Galileo, Darwin and Hawking

I have just bought Phil Dowe's new book Galileo, Darwin, and Hawking (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2005). It looks very interesting, so I shall be blogging my way through it; probably at the rate of a chapter a week.

Phil Dowe is a philosophy lecturer at the University of Queensland and has also written Physical Causation as well as a number of philosophical papers, including this one on 'Chance and providence' Science & Christian Belief Vol. 9, No 1, April 1997, pp.3-20. Here he concludes:

So, should Christians be bothered by the Chance Worldview? Does chance refute providence? No. If chance exists then either it is caused by God (and that is allowed by Bell's Theorem) and this is no problem for providence and there is no conflict with science, or chance is not caused by God, in which case it is compatible with strong Calvinist providence providing it does not lead to meaningful consequences. Insofar as chance does lead to meaningful consequences, strong providence entails that God causes that chance.