You present your arguments as though they're for theism, but to me they seem to be for deism. You say theism predicts our world better than atheism, but deism seems to predict it far better than theism.
Under theism I would expect less empty space that seems to have no relation to humans, and less time before humans came into existence. I wouldn't expect hundreds of millions of years of dinosaurs that were eventually disposed of through a massive meteor. I would also expect, as Richard says, far less suffering.
But under deism I guess all of this is fine, and deism can explain fine-tuning. We don't really have any pre-conceived notions about a deistic god so anything is basically compatible with such a god. This would be a god we can't really make heads or tails of. I'm even open to it being "perfectly good" in some sense we simply can't grasp, but a goodness with no comprehensible content has no more bearing on how I should live than atheism does. It certainly wouldn’t be a god there seems any reason to pray to. Praying is quite obviously a human construct - what reason do I have to believe the creator of the XLSSC122 massive galaxy cluster 10.4 billion light years away from us cares if I pray to him?
I talk about the scale here You're Smiling (But I Don't Believe You)
The arguments are for theism.
1. Anthropic argument: a mere deistic entity of limited power has no special reason, nor by default would be expected to be able to, create so many people without undercutting the reliability of their rational faculties.
2. Psychophysical harmony: the deistic limited creator's psychophysical harmony would be inexplicable (theism doesn't face this problem because it derives it from a deeper property).
3. Fine-tuning: the desires and powers of a limited creator would have to be finely-tuned. A perfect God doesn't face this problem because it has no finely-tuned parameters but just one property set to infinity.
"anything is basically compatible with such a god," means it doesn't predict anything specific.
"Praying is quite obviously a human construct - what reason do I have to believe the creator of the XLSSC122 massive galaxy cluster 10.4 billion light years away from us cares if I pray to him?"
Well insofar as this being created the universe and is perfect, you should do what you can to ascertain his will.
My deistic god doesn't have limited power. It's just a god that doesn't particularly care about humans in the way that man-made religions would have you believe.
And again, I'm open to the god being perfect and good. But I can see what that goodness looks like: a world full of empty space, immense suffering, and vast amounts of matter having nothing to do with humans. That's a perfection and goodness we simply cannot understand or draw any guidance from. This is effectively what you concede when you allow for unknown reasons beyond our comprehension for why God permitted so much suffering.
I can try to ascertain this god's will but it seems hopeless, and I don't know how praying could possibly help with that.
What additional explanatory work is the deity doing in this account?
We live in a world that so happens to be among those fine tuned for life, which is very rare among the set of all possible worlds. We ask why. You say: “there is an all powerful spirit who just likes it that way”. I say: “Ok, what explains the all powerful spirit who likes it that way? Where did it come from? Why does it like it that way? Why doesn’t it like it almost the same except ice cream tastes a little better?”
Seems to me resorting to “God did it”, at best, is just giving up and saying you don’t know. At worst, it introduces a very odd and apparently observed magic thing with tons of properties that we can’t really understand, which seems like a much worse explanation that “random chance” or “random chance plus if you didn’t happen to live in a life world you would not ask the question so you are confusing prior with posterior probability”.
Said another way, fine tuning is only more likely on theism if you have some sense of how likely god is at all (in fact a god that wants to tune things in the way we see). How likely is that? Completely unspecified.
I think the reason I stand with Richard on the anthropic and especially fine tuning arguments possibly being sophistic is: we do not have a fully specified model for what either theism or atheism predict, nor even really close to one.
So, unlike in usual Bayesian updating where you can be pretty confident that p(Observation|Hypothesis) is big or small, when we say p(Consciousness|atheism) is small, we really mean something like p(consciousness|atheism given what we currently understand about the universe and how it could have been) is small. But, then we have to be ready to update on pieces of evidence like E=we discover some new framework that makes the constants of our universe seem more constrained/dependent/inevitable. But then p(E) is surely _much much much_ greater than 1/googol; I think it would be insane to think "if a physicist finds a model that explains the cosmological constant, that's a 1/googol-level surprise to me"! I feel like I wouldn't want to go much below 1/100 in terms of order of magnitude! Physicists are constantly discovering crazy things about how our world fits together!
