Can “God did it” (or miracles) be an explanation?

• 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.]

• 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)]

• 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.]

• 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.]