That works too. I had something a little more complicated in mind - Convergence due to the Law of Large Numbers. (In statistics, the Central Limit Theorem is the weakest sort of convergence.) But rolling dice to get sixes is a MUCH more accessible example. 
This will depend on what you mean by ‘random’, and IMO if we use the meaning associated with evolutionary biology (in which occurrence of mutations is not causally connected to fitness or ‘need’) then I think we can say that mutations are random wrt genome location. Because we don’t see evidence that particular genome locations (or regions) experience mutations in response to ‘need’.
But maybe this highlights why the word ‘random’ is so unsatisfactory in this context. What @Mercer is pointing to is the fact that mutation rates vary dramatically across genomic regions and even at very focused locations. There are the well-known hotspots (often they are chromosomal breakpoints) but there are even more interesting epigenomic active mechanisms that seem to adjust mutation rates based on genomic location. In fact, there seem to be active mechanisms that reduce the mutation rate specifically in gene bodies (article here – PDF here).
Conversely, the strange world of error-prone DNA polymerases (sometimes called “mutases”) involves an appearance of a mechanism intended to introduce mutations specifically into gene bodies. (Example paper here.) It’s almost as if the universe wants guided mutations but can’t have them (since there’s no supernatural help to be found), so it does its best to aim the random mutation generator in the most helpful direction.
2 Likes
I really appreciate you posting the draft and it is a fascinating topic. That said, I found both summary statements absurd for quite a number of reasons. Others have beat me to the punch on many of them and I don’t have time for a lot of details—so I’ll cite one of my favorite scriptures related to this topic:
“The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord”.
— Proverbs 16:33
Yes, most people consider the rolling of dice (i.e., the casting of lots, an ancient practice using many types of objects) to have a random outcome. But the ancient Hebrews considered what is random to humans as not being random to YHWH. Christian theologians have long asserted that God’s creation is full of random events but that in no way conflicts with God’s sovereignty over his creation. Your summary statements seems to fly in the face of centuries of Christian philosophy.
Brownian motion is one of countless random processes yet I’ve never heard anybody claim that God couldn’t use it in creating things. (That’s just the first example that pops into my mind.)
Maybe I’m missing something----but I’m suspicious of unnecessary equivocation fallacies surrounding the word “random.”
I do sincerely wish I had the time to carefully dissect the entire paper but too many red flags went up in the initial paragraphs for this to get ahead of other items on my to-do list.
Nevertheless, PS is a great place to post such a draft and I appreciate you doing so. Thank you for helping make PS an interesting place.
8 Likes
Another example of that is somatic hypermutation in the acquired immune response.
The best (and unintelligent) design evolution could come up with was to selectively increase mutation rates in genes that are being expressed in those cells, which obviously includes the antibody genes. Then, at least many (definitely not all) mutations in the “wrong” genes get corrected, a second level of selectivity. Still, the often lethal byproduct of this lack of specificity is that most B-cell cancers arise from this stage because their oncogenes and tumor-suppressor genes, turned on because they are proliferating, were mutated.
Not an intelligent design, but what we would expect from natural selection.
2 Likes
My apologies to @Roy - I somehow managed to edit my comment into his, rather than creating a reply. Perhaps the Cosmic Random Number Generator briefly assumed control of my mouse?
My comment was …
Me too: Sicherman’s Dice
I also have non-transitive dice: 3 sets (A, B, C) where A tends to roll higher than B, B tends to roll higher than C, and C tends to roll higher than A. No one lets me use them on the gaming table!
1 Like
But that’s still random with respect to location, it’s just biased as well. Like putting that segment on three faces of the die.
1 Like
Perhaps I can more concisely clarify my objections to this statement using an example from a middle-school science class textbook: C-14 beta decay into N-14. As a Bible-affirming Christ-follower I would claim that God’s ROUTINELY and RANDOMLY creates nitrogen-14 atoms from carbon-14 atoms. Do you disagree?
Indeed, humans consider this beta decay to be random because we can’t predict which C-14 atom (and when) will be the next to spontaneously decay into N-14. But wouldn’t most Christians agree—I’m ignoring a few Open Theists for now—that God knows everything about his creation including the future of each component within it?
I’m not a physicist by any means nor do I have noteworthy academic training in that field. Even so, I thought it was obvious to most Christians with a general knowledge of science that God’s creation is absolutely crammed full of random processes which create things all the time and never stop doing so.
I’ve debated people who assumed that the word random was somehow a synonym for “atheist”----and that because I affirm evolution, that requires that I think that the biosphere and the universe itself came about “by random chance.” Why? Bizarre. I struggle to follow that kind of thinking. I assume that such people are assuming that God’s sovereignty and “random chance” cannot coexist—yet the Bible itself says otherwise. (See Proverbs 16:33 quoted in my previous post.)
5 Likes
Meticulous divine providence means God controls every position of every particle at every time. Craig is explicit about this. I’m not sure about Murray and Churchill but given that they are promoting Molinism in the paper I suspect their view is the same as Craig’s. Obviously, that would not be the case for all TEs though.
1 Like
Thanks for all the replies. I have a couple of general responses.
-
My argument here is not that one cannot accept evolutionary theory as the best scientific model and the doctrine of creation. It’s only that one cannot claim evolutionary theory is True in the absolute sense along with the doctrine of creation. You could easily take an instrumentalist view of the theory, accepting that it’s a model and is not intended as an accurate representation of reality. Or you could simply believe it’s false but useful. My own position is all scientific theories are instrumentalist, so evolutionary theory is not unique in that. All I’m trying to say is that you can’t claim both are true in the absolute sense.
