Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

Potential Theistic Explanations 81
abilities of human designers. 7 Perhaps we could identify the designed products
even of extraterrestrial intelligent beings, on the assumption that they
are the products of an evolutionary process similar to that which produced
us. The problem is that the less similarity there is between a purported
designer and ourselves, the less confi dent we can be in specifying how he
might be expected to act. When it comes to God, who of all designers
surely resembles us the least, we are entirely in the dark. This inability to
specify how a putative designer might be expected to act is, Sober argues,
“the Achilles’ heel of the design argument.” 8 Is there a way of avoiding
this sceptical conclusion? Well, Sober notes, the theist may be tempted to
argue that we do know what God intended. We can discover his intention
by inspecting the products of his design, namely what we see around us. 9
But of course this merely begs the question, which is whether what we see
around us is the product of divine design. Or theists might argue that
if the existence of the vertebrate eye is what one wishes to explain,
their hypothesis is that the intelligent designer constructed the vertebrate
eye. If it is the characteris tics of the vertebrate eye (the fact
that it has features F 1 , F 2 , . . . F n ), rather than its mere existence, that
one wants to explain their hypothesis is that an intelligent designer
constructed the vertebrate eye with the intention that it have features
F 1 , F 2 , . . . F n and that this designer had the ability to bring his plans
to fruition. 10
But this reasoning is empty, since it would enable the proposition God created
it to “explain” anything at all. More precisely, such reasoning merely
builds into the theistic hypothesis “the observations we seek to explain.” 11
For this reason, I would add, it would be another case of what Philip Kitcher
calls “spurious unifi cation” (3.2.3.1). 12
Sober’s view seems to be that this is a kind of in principle objection.
However, I have already described it as a de facto one (2.2.1). The following
argument does constitute a potential explanation of E.
(1) God wills E.
(2) Whatever God wills comes to pass.
(3) Therefore E.
For it does correspond to the second premise of Peirce’s schema (2.1.2). The
problem is that it does so in an almost trivial fashion, which is little more
than a restatement of E. And it is a potential explanation we have good
reason not to accept, since it would be untestable (7.1). Sober does concede
that the theist could keep postulating divine goal-ability pairs until she
fi nds one which does explain the world as we see it. But, he argues, one
cannot simply invent such auxiliary hypotheses at will. They need to be
independently testable and, ideally, to have passed independent tests. 13