Seems to me that most/all of these arguments are actually extensions of fine-tuning.
You've narrowly defined fine-tuning to be about certain specific physical laws of the universe, but more or less everything you list is some variation on "isn't it remarkable that we and reality are configured in such a way to be doing this investigation".
A sufficiently powerful selection-effect/anthropic argument thus explains all of them. That is, if we are in a type of multiverse where not just the cosmological constant but also certain facts about the nature of consciousness, the structure of our brains, etc are variables, then all of this is explained at once.
I think the strongest case you could make for one of your arguments being outside this description is "the universe could simply have been too complex for us to understand". But this has its own selection effect -- of course the explanations we have so far are ones we can understand, because... we came up with them. We have found the keys under the street lamp. If there are rules beyond our ken, out in the dark, how would we know?
Anyway, imo you can object to the idea that a multiverse is more plausible than a God, but both can explain all of this convergently.
A multiverse can't explain all of them. How does a multiverse explain why there's consciousness as a result of physical states, psychophysical harmony, or the presence of a number of people too large for standard multiverses.
Regarding discoverability, as Collins notes, even if the parameters were non-discoverable, we'd still know about them, but just not regard them as being in an optimal range for discoverabrility. Given that they're fixed to an extremely tiny level needed for discovery, that's evidence for God. What's puzzling isn't just that we know a few facts, but that we can broadly work out what's going on in the universe.
Re consciousness -- some configurations of reality allow for consciousness to arise, others do not. If you allow for the possibility that the variables determining that configuration are among those which differ across multiverse pockets, then the multiverse + selection effect has sufficient explanatory power.
You can certainly argue that this type of multiverse is unlikely, but you could also make arguments against the likelihood of this type of God (eg it seems strange that a God would create consciousnesses who suffer). I don't think it's obvious that this should count towards the God side of the convergence ledger.
Re psychophysical harmony -- if consciousness is to be evolutionarily adaptive, it must be harmonious with the physical world. If we are already accepting the premise that the sort of unified consciousness we experience arose from evolutionary processes, then harmony follows and adds little new information.
Note that there are plenty of glitches in psychophysical harmony that we would expect to be tolerated by an evolutionary process but not a benevolent designed one. For example, cluster headaches.
Re the presence of a number of people too large for standard multiverses -- you're simply asserting that a "vanilla" multiverse has limited cardinality but a multiverse created by God does not. If it is possible for God to create a higher-cardinality infinite multiverse large enough to host a higher-cardinality infinity of people, why shouldn't it be possible for that multiverse to simply exist?
Re the discoverability argument -- it begs the question. You have a list of fundamental aspects of reality that you yourself think we have not yet been able to understand (eg how consciousness arises from physical states), you assert an explanation for those things (ie God), then say that our ability to understand reality is evidence for that same explanation.
I don't know, it seems like most (maybe not all) of the converging lines of evidence are based on a set of extraordinarily contentious metaphysical assumptions: Humeanism is false, moral and axiological realism are true, SIA isn't broken, axiological stalking horses can't work, God can really be counted as simple and that divine explanations aren't merely shifting all the improbability from the likelihood to the prior, etc. I feel a lot more comfortable rejecting the disjunction of all these than the disjunction of all molecular dating methods that geologists use, where there's essentially 100% consensus and it really would take a miracle for every single one of them to be inaccurate.
I would disagree on all points. I've explained why both SSA and CC, insofar as they won't lead to total skepticism, will favor theism in posts on the anthropic argument. I also think even under humeanism the nological harmony argument works. Fine-tuning, the argument from consciousness, and so on mostly don't debate on any particularly contentious philosophical assumptions.
I agree, of course, that the evidence for an old earth is better than the evidence for theism. I'm pointing to broad structural similarities, not saying the cases are exactly the same.
Lastly, even if they do all hinge on contentious philosophical assumptions, there's still a cumulative case. Suppose to simplify that the psychophysical harmony argument shows that if dualism is true then theism must be, nomological harmony shows that if non-humeanism is true theism must be, and the anthropic argument shows that if SIA is true then theism must be. Well, theism will be compatible with any range of these views, while atheism will require a highly specific set of views to be true: humeanism, ~SIA, physicalism. Thus, even if you're right that the arguments all depend on contentious philosophical views--which I think is generally false--there can still be a cumulative case!
>I've explained why both SSA and CC, insofar as they won't lead to total skepticism, will favor theism in posts on the anthropic argument.
I actually somehow don't remember your argument for SSA leading to theism. I'll have to go back and look for it - it sounds interesting. But you're leaving out an important alternative: that all current anthropic principles are fundamentally defective and we shouldn't use any of them.
>Thus, even if you're right that the arguments all depend on contentious philosophical views--which I think is generally false--there can still be a cumulative case!
I agree there's important value to cumulative cases in philosophy, so didn't mean to come off as dismissive. My only point was to distinguish the strength of this one relative to more paradigmatic ones in the sciences or wherever.
Regardless, a point I briefly mentioned but didn't stress is that many of the arguments you mention implicitly or explicitly hinge on axiological stalking horse objections not going through. I think they do go through, and so you don't need to reject a wide variety of philosophical theses to get around most of your cumulative case - you can cut the snake off at the head, as it were. Similarly, rejecting moral or axiological realism or the relative simplicity of theism is going to stymie most of your cumulative case. I think fine-tuning is perhaps the only one that survives.
//But you're leaving out an important alternative: that all current anthropic principles are fundamentally defective and we shouldn't use any of them.//
I actually have a paper I'm writing about why this can't be right.
//many of the arguments you mention implicitly or explicitly hinge on axiological stalking horse objections not going through. //
You could also make a stocking horse objection against the evidence for evolution! You just conjoin theism with the hypothesis that God wants to add high levels of radioactive decay, create nested hierarchies, and so on. Having to add a stocking horse hypothesis to your explanation to explain the data is always a cost if the phenomenon flows naturally from the other theory.
