Abductive Apologetics

Note: Last Updated 7/29/2024.

N. T. Wright:

…If the world is the chance assembly of accidental phenomena, why is there so much that we want to praise and celebrate? Why is there beauty, love, and laughter?

(N. T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues, [New York: HarperOne, 2014], p. 111.)

     How is it that a lifeless, unconscious, irrational universe, totally devoid of meaning and purpose, gave rise to living, conscious, rational beings, who are obsessed with meaning and purpose? To quote the age old philosophical dictum first propounded by Parmenides (in form if not in figure): οὐδὲν ἐξ οὐδενός (better known by its Latin collocation: ex nihilo nihil fit), that is: “out of nothing nothing comes,” or as the lyrics from the song “Something Good,” in the film The Sound of Music, so eloquently expressed it: “Nothing comes from nothing. Nothing ever could.”

     Hans Christian Andersen is purported to have said: “The whole world is a series of miracles, but we’re so used to them we call them ordinary things.” Yet the world is anything but ordinary.

Cf. E. B. White:

     “Have you heard about the words that appeared in the spider’s web?” asked Mrs. Arable nervously.

     “Yes,” replied the doctor.

     “Well, do you understand it?” asked Mrs. Arable.

     “Understand what?”

     “Do you understand how there could be any writing in a spider’s web?”

     “Oh, no,” said Dr. Dorian. “I don’t understand it. But for that matter I don’t understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the words appeared, everyone said they were a miracle. But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle.”

     “What’s miraculous about a spider’s web?” said Mrs. Arable. “I don’t see why you say a web is a miracle—it’s just a web.”

     “Ever try to spin one?” asked Dr. Dorian.

(E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web, [New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1999], pp. 108-109.)

James Allan Francis:

     He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in still another village, where He worked in a carpenter’s shop until He was thirty. Then for three years He was an itinerant preacher. He never wrote a book, never held an office, never had a family or owned a house. He never went to college. He never visited a big city. He never traveled two hundred miles from the place where He was born. He did none of the things one usually associates with greatness. He had no credentials but Himself.

     He was only thirty-three when the tide of public opinion turned against Him. His friends ran away. He was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves. While He was dying His executioners gambled for His clothing, the only property He had on earth. When He was dead He was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend.

     Twenty centuries have come and gone, and today Jesus is the central figure of the human race and the leader of mankind’s progress. All the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned put together have not affected the life of mankind on this earth as much as that one solitary life.

(James Allan Francis, One Solitary Life, forward and reflections by Ken Blanchard, [Naperville, Simple Truths, 2005], p. 61. Cf. James Allan Francis, The Real Jesus and Other Sermons, [Philadelphia: Judson, 1926], p. 124.)

Timothy Keller:

     Scientists are very reluctant to ever say that a theory is “proved.” Even Richard Dawkins admits that Darwin’s theory cannot be finally proven, that “new facts may come to light which will force our successors . . . to abandon Darwinism or modify it beyond recognition.” But that doesn’t mean that science cannot test theories and find some far more empirically verifiable than others. A theory is considered empirically verified if it organizes the evidence and explains phenomena better than any conceivable alternative theory. That is, if, through testing, it leads us to expect with accuracy many and varied events better than any other rival account of the same data, then it is accepted, though not (in the strong rationalist sense) “proved.”

     In Is There a God? Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne argues powerfully that belief in God can be tested and justified (but not proven) in the same way. The view that there is a God, he says, leads us to expect the things we observe—that there is a universe at all, that scientific laws operate within it, that it contains human beings with consciousness and with an indelible moral sense. The theory that there is no God, he argues, does not lead us to expect any of these things. Therefore, belief in God offers a better empirical fit, it explains and accounts for what we see better than the alternative account of things. No view of God can be proven, but that does not mean that we cannot sift and weigh the grounds for various religious beliefs and find that some or even one is the most reasonable.

(Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, [New York: Dutton, 2008], p. 121.)

