Timothy McGrew

Timothy McGrew is Professor of Philosophy at Western Michigan University, where he has taught for the past 25 years. His research interests include formal epistemology, the history and philosophy of science, and the history and philosophy of religion. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Vanderbilt University, and an M.A. in Philosophy from Vanderbilt University.

Professor McGrew has edited or co-edited the volumes Philosophy of Science: An Historical Anthology (Blackwell, 2009), Internalism and Epistemology: The Architecture of Reason (Routledge, 2007), and The Foundations of Knowledge (Littlefield Adams, 1995). He has contributed to many volumes, including God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science (Routledge, 2003), The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), Four Views on Christianity and Philosophy (Zondervan, 2016), Best Explanations: New Essays on Inference to the Best Explanation (Oxford University Press, 2017), and Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God (Oxford University Press, 2018), and he has published in many academic journals including Journal of Philosophical Research, Philosophia Christi, and British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

When he is not doing philosophy, he enjoys playing chess online, coaching at his local chess club, running trails, and making high quality paper airplanes.

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How to Make a Bayesian Inference to the Best Explanation

_{Timothy McGrew
December 9, 2024}

When we gain new information about beliefs we hold, it’s good practice to update our viewpoints accordingly to avoid incoherence in our thinking. On today’s ID The Future, host Jonathan McLatchie invites professor and author Dr. Tim McGrew to the show to discuss how Bayesian reasoning can help us maintain coherence across our set of beliefs. The pair also apply Bayesian logic to the debate over Darwinian evolution to show that a confidence in design arguments can be mathematically rigorous and logically sound. Bayesian logic provides a mathematical way to update prior probabilities with new information to produce a more realistic likelihood ratio. And when it comes to evaluating different hypotheses, small pieces of evidence can add up. “Even evidence that simply …