CADRE Comments

 Jeff Lowder at Secular Outpost, argues against William Lane Craig's fine tuning argument. His objective is to show that even if the argument is valid it doesn't establish probability for God. Lowdwer's syllogism of the argument: 1. The life-permitting nature of the universe’s initial conditions is either the result of chance, necessity or design. (Premise) 2. It is not the result of chance or necessity. (Premise) 3. Therefore, it is the result of design. (From 1 and 2) This argument is clearly valid, i.e., the conclusion follows from the premises. We want to know the probability of (3). The probability of (3) will depend upon the probability of (2). If we have a very weak degree of belief that (2) is true, say we think Pr(2)=0.25, then, by itself, this argument only warrants the belief Pr(3)=0.25. N.B. I’m not claiming that (2) has an exact numerical probability equal to 0.25; that value is simply an example to illustrate the point. Excluding it as a result ...

I've been busy in recent months writing as an invited guest-author (on orthodox Christian universalism) over at the Evangelical Universalist forum ; so I haven't had much time (or energy {g}) to contribute new articles here. But my friend Professor Victor Reppert has been posting up new and previous articles on arguments from evil (especially the deductive kind), for his students and readers, at DangIdea recently (as he tends to do about twice a year); and this reminded me that I've been meaning for some time to post up a deductive variation of the anti-theistic argument from suffering that I myself came up with a while ago. (A set of anti-theistic deductive arguments from evil, linked to by Victor during the discussion, can also be found collected by Jeff Lowder at the Secular Web here. ) This is an expanded, detailed and amplified form of an argument my sometime-previous-sparring partner, Richard Carrier, was attempting to make a couple of years ago in the opening statem...