How to Make a Bayesian Inference to the Best Explanation

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Society & Culture, Life Sciences

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2024

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When we gain new information about beliefs we hold, it’s good practice to update our viewpoints accordingly to avoid incoherence in our thinking. On today’s ID The Future, host Jonathan McLatchie invites professor and author Dr. Tim McGrew to the show to discuss how Bayesian reasoning can help us maintain coherence across our set of beliefs. The pair also apply Bayesian logic to the debate over Darwinian evolution to show that a confidence in design arguments can be mathematically rigorous and logically sound. Bayesian logic provides a mathematical way to update prior probabilities with new information to produce a more realistic likelihood ratio. And when it comes to evaluating different hypotheses, small pieces of evidence can add up. “Even evidence Read More › Source

Transcript

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0:00.0	ID The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
0:12.6	Welcome to ID The Future. I'm your host, Jonathan McClachy, and today we're very honored to have with us, Dr. Tim McGrue.
0:19.7	Tim is a professor of philosophy at Western Michigan University, where he's taught for the past 30 years.
0:26.6	His research and interest includes formal epistemology, the history and philosophy of science, and the history and philosophy of religion.
0:33.6	When he is not doing philosophy, he enjoys playing chess online. He's actually a national master in chess and former Michigan State champion. He coaches at his local chess club. He likes running trails and making high-quality paper airplanes. He lives in southwest Michigan with his wife, Lydia McGrew, who's also an analytic philosopher and very widely published, and their
0:55.2	daughters. So welcome, Dr. McGrew. Great to have you on the program today. Thank you so much.
1:02.0	So Dr. McGrew, for those among our listeners who aren't familiar with your work, tell us a little bit
1:06.6	about your research interests and what you teach at the University of Western Michigan.
1:10.8	Sure. So of Western Michigan.
1:16.6	Sure. So at Western Michigan University, I get to teach a little bit of everything in philosophy. I get to teach logic, some history of philosophy, a mix of graduate and undergraduate classes,
1:22.5	had a great time here this fall, just wrapping up teaching a course entitled Defense Against the Dark Arts,
1:29.0	which has been a lot of fun. And as you can imagine, all the Harry Potter fans were clamoring
1:33.9	to get into that one. I like to teach theory of knowledge, probability theory,
1:39.1	taught a graduate course on inference to the best explanation. I teach philosophy of religion
1:43.7	and philosophy of science
1:45.8	and the history of science as well. I've got an upper level epistemology course that I really love,
1:51.2	and I have a course entitled The Modern World View, which is always fun because to some extent,
1:57.8	what is taught in that course is left to the discretion of the professor, and I thoroughly enjoy all of it. I really, I guess I would say I'm very blessed to be able to
2:06.5	teach. I think it is the ideal profession for me. I wake up rejoicing that I get to go to work
2:12.4	every day, and so that's something for which I'm very grateful. That's wonderful. So today we're here to talk about base theorem and how it relates to inferences to the best explanation.
2:23.0	Could you begin by telling us a little bit about what is base theorem and how does it inform how we understand evidence?
2:31.2	Sure.
	...

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