I think both John West and Joe Carter are trapped in a false dilemma, namely the choice between believing that certain processes are random or believing that they are directed by God. The dilemma is created by a failure to take adequately into account the complete sovereignty of God and the fact that God is outside of time. This is ironic, because Joe says he is a Calvinist, and Calvinists of all people, should have no problem with these issues.
Let’s back off from the emotionally heated subject of evolution for a moment and look at an issue that is much simpler. We have all played games of chance, I suppose. When you roll a pair of dice, is there not an obvious sense in which the outcome is “random”? Is there not an obvious sense in which the rolling of dice is a matter of “chance” so that one can use the concepts of “probability”? On the other hand, isn’t it also true that God knows and wills from all eternity what numbers come up when dice are rolled? If anyone thinks there is a contradiction between these statements, then I suggest that he hasn’t really grasped the traditional teaching about God’s atemporality. And I would further suggest that he lacks certain basic theological insights that would allow him to think clearly about evolution.
What makes a series of dice rolls a “random sequence,” in the terminology of mathematics, is that there is no systematic correlation between the different rolls. That means that one cannot predict the outcome of a roll from knowing the outcomes of previous rolls or subsequent rolls of the dice. The rolls are “statistically independent” of each other. Moreover, if we are using dice in a game, like Risk or Monopoly, then the dice rolls are also independent of the situation in the game. In other words, one cannot predict the outcome of a roll of the dice from knowing what numbers would be helpful to one of the players. In that sense, the outcomes of the dice are not oriented toward certain game outcomes. Incidentally, this is exactly the sense in which biology calls mutations random. One cannot predict what mutations will occur (it is claimed) either from what mutations previously occurred or from which mutations would be helpful to a species.
To quote Ayala and Kiger’s textbook, Modern Genetics: “There is no way of knowing whether a given gene will mutate in a particular cell or in a particular generation,” because the mutations “are unoriented with respect to adaptation.”
To return to games of chance: We would not consider such a game fair and we would not sit down to play it if we thought the dice had a predictable pattern or systematically favored certain outcomes or certain players in the game, i.e. were not “random.” Nevertheless, even in a game of “chance,” God certainly knows and wills the outcome from all eternity. He knows and wills every roll of the dice. God knows the outcomes from all eternity not because there is some secret pattern in the sequence of outcomes that allows him to compute the outcome of one roll from the outcomes of prior rolls. God knows the outcome of every roll “in advance” because he knows all things from all eternity in a single atemporal act of knowing.
To say, as Joe says, that “God making evolution appear undirected is similar to the idea that he planted dinosaur fossils and created geological strata to fool us into thinking the earth has been around more than 6,000 years,” is in my view completely to misunderstand what scientists and ordinary people mean when they speak about random processes. When one shuffles a deck of cards, one is really randomizing it—the whole point of shuffling. The randomness is not some sort of ploy or ruse on God’s part. But when we shuffle a deck, we are not escaping in any way from God’s absolute control over events: God knows and wills in exact detail from all eternity that I will shuffle the deck, precisely how I will shuffle the deck, and what the order of the cards will be after I shuffle the deck. On this point Calvinism and Catholicism agree.
Francis Collins understands the issues very well. His theological mentors are St. Augustine and C.S. Lewis. His understanding of divine providence, omnipotence, and omniscience are thoroughly in accord with the insights and explanations to be found in St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the mainstream of Christian tradition. John West quotes Francis Collins as saying that God “could” have known the specific outcomes of evolution beforehand. West picks up on the word “could” as though it indicated that Collins is not sure whether God did in fact know beforehand. Anyone who has read Collins’s book, however, should realize that Collins absolutely and unequivocally holds the belief that God knows all events from all eternity. To suggest otherwise is quite unfair. The context in the book makes quite clear that Collins was not using the word “could” in the way West seems to interpret him.
Every person of common sense realizes that there is some sense in which one can truly speak of randomness and chance in the world. Actuaries, weather forecasters, poker players, physicists, investors, pollsters, people who engage in statistical analyses of data, and all sorts of other people understand this. It in no way implies a denial of divine foreknowledge or absolute divine sovereignty over the world. St. Thomas Aquinas devoted an entire chapter (Book 3, chapter 74) of his Summa Contra Gentiles to arguing this. The title of that chapter is “Divine providence does not exclude fortune and chance.” I think Calvin would have agreed with Aquinas on this point.
One problem, I believe, is that some people think that saying “Nature is blind” is equivalent to saying “God is blind.” The two statements, however, are poles apart. God is not Nature and Nature is not God. When scientists say that certain things in nature are random, this does mean that Nature is in a certain sense blind; it does not imply anything about God’s knowledge or purposes.
June 12th, 2009 | 12:04 pm
God said to the devil, “I’ll play one game of poker with you. If I win, you and your angels must not roam the earth anymore. If you win, you can have free reign over creation formed in our image — we won’t interfere anymore.”
The devil said, “No, I decline your game invitation. I’ll take my chances with the humans.”
June 12th, 2009 | 12:23 pm
[...] his post Stephen contends that I may be trapped in a false dilemma: the choice between believing that certain processes are [...]
June 12th, 2009 | 12:27 pm
“God knows and wills in exact detail from all eternity that I will shuffle the deck, precisely how I will shuffle the deck, and what the order of the cards will be after I shuffle the deck. On this point Calvinism and Catholicism agree.”
