bible.

I never suggested there was, since the Bible is not interested in reporting on the dates of appearance of various species, orders, etc. But anyone who reads the Bible closely and frequently knows that God is conceived of as sovereign, and as getting what he wants, and often very precise local events are predicted exactly. If God determines that Jericho will fall at a specific time, etc., there is no reason to doubt that he has very clear ideas about when he wants the various creatures to appear. If he creates through evolution (as BioLogos insists), then he would have very clear ideas about what would emerge from the evolutionary process, and in what order, and when. That is, if he remains the Biblical God, and not some other sort of God, modified in conception by modern thought. You have to keep your eye on the ball here. The discussion is about whether God can remain the God of Scripture and Tradition if he allows the evolutionary process to run wild and uncontrolled, and imposes no specific goals on it. I argue that he can’t be.

Note that I am not arguing that BioLogos is wrong to affirm (more often imply, since they prefer vagueness and rarely affirm anything precise) a loosey-goosey God. I am arguing only that it is non-traditional. Whether that is good or bad is a separate question. You might personally prefer a loosey-goosey God. I am not arguing with you if you do. I only want you to concede one very small point, i.e., that such a God is not God as Christians have conceived Him for most of Christian history. If you can concede that, we can end in agreement.

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What is the difference between “not natural processes” and “chance”?

Since I am talking about what is found in the general ID population it doesn’t make much sense to talk about one person’s view. What I am trying to discuss is how those ID positions relate to randomness and theology.

We would expect that solar system formation in other places in the universe would produce different results. That is, we wouldn’t expect the same exact planets in the same exact orbits as found in our solar system. How is this any different than evolution?

But it does. If evolution is predictable then we would only have one species. We don’t.

Let’s start with a single species with a shared gene pool. Something happens that splits the population into two populations that no longer interbreed. What do we observe happening? Over time we see a divergence in their gene pools. They evolve differently.

We can’t predict accurate orbits out to millions of years. Orbits are a chaotic systems which means we can’t make long term accurate predictions. The orbits of planets are just like evolution.

That phrase indicates that you don’t understand the three body problem.

It’s not the limitation of the theory but our basic limitation of accurately predicting stochastic processes.

It’s still an assumption.

I guess it depends on what you mean by great accuracy. In just 40,000 years we can’t predict eclipses within more than a day. It gets worse from there.

I can predict with decent accuracy how many antibiotic resistant colonies you will get if we start with a known bacterium.

That’s fine. Ultimately, what I am looking for is how randomness relates to theology. If it is an unorthodox theology then it is unorthodox.

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The difference you would expect, from the normal English meanings of the words.

A volcano might vomit forth a projectile, and the projectile, on its way up, might strike a meteoroid that is on its way down to hit the earth. Both the trajectories are caused by natural causes, but we would say that the fact of their collision was due to “chance”, meaning that there was no plan or intention that the two objects would so collide.

On the other hand, if the meteoroid was headed to New York and would flatten the city if it struck there, and the volcanic projectile intercepted the meteoroid and deflected it off course, and saved New York, and if that happened because God miraculously altered the activity of the volcano to achieve that result, and we believed that God had so acted, we would say that “non-natural causes” were involved, and also that the event was not due to chance.

I do not see that the distinction is difficult.

I thought the topic here was randomness and theology, not ID. And as I said in another post, it is not just ID people who find the idea of “randomness” in theology problematic. Jon Garvey does not identify as an ID supporter, and he has basic theological objections to any claim that the traditional Christian God is compatible with real, “ontological” randomness (as opposed to “randomness” as a comment on our ignorance of causes or outcomes, or as a mathematical concept used in dealing with certain kinds of problem).

On the three-body problem, I don’t want to get caught up in tangles about how I phrased things in making a crude analogy between the complexities of planetary motion and the complexities of evolution. If you want my rough understanding of what the problem is, see this article from the online Britannica: Celestial mechanics - Three-Body, Orbit, Dynamics | Britannica.

