Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

What are Theistic Explanations? 43
fi rst posit the existence of a poltergeist and then attribute certain intentions
to him. I have distinguished these two tasks for the sake of clarity, for they
are distinct. But in practice they may be undertaken simultaneously. What
we posit is the existence of an agent having certain beliefs and desires. Both
claims stand or fall together.
You may feel some unease about Swinburne’s illustration. I do myself.
But this unease is not warranted by the structure of the explanation, which
seems to be legitimate. My unease, at least, arises from the nature of the
agent whose existence is being posited. For he is, ex hypothesi, an unembodied
personal agent, and we know of no other agents of this kind. This
fact will make us at least hesitate before we accept the proposed explanation.
Swinburne recognises the force of this objection; he simply attempts
to fi nd a way around it, when it comes to theism (7.2.2). But Swinburne is
surely right when he insists that the lack of an existing analogy does not,
by itself, rule out the proposed explanation. For the existence of an unembodied
agent may be simply a surprising fact about the world. (Given the
strangeness of, for example, quantum mechanics, it would not be the fi rst
surprising fact about the world we have had to stomach.) To what degree,
if at all, background knowledge impacts on our assessment of proposed
theistic explanations is a question to which I shall return (7.2).
3.2.3 Positing a Divine Intention
In the previous section, I argued that the theist has a double burden. He
must successfully posit both the existence of God and the existence of a particular
divine intention. Merely positing the existence of God is a necessary
but not suffi cient condition of a proposed theistic explanation, at least if
that explanation is to have any degree of content. If the proposed explanation
is to have any signifi cant degree of empirical content, then something
else is required, namely that we posit a particular divine intention.
3.2.3.1 Spurious Unifi cation
Let me develop this idea for a moment, taking as my starting point a remark
made by Philip Kitcher. Kitcher defends the idea that successful explanations
unify our knowledge, bringing disparate facts under the same pattern
of explanation. But he also speaks of the danger of what he calls “spurious
unifi cation.” The apparent unifi cation of our knowledge is spurious when
a pattern of explanation is offered that could embrace any state of affairs.
One of Kitcher’s examples is a proposed explanation that has what he calls
a theological pattern, which may be expressed as follows: 37
(1) God wants it to be the case that a.
(2) What God wants to be the case is the case.
(3) Therefore a