It'll drive ya batty for sure! LOLOL! Yet to me, it seems that God is, not rigorously deterministic with respect to His dealings with creation, but rather providential.
According to Catholic doctrine,
God is the source of being, and thus gives being to all that exists outside of himself. (God himself exists necessarily.) God is outside of time, and thus creates (and knows) everything, past, present, and future, by a single eternal (i.e., a-temporal) act. He is the creator of all finite beings in every aspect of their being, and hence creates them with all their natural propensities, powers, and mutual relationships. Consequently, while created things do have natural causal relationships to each other ("secondary causality"), God is nevertheless the direct cause of every thing ("primary causality"): God is the First Cause — "first" causally, not temporally. (A simple analogy is that a dagger and the playwright Shakespeare are both causes of Polonius' death in the play Hamlet: the dagger kills Polonius, while Shakespeare causes the whole scene, including Polonius, the dagger, Polonius' death, and the fact that the dagger causes Polonius' death. Shakespeare is analogous to the First Cause, the dagger to a secondary cause. Secondary causes only operate because of the First Cause.) It is Catholic dogma that "God, by his Providence, protects and governs all that he established, 'reaching mightily from end to end and ordering all things sweetly.'"...One sees that the doctrine of Providence is not only that God governs the world, but that his governance is wise and beneficent. Divine providence is distinguished into "mediate providence" and "immediate providence," the former exercised through secondary causes and the latter directly, without such mediation. Therefore, saying that an event is governed by Providence implies nothing about whether it has natural causes and can be naturally explained. Nevertheless, according to traditional teaching, the ordinary means of divine Providence is through natural secondary causality. As Suarez put it, "God does not intervene directly with the natural order where secondary causes are sufficient to produce the intended effect."
— Stephen M. Barr, "The Concept of Randomness in Science and Divine Providence," in Divine Action and Natural Selection, Singapore: World Scientific, 2009, p. 467. Emphasis added.A Catholic, Barr is Professor of Physics at the Bartol Research Institute and the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Delaware. In this article, he wants to know whether "randomness" in nature necessarily implies that nature is "unguided," "unplanned," and "undirected" in a sense that would contradict the notion of Providence. As a physicist, of course he knows that such things as quantum fluctuations and the motions of molecules in a gas are random. Barr also notes that biologists assume that genetic mutations are random. "Such assumptions," he writes, "are intrinsic to modern science's way of explaining the world and to our notions of what is 'natural'." On the chance/statistical randomness question, Barr concludes that chance events do occur in the natural world; but that it does not follow that such events are necessarily "uncaused." He gives an analogy by way of explanation:
Suppose one is driving down an interstate highway in the United States and observing the license plates of the cars that pass by. They will be from various States of the Union, and the sequence will exhibit some degree of randomness: New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New Jersey, Florida, etc. (There are probabilities involved, as in any random process. On certain highways a license plate from New Jersey is more like to appear than one from Kansas....) The sequence of license plates is random in the sense that knowing where one car is from does not tell you where another is from: the cars are "independent" and thus "uncorrelated." This randomness, however, in no way implies that the cars' movements and locations are "undirected," "unguided," and "unplanned." Quite the reverse is true: the cars are directed by the wills of their drivers, who are guided by maps and pursuing plans. It is just that the plan of one driver has no direct connection to the plans of the other drivers, because the lives of the various drivers are (generally speaking) uncorrelated with each other. [Ibid., p. 470]Barr's conclusion is that "every event may be part of a chain of causality, but because there are many independent chains of causality that intersect each other and impinge on each other, sequences or juxtapositions arise that exhibit a lack of correlation and thus 'statistical randomness.' The world does not have one story line, but many story lines that have little direct relation to each other.... Events that impinge on a subsystem of the world from other parts of the world, or that result from some adventitious juxtaposition, seem as 'chance' events. These chance events can disrupt or substantially change the course of events in the subsystem. Events in this world, therefore, do not follow a predictable pattern, but are caught up in a vast web of contingency." [Ibid., p. 471.]
