◉ Infinite Flexibility: Sean Carroll, Explanatory Elasticity, and the Predictive Cost of Theistic Accommodation

Sean Carroll's challenge in the 2014 God and Cosmology debate is often summarized as a complaint that theism is not physics. Its stronger form concerns explanatory elasticity: a framework that can pair almost any observed world with some possible divine intention may retain logical compatibility while losing power to discriminate among worlds. This paper makes that challenge precise without assuming that all explanation must be scientific. It distinguishes an umbrella God-concept from narrower aim-auxiliaries and derives a simple constraint from the law of total probability. If several mutually exclusive aims remain live before an outcome, the God-concept's likelihood for that outcome is the prior-weighted mixture across those aims. Selecting the best-fitting aim after observing the outcome substitutes a maximum for that mixture and uses the same evidence twice—first to choose the aim and then to praise its fit. I call the resulting restriction the evidential conservation rule: an auxiliary introduced by the focal evidence may restore compatibility, but it cannot by itself supply the evidential advantage it was introduced to create. A five-part constraint ledger—antecedent specification, independent support, cross-case stability, exclusion power, and revision exposure—then distinguishes disciplined auxiliaries from mobile rescue. Applications to cosmic fine-tuning, suffering, divine hiddenness, and petitionary prayer show both the force and limits of the rule. The conclusion is conditional. The argument neither disproves theism nor makes naturalism the default winner. It shows what a specified God-concept must provide to earn public confirmation from a particular world: stable aims or probability weights fixed independently of that world, a comparative likelihood advantage, and genuine exposure to evidential loss.