The main problem with this piece is that it misrepresents what naturalism and atheism are, and therefore misevaluates their probabilities are.
Neither atheism nor naturalism are in and of themselves committed to any particular thesis about the origin of the universe or any of its properties except, respectively ‘Whatever it was, it wasn’t divine’ and ‘whatever it was, it wasn’t magic or spirit’. Neither offers an explanation of the universe.
Now obviously it is better to have a true explanation than no explanation. But it is better to have no explanation than a bad one. Saying that the theist explanation of the universe’s origins is better than the atheist one strawmans the atheist because the atheist doesn’t have or need one: the atheist is committed only to the thesis that the theist explanation is incorrect.
In other words, the relevant question is really just: given all our relevant evidence, is the theist explanation of existence more likely true than false? And the discussion here does not really answer that very well, because it only considers the relative plausibility of rival explanations of existence, which is not the correct question.
If we are evaluating the plausibility of the theist explanation being true vs. being false, evidence that theism is false based on grounds that have nothing to do with the existence of the universe is relevant, since they affect the prior probability of God’s existence. So better hope you’ve solved the problem of evil! But more broadly, I don’t think it’s an an argument that can be won (although it can be lost), because there is no principled way of establishing the probabilities you would need in order to make it strong.
I'm saying that God being the explanation of the universe makes more sense of the universe than theories on which God isn't the explanation of the universe because it explains so much.
I agree the problem of evil lowers the probability of theism, but I think it's outweighed by the positive evidence.
But that’s irrelevant because atheism is under no obligation to make sense of the universe. It doesn’t have a positive theory of it. So the relevant question is just ‘what is the all things considered probability of the theist explanation that the atheist rejects’. And you don’t and can’t answer that.
Maybe I missed it but I also didn’t see an argument that says no possible non-theistic theory could have the same explanatory virtues as theism, which is what you would need if atheists needed to explain the universe, which they don’t.
Imagine if I said that a worldview that doesn't believe in Julius Caesar makes less sense than one that does, and adduced the many pieces of evidence for Caesar. It wouldn't do to say "Well, aCaesarism isn't a worldview." The point is that believing in Caesar makes better sense of the world, so you should believe it.
This is not a good analogy. We are discussing a question where one hypothesis (god) is used to explain another (the origin of the universe). In your example, there are two problems: we are not using Julius Caesar’s existence to explain another puzzling fact, and Julius Caesar is an otherwise well attested historical figure that we have plenty of independent reasons to believe exist.
Suppose we are interested in explaining how life began on earth. I say I have a very simple and powerful explanation: it was technologically advanced aliens. My hypothesis is (arguably) simple and if it were true explains the origin of life on earth VERY well. Should we believe the hypothesis, or deny it? It’s not enough to say the aliens hypothesis explains the facts better than the rivals, we also have to make the case that there is good reason to credit the existence of aliens in the first place. If we want to say that the reason to believe in the aliens is that they are the only good explanation for the emergence of life, we have to both establish that there is no other possible good explanation (otherwise we can just reserve judgement on the explanation) and that an explanation is needed (plausible for the origin of life, less so for the universe).
We do use Julius Caesar to explain facts--all the things that are attestations to him are facts that he explains.
A theory explaining one thing doesn't make it super likely because there are usually a lot of ways to explain it. But if the theory is simple and explains a ton of different things, while there aren't good alternative explanations, you have reason to believe it. Otherwise explain how we're justified in believing in, say, dark matter.
We might well not be justified in believing in dark matter, depending on how you define the concept. It’s very hard to say how much credence to give the truth of current theories given that we can’t evaluate the probability that our current framework will be replaced by a better one. If it turns out that ‘matter’ as currently understood doesn’t exist in the grand unified theory mark 3.0, then dark matter doesn’t exist either. What are the odds of that happening? Nobody knows, and if they say they do they’re mistaken.
In current physics, the probability of dark matter existing is also very tough to evaluate unless by it you just mean something like ‘the cause of such and such anomalies in our measurements’. Like, I think dark matter is more credible than dark energy and less credible than quarks. But I don’t have any principled way of assigning probabilities to any of them.
The point with Julius Caesar was just that you hadn’t specified what you were using him to explain, so the analogy wasn’t very close.
The reason that Dark Matter is a better explanation for the fast rotation of galaxies is not super hard to explain: there are concrete differences in how well the theories fit with priors we already accept, and how much other unexplained things they require us to accept. The point is we don’t just say ‘this explanation explains the most things, therefore we should believe it.’ The arguments you provide do not establish that the theistic explanation is credible because explanatory power does not do that, and neither does arguing it’s the best explanation we have unless we have good reason to think there are no possible better explanations.
To elaborate a little further: what if we are not in an epistemic situation that licenses endorsing an explanation of the universe’s origin? Your argument does not seem to consider that, but it is extremely relevant to the discussion.
You can always hold out hope for another theory. You can say "maybe evolution isn't true, but some unknown theory explains all the data." But when a theory naturally explains enough stuff, you should believe it.
No, because explanatory power does not determine probability. It’s the same reason conspiracy theories are not credible: they do a great job of explaining everything that happens, but we also have to evaluate whether they are otherwise plausible. And no, looking at how simple the theory is not how we do that.
It's also not a scientific fact that the universe had an origin. Modern cosmology places a limit on observing the history of the universe up to the Big Bang singularity. It makes no comment on whether the universe "started" or is cyclic or exists infinitely into the past. Cosmological arguments are just bad speculation.
This is a very well-written piece that introduced me to a few new arguments I haven't considered before, you certainly have thought about this a lot more than I have! I'd love it if you could help me better understand a couple points which I thought were really interesting but I didn't fully get your reasoning behind.
(1) How can possible but not necessary states arise under your view of theism? You establish that god is all-powerful as a trivial follow-up to the fact that they are the only necessary being, obviously god can do anything possible because god is the only thing that can do anything, so what is modally possible just becomes “the things that god can do”. But to me it seems like a problem arises if you try to suppose god has agency over choosing worlds to create (that is, having any power). Suppose god could have created world A or world B, and world B is the one that is actually created. Then either (a) there is no explanation why god created world B over world A, which is a problem because one of the main problems you voiced with atheism is that it doesn’t make sense to say something exists with no explanation, (b) there is an explanation about why god created world B over world A. But if (b) is the case, how could god possibly have created world A, after all there is an explanation for why they created world B and surely there can’t be explanations for non-existent things, at the very least this would certainly complicate the idea of explanations in general! In short, while you seem to suggest that theism does a better job at establishing modal possibility about worlds, I don’t really get how this theism doesn’t collapse into everything being necessarily the case, and if this is so than god being all-powerful really just means god has the power to do exactly one thing.
(2) Why would it be less good to be Boltzman brains? Suppose that conscious experiences are good and more and varied conscious experiences are better, like you seem to be putting forward with the every possible person existing line of argumentation. If a creator wanted to instantiate all possible conscious states within a world, wouldn’t it apriori seem utterly strange for them to stitch them together into continuous patchworks of 70ish years (a rather arbitrary period of time from the perspective of a maximally optimal solution over goodness!) to me it seems much more natural for all of them to simply be free-floating detached bits of conscious experience at whatever the Planck-length for conscious experience is. I guess you want to say something along the lines of goodness isn’t the product of conscious experience directly, but rather of particular stories/narratives that arise from a continuous sequence of conscious experiences (ie relationships), to me this seems extremely strange and unintuitive. Or maybe souls are the solution, that is another concept I don’t really get yet.
Thanks, I really appreciate the kinds words! And this comment is very thoughtful!
1) I think this will depend on whether there's a best world. If there is a best world then God would certainly make that world. If not then he'd pick a very good world. Now you worry that the first option leaves things unexplained. But I don't think it does: there's nothing wrong with the explanation of why we got world X being "because God chose that." Explanations in terms of agents' choices are kosher. You worry that the second option leads to modal collapse. There's a lot of literature about the modal collapse worry, but in short, I think if there's a necessary being, then some world is possible if it's consistent with the powers of a necessary being. There's a possible suffering filled world--God could make it--he'd just never choose to.
2) My thought is that for every person he could make as a Boltzmann brain he could instead make as a non-Boltzmann brain in an awesome world. The solution will have to do with souls!
Why don’t agent’s choices require explanations? Certainly we often reason about the reasons why people make the choices they do and it doesn’t seem like this requires a different metaphysics than reasoning about why things are the way they are in general. In your view are the choices of agents an explicit exception to the principle of sufficient reason?
I general "It’s God’s will" does not seem like a sufficient explanation for why there are laws or why the laws are what they are. In a previous post motivating "the principle of sufficient reason” you discuss Pruss finding water on the top of their clothes dryer. Surly the explanation “It’s God’s will that water appears on top of Pruss’s clothes dryer”, even if true, is not a sufficient explanation for that fact. And I don’t see why "It’s gods will that there are 6 flavors of quarks" is a suffentiant explanation of that either.
I like writing down my thoughts in argumentative format as I read your articles. I certainly don't expect a reply!
> The methodology people often employ, according to which evidence for God must come in the form of advanced predictions rather than explaining past evidence would rule out much of our knowledge. It would rule out almost all historical inquiry which virtually never proceeds by making predictions in advance. No one predicted, in advance, the evidence confirming the existence of Julius Caesar.
This is not true. If you have a Theory that Julius Caesar exists, you should be able to predict things based on that theory. For example, you would find a home that belonged to Julius Caesar and lots of people mentioning him. In contrast, if Caesar did not exist, then one would predict that no home would be found.
A testable prediction for God would predict future evidence which would distinguish God existing from God not existing. For example, if God existing entailed the existence of an undiscovered "House of God" which was not known to exist, and which would only exist if God existed, then that would be a testable prediction.
> Finally, such a method is clearly unworkable in the case of theism. If from the beginning of the world, the sky had spelled out “made by God,” that would provide significant evidence for the existence of God, even though it wouldn’t be an advanced prediction.
Doubtful. The sky might already spell "Made By God"... we just wouldn't know it. Additionally, you're sneakily smuggling in unrelated intuitions here. The sky reading "Made by God" is pretty convincing because it would support a God that directly and obviously intervenes in the material world, so one might expect further clear interventions. Of course, you admit that your theory of God can be adapted to account for literally any configuration of the world, which means it doesn't produce any testable predictions.
> Imagine a firing squad of 100 people all shoot their guns at you, but their guns all jam. It’s true that had they not jammed, you wouldn’t be around to observe it. Nonetheless, that they jammed is evidence that, for example, someone is conspiring to protect you, or someone paid off the firing squad.
Don't you believe in immortality independent of God? Seems like you would have to acknowledge you exist in any event. So the evidence update you get here is not "I exist", but "I survived the firing squad", which has nothing to do with your existence.
> From the fact that you exist, you get evidence your parents didn’t use effective contraception in the sex act that conceived you.
This is incorrect. We get evidence for this from the fact that we exist as humans who reproduce in a way that is mitigated by contraception. There's no need to update on your own existence.
Also, I'm not sure what "updating on your own existence" even means for someone who believes that it is metaphysically necessary for all possible minds to exist.
> prior probability of theism
My comment on that article stands.
> This argument, that theism explains why there’s something rather than nothing, comes in the form of various cosmological arguments—most notably the contingency argument.
The contingency argument doesn't do this. Reading your post and the summaries, it seems like all contingency does is say that if something exists, it's dependent on God. Which is all well and good, but it doesn't explain why God exists instead of literally nothing. It doesn't even try.
> It starts with the idea that everything has an explanation.
What's the explanation for this? It being necessary or convenient isn't an explanation. Are you positing this as brute fact, without an explanation?
> Nothing limited, whether in size or shape, can be fundamental, for the limit would need to be explained, but there’s nothing that could explain it (there’s nothing beyond this necessary foundation to limit it).
This can just be inverted. Something limited can be fundamental because the lack of limits would need to be explained, but there's nothing that could explain it.
Also... you then provide a bunch of explanations for why God is necessary. If your contention is that God is necessary because it needs no explanation, providing explanations seems to contradict that. Why are your explanations privileged?
> While the theist can explain laws in terms of the will of God, the atheist Humean must posit that the particles simply dance for no reason.
You're just kicking the "why" down the road. If I asked "Why does God make the particles dance?", you would just invent some whacky reason why God really needs particles to dance a certain way. If I asked you why God had those wacky reasons, you would simply assert that this is one of those facts that requires no further explanation. But at that point, why can't I just do the same with the natural law?
> Well, it’s quite mysterious that the laws apply to As—why don’t they apply to Bs or Cs or Ds or any of the other infinite physical structures.
Why does God make them apply only to As?
> Why do bosons have the power to interact with fermions rather than X’s
Why does God give Bosons the power to interact only with fermions? (I don't think this is even true? Doesn't gravity impact all energy fields?).
> It’s quite thoroughly surprising that the fundamental things have the powers to interact with other things that happen to exist, rather than one of the infinitely many nonexistent things.
What? What does it even mean to interact with things that don't exist? That's a nonsense statement. Even if you find some way to give it coherence, I could just say "maybe they do interact with nonexistent things! We'll just never know, because those non-existent things don't exist!".
> Section recap: Theism posits either zero explained fundamental things (if the contingency argument works) or one unexplained thing. This thing is very simple—just a single perfect being, a being of unlimited goodness. In contrast, naturalism must posit as brute:
No, you're just randomly packing a bunch of unrelated properties into one "thing" in order to contrive an explanation for the physical world. You have to arbitrarily posit that God is good, you have to arbitrarily posit that there are zero limits on God, you have to arbitrarily posit that all the properties of "goodness" are inconsistent with reality as we experience it (i.e. why we are not being wireheaded). Packaging things like this is just wordplay, you're not actually reducing complexity. The fact that you declare these things "irreducible" doesn't help either. Firstly, there's no reason why they can't be reduced. That's an arbitrary limit!!!!! Secondly, I can totally reduce "good" into a set of distinct propositions by creating an "unsetly large" (I don't think such a thing exists, but you do) catalogue of what would be good in every possible scenario. That's unsetly complex!!! Infinite evidence against theism!
