Part 2 — The Principle of Conservation of Belief

Luke Muehlhauser, the proprietor of Common Sense Atheism, has proposed that we can defeat religions in one easy step.  To do so, he takes a broad look at different arguments for God and notices what they all have in common: They all posit God as the best explanation for something.

Luke identifies the following four criteria for a good explanation:

1. It’s testable and it passes the tests we give it.
2. It’s consistent with our background knowledge and experience.  (What philosopher Tom Morris called The Principle of Belief Conservation).
3. It’s simpler than the alternatives.
4. It has good explanatory scope — in other words, it explains a wide variety of data.

Yesterday, I argued that God creates a testable hypothesis and that this hypothesis passes that test.  Today, we are going to move on to what philosopher Tom Morris calls “The Principle of Belief Conservation,” which he sums as follows: Read the rest of this entry →

Part 1 – Laying the Groundwork

Luke Muehlhauser, the proprietor of Common Sense Atheism, has proposed that we can defeat religions in one easy step.  To do so, he takes a broad look at different arguments for God and notices what they all have in common: They all posit God as the best explanation for something.

The problem?

How does saying “God did it” explain any of these things? How does “God did it” offer a solution to any of the problems that philosophers and scientists are working on? When you’re confronted with a difficult problem, you can’t just say “Well, I guess it was magic.” That doesn’t solve anything!

“Poof! Magic” is not an explanation.

How is he going to argue that God isn’t the best explanation?  He begins by listing reasons that an explanation would be good:

1. It’s testable and it passes the tests we give it.
2. It’s consistent with our background knowledge and experience.  (What philosopher Tom Morris called The Principle of Belief Conservation).
3. It’s simpler than the alternatives.
4. It has good explanatory scope — in other words, it explains a wide variety of data.

Luke argues that “God did it” fails all four of these criteria: Read the rest of this entry →