A Theistic Theory of Everything

A cumulative case for the best version of theism

I’ve written at some length about the arguments both for and against theism. I wrote a three-part article series making my best case for theism, and have an article where I catalog all the things that move me both significantly towards and against theism. Here, I’ll describe the version of theism that best meets each of these challenges, and argue that, while it’s not totally obvious that it’s right, it’s a very convincing hypothesis worthy of serious consideration, capable of explaining each of the pieces of contrary evidence.

Suppose we’re trying to figure out if evolution is right. Well, we’d start by noting that it’s a pretty intrinsically probable hypothesis. Given what we already know about mutation, and given that different changes to genes affect survival differently, even before observing any evidence, evolution by natural selection would be pretty probable. Then, one would look at the things that evolution explains, which are extremely numerous. “Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.”

This broad way of looking at the world—start with how probable a theory is before looking at evidence, and then look at what the view explains—is a pretty good way of reasoning. When we apply this to theism, we get similarly potent evidence. Theism starts with a pretty high prior probability, for reasons I explain in more detail here. It’s a very simple and elegant hypothesis, positing only one fundamental thing—perfection unlimited. It might follow from background information, lacks arbitrary limits, and has a certain inherent plausibility.

Then, after one has concluded that it has a high prior probability, one must look at the world. It’s perhaps only slight exaggeration to say that nothing in the world makes sense except in the light of theism. Specifically, theism explains the following facts:

—Theism has a decent prior (unclear how high the prior is exactly, but not too low).

—The contingency argument might work (helps do work to boost the prior).

—Physical stuff exists (it’s not clear exactly what this favors—whether you knew there was a God or not, I don’t really know how likely you’d think it would be that physical stuff would exist).

—It does stuff. (This favors theism a lot. There could be laws governing stuff without stuff existing at all. The fact that there is stuff and it’s governed by laws is a weird coincidence, yet conditional on the existence of God and stuff, it’s basically guaranteed it would follow laws, for matter that just sits around doing nothing has no value).

—The laws apply to the constants.

—The universe hangs together and stuff interacts.

—The stuff it does is useful and interesting, rather than just fizzling out. (Also strong evidence—most possible laws don’t result in anything interesting happening. A multiverse doesn’t solve this because a multiverse just is a set of laws—but most laws don’t get anything as interesting as a multiverse).

—There are finely tuned constants (This some more evidence. To avoid it, you probably need a multiverse or something similar. But even after something interesting happens, it’s not super likely that there would be a multiverse).

—The universe is in a low entropy state (this is weird but I don’t know enough to know what to think).

—The laws are of oddly varied strength.

—Life originated and went through the many steps required to get intricate and complex creatures like us (this article has some egregious abuse of Bayes, and I don’t know much about the details of the biology, but it makes the basic point). (This is not a ton of evidence—it’s not so clear why God would work through dividing cellular machines to make life, but it’s some evidence still).

—There are the necessary ingredients for evolution.

—There are psychophysical laws (More extremely powerful evidence. If all you knew was that there was a multiverse, you wouldn’t expect there to be new fundamental laws, with no deeper explanation, that give rise to consciousness).

—There are souls that remain consistent over time. (This isn’t too weird but is somewhat weird—only theism nicely avoids skeptical scenarios once one posits the existence of souls).

—You in particular exist. (This is quite strong evidence—theism predicts everyone would be made, atheism predicts only a few would).

—There’s psychophysical harmony. (Probably the strongest evidence so far. Nearly all possible psychophysical laws are chaotic and random and don’t generate harmony.

—The stuff that the psychophysical laws make conscious exists (the psychophysical laws make brains conscious and then there happen to be brains). (Another piece of evidence—even after there are laws that say ‘such and such physical arrangements give rise to consciousness’ it’s odd that there are those arrangements).

—People have generally true beliefs about morality, metaphysics, math, modality, and more. (More strong evidence, as the article explains. This is really hard to account for on naturalism).

—Lots of people have religious belief, powerful religious experiences, and feel a deep connection with God. Lots of smart philosophers are theists. (This is one more strange strange thing. So far, we’ve established that there are conscious creatures that have interesting inner lives. But if all you knew was that there were conscious creatures that had interesting inner lives, you wouldn’t expect a huge portion of them to believe strongly in God).

—There are pretty convincing miracle reports (e.g. Rainbow Body, Joseph of Cupertino, Our Lady of Zeitoun, maybe the resurrection). (This is not super convincing in part because theism doesn’t predict it with super high confidence. Why in the world would God use miracles to make a random Saint fly a few times, to his own embarrassment, or make Mary appear atop a Church).

—The world has lots of beauty, happiness, knowledge, capacities for forming valuable relationships, and love—it contains most of the things that could be on the objective list. (This is some evidence, but not too much, conditional on the other stuff).

—There are many convincing NDEs and other unexplained events (Dale Allison documents this well in his book Encountering Mystery).