Conversely, on God, we don't have any explicit parameters to play fine tuning with, and the reasoning is much more loose about explicit mechanisms: what are the odds that God would have created a universe with a cosmological constant at all? A universe where a cosmological constant is even a meaningful notion? We have no idea, but there's no explicit parameter to set up a comparable fine tuning argument against: "if God existed, he would just create a Mahlo's cardinal number of people without bothering to embed them in spacetimes that follow Einstein's equations at all; the fact that we exist in a universe with arguments for only 2^2^aleph_0 people, embedded in Einsteinian spacetimes is actually a huge update against God"--is this a good argument? I dunno! But I think it shows how loosely goosey our reasoning about "what the world would look like given God" is.
But whereas I think the odds are pretty good on us learning more about what constrains the universe from the picture of physics, I think the odds are much worse (not 1/googol bad though) of improving our understanding of what the universe ought to look like given God... I'm not sure there's been all that much improvement in our models of God in the last 500 years--certainly nothing to compare with our improvement in our models of the physical world!
So IMO the odds of our universe on atheism are being lowered by forgetting the (reasonably likely) possibility that we might learn things that make our universe feel more likely under atheism; but I think our odds of coming up with better arguments for God are probably pretty closed to fixed.
The last point I would concede to a theist is: science might make any specific feature of our universe more likely with better understanding, but it still seems surprising that there's anything at all, or that it's possible for consciousness to arise from our set of physical laws at all, or things like that, that don't refer to any particular set of parameters of the universe. I think this is true, and I think here it is much more unlikely that science will be able to explain the infinite regress of "but why is it _that_ way?", so fair point. But I think then we're just debating questions like my one above about Mahlo cardinal number of observers with no spacetime at all--i just doing think we'll ever get any real traction on these questions at all, and so at that point you just default to priors. I don't think it's crazy to think "it just feels more likely that for there you be anything at all requires a God", but not at a trillion to 1, or a googol to 1 or whatever.
But the whole point of requiring god in order for "anything at all" to exist undermines itself, if god exists. Why is it that much crazier to posit the universe (or the multiverse) as something that just is, rather than posit a god who is both willing and able to create the universe (or multiverse) as the thing that just is? It's the same end result but one is adding extra details without getting more explanatory power.
I agree with this, but theists think there's something about God that bootstraps itself into existence in a way that is better. I don't really get it, but I think debating this stuff is, until further notice, basically just spinning our wheels or restating our priors. My priors agree with yours, but if someone else disagrees I'm not too worked up about it. I'd rather just say, "I don't really know how to think about this stuff, and I don't think you do either, and I don't think anyone has a research program to be able to better think about this stuff, so let's just agree to disagree".
I far prefer Richard's approach to epistemology. Bayesianism is generally inapplicable to philosophy issues, because what we are even arguing bout is often unclear, plus the amount of data we have to set priors, or to update them, is so small/unreliable. Under these circumstances, self-deception about priors and weighting factors will dominate a Bayesian calculation. Bayesianism is therefore brittle, and two Bayesians can and often do claim wildly different conclusions from a Bayesian analysis of a philosophic question.
When our universe is not predicted by two rival theories, it is pretty much irrelevant which of the two is less poor at predicting our universe. Both should be discarded, and one should look for theories that match it!
The theories that match our universe are: 1) Multiverse plus strong anthropic principle; or 2) Creator God who is a poor architect, or a dysfunctional God committee design.
These are the two theories one should be evaluating.
I also dismiss the psycho-physical harmony argument as refuted in the case of interactive spiritual dualism, as evolutionary processes will tune biosystems to interact more effectively.
Our universe better matches a dysfunctional committee creation followed by Godly enmity leading to di-theism, than it does a poor God student failing a design lab.
Interesting post. Another reason why evil and fine-tuning don't cancel each other out is that both are compatible with a creator who is indifferent to morals as we understand them.
Matthew's argument that a maximally simple God would not have any limits and would therefore be perfectly good in the sense of not deliberately causing suffering is conjectural and at odds with the evidence that we have from nature.
