Since I have Dr. Garvey's attention...God, free will, randomness, and evolution

Sounds like we broadly agree, George. So how come all the flag waving for randomness in nature from Christians, of all people?

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Actually, human freewill can have a lot to do with these things, usually making them worse. With no tsunami warning system in place the death toll from a tsunami is much higher, as we saw in 2004 in the Indian Ocean Tsunami…

In 2001, in an article in Scientific American (“Drowning New Orleans”), Mark Fiscetti warned that New Orleans was a “disaster waiting to happen” should a major hurricane strike. The warning fell on deaf ears, and then Katrina happened. Further, botched recovery efforts led to more suffering and death.

And if we do nothing about fighting climate change, we will be subjected to increasingly destructive hurricanes, droughts, and wildfires.

@Jon_Garvey

I have two theories, and it they are not mutually exclusive:

  1. The fixation on “randomness” from some Christian Evolutionists is some kind of “cognitive hangover” from the Pro-Evolution side of the academic community.

and

  1. Because YEC’s have long opposed the feature of randomness in a “leave-God-out-of-it” dynamic of pro-Evolution… so those who oppose YEC’s reflexively want to show that “randomness” is not the problem that YEC’s say it is.

But the arrival of BioLogos pretty much eliminates the problem by making it acceptable to discuss God as part of Evolution … just not in the realm of Science studies.

@beaglelady,

All true. But theologicaly speaking, whether brutish human obtuseness (in attractive guise of a GOP campaign blazer) makes it worse or not, natural disasters still kill innocent non-human life in a way that makes all the partial-solutions (along the lines of theological rationalizations that natural evil are the fault of Adam & Eve) rather beside the point.

My point was simply that human free will can make disasters even worse.

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Hi Jon,

I’ve skipped reading most of the comments, so someone may have already said what I am about to say:

I did not mean to imply that ontological randomness means that God does not know the outcome of a random event. We don’t know the outcome. But that does not mean that God does not know the outcome. I do not see a contradiction in saying that an event is ontologically random - has no known cause - yet God knows what the event will be. If there is such a contradiction, you need to explain what it is.

You seem to think that God needs to know the cause of something in order for him to know what will happen. In other words, God knows the future because he has done all the complex mathematical calculations needed to know it. But this certainly isn’t the way God knows things. His knowledge is direct and immediate, not indirect and mediated by some other process.

And again, I will stress that to say that there is ontological randomness does not mean that randomness exists independently of God. If it exists, then it exists because God created it. Therefore, he can interrupt it or halt it any time he likes.

I believe in allowing God to create in any manner that he chooses to do so. If he created by specially creating every single species that has ever existed, I can live with that. If he created through a process of random events, I can live with that. I believe that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. So I trust him, no matter how he created.

Now it looks to me, if there is only one or a small number of finite universes, that the probability of the origin of life and its evolutionary history has been too small to admit of only a random process. But if God chose to create an infinite universe (such as through a flat universe and inflation), then the improbability problem would be overcome for a random process. And if God chose to allow a random process to eventually create what he wanted to achieve, what exactly would your problem be with that?

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Hi Biilbo

The classical theologians would say that the reason God has direct intuition of all events is not, as you rightly say, because he calculates the processes involved, but nor is it because he knows the future like a clairvoyant. It’s because he knows himself absolutely, and he knows all events because all events ultimately arise from him. That speaks to your quote:

God’s knowledge of such an event would therefore be because he created it, and his knowledge would be exaustive (from eternity) for that very reason. That, to begin with, deals with the idea that stuff arises which God didn’t predict, but which he is surprised and pleased about (as in open theism) or maybe surprised and displeased about (parasites or tsunamis, for example).

But what that leaves is an event that God created (so it can’t be causeless to him - he is its cause), whose outcome he knows from eternity (so it can’t be unpredictable to him) and which he uses in order to fulfil his will (so it can’t be purposeless). In that case, I have trouble understanding what’s left of “chance” about it - it sounds like design to me.

Jon,

I see no difference between the problem of randomness and the problem of human free will. If a human being can have free will, it seems possible for a quantum particle to have free will.

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Maybe the best thing I can do for anyone patient enough to follow the reasoning through on the nature of randomness is to point to almost anything by the statistician William Briggs. Here’s an interview (which obviously is only a snapshot. He also does many excellent blogs on randomness in general, and in quantum mechanics in particular.

