Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

124 Theism and Explanation
the theistic hypothesis allegedly predicts that the universe will contain
laws. But what is the competing hypothesis and what does it predict?
It might be thought that if there were no God, then there probably
wouldn’t be laws of nature. I don’t know how a probability can be assigned
in this case. 32
If this is correct, it is an important conclusion. I have argued in the previous
section that even a solitary potential explanation can be corroborated,
if it predicts facts other than the fact to be explained, and that for this
purpose it can “predict” facts that are already known. But Sober’s argument
suggests that this is impossible, that such a test requires an alternative
potential explanation, so that we can compare the likelihood of what we
observe on the two hypotheses. So is Sober right? And if he is, what are the
implications for proposed theistic explanations?
A response to Sober. My fi rst response is to note that the theistic explanations
in which I am interested are not probabilistic, in the sense of assigning
a certain probability to the explanandum. They are a species of intentional
explanation and intentional explanations are best thought of as deductive
arguments (2.1.4). We may have varying degrees of confi dence about the
truth of their premises. Those premises may enjoy only a moderate degree
of evidential support, so that the most we can say is that they are probably
true. It follows that we may not be confi dent that our argument has explanatory
force (5.5). But this does not mean it is a probabilistic argument. If
the premises of our deductive argument are true, the conclusion cannot be
false; its probability is 1.0. 33
But not everyone who offers a theistic explanation takes this view. In
particular, Richard Swinburne, whose argument Sober is attacking, regards
theistic explanations as probabilistic. So let’s grant Sober this assumption,
for the sake of the argument, and see what follows. One response is that
even if a probabilistic theistic account is the only proposed explanation on
offer, it may be possible to test one or more of its elements comparatively.
One can do so by choosing some fact about the world and inventing a rival,
natural hypothesis, to see which of these hypotheses—the theistic one and
its secular rival—would render this fact more likely. Paul Draper’s restatement
of the evidential argument from evil illustrates this procedure. What
Draper does is to focus on the distribution of pleasure and pain in the
world, and offer a natural explanation of that phenomenon. He calls this
the hypothesis of indifference:
(HI) Neither the nature nor the condition of sentient beings on earth
is the result of benevolent or malevolent actions performed by nonhuman
persons. 34
He then challenges the theist to come up with an alternative, theistic account
that would render these facts more likely or (if you prefer) less surprising.