I agree. The only way it could be true that “most mutations” have “no known cause” is to twist the meaning of “no known cause” into something like “we can’t know exactly what happened.” By this tortured reasoning, essentially all things in the cosmos have no known cause. I guess some apologists think that mutations are like nuclear decay. Not even close.
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I am once again quite baffled. How does “uncaused” logically follow from “no known cause”? Indeed, the entire history of modern science has been to observe phenomena which had “no known cause” and figure out explanations for what brought about those phenomena. Why should mutations be any different?
Am I missing something here?
I wonder also if there is some equivocation confusion between proximate cause (the processes of the natural world) and ultimate cause (the role of God.)
My point was that these arguments and lists for why evolution is not compatible with Biblical creation are neither surprising nor powerful and have been around for years. As I pointed out, I mentioned Grudem as an example because he has some of the longest lists of arguments and I’m most familiar with his compilations in print and from academic meetings. Nothing all that new here.
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I know that, but if it’s not known it can’t very well be modeled in the theory can it? And if no cause is modeled in the theory, that means the theory models it as uncaused. That makes the theory incompatible with any claim that it does have a cause, such as the Christian doctrine of creation.
“Smoking causes cancer” has to be a contender for the best known causation of all time.
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I think that statement is incorrect, in that it ignores the fact that Methodological Naturalism is part of the Scientific Method, so the “theory” needs to stick to natural causes.
It would therefore be more accurately expressed as:
Since they have no known (natural) cause, the theory must model them as having no natural cause, and that is clearly agnostic on whether God, being a supernatural cause, causes them.
Ron’s point above that ““no known cause” =/= “no cause”” is also noted. The fact that science has discovered no natural cause as yet, should not be taken as science declaring that no natural cause can exist.
Indeed. Thus my emphasis on the distinction between proximate causation and ultimate causation.
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Yes, He could. But you “appear” to be making the same argument as Murray and Churchill. It only appears random to us. It’s not actually random. Therefore the theory which models it as random must be false. This is my only point. You are making a bigger deal out of it than it is, unless you simply cannot admit that the theory is false.
Again, all I’m saying is the model must be false. You are agreeing with me, and yet you’re still arguing with me about it. Why is that?
It might not be any different. Better get crackin and figure it out then. All I’m saying is right now the theory in front of us is incompatible with creation. I ain’t saying anything about what we might discover in the future.
I’m not sure why you think evolution requires mutations to be indeterministic (what you seem to mean by “random”). Pseudo-random number generators are technically deterministic, but they produce the same distribution as truly random numbers. AFAIK you could even use them to model the ‘random’ mutations involved in evolution.
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Well no, the model doesn’t include the causes but it never makes a claim that mutations are uncaused. Models are allowed to contain simplifications, and this is one.
I might also ask if the model is “false” in such a trivial way and is agreed to be “false” in this way, why should it be relevant to theistic evolutionists? Theistic evolutionists are not required to claim that the model is “absolute truth” in this sense - not when science would regard such a claim as false.
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Yes, it can - even if the cause isn’t known, that doesn’t prevent measuring and modelling the rate and extent of it happening.
That’s how we do radioactive decay modelling, which has proved remarkably consistent with actual events. Mutations can and have been modelled similarly, with equally impressive consistency with other evidence.
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But your explanation of why they are incompatible makes them compatible. You wrote this:
As noted above, that means evolution theory and creation doctrine are both analogous to the same situation: God knows the relevant facts, but we do not.
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I’m not agreeing with you. Mutations have known causes explaining their different frequencies dependent on type, and that is explicitly modeled (though the cause itself isn’t modeled). What gave you the impression that I’m agreeing with you?
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It is known. The statement that the causes of mutation are unknown is false.
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Sure, if God exists and created the world such that life would evolve deterministically through common descent, but without truly ontologically random mutations, then any theory that actually posits mutations are ontologically random would be strictly false.
It’s just that it isn’t necessary to think that mutations are ontologically random. And it isn’t part of modern evolutionary theory that mutations are ultimately ontologically random. They are modeled randomly because of limitations of knowledge and computing power, not because we are forced to believe mutations occur without explanation.