And the whole thing is developed in his book. The bottom line is that randomness simply can’t be a cause, in the nature of things.

Without reading the entire article, I think the point is being missed. We believe that God has granted human beings something called free will. Free will seems to imply that a human being originates a cause. We don’t understand how that is possible. Or at least, I don’t understand how that is possible. Feel free to explain to me how it is possible, if you know.

Now scientists have discovered that subatomic particles behave as if they have free will. They seem to choose to go one way or another without any external force making them go one way or another. So from a human point of view, subatomic particles seem to have free will.

Now I don’t understand how subatomic particles could have free will. But then, I don’t understand how human beings can have free will, either. When you explain to me how we can have free will, I will explain to you how subatomic particles can have free will.

@Jon_Garvey,

I have never read anyone arguing this point: “nothing is causeless to God, if he is the cause.”
This is not how philosophers intend the term “causeless”. There’s no point in creating a differentiating
label if there is absolutely nothing left to differentiate.

“Causeless” can be meant as “spontaneous” or “miraculous”. It can have the appearance of being
“causeless” (did Jesus ride into the heavens on a cloud, because of superior manipulation of natural
laws?) vs. “truly causeless” (or did Jesus ride into the heavens on a cloud because it was supernatural,
rather than natural?).

But @Bilbo, the idea that God creates something that even he can’t predict, is equivalent to the idea
that he can make a rock so fantastically huge that he can’t move it.

Here is a recent article written about the idea that God intentionally limited his foreknowledge:

https://www.christiancourier.com/articles/227-does-god-limit-his-own-foreknowledge

But frankly, it seems the only convincing application of such an idea is regarding God’s
incarnation in human form, Jesus, rather than something the Infinitie Spirit of the Father
is going to spend any time doing.

@Bilbo,

What do you think you can accomplish by suggesting that God can create a cloud of
events that even he is unable to predict? No Evangelicals I know would accept that,
and I don’t know if too many others would either.

Hi gbrooks9,

I never made that claim. Jon Garvey attributed it to me.

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Well said.

Agreed.

Some of us don’t feel the need to agree with everything “the classical theologians” would say.

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I do not understand this - we usually discuss human agency and choice with restrictions arising from our physical constitution and our place in the world.

I find this incomprehensible - we discuss the forces and wave functions and rely on experimental and theoretical effort to understand the quantum world. Just what makes them (?) do things is an odd statement - scientists make phenomenological observations (experimental) and these are designed to examine theoretical aspects of physics. Where do you detect free will in this?

@Bilbo

I’m having difficulty understanding exactly what you’re trying to get at here, and (perhaps more importantly) how it’s relevant to the real world.

Let me start at the “practical” end and remind you that I’ve made a case that ontologically random events don’t fit any category of events in science, with the arguable exception of quantum events. They, even on the most speculative basis, are only believed to affect a tiny minority of macro-world events, at most. For example, most variation (copying errors, gene duplication etc, astronomical or volcanic events) have no bias from quantum events, and also develop outcomes only from subsequent macro-scale processes like protein chemistry, natural selection etc.

That seems to mean we’re dealing purely with a theological hypothetical: “Suppose God did create random events, would the idea be possible?” If so, perhaps one might be able to say that quantum events were that sort of event, and then start discussing how they might, conceivably, affect the real world through point mutations.

Briggs has actually written a lot on why quantum events should not be regarded as anything more than epistemologically random, like all other chance in the world, but you don’t want to read him on that, but concentrate purely on the theological “What if?” I’m enough of an empiricist to find questions about what God might have done, but hasn’t, pretty uninteresting, but let’s follow it at least a little way.


OK, within that hypothetical scenario, you seem to be saying that if God can create people with freewill that causes events not originating in God’s will, not him, then why not random process that also generate events not originating in God’s will? Is that right? (Your answer determines how any reply might go).

