MANY CHRISTIANS have tried to reconcile the belief in an omnipotent Creator with Darwinian theories of evolution. Discussion continues in a recent entry on this subject. A reader contends that God could have used randomness to create life forms slowly over time and suggests that this view is compatible with Christian belief. The reader, Mike, writes:

Randomness is a tool that can be used creatively, and if it’s available to humanity I hesitate to say that it’s not available to God.

But the idea that randomness in any meaningful sense brought about the complexity and interdependence of higher, or even lower, life forms is untenable. There is no convincing scientific evidence that randomness was part of the origins of life. There is abundant evidence of conscious intention and design.

Furthermore, why would God choose to operate in this way, essentially playing a game with seeming randomness? For what reason? That God somehow fashioned life slowly and gradually, discarding lower forms for higher, is entirely incompatible with Scripture. If Genesis is pure myth, then why couldn’t the Incarnation be pure myth? Why would God choose to confuse and virtually deceive us in this way?

This view of an evolutionary God demolishes the concept of Original Sin. According to Genesis, Original Sin brought about death. If many quasi-human beings preceded the first human being — something which has never been proved by the fossil record or archaeology — how was death anything new or a divine punishment for Original Sin?

There is no convincing proof that whole new life forms evolved gradually according to the evolutionary creation story. The science of genetics does not support evolution. DNA by its very nature allows only variation within kind, not wholly new genetic information. Human organs, such as the eye, are such complex systems they could not have arisen through incremental change and had any useful function along the way.

In short (and I realize this is very brief), there is no need to reconcile evolution with the belief in God’s Creation. The scientific theory of evolution is without foundation. It is pure metaphysics and weak metaphysics at that.

— Comments —

Sage McLaughlin writes:

I am not a professionally trained philosopher, so maybe I am all wet on this subject.  It’s a possibility I have to consider.  Still, it seems absolutely nonsensical to me for someone to speak of God’s “using” a “random” process.  A random distribution is stochastic, meaning among other things that any event in a series–in this case any copying error in genetic replication–is entirely unrelated to any change that came before it.  By definition, a series of morphological changes that come about by a random process do so without any reference to the changes that preceded them, and without any “pull” from changes that will occur afterward.

Given this elementary understanding of what a random event is, it would appear to be impossible to “use” such a process to generate an outcome that was definitely known and intended from the beginning, especially since the exact order of the changes would have been just such as to produce that outcome.  What other mechanism can we point to in all of God’s creation that operates on such a nonsensical principle?  What “random” process can human beings “use” to build a skyscraper?  And why, after all, is it necessary to posit that God has “used” a random process anyway?

Even if we programmed a computer to generate random integers until it generated an exact predetermined sequence, the fact that we have provided the computer with additional information which necessitated a particular result means that the process by which that final sequence was arrived at was not random.  And let us remember what the mechanism is that we are talking about–random mutation and natural selection.  The second part of that formula would also have to be undetermined, i.e., the environmental pressures placed on random mutations would also have to have arisen at random.  In what sense could God “use” a random environment to place selective pressures on randomly-generated genetic copying errors?

Intuitively, this makes no sense.  And as you say, it is completely unnecessary even to try to make sense of it because the theory of Darwinian speciation has almost nothing in the way of hard evidence to support it.  I myself have no idea how life arose on Earth, historically speaking.  But when someone talks about a designer whose only tool is a random process, suggesting a designer with no control over the object of his design, I may as well be listening to the hounds barking next door.  Or worse, since the hounds seem at least to understand what it is they are saying.

Buck writes:

I’m a semi-retired carpenter/builder who is able to visualize what I’m going to build. That is very useful. Many, if not most, of my clients need to see a good many drawings.

Mike links an explanation of Simulated Annealing in support of his argument that God Himself must – or simply chose to – use a random-app or autobot that He must have created, as if He was short on time or too busy, or some such. It begins:

There are certain optimization problems that become unmanageable using combinatorial methods [combinatorial methods: finding an optimal object from a finite set of objects] as the number of objects becomes large. A typical example is the traveling salesman problem, which belongs to the NP-complete class of problems…..

The traveling salesman and the traveling purchaser are problems designed for and with a purpose; to find something. They were created with a goal; to demonstrate and achieve an intended outcome. They are concieved, created and guided by an intelligent, purposefull being with the intention of demonstrating the “value” of this effort. All of this teleology originates in the minds of intelligent beings. Every aspect of this is a thoughtful and intelligent effort; a “task”.

Darwinian evolution is by definition natural, effortless, purposeless, mindless, and utterly random.

I’m no scientist. Maybe it’s modern man’s hyper-active observation of Darwinian evolution – it would follow, is caused by Darwinian evolution – that now seems to some to affect certain outcomes. Look away and life seems to have a natural order. Observe it closely, it must realize you’re observing it, so it attempts to appear random and mindless. But how does it “know” that we are watching?

Laura writes:

I don’t understand how simulated annealing involves meaningful randomness.

Bruce writes:

What I was imagining when I brought up the idea (at VFR) of God using a stochastic process was simply an analogy to a real-life problem we solved here at work. We were trying to compute the distribution of possible landing points for a missile on a test range. A closed-form solution was possible but it was taking too long. So someone here wrote a monte-carlo simulation that approximated the answer. When someone solved the problem in closed-form, it turned out that the stochastic approximation was extremely close. So I guess what I’m describing is a model with an algorithm and random input, not a model consisting of purely random processes.

Bruce adds:

I think that the idea of man coming from primitive hominids instead of directly from Adam and Eve poses huge problems for Christian theology. Laura, you describe this problem in your post. I think the default assumption for Christians should be that the first man and woman were a special act of creation and, from a Christian perspective, the burden of proof should be on those who deny this.

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