The Existence of God: A New Way

Abstract

This article addresses the ‘discrepancy issue’ in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, whereby Richard Swinburne’s probabilistic approach and Graham Oppy’s worldview analysis reach opposing conclusions from substantially the same evidence. In response, it sketches a new abductive argument for God’s existence by developing Peter Lipton’s notion of Inference to the Best Explanation into the method of ‘Virtue-IBE’, which compares rival theories by scoring their theoretical virtues. Virtue-IBE is offered as an improvement upon existing approaches and is applied to Bare Theism, as developed by Swinburne, Worldview Naturalism, as defended by Oppy, and Trope-Theoretic Theism, as proposed in this work (and earlier work), across six broad features of the physical world. On this assessment, Trope-Theoretic Theism, which identifies God as a maximal power trope, emerges as the loveliest, and therefore the best, of the three theories considered. The resulting conjunction of method and theory ultimately provides the basis for a new abductive case for God’s existence.