>You just conjoin theism with the hypothesis that God wants to add high levels of radioactive decay, create nested hierarchies, and so on.
But that would massively decrease the prior of the hypothesis relative to bare theism. Whereas axiological explanations of this or that phenomenon don't seem to have that feature, at least by very much. It's not really God that's doing much explanatory work in these theistic arguments, it's the axiological facts about what it would be good for him to create, and these facts are totally independent of theism; that God acts as a causal intermediary between the good and the created is a detail that's being tacked on.
Instead of "X is good -> God wants X because he wants good things -> God creates X via his omnipotence -> X obtains" as an explanation of X, just go "X is good -> X obtains." That is, the goodness of some state of affairs *directly* explains why it obtains.
But what's the mechanism for why the goodness of something explains why it obtains?
The goodness of something & it obtaining look otherwise unrelated, if there's not a plausible mechanism. It's like saying Mount Everest is big because apples are red.
It has an extremely low prior unless there's a plausible mechanism.
There is no intermediary mechanism, just like theists think there's no intermediary mechanism by which God comes to know moral truths, and no intermediary mechanism by which God brings about states of affairs he directly wills.
>X is good -> God wants X because he wants good things -> God creates X via his omnipotence -> X obtains
I asked what explains the relation between goodness & obtaining. Compared it to Mount Everest is big because apples are red. You pointed out there's also an explanatory mystery around how God creates things.
But that seems like comparing apples to oranges. Everyone will have some bruteness in their theory at some point.
It's like if someone created a "flat earth stalking horse" that ad hoc explained everything the globe model did & we criticized it because it had arbitrary, low-prior, brute posits. Then they replied "just like general relativity eventually uses brute posits. So I'm in the clear!"
>It's like if someone created a "flat earth stalking horse" that ad hoc explained everything the globe model did & we criticized it because it had arbitrary, low-prior, brute posits. Then they replied "just like general relativity eventually uses brute posits. So I'm in the clear!"
The flat Earth stalking horse that successfully accommodates all the data will be incredibly complex in terms of its brute posits compared to general relativity or the like. The axiological account of psychophysical harmony et al., by contrast, won't be significantly more complex in terms of its brute posits than the theistic one, and in fact may even arguably end up simpler.
It appears to me that what you are proposing here is basically axiarchism. But I think your objection can be circumvented by all classical theists, who say that God is identical to his properties (including goodness itself).
>Many of the things that we can understand—morality, facts about which states of affairs are possible, facts about the relative probability of different states of affairs each of which explain our experiences—by their very nature are not the sorts of things that can move around atoms>
Which doesn't mean they are some other kind of *real* thing . They might be constructs or fictions.
There's no evidence that we are correctly perceiving an objective morality. Even if we all agreed on morality, which we don't, the fact could be explained by morality being a culturally transmitted human construct.
Similarly,maths.
And of course psychophysical harmony is explained but materialism+ evolution.
The year is 2045 and two guys are hammering away, building a multi-trillion dollar super collider in mankind's desperate attempt to reignite physics by finding some ultra-elusive particles predicted by wildly abstruse mathematics. One of them turns to the other:
"You know, it's a complete miracle how understandable the world is. It's so accessibly scrutinized that it kind of proves god's existence, actually."
These arguments are only in favor of deism, not in favor of any of the Abrahamic religions that actual theists in the real world end up believing. The arguments to get from deism to Abrahamic gods are much weaker than the arguments for deism.
only a vanishingly small fraction of humanity is capable of advanced mathematics needed to discover the universe, and they're descended from moneylenders or artisans or farmers who needed mathematics for their occupations. It is not so surprising that some of us can do physics.
"fine tuning" for life is intractable to ascertain without carbon-chauvinism, water-chauvinism, or baryonic-matter-chauvinism. All you need is a self-replicator with a very low but nonzero error rate. Seems that could turn up in lots of ways that we can't even conceive of under different laws of physics. We also don't know which constants are not actually independent of each other and rather emerge from an as yet undiscovered GUT, so that there is less stuff to fine tune.
Fine-tuning does not at all require carbon-chauvinism. Take the cosmological constant, for instance. If it were different, it's not like you'd just get other chemicals. Instead, you would get no two particles ever interacting with each other--they'd all either shoot out into space immediately or collapse on each other. This wouldn't get life!
The argument assumes that a comprehensible universe must either be the product of divine intent or a random accident under naturalism. But this binary ignores the role of selection effects and the limits of current physics. In a multiverse framework, only stable, structured universes can produce intelligence capable of asking these questions. That’s anthropic selection, not divine design—chaotic universes wouldn’t generate minds capable of perceiving them in the first place.
The bigger issue is the assumption that current physics is anywhere near complete. History is filled with examples of mysterious phenomena—lightning, disease, celestial motion—once attributed to gods, later explained through deeper science. The same mistake is happening now. The UAP issue is a modern extension of this pattern. If these objects represent advanced nonhuman technology, then they suggest access to a deeper layer of physical reality that remains unmapped. What seems miraculous today often turns out to be science not yet understood.
Beyond this, the entire debate is framed as theism vs. materialist naturalism, ignoring non-theistic religious and philosophical worldviews. It assumes either a personal God who designed the cosmos for human discovery or a blind, indifferent universe, leaving no space for traditions that see order and intelligence as emergent rather than imposed. Many Eastern, Indigenous, and esoteric traditions reject this false choice, recognizing reality as structured yet dynamic, lawful yet not necessarily designed by a creator figure. Process philosophy, panpsychism, and certain non-dual traditions already offer models for an ordered reality without defaulting to theism. That these perspectives are largely absent from Western discourse speaks more to cultural bias than the nature of the universe itself.