RYC with good points as usual. Matthew with first *and* last word? Crazy debate format. I would never engage in an argument format where the person defending the proposition spoke first and last.
I wonder how many books it would take to really flesh out just your unique takes on the arguments...
I think it was a good discussion! If you're thinking of debates as essentially about point-scoring or something, that really wasn't my concern here :-)
I made this comment on a previous post, but you seem to be making the same mistake again so I'll make it again: the fact that the cosmological constant is ~10^{-122} (i.e. very close to zero) is not nearly a googol's worth of odds in favor of a fine-tuning hypothesis. That would only be the case if you assumed the cosmological constant were drawn uniformly from the interval [0,1], but there's no particular reason to assume that, and lots of reasons not to. For example, it would imply that it is impossible for the cosmological constant to be greater than 1. A more plausible model is where the log of the cosmological constant is normally distributed. It's true that in this model a small cosmological constant could still provide a significant amount of evidence in favor of a fine-tuning hypothesis, but nowhere near a googol,
I think this isn't exactly how the physics works (caveat emptor: I used AI to refresh my memory, but from what I recall the story is consistent with my physics classes; see also [1]). Basically, the vaccum energy term Λ equals Λ_0 + δΛ where Λ_0 is a free parameter of the microscopic theory (something at the Planck scale or what have you) and δΛ is a correction generated when integrating out short-distance degrees of freedom (what we are interested is the macroscopic vacuum energy Λ that we actually measure). The point is, this δΛ is something that is generated by other parts of the theory (e.g. it gets huge contributions from various massive particles), so what we end up with is Λ = Λ_0 + δΛ where the left side is << 1 and δΛ >> 1. The free parameter Λ_0 has to be fine-tuned to almost the negative of δΛ, but not quite, with the discrepancy being only at the 122nd (or whatever) significant digit. So the problem is not that Λ is tiny -- I agree that a fine-tuning argument based on this would be very weak even on an intuitive level -- but that this Λ_0 has to look exactly like (caricature) 11201528679.120580361309764382(...) and this is much more difficult to generate naturally.
I see. But from your Wiki link it looks like δΛ and Λ_0 depend on a choice of cutoff, so in some sense they don't actually have "true values", just different values for each possible choice of cutoff. (At least if I'm not misunderstanding.) So I still think it makes sense to view Λ as the parameter that's being modified as we range over possible universes.
My response here will probably depend a bit on what exactly you mean by "true values", but let me say that everyone already agrees the standard model is an effective theory valid only up to at most the Planck scale, and then some more fundamental theory (strings?) with its own parameters sets in. The point will be the same: Λ will be determined by the parameters of this more basic theory, and so that theory has to either be fine-tuned itself, or it has to somehow intrinsically (read: magically) generate the fine-tuning. There are no accepted proposals for this latter option as far as I know, and it looks very implausible to me, but I don't know. (This is basically the "further physics" objection to fine-tuning, so I'm sure it's been discussed in a thousand places.)
Your suggestion that Λ be taken as the "prior" parameter is interesting. This would involve some kind of "downward teleology" (using that term in a thin sense) where whatever mechanism picks the physical constants does so conditional on their macroscopic / long-distance values. It's a bit strange and not consistent with our usual bottom-up view of physics, but I guess there is nothing really wrong with postulating this (though it would be nice to have a more carefully worked-out model).
Theism absolutely is not compatible with our universe because of the problem of evil.
The compelling solutions to the problem of evil require a certain type of free will where one has access to alternative actions. (The pap) but such free will is by all accounts impossible in any reasonable conception of causality (see van inwagen)*. So the problem of evil cannot be escape.
Those who think it can are failing to weirdly reckon with the means available to an all knowing all powerful being. (Or I guess they could believe in something like David lewis’s cosmology I guess).
*I am aware he believed free will existed, however he seems to have eliminated all positions in logical space where we could have free will, so I think his holding on to it based on his intuitions didn’t make sense.
I really think the "theism does better than all these naturalistic explanations for X/Y/Z by virtue of simply positing a single mind without limit" idea is incredibly load-bearing (sorry Pangram) in these discussions and doesn't ultimately make a lot of sense.
