ABSTRACT
The author shares in the widespread gratitude for Professor McGrath's convincingly-argued and remarkable intellectual contributions in the area of science and religion, of which this is an example. The case for both the necessity and importance of conjunctive explanation and for the way religion functions in the explanatory schema is well set out as ever copiously documented. McGrath's allusion to the naturalness of believing in God suggests that the voice of David Hume should be heard somewhere in the choir. Hume held that there are "natural beliefs," whether or not he successfully integrated this into his thinking about religion. His view on this does not impinge on the question of conjunction, but he is an important source of the kind of empiricism which informed Logical Positivism, to which McGrath refers, and if they make big-picture connections between explanation in the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution and in twentieth-century Logical Positivism, one might do worse than keep an eye on brother David.
