Colin Howson > Quotes

“One of the recent arguments from design, that based on the so-called fine-tuning life of some fundamental physical constants, founders on the following objections: an extremely small prior probability merited by the God of theism in light – if that is the right word – of the Problem of Evil; the fact that it is not unreasonable to place a substantial probability on the hypothesis that a future theory will fix those values; and the sheer incoherence of computations of the ‘chances’ of fine-tuning were there no fine-tuner.”
― Colin Howson, Objecting to God

“Although Ramsey's and de Finetti's accounts endowed an agent's probabilities with a purely subjective status they knew that, for from rendering those quantities scientifically valueless, the condition of consistency combined with the rule of conditionalization supports a powerful new epistemology called Bayesian epistemology. Its scientific appeal lies principally in two features: (i) so-called Bayesian networks are not only extremely powerful diagnostic tools but also provide the formal basis of some of the most revolutionary developments in AI; (ii) in fairly general circumstances agents with different initial, or prior, probability functions will, with enough new information, find their updated probabilities converging; in this way, it is claimed, objectivity is realized as an emergent property of consistent subjective assignments.”
― Colin Howson