> physical stuff exists there are laws the laws apply to the physical stuff that exists.
I can just do the same thing that you do and combine all these into only "one" thing. All physicalism has to posit is that there was a singularity of energy. Everything else, like laws and interactions are just inherent in the concept of that singularity of energy. I feel like I vaguely recall hearing that was how it worked in the Plank Epoch of the early universe, where "laws" were just descriptions of how that energy operated. Everything is just an inherent quality of energy.
> But the simplest laws are boring! The simplest laws just make particles move in a circle, or in a line, or in a triangle shape.
As established above, all laws are just irreducible components of an energy singularity, so they are always maximally simple. (I am applying your own arguments about the simplicity of "goodness" somehow being established because you declare Good to be not reducible).
Also, there's no reason why the laws have to be simple in the whacky sense you describe. Why not say that the movements of the energy field are governed by random laws that, once picked, are unchanging? That doesn't harm induction in any way and also doesn't disprove our universe, because you have no evidence that a random set of laws is inconsistent with our observed universe.
> It’s especially surprising that we hit the jackpot on the constants to such an extreme degree. If many of the constants differed by just a tiny amount—on the order of 1 part in 10^120 of the possible range of their values—no complex structures would form.
This is just about complex structures as they exist in our universe. No one has any evidence that radically different laws wouldn't create equally complex structures that only make sense under our laws. The link you provide mentions things like stars & planets & oceans, but no one suggests that any of those are *necessary*. If we were in a universe with radically different laws, we may well have equivalents to "stars, planets, and oceans", which we think no other universe could create. Basically, we have a sample size of 1, and can't know if "complex structures" are something abnormal for our universe.
> Theism also explains why the bits of the physical world interact. This requires the following 7 things go right (quoting this article of mine):
These are all explained by there being many many reasons why things interact, and many many reasons/ways in which they do interact, which roughly cancel each other out. I'm not sure why you need "time". It seems like you're just saying that you need some concept of "dimensions", which is really inextricable from what we consider to be physicality. This just boils down to the classic theist incredulity as to why physical things exist at all... but they do.
By the way: Why does God get around all this stuff? I assume you'll come up with some complicated explanation for that, so why can't naturalism get equal leeway?
> Naturalism doesn’t guarantee that there would be such a mechanism
Wouldn't panpsychism do this? Or any theory which extended consciousness to many things? The only reason that "life" is special is because of consciousness. There's no evidence that human evolution is necessary for that. Again, a sample size of 1 means that its entirely possible that broad swaths (or perhaps even every single) of natural laws produce conscious things.
> This makes perfect sense in a theistic world. God has no use for mindless, valueless automata, wholly lacking in experience. The reason to make the world is primarily so as to create valuable, conscious creatures! A theist would antecedently expect the bipedal apes on Earth to have experiences.
Why doesn't God have any use for such things? Are you positing the value of consciousness as a brute fact? A limit to God? Heresy itself? (yes you are).
> Imagine worldview comparison as akin to a game. Imagine, if we’re comparing theories 1 and 2, that a person who believes each of the theories is trying to guess what the world would be like. Whoever correctly guesses more stuff, with greater probability, wins. The theist would have correctly guessed, unlike the atheist, the existence of a physical world, the presence of laws, the applicability of the laws, the fact they produce a complex world, the presence of finely-tuned constants, and the existence of biological life.
This is comical. A Theist would guess absolutely none of this if they didn't already know it exists. This is like passing a test after being handed an answer sheet. The Theist would predict a single perfectly Good being who either creates a bunch of amazing disembodied minds who bask in glory... or perhaps that God would just sit there, content in perfection.
No theist in a trillion years would "guess" that the physical world exists as we see it today.
> Think of this as analogous to cooking a dish. Consciousness is like the dish. To make a dish, there have to be possible ingredients that together make the dish, and you have to have those ingredients. Similarly, to have conscious agents, you need certain physical states to generate consciousness, and for those physical states to exist. Theism predicts both of those things, naturalism doesn’t.
Why not? I don't see a rationale for this. If Consciousness can arise from many combinations of states or infinitely many combinations, naturalism predicts it with high (perhaps even 100%) odds.
> The argument is accepted by lots of extremely smart people, so if you find yourself thinking that it’s obviously stupid, probably you are the one who is confused.
And there are lots of very very smart Christians, Atheists, and Muslims. Don't know why you're selectively appealing to crowds here, if not to Buttress a weak argument...
> The mental pairs with the physical in a way that is harmonious. When I want my arm to go up, it goes up. My mental model of reality roughly matches the way reality actually is. The table in front of me is, in reality, several feet, and I see it as being several feet. When I’m in pain, I act to avoid that pain.
We accept this as true in order to live well, but you acknowledge that we have no "evidence" for this. It's not possible to disprove solipsism through reason alone. This argument is taking the leap of faith that we aren't Boltzmann's brains and then turning around and saying "wow, we aren't Boltzmann brains. Let's make a bunch of controversial inferences", which takes the leap of faith much too far.
> For example, one very simple pairing would be that one has an experience seeing a red wall—with its redness proportional to the amount of integrated information in a brain.
You don't know that this is simpler. Imagine "complexity of consciousness" is on a scale between 0 and infinity. You're claiming that a consciousness complexity of 0.0001 is "more simple" than a complexity of, say, 1. But simplicity isn't about whose number is smaller! This is a consistent mistake you make. You assert that things must either be 0 or infinity, because every *specific* finite number is arbitrary. But if you take the cumulative probability of all uncountably infinite finite numbers, that cancels out uncountable arbitrariness! So my point is that, with a sample size of 1, there's no way of concluding that our consciousness is any less simple than it should be. It's all finite, and the fact that every finite number is a specific finite number doesn't detract from that.
> Alternatively, one could have an inverted world, where we the agents feel pain when we feel pleasure and pleasure when we feel pain. They act to get the painful stuff rather than the pleasurable stuff. Even as they think “this sucks, I’d like to get less of it,” they act to get more of it.
Matthew Psychoanalysis Arc??!? Seems like plenty of people act like this already... which cuts against your argument!
That being said, I agree that this is a strong argument. It's the most intuitively convincing one in your whole post. I think that the best response is
A. Consciousness is not **always* harmonious. It's harmonious broadly when it increases fitness. That's a point against theism and in favor of the evolutionary explanation.
B. Consciousness is information processing, so it plays a uniquely important role in producing the actions of conscious things. In order for the same actions to happen, you would have to posit some spooky external information processing force that is distinct from the natural laws in some way... another consciousness. So there is to be some consciousness doing information processing in a way that yields good outcomes, or we would die (evolution arg). And there's no reason to posit many many consciousnesses existing in the same body, so just razor them out.
> Chief among these data points is the fact that you exist.
It's unlikely that God would create me, and the chance that he would seems to be in the ballpark of a naturalist account for why there are lots of people. Unrestricted SIA is logically impossible, for reasons I discussed in those articles.
> Now consider several classes of knowledge: It’s wrong to torture babies.
Many people don't believe this as objective external moral truth. Some people in your comments consistently disparage moral realism. Maybe your belief in this is best explained by a Will to Power or something, and not the spooky non-physical superpower.
> Married bachelors are impossible
This is just saying that (~A^A) is false, which is an axiom, or close to it.
> So then unless we have some brute rational intuition about impossibilities, we should abandon our belief that contradictions are impossible—and think it’s decently likely we’ll find them if we ever enter a wormhole.
Not sure what this means. We defined what it means for something to be false, and we said that something can't be false and true. Nothing about the definition we came up with was dependent on location. You appear to be saying that our coming up with logic itself is evidence for God. But what stops us from coming up with logic absent God? You still need it to manufacture nuclear bombs.
> The sun will rise tomorrow.
All of these arguments boil down to "I'm going to choose not to be a radical skeptic. Since I have no evidence for not being a skeptic, choosing to not be a skeptic gives me a license to believe whatever I want without evidence!". Very unpersuasive.
"This is comical. A Theist would guess absolutely none of this if they didn't already know it exists. This is like passing a test after being handed an answer sheet. The Theist would predict a single perfectly Good being who either creates a bunch of amazing disembodied minds who bask in glory... or perhaps that God would just sit there, content in perfection.
No theist in a trillion years would "guess" that the physical world exists as we see it today."
I agree a theist would think that it's decently likely there would just be disembodied minds basking in bliss. But it's far from guaranteed. And conditional on making physical stuff, most of the rest of the stuff is predictable. So then the question is just what the odds are of making physical stuff. Hard to know, but doesn't seem that low.
‘Hard to know’? This is my meta problem with your style of argument. It is vibes about things we ought to be withholding judgement on. What possible basis could we have for endorsing any estimate of how likely it is a perfect being would choose to create matter? This is the same problem that sunk neo-platonism and Leibniz and Spinoza and Malebranche and all those hyper-rationalists. We don’t have any rational justification for having opinions on these kind of questions. We have no standards by which to evaluate claims like this. It is a completely unproductive argumentative approach: unproductive in principle.
But any time you infer anything there will be certain hard to know judgments. If you see a cup of tea in my room, you should assume I was drinking tea. But it's hard to know the prior probability that I would drink tea.
But at least with the tea, there are pretty clear alternative explanations, and plenty of releavant evidence that can be used to give a ballpark for the prior probability. Like, you're a human being, and some humans drink tea, whereas few drink blood. Hence, my inference that you were drinking tea is more plausible than the same one made based on a teacup full of blood.
Inference is hard and we are, in general, far too confident in our inferences. But the sort of problems that face inferences about tea are very, very, very much easier to deal with than the problems that face inferences about say, whether a perfectly good being would choose to create laws of nature. Inferences about tea are based on empirical knowledge and supported by practical successes in past predictions. Inferences about the doings of a supreme intelligence are based on wind and supported by vibes.
> > Another piece of evidence for theism comes from the fact that the world has so many great goods. On atheism, while it’s possible that there would be the possibility of powerful relationships and immense knowledge, it’s far from guaranteed.
Sample size of one. For all we know, our knowledge and relationships are utterly pathetic in comparison to other possible ones. You have no way of distinguishing.
> Because God can give us pleasure much more easily, theism makes better sense of the fact that our lives are mostly geared towards growth and relationships, rather than senseless pleasure.
You were a hedonist like... 12 months ago. You can't seriously say that there's an orientation towards meaning so inexplicable and overpowering that it proves God. Plenty of people want to be hedonmists, and if everyone had the chance to be hedonists, there's at least a good chance that most people would do it.
> Souls
Will have to think about this more.
> Second, on atheism, there’s no particular reason to expect souls to remain constant over time—perhaps we get a new soul every few minutes.
This is a demonstration of your silly attutude towards limits. It seems like you believe that literally any fact which isn't the fact of perfection has some limit. If we did get new souls every 5 minutes, you would say that's an arbitrary limit. If we don't get new souls every five minutes, you ask why not. If the concept of arbitrary limits is such that any description of anything is infinitely arbitrary, its a sign you've gone off the rails.
> Theism also makes sense of why we’re not in a skeptical scenario.
A skeptical scenario would render all of the evidence for Theism illusory, so Theism can't disprove it by explaining the facts better.
> we could be in a world where induction doesn’t work
Do you have evidence that we're not in such a world? Also, you should read those meta-induction papers.
> Miracles
The miracle you list is explained by the person having never lost a leg before. All this requires is for him to have defrauded an early modern government and for five people to have either lied or been mistaken about it.
This is exceptionally likily! You yourself say that if the eyewitnesses admitted that he was lying, he would have been horifically executed for obtaining a begging license! That alone could explain any number of eyewitnesses.
The world is an odd place, with trillions upon trillions of events happening every day. If this is the best miracle you can find, I am not convinced!
Also why the fuck is God healing the legs of random Spanish people instead of bombing factory farms?
> But generally people report somewhat consistent reports—rarely does God announce who he is during the experience, or proclaim that he is Allah and that Islam is true and Christianity false.
Pretty sure the Rashidun Caliphate would execute you for this one. Also the Catholic Church. Isn't there mass religiou conflict in India motivated by supposedly divine messaging? Seems suspicious...
> On atheism, it’s quite surprising that billions of people would start believing that an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good being created the universe and loves you
Uh no. It's pretty clear why people would delude themselves into believing in God under atheism.
> First, it’s much less simple than theism. Perfect being theism posits simply perfection—or alternatively, an unlimited mind. A being with specific, limited powers is much more complicated than a perfect being and has arbitrary limits—limits on its power or goodness
Lack of limits is itself an arbitrary limit. Why are you limiting the ability of God to have limits? You're also still using a whacky account of simplicity which makes no sense. But a limited God is also pretty odd so I'll just take for granted that's a bad view and accept the rest of your points.
> Second, such a view is much less simple than perfect being theism. It can’t do to state that all good things exist, because good things are incompatible
??? If things were maximally good, it would choose the maximally good version of things.
> You can try to patch this by saying that fundamental reality is the best collection of things, but this is less simple and there isn’t a single best collection of things. There are many ways reality could be that are as good as the best possible world—if a random leaf turned orange and no one saw it, that wouldn’t make the world worse.
If a leaf that no one sees in a forest turns Orange, does the leaf exist at all? Seems like the natural explanation is that the leaf is an extra unnecessary fact, so the color of the leaf need not exist at all.
> This problem doesn’t arise for God because God has only the minimum features needed for maximal goodness, which includes a maximally good will.
Ok, so just take the minimum features needed for things to be good. No leaf needed. Why the selective application?
> Third, this view doesn’t explain religious experience well or widespread theistic belief. Religious experiences make sense if a creator is trying to connect with us, but make less sense if there’s no creator (you could object that they’re predicted because they’re good, but most good things don’t happen).
