There is in fact no reason to accept PSR. Sometimes things just are. That may be the reason why we have such opposing opinions on anthropic principle, tbh
It does seem plausible to me that only things within spacetime need *causal* explanations, and that something like the existence of physical reality as a whole couldn’t have the sort of non-causal explanation appropriate for mathematical and moral facts. So the existence of physical reality strikes me as a plausible candidate for a fact without an explanation.
I’ve never really shared the Leibnizian intuition about infinite causal chains. If the universe’s existence at every moment is caused by its existence at prior moments, how *could* it have a further explanation that isn’t just a case of gratuitous causal overdetermination? When could God have intervened to create it, given that at every moment its existence is already causally guaranteed by its existence at prior moments? I don’t see what work there is for an additional purported explanation of the whole causal chain to do.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that this is much less convincing than the arguments you usually make, since you said from the beginning that it doesn't move you very much. But this doesn't seem any different from any other exposition of the contingency argument I've heard, and it doesn't answer the issues with it.
We don't need the PSR to explain why we seek explanations for things. The known laws of physics, which we can justify from inductive evidence, are sufficient to explain why we need causal explanations for most physical facts. More generally, the need for causal explanations is itself an inductive phenomenon. We observe the universe having causal regularity. This would be extremely unlikely if there was not some reason that it had causal regularity. Therefore, we conclude that there is some reason, and whatever this reason is, it will require causal explanations for all ordinary phenomena. But not absolutely all phenomena - there's no reason to think that very extreme phenomena that we've never observed always require causation, and now that we can perform experiments in physics to observe them, it looks like maybe they actually don't.
We also don't need the PSR to explain why necessities require explanations. That's inherent to the concept of necessity itself.
Other than the supposed need for the PSR to justify our need for explanations, I see no reason to believe it. Some people think it's intuitively justified, but I certainly have no strong intuition towards it, and I don't think the intuition would be justified anyway. But I see extremely strong reasons to disbelieve it, the main one being that it pretty straightforwardly entails necessaritarianism, which is a wildly implausible view that also seems to conflict with the PSR itself. Of course, necessitarianism conflicts with modal rationalism, but even if you could block the inference to necessitarianism, I think the PSR would still conflict with modal rationalism (you didn't have a very strong argument for rejecting this - I don't think that there even might be an argument that proves God exists from pure reason, or one that proves that the PSR itself is true from pure reason, so I don't think it's even possible that the PSR is compatible with compatible with modal rationalism.)
Without the PSR, a contingency argument can't even get off the ground, but with the PSR... it still can't get off the ground because the PSR entails that nothing is contingent.
I don't think the argument that if something is necessary, it must be omnipotent, works either. For one, it assumes that there's only one necessary thing that is responsible for any contingent states of affairs (Of course, I think it's impossible for there to be any, but if we accept that it's possible and that the argument proves there is one, we still can't conclude that there is only one.) No argument is actually given for this - it's just asserted that "none of the other necessary facts are causal." Secondly, it assumes that because God is necessary, all the properties of God are necessary as well (in particular, which universes he has the ability to create). Maybe that's a plausible assumption, but it conflicts with the argument you're making, since it would also imply that whatever actions God takes are necessary, and therefore that the world he creates is necessary. I don't think there's any principled way to rescue the argument for God's necessary omnipotence without also implying that he creates the same world in all metaphysically possible worlds (i.e., necessitarianism).
The inference from God's omnipotence to his other properties require excessive anthropomorphism. Why does God have to know about every detail of every possible world in order to create them? This is only assumed because we humans can only create something if we have some idea of what we're doing, but this is a being that is nothing like us. And even if God knows all the contingent facts about every possible world he could create and which one he in fact did create, that doesn't imply moral omniscience, so the argument to omnibenevolence fails. Even if it did imply moral omniscience, you would need additional premises to get from moral omniscience to omnibenevolence. In particular, it would require strong internalism about moral motivation.
The argument that God must have a mind is even less plausible. The first one you gave was that we should give a higher prior probability to God than some other thing that indeterministically generates universes. I don't see why. The second argument is completely ad hoc. Why would minds be the only thing that can generate different states of affairs in a way that's modally open? This would imply that any indeterministic theory of physics is not just false but inconceivable, and it also requires libertarian free will, which I think is flatly contradictory. But even if you don't think those bullets are too big to bite, there's still no motivation at all to bite them. It's a completely arbitrary assumption that minds are the only things that could work this way.
(My guess is that maybe your argument is something like, "Bayesianism is true. Therefore probability is not an objective property of the world but a subjective property of minds. Therefore minds are the only thing that can truly act in a probabilistic way, i.e. that can have a possibility of producing different states of affairs." The problem is that this either has false premises or equivocates on the notion of probability. If probability is just a degree of uncertainty, and there is no such thing as an objective probability of any sort, then it doesn't even make sense to argue that anything whatsoever could probabilistically produce different outcomes in a modally open way. The probability just represents your uncertainty about what outcome it will produce, not any objective fact about what outcomes it really truly can produce.)
Your third reason for why God has to be a mind rather than a mindless indeterministic thing is that, in order to be a necessary being that sufficiently explains everything else, it can't have any element of chance or contingency in it. This is true, but it applies equally to the God explanation as well! If God could have created any other possible universe, then the fact that he created this one is contingent. Therefore, either God's existence does not sufficiently explain everything, or it has some element of contingency to it (the fact that he had to create this universe). This is actually the fundamental problem with all contingency arguments. It's not possible for something necessary to be a sufficient explanation for a contingent state of affairs. I have never come across a contingency argument that can solve this problem without invoking crazy intellectual gymnastics. But at least some versions try to address the issue. This version just ignored it.
Finally, to address the argument at the very end, "No other model of fundamental reality has a prior probability anywhere near that, especially given that there are infinite possible ways fundamental reality could be." Theism is not a fundamental model of reality. It's one specific claim about reality. You can work out very little else about reality from theism. You won't be able to work out anything about the physical laws for example, so if you're comparing it to fundamental physical models of reality that actually do pick out the laws, it's apples to oranges. And theism does not have breathtaking explanatory power. If it did, we wouldn't have a millennia-long intellectual tradition of theists trying to come up with an explanation of why the world is so different from the one that theism predicts. And they still haven't come up with a remotely plausible solution - the current fashion (skeptical theism) is to use bad epistemological principles to argue they don't need one.
I think the argument from contingency is by far the clearest and most generic argument for God. It's basically what all the cosmogical arguments and such are trying to be.
Finally coming around to my favourite argument for theism, nice :)
Btw, a question: Does your significantly raised credence in theism significantly *lower* your credence that hedonistic utilitarianism is true? Because imho any argument for hedonistic utilitarianism is also a pretty good argument against theism, given the state of the world... so it seems plausible that any very strong argument for theism should make one doubt that utilitarianism is in fact correct
Lowers it a bit, though not a ton. If my credence in theism is 40% and my credence in hedonistic utilitarianism conditional on atheism is 70%, and my credence in hedonistic utilitarianism conditional on theism is like 30% (these are all reasonable guesses), then my credence in utilitarianism will still be 54%.
I think objective list theory utilitarianism is more likely now, but my credence in utilitarianism broadly hasnt really changed.
That's fair - If we are objective list theorists, then theism doesn't seem to make utilitarianism that implausible. 30% (H.U. | Theism) seems awfully high to me, though
54% seems rather specific…. Although I guess it the same thing in terms of margin of error/ uncertainty than like 50%, it seems like you are much more certain (perhaps epistemically unjustifiably) when you talk about things to that decimal place.
