Deep Theism

What to think about the horrors of a world ordered by a loving providential God

1 Horrors older than Saturn’s rings

For about three years, I thought the world we lived in was hell.

Not hell in the literal, direct, “postmortem torture chamber where the beast and the false prophet hang out” sense. But I thought the world was a nightmare, a house of horrors, a place that, despite rare, momentary glimpses of peace and light and joy and love should never have been brought into being.

There are about 10^18 arthropods—insects and others like insects, and around a quadrillion fish. These animals are mostly R-strategists, meaning they give birth to huge numbers of offspring, very few of whom will survive. This means that nearly every creature who has ever been born has lived a vanishingly short life of intense suffering. Conscious beings die in a whole host of ghastly ways; being devoured when still in the egg, or starving to death, or slowly and painfully dying of disease, or having their limbs ripped apart as some predator eats them.

Let’s just be clear on how many creatures this is. There are about 100 million insects per person (potentially much more) and about 100,000 fish per person. Think about how much 100,000 fish suffer—especially when they suffer, according to our best estimates, a few percent as much as humans. Our best estimates indicate that insects probably suffer a similar amount.

The animals burn, starve, and die in unimaginable numbers, at unimaginable time scales. Nature is filled, every moment, with creatures in truly mind-bending levels of agony—the agony preceding death is generally the worst moment of a person’s life. In nature, creatures die over and over again in ways too horrendous to vividly contemplate without being sickened and terrified. This isn’t new—it was true since long before Rome and Egypt, since long before humans were even on the scene. The grand, unfathomably old cosmos has had these horrors for a sizeable share of its existence. Suffering is older than the mountains and the trees, older than some stars.

Before Saturn had rings, animals were crying out in agony and terror. And they’re still doing it.

Your life probably contains lots of suffering. But at least you have goods that can counterbalance it—friends, love, all sorts of pleasures. Most of these creatures spent their lives running in terrors, with few joys beyond eating and, in the rare cases they survived long enough to do so, mating. The horror of a painful death is beyond belief—I wouldn’t trade it for a few months of happy life. Yet evolution—the indifferent, blind, alien god—has produced for nearly every being that has ever lived, a short life ending in painful death.

While the future might be good, it’s hard to imagine it being good enough to offset the billions of years of horror. If the universe is large, posthuman utopia is almost surely rare—while the horror of nature is vast and plentiful, spread across huge numbers of planets.

Joe Carlsmith

(author of one of the ~10 best blogs on the internet) has some essays talking about a concept adjacent to this which he calls deep atheism. A deep atheist is fundamentally distrustful of optimization processes. Evolution optimizes for reproduction and as a result churns out horrors beyond contemplation, far worse than anything humans have ever done. What kind of evil that humans do could ever live up to the billions of years of agony, of creatures far more numerous than humans that have been bleeding and suffering and dying since before the earth had trees.

Deep atheists generally don’t revere nature. They see nature as a horror show, an optimization process that has produced badness beyond comprehension. Worshipping and revering nature, on this picture, is a bit like the cultists who worshipped Lovecraft’s Cthulu. You don’t worship something that doesn’t care about you, that produces death and pain and destruction because of its blind and careless optimization.

Deep atheists tend to be pretty worried about AI risk. Because they distrust optimization, they think that only AIs optimized for very, very specific things will be safe. If you have an AI optimizing for pleasure, it converts the universe to utilitronium; if you have an AI optimizing for any material good, it converts the atoms in your body to that good. The AI doesn’t hate you any more than evolution hates the fish it sends forth into the shark’s maw. As Eliezer Yudkowsky says “The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.”

2 Deep theism

I believe in God. But despite that, I find myself in agreement with the deep atheists on a lot.

Evolution is a deeply horrifying process. It’s hard to imagine what more I could say about this than I already have. But, well, take a moment to imagine what it would be like to be slowly eaten alive—when you realize that’s how literally quadrillions of beings have met their demise, it’s hard to remain a tree hugger.