This argument cuts against God too. If the objection is that not enough Good things happen, then the problem of Evil is true. If the objection is that Theistic practice is bad, then same deal.
> Fourth—and I haven’t time to go into detail—the most promising theodicy doesn’t work for axiarchism. The axiarchist, therefore, has a worse explanation of evil.
Your Theodicy is terrible. Zero explanation for animal suffering. Why am I being allowed to eat this chicken sandwitch as I write this?
> Fifth, axiarchism is inherently less plausible. Agents act for reasons, so it makes sense that an agent would pursue the good. In contrast, it’s much stranger, more mysterious, and less elegant that some generic force would pursue the good. To evaluate different reasons, it seems one has to be an agent.
Axiarchism posits strictly less things than your view. Any mystery of Goodness is enhanced if you posit both goodness and an agent. Even if the agent is aligned with Goodness, that's still an extra assertion. Also "agents act for reasons" is an unjustified limit and unsimple assertion of a brute fact!
Thanks for the lengthy post Matthew! It was a delightful read, and writing out my thoughts as I re-read it gave me even more appriciation for the thought you put into your writing.
The point made in the post is that nobody predicted Caesar *in advance*. It's a response to people who try to invalidate theism by saying that it hasn't made *advance* predictions, since the data that theists say our theory predicts (e.g. a life-permitting universe) were already known about before we presented the theory.
Also, theists don't just pack a bunch of random properties into God in order to make him explanatory: we give principled reasons for thinking that *these* properties make for the best theory. For example, a theist might say that God has only one fundamental property (e.g. perfection or limitless power), and then derive the other properties from that. If you ask "why that fundamental property instead of some other?", the answer will be something like "because that's a simple property," or something similar. Nobody ever just says "God has these properties because I like these ones."
You don't have to predict everything in advance to make some advance predictions. For example, one could say "I have a Theory that Caesar Exists. This means that if I walk into Caesar's House, I should be able to see him. If I don't see him, that's evidence against him existing". That's a testable, forward-looking prediction about seeing Caesar in his house.
Theisis do not--cannot--make those kinds of froward looking claims. At least, that's what I think. Maybe someone could supply one?
> For example, a theist might say that God has only one fundamental property (e.g. perfection or limitless power), and then derive the other properties from that.
This supposedly "fundamental" property is not really fundamental, and not very simple. If you ask a Theist what they mean by "perfection" in God, they define "perfection" as "whatever account of goodness that would result in the very complicated physical world. we see around us".
Some Theists give explanations that are different on their face, but if the world ever contradicts them, then they'll just say that it must be God's plan and that they were wrong about what's perfect. In practice, then, "perfection" is defined to be just as arbitrarily complex as the natural world it seeks to explain.
I would also ask why we are able to "derive" anything from something like "perfection". If "perfection" entails some things but not others, that's an arbitrary limit!
Modern historians don't make *any* advance predictions about Caesar, because he's been dead for thousands of years, and we've had all or most of the relevant evidence concerning him for centuries. But that doesn't stop them from doing history. That's the point.
> If you ask a Theist what they mean by "perfection" in God, they define "perfection" as "whatever account of goodness that would result in the very complicated physical world. we see around us".
But that's clearly false. Most theists just adopt the sense of "goodness" that you find in ordinary common-sense morality (see e.g. Swinburne), and then argue that a creator who was perfect according to that criteria would be fairly likely to make a world like this.
> If "perfection" entails some things but not others, that's an arbitrary limit!
No, it is exactly the opposite of an arbitrary limit. An arbitrary limit is a limit which lacks any deeper explanation (that's why it's *arbitrary*). A limit which is derived from a more fundamental property *does* have a deeper explanation, namely that it follows from a more fundamental property.
> Modern historians don't make *any* advance predictions about Caesar, because he's been dead for thousands of years, and we've had all or most of the relevant evidence concerning him for centuries.
Well, yes. The relevant forward looking predictions have already been made and tested. You could probably make more (if we found zero archeological evidence going forwards of Caesar’s existence, that would be odd), but that would be unnecessarily cumulative.
But Theists have not made any forward looking predictions at any point in time which distinguish a theistic world from a natural world! That’s a big difference.
> No, it is exactly the opposite of an arbitrary limit. An arbitrary limit is a limit which lacks any deeper explanation (that's why it's *arbitrary*).
1. Perfection entailing some things but not others is an arbitrary property of perfection. There is no higher-order property which explains why perfection has limits.
2. Bulldog’s use of the term “arbitrary limit” includes literally every limit. I was pointing out that all explanations have limits, and since reality is not turtles all the way down, “arbitrary” limits are inevitable. I think this shows why his use of the word “arbitrary” is wrong. Instead of saying this are metaphysically impossible because of arbitrariness, we should use physical experience.
"But Theists have not made any forward looking predictions at any point in time which distinguish a theistic world from a natural world! That’s a big difference."
They have frequently predicted Jesus's second coming (if Jesus actually counts as God), and have always, always been disappointed.
>. If you have a Theory that Julius Caesar exists, you should be able to predict things based on that theory. For example, you would find a home that belonged to Julius Caesar and lots of people mentioning him. In contrast, if Caesar did not exist, then one would predict that no home would be found.
"...just exists for no deeper reason. A theory that says that the fundamental things exist for no reason is much worse than a theory that explains why they exist"
I think God/perfect being as a theory has weak explanatory power and I have personally made observations that lend credence to an alternate theory (I suffer). Also, God as a theory requires another theory to explain why God exists rather than nothing. It's just adding another arbitrary causative step.
I disagree with most of what's written here, and though there's too much to respond to in its entirety, I think the main problem is being overly seduced by the word "limitless" and taking it to automatically confer some great explanatory benefit. I think "limitlessness" is helpful only insofar as it yields simpler unambiguous descriptions, and that while it may do so in many cases, it doesn't obviously do so in God's case. You set up a dichotomy between limitlessness and arbitrary limits; but the first option is either inconsistent when applied to God's attributes or else it's really two different things, arbitrary limitlessness and non-arbitrary limitlessness. The former is taken to be "a maximally consistent collection of such-and-such properties, but not strictly greater than all other such maximal collections," whereas the latter is "a maximally consistent collection of such-and-such properties which really is in some sense greater than all competitors." I don't think arbitrary limitlessness is that much better, if at all, from arbitrary limitedness, and it might be worse. And I think a case needs to be made that "goodness" has a uniquely best manifestation. (And that it's a manifestation also of a specific, distinct entity, rather than, say, the mereological sum of all existents!)
The other thing is of course that many will deny there's such a fundamental property as axiological goodness. I don't see much problem in rejecting it and regarding it as a vague mishmash of various things that humans find psychologically impressive and/or comforting. Even many moral realists aren't aesthetic realists, to give a parallel; not many of us feel too compelled to imagine "coolness" is a real, psychology-independent property that our sixth sense tells us truly inheres in Kurt Cobain but not Sheldon Cooper.
I think limitlessness is inherently a virtue. If two theories are equally simple to describe but one says that space is endless and the other says it's exactly 48293473890732189473123094 meters across, seems the endless one is more probable. I also think theism is simple to describe, but we've argued about that plenty before.
I think you should at least not be super confident that there is no such property as axiological goodness. But this means theism has some probability of being simple. I agree it's a bit of a cost to theism that one of the best routes towards its simplicity involves the idea that value is a real property rather than a linguistic construct, but I find that view plausible enough that I don't think it's much of a cost. There are also other routes towards theism's simplicity that I discuss in the linked article, but most will probably require thinking value is real .
>If two theories are equally simple to describe but one says that space is endless and the other says it's exactly 48293473890732189473123094 meters across, seems the endless one is more probable
It should seem the finite one is more probable because our ordinary base of knowledge mostly (if not completely) includes knowledge about finite things and infinite things cause paradoxes/contradictions in even most formal systems that try to operationalize a useful form of infinity. And in general, even this seeming should be discarded in favor of empirical evidence, because it's not like you're just gonna guess the size of the universe from the armchair.
> two theories are equally simple to describe but one says that space is endless and the other says it's exactly 48293473890732189473123094 meters across
Bulldog. "Simple" question for you. You have two Theories. Theory A says that the Universe is endless. Theory B says that the Universe is finite, but we don't know exactly what its dimensions are.
>I think limitlessness is inherently a virtue. If two theories are equally simple to describe but one says that space is endless and the other says it's exactly 48293473890732189473123094 meters across, seems the endless one is more probable. I also think theism is simple to describe, but we've argued about that plenty before.
I agree it's often a virtue; my point was that it's only so insofar as it shortens descriptions. Consider Newtonian universe A which follows these four laws:
1-3: Newton's three laws
4: Every object has a speed between 0 and 100 mph at all times,
versus Newtonian universe B which follows these four laws:
1-3: Newton's three laws
4: Every object can have any speed in the non-negative real numbers.
You might say that universe B is simpler than universe A, since it's less limited. And I do agree with that in *some* sense. But I would say the better account of why it's simpler is because we could actually just shave off universe B's fourth law entirely and get a completely equivalent set of mathematical constraints (and which is then a strict subset of universe A's constraints, hence unambiguously smaller/simpler). That's what really matters here, and I think that's what this "limitlessness as a virtue" business is really pointing to, at least insofar as it should be taken to be correct.
In God's case, it's not obvious to me that limitlessness is playing the same role here of allowing you to shave off lots of bits of information. That depends entirely on how many ways there are to be a super-duper good thing. If there are many ways, and if it's going to take a lot of bits to specify any one (thus leading arguably to low individual priors), then it's not necessarily going to be clear how to add them all up, or even adduce any lower-bound estimates for this sum.
>But this means theism has some probability of being simple.
Sure, though by this kinda-second-order reasoning (e.g., the considerations I just raised), it also has some probability of being infinitely complex. I don't know how these are supposed to balance out against each other. And even ignoring that, I'm not sure the probability of its being simple is high enough to help much. Suppose I grant that it has a 1 in Graham's number probability of being simple. I'm sure you disagree with that being reasonable; are there any quantitative considerations you can use to provide a higher lower bound to us hidebound axiology skeptics?
Not addressing all of this, as there are too many commenters (though you're consistently among the most insightful and thoughtful!) Just to address the bit at the end, if you don't know the prior of theism, you should sort of average the conceivable priors. So if you think 80% chance theism has a prior or 0 and 20% chance it has a prior of 80% on the ideal theory, you should think it's overall prior is 16%. Then, of course, you look at the evidence.
I just disagree with your intuition--even if they can be described with equal ease, one without arbitrary limits is better.
Could you elaborate what exactly you mean by "explanation"? I'm feeling that the crux of our disagreement lies somewhere there. For instance, why is "design" an explanation for the car, while, "gladiolus" is not an explanation for the car? Or why saying "God did it" is not enough explanation for the creationist? - Surely God can explain all the seemingness of evolution, so why postulate both God and evolution at the same time?
> everything has an explanation
Okay...
> From this, we learn that there must be something that exists necessarily—that can’t be otherwise—that explains the world.
This doesn't follow. From the fact that everything has an explanation we can deduce that the world has an explanation and the explanation of the world has an explanation and an explanation of explanation of world has an explanation and so on. Where do we encounter the concept of "necessity" in this chain of reasoning?
> First of all, it seems like this thing can’t be fundamentally limited.
Why?
> Nothing limited, whether in size or shape, can be fundamental, for the limit would need to be explained, but there’s nothing that could explain it
Just like lack of limit also has to be explained. We've agreed that *everything* has an explanation, haven't we?
> (there’s nothing beyond this necessary foundation to limit it).
Where does this come from? Of course there is something else - an explanation for the foundation. And explanation for the explanation and so on.
Clearly, the idea of a necessary foundation that is the first explanation for everything else directly contradicts the the initial premise that there is an explanation for everything. It's like doing all the steps in the proof that there is no largest natural number and then saying: "therefore there is a largest natural number and lets call it N".
Something has an explanation if there's something that makes it non-mysterious and explains why it is the case. We can get a proximate explanation of this message, for example, by saying I wrote it.
I was assuming that there couldn't be infinite explanatory chains. The reason for this is that I accept causal finitism, that chains of explanation can't be infinite. Even if I didn't, positing an infinite chain doesn't explain why it's there (if each train car is pushed by an earlier one, that doesn't explain why there's the entire chain of train cars; if a ball randomly popped into being and started falling, its position at every time T would be explained by its position at time T/2, but you could still wonder why it popped into being at all).
The idea is that the necessary thing would be self-explanatory--something about it would explain why it exists.
> Something has an explanation if there's something that makes it non-mysterious and explains why it is the case.
You can't explain what "explanation" means using the verb "explain". Try tabooing it and all its synonyms.
Causality is very much on point and mysteriousness is relevant, but how do we measure it? And why does something appear mysterious to a person while something else does not? How does this cognitive algorithm work? I think if you try to address specifically the examples that I mentioned (gladiolus failing to explain cars, creationist failing to dismiss evolution with appeals to God), we will be able to breach the inferential gap between us.
> I was assuming that there couldn't be infinite explanatory chains.
I would appreciate if you explicitly mention such assumptions in your posts - it would significantly improve their comprehensibility.
> The idea is that the necessary thing would be self-explanatory--something about it would explain why it exists.
How is it in any way different from not having an explanation? What different expectations people who believe that "everything has an explanation and there is one thing that is an explanation of itself" have compared to people who believe that "Not everything has an explanation - there is one thing that doesn't have any"?
"On naturalism, no such expectation is present. Even if you think that consciousness is just physical—a position which I believe is almost certainly false—it still is a bit surprising that physical things of a certain complexity simply turn conscious. An atheist would have no reason to expect this to be the case, and yet it is—just another fact better explained by theism."
