Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

138 Theism and Explanation
7.6 INFORMATIVENESS
My fi nal desideratum is that a theory be informative. By “informativeness”
here I mean something close to what Peter Lipton describes as the
“loveliness” (as opposed to the “likeliness”) of a proposed explanation.
A “lovely” explanation, he writes, is one that specifi es “some articulated
causal mechanism . . . whose description allows us to deduce the precise
details of the effect.” 100 There are two aspects to this defi nition: the fi rst has
to do with the description of a mechanism, while the second has to do with
our ability to deduce what would follow if the proposed explanation were
true. I have already noted that a proposed theistic explanation will often
lack an intermediate causal mechanism—one that would mediate between
the divine will and its effect—and I have suggested that this fact is not necessarily
a fatal objection to a hypothesis of this kind (3.4.2). What I want
to focus on here is the second aspect of Lipton’s defi nition: the idea that
we should prefer a hypothesis that enables us to “deduce the precise details
of the effect.” Such a hypothesis will not only have empirical content—it
will exclude certain states of affairs—but it will specify in some detail just
what it does and does not predict. 101 How does theism fare when measured
against this desideratum?
7.6.1 Quantifi able Predictions
One objection that might be put forward here is that a theistic explanation
does not make quantifi able predictions. The natural sciences have been
able to make such spectacular progress partly because of their assumption,
since the time of Galileo, that “the book of nature” is “written in the language
of mathematics.” 102 This is one of the factors that allows the sciences
to have precise empirical content: it enables them to spell out exactly what
does and does not follow if a scientifi c theory were true. Thus while physicists,
for example, speak of entities that are both unobservable and very
different from those which we encounter every day, they can do so with
some precision because they have a language distinct from our everyday
language in which to describe such realities. That “language” (speaking
metaphorically) is mathematics. By way of contrast, theism lacks a precise
language with which to speak of God; it must use our everyday language.
And this language lacks precision.
A theist might respond that in this respect proposed theistic explanations
are not alone. Our everyday intentional explanations also fail to make
quantitative predictions. Worse still, they use notoriously vague terms such
as “belief,” “desire,” “hope,” and “fear.” We use such terms to explain and
to predict people’s behaviour, even when we lack any clear idea of what
mental states they denote or the mechanisms by which they are expressed
(3.2.1). So measured by this criterion, our everyday intentional explanations
are also less than “lovely.” Yet they can still be useful; they still have