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To My Critics with Appreciation Responses to Taliaferro, Swinburne, and Koons PHILOSOPHIA CHRISTI VOL. 8, NO. 2 © 2006 To My Critics with Appreciation Responses to Taliaferro, Swinburne, and Koons JORDAN HOWARD SOBEL Department of Philosophy University of Toronto R. Douglas Geivett organized a session of the Philosophy of Religion Group at the meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in San Francisco in March 2005 in which he, Robert Koons, Richard Swinburne, and Charles Taliaferro commented on Logic and Theism: Arguments For and Against Beliefs in God.1 I am grateful for their interest and the resourceful attention they have paid to the book. What fol- low are tokens of my appreciation in responses to scripts of comments I then had in hand.2 Each response revises and substantially elaborates scripts on which my responses in San Francisco were based. On Explanations of the Cosmos, Cumulative Arguments, and God as a Necessary Being 1. “Sufficient-Reason” Arguments Of explanations of the cosmos that would satisfy several “principles of sufficient reason,”3 Charles Taliaferro agrees, I think, that they must run in 1. Jordan Howard Sobel, Logic and Theism: Arguments For and Against Beliefs in God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 2. I am sorry that I did not respond to Geivett’s comments in San Francisco, and that I can- not respond now. I remember that they were interesting and well-presented, but I do not remem- ber what they were! Also, I have not had time to attend to new material in current scripts of comments by Koons and Taliaferro provided by the editor. For the reader’s ease, in this article most references to Richard Swinburne, “Sobel on Arguments from Design,” and Robert Koons, “Sobel on Gödel’s Ontological Argument,” are to the articles in Philosophia Christi 8 (2006): 227–34 and 235–47, respectively. In cases where those articles differ from the remarks present- ed in March 2005, the reference is to those earlier versions. 3. Namely, Leibnizian principles that would call for complete explanations of the existence and of every detail of the cosmos, and be final explanations “with which one can stop,” and so be noncircular explanations than ran “in the end” entirely in terms of necessities. cf. Principles 249 250 PHILOSOPHIA CHRISTI terms of thoroughly necessary reasons that make the cosmos necessary. “[T]he best move for the theist,” he says—the best move in response to this problem of necessity, I assume he means—“rests on articulating and defend- ing the coherence of God as a necessarily existing being, but not as a being all of whose actions are necessary.”4 A contingent cosmos, he suggests, could be due to such a being. Perhaps, but if so, it seems that it could be due as well to a similar being who did not exist of necessity, in which case it seems that a best move for the theist who would respond to the problem of demanding principles of sufficient reason would be to frame a less demanding principle of reason that can be satisfied for contingencies by capable contingently existing beings. This move would allow him to leave the problem of the sense of a necessary being whose actions are not all necessary for another day. I return to these things in section 4. 2. Cumulative Arguments for Theism and Atheism5 Taliaferro says that his “preferred approach . involves building a cumulative case on one side or the other” for theism or atheism. He writes, “I prefer running a version of the cosmological argument along with a design argument, and [an] argument from miracles,” and, I think he might add, ver- sions of moral arguments, as well as arguments from common consent and religious experience, and perhaps versions of ontological arguments. It is, however, difficult to see the logic of a cumulative case built from such a mixed lot of deductive and inductive arguments. 2.1. The idea of cumulative case-building comes up in the philosophy of reli- gion. Sometimes it may amount to the common sense that every intelligent voice for and against should be given a hearing before one makes up one’s mind on the important issue of this philosophy. More often, at least of late, it means cumulative nondeductive reasoning of some kind in which originally deductive arguments are mined for evidence for and against. The logic intended for this cumulative reasoning is sometimes suspect. Thus Loren Meierding writes: 7 and 8 of Leibniz’s Principles of Nature and Grace (2nd ed., trans. and ed. Leroy E. Loemker [Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976], 638–9), and Sobel, Logic and Theism, sections 3.3 and 3.4, chap- ter 5. 4. Charles Taliaferro, “Cumulative Argument, Sustaining Causes, and Miracles,” paper pre- sented at the 79th annual meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, San Francisco, March 23, 2005. Cf. Taliaferro, “Cumulative Argument, Sustaining Causes, and Miracles,” Philosophia Christi 8 (2006): 219–26. 