We do not expect that "physical things of a certain complexity simply turn conscious." In fact, there are many very smart people telling us every day why it is that AI cannot and will not turn conscious, despite how complex they are (now, I actually think they could be wrong, but my point is that this is not an actual expectation). And there are plenty of incredibly complex things that exist, like a tree or a spider web, or a coral reef or a nuclear submarine, that no one expects to be conscious.
What we DO expect to be conscious are complex living organisms that are incredibly vulnerable to dying in 10,000 different ways on a daily basis if they don't take a massive number of complex actions in order to simply not die, and which must survive for at least a certain period of days or years or decades in order to reproduce and raise their offspring to also reach that age before their extremely vulnerable bodies die. Because if those vulnerable organisms could not accomplish those tasks, they would not be here. And they ARE here. So what is your possible method by which these organisms could take complex actions that require calculating and reacting to a huge variety of unpredictable input on an hourly basis, and avoid all the ways to die, if not consciousness? You say it is surprising, and yet you give no account of any other possible alternative. I don't find it surprising at all, indeed I can't think of any other way they could possibly survive. If you can't provide an alternative way it could happen, without consciousness, and you have no evidence it is possible to happen in any other way (which you can't, because we have no examples), then you shouldn't find it surprising. Apparently it is simply the only way a very vulnerable-to-dying organism can not die.
Without consciousness to experience the feeling of hunger, why would an animal ever go out looking for something to eat? Without consciousness to experience pain, why would it ever avoid all the painful things that can kill it? Without fear, why would it hide from a predator instead of just allowing itself to be eaten? Without feeling horny, why would it seek out a mate and go through all the effort of courting or fighting to win the mate, or reproduce? You may think that a "zombie" could simply be programmed in some manner to seek food and avoid being eaten without the accompanying conscious sensation to motivate it, but that is completely hypothetical and you have no reason to believe this could work. Perhaps feeling hungry or afraid or horny is simply the easiest possible way to motivate an organism to expend the energy on taking the actions necessary to stay alive. Why do you need more of an explanation than that?
Also, if there is some magical supernatural intermediary between the physical hardware of a brain necessary for consciousness and the actual experience of "mind" the brain produces, then why are we able to do something like inject anesthetic into your foot, and doing so makes it so your brain can no longer consciously experience the sensation of your foot existing? The anesthesia isn't in your brain, it's in your foot. But it interferes with the communication of receptors between your foot and your brain, and when you shut down that communication, as far as your brain is concerned, your foot no longer exists, until the anesthesia wears off. But if it's God inserting some non-tangible supernatural intermediary between brain and the "mind" arising from the brain, are you somehow blocking or anesthetizing the supernatural "mind" by numbing your foot? I don't see why there's any need for an intermediary at all. And why can we also make the mind totally disappear with drugs/general anesthesia? If the mind is supernatural, why do physical drugs injected in the bloodstream make it turn off?
We DO know how the brain works. Just like we know how the lungs work and the bloodstream and the liver and everything else. They're all pretty weird. The lungs take in oxygen and circulate it to our cells via the bloodstream, and emit carbon dioxide. All of our muscles and nerves require electricity to run. The neurons in our brain run on electricity and emit neurotransmitters to communicate and when they do that in certain portions of the brain it creates a conscious experience. It's been no more or less explained than how any other organ functions, you just aren't satisfied with the explanation. There's no "hard" problem here, other than that theists will never accept that a conscious experience arises from the functioning of the brain because they simply don't want to accept. It would not matter just how detailed and specific you got, they still would say "but that doesn't explain it" because they don't WANT it to explain it. Someone could take the same type of objection to how the lungs emit carbon dioxide (if for some reason it violated their sensibilities to believe that they do), and keep asking but how? but why? even once it's been thoroughly explained. But they don't, because they don't have a religious belief about lungs, only about brains and minds. I know you will possibly disagree, because scientists and philosophers who believe there's a "hard problem" insist that it's there while others say there's no problem. But give me an example of how it COULD be explained to you that the brain produces consciousness. What type of evidence would you accept? It seems to me that no matter detailed and granular the explanation got, a committed theist would still say "well you're just jumping from A to B, there must still be a supernatural A.5 in between there somewhere".
(3) It's worth remembering that the traditional Thomistic arguments for theism can be formulated in lots of ways, many of which are not subject Schmid and Linford's (rather strong) objections to Feser's version. Shameless plug: https://deveradoctrina.substack.com/p/the-best-version-of-the-five-ways
To be clear, it's not *my* argument: people like Geach, Lamont, and Martin defended it before, and it's fundamentally a version of Aquinas' first way. But I'm glad you don't hate it!
Man, you are fantastic! Keep up the good work, James. Sorry, our first conversation began with me being annoyed at you (falsely believing that you are an eternal torture infernalist).
Well thank you! At risk of reducing your opinion of me, I'm less confident of universalism than I used to be, though the only version of infernalism that I find plausible is one that most people would find palatable (the author of this blog has described it as "not insane," which is high praise).
Yeah, I guess, that is a downgrade but at least you did not move to eternal torture infernalism, but if you actually did, then that would certainly make my opinion of you go down a lot. I have low opinion of eternal torture believers.
So, ultimately, I still have a pretty high opinion of you even after that worldview downgrade.
Forgive me, but I don't understand this. Why couldn't God simply create a universe filled with nothing but utilitronium (whatever that turns out to be)? The Problem of Evil seems especially problematic on any kind of welfarism.
Well, I'm an objective list theorist. I think relationships are of great value. But a world like ours is plausibly optimal for long-term relationship building--where we're vulnerable and have the opportunity to help each other out. There also might be all sorts of unknown goods https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-theres-evil
I am a Classical Utilitarian (Hedonistic Act Utilitarian similar to Bentham and Sidgwick) and I believe in God, and as Bentham's Bulldog said - "And you might think certain great pleasure depend in some metaphysically necessary way on certain states of affairs."
Bentham writes "The atheist denies the existence of the fundamental cause of all things"
Atheists deny the existence of a god or gods. It seems clear that the concept of god is not synonymous with "the fundamental cause of all things."
Apollo, Augustus or even Capitoline Jove has ever been associated with the fundamental cause of all things, yet all were seen by millions as god. One of these was an actual real-life person, though he only became a god after his death. But there were others such as the Eqyptian Pharaohs who were gods in life.
A god is a supernatural being who almost always has properties other than "creator of all things" that are of principal interest to theists.
For example. I am an atheist. I have no problem with a creator of all things, which you can call god if you will. I see this Creator (god) as omnipresent, meaning existing throughout all of spacetime and directly acting on reality and so is also omnipotent. It has no past, no future, no there. All is here and now.
Our reality is so fundamentally different from its reality that there can be no common framework, no possibility for understanding, and so no basis for a relation. Other than a name to be attached to what we perceive as the beginning of all things (which it sees as here and now), it has no other meaning we can grok.
This sterile concept is not what people need, want or conceive of God. But that is all your restrictive definition gets you. What good is that?
A theory doesn't need to make advance predictions to be good. It can postdict what has already been seen.
But the problem is, it has to actually do that.
Suppose I have some theory. The experimentalists go and measure something, and then I go "just what I predicted because ..."
It is often possible to make up an "explanation" for many different experimental results. This is especially true if the theory is wordy and vague. If the theory is precise and mathematical, sometimes there really is only a few observations it can explain. Theories like "elan vital" or "phlogisten" had wordy "explanations" for everything.
Of course flame rises, flames produce light and it is the nature of all light things to rise towards the great lights in the heavens. Of course flames fall, they are effected by gravity, the dying flame pulled down towards its grave as all things must be. Of course flames point towards the sun, the sun is the greatest light of all, the ultimate source of all flame and flames naturally yearn to return home.
If you had never seen a refrigerator taken apart and had no idea what might be inside, it would be easy to mistake "refrigerator" for being a simple and fundamental thing. Or at least a box imbued with the fundamental essence of cold.
Imagine being a computer game programmer, with access to a CRAZY HUGE amount of computer power, trying to make a highly realistic game. Newtonian mechanics is helpful, you can simulate it to make the objects move realistically. Full quantum field theory is even more helpful. You have the compute to simulate it. And this means your players can have realistic chemical reactions and all sorts of things.
It is unclear how theism helps this game developer. How would they write a program to simulate god? What would this program do in the game?
The "prediction only" rule in science is throwing out evidence, but it pro
The Roman's considered that the best explanation for the comet that appeared during the games in 44bc honoring him was that Julius Ceasar was a god and so he was deified.
It has always seemed to me that there's a bias in favor of the idea that nothing existing is more fundamental than something existing. And therefore the onus is on showing how things could come into being out of the more fundamental nothingness. Things just are seems as good an explanation of things being as anything else and it requires no search for the elusive evidence of a cause.
In our direct experiences, we find that everything that exists has a cause, while everything that doesn't exist does not require a cause for not existing. That's why the question of "why is there something rather than nothing?" makes sense, while "Why is there nothing rather than something?" doesn't. Nothing requires no explanation, but everything else does.
>In our direct experiences, we find that everything that exists has a cause,
What you find is a mundane linguistic fact that people use words like "cause" and "exist" to categorize ways of talking about matter that was recycled to be more useful. Wood doesn't magically change its essence during a manufacturing operation and out pops a table, yet people still say things like "The manufacturer caused this table to come into existence by chopping up those trees" because at one point the same wood that was in the table was part of trees and wasn't useful for humans to call a table. We never observe new things popping into existence, just old stuff being recycled into more or less useful stuff.
Does the stuff become more or less useful without any cause? Do you wake up one day and discover that, for no reason at all, less useful wood (in the form of a log) has become more useful wood (in the form of a chair) without any explanation for how that happened?
No, but what I'm saying is that ordinary discourse doesn't presuppose philosophical theories of causation and existence. These are mere heuristics people use to talk about the world that are justified by their success in interpersonal communication, not by anything metaphysical.
Do you believe that change occurs without a cause? Because if we want to leave ordinary talk behind us and move to the realm of philosophical theories of causation then I can just say "There is no case known in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinity, because in all efficient causes following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or only one. Now to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient causes, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. But if in efficient causes it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God."
My metapoint is that there isn't a unified usage of words like "change" or "cause" or "explanation," and so there isn't a hidden reality or absolute structure behind people's usages of these words.
To address your first question about change occurring without a cause - sure, we can consider the indeterminate nature of radioactive decay as one such example, or the collapse of the wavefunction. These aren't standardly thought to have causes or explanations, but we can weave a story saying "X collection of atoms have a Y% chance of decaying in Z time" and consider the story we tell to be a cause or explanation, because there's no fact of the matter that determines what is a cause or explanation besides our willingness to ascent to these usages of the terms.
For your God example, that just passes the buck of explanation or existence onto God, and we can invoke metagods to keep passing the buck, or abandon the presuppositions we have about using words like causation or existence, or some other option. I don't think there's anything remotely compelling or theoretically virtuous about believing in God from the argument you gave, in other words.
That everything has a cause seems a matter of faith. And causes and effects blur into each other. I couple that with a search for the appearance of "nothing" and it never
shows. And as it stands causes such as they can be posited for the sake of craft or whatever apply to discrete phenomenon and not to ultimate wholes. "Cause" is a working concept for the affairs of the world but it is in no way an iron law.
>Therefore, we have some non-physical faculty of intuition that allows us to grasp certain truths about the physical world, mathematics, modal facts, logical facts, and so on. This faculty is utterly bizarre and mysterious on atheism, while it makes perfect sense on theism.
This is essentially the evidence that caused C. S. Lewis to abandon atheistic materialism in favor of pantheistic idealism. Working out these ideas, and through some of the contradictions of pantheism, led then to become a theist, and later a Christian. He lays out this line of argument particularly well in his book “Miracles” in chapters 2 and 3. I wrote a post elaborating a bit on this (https://open.substack.com/pub/flyinglionwithabook/p/c-s-lewis-on-rationality-and-moral?r=fczlp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web)
Though for Lewis the fact that rationality works took priority over moral realism, though they both push the same direction. He wrote:
“All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning. If the feeling of certainty which we express by words like ‘must be’ and ‘therefore’ and ‘since’ is a real perception of how things outside our own minds really ‘must’ be well and good But if this certainty is merely a feeling in our own minds and not a genuine insight into realities beyond them—if it merely represents the way our minds happen to work—then we can have no knowledge. Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.
“It follows that no account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight. A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For the theory would Itself have been reached by thinking and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course be itself demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument that proved no argument was sound—a proof that there are no such things as proofs—which is nonsense.”
You bring up the existence of hard to deny miracles, but God being willing to interfere with the world in this way brings up what I think is a problem for your theodicy. In your other article where you discuss theodicy, you suggest that God allows bad things to happen in the world because there is some value to living in a world that has the characteristics of an indifferent universe. If that is the case, though, then why does God interfere with miracles in some cases but not in others? If God is willing to upend the pretense of an indifferent universe in order to have a beggar regrow his lost leg, then why didn't God decide to do the same in order to prevent the Holocaust, or any other number of smaller evils, perhaps all the people who lost a leg, and despite intense prayer did not have it grow back? It seems like you have to either be committed to the premise that God wants us to live in a universe that seems indifferent, and therefore avoids performing miracles, or admit that God is perfectly fine with making the universe not indifferent in certain cases, which immediately brings forward the question of why God didn't do so in other cases, including cases in which the cause for divine intervention seems stronger. Is there a value to an indifferent universe, in which case God shouldn't be performing miracles, or is God willing to intervene in the universe with miracles, in which case the justification for other evils under the pretense of an indifferent universe is undermined?
And what supernatural beings would these be? Angels or saints that have dominion over smaller areas of human interest than the all-powerful and all-concerned God? It's an interesting theory, I'll give you that.
The main problem with this piece is that it misrepresents what naturalism and atheism are, and therefore misevaluates their probabilities are.
