Dr. Vern Poythress has written a book on chance and the sovereignty of God. In fact, that’s the title. He says he was thinking about one of his previous books, Redeeming Science, when he developed the concept of chance for this book. People have appealed to chance almost as an intelligence behind questions of our origin, but to say it happened by chance when the odds are inconceivably high against it is like saying it was just magic. It’s nonsense. The real problem, Dr. Poythress explains, is that many scientists have insisted that their naturalistic philosophy is the only way to interpret the data:

Evolutionary naturalism is the view that all forms of life came about through merely material processes, with no guiding purpose at any point. But the narrow study of material causes can never legitimately make a pronouncement about God’s involvement or God’s purposes in the processes. And scientific study ought not say that there can be no exceptions, that is, events in which God acts in surprising ways.

Many pronouncements made these days in the name of science use the successes of science and the prestige of science as a platform from which to advocate the principle that there are no purposes and that God is absent. But such pronouncements represent a form of philosophy; the advocates of materialistic philosophy are importing their own assumptions into their interpretation of the scientific data.

Many of them say they will entertain any theory that explains the data well, but we have seen plenty of examples where this has not been true at all. Even the suggestion that a god of some kind may explain the patterns seen in the data is enough to raise the ire of Darwin’s watchdogs. That’s what the documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is about.