10 Ways God Can Be Simple
God can be thought of as the maximal instantiation of various properties.
0 Introduction
When deciding if some view is true, it makes sense to look at its prior probability—how likely it is before you look at the evidence. Simplicity and absence of arbitrary limits are important components of the prior probability of a theory. The theory, for instance, that there’s a small part of space that follows different physics is much less likely than the theory that there isn’t, even though they both explain the data equally well—we probably wouldn’t have seen the small patch if there was one. Thus, a boost in simplicity and non-arbitrariness can make a theory many, many times more likely—even though there are maybe infinite different ways that physics could be different in some patch of space, all of them are together much less probable than physics being uniform.
For theism to be plausible, then, God would have to be simple. Not in that he’s easy to understand but in that he is simple in his nature. String theory is very simple—positing strings with a simple mathematical description—though it’s quite complicated to understand. The best route to making God simple is finding some property that is plausible fundamental—say, goodness—and then arguing that God is what you get when you have that property without limits. If this is so then theism is quite likely—it’s what you get from an unlimited amount of some fundamental property. Fundamental properties are simple—they don’t break down into simpler parts. Theories that posit no limits on things are better than ones that posit arbitrary limits—prior to discovering the speed of light, the theory that it’s some specific value is much less likely than it having no value, because it’s a limit. Similarly, it would be odd to think that space just ends somewhere for no deeper reason. Thus, if theism is just what you get when you have one of the fundamental—and therefore simple—properties without limit, it’s much more probable than naturalism and its arbitrary, unexplained values of the various constants and laws.
I’m unsure about some of these. But I think there are enough of them that’s is pretty likely that one of them works (especially because I find a lot of them plausible). Furthermore, because if they work theism crushes naturalism on priors, you should think that probably one of them does. Let’s say that naturalism has a prior of X—if none work then theism has a prior of, say, .01X. However, if theism does work, it has a prior of tens or hundreds of times X. Thus, if we assume theism has a prior of 100X if one of them works—which is plausible, for it outclasses naturalism just like the uniform laws view outclasses the patchwork laws view—and there’s a 10% chance that one of them works, then theism, on average has a prior of over 10X, which is much higher than naturalism. Thus, if you’re not sure if these work, theism probably has a higher prior.
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