Neither atheism nor naturalism are in and of themselves committed to any particular thesis about the origin of the universe or any of its properties except, respectively ‘Whatever it was, it wasn’t divine’ and ‘whatever it was, it wasn’t magic or spirit’. Neither offers an explanation of the universe.
Now obviously it is better to have a true explanation than no explanation. But it is better to have no explanation than a bad one. Saying that the theist explanation of the universe’s origins is better than the atheist one strawmans the atheist because the atheist doesn’t have or need one: the atheist is committed only to the thesis that the theist explanation is incorrect.
In other words, the relevant question is really just: given all our relevant evidence, is the theist explanation of existence more likely true than false? And the discussion here does not really answer that very well, because it only considers the relative plausibility of rival explanations of existence, which is not the correct question.
If we are evaluating the plausibility of the theist explanation being true vs. being false, evidence that theism is false based on grounds that have nothing to do with the existence of the universe is relevant, since they affect the prior probability of God’s existence. So better hope you’ve solved the problem of evil! But more broadly, I don’t think it’s an an argument that can be won (although it can be lost), because there is no principled way of establishing the probabilities you would need in order to make it strong.
I'm saying that God being the explanation of the universe makes more sense of the universe than theories on which God isn't the explanation of the universe because it explains so much.
I agree the problem of evil lowers the probability of theism, but I think it's outweighed by the positive evidence.
But that’s irrelevant because atheism is under no obligation to make sense of the universe. It doesn’t have a positive theory of it. So the relevant question is just ‘what is the all things considered probability of the theist explanation that the atheist rejects’. And you don’t and can’t answer that.
Maybe I missed it but I also didn’t see an argument that says no possible non-theistic theory could have the same explanatory virtues as theism, which is what you would need if atheists needed to explain the universe, which they don’t.
Imagine if I said that a worldview that doesn't believe in Julius Caesar makes less sense than one that does, and adduced the many pieces of evidence for Caesar. It wouldn't do to say "Well, aCaesarism isn't a worldview." The point is that believing in Caesar makes better sense of the world, so you should believe it.
This is not a good analogy. We are discussing a question where one hypothesis (god) is used to explain another (the origin of the universe). In your example, there are two problems: we are not using Julius Caesar’s existence to explain another puzzling fact, and Julius Caesar is an otherwise well attested historical figure that we have plenty of independent reasons to believe exist.
Suppose we are interested in explaining how life began on earth. I say I have a very simple and powerful explanation: it was technologically advanced aliens. My hypothesis is (arguably) simple and if it were true explains the origin of life on earth VERY well. Should we believe the hypothesis, or deny it? It’s not enough to say the aliens hypothesis explains the facts better than the rivals, we also have to make the case that there is good reason to credit the existence of aliens in the first place. If we want to say that the reason to believe in the aliens is that they are the only good explanation for the emergence of life, we have to both establish that there is no other possible good explanation (otherwise we can just reserve judgement on the explanation) and that an explanation is needed (plausible for the origin of life, less so for the universe).
We do use Julius Caesar to explain facts--all the things that are attestations to him are facts that he explains.
A theory explaining one thing doesn't make it super likely because there are usually a lot of ways to explain it. But if the theory is simple and explains a ton of different things, while there aren't good alternative explanations, you have reason to believe it. Otherwise explain how we're justified in believing in, say, dark matter.
We might well not be justified in believing in dark matter, depending on how you define the concept. It’s very hard to say how much credence to give the truth of current theories given that we can’t evaluate the probability that our current framework will be replaced by a better one. If it turns out that ‘matter’ as currently understood doesn’t exist in the grand unified theory mark 3.0, then dark matter doesn’t exist either. What are the odds of that happening? Nobody knows, and if they say they do they’re mistaken.
In current physics, the probability of dark matter existing is also very tough to evaluate unless by it you just mean something like ‘the cause of such and such anomalies in our measurements’. Like, I think dark matter is more credible than dark energy and less credible than quarks. But I don’t have any principled way of assigning probabilities to any of them.
The point with Julius Caesar was just that you hadn’t specified what you were using him to explain, so the analogy wasn’t very close.
The reason that Dark Matter is a better explanation for the fast rotation of galaxies is not super hard to explain: there are concrete differences in how well the theories fit with priors we already accept, and how much other unexplained things they require us to accept. The point is we don’t just say ‘this explanation explains the most things, therefore we should believe it.’ The arguments you provide do not establish that the theistic explanation is credible because explanatory power does not do that, and neither does arguing it’s the best explanation we have unless we have good reason to think there are no possible better explanations.
To elaborate a little further: what if we are not in an epistemic situation that licenses endorsing an explanation of the universe’s origin? Your argument does not seem to consider that, but it is extremely relevant to the discussion.
You can always hold out hope for another theory. You can say "maybe evolution isn't true, but some unknown theory explains all the data." But when a theory naturally explains enough stuff, you should believe it.
No, because explanatory power does not determine probability. It’s the same reason conspiracy theories are not credible: they do a great job of explaining everything that happens, but we also have to evaluate whether they are otherwise plausible. And no, looking at how simple the theory is not how we do that.
So what do you look at in terms of a theory if nor prior probability and explanatory power?
It's also not a scientific fact that the universe had an origin. Modern cosmology places a limit on observing the history of the universe up to the Big Bang singularity. It makes no comment on whether the universe "started" or is cyclic or exists infinitely into the past. Cosmological arguments are just bad speculation.
This is a very well-written piece that introduced me to a few new arguments I haven't considered before, you certainly have thought about this a lot more than I have! I'd love it if you could help me better understand a couple points which I thought were really interesting but I didn't fully get your reasoning behind.
(1) How can possible but not necessary states arise under your view of theism? You establish that god is all-powerful as a trivial follow-up to the fact that they are the only necessary being, obviously god can do anything possible because god is the only thing that can do anything, so what is modally possible just becomes “the things that god can do”. But to me it seems like a problem arises if you try to suppose god has agency over choosing worlds to create (that is, having any power). Suppose god could have created world A or world B, and world B is the one that is actually created. Then either (a) there is no explanation why god created world B over world A, which is a problem because one of the main problems you voiced with atheism is that it doesn’t make sense to say something exists with no explanation, (b) there is an explanation about why god created world B over world A. But if (b) is the case, how could god possibly have created world A, after all there is an explanation for why they created world B and surely there can’t be explanations for non-existent things, at the very least this would certainly complicate the idea of explanations in general! In short, while you seem to suggest that theism does a better job at establishing modal possibility about worlds, I don’t really get how this theism doesn’t collapse into everything being necessarily the case, and if this is so than god being all-powerful really just means god has the power to do exactly one thing.
(2) Why would it be less good to be Boltzman brains? Suppose that conscious experiences are good and more and varied conscious experiences are better, like you seem to be putting forward with the every possible person existing line of argumentation. If a creator wanted to instantiate all possible conscious states within a world, wouldn’t it apriori seem utterly strange for them to stitch them together into continuous patchworks of 70ish years (a rather arbitrary period of time from the perspective of a maximally optimal solution over goodness!) to me it seems much more natural for all of them to simply be free-floating detached bits of conscious experience at whatever the Planck-length for conscious experience is. I guess you want to say something along the lines of goodness isn’t the product of conscious experience directly, but rather of particular stories/narratives that arise from a continuous sequence of conscious experiences (ie relationships), to me this seems extremely strange and unintuitive. Or maybe souls are the solution, that is another concept I don’t really get yet.
Thanks, I really appreciate the kinds words! And this comment is very thoughtful!
1) I think this will depend on whether there's a best world. If there is a best world then God would certainly make that world. If not then he'd pick a very good world. Now you worry that the first option leaves things unexplained. But I don't think it does: there's nothing wrong with the explanation of why we got world X being "because God chose that." Explanations in terms of agents' choices are kosher. You worry that the second option leads to modal collapse. There's a lot of literature about the modal collapse worry, but in short, I think if there's a necessary being, then some world is possible if it's consistent with the powers of a necessary being. There's a possible suffering filled world--God could make it--he'd just never choose to.
2) My thought is that for every person he could make as a Boltzmann brain he could instead make as a non-Boltzmann brain in an awesome world. The solution will have to do with souls!
Why don’t agent’s choices require explanations? Certainly we often reason about the reasons why people make the choices they do and it doesn’t seem like this requires a different metaphysics than reasoning about why things are the way they are in general. In your view are the choices of agents an explicit exception to the principle of sufficient reason?
I general "It’s God’s will" does not seem like a sufficient explanation for why there are laws or why the laws are what they are. In a previous post motivating "the principle of sufficient reason” you discuss Pruss finding water on the top of their clothes dryer. Surly the explanation “It’s God’s will that water appears on top of Pruss’s clothes dryer”, even if true, is not a sufficient explanation for that fact. And I don’t see why "It’s gods will that there are 6 flavors of quarks" is a suffentiant explanation of that either.
I absolutely love coldplay! Instant like for mentioning them.
I like writing down my thoughts in argumentative format as I read your articles. I certainly don't expect a reply!
> The methodology people often employ, according to which evidence for God must come in the form of advanced predictions rather than explaining past evidence would rule out much of our knowledge. It would rule out almost all historical inquiry which virtually never proceeds by making predictions in advance. No one predicted, in advance, the evidence confirming the existence of Julius Caesar.
This is not true. If you have a Theory that Julius Caesar exists, you should be able to predict things based on that theory. For example, you would find a home that belonged to Julius Caesar and lots of people mentioning him. In contrast, if Caesar did not exist, then one would predict that no home would be found.
A testable prediction for God would predict future evidence which would distinguish God existing from God not existing. For example, if God existing entailed the existence of an undiscovered "House of God" which was not known to exist, and which would only exist if God existed, then that would be a testable prediction.
> Finally, such a method is clearly unworkable in the case of theism. If from the beginning of the world, the sky had spelled out “made by God,” that would provide significant evidence for the existence of God, even though it wouldn’t be an advanced prediction.
Doubtful. The sky might already spell "Made By God"... we just wouldn't know it. Additionally, you're sneakily smuggling in unrelated intuitions here. The sky reading "Made by God" is pretty convincing because it would support a God that directly and obviously intervenes in the material world, so one might expect further clear interventions. Of course, you admit that your theory of God can be adapted to account for literally any configuration of the world, which means it doesn't produce any testable predictions.
> Imagine a firing squad of 100 people all shoot their guns at you, but their guns all jam. It’s true that had they not jammed, you wouldn’t be around to observe it. Nonetheless, that they jammed is evidence that, for example, someone is conspiring to protect you, or someone paid off the firing squad.
Don't you believe in immortality independent of God? Seems like you would have to acknowledge you exist in any event. So the evidence update you get here is not "I exist", but "I survived the firing squad", which has nothing to do with your existence.
> From the fact that you exist, you get evidence your parents didn’t use effective contraception in the sex act that conceived you.
This is incorrect. We get evidence for this from the fact that we exist as humans who reproduce in a way that is mitigated by contraception. There's no need to update on your own existence.
Also, I'm not sure what "updating on your own existence" even means for someone who believes that it is metaphysically necessary for all possible minds to exist.
> prior probability of theism
My comment on that article stands.
> This argument, that theism explains why there’s something rather than nothing, comes in the form of various cosmological arguments—most notably the contingency argument.
The contingency argument doesn't do this. Reading your post and the summaries, it seems like all contingency does is say that if something exists, it's dependent on God. Which is all well and good, but it doesn't explain why God exists instead of literally nothing. It doesn't even try.
> It starts with the idea that everything has an explanation.
What's the explanation for this? It being necessary or convenient isn't an explanation. Are you positing this as brute fact, without an explanation?
> Nothing limited, whether in size or shape, can be fundamental, for the limit would need to be explained, but there’s nothing that could explain it (there’s nothing beyond this necessary foundation to limit it).
This can just be inverted. Something limited can be fundamental because the lack of limits would need to be explained, but there's nothing that could explain it.
Also... you then provide a bunch of explanations for why God is necessary. If your contention is that God is necessary because it needs no explanation, providing explanations seems to contradict that. Why are your explanations privileged?
> While the theist can explain laws in terms of the will of God, the atheist Humean must posit that the particles simply dance for no reason.
You're just kicking the "why" down the road. If I asked "Why does God make the particles dance?", you would just invent some whacky reason why God really needs particles to dance a certain way. If I asked you why God had those wacky reasons, you would simply assert that this is one of those facts that requires no further explanation. But at that point, why can't I just do the same with the natural law?
> Well, it’s quite mysterious that the laws apply to As—why don’t they apply to Bs or Cs or Ds or any of the other infinite physical structures.
Why does God make them apply only to As?
> Why do bosons have the power to interact with fermions rather than X’s
Why does God give Bosons the power to interact only with fermions? (I don't think this is even true? Doesn't gravity impact all energy fields?).
> It’s quite thoroughly surprising that the fundamental things have the powers to interact with other things that happen to exist, rather than one of the infinitely many nonexistent things.
What? What does it even mean to interact with things that don't exist? That's a nonsense statement. Even if you find some way to give it coherence, I could just say "maybe they do interact with nonexistent things! We'll just never know, because those non-existent things don't exist!".
> Section recap: Theism posits either zero explained fundamental things (if the contingency argument works) or one unexplained thing. This thing is very simple—just a single perfect being, a being of unlimited goodness. In contrast, naturalism must posit as brute:
No, you're just randomly packing a bunch of unrelated properties into one "thing" in order to contrive an explanation for the physical world. You have to arbitrarily posit that God is good, you have to arbitrarily posit that there are zero limits on God, you have to arbitrarily posit that all the properties of "goodness" are inconsistent with reality as we experience it (i.e. why we are not being wireheaded). Packaging things like this is just wordplay, you're not actually reducing complexity. The fact that you declare these things "irreducible" doesn't help either. Firstly, there's no reason why they can't be reduced. That's an arbitrary limit!!!!! Secondly, I can totally reduce "good" into a set of distinct propositions by creating an "unsetly large" (I don't think such a thing exists, but you do) catalogue of what would be good in every possible scenario. That's unsetly complex!!! Infinite evidence against theism!