5. This section draws from the revised appendix to chapter 7 of Logic and Theism that is linked to from the Web page, “On Logic and Theism,” http://www.scar.utoronto.ca/~sobel/OnL_T. JORDAN HOWARD SOBEL 251 With the exception of the ontological argument, arguments for God’s existence are essentially inductive arguments claiming that belief in God is justified based on various kinds of available evidence. [The evidence of the Consensus Gentium argument] may, when combined with other evidence . provide sufficient support for rational belief in God’s existence. With the addition of the evidence of common consent to other available evidence, the scale may be tipped in the favour of theism.6 Relevant to this text is that Meierding claims in his article only that the evidence of the argument he discusses “provide[s] support for God’s exis- tence.”7 He claims only that this evidence incrementally confirms the exis- tence of God, P(God exists|the evidence of common consent) > P(God exists), not that it alone absolutely confirms the existence of God, P(God exists) > 1/2. He is not in a position to make this claim since he neither argues nor assumes a value for the “prior probability” of theism. John Earman (somewhat sur- prisingly) writes similarly of cumulative confirmation, namely: Mere incremental confirmation may not be what theists want for their doctrines, but it is a start. And once the start is made, there does not seem to be any principled road block to achieving a substantial degree of confirmation. For example, testimonies to a number of New Testament miracles can each give bits of incremental confirmation to [some tenet . of Christianity] that together add up to substantial con- firmation. Or the evidence of miracles can combine with the evidence of prophecy and design to provide grounds for the credibility, or even moral certainty of religious doctrines.8 There is double-trouble for the cumulative logic implicit in Meierding’s text, and nearly explicit in Earman’s. For one thing, incremental confirma- tions do not necessarily “accumulate”: it is not a valid principle that, ([P(h|e) > P(h)] & [P(h|e') > P(h)]) → (P[h|(e&e')] > P(h)): confirming evidence for a hypothesis when combined into one “body of evi- dence” can disconfirm it.9 Wesley Salmon tells a story of radioactive decay to make the point that 6. Loren Meierding, “The Consensus Gentium Argument,” Faith and Philosophy 15 (1998): 272–3. 7. Ibid., 291. 8. John Earman, Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument against Miracles (Oxford, University Press, 2000), 66–7. 9. Suppose, for a false instance, that a fair die has been cast, and that I have no idea which number came up. Assume the abbreviations, A: either 1 or 3 came up; B: either 1 or 2 came up; C: either 2 or 3, and observe that the conjunction (B&C) entails ~A. It can be seen that 252 PHILOSOPHIA CHRISTI [e]ven if each set of measurements [of different dimensions of an experimental result] confirms [an] hypothesis . [that] the conjunc- tion of the findings . confirm[s] the hypothesis . does not follow automatically. [Whether this conjunction confirms it] depends on more circumstances, including . that the conjunction itself is one of the predictions of the theory. there are broad and basic questions about the legitimacy of . accumulation of many confirming test results.10 For a second, and if anything more serious trouble for the logic suggest- ed by Meierding’s and Earman’s words, even if there is a valid restricted principle for accumulating confirmations and disconfirmations that legiti- mates the accumulation of various theistic confirmations and disconfirma- tions into a cumulative incremental confirmation (or disconfirmation), P(theism|cumulated evidence) > P(theism) [or <] that is not yet the result envisioned in their texts of absolute confirmation of theism (or atheism), that is, of the credibility, if not the moral certainty of the- ism (or atheism), P(theism) > 1/2 [or <]. 2.2. So much for bad cumulative logic. Richard Swinburne has me helped me to see that— given the objective character of his probabilities—he has a perfectly sound way of, in the first stage of his argument, accumulating incremental confirmations and disconfirmations of his theism on parts of one’s evidence to reach an “input” for the second stage of his argument, which is a Bayesian assessment that, taking into account “initial priors,” can yield an absolute confirmation or disconfirmation of this hypothesis on evi- dence (potential or “in hand”) taken all together. In the first accumulation stage the “background information” for the assessment of the bearing of a piece of evidence is all previous considered evidence.11 With k “tautological evidence,” and en the evidence of chapter number n (7: the existence of the world; 8: order in the world; 9: matters of consciousness and morality; 10: provisions for opportunities for us to do good; 11: evil; 12: history and mir- acles) he maintains that, [P(A|B) > P(A)] & [P(A|C) > P(A)] → (P[A|(B&C)] > P(A)) 1/2 1/3 1/2 1/3 0 1/3 TT T F F Confirming evidence B and C for A, when combined, disconfirms: P[A|(B&C)] = 0 < 1/3 = P(A).
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