Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

122 Theism and Explanation
that this proposed theistic explanation is a potential explanation, could it
be corroborated by “predicting” some fact we already know?
In advocating an historical view of confi rmation, Alan Musgrave argues
that it could. Even a solitary hypothesis, he insists, could be corroborated
by reference to known facts. One can still think of a theory as being tested
against a competitor, except that in this case the competitor is “the empty or
tautologous theory.” 24 In these circumstances, Musgrave argues, “the fi rst
testable theory in any fi eld will be confi rmed by all the phenomena which
it explains (whether or not they were known in advance).” 25 If one accepts
this view, then a theistic explanation that has no competitor would be corroborated
by a consilience of explanatory successes, even in the absence
of successful predictions (in the sense of predictions of hitherto unknown
facts). And if it has competitors, it could be corroborated by its ability to
explain some known fact which they are unable to explain. 26
This solution seems to me a good one. Indeed I shall refer to a similar
suggestion shortly (7.1.3), when discussing the “null hypothesis.” It is
not clear to what extent, if at all, it avoids the raven paradox, at least in
the case of a solitary hypothesis. But that’s a general problem I cannot
hope to resolve here. 27 And an historical approach—one that measures corroboration
against competing theories—has other advantages. It explains,
for instance, why lists of explanatory virtues often include “explanatory
power.” There is no doubt that we do value theories of broad scope, which
“make sense of what would otherwise be a dissociated collection of facts.” 28
But the fact that a theory may have a narrow scope—in the sense that it
purports to explain only a small range of phenomena—should not count
against it. Narrowness of scope is not necessarily an explanatory vice.
What might make us favour a theory is its capacity to explain facts that its
competitor should be able to explain, but cannot. In this sense, and in this
sense alone, is explanatory power a suitable criterion of theory choice.
At what conclusion, then, have I arrived? Should we demand of proposed
theistic explanations that they predict in the strict sense, allowing us
to deduce facts that had been hitherto unobserved? No, we should not. It
seems that a proposed theistic explanation, like any other kind of proposed
explanation, could be corroborated by facts that are already known. But it
must be the actual theistic hypothesis that is being corroborated, in all its
intentional specifi city, not some very general statement about divine action.
And in this respect most proposed theistic explanations fall short; they do
not even attempt to meet the required standard.
7.1.3 The Solitary Potential Explanation
It is tempting to leave the issue of testability there. But one philosopher of
science, Elliot Sober, has vigorously rejected the idea that a solitary hypothesis
can be tested. Sober argues against at least one class of proposed theistic
explanations on the grounds that the explanations in question have no