> physical stuff exists there are laws the laws apply to the physical stuff that exists.
I can just do the same thing that you do and combine all these into only "one" thing. All physicalism has to posit is that there was a singularity of energy. Everything else, like laws and interactions are just inherent in the concept of that singularity of energy. I feel like I vaguely recall hearing that was how it worked in the Plank Epoch of the early universe, where "laws" were just descriptions of how that energy operated. Everything is just an inherent quality of energy.
> But the simplest laws are boring! The simplest laws just make particles move in a circle, or in a line, or in a triangle shape.
As established above, all laws are just irreducible components of an energy singularity, so they are always maximally simple. (I am applying your own arguments about the simplicity of "goodness" somehow being established because you declare Good to be not reducible).
Also, there's no reason why the laws have to be simple in the whacky sense you describe. Why not say that the movements of the energy field are governed by random laws that, once picked, are unchanging? That doesn't harm induction in any way and also doesn't disprove our universe, because you have no evidence that a random set of laws is inconsistent with our observed universe.
Continued below.
> It’s especially surprising that we hit the jackpot on the constants to such an extreme degree. If many of the constants differed by just a tiny amount—on the order of 1 part in 10^120 of the possible range of their values—no complex structures would form.
This is just about complex structures as they exist in our universe. No one has any evidence that radically different laws wouldn't create equally complex structures that only make sense under our laws. The link you provide mentions things like stars & planets & oceans, but no one suggests that any of those are *necessary*. If we were in a universe with radically different laws, we may well have equivalents to "stars, planets, and oceans", which we think no other universe could create. Basically, we have a sample size of 1, and can't know if "complex structures" are something abnormal for our universe.
> Theism also explains why the bits of the physical world interact. This requires the following 7 things go right (quoting this article of mine):
These are all explained by there being many many reasons why things interact, and many many reasons/ways in which they do interact, which roughly cancel each other out. I'm not sure why you need "time". It seems like you're just saying that you need some concept of "dimensions", which is really inextricable from what we consider to be physicality. This just boils down to the classic theist incredulity as to why physical things exist at all... but they do.
By the way: Why does God get around all this stuff? I assume you'll come up with some complicated explanation for that, so why can't naturalism get equal leeway?
> Naturalism doesn’t guarantee that there would be such a mechanism
Wouldn't panpsychism do this? Or any theory which extended consciousness to many things? The only reason that "life" is special is because of consciousness. There's no evidence that human evolution is necessary for that. Again, a sample size of 1 means that its entirely possible that broad swaths (or perhaps even every single) of natural laws produce conscious things.
> This makes perfect sense in a theistic world. God has no use for mindless, valueless automata, wholly lacking in experience. The reason to make the world is primarily so as to create valuable, conscious creatures! A theist would antecedently expect the bipedal apes on Earth to have experiences.
Why doesn't God have any use for such things? Are you positing the value of consciousness as a brute fact? A limit to God? Heresy itself? (yes you are).
> Imagine worldview comparison as akin to a game. Imagine, if we’re comparing theories 1 and 2, that a person who believes each of the theories is trying to guess what the world would be like. Whoever correctly guesses more stuff, with greater probability, wins. The theist would have correctly guessed, unlike the atheist, the existence of a physical world, the presence of laws, the applicability of the laws, the fact they produce a complex world, the presence of finely-tuned constants, and the existence of biological life.
This is comical. A Theist would guess absolutely none of this if they didn't already know it exists. This is like passing a test after being handed an answer sheet. The Theist would predict a single perfectly Good being who either creates a bunch of amazing disembodied minds who bask in glory... or perhaps that God would just sit there, content in perfection.
No theist in a trillion years would "guess" that the physical world exists as we see it today.
> Think of this as analogous to cooking a dish. Consciousness is like the dish. To make a dish, there have to be possible ingredients that together make the dish, and you have to have those ingredients. Similarly, to have conscious agents, you need certain physical states to generate consciousness, and for those physical states to exist. Theism predicts both of those things, naturalism doesn’t.
Why not? I don't see a rationale for this. If Consciousness can arise from many combinations of states or infinitely many combinations, naturalism predicts it with high (perhaps even 100%) odds.
> The argument is accepted by lots of extremely smart people, so if you find yourself thinking that it’s obviously stupid, probably you are the one who is confused.
And there are lots of very very smart Christians, Atheists, and Muslims. Don't know why you're selectively appealing to crowds here, if not to Buttress a weak argument...
> The mental pairs with the physical in a way that is harmonious. When I want my arm to go up, it goes up. My mental model of reality roughly matches the way reality actually is. The table in front of me is, in reality, several feet, and I see it as being several feet. When I’m in pain, I act to avoid that pain.
We accept this as true in order to live well, but you acknowledge that we have no "evidence" for this. It's not possible to disprove solipsism through reason alone. This argument is taking the leap of faith that we aren't Boltzmann's brains and then turning around and saying "wow, we aren't Boltzmann brains. Let's make a bunch of controversial inferences", which takes the leap of faith much too far.
> For example, one very simple pairing would be that one has an experience seeing a red wall—with its redness proportional to the amount of integrated information in a brain.
You don't know that this is simpler. Imagine "complexity of consciousness" is on a scale between 0 and infinity. You're claiming that a consciousness complexity of 0.0001 is "more simple" than a complexity of, say, 1. But simplicity isn't about whose number is smaller! This is a consistent mistake you make. You assert that things must either be 0 or infinity, because every *specific* finite number is arbitrary. But if you take the cumulative probability of all uncountably infinite finite numbers, that cancels out uncountable arbitrariness! So my point is that, with a sample size of 1, there's no way of concluding that our consciousness is any less simple than it should be. It's all finite, and the fact that every finite number is a specific finite number doesn't detract from that.
> Alternatively, one could have an inverted world, where we the agents feel pain when we feel pleasure and pleasure when we feel pain. They act to get the painful stuff rather than the pleasurable stuff. Even as they think “this sucks, I’d like to get less of it,” they act to get more of it.
Matthew Psychoanalysis Arc??!? Seems like plenty of people act like this already... which cuts against your argument!
That being said, I agree that this is a strong argument. It's the most intuitively convincing one in your whole post. I think that the best response is
A. Consciousness is not **always* harmonious. It's harmonious broadly when it increases fitness. That's a point against theism and in favor of the evolutionary explanation.
B. Consciousness is information processing, so it plays a uniquely important role in producing the actions of conscious things. In order for the same actions to happen, you would have to posit some spooky external information processing force that is distinct from the natural laws in some way... another consciousness. So there is to be some consciousness doing information processing in a way that yields good outcomes, or we would die (evolution arg). And there's no reason to posit many many consciousnesses existing in the same body, so just razor them out.
> Chief among these data points is the fact that you exist.
It's unlikely that God would create me, and the chance that he would seems to be in the ballpark of a naturalist account for why there are lots of people. Unrestricted SIA is logically impossible, for reasons I discussed in those articles.
> Now consider several classes of knowledge: It’s wrong to torture babies.
Many people don't believe this as objective external moral truth. Some people in your comments consistently disparage moral realism. Maybe your belief in this is best explained by a Will to Power or something, and not the spooky non-physical superpower.
> Married bachelors are impossible
This is just saying that (~A^A) is false, which is an axiom, or close to it.
> So then unless we have some brute rational intuition about impossibilities, we should abandon our belief that contradictions are impossible—and think it’s decently likely we’ll find them if we ever enter a wormhole.
Not sure what this means. We defined what it means for something to be false, and we said that something can't be false and true. Nothing about the definition we came up with was dependent on location. You appear to be saying that our coming up with logic itself is evidence for God. But what stops us from coming up with logic absent God? You still need it to manufacture nuclear bombs.
> The sun will rise tomorrow.
All of these arguments boil down to "I'm going to choose not to be a radical skeptic. Since I have no evidence for not being a skeptic, choosing to not be a skeptic gives me a license to believe whatever I want without evidence!". Very unpersuasive.
Continued Below
"This is comical. A Theist would guess absolutely none of this if they didn't already know it exists. This is like passing a test after being handed an answer sheet. The Theist would predict a single perfectly Good being who either creates a bunch of amazing disembodied minds who bask in glory... or perhaps that God would just sit there, content in perfection.
No theist in a trillion years would "guess" that the physical world exists as we see it today."
Hard agree.
I agree a theist would think that it's decently likely there would just be disembodied minds basking in bliss. But it's far from guaranteed. And conditional on making physical stuff, most of the rest of the stuff is predictable. So then the question is just what the odds are of making physical stuff. Hard to know, but doesn't seem that low.
‘Hard to know’? This is my meta problem with your style of argument. It is vibes about things we ought to be withholding judgement on. What possible basis could we have for endorsing any estimate of how likely it is a perfect being would choose to create matter? This is the same problem that sunk neo-platonism and Leibniz and Spinoza and Malebranche and all those hyper-rationalists. We don’t have any rational justification for having opinions on these kind of questions. We have no standards by which to evaluate claims like this. It is a completely unproductive argumentative approach: unproductive in principle.
But any time you infer anything there will be certain hard to know judgments. If you see a cup of tea in my room, you should assume I was drinking tea. But it's hard to know the prior probability that I would drink tea.
Yes.
But at least with the tea, there are pretty clear alternative explanations, and plenty of releavant evidence that can be used to give a ballpark for the prior probability. Like, you're a human being, and some humans drink tea, whereas few drink blood. Hence, my inference that you were drinking tea is more plausible than the same one made based on a teacup full of blood.
Inference is hard and we are, in general, far too confident in our inferences. But the sort of problems that face inferences about tea are very, very, very much easier to deal with than the problems that face inferences about say, whether a perfectly good being would choose to create laws of nature. Inferences about tea are based on empirical knowledge and supported by practical successes in past predictions. Inferences about the doings of a supreme intelligence are based on wind and supported by vibes.
Isn’t “physical stuff” exceptionally weird? Could you even explain the concept coherently to a disembodied mind?
And if we’re prioritizing simplicity, the existence of a whole new category of distinctly “physical” things is not very simple…
I don't think it's that weird. But if it's weird, you shouldn't think it's fundamental.
> > Another piece of evidence for theism comes from the fact that the world has so many great goods. On atheism, while it’s possible that there would be the possibility of powerful relationships and immense knowledge, it’s far from guaranteed.
Sample size of one. For all we know, our knowledge and relationships are utterly pathetic in comparison to other possible ones. You have no way of distinguishing.
> Because God can give us pleasure much more easily, theism makes better sense of the fact that our lives are mostly geared towards growth and relationships, rather than senseless pleasure.
You were a hedonist like... 12 months ago. You can't seriously say that there's an orientation towards meaning so inexplicable and overpowering that it proves God. Plenty of people want to be hedonmists, and if everyone had the chance to be hedonists, there's at least a good chance that most people would do it.
> Souls
Will have to think about this more.
> Second, on atheism, there’s no particular reason to expect souls to remain constant over time—perhaps we get a new soul every few minutes.
This is a demonstration of your silly attutude towards limits. It seems like you believe that literally any fact which isn't the fact of perfection has some limit. If we did get new souls every 5 minutes, you would say that's an arbitrary limit. If we don't get new souls every five minutes, you ask why not. If the concept of arbitrary limits is such that any description of anything is infinitely arbitrary, its a sign you've gone off the rails.
> Theism also makes sense of why we’re not in a skeptical scenario.
A skeptical scenario would render all of the evidence for Theism illusory, so Theism can't disprove it by explaining the facts better.
> we could be in a world where induction doesn’t work
Do you have evidence that we're not in such a world? Also, you should read those meta-induction papers.
> Miracles
The miracle you list is explained by the person having never lost a leg before. All this requires is for him to have defrauded an early modern government and for five people to have either lied or been mistaken about it.
This is exceptionally likily! You yourself say that if the eyewitnesses admitted that he was lying, he would have been horifically executed for obtaining a begging license! That alone could explain any number of eyewitnesses.
The world is an odd place, with trillions upon trillions of events happening every day. If this is the best miracle you can find, I am not convinced!
Also why the fuck is God healing the legs of random Spanish people instead of bombing factory farms?
> But generally people report somewhat consistent reports—rarely does God announce who he is during the experience, or proclaim that he is Allah and that Islam is true and Christianity false.
Pretty sure the Rashidun Caliphate would execute you for this one. Also the Catholic Church. Isn't there mass religiou conflict in India motivated by supposedly divine messaging? Seems suspicious...
> On atheism, it’s quite surprising that billions of people would start believing that an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good being created the universe and loves you
Uh no. It's pretty clear why people would delude themselves into believing in God under atheism.
> First, it’s much less simple than theism. Perfect being theism posits simply perfection—or alternatively, an unlimited mind. A being with specific, limited powers is much more complicated than a perfect being and has arbitrary limits—limits on its power or goodness
Lack of limits is itself an arbitrary limit. Why are you limiting the ability of God to have limits? You're also still using a whacky account of simplicity which makes no sense. But a limited God is also pretty odd so I'll just take for granted that's a bad view and accept the rest of your points.
> Second, such a view is much less simple than perfect being theism. It can’t do to state that all good things exist, because good things are incompatible
??? If things were maximally good, it would choose the maximally good version of things.
> You can try to patch this by saying that fundamental reality is the best collection of things, but this is less simple and there isn’t a single best collection of things. There are many ways reality could be that are as good as the best possible world—if a random leaf turned orange and no one saw it, that wouldn’t make the world worse.
If a leaf that no one sees in a forest turns Orange, does the leaf exist at all? Seems like the natural explanation is that the leaf is an extra unnecessary fact, so the color of the leaf need not exist at all.