Both sides of this debate are arguing against the weakest parts of the other’s position while ignoring the flaws in their own logic and the vast middle ground between them. Theists assume that order requires a divine architect, while naturalists assume that lacking a creator means reality should be chaotic and meaningless. But the universe isn’t constrained by human categories—it simply is, and its full structure remains unknown. This is as much a conversation about culture and framing as it is about science and philosophy.
I of course agree that evolution created our cognitive faculties and that this was not random. But still, it's surprising given evolution that we'd develop the capacities to discover the universe.
What if the Creator were an infinite work in progress? Then, the notion that necessitates the singularity of consciousness/awareness to be inherently "benevolent", "perfect" and "harmonious" at its core would dissipate, and perhaps, it'd be replaced by one that allows for intermittent chaos to be perfectly acceptable, and even desirable. I suspect that even "deities" can grow and evolve.
"On atheism, even if the universe is in principle discoverable, there’s no reason at all to expect we’d be able to discover it. If we are bipedal apes that evolved purely by chance (to be clear, I think we are bipedal apes that evolved—just that God set things in motion so that we’d develop certain capacities), there’s no reason to expect us to be the sorts of creatures that could figure out the universe. It’s surprising that the capacities that enabled us to survive and reproduce on the savanna also allow us to carry out the highly advanced mathematics needed to discover the universe."
This doesn't really make any sense. Abstract reasoning seems to benefit both the ability of bipedal apes to make fire and count fish as much as it does solve theorems.
It can't be that advanced reasoning capacities evolution is inevitable--there were no such things for the first ~1 billion years of animal life. While evolution can explain why we can do this kind of advanced reasoning, it's perfectly compatible with us never evolving such capacities--theism, in contrast, actively predicts such capacities.
Ok, so evolution is compatible with a world where there is no advanced reasoning, so what? We clearly don't live in that world and the fact that religion predicts the world that we live in is not surprising. I mean would you expect religion to predict some other world? Evolution actually explains how we got here from a biological perspective. Religion just points out the obvious. It's pretty easy to predict the score of a soccer match after it has ended, just as religion makes up a story to support our current state.
A theory can gain purchase by explaining things we already know about. We already know about people's writings about Caesar, but the theory that Caesar existed should be believed on that basis.
While you can give an evolutionary explanation of the development of our faculties--indeed, this is the explanation I believe in--the mere naturalistic process gives no reason to expect such processes to develope. Analogously, evolution doesn't specifically predict octopi to develop; they might develop for all we know, but it's not specifically expected. In contrast, theism makes such things likelier.
If you understand evolution well enough and the environmental conditions in which octopi developped, you would indeed predict that something like them would evolve. Evolution limits our expectation about the world, while your version of Theism doesn't - it allows you to excuse any observation, be it the existence of octopi or angels, not following the rules of physics. And the power of the theory is in what it forbids, not in what it allows
Theism makes predictions. If the world didn't have conscious agents, that would be a strong mark against theism (of course, then we wouldn't observe that, but this is irrelevant).
It's quite relevant, actually. You can't predict a thing that you already know is true. This is the difference between predicting things and ad hoc reasoning. As you are the type of agent who is unable not to be aware of the fact that conscious life exists, theories that claim that conscious life exists do not limit your expectations beforehand.
But even ad hoc, theism doesn't limit expectation in this regard. You can not rule out the notion of perfect God not creating anything because he is already perfect, and anything else will reduce the average perfection, or creating only a perfectly empty universe, because emptiness is the only thing that God is not, due to his omnipresentness, or creating only unconscious beings because negative utilitarianism happens to be true.
And even if theism did limit expectations in this regard, it would still be much much less limiting of expectation than naturalism does.
I think your stuck on the idea of expectation. Science can indeed set expectations through prediction. But science follows through with a process of experimentation which may or may not verify the prediction. In the end knowledge is not about what you expect but what you find. Theism only makes predictions about our current state from our current state.
I'm not convinced this distinction holds. Theism is also perfectly compatible with us never evolving such capacities, as it happened on Earth for the first few billion years of biology. At most you can argue that theism explains a push in the direction of advanced capabilities. But then so does evolution — no matter how unlikely the path, as long as there is one, it will keep trying combinations and, once past the initial hurdle, if it's evolutionarily beneficial enough, it sticks and explodes.
How that? I don't see anything unlikely or self-contradictory about a God who would not create universes at all, and stay in its own perfect conscious bliss. I'm basically a theist of sorts, but I think this whole project of trying to reason there is a God by second-guessing what it would do is really weak - it's just too easy to look at what is out there and come up with a few epicycles explaining how just precisely that is what God would do, and not something else.
God is perfect. Conscious agents are good things. There's no downside to creating them commensurate with the literally infinite upside. Additionally because so many things are needed for agents, you don't need to think the odds of God making agents are that high--just that the odds of atheism making agents are lower.
I appreciate your explanations, but in this case I don't think this argument is balanced. The way I read it, when it fits the evidence, then God's goodness is evidently legible, and theism naturally predicts this or that. When it doesn't fit the evidence, such as apparent evils or unrealised imaginable goods, then God must be playing 4d chess and is no longer legible. With this kind of latitude you can fit any and all available evidence, which makes the argument toothless.
As I keep saying, I'd rather have some respect for God's transcendence and freedom, and let it out of the philosopher's cages. This is not exactly new, this kind of pattern was already played out in the middle ages. The God you keep arguing for sounds like a nearly mechanical utilitarian goodness-optimizer, a fit product of the computer era's tunnel vision. I much prefer a vision of fecundity and freedom, in the spirit of thinkers like Meister Eckhart.
There are many conscious agents who aren't good, though. Such as criminals, especially of the violent kind (rapists, child predators, murderers, et cetera). Not to mention--from a vegan perspective--animals who prey on other animals. It seems like the downside in creating these specific conscious agents is much greater than the upside in creating them. So, why bother creating them in the first place?