Super cool debate, thanks for sharing it! This has nothing to do with the post, but I wanted to know if you had any thoughts on the cluelessness problem in general and on Anthony DiGiovannu's unawareness sequence in particular (as you know, there's a competition of answers to the series happening this week on the EA forum).
"each persuasive individually, and decisive in combination".
What is your percent credence in theism? Iirc it's something around 60-70%? Granted that this is not a recent debate, so your views may have changed since then, but assuming you were at a similar level then, 70% is not by any means "decisive", and I think to claim that it is is at minimum irresponsibly loose with the word "decisive". If you play russian roulette with 3 bullets in a 10 chamber revolver, it is not by any means decisive that you survive.
But I'm only at like 70% because of higher-order evidence. My best first-order guess is that a perfectly rational person would be well above 90% on theism.
So it would be decisive without the higher-order evidence, but given the higher-order evidence it is not decisive?
I'm not sure I'm tracking what you mean by higher-order evidence, or maybe I'm confused on what a perfectly rational person would do, but imo a perfectly rational person would take all evidence into account when considering and assigning credences.
I'm also reminded of a rat concept along the lines of "you should not expect to be persuaded one way or the other", but I'm not sure where I heard it. I may be entirely misremembering a different concept.
Edit: I just looked up what higher order evidence means and I understand what you're saying much better now. The stanford.edu entry on it with the hypoxia example was very clarifying. So you're saying that you think theism is >>90% correct, but then realizing that, e.g. humans are often wrong when reasoning about stuff like this, you adjust down to ~70%. Is that a roughly accurate accounting of your perspective?
You present your arguments as though they're for theism, but to me they seem to be for deism. You say theism predicts our world better than atheism, but deism seems to predict it far better than theism.
Under theism I would expect less empty space that seems to have no relation to humans, and less time before humans came into existence. I wouldn't expect hundreds of millions of years of dinosaurs that were eventually disposed of through a massive meteor. I would also expect, as Richard says, far less suffering.
But under deism I guess all of this is fine, and deism can explain fine-tuning. We don't really have any pre-conceived notions about a deistic god so anything is basically compatible with such a god. This would be a god we can't really make heads or tails of. I'm even open to it being "perfectly good" in some sense we simply can't grasp, but a goodness with no comprehensible content has no more bearing on how I should live than atheism does. It certainly wouldn’t be a god there seems any reason to pray to. Praying is quite obviously a human construct - what reason do I have to believe the creator of the XLSSC122 massive galaxy cluster 10.4 billion light years away from us cares if I pray to him?
I talk about the scale here You're Smiling (But I Don't Believe You)
The arguments are for theism.
1. Anthropic argument: a mere deistic entity of limited power has no special reason, nor by default would be expected to be able to, create so many people without undercutting the reliability of their rational faculties.
2. Psychophysical harmony: the deistic limited creator's psychophysical harmony would be inexplicable (theism doesn't face this problem because it derives it from a deeper property).
3. Fine-tuning: the desires and powers of a limited creator would have to be finely-tuned. A perfect God doesn't face this problem because it has no finely-tuned parameters but just one property set to infinity.
"anything is basically compatible with such a god," means it doesn't predict anything specific.
"Praying is quite obviously a human construct - what reason do I have to believe the creator of the XLSSC122 massive galaxy cluster 10.4 billion light years away from us cares if I pray to him?"
Well insofar as this being created the universe and is perfect, you should do what you can to ascertain his will.
My deistic god doesn't have limited power. It's just a god that doesn't particularly care about humans in the way that man-made religions would have you believe.
And again, I'm open to the god being perfect and good. But I can see what that goodness looks like: a world full of empty space, immense suffering, and vast amounts of matter having nothing to do with humans. That's a perfection and goodness we simply cannot understand or draw any guidance from. This is effectively what you concede when you allow for unknown reasons beyond our comprehension for why God permitted so much suffering.
I can try to ascertain this god's will but it seems hopeless, and I don't know how praying could possibly help with that.
What additional explanatory work is the deity doing in this account?
