The Fine-Tuning Argument and the Gap Problem: Some Objections Considered

I. Introduction

The fine-tuning argument (FTA) is an argument for an Intelligent Designer of the physical universe. The basic idea is that physicists have discovered that a number of the fundamental constants that show up in the laws of physics (e.g., the cosmological constant and the fine structure constant) are remarkably fine-tuned for the existence of biological life.[1] What such “fine-tuning” amounts to is that there is a wide range of reasonable values that these constants could take on but a comparatively narrow—very narrow, in fact—range of life-permitting values, that is, values that would make the existence of biological life possible. As it happens, it is an empirical discovery that the values these constants have in fact taken on fall within the life-permitting range. Had this not been the case, biological life would not have been possible. Given the wide range of possible, reasonable values and the narrow range of life-permitting values, it is highly improbable that the constants should have taken on life-permitting values and thus highly improbable that there would be biological life. Yet here we are.

The central claim of FTA is that the hypothesis that there is an Intelligent Designer of the universe who intentionally saw to it that the values of the constants fell into the narrow life-permitting range makes the existence of a universe that is fine-tuned for life (FTL)—a universe that allows for the possibility of biological life—far more probable than does the alternative hypothesis that there is no such Intelligent Designer of the universe. More formally,

Pr(FTL | Designer) >> Pr(FTL | ~Designer).[2]

By the likelihood principle in confirmation theory, it follows that FTL constitutes significant evidence for, and greatly confirms, Designer over-against ~Designer.

Naturally, there are numerous critical responses that have been given to FTA, perhaps the most significant of which is the so-called multiverse hypothesis, which holds, roughly, that our universe is just one of an enormous number of universes in all of physical reality. The universes in the multiverse have randomly varying values for the fundamental constants of nature. The immense number of universes posited to exist in the multiverse allows for us to multiply our probabilistic resources so that the probability that some universe in the multiverse is FTL is not low.[3] The upshot is that while it might be that Pr(FTL | Designer) >> Pr(FTL | ~Designer), it might not be the case that Pr(FTL | Designer & Multiverse) >> Pr(FTL | ~Designer & Multiverse). This potentially undercuts the evidential impact that fine-tuning has on there being an Intelligent Designer of the universe. If the multiverse exists, then, with respect to the hypothesis that there is an Intelligent Designer of the universe, one might reply with the words of Laplace to Napoleon: Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.[4] Others have argued that the multiverse hypothesis is not a compelling alternative to the design hypothesis.[5]

In this article, I will not be concerned with the cogency of FTA up to this point. Instead, I will assume that it can be adequately defended against various objections and that the multiverse hypothesis in particular is not fatal to it. What I am interested in is the extent to which FTA can be construed as an argument for the existence of God, where God is taken to be the omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good creator and designer of the universe. I will refer to the hypothesis that God exists as Theism. In this regard, FTA is commonly interpreted as a species of the teleological argument for the existence of God.[6] The question that then arises is this: How are we to bridge the gap between the existence of an Intelligent Designer of the universe and the existence of God? Why should we identify the Intelligent Designer of the universe that FTA gives us reason to believe in with God?[7] This seems like a potential problem.

In natural theology, the generalization of this problem is referred to as the Gap Problem.[8] How do we bridge the gap between the existence of some sort of cosmic being and the existence of God? In cosmological arguments, the problem consists in explaining why we should take the First Cause of the universe to be God. In teleological arguments, the problem consists in explaining why we should take the Intelligent Designer of the universe (and/or of biological lifeforms) to be God. It seems like there are other possibilities as to the nature of the designer. First, perhaps there are multiple designers rather than just one designer. Construing things along theistic lines, perhaps polytheism is true and there are many gods rather than one supreme God. Second, perhaps the designer is a mundane extraterrestrial intelligence, a physical being who perhaps just works with pre-existing physical materials that he did not create[9]Third, perhaps the designer is a kind of God but is evil instead of good.[10] Fourth, perhaps the designer is a kind of God but is morally middle of the road, neither perfectly good nor “perfectly” evil.[11] There are even more possibilities besides these, but what has been said suffices to illustrate the apparent problem with the claim that FTA constitutes an argument for the traditional theistic God.

