Dr. Joshua Swamidass, a theistic evolutionist, joined us recently at TSZ. I think the following comment of his will lead to some interesting and contentious discussion and is worthy of its own thread:
Third, if we drop “Darwinian” to just refer to the current modern synthesis of evolutionary theory, you are right that the scientific account does not find any evidence of direction or planning. I agree with you here and do not dispute this.
So the question becomes, really, is it possible that God could have created a process (like evolution) with a purposeful intent that science could not detect? I think the answer here is obvious. Of course He could. In fact, I would say, unless He wanted us to discern His purpose, we could not.
In my view, then, evolution has a purpose in creating us. Science itself cannot uncover its purpose. I find that out by other means.
keiths:
dazz:
If God is involved, then — according to the argument I’ve been making in this thread — he can achieve a desired outcome in each of those trillion worlds without undermining the randomness in a single one of them.
If my argument is correct, then they are easily reconciled.
Remember that the question of whether evolution is deterministic is separate from the question of whether God achieved a desired outcome in each of those trillion worlds he created.
Another way of putting it: The determinism comes in by way of God’s choice of which worlds to instantiate, not because evolution is deterministic in each of those worlds.
A particular configuration of chemicals can decide what its chemical configuration is going to be? Based its configuration?
And you don’t think that is incoherent?
keiths,
You still haven’t described what the difference is between the chemical configuration that forces a want, and the chemical configuration that can chose itself. What is the fundamental difference between these two types of systems?
keiths,
I understand what you mean and I think you may be right, but the whole idea is so counterintuitive that it seems to boil down to the fact that god can make random processes appear entirely deterministic. I guess an omnipotent god could do that but I just can’t wrap my head about the idea of something able to throw a dice a trillion times and always get a six, and still call that a random process
But as I said before (sorry, if you addressed that, I missed it) that world would be identical in every way to any other world in which the desired outcome never comes by
A hypothetical omnipotent god can do anything. Just as well they are hypothetical. 😉
In this theory, did God create the parameters of the world he selected?
Alan,
No, omnipotence consists only of the ability to do anything that is logically possible.
dazz,
Identical only up to the point of the first random event. Thereafter, the differences could be huge, with all of them visible to God on his timeless perch.
keiths,
Who made the world that God selected?
So you think that god’s knowledge alone, can force particular results in random processes?
William Murray?
Knowledge never ‘forces results.’
keiths:
dazz:
Emphatically no. The results force the knowledge, not vice-versa.
dazz,
Here’s another angle to try.
Imagine that you flip a fair coin ten times and write down the heads/tails sequence. You repeat the experiment a million times. Then you go through and toss out all the results except for the ones in which you got all ten heads or all ten tails.
Do the remaining results defy the Law of Large Numbers? Of course not, because you biased your sample by tossing out any results that didn’t match your desired outcomes.
The case of God and non-deterministic evolution is just like that, except that the results that get thrown out are from worlds that God didn’t bother to create because he timelessly knew that they didn’t produce the desired outcome.
And William revealed it to FMM.
It all works out…
Glen Davidson
phoodoo:
walto:
🙂
I know, I know 😀
So god’s knowledge of random events must be contingent to the process itself having taken place?
OK, but this means that God can’t pick the desired worlds and toss out the rest until they’ve all developed all the random results
No, they’re contingent upon what WILL take place.
God just has to know what WILL happen (randomly).
This subthread makes me think of the BBT episode about time-travel grammer:
dazz,
He can’t wait. He’s timeless, so waiting isn’t a logical possibility for him.
He either knows the results or he doesn’t.
Hahaha, classic
OK, so we can’t know the outcome of random events unless they’re actualized. Question is, is that because of our nature, or because of the nature of random events? I would argue it’s the latter (or both).
Not really.
Random process is an oxymoron.
Nonsense.
How does being flippant change the fact that if anyone tries to use a rationalization that God didn’t create the random world he just chose it, therefore he can know without influencing, is a silly bit of philosophy trickery to try to let the theistic evolutionist have his cake and eat it too. This was the whole point of Swamidasses way of out his predicament, but it doesn’t work. Someone had to make that world. That someone is called a God.
