The September issue of Nous is out and it contains a discussion between Cory Juhl--we briefly mentioned our disapproval of his "Fine Tuning is not Surprising"--on whether there is a reasonable argument for a multiverse in the neighborhood.
I find this discussion much more interesting that the Find Tuning paper and I find myself mostly siding with Juhl this time--at least on proceedural issues of the Bayesian use of evidence. Leeds makes many fine points on procedural matters as well.
Also just out is the September issue of the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly and in it is the paper "Probabilistic arguments for multiple universes" by Draper, Draper, and Pust. It is more of a survey and a bit more open ended.
Both papers will be relevant to those interested in probabilistic versions of the fine-tuning argument and both papers yield some interesting insights on the nature of probability and evidence.
Here's the abstract for the latter paper:
Abstract: In this paper, we discuss three probabilistic arguments for the existence of multiple universes. First, we provide an analysis of total evidence and use that analysis to defend Roger White's "this universe" objection to a standard fine-tuning argument for multiple universes. Second, we explain why Rodney Holder's recent cosmological argument for multiple universes is unconvincing. Third, we develop a "Cartesian argument" for multiple universes. While this argument is not open to the objections previously noted, we show that, given certain highly plausible assumptions about evidence and epistemic probability, the proposition which it treats as evidence cannot coherently be regarded as evidence for anything. This raises the question of whether to reject the assumptions or accept that such a proposition cannot be evidence.
Also in the same edition of Nous, Roger White's "Does Origins of Life Research Rest on a Mistake?" is finally officially out. I don't see any changes from the version that's been circulating for a while. It queries the consistency of the following two propositions.
(3) The conviction that life did not arise largely by chance is treated as epistemically
prior to the development of alternative theories.
(4) The suggestion that the origin of life might be due to any kind of purposeful
agency is notconsider ed as a serious option, and does notpla y any explicit
role in theorizing.
He says,
What puzzles me is why, if appeals to intelligent agency are not on the table, we should be so reluctant to attribute the origin of life largely to chance. My purpose is to question a common approach to the subject of life’s origin. Very roughly, this approach consists in an aversion to appeals to chance in accounting for life’s origin prior to an evaluation of alternative hypotheses. I hope to make the issue clearer in the following sections. But let me be clear at the outseta boutt he aim and scope of this paper. Itis notm y purpose to evaluate specific scientific proposals on the origin of life. My discussion will be very abstract, not entering into any of the details of cutting edge research. The reason for this, as I hope will become clear, is that my concern is with an abstract epistemological question which arises prior to detailed investigation, and does not hinge on the details of research
Finally, even though this is a pretty random example--actually not random in the right way to constitute much evidence perhaps--it's interesting--to me at least--how much of the philosophy being done makes reference to philosophers who do philosophy of religion. So there is a paper replying to Ted Sider, who's argued against Hell, and a paper replying to John Hawthorne, who's defended the existence of God in print and questioned Atheism in print. There's also one on van Fraassen's Reflection Principle--van Fraassen being a serious Catholic and sometime critic of Higher Criticism (also his book The Empirical Stance has some very interesting philosophy of religion in it. And interestingly--again, probably only to me--that paper thanks Hawthorne, Hajek (who's argued vigorously (but unsuccessfully to my mind) against Pascal's Wager, and Tom Kelley (who's Catholic, but hasn't published any PR that I know of). And PPC has a response to Hazlett who I think is some kind of Christian and who has some papers on faith.
Now I certainly don't want to make too much of this, I mean, I'm not going to start looking for Bible codes or anything, but it does seem to me to be a small symptom of the growing place of philosophy of religion among mainstream philosophers.