However, the theory that smoking causes cancer is then false too in that same sense, since we do not have the knowledge at the level of detail that would allow us to predict with certainty when any particular individual will develop cancer as a result of their smoking habits.
Nevertheless it’s still true that smoking causes cancer and that life evolved, it’s just not “truly random” in the way we are forced to model it due to our limited knowledge.
If you get some sort of kick out of deriving this “it’s strictly false” in that sense then be my guest.
So just to be clear, it’s not actually a big deal to you to derive this “it’s false” statement. You don’t intend to run around advertising this as a significant admission to creationist audiences because you know it’s only meant in the sense of as an approximation that cannot fully capture all events at the subatomic level. Right?
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Then it would appear to be a trivial point. As George Box said:
All models are wrong, some are useful.
If the only imperfection in the current Theory of Evolution turns out to be that the randomness of mutations is not perfectly, ontologically random, then I would say that it will have turned out to be a miraculously successful theory/model.
It is unclear what, if any, prediction of this theory a lack of perfect, ontological randomness would adversely affect, let alone invalidate. It is not even clear that the scientific enterprise even cares if specific random events are ontologically random or not – that would appear something that it would happily leave to philosophy or theology.
Yes, all science is provisional and thus imperfect. That does not however make it “false” for any reasonable definition of that word. Most theists would admit that their understanding of God is imperfect – but I would doubt if that would lead many of them to label it as “false”.
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I agree it’s a trivial point. There’s no need for some complicated 16 page explanation of why the doctrine of creation is not contradicted by evolutionary theory if all you need to do is simply point out that the model is obviously false. That removes any contradiction. The model is false but useful. If you hold it to be false, then you are not holding contradictory beliefs and the problem is trivially solved in a single paragraph explanation.
I’m willing to accept that for purposes of discussion, as long as you are willing to admit the model is false and that holding the model is false on this particular point resolves the issue with the doctrine of creation.
If you won’t admit that it is false in how it models mutations occurring, then the contradiction with the doctrine of creation remains an issue for you. You don’t get to say the model is true on that point and also hold the doctrine of creation to be true. They are contradictory, and clearly so.
You know I work with models darn near every day, right? 
The whole point of a model is that its functions approximately like the real thing, with various degrees of error (That error may follow a Normal distribution.). A model need not be “true” is the statistical sense, but a good model is useful. That’s the mathematical side of things. On the Theological side the “true” model has a different sort of meaning.
And it IS a big deal - you are presuming that any allowance for things that seem to be random makes the whole model random, and rejecting it on the basis of that assumption. The conflict between your interpretation and TE hinges on this assumption. I’m not asking you to agree with the TE position, only that your should fairly represent what that position represents: a disagreement over the interpretation of randomness. YEC and TE are all Christians, and this is not a salvation issue (AFAIK). TE is different, yes, but that doesn’t make it wrong.
That’s the point where I should leave this. I don’t expect you to change your mind. What follows is a bit of a digression which you may happily ignore.
Possibly irrelevant now, but there is a bit more about mathematical Convergence I can add. The Central Limit Theorem in statistics is the weakest sort of convergence; it shows convergence to a random (Normal) probability distribution. There are stronger forms of convergence, where the value converges to a fixed point. Technically strong convergence means that the difference between that fixed “true” point and the actual event will be less than some arbitrarily small value with probability 1.0. The outcome of strong convergence is not really random at all.
The point being, there could be truly random events occurring, which might influence short term outcomes, but in the long term the outcome remains certain. You might think of this like the choice of paths taken to the same destination. The choice might be random, leading to a different journey, but all paths eventually lead to the same destination.
Not to cross streams with the ongoing Free Will discussion, but we might model Free Will to include “independent” choices that contain a degree of randomness. This fits this statistical theory as the only way to generate “new” information when everything else is deterministic. I think this is as close as we are likely to get to a mathematical definition of Free Will.
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If models are completely false unless absolutely true, aircraft designs based on them would fall from the sky, as there is no such thing as a 100% true model in fluid dynamics.
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