Its an untenable position.
Chemicals in collaboration phoodoo, chemicals acting together. Some act determinately, others act freely.
All of us, acting together, by our own free will.
Mung,
Keiths now has a useful trick he can use to explain anything.
How did hydrogen atoms come to be? “Well, by deciding to become hydrogen atoms-no God required, see?”
What decided to become the hydrogen atoms? “The hydrogen atoms of course!”
This is what keiths is calling coherent. The system can either decide to be deterministic, or have free choice, its up to the system to decide.
As entertaining as this long running thread has become, let me make a few key observations.
First, and most importantly, I think it is clear that I have shown the the theistic evolution position that “evolution is purposeful” is logically possible. Evolution could have purpose beyond science’s ability to detect, even if nature is intrinsically random. There are actually several ways this could be (even though discussion here has focused on Molinism).
Second, I certainly acknowledged Keiths enduring objects to theism, for example the problem of suffering, but would just emphasize that these objections (as legitimate as they are) are separate from evolution per se. Perhaps we can discuss theodicy at length sometime, but at least let’s acknowledge that this is a separate issue. As for me, I find resolution in the Gospel story, but that takes much longer to explain.
Third, I think the real remaining question is why God would “do it” this way. Here, I do not think we are in the realm of science any more, but in theology. The only way to get to a sensible answer is to consider the God of specific traditions, and see what the self-revelation of that God might be. This does not require accepting, for example, the Bible as truth as a starting point, but it would require considering the nature of the God of which Jesus testifies. This too is beyond the original post’s point about purpose in evolution, but as a Christian who takes the Bible seriously, I find a God there for which creation by evolution makes a great deal of theological sense.
Any how, thanks so much for the conversation. I’ll be following you guys from here.
I am not so sure I agree that you have shown that it is logically possible, if we must also accept that God has a special relationship different from all his other creatures, with man. I am not sure how you can claim you have overcome this problem, given that you propose evolution to be random.
If you are saying that evolution is NOT random, then fine, you are an IDist. No problem.
But if you want to say it is an unguided process, but that God selected this one from all possible worlds, you still have to say who created all possible worlds.
So if God made a process which was inevitably leading towards man, than you are not an evolutionist, by evolutionists own definition. Evolutionists claim the process leads nowhere.
Who ever claimed that “evolution is purposeful” is not logically possible?
wow
Absolute nonsense.
dazz,
I’d say it’s both. Our nature is an obstacle because we don’t possess God’s timelessness and omniscience. The nature of random events is an obstacle because they aren’t determined by prior states and thus cannot be predicted on that basis.
phoodoo,
How did you get the idea that we were talking about God choosing a world that he did not create?
Please be specific. I’m curious.
keiths,
The theistic evolutionist has to reconcile the contradiction that god made a truly random world, with the goal of having a divine relationship in that world with man. This is obviously absurd so the contortion is to say first he made every possible world, then just choose the one which made man, which was his goal all along. As if he needs the additional step of first saying he created all possible worlds. Why would he need that step, he already knows what he is after? If he is creating each of these worlds he already knows what it will make, why create other worlds just to discard them as not being the one he wants to choose. The amount of forcing of this narrative becomes absolutely comical. It also makes a farce of the use of the word random.
All of these ridiculous addendums just so the theistic evolutionist can pretend to be scientific?
Swamidass is different though, because he claims that evolution is purposeful. Not like those ignorant IDists!
phoodoo,
You didn’t answer the question:
swamidass,
While we agree that it’s possible for evolution to be purposeful yet random — a position that I’ve been defending throughout this thread — that is just a statement of logical possibility. The real hurdle comes in establishing that it is not merely possible, but likely. As I put it earlier,
swamidass:
They would be separate if you were merely claiming that evolution is purposeful, but you’ve gone well beyond that. You’re asserting that the Christian God is behind the purpose. You need a way of reconciling that with the enormous suffering created by evolution, because the Christian God is supposed to be morally perfect.
According to you, it isn’t a separate issue:
I’m curious to know why you think so, particularly because I think the opposite.