It would also be helpful to know just what you mean by random events. As far as I can see many of the usual definitions have been excluded in the discussion above:

(1) As Joshua Swamidass has long (and correctly) insisted, the scientific definition amounts to “unpredictable”. But both you and everybody else has said that God is able to predict them.
(2) A linked definition is “of unknown cause” - but since God created these processes, he knows their cause.
(3) “Causeless” would also imply God did not cause them, but again both you and most posters have denied that lack of cause is what they mean.
(4) A quick Google search turns up “happening without method or conscious decision” in the dictionary. I could speak a lot in theological terms about the nature of “creation” itself as, pretty well by definition, God’s choosing an end, and then using wise and sufficient means to attain it - and that excludes lack of method or decision. Briggs points out that as soon as you introduce final causes (“Let us make man…”, say), all randomness in the efficient causes is removed.
(5) But ignoring that, we seem to agree that God is creating these “random causes”, so he must (as if designing a true random number generator) employ both method and conscious decision to attain them, so the last definition doesn’t work on that basis either.
(6) But random number generators in the real world are either algorithmic - ie they generate no knowledge that wasn’t input by the programmer - or they source numbers from nature (eg quantum events) - which of course in our speculations is God’s work anyway, so he can’t emulate. So we can’t see his “random causes” as analogous to random number generators.

So please define exactly what your definition of “random” is, or as George so rightly says, it’s very likely one is ending up trying to discuss God creating a stone too heavy for him to lift, ie a logical nonsense. And to Jon, it’s the ability to spot logical nonsense that made the classical theologians so coherent.

@Jon_Garvey

Does @Swamidass classify these “unpredictable” events as “unpredictable to God”? I would be surprised if he did.

Based on what metaphysical (aka “imaginary”) principle would such a thing be definitionally possible? I would relegate such a claim to the idea that God can make a rock so big he can’t move it.

“Unpredictable” almost always means “unpredictable to the human mind”…

Agreed! (And so does Joshua - I was in contact with him a few minutes ago!)… except I’d be more confident to delete “almost” from “almost always”.

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I agree with @Jon_Garvey that we cannot use the concept of randomness to get God “off the hook” when considering the problem of evil/suffering. We have to deal with the fact that God is, in one way or another, ultimately responsible for everything that has ever happened and everything that will happen. Human free will was given, with God knowing full well the inevitable consequences of this freedom.

As far as causality goes, I think epistemological randomness is the only kind of randomness that is meaningful, both scientifically and philosophically. We use the concept of randomness when we don’t have (enough) knowledge about the chains of cause and effect that trigger events (e.g., mutations). In most cases we assume randomness simply to approximate countless cause-effect chains on microscopic levels. In other words, our use of randomness derives its usefulness from incomplete knowledge, which would not be an issue for an omniscient God.

Whether an underlying cause-effect chain always exists is an unanswerable question if we simply don’t know (e.g., quantum randomness, though there is progress being made in understanding the mechanisms underlying that). But even then, it appears to be a logical necessity that an omniscient almighty God would be ultimately responsible for the outcome, in which case the outcomes would not be truly “ontologically random” after all…

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No. In fact modern theologians have jettisoned a lot of baggage from “classical theologians” precisely because that baggage contains a lot of logical nonsense. We’re talking about people who thought the uterus moved around the body, just because a couple of Greeks said so. Not exactly cutting edge logic there. Some of them espoused theories on the atonement and other topics (like slavery, and “killing people you don’t like”), which are not only considered theologically wrong today, but also illogical and downright immoral.

Some of them were downright clueless about science and theology, to an extent which is truly baffling today given that some of their peers demonstrated far more discernment. Some of them even believed in witches (!), and witchcraft (!!), and contributed to four hundred years of witch hunts (!!!). The idea that they were wonderfully wise, superbly coherent, and impeccably logically robust thinkers, is just not on the table.

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@Jonathan_Burke

A fine paragraph!

I know I don’t get invited to Bible Studies because every once in a while I will stay something negative about Paul.

Paul was a brilliant "Rhetoritor", crafting beautiful speeches that were surprisingly persuasive. But every once in a while someone tries to tell me what a brilliant theologian Paul was - - and I tend to draw the line short of that conclusion.

Paul’s explanation for why Good Christian males could not get circumcised is a classic case:

Galatians 5:2

"It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not be encumbered once more by a yoke of slavery [do not be circumcised].

Take notice: I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all.

Again I testify to every man who gets himself circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole Law.…
Sentence 2 is obviously wrong. And so is Sentence 3.

Sentences like those are equivalent to someone telling a Mormon that if he were to start drinking caffeinated drinks (Mormons prohibit drinking coffee), he would have to follow all the other rules of non-Mormon society.

Or like someone telling a Jehovah’s Witness (where they prohibit parties for celebrating a birthday) that if he accepts a birthday present from a Catholic, he would be obligated to follow all the other rules of Catholicism.