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

Sean Carroll's criticism of theism in the 2014 God and Cosmology debate was not merely that theism lacks a mechanism or that naturalism currently has better physics. His sharper point was that theism has too much accommodation capacity. When a hypothesis can reinterpret almost any possible observation as compatible with divine intention, it loses the ability to discriminate among possible worlds. This paper develops that point as a general account of explanatory elasticity. A theory becomes elastically weak when its auxiliary resources allow it to stretch around data without making risky, specific, antecedent expectations. The paper situates Carroll's point within philosophy of science, Bayesian confirmation, and model selection. Popper emphasized risk and falsifiability. Quine showed that hypotheses face evidence within a web of auxiliaries. Sober and Forster argue that simplicity and predictive accuracy are connected through constraints on accommodation. I argue that theism often treats auxiliary elasticity as a virtue: God might want life, beauty, discoverability, moral drama, hiddenness, lawlike order, miracles, simplicity, complexity, suffering, or rescue. But the more possible worlds theism can bless after the fact, the less evidential work any particular world performs. I formalize the problem with a flexibility penalty. A hypothesis (H) confirms poorly when its auxiliary set (A_H) can absorb a wide range of mutually different observations while offering few independent constraints. Theistic explanations frequently raise (P(E mid H,A_H)) only by expanding (A_H) after (E) is known. That strategy may preserve logical consistency, but it reduces predictive discipline. The paper concludes that Carroll's critique is best understood not as scientistic impatience with theology, but as a demand that cosmological explanations pay for their elasticity.