It seems like atheists have a difficult time distinguishing between an argument for theism and those same arguments being used for any kind of religious god. Maybe for good reason since most theists might even reject that a non-religious (or non 3-O) god might not constitute a god at all. This is why I like the fine tuning argument for a very intelligent and powerful creator, but not necessarily a god. That's probably irrelevant to the disagreement in general between you two, though.
I will add that for the physicalist views on mind/body to hold, I think physicalists would have to do one of two things; (i) deny that humans have mental states (which is crazy), or (ii) ascribe a mental predicate deriving from any set of purely physical descriptions (which seems impossible). From Michael Huemer's 1992 undergraduate paper titled 'What Is the Mind/Body Problem?' https://owl232.net/papers/mind.htm
Huemer states at the end that, "If this paper has a theme, it is that, unfortunately, the mind/body problem is alive and well."
I will preface this by saying that the person you are arguing against appears to be a bit confused. They’re attempting to argue against your a priori metaphysical arguments with arguments about the physical world. They thus do not appear to answer any of your arguments.
Doesn’t help that all your “evidence” for Theism comes from abstract meditation and has nothing to do with actual interaction with reality. According to you, God would be self-evident even if your entire life involved sitting in a dark-box!
So they have my sympathies, even though you are right that they fundamentally do not answer you.
Secondly, this post confirms that solipsism captures all the evidence. It’s even simpler than God, because the only thing it posits is that “you the observer reading this text with qualia” exists. That’s a necessary fact! Even more simply then absolute goodness, because there’s some complexity in goodness. Your existence is just a necessary brute fact.
It renders fine-tuning irreverent. Fundamental laws being illusions explains the evidence far better than “God made these exact set of laws which gave rise to pretty intelligent apes and apparently nothing else of much interest”.
Psychophysical harmony is explained away. If “physical” things are just co strict of your own mind, then obviously there will be harmony. They’re the same thing!
You say “I see a table in front of me because there really is a table.” — but the only reason you know there is in fact a table in front of you is because you see it. This is entirely circular. We have no way of knowing that the entire world is not an illusion. Solipsism “explains” apparently psychophysical harmony at least as much as God. (In fact even more. God might have reasons to prevent such harmony)
A priori moral knowledge is both fake and explained by solipsism. It’s fake because you would obviously believe that Torture is good if you were throughly indoctrinated into a society that viewed pain as the ultimate fulfillment of human experience in the same way that you currently view pleasure. Your assertion that you would be believe torture is immoral no matter what is simply incredible. It’s also unclear why Theism solves this (particularly since God hasn’t made himself as obvious as induction or something!). In any event, you give some sort of hand wavy explanation for why God would make sure everyone has a priori knowledge. But under Solipsism, all knowledge would come from yourself—you would thus clearly have a priori knowledge because all knowledge already resides within your mind.
Now your absolute best argument against Solipsism is Anthropics. You say that it’s more likely that more people exist, so solipsism is unlikely.
This has a few problems that have been pointed out elsewhere, namely the fact that this just jury-rigs uncountably infinite evidence in favor of a hypothesis using a Theorem (Bayes) that requires a bounded probability space to operate.
But even putting that aside, under Solipsism, the chances of *you specifically* existing are 100%. Solipsism is literally the view that *only you* could exist.
Now you say “why me and not anyone else”—but this is confused. The Solipsism I defend isn’t the view that there could be many people but that you happen to be the only one. It’s the view that you are the only person that could possibly exist because everyone “else” is just a figment of your mind.
So we have two theories. One is that there could be (and therefore there are) an unboundedly infinite number of people, a proposition that probably breaks probabilistic logic. The other view is that there can only be a single being (you). Under both views, the evidence is explained. There is a 100% chance of your existence! (Actually solipsism is even better, since there’s a high chance that God wouldn’t create everyone, thus making theism less than 199% predictive of your existence).
Have you considered Theistic Solipsism? Whereby we are all ideas in God’s mind. It gets around the pesky issue that you don’t actually exist and are only in my head
How is Theistic Solipsism any different from regular Solipsism? If we're all ideas in the mind of God, then we're all just different parts of God, which means that you're just a figment of my imagination. Because my imagination is God's imagination.
But this is also true if we drop the "theistic". So yes, in a sense solipsism is entirely compatible with Theism. I don't think its the Theism Bulldog defends, though!
But... our thoughts... are part of us? This seems self-evidently true! Maybe we just have different semantic thresholds for what counts as being "part of" something? Same with fictional objects in our thoughts.
I’m not actually a theistic solipsist. I was just trying to show that it’s no worse off than human solipsism, so human solipsism isn’t really a superior alternative
Well, yes. I agree that they are both equally plausible, because they are essentially the same concept.
I am also not a solipsist. However I believe that if one accepts the balance of Bulldog’s arguments, they should be one. Through bulldog’s argumentative framing Solipsism does better on every metric that favors theism than theism itself.
