Victor Reppert on the No Evidence Charge

My own response to the "no evidence" charge is, I think pretty well known, and it goes like this: 

We first have to define what evidence is. 

I understand evidence in Bayesian terms. For me, X is evidence for Y just in case X is more likely to exist given Y than given not-Y. By this definition, something can have evidence for it and be false. 

There is a whole boatload of stuff that look to me to be a LOT more likely to exist if God exists than if God does not exist. Some of it's in the Bible, most of it isn't. 

Here's a short list: 

1) The fact that we can reason about the world. The fact that it is even possible to go from evidence to a conclusion. If this isn't possible, then science isn't even possible. But that implies that our acts of reasoning are governed by the laws of logic, as opposed to the laws of physics. But naturalism says the laws of physics govern everything, and the laws of logic are superfluous as an explanation for any event in the universe. 
2) That there are stable laws of nature, so that the distant past resembles the recent past. It's easy to imagine an atheistic world with no stability at all, where the laws keep changing for no reason. Why is that not the actual world? 
3) The we have just the right cosmic constants for life to emerge. 
4) That DNA allows for gradual change, as opposed to being completely static or so radically changeable that it is completely unpredictable. 
5) That monotheism arose against all odds in a polytheistic world in a country that hardly qualifies as a world superpower, and that it persisted in spite of the efforts of the superpowers like Assyria, Babylon, the Seleucids, and the Romans, to get it to assimilate into a polytheistic culture. 
6) That the disciples of Jesus got in the faces of those responsible for Jesus's crucifixion and told them that the Jesus they crucified was Lord and God, and lived to tell the tale and found Christianity. (If they killed Jesus, they can kill you too). 
7) That archaeology has discovered that if Luke was writing a story about the founding of Christianity, it wrote it in such a way that the "research" for his "fictional" story was corroborated centuries later by archaeology, "research" that would have required him to know all sorts of detail from Jerusalem to Malta at just the right time in the first century. 
8) That Christianity became the dominant religion of an empire in spite of getting no help, and intermittent persecution, from the political leaders of that empire, for nearly three centuries.

I can understand concluding, at the end of the day, that this evidence is outweighed by the evidence for atheism. What is beyond my comprehension is the idea that this somehow isn't evidence AT ALL. Repeating "God of the Gaps" fifty times is not a response. 

The Firing Squad Argument and fine-tuning

Defended against Elliott Sober, here.

The fine-tuning argument

This is presented here. Interesting quote:

Analogically, the fact of the fine-tuned universe means the universe is life-allowing rather than life-prohibiting. This is very imporbable on atheism. This is not improbable on theism.


The main atheist objection to this is: multiverse theory. “If there is only one universe,” British cosmologist Bernard Carr says, “you might have to have a fine-tuner. If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse.” (Discover, December 2008)

Another of Veale's Replies to ECREE, and a question for multiverse defenders

Here.   I would like to ask someone who believes

1) That extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

and

2) The apparent fine-tuning of the universe can be explained in terms of a multiverse as opposed to God

how in the world they reconcile those two commitments. A few years ago, I did a couple of posts entitled "Arguments that don't mix," and it seems to me to be pretty evident that this pair of responses belongs to that category. Why are we told that the existence of a multiverse is NOT a claim that requires extraordinary evidence, but the existence of a universe finely tuned for intelligent life, or that Jesus rose from the dead, does require extraordinary evidence.

Sudduth Defense the Fine-Tuning Argument

Against the fine-tuning argument: Theodore Drange

A Robin Collins paper on design.

The real issue: More arguments that don't mix

I think the discussion in the last post picked up on a soft target in Ross's discussion that is tangential to the issue I wanted to bring up.

Yes, I do have a problem with him saying that if there is an intelligent cause of the universe, it has to be the God of the Bible. I suppose the Allah of the Qu'ran would be equally unacceptable to philosophical naturalists, but would also be unacceptable to Christians like Ross. But this is not the point I wanted to make. The point I wanted to make was to question whether someone could, at one and the same time, accept the multiverse hypothesis as a response to the fine-tuning argument, and at one and the same time think that atheism is to be preferred to theism on the basis of parsimony. That just seems really implausible to me.

The Multiverse Hypothesis

The weight of evidence for a divinely designed universe is now so overwhelming that it has forced astronomers and philosophers who reject the God of the Bible as the Author of the cosmos to propose the existence of an infinite number of universes. - Hugh Ross

Well, there goes parsimony!

Robin Collins on fine-tuning

This is a link to work by Robin Collins, probably the leading defender of the fine-tuning argument today.

http://home.messiah.edu/~rcollins/ft.htm

Some discussion of the fine-tuning argument for theism

This is a discussion of the fine-tuning argument for theism, which is William Lane Craig's second argument in his debate with Douglas Jesseph