Discussion Grounds

Greetings once again, Luke,

Thank you for sharing more clearly what you meant by things like “werewolf” and “party tricks,” and for your expression of respect for me. I am glad to see this moving back the direction I always expected it to take from the beginning. I can easily accept (without agreeing, obviously!) that you literally believe “a theory of werewolfism could contain less implausible and less ad-hoc hypotheses than Christianity does.” That’s your position, and I accept it for what it is.

As to “party tricks,” though, which you continue press as a literal Christian belief, I still take exception to that. My son is an amateur magician who does party tricks. They’re not intrinsically dishonorable, but they’re not what Jesus did at Cana, either. The term generally connotes something trivial, an illusion rather than something real, done to draw attention to the trickster. I don’t think what he did was trivial (though I know some might argue that it was). It was certainly not an illusion nor was it done to draw attention to himself.

I also have some problems with equating “magical” with “supernatural,” and with viewing God as a wish-granter, but if that is how you viewed it, that is how you viewed it, and who am I to dispute that? Here’s the distinction: if you represent something as your belief about Christianity (that it’s less plausible than werewolf-ism, for example) then it is what it is, you believe what you believe, and that’s not subject to dispute. If you have a strongly negative view of Christianity overall, again, that’s not open to debate, I merely ask that you continue to bear in mind that this website is for “disciplined debate,” which includes respect for persons who hold those beliefs. If on the other hand you represent something as being an actual belief of Christianity, and if, as in the case of “party tricks,” it’s not an accurate representation, then you can expect to be corrected on that.

Now, on to the matter of explanations. I think we can meld your answers and mine and come up with a good overall definition. In my last post I focused more on “what is an explanation?” than on “what makes it a good explanation?” I can attribute this to a discussion going on simultaneously at Thinking Christian, where one commenter has claimed that under no circumstances could God ever be an explanation for anything (“there is no such thing as a supernatural explanation,” and other similar statements following). He has a rather idiosyncratic take on what an explanation is, and that was on my mind when I wrote Letter 11.

One small thing: on further reflection I would revise my statement there to begin,

x is explanatory of y if…
or
x contributes to the explanation of y if …

rather than

x is a good explanation of y if …

The reason for that change is that it makes the qualification I added in my first footnote much less necessary. I still mean to imply that x‘s contribution to the explanation of y is a good contribution provided that (A), (B), and (C) are met.

You say,

Saying that theory x is a good explanation for y is precisely what gives us reason to believe that x is true (as I understand explanation). So to put (B) in the requirements for a good explanation just sets us back to the starting point.

I agree and disagree. We need some reason to believe x is true. Its fit with y is certainly one potential reason (see below), but just one among many.

I did acknowledge and I still agree with your list of explanatory virtues. By them we can assess whether x fulfills (A), (B), and (C). So my suggested statement as a result would be,

x contributes to the explanation of y if:

(A) by knowing x we understand y better than by not knowing x; and if

(B) there is adequate reason to believe that x is true, reliable, trustworthy, etc.; and if

(C) there is no competing z, such that z is contrary or contradictory to x and fulfills the conditions of (A) and (B) more successfully than does x.

And we assess whether x fulfills (A), (B), and (C) by reference to a set of explanatory virtues including:

1. Testability – a good explanatory hypothesis should be testable.
2. Consistency with background knowledge – a good explanatory hypothesis should not contradict our background knowledge.
3. Past explanatory success – a good explanatory hypothesis should fit in a tradition with much past explanatory success.
4. Simplicity – a good explanatory hypothesis should be simple, not making a lot of ad-hoc assumptions.
5. Ontological simplicity – a good explanatory hypothesis should not add more unknown things to our ontology than necessary.
6. Informativeness – a good explanatory hypothesis should allow us to deduce precise details of its effects.

Note that when the argument is of the form, inference to the best explanation, part of the test for x is its fit with y, compared with other candidate explanations’ fit with y. My argument in the last several letters has been of this form, and the test I have been proffering has been a test of fit.

So my guess is that we’re in agreement on what we’re going to call a good explanation, or how we’re going to assess the quality of explanations. Am I right?

Regards,

Tom