Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

140 Theism and Explanation
This may be true, and it may constitute a good argument against belief in
theistic evolution, but it does not answer the objection. For a theistic explanation
proposes that God is bringing about the explanandum in order to
achieve some goal. 107 If a proposed theistic explanation does not specify the
divinely-willed goal, the purpose God has in acting in this way, it will have
little empirical content (3.2.3). But to specify a goal in order to explain an
action (even a basic action) is to say how we would expect the agent to act,
given that goal. If we posit that God sent the Boxing Day tsunami in order
to punish sinners (4.1.2), then we must be able to say that an event such as
a tsunami is how we would expect God to “punish” sinners.
Here’s another way of making the same point. Matthew Ratcliffe has
recently argued that much of our everyday social interaction is guided by
our shared understanding of the social norms governing human behaviour.
We know from experience “what is to be done” in a particular situation and
this is (often, at least) suffi cient to enable us to understand other people’s
actions. If we ask, for instance, why someone is standing outside a building,
on a cold day, it is suffi cient to be told “he’s a security guard.” 108 We
don’t need to attribute certain beliefs and desires to the person in question
in order to understand his behaviour. Similarly, as James Baillie writes,
I enter a café and my eyes meet those of the person behind the counter.
I need not assume “He believes that I want attention, and he desires to
help me,” etc. Rather, given the context, he takes me as a customer and
I take him as a barista. What we want, and what we do, fl ows from this
mutual understanding. 109
One can accept this point without denying what I have been assuming so
far: that positing beliefs and desires does have explanatory force and that
we sometimes explain human behaviour in precisely this way. 110 But all I
want to note here is the diffi culty Ratcliffe’s account poses for proposed
theistic explanations. When it comes to a posited divine agent, we lack anything
analogous to the shared social norms that can help us to understand
human behaviour. Even if we are told, with regard to a divine agent, that
he is (for instance) a “loving father,” it is unclear what such a role would
entail, in the case of a divine agent. We will often know “what is to be
done” by a human parent, in a particular situation, but there are no social
norms that would guide us in predicting the behaviour of a divine agent.
A believer might counter this objection by arguing that she already knows
how the divine agent will act, in this situation, for she knows how God has
acted in the past, in similar situations. Indeed, this is how believers often
reason, by appealing to what they take to be paradigmatic instances of
divine action, often found in sacred scripture. 111 But this, of course, merely
begs the question: it assumes that the believer already has a successful theistic
explanation, either of these past events themselves or of the scriptures
in which these divine actions are revealed.