Richard Swinburne:

     The basic structure of my argument is this. Scientists, historians, and detectives observe data and proceed thence to some theory about what best explains the occurrence of these data. We can analyse the criteria which they use in reaching a conclusion that a certain theory is better supported by the data than a different theory—that is, is more likely, on the basis of those data, to be true. Using those same criteria, we find that the view that there is a God explains everything we observe, not just some narrow range of data. It explains the fact that there is a universe at all, that scientific laws operate within it, that it contains conscious animals and humans with very complex intricately organized bodies, that we have abundant opportunities for developing ourselves and the world, as well as the more particular data that humans report miracles and have religious experiences. In so far as scientific causes and laws explain some of these things (and in part they do), these very causes and laws need explaining, and God’s action explains them. The very same criteria which scientists use to reach their own theories lead us to move beyond those theories to a creator God who sustains everything in existence.

(Richard Swinburne, Is There a God? [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], p. 2.)

Timothy Keller:

     When a Russian cosmonaut returned from space and reported that he had not found God, C. S. Lewis responded that this was like Hamlet going into the attic of his castle looking for Shakespeare. If there is a God, he wouldn’t be another object in the universe that could be put in a lab and analyzed with empirical methods. He would relate to us the way a playwright relates to the characters in his play. We (characters) might be able to know quite a lot about the playwright, but only to the degree the author chooses to put information about himself in the play. Therefore, in no case could we “prove” God’s existence as if he were an object wholly within our universe like oxygen and hydrogen or an island in the Pacific.

     Lewis gives us another metaphor for knowing the truth about God when he writes that he believes in God “as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” Imagine trying to look directly at the sun in order to learn about it. You can’t do it. It will burn out your retinas, ruining your capacity to take it in. A far better way to learn about the existence, power, and quality of the sun is to look at the world it shows you, to recognize how it sustains everything you see and enables you to see it.

     Here, then, we have a way forward. We should not try to “look into the sun,” as it were, demanding irrefutable proofs for God. Instead we should “look at what the sun shows us.” Which account of the world has the most “explanatory power” to make sense of what we see in the world and in ourselves? We have a sense that the world is not the way it ought to be. We have a sense that we are very flawed and yet very great. We have a longing for love and beauty that nothing in this world can fulfill. We have a deep need to know meaning and purpose. Which worldview best accounts for these things?

     Christians do not claim that their faith gives them omniscience or absolute knowledge of reality. Only God has that. But they believe that the Christian account of things—creation, fall, redemption, and restoration—makes the most sense of the world. I ask you to put on Christianity like a pair of spectacles and look at the world with it. See what power it has to explain what we know and see.

(Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, [New York: Dutton, 2008], pp. 122-123.)

Fore more see: Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, [New York: Dutton, 2008], Chapters 8-9, pp. 127ff.

Abduction.

Phyllis Illari, Federica Russo:

Inductive arguments. Inductive arguments allow us to infer a conclusion from a set of premises, but not with certainty. This means that the conclusion can be false, even though the premises are true. The reason is that, in inductive inferences, we move from content known in the premises to content in the conclusion that is not already known in the premises. So these arguments go beyond what is already contained in the premises. Inductive arguments are therefore called ‘ampliative’ and they are fallible. Inductive arguments can go from particular observations to generalizations, or to predict another observation… Abductive inferences. Abductive inferences share with inductive inferences the fact that the conclusion does not follow from the premises with certainty and that, in a sense, the conclusion expands on what is stated in the premises. However, in abduction, from a set of premises, we ‘abduce’ the conclusion, which is a proposition that purportedly best explains the premises.

(Phyllis Illari, Federica Russo, Causality: Philosophical Theory Meets Scientific Practice, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014], p. 20.)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: (Sherlock Holmes)

…when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

(Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier;” In: The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, [London: Penguin Books, 2011], p. 65.)

Douglas Walton:

Abductive inference, commonly called inference to the best explanation, is reasoning from given data to a hypothesis that explains the data.

(Douglas Walton, Abductive Reasoning, [Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2005], p. xiii.) 

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

You happen to know that Tim and Harry have recently had a terrible row that ended their friendship. Now someone tells you that she just saw Tim and Harry jogging together. The best explanation for this that you can think of is that they made up. You conclude that they are friends again.

(Igor Douven, ‘Abduction;’ In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. N. Zalta, (March 2011; revised May 2021), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/.)

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria