Jeffery Jay Lowder's Evidential Argument from the History of Science (AHS)

Here is an argument put forward by Jeff Lowder. It runs alongside the great quote used by Richard Carrier to compare naturalism and supernaturalism probabilistically.

So Carrier rightly exposes the idea that naturalism has replaced supernaturalism countless times in the history of human knowledge. For power and scope, naturalism seems to be the explanation of choice. Never once has supernaturalism supplanted naturalism in any explanatory context. This is Carrier's analogy:

The cause of lightning was once thought to be God's wrath, but turned out to be the unintelligent outcome of mindless natural forces. We once thought an intelligent being must have arranged and maintained the amazingly ordered motions of the solar system, but now we know it's all the inevitable outcome of mindless natural forces. Disease was once thought to be the mischief of supernatural demons, but now we know that tiny, unintelligent organisms are the cause, which reproduce and infect us according to mindless natural forces. In case after case, without exception, the trend has been to find that purely natural causes underlie any phenomena. Not once has the cause of anything turned out to really be God's wrath or intelligent meddling, or demonic mischief, or anything supernatural at all. The collective weight of these observations is enormous: supernaturalism has been tested at least a million times and has always lost; naturalism has been tested at least a million times and has always won. A horse that runs a million races and never loses is about to run yet another race with a horse that has lost every single one of the million races it has run. Which horse should we bet on? The answer is obvious.

In playing with this idea, Lowder has set out the argument in logical terms of probability. See what you think:

Informal Statement of the Argument

If there is a single theme unifying the history of science, it is that naturalistic explanations work. The history of science contains numerous examples of naturalistic explanations replacing supernatural ones and no examples of supernatural explanations replacing naturalistic ones. Indeed, naturalistic explanations have been so successful that even most scientific theists concede that supernatural explanations are, in general, implausible, even on the assumption that theism is true. Such explanatory success is antecedently more likely on naturalism--which entails that all supernaturalistic explanations are false--than it is on theism. Thus the history of science is some evidence for naturalism and against theism.[1]

Formal Statement of the Argument

B: The Relevant Background Information
1. The universe is intelligible.

E: The Evidence to be Explained
1. So many natural phenomena can be explained naturalistically, i.e., without appeal to supernatural agency.
2. The history of science contains numerous examples of naturalistic explanations replacing supernatural ones and no examples of supernatural explanations replacing naturalistic ones.

Rival Explanatory Hypotheses
T: classical theism
N: metaphysical naturalism: the hypothesis that the universe is a closed system, which means that nothing that is not part of the natural world affects it.

The Argument Formulated
(1) E is known to be true.
(2) Pr(E | B & N) >! Pr(E | B & T).
(3) T is not much more probable intrinsically than N.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
(4) Therefore, other evidence held equal, T is probably false.


Defense of (2)

N entails that any true explanations must be naturalistic ones. Thus, on the assumption that N is true, we have an extremely strong reason to expect that successful scientific explanations will be naturalistic ones. In contrast, if T is true, then it could have been the case that that successful scientific explanations were supernatural explanations. For example, biology could have discovered that all animals are not the relatively modified descendants of a common ancestor; neuroscience could have discovered no correlations at all between human minds and brains, etc. If the history of science were like that, then that would have supported T over N. But then the success of science in finding naturalistic explanations must be evidence for N over T. How strong is this evidence? I agree with Draper: "the more likely it is that there are true naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena (i.e., the stronger the presumption of naturalism), the more unlikely it is that there are supernatural beings."[2]

Objections to AHS

Objections to (2)

Objection: AHS "depends on conflating the old pagan religions and animisms with the Abrahamic religious beliefs. . . . [T]here is a clear distinction between those who believed in the old gods and spirits, and those who held to the Judeo-Christian notion of a transcendent and eternal Creator God. What ended the attribution of supernatural causes to natural processes wasn’t the advent of rationalism through the science but the spread of Christianity and it’s adherence to a transcendent Creator God who acted uniquely in history to create a universe that acted in accordance with certain laws and principles."[3]

Reply: This reply confuses the distinction between what we might call the "socio-historical explanation" for E with its "metaphysical explanation." The spread of Christianity is an example of the former, while AHS is focused on the latter. Even if that socio-historical explanation for E is correct, it doesn't follow that T, much less Christian theism, is correct. The objection notes that the universe acts "in accordance with certain laws and principles." That fact is irrelevant to AHS, which explicitly includes the intelligibility of the universe in its background information. At best, the fact of the intelligibility of the universe might provide evidence favoring T over N. It does not in any way undermine the claim that, given that the universe acts in accordance with certain laws and principles, the fact that science has been so successful in providing natural explanations for natural phenomena is evidence favoring N over T. To deny this point is to commit the fallacy of understated evidence.[4]

Notes

[1] See Keith M. Parsons, Science, Confirmation, and the Theistic Hypothesis (Ph.D. Dissertation, Kingston, Ontario, Canada: Queen's University, 1986), 46; Paul Draper, "Evolution and the Problem of Evil" in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology (3rd ed., ed. Louis Pojman, Wadsworth, 1997), 223-24; and idem, "God, Science, and Naturalism" Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion (ed. William Wainwright, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 38-39; and Barbara Forrest, "Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism:Clarifying the Connection" Philo 3 (2000): 7-29.

[2] Draper 2004.

[3] Jack Hudson, "Arguments for God: The Historically Unique Nature of God." Wide as the Waters (August 10,2010), http://jackhudson.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/the-historically-unique-nature-of-creation/ (spotted June 16, 2012).

[4] Paul Draper, "Partisanship and Inquiry in the Philosophy of Religion," unpublished paper. Cf. Draper 2004, 43-44.