ABSTRACT
It would be easy to reconcile the first-order claims of a completed naturalistic evolutionary theory about the sequence of mutations leading from a common ancestor to all present earth life with the claim that there is a creator of the universe. But both a completed naturalistic evolutionary theory and Western monotheism would claim more. A completed naturalistic evolutionary theory would claim to offer naturalistic statistical explanations of all the significant features of present life. And Western monotheism claims that God specifically designed the significant features of human beings. Reconciling statistical explanations with specific design is a much harder task. After recapitulating arguments showing that standard reconciliations in the evolutionary case have serious problems, I offer a new reconciliation that uses a liberal view of the nature of probability - a probability is anything that satisfies the axioms of probability - together with a theistic version of David Lewis’s best-fit probability. And since theistic best-fit probabilities solve a serious explanatory problem facing David Lewis’s best-fit probability, they are thereby of independent interest.