In this article, I consider and attempt to defuse three objections to the claim that FTA constitutes a good argument for Theism. The rest of the article is organized as follows. In § II, I argue that, prima facie, if one’s prior credence in Theism being true if there is an Intelligent Designer is high, then Theism will plausibly be (greatly) confirmed by FTA. After this, in § III-V, I consider the previously alluded to three objections to the claim that FTA constitutes a good argument for Theism. Finally, in § VI, I summarize and conclude the article.

 

II. All About the Priors?

Let “Design” denote the hypothesis that the universe was intentionally designed in order to be able to support the existence of biological life. This hypothesis is meant to be consistent with there being any number of designers (as long as there is at least one) and with the designer or designers having or not having various properties like omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, etc. Design is a very broad hypothesis.[12] Let “~Design” denote the negation of Design. Let “FTL” denote the proposition that we live in a universe that is fine-tuned for life. Then, if the fine-tuning argument (FTA) is successful, the following statement holds:

Pr(FTL | Design) >> Pr(FTL | ~Design).

By the likelihood principle, this means that FTL is strong evidence for Design. Now, suppose we are wondering what evidential impact FTL has on the existence of the God of traditional theism. Let “Theism” denote the hypothesis that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good God who created and designed the universe. Clearly, Theism logically entails Design (though, of course, the reverse direction does not hold). It follows from this that Pr(Theism) ≤ Pr(Design). It is logically possible that, upon obtaining the fine-tuning evidence, even though the probability of Design increases, the probability of Theism could nevertheless decrease. In other words, it could be that it is the case that both Pr(Design | FTL) > Pr(Design) and Pr(Theism | FTL) < Pr(Theism) are true. It could also be the case that Pr(Design | FTL) is high, while Pr(Theism | FTL) is low.

While a logical possibility, however, it seems reasonable to think that, in the absence of an argument to think otherwise, when the probability of Design increases, the probability of Theism also increases, and by the same proportion. So, for example, if prior to obtaining evidence of fine-tuning, 75% of the probability space of Design is occupied by Theism, then after obtaining evidence of fine-tuning, Theism should still occupy 75% of the probability space of Design. As a consequence, if the posterior probability of Design were to end up at .9, then the posterior probability of Theism would end up at .675. The upshot of this general picture is that if Pr(Theism | Design) is high prior to obtaining the evidence of fine tuning (i.e., prior to learning FTL), then if Pr(Design | FTL) is high, then Pr(Theism | FTL) will also be quite high. Informally, if we started out thinking that we aren’t sure whether Design is true, but we are confident that if Design turned out to be true, then Theism would be true as well, then if we end up being confident in Design, then we will also end up being confident in Theism. In such a case, we can reasonably identify the Intelligent Designer with God. Thus, FTA will be a good argument for the existence of God.

In the remainder of the article, I will consider and respond to various objections against this general picture of things with respect to FTA being a good argument for Theism.

 

III. Objection 1: God is Not a Hypothesis

The first objection to the claim that the Intelligent Designer is God that I consider is due to Edward Feser.[13] (See my previous post HERE for further discussion). Feser’s chief contention is that Theism is not a “hypothesis,” where Feser understands a hypothesis as being defined as follows:

Hypothesis: A hypothesis is a conditional or provisional explanation of observed facts or of their connection with each other; a tentative explanation suggestive of further experiment and verification. As used in the natural sciences, a hypothesis is a predictive judgment about an empirical event that will occur under a describable set of conditions. (Hypotheses are sometimes generated by more general theories; if the predicted events in fact occur, the hypotheses are said to be confirmed, and this in turn provides additional rational support for the theories in question).[14]

Feser expresses his misgivings with the claim that Theism is a hypothesis (so understood) as follows:

My view is that to present theism as a “hypothesis” that might be confirmed by scientific findings is at best irrelevant to actually establishing God’s existence and at worst harmful insofar as it insinuates serious misunderstandings of the nature of God and his relationship to the world.[15]

Now, in the context of FTA, Theism is indeed treated as a kind of “hypothesis” in Feser’s sense. As such, in Bayesian terms, it would seem that the claim that construing Theism as a kind of hypothesis is irrelevant to establishing the existence of God amounts to the claim that Pr(Theism | FTL) = Pr(Theism), i.e., the evidence of fine-tuning has no evidential impact on Theism. The claim that construing Theism as a kind of hypothesis is harmful to establishing the existence of God seems to amount to the claim that Pr(Theism | FTL) < Pr(Theism), i.e., fine-tuning is evidence against Theism.