We live in a world that so happens to be among those fine tuned for life, which is very rare among the set of all possible worlds. We ask why. You say: “there is an all powerful spirit who just likes it that way”. I say: “Ok, what explains the all powerful spirit who likes it that way? Where did it come from? Why does it like it that way? Why doesn’t it like it almost the same except ice cream tastes a little better?”
Seems to me resorting to “God did it”, at best, is just giving up and saying you don’t know. At worst, it introduces a very odd and apparently observed magic thing with tons of properties that we can’t really understand, which seems like a much worse explanation that “random chance” or “random chance plus if you didn’t happen to live in a life world you would not ask the question so you are confusing prior with posterior probability”.
Said another way, fine tuning is only more likely on theism if you have some sense of how likely god is at all (in fact a god that wants to tune things in the way we see). How likely is that? Completely unspecified.
To be clear I’m not a deist or theist
This is I think absolutely correct.
I think the reason I stand with Richard on the anthropic and especially fine tuning arguments possibly being sophistic is: we do not have a fully specified model for what either theism or atheism predict, nor even really close to one.
So, unlike in usual Bayesian updating where you can be pretty confident that p(Observation|Hypothesis) is big or small, when we say p(Consciousness|atheism) is small, we really mean something like p(consciousness|atheism given what we currently understand about the universe and how it could have been) is small. But, then we have to be ready to update on pieces of evidence like E=we discover some new framework that makes the constants of our universe seem more constrained/dependent/inevitable. But then p(E) is surely _much much much_ greater than 1/googol; I think it would be insane to think "if a physicist finds a model that explains the cosmological constant, that's a 1/googol-level surprise to me"! I feel like I wouldn't want to go much below 1/100 in terms of order of magnitude! Physicists are constantly discovering crazy things about how our world fits together!
Conversely, on God, we don't have any explicit parameters to play fine tuning with, and the reasoning is much more loose about explicit mechanisms: what are the odds that God would have created a universe with a cosmological constant at all? A universe where a cosmological constant is even a meaningful notion? We have no idea, but there's no explicit parameter to set up a comparable fine tuning argument against: "if God existed, he would just create a Mahlo's cardinal number of people without bothering to embed them in spacetimes that follow Einstein's equations at all; the fact that we exist in a universe with arguments for only 2^2^aleph_0 people, embedded in Einsteinian spacetimes is actually a huge update against God"--is this a good argument? I dunno! But I think it shows how loosely goosey our reasoning about "what the world would look like given God" is.
But whereas I think the odds are pretty good on us learning more about what constrains the universe from the picture of physics, I think the odds are much worse (not 1/googol bad though) of improving our understanding of what the universe ought to look like given God... I'm not sure there's been all that much improvement in our models of God in the last 500 years--certainly nothing to compare with our improvement in our models of the physical world!
So IMO the odds of our universe on atheism are being lowered by forgetting the (reasonably likely) possibility that we might learn things that make our universe feel more likely under atheism; but I think our odds of coming up with better arguments for God are probably pretty closed to fixed.
The last point I would concede to a theist is: science might make any specific feature of our universe more likely with better understanding, but it still seems surprising that there's anything at all, or that it's possible for consciousness to arise from our set of physical laws at all, or things like that, that don't refer to any particular set of parameters of the universe. I think this is true, and I think here it is much more unlikely that science will be able to explain the infinite regress of "but why is it _that_ way?", so fair point. But I think then we're just debating questions like my one above about Mahlo cardinal number of observers with no spacetime at all--i just doing think we'll ever get any real traction on these questions at all, and so at that point you just default to priors. I don't think it's crazy to think "it just feels more likely that for there you be anything at all requires a God", but not at a trillion to 1, or a googol to 1 or whatever.
But the whole point of requiring god in order for "anything at all" to exist undermines itself, if god exists. Why is it that much crazier to posit the universe (or the multiverse) as something that just is, rather than posit a god who is both willing and able to create the universe (or multiverse) as the thing that just is? It's the same end result but one is adding extra details without getting more explanatory power.