—You’re not in a skeptical scenario.

Each of these things are grist for the theist’s mill, deeply puzzling if theism is false, while effortlessly explained by theism. To the best of my knowledge, no theory other than theism has a good explanation of these facts. Note, the evidence for theism comes from its ability to broadly make sense of all of reality, rather than just explain a fact or two. Just as with evolution, if one denies it, their worldview begins to come apart at the seams, wholly unable to explain the following 23 facts. And this is a conservative list—I have left out the cosmological argument (which I’ve warmed up to a bit recently), the nomological argument, all of Aquinas’s ways, and much more. I have, in fact, left out the vast majority of arguments given by theists for their views.

These facts are, in fact, what made me begin to lose confidence in atheism. My worldview had no natural explanation of moral knowledge, the anthropic data, psychophysical harmony, or anything else on the list. My naturalism began to be a Frankennaturalism—with many parts that don’t fit together. The anthropic evidence points towards there being uncountably infinite people (Beth 2, to be exact). Yet why, on naturalism, would there be uncountably infinite people? I just had to add that as a brute posit, with no deeper explanation, while theism can explain it. Likewise, to explain our knowledge of morality, induction, and more, I had to posit that our brain has direct access to non-natural facts. But why would that be? Naturalism has no good explanation—it’s just another thing one needs to brutely posit. And the same is true of psychophysical harmony, and numerous other features of the world.

I began to feel a bit like a young earth creationist, having to posit bizarre, unexplained things at every turn. Theism is an elegant hypothesis that explains all of reality, naturalism requires positing a large number of improbable things. The young earth creationists have one core argument—the Bible says the Earth is young, on some readings—and yet their theory is terrible because it can’t explain, without extreme theoretical cost, a diverse range of other features of the world—from genetics to fossils to geology to astronomy. Yet I began to feel my naturalism was somewhat similar, coming apart at the seams, unable to explain a huge range of facts—about the laws of nature, consciousness, anthropics, moral knowledge, personal identity, history, and more.

But, of course, theism has the monumental task of explaining evil. This is the main challenge, much larger than explaining divine hiddenness, for instance. Once one explains why a world with a perfect God would contain such a diverse array of calamities, it’s not hard to explain hiddenness. Yet the traditional approaches will not do. The pleasure and pain one experiences was produced by evolution—we experience pleasure when we do things that generally improve fitness and pain when we do things that are bad for fitness. What are the odds that the very specific distribution of pleasure and pain given by evolution is optimal for soul-building? It’s wildly implausible that each terrible thing—cancer, rape, malaria, earthquakes—about the world ends up, in the end, being for the best.

Instead, the theist has a much better way to go: assume God would want a universe that looks roughly like an indifferent universe. Perhaps, if one accepts the evidence surrounding near-death experiences, this indifferent universe would begin to fade from one’s consciousness as one drifts closer to death. Perhaps, based on the existence of love, music, beauty, and transcendence, as Gavin Ortlund suggests in his book the universe would leave little clues into the ultimate nature of reality. Yet it would appear mostly indifferent.

Of course, for such a universe to have value, it would have to contain us. Thus, fine-tuning, the anthropic evidence, the pairing between the laws and our experiences, and more, are explained by this theory. Furthermore, we’d have to be around to experience it, and to act in the world, so psychophysical harmony is explained. Yet beyond that, the world would be expected to look like a universe would on the hypothesis of indifference.

Call this the hypothesis of indifference theodicy. God wants to make a world that looks indifferent. Why would this be? It’s hard to give a definitive answer, but there could be many reasons:

1. There might be reasons we don’t know about. This theodicy explains all the world’s evils through one core posit: that God would want to make a universe that looks indifferent. It’s not terribly unlikely that God would have a reason for this that I don’t know about. I cannot figure out why Magnus Carlsen, the chess world champion, makes many of the chess moves he makes, but I trust he has a good reason for them. Yet God is infinitely wiser than Magnus Carlsen and playing an infinitely more complex game—so if he had a reason for allowing an indifferent universe, it’s not super likely I’d understand. Just as Magnus Carlsen making one move that seems weird wouldn’t be a good reason to doubt his prodigious skill in chess, so too would God making one strange appearing move not be a good reason to doubt his divinity.

2. Perhaps being in an indifferent universe has lasting benefits. As Pruss notes, this world is just the blink of an eye—0% of our total existence. Thus, if being in an indifferent universe had any lasting benefits, it would be worth it. And it very well might: perhaps being in an indifferent universe strengthens relationships, forged through hardship, that last forever. Perhaps struggling through difficulty makes one a stronger person, and that lasts forever. Perhaps the reason is just random—maybe there’s a big choice we’ll make in a trillion years, but being in an indifferent universe will, for unpredictable reasons, result in us making the better choice.