-
I’m aware of the mutational hotspot/equiprobable issue. I tried to deal with that in a footnote, but it’s a difficult thing to spell out. The reason I said mutations are random with respect to their “type and position” is to account for that. So for each type of mutation, it has a number of places in a sequence where it could occur. The model is that there is no distinction between the opportunities for a specific type of mutation to occur, nothing to direct it to be at one location rather than another. A higher rate of mutations in one hotspot doesn’t change that. Individual mutations are still not specified even if the probability distribution isn’t flat, or equiprobable, as someone said.
-
Molinism is important to understanding their view, I think. Craig has been promoting a view which would be similar to what Dan was suggesting, if I take his meaning. In the same way that Molinism would reconcile human free will with divine sovereignty, Craig wants to say it can reconcile random mutations with divine sovereignty. I think this is a fascinating idea, but if that’s what Murray and Churchill meant, they worded it poorly. I’m not at all sure they meant that though. They reference Craig’s Molinist idea later in the paper, but they seem to be wanting to spread a wider net than that.
3 Likes
Thank you that’s exactly what I was looking for. I don’t recall covering this as an undergrad, but it was 20 years ago for me.
1 Like
I know of no reason why one cannot.
And, yes, I am very familiar with Wayne Grudem’s arguments and lists, for example. (Indeed, I got the impression from his “twelve claims made by advocates of theistic evolution” that he has a very poor grasp of what evolution-affirming Christians claim. So many straw-man arguments.) I could cite others but I most recently worked through Grudem’s arguments so he comes to mind. [Plus he was a colleague and friend long ago when I made my transition from a secular university professor to a seminary appointment and our kids were in the same private school. Wayne was a bull terrier then and a bull terrier now. A very tenacious individual.]
Science is about pursuing the best explanations for the available data—and evolutionary biology certainly has an impressive track record in that regard. And that includes making useful predictions about evidence yet to be discovered (and hitting a bullseye again and again.)
“True in the absolute sense” is terminology that seems quite out of place within a scientific discipline which never claims to presently have all-of-the-final-answers (if that is what you mean by “true in the absolute sense.”) Science is always provisional while religious studies is a field with a lot of observations about “absolute truth.” But I can’t recall the last peer-reviewed scientific paper I read which claimed some sort of absolute or ultimate truth.
I describe it this way to my theology students: Of all of the possible worlds which God might have created, he chose to create this particular “reality path” which includes random processes which function exactly as we observe them to function. God knew their outcome in advance and chose this particular reality accordingly. He also knew all of the free will decisions all humans would make. Yes, I’m a Molinist and I consider human free will and divine sovereignty fully in harmony. (Many posts on PS have addressed those issues although it has probably been a while. We used to have a lot more theologian-types around here.)
Again, God choosing this particular university and timeline in no way precludes random processes. The fact that they are random and unpredictable for us humans doesn’t mean that God is equally limited.
Yes, God could have chosen to create a universe where the next C-14 atom to randomly decay to N-14 happened to be in the potted plant to the right of my desk but instead he created a universe where that honor goes to a particular C-14 atom exhaled by a Vietnamese farmer presently waking up to eat his breakfast. When God chose to create this particular universe and timeline, he made a LOT of decisions about outcomes which gradually unfolded on a cosmic scale. And that includes countless mutations that would play out in particular ways.
Of course, because I ascribe to the B-theory of time and think God is outside of time (because time is simply an attribute of the universe he created and therefore he is not in some way constrained by it), I find all of this easy to harmonize. [Bill Craig, on the other hand, ascribes to the A-theory of time, BTW.]
5 Likes
I don’t see any analogy there.
A question for those on this forum with more scientific knowledge than myself:
Are the biochemical processes that lead to the mutations that cause evolution sufficiently similar to those that cause the mutations that lead to cancer that, if the former are ‘ontologically random’, then the latter must likewise be so as well?
If so, then it would seem that the following statement:
… would entail this statement as well:
But God’s creative acts cannot be random, so He cannot exert control over who does, or does not, get cancer.
Then the question becomes is the latter statement theologically problematical? (Particularly so, given that cancer is a leading cause of death in the modern world.) If so, is it sufficiently problematical that it would require reevaluation of the former statement?
In the past cancer was not a leading cause of death, It’s a problem because medical science has remove so many other causes of death. The biggest reduction in deaths is due to basic sanitation. Antibiotics are second, I think. From a certain standpoint we might say that humans are now living longer than we were designed to live, so the problem of cancer is our own darn fault. Still, God would have foreseen this, and has done nothing?
We might conclude that God left some problems for us to solve on our own.
Checking chimpanzee mortality proved interesting. About 1/3 of chimpanzees are killed by other chimpanzees. So civilization must have been a big reduction in deaths.
1 Like
Having some types of mutation being more frequent due to their chemical nature or some areas of a genome being more likely to mutate due to their structure does not mean that mutations are not random w.r.t. location any more than rolling ‘7’ with two dice being more likely than rolling ‘3’ means that the numbers generated by dice are not random.
1 Like
On the other hand isn’t there these biblical stories about people living to 600 or 900 and stuff?
1 Like
But is anyone in particular doing that? Scientists are well aware that all conclusions are provisional, subject to new data.
It also appears that you are conflating evolutionary theory, which is about the mechanisms underlying evolution, with evolution itself.
You are most welcome. But why start with a wrong statement? The fact that the “mistake” is in the substrate and not the enzyme replicating it would seem to make a major theological difference in your argument.
3 Likes
Definitely. Tumors evolve very rapidly. It helps to view it as selection within a single organism.
I would think so. It didn’t make any sense to me even without considering cancer.
3 Likes
On the other hand isn’t there these biblical stories about people living to 600 or 900 and stuff?
[/quote]
But according to those same stories, shorter lifespans are also our own fault. 