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metaphysiocrat's avatar

I love the ambition here, but I think this explains far too much: under it, everything that looks deliberately arranged is evidence for theism in general, while everything that isn't is evidence for the make-the-world-look-indifferent theistic goal.

Sometimes science flips whether things look deliberately arranged: for instance Darwiniism makes the evidence for biological fine-tuning much weaker, or how calculation of the cosmological constant makes physics fine-tuning more plausible. It probably shouldn't be the case that both versions of each would serve as evidence for "shy theism!"

This isn't to say there might not be some theistic goal that represents the pattern here. I think you're on the right track that if there's theistic design, particular evils are probably downstream of locally indifferent laws, but in turn I would expect local indifference to be a function of divine aesthetic considerations, or cosmic warfare (morally imperfect angels running simulations or whatever), or multiworld theodicy subject to some kind of simplicity constraint. Re: aesthetic value it *seems* right to me that a mechanically consistent universe is more beautiful than a relatively arbitrary one, but also that a psychophysically harmonious universe is more beautiful than a disharmonious one, etc. Aesthetic value is different from moral value, but if it would be simple for an agent to have a particular set of aesthetic values, that might point towards a relatively high probability hypothesis for a van Inwangenian simple creator with aesthetic goals. (I'm skeptical of aesthetic realism but if it can do that kind of explanatory work, so much the worse for my skepticism.)

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Rhapsodist's avatar

Like you, I’ve never found the purported proofs of the internal inconsistency of theism persuasive. At best, they show that a particular analysis of some attribute or set of attributes is inconsistent, but it’s never clear to me why a theist has to be committed to the particular target analysis. But I do wonder if those kinds of arguments might raise problems for the idea that theism is a simple hypothesis with all the logical or probabilistic consequences we’d like it to have. If it’s so hard to give a satisfactory analysis of omnipotence, etc., can it really be true that all the properties we want to attribute to God—along with everything else we want theism to explain—just fall naturally out of the supposedly simple hypothesis that there is a perfect being?

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