The Principle of Simplicity and its Role in the Argument for Theism: an Examination of Swinburne's Version

Simplicity is one of the most important criteria for the evaluation of scientific theories in the philosophy of science. Today some philosophers of religion, such as Swinburne, have retreated from deductive arguments for God and sought to appeal to inductive arguments for theism. Thus they have employed the criterion of simplicity for the evaluation of theism in contrast with rival theories such as naturalism or humanism. In this paper, I criticize such attempts—I have categorized the objections into three groups. There is no doubt that such attempts are still in their beginnings and they might be improved in order to resist the objections.