Abstract
Due to the logical relations between theism and intelligent design (id), there are two challenges to theism that also apply to id. In the falsifiability challenge, it is charged that theism is compatible with every observation statement and thus asserts nothing. I argue that the contentious assumptions of this challenge can be avoided without loss of precision by charging theism (and thus id) directly with the lack of observational assertions. In the translatability challenge, it is charged that theism can be translated into a (non-theistic) set of observation statements without loss of cognitive content. I argue that the contentious assumptions of this challenge are avoided by the related charge that the (non-theistic) evolutionary theory makes all the observational assertions of id, while the converse does not hold. Elliott Sober has argued that id meets the falsifiability challenge, but, since it makes almost no observational assertions, is not testable. I point out two problems with Sober’s argument and show that id is both deductively and probabilistically testable. Sober’s argument, I suggest, inconsistently combines the modified falsifiability challenge with the modified translatability challenge. If his claims about id’s observational assertions are true, however, id succumbs to the modified translatability challenge.
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Notes
With a reference to his discussion of the trinity, Swinburne adds in a footnote: “In understanding God as a person, while being fair to the Judaic and Islamic view of God, I am oversimplifying the Christian view.”
Nielsen (1966, 13) lists further definitions according to which God is a designer.
Mackie (1982, ch. 12 and p. 230) gives a critical discussion of such approaches.
Accordingly, Flew’s challenge is a question about the personal beliefs of his fellow disputants, and the goal is to elucidate what assertions the theistic statements make according to them, and thus what the words ‘create’ and ‘love’ mean according to them when it comes to God.
I owe this example to an anonymous referee.
Since Sober does not use ‘prediction’ only to refer to claims about the future, I take it to be synonymous with ‘assertion’.
This argument can be made more precise and much longer (Lutz 2012, claim 8.7).
As with the falsifiability challenge, Tooley (1975, 505–506) uses an intentionally underspecified notion of testability to account for probabilistic inferences. And as in the case of the falsifiability challenge, this confuses the indicator of a property (being tested by the same observation statements) with the property itself (making the same observational assertions).
This argument can also be made more precise and much longer (Lutz 2012, claim 9.2).
It is also easily shown that two theories are empirically equivalent if and only if each theory makes all the observational assertions of the other (Lutz 2012, claim 8.3).
Sober never spells out precisely which observational assertions id makes besides adap.
This assumes that adap does not contain all probabilistic assertions of et. This is clearly what Sober assumes, for otherwise id would make all probabilistic empirical assertions of et, and thus it would hold that et “doesn’t predict much of anything”.
There are also more general problems with contrastive testability, independently of id (Lutz 2012, §8.3).
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Thomas Müller and Elliott Sober for helpful discussions and two anonymous referees for trenchant and exceptionally gracious comments.
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Lutz, S. Empiricism and Intelligent Design I: Three Empiricist Challenges. Erkenn 78, 665–679 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-012-9391-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-012-9391-6