One thing that annoys me is how "rationalists" are extremely irrational when it comes to consciousness. They assume - with no reason to do so - that it must be some sort of scientific process without any evidence or reason why we should be conscious. This also applies to arguments of free will, which is dismissed as an illusion despite having no reason to assume it is outside philosophical theories. They ignore Feynman's warning that if it disagrees with observation it is wrong, and our observations.seem to confirm free will and a unique consciousness.
Both with consciousness and with design. They dismiss these observations as "appearance of consciousness" and "appearance of design". Wouldn't it be convenient for Young Earth Creationists to play the same game? "Appearance of fossil layers"..."appearance of ice cores"..."appearance of tree rings", etc.
The comprehensibility of the universe is rather elitist. Pace Deutsch, humans in general can't understand the whole of physics. Maybe 2000 people out of 8 billion understand string theory.
The universe also isn't very optimized for scientific discovery because--as you imply--only a small percentage of the population is actually capable of making new scientific discoveries. This percentage could have been much larger had the entire human race had an average IQ of 110+, similar to Ashkenazi Jews, but the actual current global IQ is only in the 80s, IIRC. Indeed, it didn't help matters that almost half of global Ashkenazi Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and they were a group that were highly vital for global scientific discoveries. (The killings, exile, and gulagization of intellectuals in Communist countries like Russia didn't help matters either.)
We could, of course, rely on technology (IVF plus IVG plus embryo selection for desirable traits/genes on an extraordinarily massive scale, heavily subsidized for everyone) to aggressively uplift everyone, but this would still be a huge technological breakthrough at human hands, not the result of the traditional process of evolution or something that was divinely created by God.
I believe in god but I think this argument is way off.
If discoverability was an important benchmark than we should be successful in what's important, discovering god.
Modern physics substitutes math for understanding. Most scientist believe in underlying unity yet undiscovered. Once we understand the why, the "fine tuning" will likely disappear. An analogy is when I walk out my front door I find myself out of all the places in the world, specifically "fine tuned" for my convenience, in my front yard.
The underlying unity may itself be an argument for god but it suffers from the problem of unquantifiable odds and is mostly like saying "well how else was the world created".
The key problem of evil is not "why would god..." but rather that it seems to show lack off design where it counts and contrasts with physical design and fine tuning suggesting that spirituality and morality lack a concrete existence.
Looking forward to your spirited defense of evolution. I also love evolutionary thinking, and complex systems and feedback loops in general, and often think that people should be more familiar with their generative power and counter-intuitive properties.
On the other side... to paraphrase the Tao Te King, the God known for its explanatory powers is not the real God.
In your understanding of god, does he care whether we humans believe in him? Are there any consequences -- either in this life or the afterlife -- for believing (or not believing)?
Assume the God of philosophy exists. The nature of God propagates through creation and is perceived in some manner by us. As we refine our knowledge of God we increase the congruence of our world view with "reality" in a way that enhances prediction, well-being and continuity of being. If God exists, it's in your own interest to know Him.
Most of the arguments for God imply a divine will. At a minimum, this will is something like existence, creativity and life in abundance. Definitionally God would want alignment to his will. Alignment seems like it would propagate the divine will and misalignment is definitionally meaningless death.
Basically, if a mysterious entity willed the universe into existence, probably something you want to discover and align yourself with.
I'm pretty sure Matthew is a universalist, so he does not think non-believers are sent to an eternal hell. If one does not believe in God, one is less able to grow in one's relationship with Him.
I like the article in general. My main gripe with it is that it makes the same mistake many people do and formulates the fine-tuning argument as being for the exclusive purpose of life as opposed to the more limited claim of order, structure, and complexity.
Also, I don't know why people don't see the reasonable middle position of Deism. The problem of evil, which seems to be your sole problem with God, is only a question on divine providence.
"If we are bipedal apes that evolved purely by chance (to be clear, I think we are bipedal apes that evolved—just that God set things in motion so that we’d develop certain capacities), there’s no reason to expect us to be the sorts of creatures that could figure out the universe. It’s surprising that the capacities that enabled us to survive and reproduce on the savanna also allow us to carry out the highly advanced mathematics needed to discover the universe."
This was the part of Douthat's piece that made the least sense to me. Why is any divine design necessary for general intelligence to be applicable to both prehistoric challenges and (with many iterations) modern science and mathematics? Why couldn't that just be an emergent property of intelligence?
Take something that no one claims is divinely inspired: a human invention, the wheel. The wheel was devised over 10,000 years ago, initially to help potters shape clay. Does it really seem likely that the same device that was useful for shaping clay would also be useful for moving carts, enabling war chariots, and then thousands of years later being the basis of *virtually all the complex machines and power-generating mechanisms of the Industrial Revolution*? It doesn't seem likely, but it's undoubtedly true, and it's true because humans adapted this useful thing they had for a number of different uses. Why couldn't we have done the same with our brains?
Seems to me that most/all of these arguments are actually extensions of fine-tuning.
You've narrowly defined fine-tuning to be about certain specific physical laws of the universe, but more or less everything you list is some variation on "isn't it remarkable that we and reality are configured in such a way to be doing this investigation".
A sufficiently powerful selection-effect/anthropic argument thus explains all of them. That is, if we are in a type of multiverse where not just the cosmological constant but also certain facts about the nature of consciousness, the structure of our brains, etc are variables, then all of this is explained at once.
I think the strongest case you could make for one of your arguments being outside this description is "the universe could simply have been too complex for us to understand". But this has its own selection effect -- of course the explanations we have so far are ones we can understand, because... we came up with them. We have found the keys under the street lamp. If there are rules beyond our ken, out in the dark, how would we know?
Anyway, imo you can object to the idea that a multiverse is more plausible than a God, but both can explain all of this convergently.
