Volume 4, Issue 1, Spring-Summer 2001
William A. Rottschaefer
Pages 38-53
No Messages Without a Sender
A Critique of Holmes Rolston’s Information-Based Argument for the Existence of God
In his recent Gifford Lectures, Holmes Rolston argues that the informational character of biological phenomena is better explained by a theistic God of the process variety than by appealing to naturalistic biological explanations. In this paper, I assess Rolston’s argument by examining current biological and philosophical interpretations of the role of the theoretical concept of information in the description and explanation of biological phenomena. I find that none of these understandings of the concept allow Rolston’s conclusion. Natural selection explanations are in principle sufficient for accounting for the informational character of biological phenomena.