How do those who believe in theistic evolution, that God guided evolution and that evolution and Christianity are not contradictory, account for the fact that evolution involves randomness? Mutations are random, natural selection is not. These two processes are required for evolution to work. But how to theistic evolutionists explain how God can guide a random process?

Nobody argues God guides random processes now, right? Flip a coin and write down if it's heads or tails, then repeat it 10,000 times. Write down your ratio of heads:tails. Do it again tomorrow, and the day after. All three times you will get extremely close to a 50:50 ratio. It'll be the same if you do it a decade from now, or if you do it halfway across the world, or if you give it to a baby and let him flip the coin. Whether you are born a male or female is similar to flipping a coin, there is exactly a 50% chance you'll be one sex vs another. Genetics and mutation both involve chance, and both are part of evolution. God doesn't control random processes, agreed?

So it's impossible for God to guide evolution, since evolution requires chance and God can't control chance. Unless...God suddenly and instantly changed the rules of the universe the instant humans arrived on the scene, so that now there is such thing as randomness but it didn't exist before (because he controlled it). Is this what theistic evolutionists believe?

I am predicting that some theists will just argue that God laid down a massive mathematical formula that incorporates both guidance-based and chance-based mutations. The chance-based mutations he did not approve of, he guided elsewhere or exterminated.

Or something along those lines...

those little cells are f'n geniuses. They do more work in 1 day than I do all year

/thread

I'll give the "something along those lines" a shot.

God created a landscape of all possible biological creatures....including human beings.

God continued to use evolutionary algorithms until a being with human like attributes was selected.

Even if we're talking about an omniscient, all knowing God with infinite intelligence, I don't think it's even possible for a mathematical formula to guarentee God that humans will come about 5 billion+ years later (when he first created the first cell, then let evolution take its course).

"One cannot design something by chance. If I wanted a straight flush in the game of poker I could do one of two things. I could pick from the deck those cards that are required for a straight flush, or I could shuffle the cards and deal myself a hand to see if the necessary cards would be dealt to me at random. But it would not make any sense to speak of designing the hand by shuffling.5 Shuffling cannot ensure the results (the end), and thus it is not design. Likewise, God could not have used evolution to create because that is tantamount to saying God designed the world through randomness."

http://www.onenesspentecostal.com/theisticevolution.htm

Theists can easily that argue that what's seemingly random to us, is not random at all - to a God capable of calculating quadrillions upon quadrillions of variables in the space of a nano-second...

Then they don't understand what the word random means. By definition, random is uncontrolled. Here's dictionary.com's definition:

"proceeding, made, or occurring without definite aim, reason, or pattern"

It's 100% impossible that god can control a random process because random by definition is unguided. And modern evolutionary science theory states evolution involves randomness.

I refer you back to this:

This really is pretty muddled, isn't it? First, just a detail but the odds of male and female are not 50/50. Did you know that? Second, random simply means we cannot predict the result. With a coin toss, the end result is a function of the starting position of the coin, the force of the flip, the rotation imparted, the impact with the landing surface, etc. In theory that could all be calculated and the end result determined. So it is called "random" but that is just an artifact of unknown information that could be known.

The bold comment is stated as if it is self-evident, but as stated I would have to say that I do not agree. I could be convinced, but would require a justification for that to be admitted as a known fact.

Ok, so you're saying if there was a mutation in the original colony of single celled organisms (at the start of life) that would have led to a path that didn't create humans, god would have intervened in natural selection (turning it into supernatural selection!) so that organism's mutation isn't passed on. Ok, that's reasonable.

But, how can he control whether the mutation that WILL lead to eventual humans will even occur in the first place? He can't because it's randomness that determines whether the mutation will occur.

I'm not arguing whether it's reasonable or not. I'm simply finding flaws in your attack of theist beliefs. I personally agree with you. I just don't think your line of attack here is very strong.

No I didn't know that. Are you sure? Source? I know the actual sex ratios are not 50-50, but the odds of you being born one sex vs. another are 50-50. Does it have something to do with one sex being a bit more likely to die as a fetus in the womb or something?

But the flipping the coin is just a human invention to produce a random result. No human in the world calculates all that when flipping a coin, and is able to flip 100 heads in a row due to his manipulation skills.

I believe it's 18/35 male (or thereabouts) I've also heard that male babies are slightly more likely to die during childhood and that it reaches 50/50 around the twenties - that's a function of culture and technology though, not any deep comment on evolution.

No source other than medicos' dinner parties, I'm afraid.

Suppose you decided that you want to commit suicide. Suppose you decide to do the deed by playing russian roulette until the brains fly. Have you willfully committed suicide or is your death just a result of random happenstance?

Chance can give you everything you want if you design the game to make your goals possible and have enough bites at the apple. If God makes human beings part of the landscape of all possible biological beings all He then has to do is make the universe big enough and wait for His design to appear.

I don't think this is quite right. Let's assume that the universe is deterministic and that we conquer the uncertainty principle so that we can completely predict which mutations will actually occur (presumably this is something like the position god is in). The process would still be in a sense random if there was no guidance or reason that determined which mutations actually occurred.

I think the best answer is Stu's. God can in a sense control the outcome of evolution by creating a deterministic world where the chance mutations that occur will actually lead to humans existing. God knows this (because god knows everything), but is not actively causing those mutations to occur rather than others. Notice however that this is not due to any interference by god in the process of evolution. Thus, it really would be the case here that humans evolved purely through chance mutations even though god chose to create the possible world where those chance mutations occurred rather than some other possible world.

I like RLK's better. There's nothing essential about actual randomness in the TOE. It's just unknowable to us in advance, that's the salient feature.

Stu Pidasso's theory is a peculiarly inefficient expression of God's will - "I shall make people I can give free will too....by ensuring there are quintillions of trials in a monstrously huge and ancient universe, proceeding according to some laws of physics I will set, together with some random fluctuations, the probabilities tweaked such that what I want will happen somewhereorother at sometimeorother (both of which I know but am not choosing)."

Perhaps God designed humans to come into existence without actually designing them for a reason.

From a long forgotten thread:

Why does God want humans to love him is he insecure?

All questions are trivial if 'perhaps' is an allowable answer.

Capriciousness is an even more peculiar take on 'God's will'.

It doesn't matter. I could have made other assumptions. How about these:

Assumption 1: God is undesigned.
Assumption 2: God wanted humans to be like him...undesigned.

Perhaps just means it is a possible answer...not a certain one.

I am sure about the end result, that there is a slight bias to male births over female by a few percent. If you google "gender selection" you can see that for yourself. I did not do much digging but I will tell you what I remember from past reading which is that the slightly smaller size of the y-chromosome makes the xy-male sperm slightly lighter and faster than the xx-female sperm. Since conception is essentially a race to the ovum there is a bias in favor of male sperm fertilization. From that moment on, the genetic disadvantage of less dna along with social factors creates a bias against male survival so that the initial conception edge is reduced by prenatal death and continues to erode the male population after birth until at advanced edge the survivors are predominantly female.

I guess I am missing the point, but it may be semantics. If God created a deterministic world such that a sequence of mutations without further interference would produce humans, would you consider the outcome to be random? I guess I would say "No". Carrying that further, if an uncontrolled process were to produce a predictable result from a known starting point, then I would not consider the process to be random either.

However, even if that were all true given my current point of view and my lack of knowledge of the deterministic reality of the universe and the complete knowledge of the starting point, I could look back on things and decide that it does appear to be random. Essentially any event that could happen with finite probability could ultimately be either random or designed. I have no way of distinguishing between those possibilities.

Theists can make up any answer they want to... at the end it's all magic...