A multiverse can't explain all of them. How does a multiverse explain why there's consciousness as a result of physical states, psychophysical harmony, or the presence of a number of people too large for standard multiverses.
Regarding discoverability, as Collins notes, even if the parameters were non-discoverable, we'd still know about them, but just not regard them as being in an optimal range for discoverabrility. Given that they're fixed to an extremely tiny level needed for discovery, that's evidence for God. What's puzzling isn't just that we know a few facts, but that we can broadly work out what's going on in the universe.
Re consciousness -- some configurations of reality allow for consciousness to arise, others do not. If you allow for the possibility that the variables determining that configuration are among those which differ across multiverse pockets, then the multiverse + selection effect has sufficient explanatory power.
You can certainly argue that this type of multiverse is unlikely, but you could also make arguments against the likelihood of this type of God (eg it seems strange that a God would create consciousnesses who suffer). I don't think it's obvious that this should count towards the God side of the convergence ledger.
Re psychophysical harmony -- if consciousness is to be evolutionarily adaptive, it must be harmonious with the physical world. If we are already accepting the premise that the sort of unified consciousness we experience arose from evolutionary processes, then harmony follows and adds little new information.
Note that there are plenty of glitches in psychophysical harmony that we would expect to be tolerated by an evolutionary process but not a benevolent designed one. For example, cluster headaches.
Re the presence of a number of people too large for standard multiverses -- you're simply asserting that a "vanilla" multiverse has limited cardinality but a multiverse created by God does not. If it is possible for God to create a higher-cardinality infinite multiverse large enough to host a higher-cardinality infinity of people, why shouldn't it be possible for that multiverse to simply exist?
Re the discoverability argument -- it begs the question. You have a list of fundamental aspects of reality that you yourself think we have not yet been able to understand (eg how consciousness arises from physical states), you assert an explanation for those things (ie God), then say that our ability to understand reality is evidence for that same explanation.
I don't know, it seems like most (maybe not all) of the converging lines of evidence are based on a set of extraordinarily contentious metaphysical assumptions: Humeanism is false, moral and axiological realism are true, SIA isn't broken, axiological stalking horses can't work, God can really be counted as simple and that divine explanations aren't merely shifting all the improbability from the likelihood to the prior, etc. I feel a lot more comfortable rejecting the disjunction of all these than the disjunction of all molecular dating methods that geologists use, where there's essentially 100% consensus and it really would take a miracle for every single one of them to be inaccurate.
I would disagree on all points. I've explained why both SSA and CC, insofar as they won't lead to total skepticism, will favor theism in posts on the anthropic argument. I also think even under humeanism the nological harmony argument works. Fine-tuning, the argument from consciousness, and so on mostly don't debate on any particularly contentious philosophical assumptions.
I agree, of course, that the evidence for an old earth is better than the evidence for theism. I'm pointing to broad structural similarities, not saying the cases are exactly the same.
Lastly, even if they do all hinge on contentious philosophical assumptions, there's still a cumulative case. Suppose to simplify that the psychophysical harmony argument shows that if dualism is true then theism must be, nomological harmony shows that if non-humeanism is true theism must be, and the anthropic argument shows that if SIA is true then theism must be. Well, theism will be compatible with any range of these views, while atheism will require a highly specific set of views to be true: humeanism, ~SIA, physicalism. Thus, even if you're right that the arguments all depend on contentious philosophical views--which I think is generally false--there can still be a cumulative case!
>I've explained why both SSA and CC, insofar as they won't lead to total skepticism, will favor theism in posts on the anthropic argument.
I actually somehow don't remember your argument for SSA leading to theism. I'll have to go back and look for it - it sounds interesting. But you're leaving out an important alternative: that all current anthropic principles are fundamentally defective and we shouldn't use any of them.
>Thus, even if you're right that the arguments all depend on contentious philosophical views--which I think is generally false--there can still be a cumulative case!
I agree there's important value to cumulative cases in philosophy, so didn't mean to come off as dismissive. My only point was to distinguish the strength of this one relative to more paradigmatic ones in the sciences or wherever.
Regardless, a point I briefly mentioned but didn't stress is that many of the arguments you mention implicitly or explicitly hinge on axiological stalking horse objections not going through. I think they do go through, and so you don't need to reject a wide variety of philosophical theses to get around most of your cumulative case - you can cut the snake off at the head, as it were. Similarly, rejecting moral or axiological realism or the relative simplicity of theism is going to stymie most of your cumulative case. I think fine-tuning is perhaps the only one that survives.
//But you're leaving out an important alternative: that all current anthropic principles are fundamentally defective and we shouldn't use any of them.//
I actually have a paper I'm writing about why this can't be right.
//many of the arguments you mention implicitly or explicitly hinge on axiological stalking horse objections not going through. //
You could also make a stocking horse objection against the evidence for evolution! You just conjoin theism with the hypothesis that God wants to add high levels of radioactive decay, create nested hierarchies, and so on. Having to add a stocking horse hypothesis to your explanation to explain the data is always a cost if the phenomenon flows naturally from the other theory.
>You just conjoin theism with the hypothesis that God wants to add high levels of radioactive decay, create nested hierarchies, and so on.
But that would massively decrease the prior of the hypothesis relative to bare theism. Whereas axiological explanations of this or that phenomenon don't seem to have that feature, at least by very much. It's not really God that's doing much explanatory work in these theistic arguments, it's the axiological facts about what it would be good for him to create, and these facts are totally independent of theism; that God acts as a causal intermediary between the good and the created is a detail that's being tacked on.
What is an "axiological stalking horse"? Or what is an example?
Instead of "X is good -> God wants X because he wants good things -> God creates X via his omnipotence -> X obtains" as an explanation of X, just go "X is good -> X obtains." That is, the goodness of some state of affairs *directly* explains why it obtains.