How does Feser defend these contentions? First, he gives an illustration of the way in which scientific hypotheses about the causes or explanations of observed effects are formed. Suppose that some effect E occurs under conditions of type T. From here, suppose that we form hypothesis H according to which a cause C is responsible for E. We can then test this hypothesis by bringing about C under T and observing whether or not E occurs. If it does, then we have confirmation of H. In Bayesian terms, Pr(H | C & E & T) > Pr(H). Even if, however, we get confirmation of H in this way, Feser notes, “it will be possible that something other than C is the cause, so that the most that further testing can do is render this supposition improbable (even if, perhaps, highly improbable).”[16]

From here, Feser argues that the relationship between C and E is not like the relationship between God and the universe according to Theism: “[T]heism holds that the fact that there is any world at all is something that could not even in principle have obtained in the absence of divine creative action.”[17] Continuing,

For classical theism, if we’re talking about a view according to which the world might have existed apart from God, but simply happens not to do so, then we’re not really talking about theism but rather about something that only superficially resembles it.[18]

So, the argument, as best as I can tell, is that according to Theism, God is a necessary being, a being that must exist and that is necessarily the cause (and, we might add, designer) of the universe. The universe could not have even in principle existed without God. Since, therefore, empirical confirmation does not get us to the conclusion that Theism, taken as a hypothesis, must be true, it follows that Theism cannot plausibly be understood as a hypothesis, something that can be confirmed or disconfirmed by empirical evidence. As such, since the Intelligent Designer arrived at by FTA is a hypothesis in this sense, we have reason to think that it must fall short of being God.

In response, I think that there are numerous problems with this argument. First, Feser’s argument seems to trade on an ambiguity between metaphysical and epistemic modality. Even if God’s existence is metaphysically necessary, it might not be epistemically necessary, i.e., God’s existence, though objectively necessary, might not be absolutely certain to me given what I know. In Bayesian reasoning, we are concerned with epistemic probabilities (credences), and there is nothing problematic whatsoever about assigning credences that are less than 1 to metaphysically necessary propositions. Now, if our credence in some metaphysically necessary proposition P is less than 1, i.e., if Pr(P) < 1, then it could very well happen that we obtain some evidence E that, upon conditionalizing, raises our credence in P. In other words, if Pr(P) < 1, then it could be the case that Pr(P | E) > Pr(P). We are concerned here with subjective probabilities. Of course, by the principal principle, if we know that the objective probability of P is 1, then our credence in P should also be 1. But we might not know this.

There are readily available examples from mathematics and theoretical computer science to illustrate this point. By the nature of the case, if Goldbach’s Conjecture, the Riemann Hypothesis, and the conjecture that P ≠ NP are true, then they are necessarily true. As it happens, though, we are not sure that any of these hypotheses are true. As such, we should not assign credence 1 to any of them even though if they are true then their objective probabilities are all 1. As such, there is nothing illegitimate about treating these mathematical conjectures as “hypotheses” that can be confirmed or disconfirmed by empirical evidence. Goldbach’s Conjecture in particular enjoys empirical evidence in its favor: It has been verified to hold for trillions and trillions of natural numbers. This is generally taken as evidence that the conjecture is true. It is quite intuitive to think that our confidence in Goldbach’s Conjecture should be higher given the knowledge that it is true for the first trillion natural numbers than it is in the absence of such knowledge. But then it is clear that the truth of (metaphysically) necessary propositions can be confirmed by empirical evidence.[19]

The only way for a proposition to not be susceptible of being confirmed by evidence in the sense of having its (epistemic) probability raised by evidence is for that proposition to already be certain, i.e., probability 1. Since, therefore, it has been shown that metaphysical necessity does not entail epistemic certainty, it follows that a metaphysically necessary proposition can in principle be confirmed by evidence, including empirical evidence. Consequently, if our credence in Theism is less than 1, then in principle Theism could be confirmed for us by empirical evidence. Therefore, there is nothing in principle preventing it from being the case that Pr(Theism | FTL) > Pr(Theism), and Feser has certainly given us no reason to think that Pr(Theism | FTL) < Pr(Theism). So, Feser’s contention that Theism cannot be treated as a hypothesis that can be confirmed by empirical evidence is unfounded. Thus, Feser has not given us a reason to think that FTA cannot constitute a good argument for Theism.

