50 Comments
Jan 17Liked by Bentham's Bulldog

I must admit I’ve shed my hardcore atheism for a far more modest one that I may be inclined to call agnosticism. Though I do think that if God exists, they would have various sorts of Vegan ideals. I.e. it’s wrong to farm animals.

Expand full comment
Jan 17Liked by Bentham's Bulldog

Reading about Fine Tuning and Souls in Knowledge, Reality, and Value opened up my mind a bit. I have always been taken back by how strange it is that anything exists. I still think Abrahamic religions are implausible, but I'm probably 50/50 on there being SOME entity it'd be appropriate to call God

Expand full comment

God claimed he fortells the future, especially about who the Messiah will be in the Hebrew Scriptures. “Declare to us the things to come, tell us what the future holds, so that we may know that you are gods.” (Isa. 41:23) “Who foretold this long ago, who declared it from the distant past? Was it not I, the Lord?” (Isa. 45:21)

Peter - Acts 3:18,22 those things which God foretold by the mouth of all His prophets, that the Christ would suffer, He has thus fulfilled. For Moses truly said to the fathers, ‘The LORD your God will raise up for you a Prophet like me from your brethren (Deu 18:15)'

Jesus - John 5:46 For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me. Luke 24:44,46 Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me. This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day

These were written centuries ago!

Birth/Life - As Moses had to escape infanticide, and was made to return to his land, and as Moses turned water to blood as his first sign and commanded the sea and fed many in the wilderness, so was Jesus, and as Moses established the memorial of the slain lamb to remember their deliverance, so was Jesus.

Messiah would be a prophet (Deu18:15), a priest (Zec6:13); called King (Ps2:6), declared the Son of God (Ps2:7); Messiah would be God (Isa9:6) born in Bethlehem (Micah5:2); born of a virgin (Isa7:14); come from the line of Abraham (Gen22:18), Issac (Gen17:19), Jacob (Num24:17), from the tribe of Judah (Gen49:10), heir to the throne of King David (Isa9:7); come before the destruction of the second temple at AD 70 (Mal3:1). Ministry begins in Galilee (Isa9:1); Will heal the blind, deaf, lame and raise the dead (Isa35:5); Will teach the people using parables (Ps78:2); enter Jerusalem on a donkey (Zec9:9); usher in a new covenant (Jer31:31)

Crucifixion - As Joseph was betrayed and sold by his own and later was exalted, so was Jesus. As Moses lifted up the bronze serpent so that those who look to it are saved, so was Jesus. As Psalm 22 & Isaiah 53 describe crucifixion and as the Passover lamb which was to be eaten and its blood on the door saved them and as the sacrificial lamb symbolized the atoning for sins, so was Jesus. As the high Priest in the tabernacle sprinkles the blood of the sacrifice on the golden mercy seat in the holy of holies, so was Jesus.

betrayed for 30 pieces of silver (Zec11:13); be rejected by His own people; pierced & atone for our sins (Isa53:3-10) and bring an end to sin (Dan9:24)

Resurrection - As Jonah spent three days and three nights in the belly of a great fish, so was Jesus' resurrection from the dead on the third day. As Issac was to be sacrificed on the third day and was delivered from death, so was Jesus.

rise from the dead (Ps16:10); become a Light to the Gentiles and all nations (Isa60:3); worshipped by all nations (Dan9:14)

Expand full comment
Mar 11Liked by Bentham's Bulldog

Your remind me of a quote from the introduction to C. S. Lewis's book *The Problem of Pain*

"If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator? Men are fools, perhaps; but hardly so foolish as that. The direct inference from black to white, from evil flower to virtuous root, from senseless work to a workman infinitely wise, staggers belief. The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have been the ground of religion: it must always have been something in spite of which religion, acquired from a different source, was held.

"It would be an error to reply that our ancestors were ignorant and therefore entertained pleasing illusions about nature which the progress of science has since dispelled....Certainly at all periods the pain and waste of human life was equally obvious. Our own religion begins among the Jews, a people squeezed between great warlike empires, continually defeated and led captive, familiar as Poland or Armenia with the tragic story of the conquered. It is mere nonsense to put pain among the discoveries of science. Lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practised, in a world without chloroform.