An interesting side-point I picked up from this article, which I mention not in relation to the current discussion but because Newton’s “error” regarding the planets is so often mentioned here:

“The motion of the planets of the solar system over time scales approaching its 4.6-billion-year age is a classic n -body problem, where n = 9 with the Sun included. The question of whether or not the solar system is ultimately stable—whether the current configuration of the planets will be maintained indefinitely under their mutual perturbations, or whether one or another planet will eventually be lost from the system or otherwise have its orbit drastically altered—is a long-standing one that might someday be answered through numerical calculation. The interplay of orbital resonances and chaotic orbits discussed above can be investigated numerically, and this interplay may be crucial in determining the stability of the solar system. Already it appears that the parameters defining the orbits of several planets vary over narrow chaotic zones, but whether or not this chaos can lead to instability if given enough time is still uncertain.”

The standard narrative, of course, is that Newton, worried that the solar system would eventually become unstable, postulated that God would have to intervene every so often to prevent this, and that Laplace corrected Newton by showing that no such intervention would be necessary and that the system would be stable over the long term. (Indeed one commenter here just the other day tried to score a point by relying on this narrative.) But if the Britannica article is correct, it is not known whether in the long run the system will remain stable. In other words, Newton might have been right.

End of side point.

Agreed.

I was talking about evolution not just any place in the universe, but on this earth, with its particular mass, composition, magnetic fields, distance from the sun, etc. And I was talking about not just any solar system in the universe, but ours in particular. You’ve introduced an improper comparison. The point is that in this solar system, we can predict specific events of planetary motion with fairly high accuracy many years into the future, whereas on this earth, even if you had a full list of species existing in a particular year of the Cambrian, and complete set of environmental conditions, you could not predict where evolution would take things. You cannot evade this distinction, no matter how many tricky dodges you employ. I don’t see any point in repeating myself on this.

That’s not a logical conclusion. It doesn’t follow from the definition of either “evolution” or “predictable.” You might as well say that if the laws of political development were predictable, the world would only have one country.

Yes, and so what? The question is whether you could predict, knowing how often mutations occur in the population, where they occur in the genome, what mutations are likely to confer selective advantage in certain environments, what the environmental conditions are at the starting point, when the divergence into two new species would occur, and what those two new species would look like. And you can’t. You can’t be sure what evolution will produce in, say, 100 generations or 1,000 generations, how many new species will be formed, etc. But you can be reasonably sure, give or take a few miles and a few minutes, where Jupiter will be 100 years from now.

If you doubt the validity of the assumption, your quarrel is with Christian tradition. I’m just reporting here. I set out only to explain why the BioLogos treatment of “randomness” in relation to evolution and theology was not traditional. You seemed initially to be claiming that no, it was perfectly traditional. Now, in some of your comments, your position seems to be, well, maybe it’s not traditional, but that’s no big deal, because the tradition might be wrong about God. If that had been your position all along, we never would have been in dispute. I’ve granted from the outset that the theology of the BioLogos scientists could be the truth about God, and 1700 years of Christian tradition might have got God wrong. All I wanted you to grant was that the loosey-goosey God isn’t the God that most Christians have affirmed. If you grant that, then you must perfectly understand why not just me, not just ID people, but thousands of American evangelical Christians are not comfortable with the way BioLogos scientists theologize about evolution. You don’t have to agree with those Christians about God; all I’m asking you to admit is that they have tradition on their side and the speculations of Falk, Giberson etc. don’t. If you grant that, then we have no dispute.

I don’t deny it, but that’s only one property of one type of bacterium, and the two types don’t differ (in your example) in any other way than that one has the resistance and the other doesn’t. Now, if there were two human beings, and one was resistant to certain diseases, and the other wasn’t, would you say that therefore they were radically different creatures? Or would you say they are just two humans with a slight difference? I think you know I’m asking not about such small differences but about major morphological change. I’m asking not whether you could predict how many resistant colonies you will get of essentially the same creature, but whether you can predict that a certain primitive artiodactyl will eventually sire an entire order of whales. And I don’t think you can. I don’t think anyone can. Or ever will be able to, as long as evolutionary theory proceeds along current lines.

