"Is There a God?": Notes on the Book by Richard Swinburne (II/VIII)

For more about what's going on here, see this post.

For those of you who'd like to follow along, this is the book I am reading:
          Swinburne, Richard. Is There a God? Revised ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Print.
Chapter II: How We Explain Things
Summary
     In which Swinburne spends 6 full pages trying to teach inductive reasoning without ever using the phrase "inductive reasoning." Swinburne then proceeds in a rather Holmesian manner, outlining the process of justifying a claim with 4 criteria: data; simplicity; background knowledge; and a criterion which, try I might, I cannot simplify into a short catchphrase ("However well some proposed law satisfies Criteria 1-3, if there is an incompatible law which satisfies those criteria even better, since they cannot both be laws, the former must be rejected." 26). He makes at least one good point that I have not seen better worded elsewhere, and that is this: "[Criterion 1] is satisfied to the extent to which a law or theory leads us to expect many events. The more it can explain, the better. The more varied events it can explain, the better." (29) Now at least I can see how this chapter will apply to the rest of the book--it would appear that Swinburne plans to show that the theory of god (theism) explains more and more varied events than any other claim possibly could.
Christian Response
     As I began to touch on at the end of my summary of chapter 2, Christians should very much approve of this chapter, as it prologues a "proof" of god, if there can be such a thing (it would perhaps be more accurate to use the phrase "argument in favor of," or the word "claim," as Swinburne does). This chapter does not, however, actually cover an ethical issue or in fact anything interesting at all, so I'm not sure how anyone could disagree with it.
Personal Response
     If I have to read another chapter of nothing but definitions I am going to vomit. If I wanted a step-by-step proof I would have read a geometry textbook. Perhaps that's where I went wrong in selecting the title "Is There A God?"