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.

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.

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?

“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.

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.