"At all times, then, an inference from the course of events in this world to the goodness and wisdom of the Creator would have been equally preposterous; and it was never made. Religion has a different origin."

I think this is an important point. Nobody believes in a benevolent God because of the evil in the world. They come to believe for other reasons and, having believed, accept that there must be an explanation for this evil. Even if they themselves do not know it exactly.

Expand full comment

So it took a couple months to go from 5% to ~50%. We can extrapolate that you will be doing rounds as a post-atheist evangelical by early summer!

Now I don’t want to be demeaning. If you’ve considered all these weighty arguments and found that they outweigh hiddenness and evil, then good for you. It’s still funny that your belief in animal suffering is what emotionally drives you to theism.

Expand full comment
author

I’m at maybe 20%

Expand full comment

Really? I got the impression from the article that you were at more like 40%.

Expand full comment
author

Probably more like 30% on average, but it bounces around.

Expand full comment

Ehhhh I find that most atheist questions are just reframed within the theist frame, plus new ones. If I put all the mysteries together I haven't made them smaller. I hope there is a heaven, bit I don't know how I'd forecast it and I don't feel optimistic.

Expand full comment
author

What do you make of, for example, the anthropic argument?

Expand full comment

It's a problem, but I don't see how theism is an explanation. How does such a deity work? I think it's little different than "zues did it" and that hasn't helped discovery in the past,

Expand full comment
author

Well, it’s omnipotent so it could create everyone merely by willing. And if creating someone is valuable, then it would do so. Zeus is a really poor explanation--it has a low prior probability and limited ability to explain things.

Expand full comment

Okay but why create us as humans with suffering rather than as all powerful gods like it is? And why is creating someone valuable?

Expand full comment

A little bit beside the point, but in the audio commentary of "Pan's Labyrinth", the director says that up until a certain point, both readings could be true. But when she is punished and locked into her room, and then she draws a door on the wall with chalk and escapes through that door, this is something which cannot be explained if it is all only happening in her little mind.

Expand full comment

Great article, Matthew.

I personally am a reluctant naturalist. I was a christian for most of my life and, unwillingly, i end up losing my faith. The problem i see with most of the arguments for theism is that "theism explains x" is a poorly defined term. Some people, influenced by bayesian epistemology, by "explain" mean just "make it more expected". According to this view, explanatoriness is just expectedness. But then we get in those old problems (The fact that the word displays the features that it does incrementally confirms the hypothesis "the Babylonian god Marduk exists and he created a word with the features our world displays".

If one is allowed to posit whatever one wants as long as it "explains the evidence", no wonder we can find a potential answer for everything. But i doubt it's the best methodology.

Although i currently very far from believing in a personal creator of the universe (not to say a good one), i think we all should exercise intellectual humility by actively putting our views to the test, seriously engaging the best "from the other side". That's why i really enjoyed your text and i found your experience very intriguing. I'll check Dustin's work. I encountered many references to him online, but never took time to read more about his work.

You're a very smart and thoughtful guy. So i'm looking for your next reflections on these subjects.

Btw, i'm a graduate philosophy student (from Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil) and my dissertation is about this very topic: the evidential (ir)relevance of explanatoriness. Maybe we can talk about sometime.

All the best,

Thanks for sharing.

Expand full comment
author

//I personally am a reluctant naturalist. I was a christian for most of my life and, unwillingly, i end up losing my faith. The problem i see with most of the arguments for theism is that "theism explains x" is a poorly defined term. Some people, influenced by bayesian epistemology, by "explain" mean just "make it more expected". According to this view, explanatoriness is just expectedness. But then we get in those old problems (The fact that the word displays the features that it does incrementally confirms the hypothesis "the Babylonian god Marduk exists and he created a word with the features our world displays".//

Yes but the prior probability of the "the Babylonian god Marduk exists and he created a word with the features our world displays" is very low, so the probabilities cancel out. Conditional on the god Marduk existing, the odds he'd create a world like ours are slim. One should look at the prior probability of some view and then look at the evidence.

Thanks for the kind words.

Expand full comment

When Howson and Urbach, back in the 90s, presented this same reply to the problem (which Gerhard Schurz has aptly called Bayesian Pseudo-Confirmation), it didn't take long for the community to point out that the problem is that it seems pretty obvious that these kind of hypotheses are not confirmed at all (and not just that they are to a lesser degree). That's what i had in mind. I'm sorry for not making it more explicit in the first time.

