The concept of the best of all possible worlds is widely considered to be incoherent on the grounds that, for any world that might be termed the best, there is always another that is better. I note that underlying this argument is a conviction that the goodness of a world is determined by a single kind of good, the most plausible candidates for which are not maximizable. Against this I suggest that several goods may have to combine to determine the (...) goodness of a world, and because of logical conflicts between them, the goods can be optimized to give a genuine best of all possible worlds. (shrink)

Given ht as the hypothesis of theism, hm as the hypothesis of materialism, and e as the evidence of a complex life-bearing universe, Richard Swinburne presents these arguments in The Existence of God: that this ordered universe is a priori improbable, given the stringent requirements for life and the Second Law of Thermodynamics; that this universe’s structure is evidence for theism, and that theism therefore explains this universe; Swinburne argues that because P > P, it follows that P > P; (...) and a theistic explanation for the universe is more probable because it is simpler; therefore it is more likely that God exists than not. As I have addressed in a prior paper, this paper will address the Bayesian argument that Swinburne offers in , i.e. that P > P. In the paper I draw a number of conclusions, most pertinently, that Hacking’s Total Probability Rule for cases of mutually exclusive hypotheses [ht vs hm] and evidence e entails that ht can only be confirmed if P is low. I also conclude that if we follow the TPR for Swinburne’s argument, we achieve the result that theism is at best slightly improbable, or equiprobable with materialism. (shrink)

God is traditionally understood to be a perfect being who is the creator and sustainer of all that is. God's creative and sustaining activity is often thought to involve choosing a possible world for actualization. It is generally said that either there is (a) exactly one best of all possible worlds, or there are (b) infinitely many increasingly better worlds, or else there are (c) infinitely many unsurpassable worlds within God's power to actualize. On each view, critics have offered arguments (...) for atheism that turn on God's choice of a world. In what follows, I first discuss some background issues, and I then survey the contemporary literature on these arguments. (shrink)

In a recent article (Kraay 2013), I argued that some prominent responses to two important arguments for atheism invoke divine satisficing – and that the coherence and propriety of this notion have not been established. Chris Tucker (2016) agrees with my evaluation of divine satisficing, but disagrees with my exegesis of these responses. He argues that they should be understood as invoking motivated submaximization instead. After reviewing the dialectical situation to date, I assess whether motivated submaximization can be deployed in (...) such a way as to defeat these argument for atheism. I argue that it’s far from clear that it can. (shrink)