I agree with this, but theists think there's something about God that bootstraps itself into existence in a way that is better. I don't really get it, but I think debating this stuff is, until further notice, basically just spinning our wheels or restating our priors. My priors agree with yours, but if someone else disagrees I'm not too worked up about it. I'd rather just say, "I don't really know how to think about this stuff, and I don't think you do either, and I don't think anyone has a research program to be able to better think about this stuff, so let's just agree to disagree".
I far prefer Richard's approach to epistemology. Bayesianism is generally inapplicable to philosophy issues, because what we are even arguing bout is often unclear, plus the amount of data we have to set priors, or to update them, is so small/unreliable. Under these circumstances, self-deception about priors and weighting factors will dominate a Bayesian calculation. Bayesianism is therefore brittle, and two Bayesians can and often do claim wildly different conclusions from a Bayesian analysis of a philosophic question.
When our universe is not predicted by two rival theories, it is pretty much irrelevant which of the two is less poor at predicting our universe. Both should be discarded, and one should look for theories that match it!
The theories that match our universe are: 1) Multiverse plus strong anthropic principle; or 2) Creator God who is a poor architect, or a dysfunctional God committee design.
These are the two theories one should be evaluating.
I also dismiss the psycho-physical harmony argument as refuted in the case of interactive spiritual dualism, as evolutionary processes will tune biosystems to interact more effectively.
Our universe better matches a dysfunctional committee creation followed by Godly enmity leading to di-theism, than it does a poor God student failing a design lab.
Interesting post. Another reason why evil and fine-tuning don't cancel each other out is that both are compatible with a creator who is indifferent to morals as we understand them.
Matthew's argument that a maximally simple God would not have any limits and would therefore be perfectly good in the sense of not deliberately causing suffering is conjectural and at odds with the evidence that we have from nature.
RYC with good points as usual. Matthew with first *and* last word? Crazy debate format. I would never engage in an argument format where the person defending the proposition spoke first and last.
I wonder how many books it would take to really flesh out just your unique takes on the arguments...
I think it was a good discussion! If you're thinking of debates as essentially about point-scoring or something, that really wasn't my concern here :-)
Yeah imo even with BB having the first and last word it's pretty clear who's using sounder reasoning here.
The affirmative position opening and closing has been the standard format for interscholastic debate for decades.
I made this comment on a previous post, but you seem to be making the same mistake again so I'll make it again: the fact that the cosmological constant is ~10^{-122} (i.e. very close to zero) is not nearly a googol's worth of odds in favor of a fine-tuning hypothesis. That would only be the case if you assumed the cosmological constant were drawn uniformly from the interval [0,1], but there's no particular reason to assume that, and lots of reasons not to. For example, it would imply that it is impossible for the cosmological constant to be greater than 1. A more plausible model is where the log of the cosmological constant is normally distributed. It's true that in this model a small cosmological constant could still provide a significant amount of evidence in favor of a fine-tuning hypothesis, but nowhere near a googol,
I think this isn't exactly how the physics works (caveat emptor: I used AI to refresh my memory, but from what I recall the story is consistent with my physics classes; see also [1]). Basically, the vaccum energy term Λ equals Λ_0 + δΛ where Λ_0 is a free parameter of the microscopic theory (something at the Planck scale or what have you) and δΛ is a correction generated when integrating out short-distance degrees of freedom (what we are interested is the macroscopic vacuum energy Λ that we actually measure). The point is, this δΛ is something that is generated by other parts of the theory (e.g. it gets huge contributions from various massive particles), so what we end up with is Λ = Λ_0 + δΛ where the left side is << 1 and δΛ >> 1. The free parameter Λ_0 has to be fine-tuned to almost the negative of δΛ, but not quite, with the discrepancy being only at the 122nd (or whatever) significant digit. So the problem is not that Λ is tiny -- I agree that a fine-tuning argument based on this would be very weak even on an intuitive level -- but that this Λ_0 has to look exactly like (caricature) 11201528679.120580361309764382(...) and this is much more difficult to generate naturally.
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem#Cutoff_dependence_and_renormalization
I see. But from your Wiki link it looks like δΛ and Λ_0 depend on a choice of cutoff, so in some sense they don't actually have "true values", just different values for each possible choice of cutoff. (At least if I'm not misunderstanding.) So I still think it makes sense to view Λ as the parameter that's being modified as we range over possible universes.
