You don’t have to show them to me because I’m already on board with that. A gamma ray, a stray particle collision, or whatever can produce a mutation. That doesn’t get to the heart of ontological randomness as I understand it. In fact then, far from being random, it shows why the mutation appeared where it did and not somewhere else. I think we essentially agree about apparent randomness and its role in our scientific / statistical / mathematical understandings of things. It’s only at the mysterious roots of it as a proposed mechanism in and of itself that I diverge from your outlook. I just don’t see any persuasive evidence for OR (nor even a way that there could be any). It is an unfalsifiable conjecture (both ways) and I freely admit that.
Then I am a bit puzzled why you said this:
“Labeling the phenomenon as random does nothing to produce the “invisible floating muscle car” that allegedly exists to make something random in a most fundamental sense. That is what you don’t have and can’t produce.”
You seem to hint at scientists using faith as a source of random events, yet I keep citing known and observable mechanisms that produce random outcomes. Perhaps I am missing something?
Again, I think this comes down to parsimony and the burden of proof as part of the epistemology I am using. If we have a known cause and an outcome that is indistinguishable from randomness then you would need additional evidence FOR another process if you are going to claim it is non-random or guided.
The type of epistemology you are using doesn’t seem to be equally applied across phenomenon. For example, we have a ton of evidence that winds, air pressure, and humidity produce clouds. Do we also have to prove that ontological cloud making does not include the influence of invisible pink unicorns guiding and shaping the clouds? I don’t see any need to. The natural processes we observe seem sufficient as a cause. If it is sufficient for cloud making, why isn’t it sufficient in other cases?
Thank you for stepping in and saying this, Merv. I feel the same way, though I know that, being neither a philosopher nor a theologian, my wading into these waters opens me to being labeled a this or a that or pounced on as incoherent. I guess I’m okay with that.
But I’ve been puzzling all morning over this middle ground. It’s really interesting, or satisfying, to think of God predetermining an end result while also allowing freedom within it.
An imperfect metaphor: A friend of mine owns an online gaming company. He talks about buying people’s clicks from Facebook. And at first I was really offended by this. Do these Facebook “sheeple” really have no agency in the matter? How dare he remove their agency from the equation altogether? But he said, no, statistically, given people’s interest in certain topics, aesthetics, etc., it’s statistically predictable that if you put this out to a given size of audience, you will get a given number of clicks out of it. That’s why Facebook can charge an advertiser in this way. This really stuck with me.
Could God predetermine a final end — say, the Ninevites in Jonah’s time hearing a message of repentance — and still allow for Jonah’s choice to flee from Nineveh? Is He powerful enough to have prepared a Plan B (the whale) as well as Plans C through ZZZZZ[…] that we know nothing of, because He is God?
Of course, such a flexible approach still doesn’t solve theodicy. You still have cancers, and the question will be, why does God even allow this as an option when creating something like the mechanism of genetic mutation? And there are many other questions within such a model (e.g. Which ends does God predetermine? What events are ends and what are means to the end? etc.). But as a working metaphor, as a non-philosopher, it gives me enough space in my daily walk to trust in God’s sovereignty as well as to acknowledge the reality of free will. Am I hiding behind fuzzy concepts? Probably. But I’m not sure these things will ever be crystal clear, this side of eternity.
Incidentally, I find it telling, and not a little unsettling, that a search for “Christadelphian” on the Forum brings up exclusively posts (and several of them) from Jon and Eddie (and notably, none from Jonathan himself). Most of us seem to get along just fine without pegging down someone’s confessional roots and then making regular reference to them.
This I say as one who appreciates diverse viewpoints on the Forum, even when they can be strident.
