IMHO, you’re still not accounting for the difference in context between a mortal being and an omnipotent one that lies outside of the universe.
From our perspective, the course of the universe is fundamentally random because it is not possible to know the state of all matter and energy. Predicting the course of evolution, or any other complex phenomena, is impossible because it’s not possible to account for all the data. We can’t even accurately predict the weather. Shit, you can’t accurately predict how a “Plinko” chip is going to fall on “The Price Is Right.” To accurately do so to perfection would require data in volumes beyond conception.
From our perspective, the universe follows a set of rules. Matter and energy are different forms of the same thing. Matter is made up of atoms. Atoms have a nucleus, made of protons and neutrons, and electrons in valences that move from atom to atom. Light behaves this way, X-rays behave that way. We don’t yet fully understand all the rules, but nonetheless we know they exist.
From our perspective, the universe can be treated, in most cases, as containing a large number of events that are inseparable from random chance. Not all things are random, though. Some things can be predicted with confidence; if I pick up my keyboard right now and let go of it, it will very likely fall back towards the center of the earth. It will not pass through my desk, but instead will stop there. I know this because gravity and the nature of mass give us reasonably predictable outcomes.
But consider, say, the lottery. In the Lotto 6/49 they pick six balls out of 49 in one of those tumbly-rolly lottery machines. The odds of any given combination coming out are just under one in fourteen million, and from our perspective, it’s effectively a random pick. There is simply no way to predict what six numbers will come out. But it’s not actually random. The six balls that come out are a direct product of physics - the way the tumbly-thing rotates, the exact construction of each of the lottery balls, the way they hit each other, the movement on air inside the lottery machine, all the tiny little imperfections in each ball, even the microscopic bits of dust inside the machine, gravitational flucations, the state and spin of every electron in every atom in every peice of matter involved - information and data in amounts beyond the limits of human conception affect which six numbers will roll out. If you could know all those gazillions of bits of data and calculate accordingly, you could predict the lottery results every single time. But you don’t know it all. You can’t. All the human minds and all the computers and adding machines that have ever existed in the history of the Earth or will ever exist will never, ever know a noticeable fraction of all the information you’d need to predict the results of a lottery draw. The lottery draw is, to us, a random event - totally, utterly unpredictable, with any one number combination being equally as likely as any other, at least so far as we know. But it’s really not random - it’s predetermined by physical law, one of bajillions of predetermined events that the universe has been building towards in fourteen billion years of existence.
We treat complex events as random because for our purposes that’s the mathematically, philosophically convenient way to treat them. Very simple events can be predicted with accuracy; a dropped object will usually fall down. Moderately complex events can be predicted with only general accuracy. Complex events cannot be predicted at all, so we call them “random.” But the extent of randomness in a system is purely subjective. If you had more information, you could predict more, and if you had all information in the universe, you could predict everything. We can’t have all the information in the universe, and we never will, so some things are just plain random.
But if you believe in the Christian God - and I’m not saying you have to, or even that I do - that God, pretty much by definition, HAS all the information. He is not limited by physical law or the temporal limits human being are. So to Him, all things are predictable. The results of a lottery are known to a being with an understanding of every quantum of mass and energy.
To us, the progress of the universe is, scientifically, a phenomenon filled with randomness simply because we have only an eensy-teensy bit of the information required to understand it. But as we understand more, we eliminate randomness. There are many things that appeared to be random that we now understand follow patterns. To people in the time of the Roman Republic, the arrangement of stars in the sky would have seemed random; we now know why there’s more stars in part of the sky than in the rest, and some of the physical forces that govern that. The appearance of many diseases would have seemed capricious and random to people in the past; now, thanks to a better understanding of biology, we see it is not random at all, but that it follows predictable patterns. Weather, beyond regional variations, would have seemed essentially random, but we now understand some of its creating factors.
While there’s still a lot we have to learn at the subatomic level, the general movement of science has been towards concluding that everything happens for a reason, but that the level of data involved is such that most things must be e treated as random events for the purpose of study, because we cannot know enough to treat them otherwise. The evolution of life on earth would have taken a dramatically different course had the K-T Event not exterminated most of the world’s large terrestrial animals - the Earth might well still be dominated by dinosaurs. But whatever caused it, it was an event that resulted as the culmination of theoretically predictable physical events that (it is widely assumed) caused an asteroid, by following the consistent laws of physics, in eccentric orbit around the Sun to collide with the Earth. We can’t even predict when the next asteroid impact will be, but if we knew every possible peice of data we could.
But God can. Now, then you say…
But to science, who cares? It doesn’t matter if God preordained everything at the Big Bang. In terms of our scientific understanding the universe it makes no difference at all who wrote the script. Our treatment of the universe remains the same, and the conclusions of scientists are no less valid. God, by definition, lies outside of the universe. Science concerns itself with what’s happening in the universe, which is convenient because it’s all we have access to.
For that reason, I just don’t feel believe in God is incompatible with acknowledging the simple fact that evolution happens. “The Theory of Evolution” is not a commentary on whether or not God exists, it’s a set of observations of facts, that things mutate into other things and new species emerge. That appears to be unquestionably true, whether or not God set it into motion.
(Now, I would acknowledge that SOME believers in God do think that God actively interferes with the laws of the universe, but for the most part, at least if you believe what’s in the books, apparently all the interferences started happening about four thousand years ago, which is pretty far past the point at which humans had evolved.)
