Joseph Butler

Background

Joseph Butler (1692–1752), Anglican bishop of Bristol and then Durham, is the eighteenth century's most important philosophical theologian in English and the fountainhead of the cumulative-case, probabilistic method this wiki's evidentialist framing descends from. His Analogy of Religion (1736), written against the deists, argues that the difficulties alleged against revealed religion have exact analogues in the course of nature that the deist already accepts. Its methodological maxim became the motto of the whole tradition: "to us, probability is the very guide of life" (Butler, Analogy, Introduction).

Butler's signature idea is probation: this life is a state of trial and discipline, and that frame extends to the evidence of religion itself. "The evidence of religion not appearing obvious, may constitute one particular part of some men's trial in the religious sense: as it gives scope, for a virtuous exercise, or vicious neglect of their understanding, in examining or not examining into that evidence. There seems no possible reason to be given, why we may not be in a state of moral probation, with regard to the exercise of our understanding upon the subject of religion, as we are with regard to our behavior in common affairs" (Butler, Analogy II.6).

Positions held in this wiki

• Divine Hiddenness — the classic form of the response most philosophers now give to Schellenberg: non-obvious evidence serves probationary goods, and unevenly distributed light is of a piece with providence's other uneven blessings.
• Miracles and the Laws of Nature — the probabilistic framework for miracle testimony, written before Hume's essay: any particular fact is antecedently improbable yet overcome by ordinary proof, and he deployed the frozen-water example (the "Indian prince" case) drawing the opposite moral from Hume's (Butler, Analogy, Introduction).

Key works in our corpus

• The Analogy of Religion (1736) — in corpus. Key passages: Introduction (probability as the guide of life; the frost/analogy discussion); Part II, ch. 6 ("The Want of Universality in Revelation") — the direct eighteenth-century anticipation of the hiddenness debate; Part II, ch. 2 (the deflation of the "peculiar presumption" against miracles).

Corpus gap: the Fifteen Sermons (1726), Butler's moral philosophy, are not yet ingested.

Principal critics

• David Hume — the Enquiry's Section X is in effect the reply to Butler's probabilism: for miracles, the presumption is not finite but proof-grade.
• J. L. Schellenberg — the accommodation objection: the goods probation invokes could be had within a conscious relationship with God, so they do not explain nonresistant nonbelief.

See also

• William Paley — the successor who turned Butler's framework into a direct rebuttal of Hume.
• Blaise Pascal — the calibrated-hiddenness alternative to the probationary account.
• Richard Swinburne — the Bayesian modernization of Butler's cumulative case; the SEP reads Butler's "all the evidence taken together" as a verbal Bayesian argument.