COSMIC PURPOSE AND THE CONTINGENCY OF HUMAN EVOLUTION

Some understand the evolutionary process as more or less predictable; others stress its contingency. I argue that both Christian evolutionists who have assumed that the purposes of the Creator can be realized only through more or less predictable processes as well as those who infer from the contingency of the evolutionary process to the lack of purpose in the universe generally, are mistaken if the Creator escapes from the limits imposed on the creature by temporality, as the traditional Augustinian account supposes. The notion of “purpose” must itself be reinterpreted in such a case. It makes no difference whether the appearance of Homo sapiens is the inevitable result of a steady process of complexification stretching over billions of years, or whether it comes about through a series of coincidences that would have made it entirely unpredictable from the (causal) human standpoint. Either way, the outcome is of God's making, and from the biblical standpoint may appear as part of God's plan.     

ERNAN MCMULLIN ON CONTINGENCY,COSMIC PURPOSE,AND THE ATEMPORALITY OF THE CREATOR

This article reviews, and offers supportive reflections on, the main points of Ernan McMullin's provocative 1998 article, “Cosmic Purpose and the Contingency of Human Evolution,’’ reprinted in this issue of Zygon. In it he addresses the important science‐theology issue of how the Creator's purpose and intention to assure the emergence of human beings is consonant with the radical contingency of the evolutionary process. After discussing cosmic and biological evolution and critically summarizing recent solutions to this question by Keith Ward, John Polkinghorne, Arthur Peacocke, Alvin Plantinga, and others, who presuppose in different ways that God is subject to time, McMullin compellingly argues for the traditional position, that God is unconditioned by time, and this enables God to work purposefully through contingency, randomness, and chance just as easily as through law‐like regularity.     

A FIELD STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF RATING PURPOSE ON THE QUALITY OF MULTISOURCE RATINGS

Using a field sample of peers and subordinates, the current study employed generalizability theory to estimate sources of systematic variability associated with both developmental and administrative ratings (variance due to items, raters, etc.) and then used these values to estimate the dependability (i.e., reliability) of the performance ratings under various conditions. Results indicated that the combined rater and rater-by-ratee interaction effect and the residual effect were substantially larger than the person effect (i.e., object of measurement) for both rater sources across both purpose conditions. For subordinates, the person effect accounted for a significantly greater percentage of total variance in developmental ratings than in administrative ratings; however, no differences were observed for peer ratings as a function of rating purpose. These results suggest that subordinate ratings are of significantly better quality when made for developmental than for administrative purposes, but the same is not true for peer ratings.