You state in the post that you are a generic theist. Is this your actual position now, or are you still just playing devils advocate? I am getting confused 🫤
Don’t know how common that view is among atheists; I certainly never believed it. Evidence for theism is extremely easy to imagine. God just introducing Himself to everyone. Revelation that was undeniably either project or time travel, like detailed schematics for a 20th century PC revealed to an Ancient Greek, who wrote it down, put it in a bottle… when when discovered was carbon dated, etc
The guy you’re arguing with…doesn’t sound worth reading…of course plausibility matters. For me the #1 thing in this topic is extreme implausibility of ghosts. Ie disembodied minds. Mind seem to be the activity of the brain. I don’t pretend to have an answer to the mind body problem, but the structure of the mind makes sense in light is evolution. Nothing about it would otherwise. So a mind with no body, no past, no parents…to me, you might as well posit a ghost car on Pluto.
Evidence to refute this would be extremely easy to come by. All we would need is for ghosts to exist. It should be utterly trivial to prove they existed if they actually did. Ryan George, creator of Pitch Meetings has some funny sketches about ghosts… like why do they just do jump scares and then vanish? They get their revenge by…making the air somewhat cold? Knocking things over? So they have the powers of an open window, or at best a small house cat. A world in which ghosts were real would probably have massively more unexplained missing persons cases.
Or if people who claimed to communicate with the dead could prove it under controlled conditions, and had access to information that couldn’t be gotten any other way.
This wouldn’t necessarily be evidence for a deity/creator… But it would make it vastly more plausible. Doesn’t have to be ghosts of dead people… Just solid evidence for the existence of any sort of non corporeal spirit being.
But the evidence for any such thing seems pretty bad. But most people throughout history have believed in spirits anyway. And there are plausible evolutionary reasons for that. The simpler explanation is that we have a tendency to want explain things in terms of the intentions of another agent, and to intuit the existence of agency/minds even when there is none.
Great response. I thought BSB’s rebuttal was very weak because he just accused you of arguing from emotion, faith and assumptions even though you’ve been studying this for years, most of them as a convinced atheist.
Him apparently misunderstanding what a hypothetical is was embarrassing with the Adam and Eve case that’s reaching comical levels of new atheist territory I think. I hope he addresses your arguments properly at some point because I think they are incredibly interesting and under-discussed, particularly the anthropic argument.
Was the anthropic yours or is it defended by another philosopher?
It seems like atheists have a difficult time distinguishing between an argument for theism and those same arguments being used for any kind of religious god. Maybe for good reason since most theists might even reject that a non-religious (or non 3-O) god might not constitute a god at all. This is why I like the fine tuning argument for a very intelligent and powerful creator, but not necessarily a god. That's probably irrelevant to the disagreement in general between you two, though.
I will add that for the physicalist views on mind/body to hold, I think physicalists would have to do one of two things; (i) deny that humans have mental states (which is crazy), or (ii) ascribe a mental predicate deriving from any set of purely physical descriptions (which seems impossible). From Michael Huemer's 1992 undergraduate paper titled 'What Is the Mind/Body Problem?' https://owl232.net/papers/mind.htm
Huemer states at the end that, "If this paper has a theme, it is that, unfortunately, the mind/body problem is alive and well."
Wow, even by new atheist standards this guy is remarkably stupid and insufferable.
I will preface this by saying that the person you are arguing against appears to be a bit confused. They’re attempting to argue against your a priori metaphysical arguments with arguments about the physical world. They thus do not appear to answer any of your arguments.
Doesn’t help that all your “evidence” for Theism comes from abstract meditation and has nothing to do with actual interaction with reality. According to you, God would be self-evident even if your entire life involved sitting in a dark-box!
So they have my sympathies, even though you are right that they fundamentally do not answer you.
Secondly, this post confirms that solipsism captures all the evidence. It’s even simpler than God, because the only thing it posits is that “you the observer reading this text with qualia” exists. That’s a necessary fact! Even more simply then absolute goodness, because there’s some complexity in goodness. Your existence is just a necessary brute fact.
It renders fine-tuning irreverent. Fundamental laws being illusions explains the evidence far better than “God made these exact set of laws which gave rise to pretty intelligent apes and apparently nothing else of much interest”.
Psychophysical harmony is explained away. If “physical” things are just co strict of your own mind, then obviously there will be harmony. They’re the same thing!
You say “I see a table in front of me because there really is a table.” — but the only reason you know there is in fact a table in front of you is because you see it. This is entirely circular. We have no way of knowing that the entire world is not an illusion. Solipsism “explains” apparently psychophysical harmony at least as much as God. (In fact even more. God might have reasons to prevent such harmony)
A priori moral knowledge is both fake and explained by solipsism. It’s fake because you would obviously believe that Torture is good if you were throughly indoctrinated into a society that viewed pain as the ultimate fulfillment of human experience in the same way that you currently view pleasure. Your assertion that you would be believe torture is immoral no matter what is simply incredible. It’s also unclear why Theism solves this (particularly since God hasn’t made himself as obvious as induction or something!). In any event, you give some sort of hand wavy explanation for why God would make sure everyone has a priori knowledge. But under Solipsism, all knowledge would come from yourself—you would thus clearly have a priori knowledge because all knowledge already resides within your mind.