> This problem doesn’t arise for God because God has only the minimum features needed for maximal goodness, which includes a maximally good will.
Ok, so just take the minimum features needed for things to be good. No leaf needed. Why the selective application?
> Third, this view doesn’t explain religious experience well or widespread theistic belief. Religious experiences make sense if a creator is trying to connect with us, but make less sense if there’s no creator (you could object that they’re predicted because they’re good, but most good things don’t happen).
This argument cuts against God too. If the objection is that not enough Good things happen, then the problem of Evil is true. If the objection is that Theistic practice is bad, then same deal.
> Fourth—and I haven’t time to go into detail—the most promising theodicy doesn’t work for axiarchism. The axiarchist, therefore, has a worse explanation of evil.
Your Theodicy is terrible. Zero explanation for animal suffering. Why am I being allowed to eat this chicken sandwitch as I write this?
> Fifth, axiarchism is inherently less plausible. Agents act for reasons, so it makes sense that an agent would pursue the good. In contrast, it’s much stranger, more mysterious, and less elegant that some generic force would pursue the good. To evaluate different reasons, it seems one has to be an agent.
Axiarchism posits strictly less things than your view. Any mystery of Goodness is enhanced if you posit both goodness and an agent. Even if the agent is aligned with Goodness, that's still an extra assertion. Also "agents act for reasons" is an unjustified limit and unsimple assertion of a brute fact!
Thanks for the lengthy post Matthew! It was a delightful read, and writing out my thoughts as I re-read it gave me even more appriciation for the thought you put into your writing.
The point made in the post is that nobody predicted Caesar *in advance*. It's a response to people who try to invalidate theism by saying that it hasn't made *advance* predictions, since the data that theists say our theory predicts (e.g. a life-permitting universe) were already known about before we presented the theory.
Also, theists don't just pack a bunch of random properties into God in order to make him explanatory: we give principled reasons for thinking that *these* properties make for the best theory. For example, a theist might say that God has only one fundamental property (e.g. perfection or limitless power), and then derive the other properties from that. If you ask "why that fundamental property instead of some other?", the answer will be something like "because that's a simple property," or something similar. Nobody ever just says "God has these properties because I like these ones."
You don't have to predict everything in advance to make some advance predictions. For example, one could say "I have a Theory that Caesar Exists. This means that if I walk into Caesar's House, I should be able to see him. If I don't see him, that's evidence against him existing". That's a testable, forward-looking prediction about seeing Caesar in his house.
Theisis do not--cannot--make those kinds of froward looking claims. At least, that's what I think. Maybe someone could supply one?
> For example, a theist might say that God has only one fundamental property (e.g. perfection or limitless power), and then derive the other properties from that.
This supposedly "fundamental" property is not really fundamental, and not very simple. If you ask a Theist what they mean by "perfection" in God, they define "perfection" as "whatever account of goodness that would result in the very complicated physical world. we see around us".
Some Theists give explanations that are different on their face, but if the world ever contradicts them, then they'll just say that it must be God's plan and that they were wrong about what's perfect. In practice, then, "perfection" is defined to be just as arbitrarily complex as the natural world it seeks to explain.
I would also ask why we are able to "derive" anything from something like "perfection". If "perfection" entails some things but not others, that's an arbitrary limit!
Modern historians don't make *any* advance predictions about Caesar, because he's been dead for thousands of years, and we've had all or most of the relevant evidence concerning him for centuries. But that doesn't stop them from doing history. That's the point.
> If you ask a Theist what they mean by "perfection" in God, they define "perfection" as "whatever account of goodness that would result in the very complicated physical world. we see around us".
But that's clearly false. Most theists just adopt the sense of "goodness" that you find in ordinary common-sense morality (see e.g. Swinburne), and then argue that a creator who was perfect according to that criteria would be fairly likely to make a world like this.
> If "perfection" entails some things but not others, that's an arbitrary limit!
No, it is exactly the opposite of an arbitrary limit. An arbitrary limit is a limit which lacks any deeper explanation (that's why it's *arbitrary*). A limit which is derived from a more fundamental property *does* have a deeper explanation, namely that it follows from a more fundamental property.
> Modern historians don't make *any* advance predictions about Caesar, because he's been dead for thousands of years, and we've had all or most of the relevant evidence concerning him for centuries.
Well, yes. The relevant forward looking predictions have already been made and tested. You could probably make more (if we found zero archeological evidence going forwards of Caesar’s existence, that would be odd), but that would be unnecessarily cumulative.
But Theists have not made any forward looking predictions at any point in time which distinguish a theistic world from a natural world! That’s a big difference.
> No, it is exactly the opposite of an arbitrary limit. An arbitrary limit is a limit which lacks any deeper explanation (that's why it's *arbitrary*).
1. Perfection entailing some things but not others is an arbitrary property of perfection. There is no higher-order property which explains why perfection has limits.
2. Bulldog’s use of the term “arbitrary limit” includes literally every limit. I was pointing out that all explanations have limits, and since reality is not turtles all the way down, “arbitrary” limits are inevitable. I think this shows why his use of the word “arbitrary” is wrong. Instead of saying this are metaphysically impossible because of arbitrariness, we should use physical experience.
"But Theists have not made any forward looking predictions at any point in time which distinguish a theistic world from a natural world! That’s a big difference."
They have frequently predicted Jesus's second coming (if Jesus actually counts as God), and have always, always been disappointed.
>. If you have a Theory that Julius Caesar exists, you should be able to predict things based on that theory. For example, you would find a home that belonged to Julius Caesar and lots of people mentioning him. In contrast, if Caesar did not exist, then one would predict that no home would be found.
That's retrodiction.
"...just exists for no deeper reason. A theory that says that the fundamental things exist for no reason is much worse than a theory that explains why they exist"
I think God/perfect being as a theory has weak explanatory power and I have personally made observations that lend credence to an alternate theory (I suffer). Also, God as a theory requires another theory to explain why God exists rather than nothing. It's just adding another arbitrary causative step.
I disagree with most of what's written here, and though there's too much to respond to in its entirety, I think the main problem is being overly seduced by the word "limitless" and taking it to automatically confer some great explanatory benefit. I think "limitlessness" is helpful only insofar as it yields simpler unambiguous descriptions, and that while it may do so in many cases, it doesn't obviously do so in God's case. You set up a dichotomy between limitlessness and arbitrary limits; but the first option is either inconsistent when applied to God's attributes or else it's really two different things, arbitrary limitlessness and non-arbitrary limitlessness. The former is taken to be "a maximally consistent collection of such-and-such properties, but not strictly greater than all other such maximal collections," whereas the latter is "a maximally consistent collection of such-and-such properties which really is in some sense greater than all competitors." I don't think arbitrary limitlessness is that much better, if at all, from arbitrary limitedness, and it might be worse. And I think a case needs to be made that "goodness" has a uniquely best manifestation. (And that it's a manifestation also of a specific, distinct entity, rather than, say, the mereological sum of all existents!)
The other thing is of course that many will deny there's such a fundamental property as axiological goodness. I don't see much problem in rejecting it and regarding it as a vague mishmash of various things that humans find psychologically impressive and/or comforting. Even many moral realists aren't aesthetic realists, to give a parallel; not many of us feel too compelled to imagine "coolness" is a real, psychology-independent property that our sixth sense tells us truly inheres in Kurt Cobain but not Sheldon Cooper.
I think limitlessness is inherently a virtue. If two theories are equally simple to describe but one says that space is endless and the other says it's exactly 48293473890732189473123094 meters across, seems the endless one is more probable. I also think theism is simple to describe, but we've argued about that plenty before.
I think you should at least not be super confident that there is no such property as axiological goodness. But this means theism has some probability of being simple. I agree it's a bit of a cost to theism that one of the best routes towards its simplicity involves the idea that value is a real property rather than a linguistic construct, but I find that view plausible enough that I don't think it's much of a cost. There are also other routes towards theism's simplicity that I discuss in the linked article, but most will probably require thinking value is real .
>If two theories are equally simple to describe but one says that space is endless and the other says it's exactly 48293473890732189473123094 meters across, seems the endless one is more probable
It should seem the finite one is more probable because our ordinary base of knowledge mostly (if not completely) includes knowledge about finite things and infinite things cause paradoxes/contradictions in even most formal systems that try to operationalize a useful form of infinity. And in general, even this seeming should be discarded in favor of empirical evidence, because it's not like you're just gonna guess the size of the universe from the armchair.
> two theories are equally simple to describe but one says that space is endless and the other says it's exactly 48293473890732189473123094 meters across
Bulldog. "Simple" question for you. You have two Theories. Theory A says that the Universe is endless. Theory B says that the Universe is finite, but we don't know exactly what its dimensions are.
What is the prior probability of A compared to B.
>I think limitlessness is inherently a virtue. If two theories are equally simple to describe but one says that space is endless and the other says it's exactly 48293473890732189473123094 meters across, seems the endless one is more probable. I also think theism is simple to describe, but we've argued about that plenty before.
I agree it's often a virtue; my point was that it's only so insofar as it shortens descriptions. Consider Newtonian universe A which follows these four laws:
1-3: Newton's three laws
4: Every object has a speed between 0 and 100 mph at all times,
versus Newtonian universe B which follows these four laws:
1-3: Newton's three laws
4: Every object can have any speed in the non-negative real numbers.
You might say that universe B is simpler than universe A, since it's less limited. And I do agree with that in *some* sense. But I would say the better account of why it's simpler is because we could actually just shave off universe B's fourth law entirely and get a completely equivalent set of mathematical constraints (and which is then a strict subset of universe A's constraints, hence unambiguously smaller/simpler). That's what really matters here, and I think that's what this "limitlessness as a virtue" business is really pointing to, at least insofar as it should be taken to be correct.
In God's case, it's not obvious to me that limitlessness is playing the same role here of allowing you to shave off lots of bits of information. That depends entirely on how many ways there are to be a super-duper good thing. If there are many ways, and if it's going to take a lot of bits to specify any one (thus leading arguably to low individual priors), then it's not necessarily going to be clear how to add them all up, or even adduce any lower-bound estimates for this sum.
>But this means theism has some probability of being simple.
Sure, though by this kinda-second-order reasoning (e.g., the considerations I just raised), it also has some probability of being infinitely complex. I don't know how these are supposed to balance out against each other. And even ignoring that, I'm not sure the probability of its being simple is high enough to help much. Suppose I grant that it has a 1 in Graham's number probability of being simple. I'm sure you disagree with that being reasonable; are there any quantitative considerations you can use to provide a higher lower bound to us hidebound axiology skeptics?
Not addressing all of this, as there are too many commenters (though you're consistently among the most insightful and thoughtful!) Just to address the bit at the end, if you don't know the prior of theism, you should sort of average the conceivable priors. So if you think 80% chance theism has a prior or 0 and 20% chance it has a prior of 80% on the ideal theory, you should think it's overall prior is 16%. Then, of course, you look at the evidence.
I just disagree with your intuition--even if they can be described with equal ease, one without arbitrary limits is better.
Could you elaborate what exactly you mean by "explanation"? I'm feeling that the crux of our disagreement lies somewhere there. For instance, why is "design" an explanation for the car, while, "gladiolus" is not an explanation for the car? Or why saying "God did it" is not enough explanation for the creationist? - Surely God can explain all the seemingness of evolution, so why postulate both God and evolution at the same time?
> everything has an explanation
Okay...
> From this, we learn that there must be something that exists necessarily—that can’t be otherwise—that explains the world.
This doesn't follow. From the fact that everything has an explanation we can deduce that the world has an explanation and the explanation of the world has an explanation and an explanation of explanation of world has an explanation and so on. Where do we encounter the concept of "necessity" in this chain of reasoning?
> First of all, it seems like this thing can’t be fundamentally limited.
Why?
> Nothing limited, whether in size or shape, can be fundamental, for the limit would need to be explained, but there’s nothing that could explain it
Just like lack of limit also has to be explained. We've agreed that *everything* has an explanation, haven't we?
> (there’s nothing beyond this necessary foundation to limit it).
Where does this come from? Of course there is something else - an explanation for the foundation. And explanation for the explanation and so on.
Clearly, the idea of a necessary foundation that is the first explanation for everything else directly contradicts the the initial premise that there is an explanation for everything. It's like doing all the steps in the proof that there is no largest natural number and then saying: "therefore there is a largest natural number and lets call it N".
Something has an explanation if there's something that makes it non-mysterious and explains why it is the case. We can get a proximate explanation of this message, for example, by saying I wrote it.
I was assuming that there couldn't be infinite explanatory chains. The reason for this is that I accept causal finitism, that chains of explanation can't be infinite. Even if I didn't, positing an infinite chain doesn't explain why it's there (if each train car is pushed by an earlier one, that doesn't explain why there's the entire chain of train cars; if a ball randomly popped into being and started falling, its position at every time T would be explained by its position at time T/2, but you could still wonder why it popped into being at all).
The idea is that the necessary thing would be self-explanatory--something about it would explain why it exists.
> Something has an explanation if there's something that makes it non-mysterious and explains why it is the case.
You can't explain what "explanation" means using the verb "explain". Try tabooing it and all its synonyms.
Causality is very much on point and mysteriousness is relevant, but how do we measure it? And why does something appear mysterious to a person while something else does not? How does this cognitive algorithm work? I think if you try to address specifically the examples that I mentioned (gladiolus failing to explain cars, creationist failing to dismiss evolution with appeals to God), we will be able to breach the inferential gap between us.
> I was assuming that there couldn't be infinite explanatory chains.
I would appreciate if you explicitly mention such assumptions in your posts - it would significantly improve their comprehensibility.
> The idea is that the necessary thing would be self-explanatory--something about it would explain why it exists.
How is it in any way different from not having an explanation? What different expectations people who believe that "everything has an explanation and there is one thing that is an explanation of itself" have compared to people who believe that "Not everything has an explanation - there is one thing that doesn't have any"?