And on the feasibility of assigning a non-arbitrary prior probability (even if it's just an approximation) for this kind of hypotheses, i'm sure i don't need to rehearse the problems here (although i'm curious how you personally manage to do that; would it be just based on intuition?).

Thanks for the reply.

Expand full comment
author

They are massively confirmed. It's just that they started out super unlikely. The theory that there's a fairy who will give me a royal flush in poker is massively more likely if I get a royal flush. It's hard to assign priors--sometimes you just have to look at the evidence and come to conclusions.

Expand full comment

They are massively confirmed according to the bayesian framework. And that's

the problem i'm pointing out. That's why i don't think it's a good idea to frame these evaluations in bayesian terms. If we conflate confirmation with evidence, as the vast majority of bayesians do¹, we are obliged to say that there is evidence for the marduk hypothesis, which is an absurd conclusion, given all we know about the world.

A reliable account of evidential support should be able to tell us a post-facto speculation or concocted explanation from a good one, and bayesianism clearly can't.

----------

¹ The only exceptions i'm aware are authors of the book Belief, Evidence, and Uncertainty: Problems of Epistemic Inference.

Expand full comment
author

It's not an absurd conclusion! There's something that is more strongly predicted on the Marduk hypothesis, but it's better explained by other things, so the hypothesis is absurd.

Expand full comment

Would you then concede that, in your view, there is some (albeit insufficient) evidence for the Marduk hypothesis?

That, i think, is the clearest way in which one can see that the bayesian machinery is worthless in these contexts.

Unless you distinguish between confirmation and evidence, in which case i'd like to know how, that's something you will have to concede. The only way for it to look reasonable is to reinterpret what we mean by "evidence" in such a way that we lose touch with how the word was and is used by everybody.

Expand full comment

The Temptation of Jack Orkney, by Doris Lessing

Expand full comment

I consider myself an (and i'm not sure this is the appropriate order of the words) Agnostic Theistic Naturalist and it took years to get to that point. If there is a religious tradition I feel calling to me, it is Eastern Christianity, for various reasons. I can expand if anyone is interested but what Bentham's Bulldog wrote here resonated with me enough to share.

Expand full comment

It sounds like you are on an interesting journey, and much of what you have shared resonates with me. I started off as an atheist who thought that theism was just too stupid to consider. Then I met a Christian who's version of Christianity seemed a lot more logical and reasonable than the others I had encountered. I still didn't believe it to be *true*, but I could see how it held together - rather like comparing a really good episode of Star Trek to some really bad ones. But months later I experienced an unexpected paradigm shift, and suddenly I just couldn't see how I ever found atheism believable. So I can't point to a clever theistic argument and say "that" is what persuaded me to believe. I also never found a fatal flaw in atheism, and I still have a lot of respect for honest open-minded atheists. I've gotten used to being abused by closed minded bigots from both sides who can't bear the thought that there might be any merit in anything said by someone from the other tribe! I wish you all the best on your search for truth, no matter where it eventually leads you.

Expand full comment

Intelligent design might explain fine tuning, but it doesn't require a perfect, omnipotent being. The existence of evil could be explained by an imperfect designer. I also think omnipotence and omniscience are probably metaphysically impossible anyway.

Expand full comment
author

The reason to believe in a perfect being are:

1) more intrinsically probable. It’s simpler (just one property--perfection), lacks arbitrary limits, and is less elegant.

2) it’s hard to have a being that’s powerful enough to make every soul and specify the laws in great detail but isn’t omnipotent. But if not every soul is created, given there are Beth 2 possible souls, it’s absurdly unlikely I’d be one of the ones created.

3) limited gods assume rather than explain psychophysical harmony. They need to brutely have a harmonious pairing between the physical and the mental. Theism, in contrast, derived it from the more fundamental property of perfection.

I don’t think either omniscience or omnipotence are impossible, but I’m not super sure.

Expand full comment

I also think that theism isn't a simple hypothesis at all. "Perfection," though of course a single word, is masking an enormously complicated cluster of properties, even if it seems natural to us due to various quirks of our psychology. (By comparison, the concept "face" might seem intuitively simpler to some people than "regular 3829-gon," but it of course is not - try writing a short computer program that recognizes one versus the other.)