There is in fact no reason to accept PSR. Sometimes things just are. That may be the reason why we have such opposing opinions on anthropic principle, tbh
It does seem plausible to me that only things within spacetime need *causal* explanations, and that something like the existence of physical reality as a whole couldn’t have the sort of non-causal explanation appropriate for mathematical and moral facts. So the existence of physical reality strikes me as a plausible candidate for a fact without an explanation.
I’ve never really shared the Leibnizian intuition about infinite causal chains. If the universe’s existence at every moment is caused by its existence at prior moments, how *could* it have a further explanation that isn’t just a case of gratuitous causal overdetermination? When could God have intervened to create it, given that at every moment its existence is already causally guaranteed by its existence at prior moments? I don’t see what work there is for an additional purported explanation of the whole causal chain to do.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that this is much less convincing than the arguments you usually make, since you said from the beginning that it doesn't move you very much. But this doesn't seem any different from any other exposition of the contingency argument I've heard, and it doesn't answer the issues with it.
We don't need the PSR to explain why we seek explanations for things. The known laws of physics, which we can justify from inductive evidence, are sufficient to explain why we need causal explanations for most physical facts. More generally, the need for causal explanations is itself an inductive phenomenon. We observe the universe having causal regularity. This would be extremely unlikely if there was not some reason that it had causal regularity. Therefore, we conclude that there is some reason, and whatever this reason is, it will require causal explanations for all ordinary phenomena. But not absolutely all phenomena - there's no reason to think that very extreme phenomena that we've never observed always require causation, and now that we can perform experiments in physics to observe them, it looks like maybe they actually don't.
We also don't need the PSR to explain why necessities require explanations. That's inherent to the concept of necessity itself.
Other than the supposed need for the PSR to justify our need for explanations, I see no reason to believe it. Some people think it's intuitively justified, but I certainly have no strong intuition towards it, and I don't think the intuition would be justified anyway. But I see extremely strong reasons to disbelieve it, the main one being that it pretty straightforwardly entails necessaritarianism, which is a wildly implausible view that also seems to conflict with the PSR itself. Of course, necessitarianism conflicts with modal rationalism, but even if you could block the inference to necessitarianism, I think the PSR would still conflict with modal rationalism (you didn't have a very strong argument for rejecting this - I don't think that there even might be an argument that proves God exists from pure reason, or one that proves that the PSR itself is true from pure reason, so I don't think it's even possible that the PSR is compatible with compatible with modal rationalism.)
Without the PSR, a contingency argument can't even get off the ground, but with the PSR... it still can't get off the ground because the PSR entails that nothing is contingent.
I don't think the argument that if something is necessary, it must be omnipotent, works either. For one, it assumes that there's only one necessary thing that is responsible for any contingent states of affairs (Of course, I think it's impossible for there to be any, but if we accept that it's possible and that the argument proves there is one, we still can't conclude that there is only one.) No argument is actually given for this - it's just asserted that "none of the other necessary facts are causal." Secondly, it assumes that because God is necessary, all the properties of God are necessary as well (in particular, which universes he has the ability to create). Maybe that's a plausible assumption, but it conflicts with the argument you're making, since it would also imply that whatever actions God takes are necessary, and therefore that the world he creates is necessary. I don't think there's any principled way to rescue the argument for God's necessary omnipotence without also implying that he creates the same world in all metaphysically possible worlds (i.e., necessitarianism).
The inference from God's omnipotence to his other properties require excessive anthropomorphism. Why does God have to know about every detail of every possible world in order to create them? This is only assumed because we humans can only create something if we have some idea of what we're doing, but this is a being that is nothing like us. And even if God knows all the contingent facts about every possible world he could create and which one he in fact did create, that doesn't imply moral omniscience, so the argument to omnibenevolence fails. Even if it did imply moral omniscience, you would need additional premises to get from moral omniscience to omnibenevolence. In particular, it would require strong internalism about moral motivation.
