Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

1 Against Religious Explanations
’Tis a pious account, cried my father, but not philosophical—
there is more religion in it than sound science.
Tristram Shandy
Sometime in the nineteenth century, God disappeared. He did not, of
course, disappear from the wider culture, where belief in God remains
infl uential, in some contexts more than ever. But he did disappear from the
professional writings of those who were coming to be known as scientists. 1
It is not that all scientists ceased to be believers. They did not. And for those
who remained believers, even a world without miracles, a world of “fi xed
and invariable laws,” 2 could be seen as bearing witness to a Creator. 3 But
no matter how religious scientists may have been as individuals, God was
banished from their scientifi c discourse, as the sciences came to be exclusively
concerned with natural rather than supernatural causes.
This development is particularly noteworthy in the life sciences, which
had provided rich pickings for the natural theologians of an earlier age. As
late as 1830, the geologist Charles Lyell did not try to explain how species
emerged; he merely described the circumstances of their emergence. 4
And the “creative energy” to which Lyell attributed their emergence has a
strongly providentialist fl avour. It ensured that species appeared in places
where they could fl ourish and gain a foothold on the earth. 5 But with the
publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s work On the Origin of Species,
even such quasi-religious explanations come to an end. 6 After Darwin,
no religious explanation of a feature of the natural world would be taken
seriously, at least by scientists. Even if scientists could discover no natural
cause of the phenomenon in question, they would assume that one exists. 7
This exclusion of divine agency has become a taken-for-granted feature
of scientifi c endeavour. The attitude it expresses is often described as the
“naturalism” of the modern sciences.
1.1 THE NATURALISM OF THE SCIENCES
In the pages that follow I explore an alternative to this naturalistic stance.
I explore the possibility of offering a non-natural explanation of some
observable state of affairs, one which invokes a divine agent. My question
is: Could an explanation that invokes a divine agent be a good explanation?