So is everyone in the discussion. But much depends on one’s fundamental assertions or assumptions. If one asserts or assumes that what Jon Garvey calls “ontological randomness” is a real part of the universe, then it’s very hard if not impossible to square that with traditional Christian theology. On the other hand, if randomness is only a way of talking about our ignorance of details, and no assertion is made that there are events that take place in the universe that have no sufficient cause but “just happen”, then the way scientists talk about randomness need not clash with traditional theology.

Which would not bother you, since you don’t think theology – orthodox or unorthodox – is true anyway, but is an important consideration for traditional Christians meditating on claim that theology must change to accommodate evolution. I’m just defending their right to be concerned, given their understanding of what traditional theology teaches about God.

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There should not be equivalent approximations for systems that are not equivalent.

It’s not a limitation at all. It’s what evolutionary theory, combined with physics, chemistry, and evolutionary biology literally predict.

Indeed. Eddie is exhibiting a phenomenon that seems to be universal among evolution denialists: a conceptual blind spot with respect to obvious temporal differences.

Instead, Eddie has decreed that planetary motion is a “purely mechanical system.” The difference is time, not any mechanical nature.

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In the first scenario the process is natural and is also a chance event.

In the second scenario, the process is not natural and is not chance.

Earlier, you stated:

“Yes, I have a whole shelf of it here, and I’ve read all of it. Yes, some ID proponents contrast design with natural processes. Others are more careful, and contrast design with chance.”

What difference is there between natural and chance (which I poorly worded the first time I asked)? They seem to be synonymous within ID. The only way I see around it is if the designer is natural, like humans. However, I don’t think many ID proponents think natural alien beings are the designers.

Furthermore, how would you tell the difference between design and chance? If I lose the lottery is it due to chance, but is it design if I win?

ID seems to be an extension of Christian theology.

The main gist is that once you have three bodies you can’t accurately predict their future positions:

The orbits of three bodies is chaotic, and therefore unpredictable on some time scale. Evolution is no different.

Again, the three body problem.

That’s because evolution is a stochastic process like many other systems in nature. It has the same chaotic tendencies as three bodies orbiting each other.

And I am merely pointing out that it is an assumption.

It certainly looks traditional to me.

God’s sovereignty is placed above all else, and while a process looks stochastic to us it may look different to God. That’s seems traditional to me.

If the theory of evolution is true, why would we expect to be able to make such a prediction? Again, it is a stochastic and chaotic process that is not amenable to long term predictions like the ones you are describing.

I would agree with that description. Science can only tell us if something appears to be random, but it can’t tell us if something is ontologically random. Therefore, any integration of science and theology would need to acknowledge both of these positions. The science of evolution concludes that mutations appear to be random, but it is still possible that mutations are not random on an ontological level.

I don’t doubt that others care more about orthodoxy than I do. Atheists can still try to educate themselves on what Christians consider orthodoxy.

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I didn’t know about the three-body problem. Now I know all of science can be ruled by significant chaotic elements. Hail Darkseid!

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That’s right; there is no reason why chance and natural causes can’t both be explanations for an event, when the event is looked at from different angles.

That’s right.

The example I gave should make that clear. The fact that an event can be caused both by nature and by chance doesn’t make the two things the same. A student might do well on a difficult exam both because he is bright and also because he studied very hard, but natural talent and studying hard are not the same thing. They can be distinguished conceptually even when they are found in the same place. The chance element in the volcanic ejecta striking the meteoroid can be distinguished conceptually from the laws of nature which forced each body along their paths. We can conceive of a situation where the two objects, both still moving with the same velocities by the same laws, missed each other by five minutes, or five years. Without the natural causes, no collision, and without the chance coincidence, no collision. Same event, but easily distinguishable causes.

(You could collapse the causes into an identity only by postulating that all events that have ever happened in the history of the universe follow by billiard-ball necessity from the Big Bang. Then all apparent chance would boil down to nothing but necessity. But I don’t think you believe that all events that have ever happened were necessitated by the original situation at the time of the Big Bang. If you do, let me know.)

