Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

Successful Theistic Explanations 141
These considerations bring me back to the point I made when discussing
theological scepticism (5.5). Given the mysteriousness of the posited
divine agent, we can never be confi dent that the explanandum is, in fact,
how we would expect God to act. The rationality principle may enable us
to make some predictions (5.2), but we can never be confi dent about the
judgements we make. The point I am making here is a closely related one,
namely that any predictions we make—however provisionally—will lack
precision. We have a pretty good idea how a human being might go about
“comforting” or “punishing” a fellow creature, so given this posited intention,
we can predict just how she will and will not act. But how would God
go about comforting someone? Or punishing someone? Or speaking to her?
An omnipotent being will presumably have a practically infi nite range of
choices open to him, only a few of which we can begin to comprehend.
Since we do not know the full range of divine options, we cannot know
with any degree of confi dence how God would or would not act, in order to
achieve his goals. Once again, it seems, the theological sceptic has a point.
7.6.4 The Danger of Accommodation
What follows from these considerations? It seems that any proposed theistic
explanation will lack something, when measured against this desideratum
of informativeness. It will be, at best, an “unlovely” explanation,
which will not allow us to “deduce the precise details of the effect.” 112 In
itself, this fact counts against proposed theistic explanations. But it also
means that they face a particular danger, that of “making things fi t.” More
technically, they face the danger of accommodation as distinct from prediction.
It will be all too easy for the theist to redescribe the explanandum,
perhaps in all innocence, so that it appears to fi t her description of divine
action. But the “explanation” in question may be nothing more than a
kind of verbal coincidence.
Here’s an example of how this might occur. Let’s say I experience a sense
of confi dence and joy when reading a particular passage of scripture. How
am I to explain this? The believer might appear to explain this feeling by
saying that what I am experiencing is the voice of God. 113 More precisely,
she may suggest that what I am experiencing is the “internal testimony of
the Holy Spirit” of which John Calvin wrote. 114 And this “explanation” of
my feelings might be taken to corroborate some other theistic claim, perhaps
one having to do with the authority of scripture. While there are many
problems with a proposed explanation of this kind, 115 one of them arises
from the diffi culty of knowing just what this claim means. What would it
mean to “hear” the “voice of God” when God is an incorporeal being who
does not “speak” in our everyday sense of that word? Precisely because this
claim is less than informative, it is easy for the believer to suggest it is true,
that what I am experiencing is indeed the Holy Spirit. (We might regard
this as a variant on Kitcher’s “spurious unifi cation” problem [3.2.3.1].)