Fine‐tuning, weird sorts of atheism and evidential favouring

Analytic Philosophy (3):1-12 (2021)
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Abstract

This paper defends a novel sceptical response to the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God (FTA). According to this response, even if FTA can establish, what I call, the confirmation proposition: ‘fine-tuning confirms the God hypothesis’, there is no reason to think that a strengthening of FTA can establish the evidence-favouring proposition: ‘fine-tuning favours the God hypothesis over its competitors’. My argument is that, any criteria for the explanation of fine-tuning that permit us to take the God hypothesis seriously ought to make us sceptical that fine-tuning favours the God hypothesis over its competitors. As taking the God hypothesis seriously requires us to give a fair hearing to all sorts of non-theistic explanations, including the so-called weird sorts of atheism.

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Tamaz Tokhadze
University of Sussex (DPhil)

Citations of this work

Likelihoodism and Guidance for Belief.Tamaz Tokhadze - 2022 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 53 (4):501-517.

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References found in this work

The Design Argument.Elliott Sober - 2019 - Cambridge University Press.
The Existence of God.Richard Swinburne - 1979 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
The Existence of God.Richard Swinburne - 1979 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
A Treatise on Probability.J. M. Keynes - 1989 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 40 (2):219-222.

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