Examples exist which would clearly be best explained by referencing God.
• …What if you seem to go to a hell-like state for billions of years (e.g. after ostensibly dying, seeing Jesus, and being condemned)?
Belief in God’s existence can be rational given enough evidence. This is relevant because unless there is proof of God's non-existence, then it is possible for God to be the explanation for things (i.e. God is logically a potential explanation).
God’s existence/actions actually do best explain some facts in the world. [See: Does God exist?] For example, genuine miracles have occurred. This is relevant because if God’s existence or actions best explain any of these, then God/miracles can actually help explain reality.
“God did it” is just an appeal to ignorance (i.e. it’s a so-called “God of the gaps” argument—“I don't know. Therefore, God did it”). This is relevant because appeals to ignorance are fallacious, and explanations based on fallacious reasoning are not even potential explanations.
No, theistic explanations are not necessarily appeals to ignorance,…
• …these are best seen as formally valid modus tollens arguments.
• …theistic explanation is often justified by deduction, induction, or abduction.
So? Even if a theistic explanation was justified by appealing to ignorance,…
• …legitimately potential explanations can be proposed for illegitimate reasons.
“God did it” is just an appeal to magic.
• …Explanations without mechanisms are magic.
• …Explanations citing the supernatural cite magic.
• …Explanations which are not scientific are magic.
“God did it” is wildly mysterious; it tries to “explain the obscure by something more obscure.”1
•… God’s causal actions do not even involve spatio-temporal mechanisms!2
No, God is not more mysterious. After all,…
• …God is a very familiar explanation (maybe too familiar!).3
So? It doesn’t matter anyways if an explanation is more “mysterious,”…
• …true explanations often invoked greater mysteries: quantum physics, gravity, continental drift, relativity theory.4
• …genuinely potential explanations would invoke greater mysteries (e.g. if we encounter obviously non-human technology on Mars, we'd say “aliens did it”).5
• Walter Sinnott-Armstrong: “...if the Big Bang had different features, God would be just as good (or bad) at explaining those other features. …an eternal God adds nothing to the scientific explanations. To cite God as the cause of the Big Bang is to explain the obscure by the more obscure, which gets us nowhere.” [God: A Debate between a Christian an an Atheist (Oxford, 2003), 45.]
• Robert Price: “…in that moment one has not found an alternate explanation at all. It is like the fundamentalists who say God must have ignited the Big Bang since scientists cannot yet account for what chain of causation led to it. How is “God” an explanation, even if there is a God? God is a mystery,… And to claim one has “explained” a problem by invoking a mystery is no advance at all. You are trying to invoke a bigger enigma to explain a smaller one. ‘I have the answer to X! The answer is XX!”’ [Price’s review of “N.T. Wrights The Resurrection of the Son of God”]
• Richard Dawkins: “Even if the postulation of such an entity explained anything… it still wouldn’t help because it raises a bigger mystery than it solves.” [The “know-nothings”, the “know-alls”, and the “no-contests,” A lecture by Richard Dawkins extracted from The Nullifidian, Dec. 1994.] (For a similar comment, see The Blind Watchmaker (W.W. Norton & Company, 1986), 141.]
• Bede Rundle: “To qualify as supernatural it must be distanced from any spatio-temporal character which would place it in our world, but to make sense to us as explanatory of changes therein it must be sufficiently concrete to interact with material bodies, and the more convincingly a case is made for the former status, the greater the difficulty put in the way of the latter.” [Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing (Clarendon Press, 2004). 28.] By way of response, however, God’s not using spatio-temporal mechanisms does not mean there are mysterious mechanisms outside of space and time that God uses instead; rather, aside from direct personal choice, divine action uses no mechanisms at all! See: Personal explanation is legitimate. [Forthcoming] A quick word about familiarity here: humans have always known that getting bumped in the head could affect their mental state. This is not a scientific discovery! Most all humans in history were “interactionist-dualists” (i.e. believing the immaterial soul and material brain/body affect each other). So humans have long held to direct mental-to-physical interaction via personal choice; it is about as familiar to humanity as a concept gets—even if it’s awkward for materialists who deny the soul. That is to say, while materialists today may deny empowered souls exist as such, they cannot simply assume it is unfamiliar in this argument without first establishing materialism is true (in which case, theism would be false anyways).
• Alec Fisher: “It’s not easy to know how to evaluate the arguments in this passage—or even whether they are arguments. The passage is very engagingly and eloquently written. However, my judgment is that [they] carry little persuasive force, because they so often tend to beg the question.” [The Logic of Real Arguments 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2004), .]
