This paper considers the Bayesian form of the fine-tuning argument as advanced by Richard Swinburne. An expository section aims to identify the precise character of the argument, and three lines of objection are then advanced. The first of these holds that there is an inconsistency in Swinburne’s procedure, the second that his argument has an unacceptable dependence on an objectivist theory of ...

We argue that there is a tension between two types of design arguments-the fine-tuning argument (FTA) and the biological design argument (BDA). The tension arises because the strength of each argument is inversely proportional to the value of a certain currently unknown probability. Since the value of that probability is currently unknown, we investigate the properties of the FTA and BDA on dif...

Historically, the argument from design probably has been the most widely cited argument for the existence of God, both in the West and the East (such as in theistic schools of Hinduism). Modern scientifi c discoveries, particularly the discovery beginning around the 1950s that the fundamental structure of the universe is “balanced on a razor’s edge” for the existence of life, have given this ar...

Event argument extraction (EAE) aims to identify the arguments of a given event, and classify roles that those play. Due high data demands training EAE models, zero-shot cross-lingual has attracted increasing attention, as it greatly reduces human annotation effort. Some prior works indicate generation-based methods have achieved promising performance for monolingual EAE. However, when applying...

Our laws of nature and our cosmos appear to be delicately fine-tuned for life to emerge, in a way that seems hard to attribute to chance. In view of this, some have taken the opportunity to revive the scholastic Argument from Design, whereas others have felt the need to explain this apparent fine-tuning of the clockwork of the Universe by proposing the existence of a ‘Multiverse’. We analyze th...

More than two decades ago, Richard Swinburne and Robert Adams put forth an argument for theism that they aptly labeled the argument from consciousness . 1 A thumbnail sketch of the argument goes like this: Th ere are facts involving correlations between brain states and conscious states of persons for which rational inquiry demands a satisfying explanation. Th ere are but two broad forms such a...