3. I won’t go too in-depth on this theodicy, as it’s a bit complicated, but perhaps the soul-binding theodicy is right.

4. Perhaps experiencing what a Godless universe would be like would result in us having a deeper relationship with God, just as one being away from their spouse for a month might strengthen their relationship, allowing them to see how they’ve been taken their spouse for granted.

5. Perhaps, as Peter Van Inwagen suggests, seeing the horrors of the world helps make us more likely to freely accept God. Thus, God’s plan for perfect salvation is helped by the presence of an indifferent world.

Each of these are rather speculative, yet none is obviously crazy. And if any are true, they are more than enough to justify evil. All of them point to benefits that are infinite in degree—either because they last forever or because they strengthen our relationship with God, which is of infinite value. Therefore, they’d be more than enough to justify the horrors of the world 100 times over.

Once we accept theism + the hypothesis of indifference theodicy, we can explain all of evil. I listed many pieces of data that favor theism above, all of which are easy for this hypothesis to explain. Now, one might worry that theism lacks the tools to explain miracles, on this view. An indifferent world does not generate miracles. Yet this is too quick.

I agree that this hypothesis makes it implausible that God would carry out miracles. Yet this was already implausible. Why in the world would God not intervene to stop slavery, the holocaust, various genocides, tortures, murders, or rapes, yet intervene to allow a 17th-century Friar to levitate or an orb of light to appear atop an Egyptian temple.

The theist can, as naturalists do, deny that there are miracles. Or alternatively, they can attribute them to other beings like angels or demons, as Dale Allison suggests. It’s true that this sounds silly, but Allison adduces quite a lot of evidence for the existence of angels. If God were in the miracles business, he would use his miracles for good, rather than for performing cheap magic tricks (if I’m wrong about this, no offense God—I find the flying thing pretty cool).

Now, onto the evidence for atheism that I provided in this article. The original evidence is in blockquotes, before the explanation.

This isn’t technically something that you update on, but theism most likely has a low prior probability.

This is not, I think, too decisive, for reasons I lay out here. There are many different routes to theism being quite intrinsically probable and simple, and all of them have to fail for theism to start with a low prior. If we think only one has a 10% chance of succeeding, the prior in theism will still be pretty significant.

There are lots of evils (natural evils, teleological evils, bizarre absence of goods, gratuitous suffering in the psychophysical laws, and many more).

This is explained by this theistic hypothesis just as well as atheism. Both explain it through the hypothesis of indifference.

Divine hiddenness.

This is explained by the theistic hypothesis well too. God hides, for an indifferent universe wouldn’t make his existence obvious. Furthermore, given that on this hypothesis God gives little clues into his nature, this hypothesis best explains why so many people come to believe in God and believe that he is an important part of their life. That’s weird on naturalism—one wouldn’t expect people to think that there was a divine being of infinite power, mercy, love, glory, goodness, and knowledge after finding out that naturalism is true.

The absence of any super clear evidence for a miracle.

This theory can explain that data by denying miracles. If one thinks the evidence for miracles is weak, this will be some evidence against the theory. Yet if they think the evidence is strong, it will be some evidence for the theory.

Potentially inconsistent divine attributes.

Not convincing. I’ve looked into most of these, and none are remotely convincing. Expanding on that charge would require more detail, but they all assume contentious things about omniscience or omnipotence that the theist should obviously deny.

The universe is big and old

The theory explains this. An indifferent universe would be big and old and only have us as a small part. Furthermore, as I’ve argued elsewhere, this argument isn’t especially decisive—being small doesn’t make one irrelevant.

If Huemer is right about infinity, which he might very well be, then a God of infinite power is probably impossible.

Huemer is probably wrong about the infinite, and even if he’s right, omnipotence doesn’t require infinite intensive magnitudes—it just requires being able to bring about any metaphysically possible state of affairs, potentially with a caveat or two.

The anthropic stuff maybe makes it weird that we’re so early.

I think the linked article defangs this significantly. Theism, by predicting we’re immortal, in fact, makes it more likely that we’d happen to be around now. In particular, it makes it more likely that we’d be around, at this moment, to experience love and beauty. On naturalism, it’s quite unlikely that we’d be around at this particular moment, for we’ll only live once—on theism, it’s far more likely that we’d be around right now, just as how if it rains every day, it’s more likely it will rain today than if it just rains once.

The fundamental physical laws are simple (because fundamental stuff must be simple, atheism basically entails this, unlike theism).

Again, this theodicy explains this feature of the world. Most indifferent universes would have simple fundamental laws, so this explains why the laws are uniform and predictable, rather than varying to bring about value.

The version of theism I’ve sketched out in this artcle is quite simple and is able to easily explain all the data. It posits only one thing fundamentally: unlimited perfection. It’s supported by numerous converging lines of evidence, from all across philosophy, history, and science. And it’s able to explain evil. All this makes it an absurdly good theory, the most plausible single model of fundamental reality.