God in the Age of Science?: A Critique of Religious Reason by Herman Philipse

Author:Herman Philipse [Philipse, Herman]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

Part III

THE PROBABILITY OF THEISM

11

Ultimate Explanation and Prior Probability

The belief that God exists is justified, I argued in Part I, to the extent that its truth can be established by appealing to evidence which is public, at least in part. Adopting a religious belief on the basis of a revelation, of divine grace, or at the internal instigation of a holy spirit, is not reasonable for conscientious believers unless it is supported by natural theology. Furthermore, in our scientific age natural theology has to apply a methodology sufficiently similar to that of the empirical sciences in order to be credible, and to meet the standards of rationality5 as defined in Chapter 5. These results imply that bare theism (the thesis that God in fact exists) has to be interpreted as an existential hypothesis or explanatory theory, which should be confirmable by empirical evidence. Whereas this interpretation of theism may represent a minority position among contemporary religious believers, prominent Christian philosophers of religion such as Richard Swinburne rightly defend it.

In Part II it became clear that the interpretation of theism as a theory is confronted by a number of serious problems. Let us suppose for the sake of argument, however, that theists are able to solve these problems, at least to the extent that bare theism turns out to be a meaningful and coherent theory with some predictive power. Let us also require that theists succeed in avoiding the risk of God-of-the-gaps. Then we should wonder how probable it is that bare theism is true, given the total permitted evidence for and against it. The objective of Part III is to find the correct answer to this hypothetical question. In the present chapter, I raise a number of preliminary conceptual issues.

Theism is often presented as a particularly satisfying explanation of the universe as a whole and of man, because it is an ultimate one. But to what extent is this really the case in the sense of ‘ultimate’ as defined by theists? Furthermore, how should we analyse the logic of confirmation and disconfirmation of explanatory hypotheses? Many philosophers of science use the theorem of Bayes in order to formalize this logic, but it will become clear that the argumentative strategy adopted by theists will work only if they apply the theorem in a disputable manner.

Finally, confronted with the problem of under-determination, theists may want to argue that irrespective of empirical (dis)confirmations, theism is more likely to be true than infinitely many conceivable rivals, which explain equally well the same set of empirical data. Theists such as Richard Swinburne hold that the criterion of simplicity is decisive in determining this prior probability of theism, because simplex veri sigillum (simplicity is the seal of truth), and they rule out other criteria, such as fit with empirical background knowledge. But can the criterion of fit with background knowledge be eliminated? How does the criterion of simplicity relate to other criteria, such as the scope of a theory? And is the criterion of simplicity, as

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