Online research in philosophy

J. L. Schellenberg’s Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason claims that the existence of reflective persons who long to solve the problem of God’s existencebut cannot do so constitutes an evil rendering God’s existence improbable. In this essay, I present Schellenberg’s argument and argue that the kind of reasonable nonbelief Schellenberg needs for his argument to succeed is unlikely to exist. Since Schellenberg’s argument is an inductive-style version of the problem of evil, the empirical improbability of the premise I challenge renders the conclusions derived from it empirically improbable as well.

J. L. Schellenberg’s Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason claims that the existence of reflective persons who long to solve the problem of God’s existencebut cannot do so constitutes an evil rendering God’s existence improbable. In this essay, I present Schellenberg’s argument and argue that the kind of reasonable nonbelief Schellenberg needs for his argument to succeed is unlikely to exist. Since Schellenberg’s argument is an inductive-style version of the problem of evil, the empirical improbability of the premise I challenge renders the conclusions derived from it empirically improbable as well.

Since the mid-1970s, scholars have recognized that the skeptical interpretation of Hume’s central argument about induction is problematic. The science of human nature presupposes that inductive inference is justified and there are endorsements of induction throughout Treatise Book I. The recent suggestion that I.iii.6 is confined to the psychology of inductive inference cannot account for the epistemic flavor of its claims that neither a genuine demonstration nor a non-question-begging inductive argument can establish the uniformity principle. For Hume, that inductive inference is justified is part of the data to be explained. Bad argument is therefore excluded as the cause of inductive inference; and there is no good argument to cause it. Does this reinstate the problem of induction, undermining Hume’s own assumption that induction is justified? It does so only if justification must derive from “reason”, from the availability of a cogent argument. Hume rejects this internalist thesis; induction’s favorable epistemic status derives from features of custom, the mechanism that generates inductive beliefs. Hume is attracted to this externalist posture because it provides a direct explanation of the epistemic achievements of children and non-human animals—creatures that must rely on custom unsupplemented by argument.

Sceptical theists--e.g., William Alston and Michael Bergmann--have claimed that considerations concerning human cognitive limitations are alone sufficient to undermine evidential arguments from evil. We argue that, if the considerations deployed by sceptical theists are sufficient to undermine evidential arguments from evil, then those considerations are also sufficient to undermine inferences that play a crucial role in ordinary moral reasoning. If cogent, our argument suffices to discredit sceptical theist responses to evidential arguments from evil.

William Rowe's empirical argument from evil is designed to prove that God's existence is improbable based on the existence of gratuitous evil. One of the most significant objections to Rowe's argument is what William Alston has termed the Agnostic Thesis. The Agnostic Thesis claims that the human epistemic situation is such that we are unable to determine whether or not actual gratuitous evil exists. This paper takes issue with Rowe's response to the Agnostic Thesis. It is my contention that Rowe's defence of his argument misconstrues the sort of defeater-defeater the theist intends the Agnostic Thesis to be. When this misconstrual is exposed, the failure of Rowe's defence of his empirical argument from evil against the Agnostic Thesis becomes evident.

According to Popper and Miller [1983 and 1987], the part of a hypothesis that transcends the evidence is probablistically countersupported by the evidence. Therefore, inductive support is not probabilistic support. Their argument hinges on imposing the following necessary condition on ‘the part of a hypothesis h that goes beyond the evidence e’: that transcendent part, called k, must share no nontrivial consequences with e. I propose a new condition on k that is incompatible with Popper and Miller's condition. I then show why the new condition is a viable alternative to Popper and Miller's. By doing so, I refute their argument that probabilistic support cannot be inductive. *I'd like to thank Michael Redhead. Jeremy Butterfield. and an anonymous referee for comments on earlier drafts. Thanks especially to David Miller for insightful criticisms. Adopted from work done in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. University of Cambridge. 1989.

An argument, different from the Newman objection, against the view that the cognitive content of a theory is exhausted by its Ramsey sentence is reviewed. The crux of the argument is that Ramsification may ruin inductive systematization between theory and observation. The argument also has some implications concerning the issue of underdetermination.

One of the primary tools in the theist’s defense against “noseeum” arguments from evil is an epistemic principle concerning the Conditions Of ReasoNableEpistemic Access (CORNEA) which places an important restriction on what counts as evidence. However, CORNEA is false because it places too strong acondition on what counts as inductive evidence. If CORNEA is true, we lack evidence for a great many of our inductive beliefs. This is because CORNEA amounts to a sensitivity constraint on evidence, and inductive evidence is often insensitive. So unless a theist is also an inductive skeptic, she must abandon CORNEA in responding to this sort of argument from evil.

Recent responses to evidential formulations of the argument from evil have emphasized the possible limitations on human cognitive access to the goods and evils that might be connected with various wordly states of affairs. This emphasis, I argue, is a twin-edged sword, as it imperils a popular form of natural theology. I conclude by arguing that the popularity enjoyed by Reformed Epistemology does not detract from the significance of this result, since Reformed Epistemology is not inimical to natural theology, and Reformists themselves concede the usefulness of theistic proofs.