Now your absolute best argument against Solipsism is Anthropics. You say that it’s more likely that more people exist, so solipsism is unlikely.
This has a few problems that have been pointed out elsewhere, namely the fact that this just jury-rigs uncountably infinite evidence in favor of a hypothesis using a Theorem (Bayes) that requires a bounded probability space to operate.
But even putting that aside, under Solipsism, the chances of *you specifically* existing are 100%. Solipsism is literally the view that *only you* could exist.
Now you say “why me and not anyone else”—but this is confused. The Solipsism I defend isn’t the view that there could be many people but that you happen to be the only one. It’s the view that you are the only person that could possibly exist because everyone “else” is just a figment of your mind.
So we have two theories. One is that there could be (and therefore there are) an unboundedly infinite number of people, a proposition that probably breaks probabilistic logic. The other view is that there can only be a single being (you). Under both views, the evidence is explained. There is a 100% chance of your existence! (Actually solipsism is even better, since there’s a high chance that God wouldn’t create everyone, thus making theism less than 199% predictive of your existence).
Have you considered Theistic Solipsism? Whereby we are all ideas in God’s mind. It gets around the pesky issue that you don’t actually exist and are only in my head
How is Theistic Solipsism any different from regular Solipsism? If we're all ideas in the mind of God, then we're all just different parts of God, which means that you're just a figment of my imagination. Because my imagination is God's imagination.
But this is also true if we drop the "theistic". So yes, in a sense solipsism is entirely compatible with Theism. I don't think its the Theism Bulldog defends, though!
We wouldn’t be parts of God anymore then our thoughts are parts of us. We’d be closer to fictional objects
But... our thoughts... are part of us? This seems self-evidently true! Maybe we just have different semantic thresholds for what counts as being "part of" something? Same with fictional objects in our thoughts.
I don't think we disagree on anything.
I’m not actually a theistic solipsist. I was just trying to show that it’s no worse off than human solipsism, so human solipsism isn’t really a superior alternative
Well, yes. I agree that they are both equally plausible, because they are essentially the same concept.
I am also not a solipsist. However I believe that if one accepts the balance of Bulldog’s arguments, they should be one. Through bulldog’s argumentative framing Solipsism does better on every metric that favors theism than theism itself.
You state in the post that you are a generic theist. Is this your actual position now, or are you still just playing devils advocate? I am getting confused 🫤
I'm kind of agnostic but conditional on theism being right I'd be a generic theism.
Don’t know how common that view is among atheists; I certainly never believed it. Evidence for theism is extremely easy to imagine. God just introducing Himself to everyone. Revelation that was undeniably either project or time travel, like detailed schematics for a 20th century PC revealed to an Ancient Greek, who wrote it down, put it in a bottle… when when discovered was carbon dated, etc
The guy you’re arguing with…doesn’t sound worth reading…of course plausibility matters. For me the #1 thing in this topic is extreme implausibility of ghosts. Ie disembodied minds. Mind seem to be the activity of the brain. I don’t pretend to have an answer to the mind body problem, but the structure of the mind makes sense in light is evolution. Nothing about it would otherwise. So a mind with no body, no past, no parents…to me, you might as well posit a ghost car on Pluto.
Evidence to refute this would be extremely easy to come by. All we would need is for ghosts to exist. It should be utterly trivial to prove they existed if they actually did. Ryan George, creator of Pitch Meetings has some funny sketches about ghosts… like why do they just do jump scares and then vanish? They get their revenge by…making the air somewhat cold? Knocking things over? So they have the powers of an open window, or at best a small house cat. A world in which ghosts were real would probably have massively more unexplained missing persons cases.
Or if people who claimed to communicate with the dead could prove it under controlled conditions, and had access to information that couldn’t be gotten any other way.
This wouldn’t necessarily be evidence for a deity/creator… But it would make it vastly more plausible. Doesn’t have to be ghosts of dead people… Just solid evidence for the existence of any sort of non corporeal spirit being.
But the evidence for any such thing seems pretty bad. But most people throughout history have believed in spirits anyway. And there are plausible evolutionary reasons for that. The simpler explanation is that we have a tendency to want explain things in terms of the intentions of another agent, and to intuit the existence of agency/minds even when there is none.
Great response. I thought BSB’s rebuttal was very weak because he just accused you of arguing from emotion, faith and assumptions even though you’ve been studying this for years, most of them as a convinced atheist.
Him apparently misunderstanding what a hypothetical is was embarrassing with the Adam and Eve case that’s reaching comical levels of new atheist territory I think. I hope he addresses your arguments properly at some point because I think they are incredibly interesting and under-discussed, particularly the anthropic argument.
Was the anthropic yours or is it defended by another philosopher?
Great opening statement and rebuttal!