 

IV. Objection 2: Poor Design

Jimmy Alfonso Licon has raised the objection that the Intelligent Designer of the universe is not plausibly taken to be God because of what he refers to as the poor design worry. Licon summarizes the problem as follows:

Simply put, the worry is this: if God created the universe, specifically with the purpose of bringing about moral agents, we would antecedently predict that the universe and the laws of nature, taken as a whole, would be well-equipped to do just that. However, in light of how rare a life-permitting universe is, compared to all the ways the universe might… have been life-prohibiting given the laws of physics, strongly suggests that the universe was poorly designed for that purpose.[20]

If God, as a perfect designer, created the universe for the purposes of bringing about moral agents, we would expect the universe to do an excellent job of doing that. But, in light of how rare such a universe is, given the laws of physics, there seems like good reason, in light of how poorly designed the universe is, to doubt that God was responsible for the universe. Call this worry Poor Design.[21]

The argument, as I understand it, is that God is supposed to be a perfect designer. Now, if we are supposing that God intentionally designed the universe with the purpose in mind of making it life-permitting, then we would expect the universe to be, in some sense, maximally well-designed so that not just the physical constants but the laws of nature themselves ought to be well-suited to the task of allowing for the existence of biological life. Let us refer to the proposition that the laws of nature themselves are well-designed for life as well-designed laws (WDL). The claim is then that given Theism, we should expect WDL. But the evidence of fine-tuning has shown us that WDL is false since the laws of nature are so poorly designed for life that only a tiny range of the permissible values that the fundamental constants of nature can take on is life-permitting. Evidently, then, the laws themselves are not well-suited to supporting life given that they have to be “calibrated” in such an elaborate way in order to be able to support life. But then the evidence of fine-tuning actually cuts against Theism, i.e., Pr(Theism | FTL) < Pr(Theism). Perhaps, we might say, fine-tuning is evidence for a kind of cosmic MacGyver who is forced to ingeniously monkey with laws of physics unfriendly to life that were simply given to him in order to produce life, but it is not evidence for a divine and perfect designer who is supposed to have designed not just the parameters of the laws of nature but the laws themselves as well.

In response to this, let “MacGyver” denote the hypothesis that an imperfect, non-divine designer designed the universe to be life-permitting. It seems to me that, at best, Licon has given us reason to think that Pr(MacGyver | FTL) > Pr(Theism | FTL). But this by no means entails that Pr(Theism | FTL) < Pr(Theism). Indeed, it could still be the case that Pr(Theism | FTL) >> Pr(Theism). For example, suppose that prior to learning FTL, we were pretty equally split on Design versus ~Design and that within Design, we were equally split on Theism and MacGyver so that Theism occupied 50% of the probability space of Design, and MacGyver occupied the other 50%. Now, suppose that FTL greatly confirms Design over ~Design and that it also confirms MacGyver over Theism. Theism could still occupy a much greater proportion of the total probability space upon learning FTL than it did prior to learning FTL. It’s just that MacGyver would occupy a greater proportion still.

As I said, though, I think that Pr(MacGyver | FTL) > Pr(Theism | FTL) is the most that Licon has shown. That he has even shown this much is not obvious. For whether it is true that Pr(MacGyver | FTL) > Pr(Theism | FTL) will depend in part on what the prior probabilities of Theism and MacGyver are. For many of us, Theism will strike us as much more intrinsically plausible than MacGyver and thus our prior credence in Theism will be significantly higher than our prior credence in MacGyver. In such a case, it could be that even though FTL raises the prior probability of MacGyver more than it raises the prior probability of Theism, it is nevertheless the case that the posterior probability of Theism will be greater than the posterior probability of MacGyver. Of course, this kind of reasoning will not apply to those staunch skeptics who have a very low prior credence in Theism, but it is perhaps too much to expect the consideration of FTA alone to sway such individuals. There are other arrows in the theist’s quiver that can be used in a cumulative case for Theism.

