Can God design from chance?

[Fatima-Crusader]

If God used natural laws to create us and allowed creation partake in His perfect casuality, how would He guide it? I know Gods knows everything before it happens, but wouldnt it still be random?

 

[MPat]

If God used natural laws to create us and allowed creation partake in His perfect casuality, how would He guide it? I know Gods knows everything before it happens, but wouldnt it still be random?

You can try an analogy with genetic algorithms. For example, play a game that, presumably, uses them (Play Idle Machine Learning, a free online game on Kongregate).

Now, is it true that in this game you are “guiding evolution”? Yes. How? Well, by changing various parameters. You can change parameters of population (like population size), you can change parameters of the world (different tracks)…

If you really really really wanted to, you could find a debugger and edit some variables directly.

Now, is there randomness in this game? Yes and no. Yes, there are going to be calls to something like function “random()”. But it is generating “pseudorandom” numbers that are, in principle, predictable.

Now, if you can “guide evolution” in a game, we can expect God to have ways to guide biological evolution.

And if pseudorandom numbers are good enough for game, unpredictability is unlikely to be vital for biological evolution either.

 

[John_Martin]

It is the contingent human, Mary, who had potential to CO-OPERATE with God, to CO-CAUSE with God.
God always knows the Son becoming Man YET NEVER knows the Son becoming Man apart from: a JOINT-CAUSAL Act of Knowing with Mary Temporally Knowing With Him. Yes or No | SoftVocation

The JOINT-CAUSAL Act:
The LORD, ‘I AM’, ALWAYS knew that when the contingent human named Mary jointly knew what he knows, that she would be the Mother of the Son of the Most High, then the Son would become Man. HE ALWAYS KNEW : She did not ALWAYS know, she knew in a moment of temporal recognition, and suddenly she and God knew TOGETHER as CO-CAUSAL AGENTS.

Everything that God does on earth in time is with his servants in CO-OPERATION, both with his Angels and his Human Servants. That is how he appears to “change in time”, yet does not ever change.

God’s CO-OPERATOR is the one with potential, and therefore we can see the Will of God happen temporally due to the servants’ Co-Operation, Co-Knowing, Co-Causing.

Jesus called us who are servants of the LORD to pray, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, …” so that God’s Will might temporally BE in creation, and not just eternally be in the mind of God - yet in his mind, he knows himself Co-Causing his will WITH us when we really pray in time, so at that moment there is a joint will of the LORD and his servant, who is temporal. God NEVER knows himself doing anything ALONE in Time, always anything temporal or contingent he knows as done with Co-Operation, Co-Willing, Co-Knowing with a contingent being (a man or an angel).

God eternally knows himself delivering Israel from bondage in Egypt.
But not really. It is not happening eternally.
He actually eternally knows himself delivering Israel jointly with Moses who is saying to Pharaoh, “Let my people go.”
But Moses is not eternally saying this to Pharaoh.

God knows himself causing created reality when someone “not God” joins him in knowing and acting.
Moses does not know anything about this until the Angel of the LORD calls him in the burning bush.

But, after that, Moses and the LORD are knowing the same thing, and the people of Israel are freed.
How? What God knows eternally is joined by Moses in his knowing and doing and commanding of Pharaoh.
God’s knowing became a material reality outside the mind of God when Moses, who is material reality outside the mind of God, fulfilled God’s knowing of Moses knowing.

St. Augustine, in his Confessions, the last three sections (Books), gives a plausible description of how this co-causation could “begin”, “In the Beginning”, and I would advise full familiarity with this is wise.

John Martin