Considering Not a Chance

Daughter who spies me reading the book: “Daddy, isn’t R.C. Sproul boring?”

“No, honey. Not to me.”

She is only 9 and R.C. is still a bit over her head. But one of Sproul’s strengths has always been putting the cookies where average people can reach them (not necessarily 9 year-olds however). As a young Christian I read his books and listened to his tapes. I owe him a great debt, so to speak.

In Not a Chance R.C. Sproul turns (most of) his attention away from theology and toward the philosophy of science. His concern is the growth of irrationality in science particularly as it intersects with issues related to creation. For people who don’t usually read philosophy, or haven’t in quite some time, he strives to make it accessible. He also strives to see the application. He interacts with a very long list of philosophers. He mostly succeeds in his goal of accessibility.

He begins with discussing the notion of chance. It can be used in the mathematical sense of probabilities, which is appropriate in science. We speak this way often: what are the chances of rain today? It can also be used to speak of something being accidental or unpredictable. This is typically an inappropriate use of the term in science. This use is growing as some scientists talk about things being created by chance. His point is that chance is not an entity and therefore cannot create anything. To speak as it can is to descend into irrationality. It is not irrational to say we don’t understand something at this point in time. But speaking of it as by chance is.

“I have been contending for the rigorous application of the laws of logic to inferences drawn from induction. Indeed that is what this book is all about.”

He also delves into the question of the universe as created, self-created or self-existent. Sometimes self-created and self-existent are used interchangeably by some scientists. They are not the same. All scientific data at this point in time would appear to rule out a self-existent universe. There was a “time” when it was not. Self-creation is also a logical nightmare. It cannot be and not be in the same sense and at the same time. The universe would clearly appear to be contingent as a result. He makes a brief argument for a Creator.

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Considering The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God

In my second year of seminary, John Frame’s The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God became required reading in the first year. Oh, well. It has only taken me about 20 years to read the book.  I began to read it 2 years ago, I think, while I was home “watching” the kids while CavWife taught a group exercise class on Monday afternoons. Last year I spent that time studying and developing a curriculum for the Book of Revelation. Though I no longer watch the kids on Monday afternoons, I resumed reading the book this Fall as time permitted. It was worth the work.

The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (an interesting title) is the first in Frame’s A Theology of Lordship series, of which I have already read The Doctrine of God (Salvation Belongs to the Lord is a shorter version that is quite readable). The title of this book suggests the main concern of the book- how can we know God. This is a book about epistomology, the study of how we know. We often take this for granted and never think through it. Those presuppositions drive many of the debates and arguments we have with people. We often fall into bad argumentation (logical fallacies for instance).

“Our criteria, methods, and goals in knowing will depend on what we seek to know.”

Frame wants to examine our presuppositions, and argue for a presupposition understanding of how we know what we know and what we can know.  He starts with knowing God, as Calvin did in The Institutes of the Christian Religion. But he starts with God as Covenant Lord. As Covenant Lord, He made us to think and understand as receivers of revelation. As Covenant Lord, he determines what is revealed to us.

“We do not come to know God, or anything else, in a vacuum. … Still, one has to start somewhere; he cannot relate everything to everything else at once, for otherwise he would be God.”

He touches on subjects like transcendence (God as head of the covenant) and immanence (God’s nearness or involvement with creation), authority,  control and presence, knowability and incomprehensibility etc. He moves out of the theoretical at times to show how these tensions reveal themselves in theological debate, particularly the disagreement between Van Til and Clark. In other words, he examines many of the implications of the Creator-creature distinction.

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