I think theists ought to agree with this. The world is clearly not ideal in its setup. It’s not how God’s perfect world would be run. Instead, this is what happens when the world is apart from God—either because God has moral reasons to put us in a world that is in some sense apart from him or we choose to be apart from him or diabolical forces put us in a world apart from him by abusing their free will. The world God is aiming at—the one we’ll spend forever in—is infinitely grand. A second of the afterlife will easily outshine all the pleasures of this world, and we’ll go to appreciate new goods the likes of which we can only dream of. My belief is well-captured by C.S. Lewis’s ending to the Narnia series:

“The dream is ended: this is the morning."

And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

Our world, on this picture, is not the end. Atheism may be true of our world, atheism may go quite deep, but not infinitely deep. Ultimately, the world is an optimization process—but one designed by love itself for the good of all. Our local reality may, in various ways, suck, but ultimate reality is unparalleledly good.

Notably, I think I’m quite a bit more optimistic than most theists. I think everything will turn out well in the end. There won’t be huge numbers of people suffering in hell—burning in flames that are never quenched. Every tear will be wiped away, and everything sad will become untrue.

Many theists are, in the Carlsmith’s sense, something nearer to deep atheism. In fact, it might even be the deepest atheism. Even when God himself is in charge, running the show, their atheism goes so deep that they think that things won’t turn out for the best—that people will continue to suffer forever.

In this life, we are weak and vulnerable. We can harm each other and be harmed. We can give our lives shielding our loved ones from harm or we can turn to evil. God does not intervene in nature; he leaves the world under our control. We are subject to real, genuine dangers and horrors—enabling forgiveness and the truest kinds of love.

The truest kinds of love can only take place in a world where we are vulnerable. The best love stories in popular cullture always involve some kind of tragedy: Titanic, The Long Morrow (ht. Gilmore Girls), The Fault In Our Stars. When my great-grandmother cared for my great-grandfather, that was only possible in a world where we were vulnerable, a world containing genuine evils, where God wasn’t running the show.

The theistic picture of the world is rather straightforward. God places us in a world with the horrors that I mentioned—a world that is, in some broad sense, apart from him—to express the greatest forms of love. In this world, we are genuinely vulnerable, able to display bravery and sacrifice—to give our lives for the ones we love, able to make sacrifices to show that we care. The benefits of this world—a shallow atheism, where God isn’t constantly intervening—last forever, as the relationships we form are eternal.

This broad picture of the world, on which an ultimate reality of pure goodness introduces evils, isn’t too hard to understand. The atheist thinks this happened, in reverse. An indifferent universe birthed love and joy and beauty as a spandrel—a single happy tumor on the skin of an indifferent God. Soon, the joys of the world will end. Soon, all the good and evil will be swallowed up, devoured by the maw of the same blind physical forces that produces us. Ultimately, the universe doesn’t care about us in the slightest, but this indifference produces a brief glimmer of value, soon to disappear.

My brand of theism holds that an ultimate reality of pure goodness birthed a tiny and temporary spot of indifference. The atheist holds that an ultimate reality of indifference birthed a tiny and temporary spot of goodness.

On atheism, hell is the natural state. On theism, God makes us sojourn through hell, so that we may come to love each other and God more fully.

3 What I said in the last section but visually

(This is all the art you people are ever getting out of me)!

(Also, brief digression—atheists shouldn’t think the universe is either good or bad. On anthropic grounds, they should thing the world is infinite but an infinite world is, absent very weird circumstances, neither good nor bad).

4 Horror and hope

On atheism, good things are a fairly minute sideshow in the history of the universe. Sure, they’re what matters in the universe, but they’re not really what the cosmic story is about. Life is short-lived and temporary—the main story involves celestial events interacting on timescales that we can’t fathom.

On theism bad things are a sideshow. All of the horrors of our world are infinitely surpassed by just a single second of the afterlife. What true love is to stubbing your toe, heaven is to the worst moment of your life.

As I said before, I think this is true. I certainly hope it is true. It would be the best possible news.

I also find there to be something aesthetically repulsive about it.