CottShop, when you averred that God's mode of causation of/in the world is "deterministic," the image that came to my mind was the system of mechanistic causation elaborated by Isaac Newton. But that system cannot do for God, it seems to me. For causation in Newton's world is always a local, time-bound phenomenon. God as First Cause (i.e., a-temporal cause) is not bound by the space/time system of classical mechanics. And yet it is also clear that Newton very much wanted to "put God into the world," in order to, among other things, "fine-tune" it (i.e., error correction) from time to time. These details are beyond the scope of the present writing.
Personally, I don't think a model like this does justice to God as First Cause. I think hosepipe's astute remark — that "God does not make Bluebirds. He made Bluebirds that make Bluebirds" — indicates the manner in which divine Providence tends to work in nature (i.e., through secondary causes). Certainly it seems that God directs and guides the world and all therein according to his plan and purpose; but he doesn't have to, say, directly mess with the (apparently random) quantum world in order for the "right" outcomes to occur in nature.
Analogously, inversely-causal metainformation (which is an a-temporal cause) might be thought of as First Cause (in the sense of Logos) of the biological world. All secondary causation in living nature flows from it, and is "constrained" by it.
Just trying to work through these ideas, my friend. Again, you're right: They'll drive you "batty!" Your thoughts?
I would however that Barr had tackled the word "random" per se - that in the natural sciences, it really means "unpredictable." At the root, mathematics, one cannot say something is random in the system when he doesn't know what the system "is." And we do not know and can never know the full number and type of dimensions, e.g. space and time.
Concerning predestination, I do aver that no one and no thing can thwart the will of God.
Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life. - John 5:24
Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths. - Proverbs 3:5-6
Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he hath known my name. - Psalms 91:14
[[Personally, I don’t think a model like this does justice to God as First Cause. I think hosepipe’s astute remark — that “God does not make Bluebirds. He made Bluebirds that make Bluebirds” — indicates the manner in which divine Providence tends to work in nature (i.e., through secondary causes). Certainly it seems that God directs and guides the world and all therein according to his plan and purpose; but he doesn’t have to, say, directly mess with the (apparently random) quantum world in order for the “right” outcomes to occur in nature.]]
Not sure I’m following your line of reasoning here- God was indeed ‘first cause’, and it is my beleif that He created the genome to handle most mistakes thrown at it by designing the informaiton to adjust on the fly- this would take forethought and foreknowledge to code the metainfo to deal with intrusions- I’m not seeing how time constraints play into this? I don’t see that God has to keep ‘stepping in’ to adjust code ‘as needed’ as the code was ‘perfected’ (in the sense that it contianed all necessary info right fro mthe start to deal with problems- I’m not implying that all problems can be handeled, but rather that species specific info is able to handle most, but is still under hte curse and could potentially not be able to handle some, according to God’s directives at creation)
[[ In this article, he wants to know whether “randomness” in nature necessarily implies that nature is “unguided,” “unplanned,” and “undirected” in a sense that would contradict the notion of Providence.]]
No I don’t beleive so- God woudl know, being omniscient, what randomenss would do to species before it even occured, and would have designed creatures to either handle the problems or succumb to them according to His will. He very well could have created creatures to lvie for some itme, but die off- go extinct, and infact we know htis has happened, but it didn’t take God by surprise, as it were, when this happened- These die-offs are a result of sin, and were planned for.
As God directs everything, being omnipotent, even ‘randomness’ bows to His direction or rather is subject to His direction- this is another deep subject, as one has to wonder how somethign could be ‘random’ when it is ‘directed’ By God- but perhaps it owudl be better to state it is ‘used’ by God for His own purposes
[[The world does not have one story line, but many story lines that have little direct relation to each other.... ]]
I’m not sure I agree with htis- I think everythign is itner-related, and that an omniscient God sees all ‘independent lines’ (which are actually depenedent on other lines), and created everyhtign to either positively deal with, or negatively deal with, all possible ‘independent’ actions no metter what order they occure in (Which again, God, being onmiscient, woudl have already foreseen).
We’re only really able to see perhaps several ‘independent’ lines at a time (kind of like in a chess game- the best players can visualize quite a few lines of manuevers in advance) and htis I think limits our understanding, but if we were to be able to see all ‘indepenedent’ lines, I think we would see that they are all inter-dependent in actuality.
Ouch! Brain ache.