But what's the mechanism for why the goodness of something explains why it obtains?
The goodness of something & it obtaining look otherwise unrelated, if there's not a plausible mechanism. It's like saying Mount Everest is big because apples are red.
It has an extremely low prior unless there's a plausible mechanism.
There is no intermediary mechanism, just like theists think there's no intermediary mechanism by which God comes to know moral truths, and no intermediary mechanism by which God brings about states of affairs he directly wills.
So we have two theories:
>X is good -> X obtains.
>X is good -> God wants X because he wants good things -> God creates X via his omnipotence -> X obtains
I asked what explains the relation between goodness & obtaining. Compared it to Mount Everest is big because apples are red. You pointed out there's also an explanatory mystery around how God creates things.
But that seems like comparing apples to oranges. Everyone will have some bruteness in their theory at some point.
It's like if someone created a "flat earth stalking horse" that ad hoc explained everything the globe model did & we criticized it because it had arbitrary, low-prior, brute posits. Then they replied "just like general relativity eventually uses brute posits. So I'm in the clear!"
>It's like if someone created a "flat earth stalking horse" that ad hoc explained everything the globe model did & we criticized it because it had arbitrary, low-prior, brute posits. Then they replied "just like general relativity eventually uses brute posits. So I'm in the clear!"
The flat Earth stalking horse that successfully accommodates all the data will be incredibly complex in terms of its brute posits compared to general relativity or the like. The axiological account of psychophysical harmony et al., by contrast, won't be significantly more complex in terms of its brute posits than the theistic one, and in fact may even arguably end up simpler.
It appears to me that what you are proposing here is basically axiarchism. But I think your objection can be circumvented by all classical theists, who say that God is identical to his properties (including goodness itself).
>Many of the things that we can understand—morality, facts about which states of affairs are possible, facts about the relative probability of different states of affairs each of which explain our experiences—by their very nature are not the sorts of things that can move around atoms>
Which doesn't mean they are some other kind of *real* thing . They might be constructs or fictions.
There's no evidence that we are correctly perceiving an objective morality. Even if we all agreed on morality, which we don't, the fact could be explained by morality being a culturally transmitted human construct.
Similarly,maths.
And of course psychophysical harmony is explained but materialism+ evolution.
> And of course psychophysical harmony is explained but materialism+ evolution.
But or by?
"I’m not super sure about this argument, as the physics mostly went over my head"
Soulful Jewish rationalist wordcels and getting Euler'd by math and physics arguments, name a better combo. You truly are the new Scott Alexander.
The year is 2045 and two guys are hammering away, building a multi-trillion dollar super collider in mankind's desperate attempt to reignite physics by finding some ultra-elusive particles predicted by wildly abstruse mathematics. One of them turns to the other:
"You know, it's a complete miracle how understandable the world is. It's so accessibly scrutinized that it kind of proves god's existence, actually."
These arguments are only in favor of deism, not in favor of any of the Abrahamic religions that actual theists in the real world end up believing. The arguments to get from deism to Abrahamic gods are much weaker than the arguments for deism.
only a vanishingly small fraction of humanity is capable of advanced mathematics needed to discover the universe, and they're descended from moneylenders or artisans or farmers who needed mathematics for their occupations. It is not so surprising that some of us can do physics.
"fine tuning" for life is intractable to ascertain without carbon-chauvinism, water-chauvinism, or baryonic-matter-chauvinism. All you need is a self-replicator with a very low but nonzero error rate. Seems that could turn up in lots of ways that we can't even conceive of under different laws of physics. We also don't know which constants are not actually independent of each other and rather emerge from an as yet undiscovered GUT, so that there is less stuff to fine tune.
I'm not religious but nor am I a deist. I think the most likely view is one on which God cares about us for reasons I lay out here https://benthams.substack.com/p/god-best-explains-the-world
Fine-tuning does not at all require carbon-chauvinism. Take the cosmological constant, for instance. If it were different, it's not like you'd just get other chemicals. Instead, you would get no two particles ever interacting with each other--they'd all either shoot out into space immediately or collapse on each other. This wouldn't get life!
> hese arguments are only in favor of deism, not in favor of any of the Abrahamic religions that actual theists in the real world end up believing.
There's lots of space for exploration and possible belief beyond the Abrahamics, thank God.
The argument assumes that a comprehensible universe must either be the product of divine intent or a random accident under naturalism. But this binary ignores the role of selection effects and the limits of current physics. In a multiverse framework, only stable, structured universes can produce intelligence capable of asking these questions. That’s anthropic selection, not divine design—chaotic universes wouldn’t generate minds capable of perceiving them in the first place.
The bigger issue is the assumption that current physics is anywhere near complete. History is filled with examples of mysterious phenomena—lightning, disease, celestial motion—once attributed to gods, later explained through deeper science. The same mistake is happening now. The UAP issue is a modern extension of this pattern. If these objects represent advanced nonhuman technology, then they suggest access to a deeper layer of physical reality that remains unmapped. What seems miraculous today often turns out to be science not yet understood.
Beyond this, the entire debate is framed as theism vs. materialist naturalism, ignoring non-theistic religious and philosophical worldviews. It assumes either a personal God who designed the cosmos for human discovery or a blind, indifferent universe, leaving no space for traditions that see order and intelligence as emergent rather than imposed. Many Eastern, Indigenous, and esoteric traditions reject this false choice, recognizing reality as structured yet dynamic, lawful yet not necessarily designed by a creator figure. Process philosophy, panpsychism, and certain non-dual traditions already offer models for an ordered reality without defaulting to theism. That these perspectives are largely absent from Western discourse speaks more to cultural bias than the nature of the universe itself.
