Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

6 Inference to the Best Explanation
“Tracks,” said Piglet. “Paw-marks.” He gave a little squeak of excitement.
“Oh, Pooh! Do you think it’s a—a—a Woozle?”
“It may be,” said Pooh. “Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t.
You never can tell with Woozles.”
A. A. Milne
Let me begin this, the penultimate chapter of my enquiry, by summarising
the conclusions I have reached. I began by identifying a number of objections
to proposed religious explanations. The fi rst is that theistic explanations
exclude no possible state of affairs; the second is that the actions of an
agent who can work miracles would be unpredictable; the third maintains
that the very concept of God is incoherent; the fourth suggests that the will
of God cannot be a cause and hence cannot be invoked in an explanation.
I did, in a footnote, allude to a fi fth objection. 1 It is the idea, based on
Hume’s principle of proportioning cause to effect, 2 that we would never be
warranted in positing a being of infi nite power in order to explain a fi nite
effect. 3 I have not dwelt on this objection since at least some of its force
is captured by my optimality condition (5.3.3). As the reader will recall,
this suggests that if you posit a being of infi nite power and goodness, the
explanandum may not correspond to how we would expect him to act.
After examining each of these objections, I decided that none constitutes
a “silver bullet,” a decisive objection which would warrant a summary dismissal
of a theistic hypothesis. With regard to the fi rst objection, I suggested
ways in which proposed theistic explanations could be formulated so as to
have empirical content. With regard to the second objection, I argued that
if we assume that the divine agent is a rational agent—an assumption that
underlies all intentional explanations—then his behaviour is not entirely
unpredictable. With regard to the fi fth objection, I suggested that we cannot,
a priori, exclude the bare possibility that a proposed theistic explanation
might satisfy the optimality condition. It does, however, constitute a
signifi cant hurdle for the theist.
What about the objections three and four, both of which argue that
there is something incoherent about the very idea of a theistic explanation?
There is certainly a prima facie case here for the theist to answer. One
could argue that he is obliged to show that his hypothesis does not embody
contradictory claims. Can this be done? I don’t know. Richard Swinburne
admits that the theist can avoid the charge of incoherence only by appealing