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Mellor's ‘Bridge–Hand’ Argument
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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In his article ‘God and Probability’, 1 Hugh Mellor introduced the notion of the ‘bridge-hand fallacy’, allegedly committed by those who think they can appeal to probabilities in arguments for design. I should like to give this notion another airing, partly because of its recent criticism in two interesting books - R. G. Swinburne' The Existence of God and D. J. Bartholomew's God of Chance - and partly because it seems worth asking how it fares in relation to the most recent examples of design argument, namely those which appeal to the so-called ‘anthropic principle’ in cosmology.
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page 475 note 1 Bartholomew also thinks that Mellor commits an elementary mistake in the way he converts statistical probability into inductive probability. However, since this does not actually affect the main argument, I shall not pursue the point.
page 476 note 1 See Peacocke's, A. R. discussion of the work of M. Eigen in Creation and the World of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 101ff.Google Scholar
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