Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

178 Notes
43. Swinburne, Existence of God, 165, 185.
44. Shanks, God, the Devil, and Darwin, 219.
45. Hume, “Enquiry,” §90 (114). His fuller defi nition is, “a transgression of a
law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of
some invisible agent” (ibid., 115 n. 1).
46. An assumption that is (as I noted earlier) no longer uncontested (Steinhardt
and Turok, “A Cyclic Model of the Universe,” 1436–39).
47. You might argue, as does William Lane Craig (in Craig and Smith, Theism,
Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, 231), that a natural explanation
of the beginning of the universe violates the principle ex nihilo nihil fi t. But,
as Craig recognises, this is a metaphysical principle rather than a law of
nature.
48. Craig, “Problem of Miracles,” 29.
49. Quentin Smith (“The Reason the Universe Exists,” 579–86) argues that the
universe could have caused itself to begin to exist. I am not (yet) convinced,
but I shall not address his arguments here.
50. Smith, “Historical Method,” 7.
51. Pennock, Tower of Babel, 194–5.
52. Strauss, The Life of Jesus, §14 (79).
53. You might, for instance, expect such a being to create the world, as he wanted
it to be, by a single divine act, merely by willing it into existence. But you
might not expect that such a world would require his ongoing miraculous
intervention. (On the latter point, see Quentin Smith’s argument in Craig and
Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, 202–6.)
54. It is true that Hume’s argument applies primarily to historical reports of
miracles, but I take it to be applicable even to those events which we witness
fi rst-hand.
55. Hume, “Enquiry,” §86 (110).
56. Ibid., §90 (115).
57. Earman, “Bayes, Hume, and Miracles,” 297.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 5
1. Earman, Hume’s Abject Failure, 3.
2. Hume, “Dialogues,” xi (107).
3. Hume, “Enquiry,” §57 (72).
4. Sober, “Design Argument,” 28–29.
5. See, for instance, Dembski, “Obsessively Criticized,” Section 4.
6. Sober, “Design Argument,” 38.
7. Sober, “Testability,” 64; “Design Argument,” 39.
8. Sober, “Design Argument,” 38.
9. Sober, “Testability,” 65.
10. Sober, “Probability Reasoning,” 75.
11. Ibid. .
12. Kitcher, “Explanatory Unifi cation,” 528.
13. Sober, “Testability,” 65; “Intelligent Design,” 76; “Design Argument,”
41–42.
14. This is not identical with the criterion of independent specifi cation sometimes
employed in discussions of causation—the idea that “A cannot be regarded as
a cause of B unless A can be specifi ed in some way that does not mention B”
(Pears, “Desires as Causes,” 86). As David Pears argues (ibid., 86–87), this
principle is far from fi rmly established. But it is a different principle from the
one I am defending here.