The final thing that I will say in response to Licon is that his argument presupposes that God could have brought about the kind of life in the universe that He has with different laws of nature. But this is certainly a contestable claim. Indeed, such a claim will be flatly rejected by those of us who (like me) accept a powerist conception of laws of nature according to which laws of nature are mere expressions of the causal powers possessed by individual concrete objects.[22] On this picture, one cannot change the laws of nature without changing the fundamental kinds of things that exist. So, assuming that God wanted to create life like ours, God could not have done so with alternative laws of nature. So, the fact that our laws of nature require a great deal of fine-tuning should not count against Theism if we assume that God wanted to create life like ours.

There are, to be sure, still difficulties here for powerists. The first difficulty is in reconciling powerism with the distinction between the laws of nature and the fundamental constants that appear in the laws of nature. It is unclear how to make sense of the idea that the laws of nature supervene on the causal powers of individual concrete objects and yet the values of the constants that appear in them do not. This is not a problem that I will attempt to solve here, but it is one that ultimately needs to be solved by powerists who want to defend FTA. The second difficulty is that while it is true that, given powerism, God could not have created our kind of life with different laws of nature, it is possible that God could have created other kinds of life with other supervening laws of nature, where such laws of nature do not require the kind of fine-tuning that our laws do. It is difficult to assess the evidential weight and relevance of this consideration, though, and the point at present is that Licon bears the burden of doing so to carry his argument, and he has at present not done so. So much for Licon’s objection.

 

V. Objection 3: Divine Psychology and Inscrutable Priors

Neil A. Manson has argued that FTA cannot constitute a good argument for Theism because the prior probability that God would create life is inscrutable. As he says, “God’s mind is so different from ours that we cannot judge what God would be likely to create, or even whether God would be likely to create at all.”[23] We simply have no idea at all whether Pr(FTL | Theism) > Pr(FTL | ~Theism) because we have no idea what Pr(FTL | Theism) is in the first place. No credence can be assigned.

The problem with this objection is that Bayesian epistemology simply cannot work if there are propositions with inscrutable credences. One cannot have coherence among credences nor can one conditionalize on evidence with inscrutable credences. In other words, the two foundational principles of Bayesian epistemology (viz., coherence and conditionalization) cannot function with inscrutable credences. From the Bayesian perspective, everything is relevant to everything. If one thing is inscrutable, everything is in danger of becoming inscrutable.

Manson is fairly dismissive of this response to his claim, associating it with “hard-core Bayesians.”[24] But insofar as Bayesian epistemology wouldn’t work with inscrutable credences, Manson’s objection against FTA as an argument for Theism would, if cogent, also be an argument against (at least “standard”) Bayesian epistemology. It is of course open to Manson to argue against standard Bayesianism, but doing so will require a much greater effort than what he has so far given by his appeal to the difficulty of engaging in divine psychology. Moreover, it seems that Manson owes us an account of probabilistic reasoning that works with inscrutable credences and that is at least as good as standard Bayesianism. As Luke A. Barnes notes in his response to Manson:

In practice, most scientists would simply set the prior probability or likelihood of an inscrutable theory to zero, and thereby ignore it. But applying this to the FTA amounts to the declaration that we should reason as if the probability of God creating a life-permitting universe is zero, which seems far too strong to be justified by mere scepticism. If the Bayesian can’t set inscrutable probabilities to zero, we need a principled way to exclude inscrutable theories before we start. Probability textbooks are all missing a chapter near their beginning. What are these principles, how do they relate to the basics of the Bayesian approach, and how has probability theory managed for so long without them?[25]

Until Manson can satisfactorily answer these pressing questions, it seems reasonable for theists to simply hide behind Bayesianism. It is an excellent place to hide. After all, there is no shame in holding that FTA—taken as an argument for Theism—is only as plausible as Bayesianism itself, given what a successful and robust research program Bayesianism has been both in epistemology and in the physical sciences.

 

VI. Conclusion

In this article, I hope to have helped clear the way for successfully bridging the gap between the existence of an Intelligent Designer and the existence of God with respect to the fine-tuning argument. I have suggested that if one’s prior credence in the Intelligent Designer (if there is such a being) being God is high, then the fine-tuning argument will likely constitute a good argument for the existence of God. I then considered and attempted to defuse three objections to the attempt to bridge the gap between Intelligent Designer and God that either call into question whether one’s prior credence in the Intelligent Designer being God ought to be high or argue that the fine-tuning evidence should actually lower one’s credence in the Intelligent Designer being God. If I have been successful, then what I have said constitutes a modest contribution to solving the Gap Problem for the fine-tuning argument.

