The inductive principle

One of the nicest illustrations of the futility of atheistic philosophy is the fact that the inductive principle -- essentially, the principle that past experience is a good predictor of future events, or in short, that "the future will be like the past" -- is simply without justification on an atheistic worldview. This is pretty bad, since the inductive principle is a precondition for all science. I mentioned this about three years ago, but surprisingly haven't brought it up since. To elaborate, I'll quote from my favorite section of Greg Bahnsen's Van Til's Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (pg 618-19. I've inlined parts of the footnotes):

Unbelievers who have been both brilliant and honest about the matter (The foremost example of this, of course, is David Hume's devastating critique of causal reasoning in An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding...) have openly conceded that they have no rational basis for believing that the future will resemble the past. We may have observed that event B followed event A many times in the past, but to know that B necessarily follows A (i.e., that the relation is causal), calls for reference to a metaphysical principle (namely, that the future will be like the past) [not to mention the metaphysical status of laws, how one can judge something to be a law of nature, what it even means for something to be a law of nature, and other really important issues in the philosophy of science]) for which the unbeliever has no warrant or right. As Bertrand Russell was driven to conclude: "The general principles of science, such as the belief in the reign of law, and the belief that every event must have a cause, are as completely dependent upon the inductive principle as are the beliefs of daily life. All such general principles are believed because mankind have found innumerable instances of their truth and no instances of their falsehood. But this affords no evidence for their truth in the future, unless the inductive principle is assumed." Assumed? But that is what was supposed to be proved! Russell was aware of his defeat: "Hence we can never use experience to prove the inductive principle without begging the question. Thus we must... forgo all justification of our expectations about the future." (Bertrand Russell, "On Induction," in The problems of Philosophy...).

Bahnsen goes on to point out that "The unbelieving worldview cannot provide a cogent reason for what we necessarily assume in all of our reasoning. Thus, it is entirely unreasonable not to believe in God."

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