Oct 22, 2023·edited Oct 22, 2023Liked by Bentham's Bulldog
Great post! Thanks for sharing your thoughts about arguments for theism. To be perfectly honest, a lot of the philosophical stuff is over my head. But since you mentioned Francis Collins as a theist and brilliant mind, I thought you might be interested in hearing his story of how he became a theist. On YouTube, look up the Alpha film series, episode 1, "Is there more to life than this?". Starting at 10:15, Francis Collins shares his story.
>>>For one to write the laws that fully describe the universe, they would have to make explicit reference to consciousness, unlike, for example, chairs. Chairs fall out of facts about atoms—consciousness does not.<<<
Wow, this seems like the best, most straightforward and concise explanation of what makes something a "natural kind" that I've ever come across!
Or am I confused about what a "natural kind" is supposed to be? 🤔
"One view that is somewhat plausible is that simplicity depends on the length of a message required to mathematically describe some event. On this, theism doesn’t do that well."
Idk. I guess theism is just the theory that:
∃xP(x)
where P(x) = x is a perfect being.
And that's awfully short! (It's true that God will have other properties which are not logically entailed by that, e.g., believing that my cats exist and have such-and-such number of hairs. But God's perfection will ultimately explain those properties--why it that my cats exist, and God knows that they do. And what matters is the simplicity of your explanatorily fundamental posits.)
One worry for any message-length accounts of simplicity is that there needs to be some privileged way of deciding what language you're allowed to use--e.g., if I am allowed to introduce some extremely gerrymandered predicate, flying spaghetti monsteriness, which includes all the properties of the flying spaghetti monster, then I can simply describe the FSM as well. I guess someone could argue that perfection is not sufficiently natural to be appropriately used, or something. But probably the absolute worst case scenario for theism here is that we have to introduce separate predicates for omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence, which still gets you a really simple theory, as far as accounts of fundamental reality go.
As a newly formed not-an-atheist (not sure about deism vs pantheism vs traditional theism quite yet), I think the argument from morality is the best argument out there for belief in some kind of a higher power. If you accept that we can, by our intuitions, understand morals to be inherent, they need a source, in the same way that the source of physical forces is at some level subatomic particles. Being a source of morality is an important characteristic of God in at least some religious traditions. I'm sure it needs to be complicated more to hold up philosophically, especially the source of morality to god step, but it's very intuitive for a layman like me. It does have the issue that it doesn't point to a lot of traditional theist characteristics, but it does, by presenting a certain view of God as aligned with human morals, resolve at least some denominational concerns.
The arguments you've presented here are all for a "generic" theism i.e. one that is not associated with any particular religion. It would obviously be quite a leap to conclude anything about the truth of, say, Noah's Ark or the miracles of Jesus from anything you've said here.
And yet, whenever I hear someone advocate for theism, they are pretty much always coming at it from the perspective of a particular religious tradition. But maybe I just haven't listened to the right people. I'm curious, do any of the brilliant theist thinkers you referenced here have the generic theist view i.e. "I believe in God but don't believe / not sure about which, if any, particular religion is true"? And if not, I wonder why that is?
The fact that the speed of light is the arbitrary seeming 186000 miles a second...isn't really arbitrary...it's the outcome of measuring it in arbitrary units. In natural units,it's 1.
Great post! Thanks for sharing your thoughts about arguments for theism. To be perfectly honest, a lot of the philosophical stuff is over my head. But since you mentioned Francis Collins as a theist and brilliant mind, I thought you might be interested in hearing his story of how he became a theist. On YouTube, look up the Alpha film series, episode 1, "Is there more to life than this?". Starting at 10:15, Francis Collins shares his story.
>>>For one to write the laws that fully describe the universe, they would have to make explicit reference to consciousness, unlike, for example, chairs. Chairs fall out of facts about atoms—consciousness does not.<<<
Wow, this seems like the best, most straightforward and concise explanation of what makes something a "natural kind" that I've ever come across!
Or am I confused about what a "natural kind" is supposed to be? 🤔
"One view that is somewhat plausible is that simplicity depends on the length of a message required to mathematically describe some event. On this, theism doesn’t do that well."
Idk. I guess theism is just the theory that:
∃xP(x)
where P(x) = x is a perfect being.
And that's awfully short! (It's true that God will have other properties which are not logically entailed by that, e.g., believing that my cats exist and have such-and-such number of hairs. But God's perfection will ultimately explain those properties--why it that my cats exist, and God knows that they do. And what matters is the simplicity of your explanatorily fundamental posits.)
One worry for any message-length accounts of simplicity is that there needs to be some privileged way of deciding what language you're allowed to use--e.g., if I am allowed to introduce some extremely gerrymandered predicate, flying spaghetti monsteriness, which includes all the properties of the flying spaghetti monster, then I can simply describe the FSM as well. I guess someone could argue that perfection is not sufficiently natural to be appropriately used, or something. But probably the absolute worst case scenario for theism here is that we have to introduce separate predicates for omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence, which still gets you a really simple theory, as far as accounts of fundamental reality go.
As a newly formed not-an-atheist (not sure about deism vs pantheism vs traditional theism quite yet), I think the argument from morality is the best argument out there for belief in some kind of a higher power. If you accept that we can, by our intuitions, understand morals to be inherent, they need a source, in the same way that the source of physical forces is at some level subatomic particles. Being a source of morality is an important characteristic of God in at least some religious traditions. I'm sure it needs to be complicated more to hold up philosophically, especially the source of morality to god step, but it's very intuitive for a layman like me. It does have the issue that it doesn't point to a lot of traditional theist characteristics, but it does, by presenting a certain view of God as aligned with human morals, resolve at least some denominational concerns.
The arguments you've presented here are all for a "generic" theism i.e. one that is not associated with any particular religion. It would obviously be quite a leap to conclude anything about the truth of, say, Noah's Ark or the miracles of Jesus from anything you've said here.
And yet, whenever I hear someone advocate for theism, they are pretty much always coming at it from the perspective of a particular religious tradition. But maybe I just haven't listened to the right people. I'm curious, do any of the brilliant theist thinkers you referenced here have the generic theist view i.e. "I believe in God but don't believe / not sure about which, if any, particular religion is true"? And if not, I wonder why that is?
The fact that the speed of light is the arbitrary seeming 186000 miles a second...isn't really arbitrary...it's the outcome of measuring it in arbitrary units. In natural units,it's 1.