I bet you have done so hundreds of times in your life. If you have ever played poker, and the dealer seems to have royal flushes, straight flushes, four of a kind, and full houses in every single hand, you would strongly suspect design rather than chance. Professors detect the difference frequently when their students plagiarize. The probability that a student would independently come up with the exact words of three pages of Bertrand Russell is so low that chance is ruled out as an explanation. In short, whenever you make the judgment that unguided causes could not have produced a result, you will infer design (presuming you have already ruled out the possibility of natural law).

So the principle that ID people use is one that you yourself already know, and endorse in many areas of your life. There is nothing wrong with the general reasoning. The only place where one can legitimately disagree with ID is over the application. It might be the case that certain results could be produced by either design or unguided causes, in which case the design inference would not be valid.
And if we strip away all the culture war considerations, religious and anti-religious motivations on both sides, that’s the intellectual core of the dispute over ID. It’s whether the generally sound principle used by ID proponents is properly applied to biological systems, to the fine-tuning of nature, etc.

It can be employed by Christian theologians, no doubt, but it’s not an extension of it. ID-like arguments were found in pre-Christian times, among classical writers who believed in no divine revelation. And ID-like arguments are adopted today by many whom Christians would regards as heathen or infidel: Muslims, Hindus, Deists, etc. It’s predominantly adopted by Christians in the USA, but that’s not surprising, given the historically Christian background of the USA. In Turkey, it’s adopted predominantly by Muslims, because that’s the majoritarian tradition there. It’s an idea which can be adapted to a variety of religious and cultural settings, and is independent of them in principle, even if there is often great overlap in practice.

Yes, I understood that. But you can still come reasonably close.

I already conceded that this statement sounds traditional. That’s why I called it a “motherhood” statement. But when you know the past statements of the individual BioLogos TEs as well as I and Jon Garvey do, you will know that this statement is not the whole story about BioLogos.

My contention was never that no orthodox statements are uttered by BioLogos people, but only that they have sometimes affirmed or flirted with unorthodox ones. And Jon and I aren’t going to pretend that we haven’t read the statements we’ve read, that we haven’t spent scores of hours wrangling with BioLogos people that we remember spending, because you say you don’t believe us that they said those things. We know what we know, and whether you will take our word for what was said in the past (and now conveniently buried on a computer in a locker somewhere in Grand Rapids, even though the BioLogos people have the technical knowledge to put it all up on the web in some read-only format) is a matter of indifference to me. I know what they said, and I know that some of it was unorthodox. I’ve already given some examples in paraphrase. I’ve also named you a book in which you can find a number of exact quotations from BioLogos people. Whether you accept my word, whether you will read the book – that’s something I have no power over, and will not lose an ounce of sleep over. I’m as certain that they said what they said as you are of the Pythagorean Theorem, and just as you would not lose sleep if you couldn’t convince me of the truth of the Theorem, so I will snooze quite comfortably if I can’t convince you that that unorthodox statements were made. Your assent to that fact just is not important to me.

If it’s driven largely by chance rather than by necessity, of course you won’t. And I’ve already said that I don’t blame evolutionary theorists for that. I wasn’t pointing it out to say that evolutionary is lousy; I was pointing it out to help you see why many orthodox Christians find it hard to square with a God who wills certain specific results. If evolutionary theory said that species arose as a result of billiard-ball-like motions and all the divisions are traceable back to a master pool shot, orthodox Christians could get on that bandwagon easily. (Of course, YECs etc. will reject evolution no matter what, but I’m talking about the Christians who are potentially persuadable to evolution, i.e., see no theological principle that forbids the emergence of new species.)

I don’t disagree.

Sure they can. And the best way of doing that is not through reading off-the-cuff, half-baked, improvised theological statements by Applegate, Haarsma, Collins, Venema, etc., but by reading the Greek and Latin Fathers, the Medievals, the Reformers, and good summaries of the classical doctrinal positions, such as one might find in Etienne Gilson, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, various historians of Reformation thought, etc.