God, Chance and Purpose: Can God Have It Both Ways? download book

Book: God, Chance and Purpose: Can God Have It Both Ways?

Author: David J. Bartholomew

Pages: 272

Format: pdf

Language: English

ISBN10: 0521707080

Even though I'm not a fan of theology, I can recommend this carefully written and serious book to anyone who is interested in the theological implications of chance as seen by a professional statistician. His thesis is "chance is to be seen as within the providence of God rather than outside it" and I'm not competent to comment on the theological arguments. But less than half the book explicitly involves God; much of the book is a descriptive account of where and how scientists see chance involved in the natural and human world. For instance, the chapters on "Chaos out of order" and "Order out of chaos" are nice reminders of the importance of the levels and scales on which we view the world; what looks random on one level may look ordered on another. And the brief and straightforward accounts of many topics (small world networks, random epidemics, game theory, genetic algorithms and a dozen more) are clear and non-technical. So this book is as good or better at surveying the domain of chance as many popular science books written expressly for that purpose; though to my taste, like most other books it is too uncritical of the claimed real-world
relevance of such mathematical models.
Also noteworthy is a central chapter giving a cogent technical critique of the attempts by William Debski, a leading advocate of Intelligent Design, to calculate the chance of a particular biological feature (such as the bacterial flagellum) having ``evolved by chance".