In particular, if we're stipulating that having a mind is a perfection, then "mind" is vastly more complicated than anything in physics. Omnipotence suffers from similar problems. One, "X can do anything possible" means "if X wills for O and O is possible, then O," which is building in the incredibly elusive and multiply realizable notion of "will." Second, it's not clear that "can do anything possible" actually picks out a unique collection of abilities. There may be multiple sets of maximally consistent abilities - one set might contain "can survive anything" and another might "can destroy anything." Unless you have a complete way of picking out one specific maximal set, you're going to run into difficulties. I don't think theistic philosophers have successfully figured out how to do this, at least without merely reducing it to other concepts which are equally complicated.

Expand full comment
author

I have another article in which I argue that theism is intrinsically probable. I'm not super sure how to calculate intrinsic probability of evaluate theisms', so I think it gets a low but not super low prior. https://benthams.substack.com/p/for-theism-part-2

Expand full comment

I like that post, think all of the arguments there are worth considering and that you've done a good job outlining them. However, I only meant to be pushing back on the "simplicity" part of theism (or rather, the "simplicity" part of "perfection"), which I don't think that article really addresses rather than asserts.

Expand full comment
author

I think goodness is irreducible. Saying X is good can't be rephrased with reference merely to the location of particles. But if goodness is fundamental, positing it in unlimited quantities is simple.

Expand full comment

I think I'd push back on the coherence of such a notion if that's the route you're going (why believe "good/perfect" picks out anything singular? see my multiple maximal consistent sets objection to omnipotence), and at any rate it sounds vulnerable to some kind of parody. If I propose some notion of shmerfection such that an atheistic natural universe which looks like our own is maximally shmerfect (thus simple), I don't think you'd be convinced if I proposed that it's unanalyzable and thus immune to worries about intrinsic complexity.

Expand full comment

Err, "multiple sets of maximally consistent abilities" should be "multiple maximally consistent sets of abilities," sorry! I also wanted to stress that this threatens to be a worst-possible spoiler for simplicity. If there's no algorithmic way to specify whether an ability is in God's maximally consistent set of abilities, then you're depending on an infinite sequence of essentially arbitrary choices, axiom-of-choice-style. There's no way this won't have some kind of infinite measure of complexity, whichever measure you're going with. You can try to appeal to some notion of "positive property" à la Gödel, but what exactly is the set of positive properties? Is there more than one?

Expand full comment

Not sure why you said there are beth 2 possible souls.

I think perfection is intrinsically less probable than imperfection. For one thing, perfection is a single point (the maximum point) on a scale, while imperfection is a range. Perfection also might be metaphysically impossible. I also don't think it is simpler. I think being "perfect" is a hugely complicated property.

It may not be hard to make a universe without being omnipotent. There are some theories in cosmology today about how new universes may come into existence. E.g., maybe black holes create new universes. It's not out of the question, in fact, that human beings might some day be able to create new universes. Furthermore, it's not out of the question that, in doing so, we might be able to influence the values of some of the fundamental constants of such universes. Perhaps we could create a universe in just the right way to give it a desired gravitational constant. But we still could not prevent all suffering in the baby universe.

So it's not crazy that there could be a being who could create a universe with desired physical constants but could not prevent all suffering.

Expand full comment
author

Dustin Crummett has a nice blog article arguing for the simplicity of theism. https://capturingchristianity.com/why-god-exists-the-intrinsic-probability-of-theism/. I think all this gets pretty tricky but it’s enough to make the prior somewhat reasonable.

David Lewis showed that there are at least Beth 2 possible people. I think people are souls, so there are at least Beth 2 possible souls. It may be easy to make one works but it’s hard to make Beth 2.

Expand full comment

So it sounds like: the good stuff about the world is explained by theism; the bad stuff is explained by atheism. And there's plenty of both.

Expand full comment
author

Yeah! But it’s pretty hard to see a non ad hoc way to generate the extremely specific and surprising good things--like psychophysical harmony, the existence of every soul, consistent souls laws, moral and modal knowledge, and more. In contrast, there might be some theodicy that could provide a general account of evil.

Expand full comment

join theist side brother. We have absolute optimism here about the world.

Expand full comment

Deity Defeater ---> Deity Avenger

Expand full comment