Random Until Further Notice

I believe that much of the anxiety that people express about evolution is rooted in a single concept--its randomness. After all, if evolution accounts for the existence and diversity of life and is truly random, we have a number of theological difficulties on our hands. The scriptures clearly teach concepts of planning and foreordination, and so would seem to be at odds with evolutionary theory. As we shall see, if we really probe this problem to its depth we will get into unanswerable questions concerning the foreknowledge of God. These kinds of questions have been kicked around for a long time by people much smarter than I am. I doubt that definitive answers are available in this life. Rather than get into philosophical speculation I want to discuss the nature of science and its limitations.

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Like many other fields of study, evolution is usually a study of history. Based on present experiments and observation, and on evidence from the past, scientists are able to reconstruct processes and events that have lead to conditions we see today. However just like other studies of history, reconstruction of the past is of limited use in predicting the future with precision.

Let's take climatology and meteorology as an example. If we wanted to learn about past weather conditions we would pursue several avenues of research. We would gather records that contained measurements of past weather data. We would look at things affected by weather such as agriculture. We might also look at remaining physical evidence, such as tree rings, for indications of flood, rain, or drought. All of this together would give us a good picture of what happened in past weather systems. But as we all know, it is of limited use in making specific predictions about future weather. This is because the number of variables involved are enormous. But we can ask a rhetorical question here: does God know whether it will rain on my house a year from today?

Let's look at a biological example: cancer. In many types of cancer the root genetic problem can be identified. While some people may have a predisposition to certain cancers, others apparently do not. Yet exact predictions about whether a person will get cancer cannot be made because of the enormous number of variables in play. On the predictive side, all we can do is talk in terms of probabilities.

Now let's ask some questions: Does God know who will get cancer? Does he know which particular cell will start the cancer? Does he know what the specific cause will be? Does God cause all cancers? Are all cancers a result of pure chance? If God did, from time to time, cause a person to get cancer (as a trial, for example), could we identify those instances by scientific means?

These same types of problems and questions apply not only to evolution, but other areas of biology, medicine, public health, multiple areas of physics, cosmology, astronomy, linguistics, anthropology, ecology, geography--all areas of life, really. We do not have a way to distinguish any direct role God has played in these things from natural processes, except through revelation. But since revelation is largely non-transferable, we prefer natural explanations until God specifically identifies his role. (These issues also touch on why I am not hot on the intelligent design movement.)

So let's not fret over whether life's origin and diversity is a result of chance or not. Scientists talk in terms of chance and randomness because, whether they believe it's the whole story or not, they cannot do otherwise.

[This is a cross-post from Mormons and Evolution. Clicking comments will re-direct you there.]

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