Naturalism Is Nonsense

There’s a reason why the biggest philosophical question of the twenty-first century is anthropology, the significance of human beings. Everywhere we turn, we are told that we are insignificant cosmic accidents—that we are the result not of the purposive creation of an eternal and all-wise and holy God, but that we are grown-up germs who have emerged fortuitously from the slime. And I’ve heard very learned, more than one, PhDs give the formula for the rise of the universe itself. The formula is this: Space plus time plus chance equals the universe and humanity.

The universe, and everyone who’s in it, is a result of the equation space plus time plus chance. Have you ever heard that? When they talk like this, they stop being scientists. And it’s not that they revert to some mythological foundation for reality, for the universe, or for human beings, because myths at least have the salutary benefit of from time to time giving us some kind of moral lesson or some kind of ethical insight.

We can’t even get good mythology out of this because this formula is manifest nonsense. What is space? You can’t even talk about is-ness with respect to space. What’s the ontological structure of space? Nothing. What is the ontological essence of time if there’s no matter and no motion? Nothing. And what is the ontological status of chance? Nothing. As I’ve argued many times, chance can do nothing because it is nothing. It has no power because it has no being. So, what we have here is this equation “zero plus zero plus zero equal everything.” And that’s just flat-out nonsense.