Religious Studies

Naturalism has been characterized both as a claim about what exists (claim naturalism) and as a commitment to a certain methodology (method naturalism). The fine-tuning argument for God's existence presents a significant challenge to each way of characterizing naturalism. The claim naturalist faces the fact that the best response to the fine-tuning argument (the many-world hypothesis) requires the existence of many universes that are not clearly naturalistic themselves. Method naturalism faces the challenge that it does not have the resources to ground the preference of the many-world hypothesis to the designer hypothesis. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]