In a debate against William Lane Craig, the Christian philosopher and theologian, Dr. Alex Rosenberg stated:
God makes no contribution to the predictive power of any (part of any) of any of the the sciences.
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Therefore no basis on which to invoke God for explanatory or any other purposes in science. Science has no more need for and indeed considerable reason to deny the existence of God than it has to accept the Easter Bunny, etc.
The absence of a role for God in the explanatory and predictive content of science is quite apart from the problem of evil is the principle reason that 95% of the members of the Academy of Sciences are atheists and why science can provide no only no good cases for theism but an excellent argument against it.Craig's response was to reduce the importance of predictability, which was fine, then to talk about the fine-tuning (so-called) argument (about which I'm sceptical as it seems to be a case of affirming the consequent), the existence of objective moral values and duties and the indirect explanatory benefit of positing things as scientific: Craig put God into this category.
However, God is not 'scientific' while nevertheless giving explanatory context for most of human experience.
The most important point was to go to the heart of Rosenberg's attack, and point out that God is a free agent, and predictability is not applicable to such in the mechanistic terms of science.
Theism doesn't need or rely upon any putative scientific status as it provides a grounding ontology for all of our experience of the real world.
I think Rosenberg is one of the many atheists or anti-theists who think implicitly of the creator God as contained in the cosmos, rather than external to it.
The creator created, we know, by his word, and with rational causality, showing us a world that is propositionally available to us as its stewards and has a reliable relationship with propositional description and understanding (see also Proverbs 3:19, 20). Science is the work of making such descriptions and gaining understanding of the creation, within the nature of the cosmos as a place rationally created for our habitation as rational agents: that is, those in the image of the rational and propositionally communicating God.
This gives us the basis of and means for the pursuit of scientific understanding, but compared to knowing God, is the much like a souped-up version of bicycle repair.
Rosenberg also seems to think that Christians particularly rely on God as some sort of solver of difficult problems, or the 'mystery' behind the physical world. In this is could not be further from the truth. Confidence in the rational creator drives us and encourages us to exploration of a world that must be explicable in propositional terms; it must be because he has given it to us as its stewards, to understand and know it in terms of the completed creation set out in Genesis 1.
This is not a recipe for animism or indolence, which Rosenberg seems to mistake Christian faith for, but for continuous inquiry under the certainty of that inquiry being not in vain.