…none of which is random. Wind blows from higher pressure regions to lower. Every time. Humidity (or lack thereof) follows along with it. Every time. Diffusion spreads molecules from higher concentration areas to lesser concentrated. Every time. (That latter being the quintessential example of randomness we could apply!) I’ve looked into chaos theory and appreciate as much as you do the intractable randomness (chaos) in weather that defies long term detailed forecast. What we don’t see here is how an individual water molecule (that is part of this big uniform randomness) does anything apart from what laws of inertia, collisions, and electrostatic attractions compel it to do (quantum uncertainty being the invisible elephant in the room if I may mix up some more metaphors). Or maybe we should call them pink unicorns. Those all belong to you as much as to me so far as I can see here, but if it makes you feel better we can pretend the burden of “some proof” in all this is entirely mine. I’ll take it off your hands and simply drop it since I’m under no illusion that anybody here is evidencing anything much less proving it.
Here … let me try this: We both agree that flipping a fair coin many times ought to produce a standard probability distribution and that is just as random in concept as all the other things you’ve been adding – they’re all just buried deeper in complexity with vastly more possible outcomes. But coin flipping is really all we need. So let’s give this a whirl.
I drop a quarter from a couple meters off a concrete floor and it bounces around and settles. I can try to hold it flat heads-up as I drop it from that high,but due to all the bouncing I fail to noticeably influence the outcome and our probability distribution remains intact and centered around 50-50. So far so random. Now I do it from a meter above the hard floor. Maybe the same result. I work my way down until I am able, by how I drop it to begin to noticeably influence the distribution. We begin to notice that my “flips” are 60 heads to 40 tails or something like that. BUT … it is still random! Skewed random, yes, but the individual outcomes, while influenced by me, are still in doubt. We get down to a mere inch or two above the surface and by dropping it heads side up, I make it appear heads 90 times out of 100? Is this still random? Ten of those flips it bounced funny and managed to flips to the tails side. Pretty soon I’m so low above the table that I succeed in getting heads 100% of the time (for the times tried anyway). Do we all agree by this point that it is not random? Presuming your agreement in this, I would then observe it failed to be random because of a known cause (my unfair “flipping” strategy). You would say it failed to be random because it no longer has the expected probability distribution. And I would agree. But what about all the intermediate times? Were those not random because it failed to be the expected 50-50 associated with a fair coin? If not, then why not? Many other random events have far from 50-50 distributions and we don’t question their randomness for that. I argue that you would see my “flipping influence” (please excuse my language!) as an intrusion into the randomness of the event. I.e. the more identifiable cause for a particular outcome there is present, the less you would identify the phenomenon as truly random. That’s where I’m coming from in thinking that randomness (OR --the deepest causal sort) and causation are exclusive. But that’s just me philosophizing. I’m glad you disagree as without that, we wouldn’t be having a good conversation!
I am equally credentialled with you in your “non-philosopherness”. [And if any universities were waiting in the wings to award me with an honorary English doctorate, I think that possibility just done got shot down!]
The “advantage” we non-degreed arm chair philosophers have is that we don’t know when to shut up. There’s probably some sort of law that there is an inverse relationship between the amount a person knows and the volume of words they volunteer in blog forums. I think of such a relationship and shudder. But embarrassing ourselves is also one way to slowly learn. I’ve learned a lot from you all here.
Added edit: seriously though, Amen to your willingness to live with uncertainty and in trust of God’s providence. Indeed where else can any of us stand?
The other good thing here is that we give the philosophy experts a lot of practice using their skills of logic as they shred our philosophical dabblings to pieces… Like target practice!
This is accepted and understood by both theists and atheists (generally speaking). The thorny issue occurs when one side argues for the existence of God, and the other side insists someone provides evidence.
Btw I am somewhat confused by your brand of atheism - I would assume an agnostic would wait to be persuaded, but I could be wrong.
Randomness is another term that gets us into an endless argument.
Frankly, I can’t believe that this is something to be disputed when you are dealing with a supernatural being.
- A supernatural omniscience does not require natural lawfulness to work… it’s supernatural.
- A requirement that only natural lawfulness can allow omniscience is not a mainstream principle of monotheism.
- So whether Quantum Mechanics allows for truly random events, or merely the appearance of random events from the viewpoint of human intelligence, shouldn’t matter “a fig” on this issue.
