Probability Theories and the Justification of Theism

The past few years have witnessed a remarkable resurgence of interest in the intersection of formal methodology and epistemological theory, manifested in the organization of various conferences and the publication of numerous edited volumes. It is our opinion that this trend is likely to have a profound and positive impact on philosophical research, and will do so beyond the confines of epistemology proper, as recent developments in formal epistemology are brought to bear on relevant debates in further philosophical sub-disciplines.

Manuscrito, 2021

In this article I expound some of the main criticisms by David Hume and Immanuel Kant against the legitimacy of natural theology, the philosophical activity of presenting arguments for or against the existence of God. The aim is not to contribute to the scholarship in history of philosophy, but as a starting point for describing the main lines of Richard Swinburne's approach to natural theology in terms of inductive probabilistic arguments. His proposal has been part of a current philosophical movement of reestablishing the argumentative debate on the existence and nature of God, an area that has been growing in quantity and quality since the 1970's.

Fundamento, 2013

St. Paul famously claimed that pagans who did not worship God were 'without excuse' , because 'ever since the creation of the world [God's] eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things which he has made. ' 1 Inspired by this text, many Christian thinkers from the second to the eighteenth centuries put forward arguments from premises 'evident to the senses' to the existence of God. One form of that tradition attempts to produce deductively valid arguments. It is a not unreasonable interpretation of Aquinas's Summa Theologiae 1.2.3., that he sought to give five such arguments there. But the enterprise of producing deductive arguments is, I think, an enterprise doomed to failure. For if it could be achieved, then a proposition which was a conjunction of the evident premises together with 'there is no God' would be incoherent, would involve self-contradiction. But again propositions such as 'there is a Universe, but there is no God' , though perhaps false, seem fairly evidently coherent.

Faith and Philosophy, 1993

The logical treatment of the nature of religious belief (here I will concentrate on belief in Christianity) has been distorted by the acceptance of a false dilemma. On the one hand, many (e.g., Braithwaite, Hare) have placed the significance of religious belief entirely outside the realm of intellectual cognition. According to this view, religious statements do not express factual propositions: they are not made true or false by the ways things are. Religious belief consists in a certain attitude toward the world, life, or other human beings, or in what sorts of things one values. On the other hand, others (such as Swinburne, 1981, Chapers 1 and 4) have taken religious belief to include (at least) being certain of the truth of particular factual religious propositions. The strength of a person's religious belief is identified with his degree of confidence in the truth of those propositions, measured by the "subjective probability" which those propositions have for that person. I propose a third alternative, according to which, (1) contrary to the first view, religious belief does involve a relation to factual religious propositions, such as that God exists, that Jesus was God and man, etc., --propositions which are made true or false by the way things actually are --but, (2) contrary to the second view, the strength of religious belief is measured, not by the degree of one's confidence 1 in the truth of these propositions, but rather by the way in which the value or desirability to oneself of the various ways the world could be is affected by their including or not including the truth of these religious propositions. Thus, religious belief does consist in what one values or prizes, not in what one takes to be probably true, and yet this does not deprive the distinctive propositions of theology of their factual significance. This third alternative was articulated by Kierkegaard, most explicitly in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript. (Kierkegaard, 1944) I will defend this Kierkegaardian view by means of two mathematical tools developed in the twentieth century: decision theory, originating in the work of Frank Ramsey in the 30's, and the theory of hyper-real

Faith and Philosophy, 1987

Although the doctrines of theism are rich enough to support a distinctively theistic conception of probability, historically there has been little discussion of probability from a theistic perspective. In this article I investigate how a theist might view epistemic probability. A unique conception of probability naturally follows from ideas central to theism, and it is argued that this conception of probability avoids many problems associated with other interpretations of probability.

Sophia, 2017

In my 2013 article ‘A Refutation of Skeptical Theism,’ I argued that observing seemingly unjustified evils (SUEs) always reduces the probability of God’s existence. When figuring the relevant probabilities, I used a basic probability calculus that simply distributes the probability of falsified hypotheses equally. In 2015, Timothy Perrine argued that, since Bayes Theorem doesn’t always equally distribute the probability of falsified hypotheses, my argument is undermined unless I can also show that my thesis follows on a Bayesian analysis. It is the purpose of this paper to meet that burden.

Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry, 2021

READ THE ARTICLE HERE: https://doi.org/10.33929/sherm.2021.vol3.no1.04 Bayes' Theorem is a simple mathematical equation that can model every empirical argument. Accordingly, once understood it can be used to analyze, criticize, or improve any argument in matters of fact. By extension, it can substantially improve an overall argument for atheism (here meaning the belief that supernatural gods probably do not exist) by revealing that god apologetics generally operates through the omission of evidence, and how every argument for there being a god becomes an argument against there being a god once you reintroduce all the pertinent evidence that the original argument left out. This revelation further reveals that god apologetics generally operates through the omission of evidence. This paper demonstrates these propositions by illustrating their application with examples.

Sophia 52 (3):425-445 (2013)

Skeptical theists argue that no seemingly unjustified evil (SUE) could ever lower the probability of God's existence at all. Why? Because there might be undetectable justifying reasons (JuffREs) for allowing any evil that seems unjustified. However, they are unclear regarding whether or not God's existence is relevant to the existence of JuffREs, and whether or not God's existence is relevant to their detectability. But I will argue that, no matter how the skeptical theist answers these questions, it is undeniable that the skeptical theist is wrong; SUEs lower the probability of God's existence. To establish this I will consider the four scenarios regarding the relevance of God's existence to the existence and detectability of JuffREs, and show that in each—after we establish our initial probabilities, and then update them given the evidence of SUE—the probability of God's existence drops.

Analysis, 2017

2013

It has been claimed by some in creationist circles that modern physics is derived from a priori atheistic reductionistic presuppositions. On the contrary, it is claimed in this paper that it is possible to construct a Christian theistic interpretation of the experimental facts which is consistent with the Biblical doctrines of man, creation, revelation, and God. This reconciliation is derived by the correct method which subordinates "scientific" interpretation to the authority of special revelation. It is also demonstrated that some of the presuppositions and arguments of creationists against theories such as quantum mechanics and relativity actually exhibit anti-theistic philosophies (Thomism and Arminianism) or fundamental misunderstandings of these theories. A Christian theistic view of the phenomena and theories of moderr physics is presented.