Abstract
I argue that there could not be grounds on which to introduce God into our ontology. My argument presupposes two doctrines. First, we should allow into our ontology only what figures in the best explanation of an event or fact. Second, explanation is contrastive by nature, in that the explanandum always consists in a contrast between a fact and a foil. I argue that God could not figure in true contrastive explanatory statements, because the omnipotence of God guarantees that for any true proposition p, God could have made it the case that ~p just as much as He could have made it the case that p.
Highlights
I argue that there could not be grounds on which to introduce God into our ontology
My argument presupposes two doctrines: A1: We should allow into our ontology only what figures in the best explanation of an event or fact
I argue that God could not figure in true contrastive explanatory statements, because the omnipotence of God guarantees that for any true proposition p, God could have made it the case that ~p just as much as He could have made it the case that p
Summary
I argue that there could not be grounds on which to introduce God into our ontology. My argument presupposes two doctrines. It follows that we have good reason to believe that x exists only if x has some some explanatory power: only those entities the postulation of which is necessary for explaining something should be believed to exist.3 I will argue that appeal to God is always explanatorily impotent.
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