• Gregory Dawes: “Many of our most successful explanations raise new puzzles and present us with new questions to be answered.” [Theism and Explanation (Routledge, 2009), 16.] Newton famously offered no mechanism for gravity, and yet it was quintessentially explanatory (removing puzzlement). Consider also the theory of “continental drift” (put forward in 1596 by Abraham Ortelius). Ortelius—and later Alfred Wegener—noted how well continents appeared to be able to lock together like jigsaw puzzle pieces, provided that they can drift apart. The theory was widely rejected because no mechanism was provided. It was later vindicated, however, when Arthur Holmes advanced the theory of plate tectonics. Despite being rejected, continental drift surely played a legitimate explanatory role in accounting for the arrangement and distribution of landmasses across Earth. This is all to say, not only does the principle not apply in the broadest context, it doesn’t even apply in scientific contexts! • Carl Hempel: “the view that an adequate scientific explanation must, in a more or less precise sense, effect a reduction to the familiar, does not stand up under close examination.” [Philosophy of Natural Science (Princeton, 1966), 83.]
Real explanations can’t explain everything (i.e. they aren’t equally compatible with all observations). [See: “Meaningful explanations are testable/falsifiable.”] This is relevant because “God did it” is compatible with any test result.
No/So?,…
• …“nature did it” can explain anything as well; precision matters.
• [See objections under “Meaningful explanations are testable/falsifiable.”]
Meaningful explanations are empirically verifiable (i.e. meaningful statements make a detectable difference to what you see, smell, hear, or taste). This is relevant because theistic explanations cannot make any difference in the world that can be detected or verified with your senses.1
No, explanations need not be verifiable, after all…
•…verificationism is self-refuting
•…a competing theory of meaning is true
•…scientific laws can't be verified for all points/times
•…math/logic truths are not verifiable (nor true-by-definition)
• A.J. Ayer: “[The] term ‘god’ is a metaphysical term. And if ‘god’ is a metaphysical term, then it cannot even be probable that a god exists. For to say that ‘God exists’ is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false… unless [the religious believer] can formulate his ‘knowledge’ in propositions that are empirically verifiable, we may be sure he is deceiving himself.” [Language, Truth, and Logic 2nd ed (Dover Publications, 1936), 114, 120.] However, verificationism is dead today, and this has factored into the consensus on the intelligibility of theistic statements. Whether theistic statements ended up being true or false, it remained true that… • Mikael Stenmark: “After intensive discussion the consensus among philosophers was that religious belief and their linguistic expressions pass the semantic test. They must be treated as cognitively meaningful statements.” [Rationality in Science, Religion, and Everyday Life (Notre Dame)]
Meaningful explanations are testable/falsifiable via one's sensory perception.
•…An untestable entity is identical to nothing
But no, meaningful statements need not be empirically “falsifiable”. After all…
•…falsifiability/testability is incoherent
•…a competing theory of meaning is true
•…the criterion is self-refuting
•…no statement can actually be falsified
•…some unfalsifiable claims seem meaningful
So? Theistic explanations are not in principle unfalsifiable, after all…
• …some theistic explanations ostensibly have been falsified.2
• …theistic explanation can be falsified by making reference to God's omnibenevolence.3
• Gregory Dawes: “God created the world may (or may not) be an unfalsifiable proposition, but that he did so on Sunday October 23, 4004 bc, surely is falsifiable. Indeed, as all but young-earth creationists would agree, it has been shown to be false.” [God and Explanation (Routledge, 2009), 81.]
• Gregory Dawes (Non-theist): “If the God in question is omnipotent and morally perfect, we would not expect him to bring about, for instance, states of gratuitous suffering… it follows that even a very minimal proposed theistic explanation of the kind Kitcher cites has some empirical content. There are possible states of affairs that it excludes.” [Theism and Explanation (Routledge, 2009), 44.]
Real explanations cite the mechanisms which lead to the result.
•… Salmon's “causal-mechanical” model of explanation is true.
No, explanations need not cite mechanisms. After all…
• …personal explanations don't cite mechanisms
• …quarks, etc. behave without mechanisms
So? Even if they do cite mechanisms,…
• …personal choice is a mechanism (which theistic explanation cites)1
• Richard Swinburne (Professor of philosophy at Oxford): “...personal choice among equally good alternatives is a mechanism which we see intuitively to be a simple and natural mechanism for selecting alternatives; for it is a mechanism, indeed the only mechanism, of which we have inside experience and whose operation is thus comprehensible.” [‘Mackie, induction, and God’, Religious Studies vol. 19 (1991): 390.]
Real explanations belong to our most unified account (in the Kitcher “unificationist” sense).1 This is relevant because theistic explanation is not part of our most unified account.
No, after all,…
• …God fosters incredible unification; it belongs! (And it’s not “spurious unification”) [Forthcoming]
So?,
• …Philip Kitcher's “unificationist” model is false. [Forthcoming]