Richard: “If you include God in Evolution it is not ToE. Why can’t people see that?”
You have defined “ToE” to be atheistic. Very well, people can understand that is what you mean. But if someone else explains that what they are talking about in reference to evolution is merely the biological patterns and not atheistic, it is not reasonable to insist that they are wrong because they really mean “ToE”.
“If God controls the speciation then Survival of the fittest is obsolete. if Survival of the fittest is correct then God is not controlling the result, it is.”
“Survival of the fittest” is a very popular but wrong description of evolution. The phrase originated in the context of promoting weeding out the “inferior” people and has remained closely tied to a wrong, teleological idea of biological evolution being “progress”, producing results that are inherently better because they are further along in the process, and not merely being better at certain things and not at others because that’s how they changed over time. There is no such thing as “the fittest”. Various biological features are useful in some situations but not in every possible situation. Environments vary. Situations vary. Organisms must balance competing demands. One individual may be better at one place and time; a different one at another. Also, it is not merely the fittest that survive; the fit enough survive. Although it tends to make nature TV shows more exciting, ruthless competition is not the only way, or even the most common way, for evolutionary success. Nor does the occurrence of ruthless competition in nature mean that we ought to imitate it.
Even if survival of the fittest were true, it does not mean that God is not in control. Gravity can lead to unpleasant results, but that doesn’t mean that God is not in charge. The Bible sees the laws and forces of nature as God’s normal patterns of running the world, not as alternatives to His control. “This is the physical pattern that we observe” neither requires nor rules out God’s control. Genesis 1 emphasizes that all of nature is merely God’s creation. There are no rival gods or powers to have agendas of their own. One can say at one level that the changes in organisms over time are controlled by evolution without ruling out God controlling those changes and working towards an overall plan.
“Random” has multiple meanings that need to be distinguished. Some things, such as radiometric decay, whether a particular mutation happens in a particular organism, flipping a coin, casting lots, etc. follow the mathematical pattern of being probabilistic - our best models say “there’s x% chance of this happening and y% of that happening.” Such a pattern is mathematically referred to as random. Other events, while not following that exact mathematical pattern, are humanly unpredictable, and might be called random. Random is also used in the sense of without purpose. That is not the same as unpredictable. I can have a purpose for flipping a coin, for example. The Bible affirms that God is in control of the outcome of casting lots. He’s in control of things that are humanly unpredictable. He’s in control of events where the human agents did not have much purpose. Random does not exclude God; it merely describes our inability to predict exactly.
“Scientific Evolution does not allow for God, it cannot. And, because of this it tries to describe how things change without His help.” Science is looking at the physical things, and so cannot directly see God. But that does not exclude Him; it is a limitation of what science can do, not a limitation on what God does.