- Even the question of how God can tell the future if not all things are naturally lawful is irrelevant if God merely sets up the lawfulness to arrive at point B, C, D and E… where God executes Supernatural Event B.prime, C.prime, D.prime and so forth. All God would need to know is when and where things will go after his supernatural event has been executed.
Based on the 4 points proffered above, what do the two of you have left to dispute?
@Bilbo, I’m not even sure which side of the discussion you are on.
George, the question Bilbo posed wasn’t supernatural events v lawful natural events, but both of those categories v ontologically random events, which God doesn’t plan (or they would’t be ontologically random).
Still nobody here has suggested any actual category of such events that are known to science apart from human choices (which are not random, but chosen), and quantum events, which are intellectually interesting, and potentially significant for some events that matter to us, but which are still not generally considered to impact the outcomes of most, if any, classical events in our world. If they are ever found to do so, they will demonstrate only our world’s susceptibility to accidents, not its freedom.
The roulette wheels - far more relevant to understanding “chance” in nearly all evolutionary processes, including many forms of mutation such as gene duplication - have disappeared from the discussion because nobody has been willing to to any ontologically random elements not explicable by the laws of nature.
Philosophically, since God is the First Cause of all things, in the “creation of randomness” one would have to think how God could be the first cause of events with no cause - hence the square circle i mentioned. Christian philosophy says God sustains all the things he creates in existence - but how do events he hasn’t created manage to begin, or continue, to exist? And if he did create them, they’re no longer random, even if he did so supernaturally and uniquely - quite the opposite, because his actions are all rational and wise.
Theologically, one has to wonder why building ontological randomness into the world would help anything or anybody, or glorify God. That’s as opposed to making the causes of many things opaque to us, which may serve many good purposes.
I can certainly go along with the idea of even non-human entities being given goals and purposes by God, and a degree of freedom in how they achieve those goals. But that’s Aristotelian science, because such teleology was deliberatey excluded from science in the 17th century, and I don’t get much sympathy for AT ideas when I’ve mentioned them here. I’ve not heard many apologists for panpsychism here either, which is a related way of allowing such freedom to have real traction (and was quite popular to a recent generation of TE academics influenced by Whitehead, but not much in evidence here, where such “woo” doesn’t go down well).
Hence I agree with all four of your points, but suggest they don’t apply to the question Bilbo raised, and which is the one that carries all the weight of theodicy issues etc. Does evolution happen because God plans and directs it (through law, through supernatural acts, and/or through inherent teleological agents for all I know), or does evolution happen (at least in part) unplanned and undirected by God. In the first case all is from the hand of God; in the second many things are not from the hand of God.
Have you searched on “Calvinist”? 
This apparent dichotomy has been mentioned in a couple of different ways, but I don’t think it clearly aligns with a theist/non-theist divide. To my way of thinking, it’s hard to imagine anything going all the way down–something has gotta be going on down there. Like many similar questions, I would say that the best answer to what that something might be looks like “that is currently beyond our understanding”, in the most literal sense. It seems to me that theism is a belief about what’s going on, and my position is a form of non-theism.
Indeed! (and agreed.)
I did. Two uses by you, two by me, seven by George, and a whopping fourteen by Eddie.
I don’t know a single atheist who believes this. Pro tip: Christians who type on Christian discussion forums are not always reliable sources of information on the beliefs of atheists.
Okay… so a little agonizing getting through all the “ifs” and “buts” … until we finally get to the last paragraph:
"Does evolution happen because God plans and directs it (through law, through supernatural acts, and/or through inherent teleological agents for all I know), or does evolution happen (at least in part) unplanned and undirected by God. In the first case all is from the hand of God; in the second many things are not from the hand of God."
And that it all seems to focus on the issues of Theodicy.
So first all, let’s dispatch this evil serpent Theodicy. No matter what your position on Freewill, or God’s connection with Free Will, the problem of Theodicy is not resolved by introducing ontological randomness!