The argument that God must have a mind is even less plausible. The first one you gave was that we should give a higher prior probability to God than some other thing that indeterministically generates universes. I don't see why. The second argument is completely ad hoc. Why would minds be the only thing that can generate different states of affairs in a way that's modally open? This would imply that any indeterministic theory of physics is not just false but inconceivable, and it also requires libertarian free will, which I think is flatly contradictory. But even if you don't think those bullets are too big to bite, there's still no motivation at all to bite them. It's a completely arbitrary assumption that minds are the only things that could work this way.
(My guess is that maybe your argument is something like, "Bayesianism is true. Therefore probability is not an objective property of the world but a subjective property of minds. Therefore minds are the only thing that can truly act in a probabilistic way, i.e. that can have a possibility of producing different states of affairs." The problem is that this either has false premises or equivocates on the notion of probability. If probability is just a degree of uncertainty, and there is no such thing as an objective probability of any sort, then it doesn't even make sense to argue that anything whatsoever could probabilistically produce different outcomes in a modally open way. The probability just represents your uncertainty about what outcome it will produce, not any objective fact about what outcomes it really truly can produce.)
Your third reason for why God has to be a mind rather than a mindless indeterministic thing is that, in order to be a necessary being that sufficiently explains everything else, it can't have any element of chance or contingency in it. This is true, but it applies equally to the God explanation as well! If God could have created any other possible universe, then the fact that he created this one is contingent. Therefore, either God's existence does not sufficiently explain everything, or it has some element of contingency to it (the fact that he had to create this universe). This is actually the fundamental problem with all contingency arguments. It's not possible for something necessary to be a sufficient explanation for a contingent state of affairs. I have never come across a contingency argument that can solve this problem without invoking crazy intellectual gymnastics. But at least some versions try to address the issue. This version just ignored it.
Finally, to address the argument at the very end, "No other model of fundamental reality has a prior probability anywhere near that, especially given that there are infinite possible ways fundamental reality could be." Theism is not a fundamental model of reality. It's one specific claim about reality. You can work out very little else about reality from theism. You won't be able to work out anything about the physical laws for example, so if you're comparing it to fundamental physical models of reality that actually do pick out the laws, it's apples to oranges. And theism does not have breathtaking explanatory power. If it did, we wouldn't have a millennia-long intellectual tradition of theists trying to come up with an explanation of why the world is so different from the one that theism predicts. And they still haven't come up with a remotely plausible solution - the current fashion (skeptical theism) is to use bad epistemological principles to argue they don't need one.
Are you familiar with Kenny Pearce contingency argument he uses in his debate with Oppy? It is my favorite one.
Wait, if probability is only in the mind, how does this gel with quantum mechanics? You believe in hidden variable theories?
I think the argument from contingency is by far the clearest and most generic argument for God. It's basically what all the cosmogical arguments and such are trying to be.
Finally coming around to my favourite argument for theism, nice :)
Btw, a question: Does your significantly raised credence in theism significantly *lower* your credence that hedonistic utilitarianism is true? Because imho any argument for hedonistic utilitarianism is also a pretty good argument against theism, given the state of the world... so it seems plausible that any very strong argument for theism should make one doubt that utilitarianism is in fact correct
Lowers it a bit, though not a ton. If my credence in theism is 40% and my credence in hedonistic utilitarianism conditional on atheism is 70%, and my credence in hedonistic utilitarianism conditional on theism is like 30% (these are all reasonable guesses), then my credence in utilitarianism will still be 54%.
I think objective list theory utilitarianism is more likely now, but my credence in utilitarianism broadly hasnt really changed.
That's fair - If we are objective list theorists, then theism doesn't seem to make utilitarianism that implausible. 30% (H.U. | Theism) seems awfully high to me, though
54% seems rather specific…. Although I guess it the same thing in terms of margin of error/ uncertainty than like 50%, it seems like you are much more certain (perhaps epistemically unjustifiably) when you talk about things to that decimal place.