After reading the Swinburne Dennett exchange in Prospect Magazine, I browsed the other debates and found one from May 1998 between some guy named Nicholas Beale and Colin Howson of Howson and Urbach's magisterial _Scientific Reasoning_. Unfortunately it wasn't available online without a subscription so I had my library get it for me. I'd post the PDF but it's just too lame to bother. [OK, I ended up saying more than I thought I would so here's the article.]
I'd never heard of Beale but I thought it would be fascinating to see what Howson had to say in response to fine tuning arguments, having had something to say about that myself (with Ted). As it turns out Beale is incredibly amateurish in his gambit, it's embarrassing really. I think he mentions some good evidence but I've rarely seen it used more incompetently, though he comes off better on defense. At any rate here are some observations I found interesting (some surprising some not).
*He describes himself as a "simplicity skeptic" (Nay!)
*Says lilkihoods are no good on their own. (Yay!)
*Says that morality is not objective and most philosophers believe this. (Nay!)
*Says that theism makes no detailed predictions about the universe. [Similarly to Sober, but a bit different view it seems.]
*Says no physicist he knows thinks quantum theory is true. (Yay!)
*Says there is little evidence that the world is comprehensible. (Nay!)
*Prefers societies which do not torture babies to those which do. (Um, Yay?)
*Thinks the "resurrection myth" was encouraged by its "propaganda value". (Nay!)
*Says the Bible contradicts itself. (Yay! No wait, Nay!)
*Says that Jesus was not a great moral teacher. [Russell's reason: he taught Hell]
*Says the probability of theism given evil is zero.
More below the fold.
The first real interaction comes on the argument from comprehensibility. Beale says that naturalism cannot explain why we have the complex mathematical abilities we have sense they go far beyond what is required for survival. Howson responds that
it is known that mathematics can be developed within a conceptual system consisting only of general logic and the relation "x is a member of y"and adds that classificatory ability was adaptive. Two comments: it sure seems like it could be adaptive, but we don't know whether it was. I'm not doubting that it seems clearly adaptive it's just that I'm so bloody weary of just-so stories about adaptiveness (but I tend to make them!). If by general logic he means first order logic, then other than Crispin Wright I'm not sure who would agree with that. Maybe you can get arithmetic but I'm not sure you can get all that Howson seems to imply.
I do think Beale rightly responds that theism need not make detailed predictions to be an acceptable hypothesis. It is, after all, a theory of everything. Consider an alternative theory: That the universe exists because it is metaphysically necessary that there exist a physical universe. I think there are atheists who hold this and it does entail the data, though it doesn't generate the kind of detailed predictions that Howson and Sober seem to want. I wouldn't reject it for that reason. Furthermore, consider the hypothesis that the laws of physics are metaphysically necessary as well as are the initial conditions of the universe. This hypothesis generates all the detailed predictions you want, but I wouldn't believe it for an instant. So it seems to me that detailed predictions are just quite beside the point. Like Swinburne, I think it all comes down to the epistemic role of simplicity which I've recently discussed here.
Howson does describe himself as an agnostic rather than an atheist, but he repeatedly says the probability of theism on the evidence is zero. The low point for Howson is that his Jesus scholarship seems to be limited to the inevitable Life magazine articles we can expect to begin seeing soon when they do their obligatory Easter cover.
On making predictions, I think what we want is whether one of two theories is more reasonable given the evidence, not which theory makes the evidence more likely the necessary universe explanation clearly makes the evidence more likely, but that doesn't mean the evidence makes the necessary universe more likely. So isn't the call for predictions getting things backwards?
'Beale says that naturalism cannot explain why we have the complex mathematical abilities we have sense they go far beyond what is required for survival.'
Well, I think that I , rather than God, are responsible for at least some people having some mathematical abilities.
Other maths teachers are also partly responsible....
Am I doing something supernatural in teaching children what 10 percent of 150 is?
What exactly is Beale's point? I don't understand.
Can naturalism explain how a seal can balance a ball on its nose - an ability which has very little to do with survival in a seal's natural habitat?
What should we make of creatures having abilities which are not immediately necessary for survival?
Jeremy, what notion of reasonableness do you have in mind here. There are plausibility theorists, but somehow I don't think that's what you have in mind.
I didn't have anything particular in mind, just that reasonableness has to involve something more (or perhaps wholly other) than which view will best predict the evidence, as the necessary universe case shows. I'm not sure I was trying to say any more than what you said, just putting in more popular-speak.
Well, I do think good explanations should lead us to expect the data. I think that's constitutive of the concept of explanation. But I also think we have no epistemic right to infer anything beyond what is necessary to cover the data. The necessary universe hypothesis posits a vast number of highly specific brute facts whereas the theistic hypothesis postulates one entity of the simplest kind with a single property held in the simplest way. Thus I think we would be unjustified in adopting the necessary universe hypotheses *even though* it has going for it that it leads us to expect the observational data. That's a good-making feature of an explanation. I take it seriously as a proposed explanation.
Hi Trent. I'm sorry you didn't think much of my arguments - but FWIW the summary of my positions is so muddled, with so many just plain wrong, that I wonder if you have understood the arguments. In response to Steve, the point is the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" ably expressed by Polkinghorne, Einstein & others.