5 October 2023

Chance based on chance

I came across an old debate of WL Craig's on science and Christian faith.

In the debate Rosenberg completely misunderstands Christian faith, confusing it with animism at best, rather than giving the basis for a rational world view deriving from the direct rational source of creation in propositional information: God thinks of it, speaks it and it happens. What happens is directly related to the words spoken opening up the creation to propositional access.

As an intended creation, propositionally exposed to us, it is accessible to propositional enquiry: we can keep asking and exploring to find out what it is with no limits.

Schaeffer in The God Who Is There in the section on Musique Concrete reports an example of such:

"...The voice is first built up out of chance sounds, reflecting modern man's view that man who verbalizes arose by chance in a chance universe with only a future of chance ahead of him."

Chance here means irrationally, without reason, and so inexplorable and unfathomable.

This is the world, finally ungrounded, the world that Rosenberg unwittingly seeks to build science upon. But his world, the world of mere material with random and information-less interactions, is only the basis for non-science, for the animism that he ironically thinks represents Christianity.

Incidentally, this lies at the heart of the fatal contradiction of theistic evolution: That the God who speaks, didn't in fact speak, but somehow worked into a non-speaking cosmos that denies on its own nature any system of information and 'just happens', undermining any basis for a rational epistemology.