Michael Rota

contemporaryAnalytic Philosophy of Religion

Michael Rota is a contemporary analytic philosopher of religion at the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota), specializing in natural theology and probabilistic arguments for theism. He is known for applying Bayesian reasoning to classical arguments for God's existence, including fine-tuning arguments and Pascal's Wager. His work engages questions of moral uncertainty, epistemic rationality, and the evidential force of cosmological and teleological evidence.

Notable Achievements

Authored Taking Pascal's Wager: Moral Uncertainty and Nonideal Epistemology (2016, Oxford University Press)

Developed Bayesian analyses of the fine-tuning argument, addressing the reference class and prior probability problems

Applied probabilistic frameworks to assess cumulative evidence for theism

Contributed to debates on rational belief under moral and epistemic uncertainty

Positions & Arguments(1)

Natural Theology

claim

When focusing on a limited class of constants C, background evidence used to motivate the prior P(D) may include initial conditions of the universe, laws of physics, and values of all constants other than C