Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

Successful Theistic Explanations 131
just which intention lies behind each creative act (7.1.1), but he implicitly
recognises that different intentions are required. And in explaining, for
instance, the existence of animals, Swinburne takes for granted the existence
of a universe. Only if we subsume all of these intentions under the
catch-all category of “reasons God would have to do x”—a strategy I have
already argued is unhelpful—would this appear to be one explanation.
In a word, Mackie is right. While positing the existence of an unembodied
agent might be warranted, if that hypothesis possessed other explanatory
virtues, the fact that it posits an otherwise unknown kind of mechanism
counts against it. The theist may not neglect this fact.
7.3 PAST EXPLANATORY SUCCESS
There is another explanatory virtue that could be classed under background
knowledge, but which is signifi cant enough to be listed separately.
It is the previous explanatory success (or lack of it) of the kind of hypothesis
that is on offer. Some care is required here. I am not speaking of what
we might call the “track record”of the same hypothesis. For given that a
hypothesis can be corroborated by known facts (7.1.2), considerations of
past explanatory success would come under the heading of corroboration.
But hypotheses cannot be fully understood, nor should they be evaluated,
in isolation from one another. Any particular hypothesis can be seen as
part of a research programme or a research tradition, which unites a series
of proposed explanations sharing certain common assumptions. And we
can include under background knowledge the past successes or failures of
the research programme to which our hypothesis belongs.
It is true that to speak of “research programmes” raises some diffi cult
issues. For any particular classifi cation of hypotheses into research programmes
can be contested. What we may regard as distinct research programmes
often overlap: they share common assumptions. 62 And within a
single research programme there may exist fi erce disputes about the assumptions
being employed. 63 But I argued in Chapter 1 that we can distinguish
the naturalistic research programme of the modern sciences—which proceeds
as if there were no God—from the tradition of proposed theistic
explanations. Insofar as they sometimes seek to offer mutually exclusive
explanations of the same phenomena (4.3.3.2), these two programmes are
in competition.
Not only are they in competition, but a comparison of their track records
will count against theism. For the naturalistic research programme of the
modern sciences has been stunningly successful since its inception in the seventeenth
century. Again and again, it has shown that postulating the existence
of a deity is not required in order to explain the phenomena. Sir Isaac Newton
(1642–1727) still required God to fi ne-tune the mechanics of his solar system,
but by the time of Pierre Simon de Laplace (1749–1827), the astronomer