Both sides of this debate are arguing against the weakest parts of the other’s position while ignoring the flaws in their own logic and the vast middle ground between them. Theists assume that order requires a divine architect, while naturalists assume that lacking a creator means reality should be chaotic and meaningless. But the universe isn’t constrained by human categories—it simply is, and its full structure remains unknown. This is as much a conversation about culture and framing as it is about science and philosophy.
I of course agree that evolution created our cognitive faculties and that this was not random. But still, it's surprising given evolution that we'd develop the capacities to discover the universe.
What if the Creator were an infinite work in progress? Then, the notion that necessitates the singularity of consciousness/awareness to be inherently "benevolent", "perfect" and "harmonious" at its core would dissipate, and perhaps, it'd be replaced by one that allows for intermittent chaos to be perfectly acceptable, and even desirable. I suspect that even "deities" can grow and evolve.
"On atheism, even if the universe is in principle discoverable, there’s no reason at all to expect we’d be able to discover it. If we are bipedal apes that evolved purely by chance (to be clear, I think we are bipedal apes that evolved—just that God set things in motion so that we’d develop certain capacities), there’s no reason to expect us to be the sorts of creatures that could figure out the universe. It’s surprising that the capacities that enabled us to survive and reproduce on the savanna also allow us to carry out the highly advanced mathematics needed to discover the universe."
This doesn't really make any sense. Abstract reasoning seems to benefit both the ability of bipedal apes to make fire and count fish as much as it does solve theorems.
It can't be that advanced reasoning capacities evolution is inevitable--there were no such things for the first ~1 billion years of animal life. While evolution can explain why we can do this kind of advanced reasoning, it's perfectly compatible with us never evolving such capacities--theism, in contrast, actively predicts such capacities.
Ok, so evolution is compatible with a world where there is no advanced reasoning, so what? We clearly don't live in that world and the fact that religion predicts the world that we live in is not surprising. I mean would you expect religion to predict some other world? Evolution actually explains how we got here from a biological perspective. Religion just points out the obvious. It's pretty easy to predict the score of a soccer match after it has ended, just as religion makes up a story to support our current state.
A theory can gain purchase by explaining things we already know about. We already know about people's writings about Caesar, but the theory that Caesar existed should be believed on that basis.
I didn't say it was inevitable, just predictable.
While you can give an evolutionary explanation of the development of our faculties--indeed, this is the explanation I believe in--the mere naturalistic process gives no reason to expect such processes to develope. Analogously, evolution doesn't specifically predict octopi to develop; they might develop for all we know, but it's not specifically expected. In contrast, theism makes such things likelier.
Why expect anything? It just happened. It might have happened before, in the Jurassic period.
The way Bayesian reasoning works is that you favor hypotheses according to which the things in the world are less unexpected.
"God wants us to understand the world" is a a supplementary hypothesis...certainly not an entailment if a simple God.
What this showcases is that there is great drawbacks to relying so much on Bayesian reasoning.
The opposite, actually.
If you understand evolution well enough and the environmental conditions in which octopi developped, you would indeed predict that something like them would evolve. Evolution limits our expectation about the world, while your version of Theism doesn't - it allows you to excuse any observation, be it the existence of octopi or angels, not following the rules of physics. And the power of the theory is in what it forbids, not in what it allows
Theism makes predictions. If the world didn't have conscious agents, that would be a strong mark against theism (of course, then we wouldn't observe that, but this is irrelevant).
It's quite relevant, actually. You can't predict a thing that you already know is true. This is the difference between predicting things and ad hoc reasoning. As you are the type of agent who is unable not to be aware of the fact that conscious life exists, theories that claim that conscious life exists do not limit your expectations beforehand.
But even ad hoc, theism doesn't limit expectation in this regard. You can not rule out the notion of perfect God not creating anything because he is already perfect, and anything else will reduce the average perfection, or creating only a perfectly empty universe, because emptiness is the only thing that God is not, due to his omnipresentness, or creating only unconscious beings because negative utilitarianism happens to be true.
And even if theism did limit expectations in this regard, it would still be much much less limiting of expectation than naturalism does.
I think your stuck on the idea of expectation. Science can indeed set expectations through prediction. But science follows through with a process of experimentation which may or may not verify the prediction. In the end knowledge is not about what you expect but what you find. Theism only makes predictions about our current state from our current state.
I'm not convinced this distinction holds. Theism is also perfectly compatible with us never evolving such capacities, as it happened on Earth for the first few billion years of biology. At most you can argue that theism explains a push in the direction of advanced capabilities. But then so does evolution — no matter how unlikely the path, as long as there is one, it will keep trying combinations and, once past the initial hurdle, if it's evolutionarily beneficial enough, it sticks and explodes.
Theism naturally predicts that there'd be some agents that would eventually arise.
How that? I don't see anything unlikely or self-contradictory about a God who would not create universes at all, and stay in its own perfect conscious bliss. I'm basically a theist of sorts, but I think this whole project of trying to reason there is a God by second-guessing what it would do is really weak - it's just too easy to look at what is out there and come up with a few epicycles explaining how just precisely that is what God would do, and not something else.
God is perfect. Conscious agents are good things. There's no downside to creating them commensurate with the literally infinite upside. Additionally because so many things are needed for agents, you don't need to think the odds of God making agents are that high--just that the odds of atheism making agents are lower.
I appreciate your explanations, but in this case I don't think this argument is balanced. The way I read it, when it fits the evidence, then God's goodness is evidently legible, and theism naturally predicts this or that. When it doesn't fit the evidence, such as apparent evils or unrealised imaginable goods, then God must be playing 4d chess and is no longer legible. With this kind of latitude you can fit any and all available evidence, which makes the argument toothless.
As I keep saying, I'd rather have some respect for God's transcendence and freedom, and let it out of the philosopher's cages. This is not exactly new, this kind of pattern was already played out in the middle ages. The God you keep arguing for sounds like a nearly mechanical utilitarian goodness-optimizer, a fit product of the computer era's tunnel vision. I much prefer a vision of fecundity and freedom, in the spirit of thinkers like Meister Eckhart.