 

  

References

Barnes, Luke A. (2019). A Reasonable Little Question: A Formulation of the Fine-Tuning Argument. Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy, 6(20201214). 
https://doi.org/10.3998/ergo.12405314.0006.042

Collins, Robin (2012). The Teleological Argument: An Exploration of the Fine-Tuning of the Universe. In W. L. Craig & J. P. Moreland (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (pp. 202–281). essay, Wiley Blackwell.

Craig, William L. (2003). Design and the Anthropic Fine-Tuning of the Universe. God and Design, 170–192. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203398265-17

Draper, Paul (2009). The Problem of Evil. In T. P. Flint & M. C. Rea (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (pp. 332–351). essay, Oxford University Press.

Feser, Edward (2013). Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way. Nova et Veter, 11(3), 707–749.

Feser, E. (2022, December 8). Is God’s existence a “hypothesis”? Edward Feser’s Blog. May 8, 2024, https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/12/is-gods-existence-hypothesis.html

Hawthorne, John, Isaacs, Yoaav, & Wall, Aron C. (2024 draft). The Foundations of Fine-Tuning. Forthcoming.

Isaacs, Yoaav, Hawthorne, John, & Russell, Jeffrey S. (2022). Multiple Universes and Self-Locating Evidence. The Philosophical Review, 131(3), 241–294. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-9743809

Koons, Robert C., & Pickavance, Timothy (2017). The Atlas of Reality: A Comprehensive Guide to Metaphysics. Wiley Blackwell.

Law, Stephen (2010). The evil-god challenge. Religious Studies, 46(3), 353–373.
https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034412509990369

Licon, Jimmy A. (2015). The Fine-Tuning Argument and the Problem of Poor Design. Philosophia, 43(2), 411–426. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-014-9576-0

Manson, Neil A. (2018). How not to be generous to fine-tuning sceptics. Religious Studies, 56(3), 303–317. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034412518000586

Mooney, Justin (2019). From a Cosmic Fine-Tuner to a Perfect Being. Analysis, 79(3), 449–452.
https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/any091

Oppy, Graham R. (2006). Arguing About Gods. Cambridge University Press.

Pruss, Alexander (2012). The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument. In W. L. Craig & J. P. Moreland (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (pp. 24–100). essay, Wiley Blackwell.

Endnotes

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[1] I use the term “biological life” to simply refer to physical lifeforms as opposed to possible nonphysical lifeforms like God, angels or disembodied souls.

[2] “X >> Y” means (for my purposes) that X is significantly greater than Y.

[3] Cf. Isaacs, Hawthorne, & Russell (2022), pp. 241-242.

[4] “I had no need of that hypothesis.”

[5] See, e.g., Collins (2012), pp. 256-272.

[6] See, e.g., Craig (2003); Collins (2012).

[7] Cf. Mooney (2019).

[8] See, e.g., Pruss (2012), pp. 25.

[9] See, e.g., Oppy (2006), pg. 208.

[10] See, e.g., Law (2010).

[11] See, e.g., Draper (2009), pp. 343, 346.

[12] Hawthorne, Isaacs, & Wall (2024), pg. 66.

[13] Feser (2022).

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid. Cf. Feser (2013), pp. 740-741.

[16] Feser (2022); emphasis in original.

[17] Ibid.; emphasis in original.

[18] Ibid.; emphasis in original.

[19] I should note that Bayesian epistemology does not generally treat “empirical evidence” differently than any other kind of evidence. For Bayesians, evidence is evidence. You learn it, and you conditionalize on it.

[20] Licon (2015), pp. 411; emphasis in original.

[21] Ibid., pp. 412; emphasis in original.

[22] See, e.g., Koons & Pickavance (2017), pg. 106.

[23] Manson (2018), pp. 306.

[24] Ibid., pp. 308. Manson also argues that if inscrutability is a problem for his response to the fine-tuning argument, then it is likewise a problem for skeptical theism as a response to the problem of evil. This seems fair enough, but I am inclined to say so much the worse for skeptical theism.

[25] Barnes (2019), § 4.6.