✶The Induction Ownership Fallacy: Hume, Theistic Appropriation, and the Illicit Conversion of a Shared Burden into an Apologetic Advantage

Hume's problem of induction is sometimes used in Christian apologetics to argue that non-theistic inquiry cannot justify expecting the future to resemble the past, whereas Christianity can account for induction through a rational and faithful creator. This argument starts from a real shared limit: contingent observations do not deductively entail unobserved cases, and an inductive defense of induction is not a premise-neutral proof. The disputed move is the conversion of that common burden into an exclusive Christian epistemic advantage. This paper reconstructs the strongest ownership claim and separates five increasingly demanding achievements: ontological grounding, a prior expectation of broad order, higher-order assurance, local projection warrant, and exclusive warrant. It then subjects the last claim to a four-gate test. A worldview that allegedly owns inductive warrant must support the relevant stability, connect finite agents to its content, constrain particular projections, and exclude rival routes. A general divine-order premise may contribute at the first three levels without identifying which predicates are projectible, where a regularity's boundary lies, what probability to assign, or when an apparent exception is a miracle, hidden condition, or error. A second argument develops an access--externalism gradient. If warrant requires reflective access to the divine guarantee, the theological, historical, and application bridges must themselves be defended through fallible inductive and abductive practices. If warrant instead depends externally on reliable faculties functioning in an appropriate environment, an agent need not affirm the true metaphysical explanation in order to reason with warrant. Properly basic and hybrid accounts may add rational assurance, but applying a broad assurance to a drug, storm, promise, or damaged bridge still requires domain-sensitive bridges. Matched cases across medicine, engineering, testimony, forecasting, and blinded inquiry show why neither pure nor hybrid routes establish proprietary local warrant. The result does not refute Christianity, deny that the Christian deity could be the ultimate ground of natural order, supply a deductive proof of induction, or rule out a more detailed transcendental or probabilistic argument. It establishes a narrower conclusion: the generic guarantor move does not turn Hume's shared constraint into an apologetic victory. Metaphysical grounding, broad expectation, personal assurance, local guidance, and exclusive entitlement are distinct achievements; credit at one level cannot simply be carried upward.