Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

Notes 169
James Maclaurin has reminded me, is an intuitive procedure, but its reliability
is certainly testable. But let me leave that issue aside.
55. Brauer, Forrest, and Gey, “Is it Science Yet?” 53.
56. Rae, History and Hermeneutics, 104–5.
57. Barth, Church Dogmatics §19.2 (535).
58. Dawes, Historical Jesus Question, 241–47.
59. Dawes, “Religious Studies, Faith, and the Presumption of Naturalism,”
§22.
60. Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction, §1 (6–7), §43 (382).
61. Hardy, “Indian Mathematician Ramanujan,” 139.
62. Brauer, Forrest, and Gey, “Is it Science Yet?” 58.
63. Kitcher, Abusing Science, 155.
64. Ibid., 125.
65. Shanks, God, the Devil, and Darwin, 141.
66. Ibid., 145.
67. Ibid., 148.
68. Earman, Hume’s Abject Failure, 3. This is Earman’s description of what
Hume is trying to do with regard to miracles. As the title of his book suggests,
he believes that Hume failed.
69. Darwin, Origin of Species, Chap. 14 (453); for a similar comments, see Chap.
6 (217).
70. Darwin, “Essay on Theology and Natural Selection,” 417–18.
71. Huxley, “Origin of Species,” 282. With regard to historical accuracy, we
need to be cautious about interpreting such remarks. By Huxley’s day, the
religious explanations on offer consisted of little more than pious allusions
to some unspecifi ed divine activity, since it was no longer possible for an
educated person to take literally the Genesis story of creation. (See Knight,
“Context of Creationism,” 41.) So what Darwin and Huxley were dismissing
were not merely religious explanations, but religious explanations that
lacked empirical content. I shall come back to the question of empirical content
shortly (3.2.3).
72. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 141.
73. Ibid. Graham Oppy (“Hume,” 523) suggests that Dawkins’s argument is the
same as that which David Hume puts into the mouth of Philo (“Dialogues”,
iv [65–66]). However, Philo’s argument is a little more sophisticated. It suggests
that the theistic hypothesis is unsatisfactory because it is neither simpler
nor more general than the explanandum (the fact to be explained), simplicity
and generality being regarded as explanatory virtues. (See also Hume,
Enquiry, 4.1 §26 [30].)
74. Lawson and McCauley, Rethinking Religion, 165.
75. Ibid., 156.
76. Pennock, Tower of Babel, 195; see also ibid., 289–92.
77. Ibid.
78. Flew and MacIntyre, New Essays, 96–130; cf. Atran, In Gods We Trust,
91–93.
79. Notturno and McHugh, “Is Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory Really Falsifi -
able?” 308.
80. As Elliot Sober notes (“Design Argument,” 42), some critics of religious
explanations suggest both that religious explanations are unfalsifi able and
that they have been shown to be false. But this is merely an attempt to have
one’s cake and eat it, too.
81. This is, notoriously, Archbishop Ussher’s dating, in a work published in 1650
(McCalla, The Creationist Debate, 33).