[It isn’t my intention belittle your beliefs at all, so please don’t take what I am about to say as an insult]
If I said that I believe fairies are the best explanation for the order of colors in a rainbow, I am sure you would scratch your head as to why that explains anything. Furthermore, I think you would be a bit puzzled if I followed that with the statement “I think the only rational explanation for the order of colors in rainbows is fairies”. You would be wondering what that rational is.
I would agree with that as well. I don’t see any scientific path that leads to that conclusion, but I can certainly understand why people would believe in a creator because of their philosophical or theological beliefs.
The answer here is to ask the why questions and you eventually hit the wall. What caused electromagnetism, the strong and weak force plus gravity?. What caused to hydrogen atom? To ultimately explain clouds forming you need to explain the ultimate cause.
How do you build a model that can sustainably generate functional information using non human natural processes? There is a 5 million dollar prize for this
Ultimately you would have to explain the origin of the photon. How did something a versatile and useful in nature as a photon come into existence. A random accident?
I would ask why the natural explanation of the standard model is not a valid explanation. You claim that natural explanations can’t explain themselves, and yet you probably accept natural explanations for many things we observe in nature. I am just wondering why you think natural explanations can’t even be considered in some situations.
Until you can show us how to measure functional information I don’t see how you can even claim that it exists. Surely we don’t have to explain something that can’t even be shown to exist.
I can’t do it. But I am confident that God did. I have no difficulty believing that God is fully capable of creating a starting point for a universe from which natural processes then proceed to produce all sorts of amazing things. So when scientists describe how natural processes produce X, Y, and Z and so many other incredible phenomena, I have no reason to disagree with them.
I suppose it depends upon your definition of “random.” To me, “random” describes something which is unpredictable according to human understanding. Yet, as a Molinist, I believe nothing is unpredictable to God and that God chose this particular universe and reality path as opposed to some other. [SEE FOOTNOTE] Thus, the proton and its particular set of characteristics can be “an accident” and yet totally planned within God’s providence. Indeed, natural processes and “accidents” achieving amazing results is exactly what I would expect.
I am much the opposite of an Open Theist because I believe that time is purely an attribute of the matter-energy universe and so God is not subject to time confines, just as he is not limited by geography. This also means that God is omnipresent temporally just as he is omnipresent spatially—as time is just another dimension over which God is sovereign. Thus, just as one could say that God is omnipresent in Manila exactly as he is in Chicago, God “experiences” and knows now in all times in the same way. In this moment of 2019, God “simultaneously” is just as present in all of the “nows” that were experienced by humans in the past, such as on the day when Abram became Abraham. If God sees all events in all times of the history of the universe, nothing is unpredictable and so (to a Molinist) Open Theism is a flawed view of a very limited deity. (Incidentally, for those familiar with Molinism, this poses no problem for free will or theodicy. I’ve expanded on those topics many times on these forums so I’ll not replay them here. Nevertheless, it has been a while so perhaps we are due for a reboot if someone is interested. Unfortunately, I’m still moving and am not here every day.)
FOOTNOTE:
Yes, I realize that to a mathematician or physicist, not all unpredictable things are truly random. I tend to approach these topics from a linguistic framework and so I am prone to use non-technical, mainstream definitions which are familiar to the average reader who may not be a physicist.
