[asa] God, Chance and Purpose

In a post on May 5, I mentioned that Craig Story had recommended the book by David J. Bartholomew, "God, Chance and Purpose: Can God Have It Both Ways" published in 2008 by Cambridge University Press. He is Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

I just finished reading it and would like to give it one of my highest recommendations. I have asked the bookstore manager to have a number of copies available at GFU at our annual meeting.

Bartholomew has articulated what I have been quietly thinking for many years but never had the expertise to think through coherently or to articulate. I figured it might all be too heretical and could be hard to swallow, even for this list.

At the risk of having some of this taken out of context but wanting to whet your appetite, permit me to highlight a few of his sentences.

p. 135. "What we do know is that we are in a situation in which random behaviour at the micro level produces order at the macro level and where determinism at the micro level generates apparent randomness at the macro level." In other words, randomness and determinism are intrinsically linked in our world at complementary levels. So far so good.

He takes issue with the approach by Russell, Murphy and others who find room for God's providence in the cloak of quantum uncertainty. He quotes Stephen Hawking as writing "If one likes one could ascribe this randomness to God, but it would be a very strange kind of intervention: there is no evidence that it was directed towards any purpose. Indeed if it were, it would, by definition not be random." Bartholomew continues "It is part of the last sentence of the quotation that touches the nub of the matter. Randomness is what we have when all purpose and direction is excluded. We cannot, therefore, smuggle purpose in by the back door under cover of randomness.
"If, on the other hand, the equations of quantum theory do describe genuine randomness, there is no room for action by God mediated through individual events at the quantum level."

He also dispenses with Dembski's approach in chapter 7 "Can Intelligent Design be established scientifically?" but I confess I'll have to read it again to understand it well enough to summarize.

Bartholomew also calls attention on p. 183 to Miller's "Perspectives on an Evolving Creation" and specifically names both Keith Miller and Terry Gray, citing their discussion of randomness.

What is his suggestion? On p. 192 he says "There is no physical mechanism--there does not need to be--but chance and necessity alone are sufficient to do the job in exactly the way God intended." In other words, the randomness we see is real and the individual "random" events are not individually determined by God but the macroscopic purpose and direction is accomplished through the randomness of the micro level. He goes on to discuss human freedom in the same terms.

Clearly, this will cause considerable angst to those who require God's specific involvement, knowledge, and guidance of each individual event. But I think there's a lot of merit to his suggestion. I encourage you to read it and give it serious thought.

Randy

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Received on Thu Jun 5 11:00:00 2008