My response here will probably depend a bit on what exactly you mean by "true values", but let me say that everyone already agrees the standard model is an effective theory valid only up to at most the Planck scale, and then some more fundamental theory (strings?) with its own parameters sets in. The point will be the same: Λ will be determined by the parameters of this more basic theory, and so that theory has to either be fine-tuned itself, or it has to somehow intrinsically (read: magically) generate the fine-tuning. There are no accepted proposals for this latter option as far as I know, and it looks very implausible to me, but I don't know. (This is basically the "further physics" objection to fine-tuning, so I'm sure it's been discussed in a thousand places.)
Your suggestion that Λ be taken as the "prior" parameter is interesting. This would involve some kind of "downward teleology" (using that term in a thin sense) where whatever mechanism picks the physical constants does so conditional on their macroscopic / long-distance values. It's a bit strange and not consistent with our usual bottom-up view of physics, but I guess there is nothing really wrong with postulating this (though it would be nice to have a more carefully worked-out model).
EDIT: By the way, this thread [https://substack.com/@plasmabloggin/note/c-249645803] is pretty intense but informative.
Theism absolutely is not compatible with our universe because of the problem of evil.
The compelling solutions to the problem of evil require a certain type of free will where one has access to alternative actions. (The pap) but such free will is by all accounts impossible in any reasonable conception of causality (see van inwagen)*. So the problem of evil cannot be escape.
Those who think it can are failing to weirdly reckon with the means available to an all knowing all powerful being. (Or I guess they could believe in something like David lewis’s cosmology I guess).
*I am aware he believed free will existed, however he seems to have eliminated all positions in logical space where we could have free will, so I think his holding on to it based on his intuitions didn’t make sense.
I really think the "theism does better than all these naturalistic explanations for X/Y/Z by virtue of simply positing a single mind without limit" idea is incredibly load-bearing (sorry Pangram) in these discussions and doesn't ultimately make a lot of sense.
“whereas there’s no question that atheism is at least compatible with our observations“
Saint Thomas Aquinas doubts. Saint Anselm even doubts whether atheism is coherent prior to our observations.
Don't be swayed by that doubting Thomas!
Right. Nowadays I genuinely think "∃x (x = x)" just outright falsifies naturalism.
Super cool debate, thanks for sharing it! This has nothing to do with the post, but I wanted to know if you had any thoughts on the cluelessness problem in general and on Anthony DiGiovannu's unawareness sequence in particular (as you know, there's a competition of answers to the series happening this week on the EA forum).
Theism wins outright.
Also, I like the stupid poker cheater analogy lol
"each persuasive individually, and decisive in combination".
What is your percent credence in theism? Iirc it's something around 60-70%? Granted that this is not a recent debate, so your views may have changed since then, but assuming you were at a similar level then, 70% is not by any means "decisive", and I think to claim that it is is at minimum irresponsibly loose with the word "decisive". If you play russian roulette with 3 bullets in a 10 chamber revolver, it is not by any means decisive that you survive.
But I'm only at like 70% because of higher-order evidence. My best first-order guess is that a perfectly rational person would be well above 90% on theism.
So it would be decisive without the higher-order evidence, but given the higher-order evidence it is not decisive?
I'm not sure I'm tracking what you mean by higher-order evidence, or maybe I'm confused on what a perfectly rational person would do, but imo a perfectly rational person would take all evidence into account when considering and assigning credences.
I'm also reminded of a rat concept along the lines of "you should not expect to be persuaded one way or the other", but I'm not sure where I heard it. I may be entirely misremembering a different concept.
Edit: I just looked up what higher order evidence means and I understand what you're saying much better now. The stanford.edu entry on it with the hypoxia example was very clarifying. So you're saying that you think theism is >>90% correct, but then realizing that, e.g. humans are often wrong when reasoning about stuff like this, you adjust down to ~70%. Is that a roughly accurate accounting of your perspective?
Yeah.
Thanks, that makes a lot more sense now. Thanks for clarifying!