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    C.D. Broad and later Elliott Sober showed that cumulative... — Carmelics
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    Challenges→Multiple inductive arguments together may provide substantial support for theistic belief

    C.D. Broad and later Elliott Sober showed that cumulative case arguments conflate correlated evidence with genuinely additive probabilistic support.

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    • 1.Evidence for God's existence (fine-tuning, cosmological, moral arguments) often shares common explanatory targets, making them probabilistically dependent.
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    • 2.When evidence is correlated, multiplying probabilities as if independent artificially inflates cumulative support without accounting for this dependence.
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    • 3.Bayesian analysis requires explicit conditional probabilities; cumulative case arguments typically omit these calculations entirely.
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    Reasons Against

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    • 1.Not all cumulative case arguments treat evidence as independent; sophisticated versions explicitly model evidential relationships and adjust accordingly.
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    • 2.Even correlated evidence can provide multiplicative support if each piece explains distinct phenomena or comes from independent sources, which Broad/Sober underaddressed.
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    • 3.The charge conflates a flaw in how some argue cumulatively with whether cumulative reasoning itself is invalid as a philosophical method.
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    Natural Theology1 linked

    Related

    Bayesian analysis requires explicit conditional probabilities; cumulative case a...Even correlated evidence can provide multiplicative support if each piece explai...Evidence for God's existence (fine-tuning, cosmological, moral arguments) often ...Multiple inductive arguments together may provide substantial support for theist...
    +3 moreShow less
    Not all cumulative case arguments treat evidence as independent; sophisticated v...The charge conflates a flaw in how some argue cumulatively with whether cumulati...When evidence is correlated, multiplying probabilities as if independent artific...

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    2 (1 for, 1 against)
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