But this is your forum so I'll shut up now :)
There are many conscious agents who aren't good, though. Such as criminals, especially of the violent kind (rapists, child predators, murderers, et cetera). Not to mention--from a vegan perspective--animals who prey on other animals. It seems like the downside in creating these specific conscious agents is much greater than the upside in creating them. So, why bother creating them in the first place?
Here's a non-paywalled version of Douthat's article: https://archive.ph/klqrg
(By the way, how the hell do you pronounce "Douthat"?)
One thing that annoys me is how "rationalists" are extremely irrational when it comes to consciousness. They assume - with no reason to do so - that it must be some sort of scientific process without any evidence or reason why we should be conscious. This also applies to arguments of free will, which is dismissed as an illusion despite having no reason to assume it is outside philosophical theories. They ignore Feynman's warning that if it disagrees with observation it is wrong, and our observations.seem to confirm free will and a unique consciousness.
Both with consciousness and with design. They dismiss these observations as "appearance of consciousness" and "appearance of design". Wouldn't it be convenient for Young Earth Creationists to play the same game? "Appearance of fossil layers"..."appearance of ice cores"..."appearance of tree rings", etc.
What do you think about "unnecessary" beauty. Is there a good "just so" story for why we find the colors of autumn leaves beautiful?
The comprehensibility of the universe is rather elitist. Pace Deutsch, humans in general can't understand the whole of physics. Maybe 2000 people out of 8 billion understand string theory.
The universe also isn't very optimized for scientific discovery because--as you imply--only a small percentage of the population is actually capable of making new scientific discoveries. This percentage could have been much larger had the entire human race had an average IQ of 110+, similar to Ashkenazi Jews, but the actual current global IQ is only in the 80s, IIRC. Indeed, it didn't help matters that almost half of global Ashkenazi Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and they were a group that were highly vital for global scientific discoveries. (The killings, exile, and gulagization of intellectuals in Communist countries like Russia didn't help matters either.)
We could, of course, rely on technology (IVF plus IVG plus embryo selection for desirable traits/genes on an extraordinarily massive scale, heavily subsidized for everyone) to aggressively uplift everyone, but this would still be a huge technological breakthrough at human hands, not the result of the traditional process of evolution or something that was divinely created by God.
I'm pretty sure the average IQ is 100.
That's in the US. I'm talking about *globally*.
The global.average is 100. US is slightly below.
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/world-iq-82/
Nonsense. The average can't be below the average, ie 100.
I believe in god but I think this argument is way off.
If discoverability was an important benchmark than we should be successful in what's important, discovering god.
Modern physics substitutes math for understanding. Most scientist believe in underlying unity yet undiscovered. Once we understand the why, the "fine tuning" will likely disappear. An analogy is when I walk out my front door I find myself out of all the places in the world, specifically "fine tuned" for my convenience, in my front yard.
The underlying unity may itself be an argument for god but it suffers from the problem of unquantifiable odds and is mostly like saying "well how else was the world created".
The key problem of evil is not "why would god..." but rather that it seems to show lack off design where it counts and contrasts with physical design and fine tuning suggesting that spirituality and morality lack a concrete existence.
Looking forward to your spirited defense of evolution. I also love evolutionary thinking, and complex systems and feedback loops in general, and often think that people should be more familiar with their generative power and counter-intuitive properties.
On the other side... to paraphrase the Tao Te King, the God known for its explanatory powers is not the real God.
In your understanding of god, does he care whether we humans believe in him? Are there any consequences -- either in this life or the afterlife -- for believing (or not believing)?
Assume the God of philosophy exists. The nature of God propagates through creation and is perceived in some manner by us. As we refine our knowledge of God we increase the congruence of our world view with "reality" in a way that enhances prediction, well-being and continuity of being. If God exists, it's in your own interest to know Him.
Most of the arguments for God imply a divine will. At a minimum, this will is something like existence, creativity and life in abundance. Definitionally God would want alignment to his will. Alignment seems like it would propagate the divine will and misalignment is definitionally meaningless death.
Basically, if a mysterious entity willed the universe into existence, probably something you want to discover and align yourself with.
I'm pretty sure Matthew is a universalist, so he does not think non-believers are sent to an eternal hell. If one does not believe in God, one is less able to grow in one's relationship with Him.
I like the article in general. My main gripe with it is that it makes the same mistake many people do and formulates the fine-tuning argument as being for the exclusive purpose of life as opposed to the more limited claim of order, structure, and complexity.
Also, I don't know why people don't see the reasonable middle position of Deism. The problem of evil, which seems to be your sole problem with God, is only a question on divine providence.
"If we are bipedal apes that evolved purely by chance (to be clear, I think we are bipedal apes that evolved—just that God set things in motion so that we’d develop certain capacities), there’s no reason to expect us to be the sorts of creatures that could figure out the universe. It’s surprising that the capacities that enabled us to survive and reproduce on the savanna also allow us to carry out the highly advanced mathematics needed to discover the universe."
This was the part of Douthat's piece that made the least sense to me. Why is any divine design necessary for general intelligence to be applicable to both prehistoric challenges and (with many iterations) modern science and mathematics? Why couldn't that just be an emergent property of intelligence?
Take something that no one claims is divinely inspired: a human invention, the wheel. The wheel was devised over 10,000 years ago, initially to help potters shape clay. Does it really seem likely that the same device that was useful for shaping clay would also be useful for moving carts, enabling war chariots, and then thousands of years later being the basis of *virtually all the complex machines and power-generating mechanisms of the Industrial Revolution*? It doesn't seem likely, but it's undoubtedly true, and it's true because humans adapted this useful thing they had for a number of different uses. Why couldn't we have done the same with our brains?