How you will shuffle the deck and THAT you will shuffle the deck, God knows. He also knows the outcome of the shuffling. Yet, that He WILLS it would seem to negate the element of free will inherent in shuffling the deck.
June 12th, 2009 | 1:53 pm
[...] Carter and Stephen Barr are having a very interesting debate on Theistic evolutionists – what is random, what is directed [...]
June 12th, 2009 | 2:27 pm
All that’s really important in your analogy is that the potential outcomes are inherent in the design of the dice. Randomness is a useful property we’ve invented to describe those outcomes. It’s useful because it corresponds to observed behavior.
Likewise, if one believes in God, the occurrence of life ‘as we know it’ reflects the constaints designed into the universe.
Beyond that, trying to reconcile the way the world works with a God that meets one’s theological constraints seems like a pointless and hence useless exercise in intellectual naval gazing.
June 12th, 2009 | 3:20 pm
[...] represented by Francis S. Collins (and myself) that he really was criticizing. As I noted in my previous post, it is the insights of St. Augustine that are most needed here, and therefore I think there is [...]
June 12th, 2009 | 5:55 pm
Stephen, thank you so for this post. Your position as a respected authority (or at least a commentator) who is favorable to Christianity can bridge gaps of trust that are seemingly impassable by the science-oriented person. I also found your explanation to be clear, concise and no-confrontational which is truly needed.
June 18th, 2009 | 8:20 am
As an intelligent design advocate, I can agree with just about everything you said about randomness and theology. God knows but does not determine, etc, etc. The issue with evolution and biology is not theological. Is evolution a game of chance like Monopoly or is it a game of chess, where each move is planned out ahead of time by intelligent forethought?
“What makes a series of dice rolls a “random sequence,” in the terminology of mathematics, is that there is no systematic correlation between the different rolls. That means that one cannot predict the outcome of a roll from knowing the outcomes of previous rolls or subsequent rolls of the dice. The rolls are “statistically independent” of each other.”
It is exactly this sense of randomness, which you discuss at length and very well I might add, that intelligent design believes cannot be responsible for certain features of life. The argument is not about the nature of randomness, but about how much this kind of randomness can actually do.
June 20th, 2009 | 11:48 pm
[...] the Discovery Institute website, John G. West gives a three-part response to some things I said on this blog. In the first part he says: “Barr claims that ‘[w]hen scientists say that certain things in [...]
June 21st, 2009 | 10:22 am
I am missing something here. Are you discussing randomness in the sense of the unpredictibility in quantum mechanics? I thought determinism was only knocked-down when the probabilistic nature of quantum was discovered. But gene mutation isn’t a quantum process. Mr. Barr, when you quote Modern Genetics: “There is no way of knowing whether a given gene will mutate in a particular cell or in a particular generation,’ because the mutations’ are unoriented with respect to adaptation.’” are you implicitly agreeing that gene mutation is akin to quantum change? Isn’t the “no way of knowing” the outcome of gene mutation more likely a result of truly “hidden variables?”
I can understand how quantum mechanics negates determinism on the quantum level, but I don’t see how biological evolution does.
Now, of course, determinism need not be design, but it isn’t randomness either, so why isn’t the “hidden variables” argument pertinent to biological evolution as it is, or was, in quantum mechanics?
June 21st, 2009 | 2:11 pm
While the Catholic Church teaches that God is omniscient I am not aware of anything in Scripture, Tradition or pronouncements from the Magisterium which teach that God wills every cause, effect and action in His creation. We know what God “wills” only to the extent that He has revealed His will.
Barr instead makes the argumentative leap that because God knows all that He therefore willed every cause, effect, and act. There are no Catholic doctrines which could convert this formal fallacy into a valid (and true) conclusion. This, more or less, collapses Barr’s position.
Barr’s “Risk” game analogy hardly illustrates his guess that God willed random mutations over time to explain the origin of biological diversity. In the game “Risk” it is not the random dice rolls which have any role in some coherent, progressive outcome (or disaster), it is by the explicit design of the intelligent agent player. The dice rolls serve mostly to limit the freedom of the intelligent agent. There is no basis of resemblance between the things compared and hence the analogy is flawed.
Barr proposed nothing new under the sun concerning theistic evolutionism.
June 25th, 2009 | 5:09 pm
I agree that God can (obviously) direct random processes. But that doesn’t seem to be the issue to me. The issue, rather, is what does reason applied to the evidence that “we” have, tell us? Clearly, we can distinguish between directed and random processes and equally clearly darwinian or neo-darwinian evolution fails miserably to account for life. More on that in a moment.
If evolutionary theory says “nobody did it” – and it does, and theistic evolutionists say that God did it, then we have the spectacle of God saying that “nobody did it.” I see a bit of a logical problem here.
Any materialistic account of life must account for information. This means that the laws of physics must be able to account for information. But this is impossible. Information requires language and language requires symbols and rules and physics has nothing to say about either symbols or rules. Never has, never will. Therefore, not only is darwinian evolution not true, it is not even possible for it to be true. Francis Collins and anyone who thinks that God “did it” by “not doing it” needs to rethink their position.
June 27th, 2009 | 10:32 am
[...] to note that Stephen Barr has been writing some excellent posts on Christianity and evolution (see here, here, and [...]
July 2nd, 2009 | 9:06 pm
Believing in God is not a random chance of rolling the dice. I’m not sure where you get that info.
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