Thought Snack: God's Involvement in Inductive Reasoning
“We have observed that even after repeating an experiment many times, a scientist cannot draw a generalizing conclusion with complete certainty. But we may explore another type of question, namely, why the scientist has any degree of confidence at all. Why should a scientist have any positive expectation that the ball will behave as it did before? If we lived in a world of complete chaos, nothing would be in the least predictable. It would hardly be a world at all. And we ourselves could not count on the reliability of our memories or the regularity of our heartbeat, or anything else. Why, most of the time, do we find that regularities that we have observed continue to be observed? Philosophers have puzzled over these conundrums, but they have not reached a consensus. If we listen to what the Bible says, we have the beginning of an answer. God has created a world that has regularities in it. He has created a world using his wisdom, and he has made a world suitable for human habitation. Inductive arguments about balls work because God has seen to it that balls behave in a regular fashion. In addition, he has made human beings in his image, so that our minds are in some ways in tune with his. So our expectations about regularities frequently (though not always) match God’s own plans for the world. Inductive arguments work because God made the world with regularities that harmonize with our sense of what to expect.”
– Excerpt from Logic: A God-Centered Approach to the Foundation of Western Thought by Vern Sheridan Poythress.