It might conceivably address some corner of Theodicy… but hardly the bulk of it. Human Freewill has nothing to do with a tsunami wiping out thousands of innocents, or a hurricane, or a genetic disease killing infants. Personally, I think YEC’s have a much harder time resolving Theodicy than evolutionists. For example, the Exodus story tells us that God can eliminate whole classes of ife, by means of the Destroyer. So why wasn’t the Destroyer employed instead of the Flood? Thousands and millions of non-human animals were drowned - - a violent death no matter how you look at it - - not to mention a definite percentage of human population which were infants and toddlers.
And then if we go back to Genesis, God condemns all of humanity for something Adam did? Is this not the very symbol of Divine indifference to fairness to his creation?
For quite some time I have been pointing out that Christians that are pro-Evolution are in no better position to deal with Theodicy than Evangelicals. But I believe I’m wrong in saying that. I can say that every Christian has some “theodicy” that their theology or metaphysics doesn’t resolve. But certainly Christian Evolutionists have eliminated the most obvious cases of definitionally egregious cases of Divine wrath against His creation.
But let’s proceed to the rest of your comments, @Jon_Garvey:
…does evolution happen (at least in part) unplanned and undirected by God. In the first case all is from the hand of God; in the second many things are not from the hand of God?"
I don’t think there is any Biblical evidence that God does not plan all of Creation. In the Biologos Mission Statements, considerable leeway is offered as to whether Chritian Evolutionists want to give God lots of opportunities to produce supernatural events, or have only but the very few most notable examples of God’s use of supernatural executive powers.
But let’s look at the logic of why someone wants God to leave vast sections of nature unplanned:
they think such unplanned behavior will allow for Human Freedom (which we’ve already shown doesn’t eliminate problems in Theodicy. As a Unitarian Universalist, who believes in the Chess Master Parable, it is demonstrably proven that 100% of a group can be “conquered” in games of chess by a single chess master… where the metaphore is simply: God can checkmate all humanity to Heaven, without suppressing Human Freewill.
So the need to have unplanned nature has been completely circumvented.
Two, the very nature of “unplanned nature”, sufficient enough to specifically allow “freedom of choice” for Humans, is a magical notion, rather than a logical one. Let’s just say Quantum fluctuations were the engines of human freedom (which I can’t even imagine how we would define that) - - metaphysically, this doesn’t mean God doesn’t know (for himself) how these decisions would come out. He could still do so.
But, assuming God chooses not to know, the issue would then be are human decisions the naturally lawful result of events unplanned by God, but still lawful?
Or are human decisions only possible with naturally UnLawful events (whether God knows or doesn’t know how things will end). But if human decisions are based on UnLawful events, how would that be any different from a human suffering from some disassociative disorder, or some other insanity?
While for many centuries, religious thinkers have wondered if God’s perfection necessarily eliminates Freewill of Humanity. But I see the problem in the opposite way: if through God’s involvement, Humans can channel the operations of Free Choice from some string space, or one of the 11 dimensions, that would be the only way humans could have real free will!
As one famous atheist said, When examining the question of Free Will, the surprise is that Real Free Will is impossible, but there is a kind of Free Will available (limited to "Moral Accountability), just not the kind you think you have.
Without God, humans are at the mercy of either “crazy randomness” or the full control of “cosmic lawfulness”. But with God, God has provided them a way to be isolated from the tyrant of neural lawfulness, by placing the intentional soul in a non-Earthly dimension, where it can operate in some genuinely free circumstances.
As I have mentioned to @T_aquaticus, I have found some statements from atheists confusing and I would very much like a clear and comprehensible statement of what atheists believe. I suspect that the latter part of my statement may have numerous variations, and I would like to know what these may be. The dictionary states:
atheism: the theory or belief that God does not exist.
The first I look at (through Google) says:
disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods.
which I like a lot better, and I think most atheists would as well.
I have to chuckle - atheists discussing what atheism is with an Orthodox Christian - haha: 
.
“Ask and it will be given to you”