That’s because you’re a methodological naturalist. 🙂
No need to be. Science can deal with testable hypotheses even if they involve the supernatural. Testability is essential; naturalism isn’t.
It isn’t enough to come up with a concept of God, traditional or otherwise, whose nature seems compatible with what we know about evolution. As explained above, it also needs to be likelier than the straightforward alternative, which is that evolution appears undirected because it is undirected.
keiths,
I asked you, twice, who is creating these worlds he is choosing from. If God chooses amongst all the possible worlds, what does it mean, if he is the one who creates the worlds? It makes no sense. Why would an omnipotent God make worlds with outcomes he doesn’t want? He is the one making the world, so he already knows its outcome. So the only reason for him to CHOOSE, would be if someone else made the world. Or else, he makes the world he wants, not a trillion world which he doesn’t want.
So your answer now, that it is God who is making the worlds he is selecting from, then he only needs to make one, the one he wants. He selects from a pool of one. And the one he has made has exactly the parameters needed to insure that he gets exactly the results he wants. Thus it is not random in any sense of the word whatsoever.
Random has left the building.
keiths,
Keep in mind, this is arguing from the position of the theistic evolutionist, who is trying to find a way to have his randomness, as well as his certainty of God’s relationship with man. Basically he has no position in this case, so he is making up this bizarre rationalization, that its random, because first he made a zillion random worlds that didn’t work, then finally one did.
It makes some crazy assumptions about an all knowing God not knowing what the hell he is making until after the fact, then retroactively selecting the one which is best.
Its total nutsville. But better than admitting to ID for some I guess.
Furthermore keiths, I would say the so called naturalists like KN are in a similarly unfixable boat.
They don’t want to say the world is chaos, because it certainly doesn’t look like that. But they can’t say its planned, because that goes against their whole fiber of being to admit to that. So they have this weird quasi-religious explanation that the rationality of the universe is inherent in nature. Nature just does it. Who or what is this nature? Please don’t ask, its just this force which permeates everything, but which has no intelligence. God on a diet, with a poor marketing department. God of the rocks.
How anyone can stick by this as if its some kind of reasonable belief is beyond me. “It just is, doesn’t need to have a reason, shit happens, maybe in another universe its different, nature has striving, but it wasn’t planned that way…”
The metaphysics of nothingness. Its quite a useful temporary life-jacket.
I guess I’m forever mindfucked. Perhaps putting this together in the form of a syllogism would help. On one hand I see no logical flaw in the concept of timeless knowledge of random/libertarian stuff, but this also implies going against the very nature of those things: if it’s a necessary property of random events that they can’t be known until actualized, but because of god’s timelessness he can, the he can do things that go against the nature of his own creation.
It also seems to follow that God can’t put himself within our time frame to observe the outcome of random processes and acquire the knowledge just like we do: as you put it, he either knows things timelessly or he doesn’t know them at all. If he could do that within space-time, he could still know these things much better than we do, he could be everywhere, observing every little wave function collapsing, every tiny free choice made.
So I’m having a hard time at understanding why would anyone want to believe in a god like that. A god that gives you free will without choices, that makes us believe that those kids dying from random mutations actually had to do so to fulfill god’s plan. A plan that can’t include, by the way, putting himself within time in the form of his own son to save us all.
I’ve made this argument before, maybe flawed too but it seems to me a god like that is not compatible with Christianity.
Well, if this is the god I’ll have to meet in judgement day I can imagine how that conversation will go:
False dichotomy
“Admitting to ID” AKA rejecting reality. Nuts capital City
Only if your third option is- nature did it. God-lite.
Call it what it really is Pantheism- god but with out the personality
peace
Or perhaps you have imagined a god that does what nature does… naturally
dazz,
Gives you a small taste of what it must be like to be phoodoo or Mung, doesn’t it? 🙂
Sounds like what you’re really objecting to is God’s timelessness and the special knowledge it grants him. Maybe open theism is the answer to your prayers, so to speak.
You get that with open theism.
The problem with open theism, and with the timelessness stuff, is that they’re both largely motivated by the desire to preserve libertarian free will, and LFW just isn’t coherent. There’s nothing anyone can do to rescue it.