In class today I described the cosmic fine-tuning version of the design argument and the standard “many universes” counter-hypothesis. I also described how each side can appeal to Ockham’s Razor (don’t complicate explanatory hypotheses more than necessary) as a tie-breaker. The problem with such appeals, I said, is that Ockham’s Razor can be wielded in different ways to different effect, leaving the outcome in this case somewhat ambiguous.<\/p>\n
Kurt raised the issue of intelligibility – do we really have enough of a grip on the idea of God, or of a transcendent Designer, for it to be a meaningful hypothesis? That’s a legitimate worry, one that a theist can only meet by articulating the idea of God in terms that we do have some grip on. Presumably we do have some understanding of notions like having power<\/span>, being a person<\/span>, goodness<\/span>, being knowledgeable and wise<\/span>, etc. for the theist to get started. Can the theist go far enough with this to meet the concern? I’ll leave that for you to decide or work out on your own.<\/p>\n I’d like to close with a worry that I have about the Many Universes Hypothesis (MUH). The concern is that this amounts to an illegitimate multiplication of our probabilistic resources. Why illegitimate? Because it’s ad hoc<\/span>. I don’t see that we have any independent<\/span> reasons, apart from the desire to avoid positing a cosmic Designer, for thinking that these universes exist. By hypothesis, these universes are causally isolated from our own, so there couldn’t in principle be any empirical evidence for their existence. The most we can say is that, for all we know, they could<\/span> exist. But I can say that much about pretty much anything, and that’s why I think there’s got to be independent justification of some kind for taking it seriously in this case. For example, if I come across a collected edition of Shakespeare’s writings I would explain it in terms of design. Alternatively, however, I could<\/span> hypothesize it as the result of a whole lot<\/span> of monkeys banging on word processors for a very long<\/span> time. Now, if I had some independent reason for thinking that there actually were so many monkeys with access to functional word processors over such a long time, I might take that hypothesis seriously. But I have no such reasons, so I dismiss it out of hand.<\/p>\n The questions I’d like to pose, then, are these: Are there any independent<\/span> reasons for thinking that MUH is true? And if not, then why is MUH worth taking seriously whereas the monkey hypothesis is not?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n Finally, I would like to observe that the adhocness <\/span>charge doesn’t count equally against theism because we have (or so it seems) several independent <\/span>reasons for thinking that a being like God exists (cosmological arguments, religious experience, etc.).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In class today I described the cosmic fine-tuning version of the design argument and the standard “many universes” counter-hypothesis. I also described how each side can appeal to Ockham’s Razor (don’t complicate explanatory hypotheses more than necessary) as a tie-breaker. The problem with such appeals, I said, is that Ockham’s Razor can be wielded in\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}