Re: [asa] Neo-Darwinism and God's action

 "Logan seems to believe that if there is divine guidance there will necessarily be evidence of non-randomness."

Yes, he believes it because he says, "...The agency is potentially detectable" if events are not random, and "When intelligent beings direct events, the events are not random..." Detecting an agency would be tantamount to detecting non-randomness.

However, it's easy to come up with a model of divine activity that would involve guidance but be indistinguishable from purely random processes. One such model:

Suppose the world is distinct from God in that it could continue functioning in God's absence. Its functions would be determined by properties built into its constituents--in other words, laws of nature. Suppose God most of the time actually allows such world to function on its own but closely monitors it to see how it is evolving and on occasion tweaks it to keep it going in a desired direction.

God's guidance therefore would consist, first, of the initial creation of a robust world, and second, of these occasional tweaks. If such tweaks were rare and also at the quantum level, they could not necessarily be detected as departures from quantum randomness. A sequence for a random process can contain any point within its probability distribution and not be detectably nonrandom even if one or a few points had been divinely determined. Only if a point lay outside the allowed probability distribution could it be attributed to miracle (divine intervention). One can suppose that God with his foreknowledge could do his tweaking early enough to avoid such miracles and hence remain undetectable.

Furthermore, God could do lots of miracles and still remain undetected if he restricted his miracles to times when no one was looking.

Don

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Randy Isaac<mailto:randyisaac@comcast.net>
  To: asa@calvin.edu<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
  Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2008 7:16 PM
  Subject: [asa] Neo-Darwinism and God's action

  Jack Haas just drew my attention to Logan Gage's response<http://www.evolutionnews.org/2008/02/of_providence_and_evolution_a.html> to my letter in the Jan 2008 issue of CT. I would greatly appreciate your views on the last two paragraphs of his article. We have touched on randomness several times in this forum and I believe it continues to be one of the fundamental questions. Logan seems to believe that if there is divine guidance there will necessarily be evidence of non-randomness. Or have I misunderstood him?

  Randy

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Received on Fri Feb 15 05:07:03 2008