"On naturalism, no such expectation is present. Even if you think that consciousness is just physical—a position which I believe is almost certainly false—it still is a bit surprising that physical things of a certain complexity simply turn conscious. An atheist would have no reason to expect this to be the case, and yet it is—just another fact better explained by theism."
We do not expect that "physical things of a certain complexity simply turn conscious." In fact, there are many very smart people telling us every day why it is that AI cannot and will not turn conscious, despite how complex they are (now, I actually think they could be wrong, but my point is that this is not an actual expectation). And there are plenty of incredibly complex things that exist, like a tree or a spider web, or a coral reef or a nuclear submarine, that no one expects to be conscious.
What we DO expect to be conscious are complex living organisms that are incredibly vulnerable to dying in 10,000 different ways on a daily basis if they don't take a massive number of complex actions in order to simply not die, and which must survive for at least a certain period of days or years or decades in order to reproduce and raise their offspring to also reach that age before their extremely vulnerable bodies die. Because if those vulnerable organisms could not accomplish those tasks, they would not be here. And they ARE here. So what is your possible method by which these organisms could take complex actions that require calculating and reacting to a huge variety of unpredictable input on an hourly basis, and avoid all the ways to die, if not consciousness? You say it is surprising, and yet you give no account of any other possible alternative. I don't find it surprising at all, indeed I can't think of any other way they could possibly survive. If you can't provide an alternative way it could happen, without consciousness, and you have no evidence it is possible to happen in any other way (which you can't, because we have no examples), then you shouldn't find it surprising. Apparently it is simply the only way a very vulnerable-to-dying organism can not die.
Without consciousness to experience the feeling of hunger, why would an animal ever go out looking for something to eat? Without consciousness to experience pain, why would it ever avoid all the painful things that can kill it? Without fear, why would it hide from a predator instead of just allowing itself to be eaten? Without feeling horny, why would it seek out a mate and go through all the effort of courting or fighting to win the mate, or reproduce? You may think that a "zombie" could simply be programmed in some manner to seek food and avoid being eaten without the accompanying conscious sensation to motivate it, but that is completely hypothetical and you have no reason to believe this could work. Perhaps feeling hungry or afraid or horny is simply the easiest possible way to motivate an organism to expend the energy on taking the actions necessary to stay alive. Why do you need more of an explanation than that?
Also, if there is some magical supernatural intermediary between the physical hardware of a brain necessary for consciousness and the actual experience of "mind" the brain produces, then why are we able to do something like inject anesthetic into your foot, and doing so makes it so your brain can no longer consciously experience the sensation of your foot existing? The anesthesia isn't in your brain, it's in your foot. But it interferes with the communication of receptors between your foot and your brain, and when you shut down that communication, as far as your brain is concerned, your foot no longer exists, until the anesthesia wears off. But if it's God inserting some non-tangible supernatural intermediary between brain and the "mind" arising from the brain, are you somehow blocking or anesthetizing the supernatural "mind" by numbing your foot? I don't see why there's any need for an intermediary at all. And why can we also make the mind totally disappear with drugs/general anesthesia? If the mind is supernatural, why do physical drugs injected in the bloodstream make it turn off?
We DO know how the brain works. Just like we know how the lungs work and the bloodstream and the liver and everything else. They're all pretty weird. The lungs take in oxygen and circulate it to our cells via the bloodstream, and emit carbon dioxide. All of our muscles and nerves require electricity to run. The neurons in our brain run on electricity and emit neurotransmitters to communicate and when they do that in certain portions of the brain it creates a conscious experience. It's been no more or less explained than how any other organ functions, you just aren't satisfied with the explanation. There's no "hard" problem here, other than that theists will never accept that a conscious experience arises from the functioning of the brain because they simply don't want to accept. It would not matter just how detailed and specific you got, they still would say "but that doesn't explain it" because they don't WANT it to explain it. Someone could take the same type of objection to how the lungs emit carbon dioxide (if for some reason it violated their sensibilities to believe that they do), and keep asking but how? but why? even once it's been thoroughly explained. But they don't, because they don't have a religious belief about lungs, only about brains and minds. I know you will possibly disagree, because scientists and philosophers who believe there's a "hard problem" insist that it's there while others say there's no problem. But give me an example of how it COULD be explained to you that the brain produces consciousness. What type of evidence would you accept? It seems to me that no matter detailed and granular the explanation got, a committed theist would still say "well you're just jumping from A to B, there must still be a supernatural A.5 in between there somewhere".
(1) I agree with almost all of this.
(2) Your grandmother sounds cool.
(3) It's worth remembering that the traditional Thomistic arguments for theism can be formulated in lots of ways, many of which are not subject Schmid and Linford's (rather strong) objections to Feser's version. Shameless plug: https://deveradoctrina.substack.com/p/the-best-version-of-the-five-ways
Yeah, I don't hate your revamped argument from motion.
To be clear, it's not *my* argument: people like Geach, Lamont, and Martin defended it before, and it's fundamentally a version of Aquinas' first way. But I'm glad you don't hate it!
Man, you are fantastic! Keep up the good work, James. Sorry, our first conversation began with me being annoyed at you (falsely believing that you are an eternal torture infernalist).
Well thank you! At risk of reducing your opinion of me, I'm less confident of universalism than I used to be, though the only version of infernalism that I find plausible is one that most people would find palatable (the author of this blog has described it as "not insane," which is high praise).
Yeah, I guess, that is a downgrade but at least you did not move to eternal torture infernalism, but if you actually did, then that would certainly make my opinion of you go down a lot. I have low opinion of eternal torture believers.
So, ultimately, I still have a pretty high opinion of you even after that worldview downgrade.
I might write a post about my view of hell pretty soon. Hopefully my reputation survives intact :)
How do you reconcile utilitarianism and theism? Wouldn't God have created a universe tiled with hedonium? The free will defense doesn't work either.
I'm not a hedonist. And you might think certain great pleasure depend in some metaphysically necessary way on certain states of affairs.
Forgive me, but I don't understand this. Why couldn't God simply create a universe filled with nothing but utilitronium (whatever that turns out to be)? The Problem of Evil seems especially problematic on any kind of welfarism.
Well, I'm an objective list theorist. I think relationships are of great value. But a world like ours is plausibly optimal for long-term relationship building--where we're vulnerable and have the opportunity to help each other out. There also might be all sorts of unknown goods https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-theres-evil
Thank you for this! I will definitely check it out.
I am a Classical Utilitarian (Hedonistic Act Utilitarian similar to Bentham and Sidgwick) and I believe in God, and as Bentham's Bulldog said - "And you might think certain great pleasure depend in some metaphysically necessary way on certain states of affairs."
Bentham writes "The atheist denies the existence of the fundamental cause of all things"
Atheists deny the existence of a god or gods. It seems clear that the concept of god is not synonymous with "the fundamental cause of all things."
Apollo, Augustus or even Capitoline Jove has ever been associated with the fundamental cause of all things, yet all were seen by millions as god. One of these was an actual real-life person, though he only became a god after his death. But there were others such as the Eqyptian Pharaohs who were gods in life.
A god is a supernatural being who almost always has properties other than "creator of all things" that are of principal interest to theists.
For example. I am an atheist. I have no problem with a creator of all things, which you can call god if you will. I see this Creator (god) as omnipresent, meaning existing throughout all of spacetime and directly acting on reality and so is also omnipotent. It has no past, no future, no there. All is here and now.
Our reality is so fundamentally different from its reality that there can be no common framework, no possibility for understanding, and so no basis for a relation. Other than a name to be attached to what we perceive as the beginning of all things (which it sees as here and now), it has no other meaning we can grok.
This sterile concept is not what people need, want or conceive of God. But that is all your restrictive definition gets you. What good is that?
A theory doesn't need to make advance predictions to be good. It can postdict what has already been seen.
But the problem is, it has to actually do that.
Suppose I have some theory. The experimentalists go and measure something, and then I go "just what I predicted because ..."
It is often possible to make up an "explanation" for many different experimental results. This is especially true if the theory is wordy and vague. If the theory is precise and mathematical, sometimes there really is only a few observations it can explain. Theories like "elan vital" or "phlogisten" had wordy "explanations" for everything.
Of course flame rises, flames produce light and it is the nature of all light things to rise towards the great lights in the heavens. Of course flames fall, they are effected by gravity, the dying flame pulled down towards its grave as all things must be. Of course flames point towards the sun, the sun is the greatest light of all, the ultimate source of all flame and flames naturally yearn to return home.
If you had never seen a refrigerator taken apart and had no idea what might be inside, it would be easy to mistake "refrigerator" for being a simple and fundamental thing. Or at least a box imbued with the fundamental essence of cold.
Imagine being a computer game programmer, with access to a CRAZY HUGE amount of computer power, trying to make a highly realistic game. Newtonian mechanics is helpful, you can simulate it to make the objects move realistically. Full quantum field theory is even more helpful. You have the compute to simulate it. And this means your players can have realistic chemical reactions and all sorts of things.
It is unclear how theism helps this game developer. How would they write a program to simulate god? What would this program do in the game?
The "prediction only" rule in science is throwing out evidence, but it pro
The Roman's considered that the best explanation for the comet that appeared during the games in 44bc honoring him was that Julius Ceasar was a god and so he was deified.
It has always seemed to me that there's a bias in favor of the idea that nothing existing is more fundamental than something existing. And therefore the onus is on showing how things could come into being out of the more fundamental nothingness. Things just are seems as good an explanation of things being as anything else and it requires no search for the elusive evidence of a cause.
In our direct experiences, we find that everything that exists has a cause, while everything that doesn't exist does not require a cause for not existing. That's why the question of "why is there something rather than nothing?" makes sense, while "Why is there nothing rather than something?" doesn't. Nothing requires no explanation, but everything else does.
>In our direct experiences, we find that everything that exists has a cause,
What you find is a mundane linguistic fact that people use words like "cause" and "exist" to categorize ways of talking about matter that was recycled to be more useful. Wood doesn't magically change its essence during a manufacturing operation and out pops a table, yet people still say things like "The manufacturer caused this table to come into existence by chopping up those trees" because at one point the same wood that was in the table was part of trees and wasn't useful for humans to call a table. We never observe new things popping into existence, just old stuff being recycled into more or less useful stuff.
Does the stuff become more or less useful without any cause? Do you wake up one day and discover that, for no reason at all, less useful wood (in the form of a log) has become more useful wood (in the form of a chair) without any explanation for how that happened?
No, but what I'm saying is that ordinary discourse doesn't presuppose philosophical theories of causation and existence. These are mere heuristics people use to talk about the world that are justified by their success in interpersonal communication, not by anything metaphysical.
Do you believe that change occurs without a cause? Because if we want to leave ordinary talk behind us and move to the realm of philosophical theories of causation then I can just say "There is no case known in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinity, because in all efficient causes following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or only one. Now to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient causes, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. But if in efficient causes it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God."
My metapoint is that there isn't a unified usage of words like "change" or "cause" or "explanation," and so there isn't a hidden reality or absolute structure behind people's usages of these words.
To address your first question about change occurring without a cause - sure, we can consider the indeterminate nature of radioactive decay as one such example, or the collapse of the wavefunction. These aren't standardly thought to have causes or explanations, but we can weave a story saying "X collection of atoms have a Y% chance of decaying in Z time" and consider the story we tell to be a cause or explanation, because there's no fact of the matter that determines what is a cause or explanation besides our willingness to ascent to these usages of the terms.
For your God example, that just passes the buck of explanation or existence onto God, and we can invoke metagods to keep passing the buck, or abandon the presuppositions we have about using words like causation or existence, or some other option. I don't think there's anything remotely compelling or theoretically virtuous about believing in God from the argument you gave, in other words.
That everything has a cause seems a matter of faith. And causes and effects blur into each other. I couple that with a search for the appearance of "nothing" and it never
shows. And as it stands causes such as they can be posited for the sake of craft or whatever apply to discrete phenomenon and not to ultimate wholes. "Cause" is a working concept for the affairs of the world but it is in no way an iron law.
>Therefore, we have some non-physical faculty of intuition that allows us to grasp certain truths about the physical world, mathematics, modal facts, logical facts, and so on. This faculty is utterly bizarre and mysterious on atheism, while it makes perfect sense on theism.
This is essentially the evidence that caused C. S. Lewis to abandon atheistic materialism in favor of pantheistic idealism. Working out these ideas, and through some of the contradictions of pantheism, led then to become a theist, and later a Christian. He lays out this line of argument particularly well in his book “Miracles” in chapters 2 and 3. I wrote a post elaborating a bit on this (https://open.substack.com/pub/flyinglionwithabook/p/c-s-lewis-on-rationality-and-moral?r=fczlp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web)
Though for Lewis the fact that rationality works took priority over moral realism, though they both push the same direction. He wrote:
“All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning. If the feeling of certainty which we express by words like ‘must be’ and ‘therefore’ and ‘since’ is a real perception of how things outside our own minds really ‘must’ be well and good But if this certainty is merely a feeling in our own minds and not a genuine insight into realities beyond them—if it merely represents the way our minds happen to work—then we can have no knowledge. Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.
“It follows that no account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight. A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For the theory would Itself have been reached by thinking and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course be itself demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument that proved no argument was sound—a proof that there are no such things as proofs—which is nonsense.”
You bring up the existence of hard to deny miracles, but God being willing to interfere with the world in this way brings up what I think is a problem for your theodicy. In your other article where you discuss theodicy, you suggest that God allows bad things to happen in the world because there is some value to living in a world that has the characteristics of an indifferent universe. If that is the case, though, then why does God interfere with miracles in some cases but not in others? If God is willing to upend the pretense of an indifferent universe in order to have a beggar regrow his lost leg, then why didn't God decide to do the same in order to prevent the Holocaust, or any other number of smaller evils, perhaps all the people who lost a leg, and despite intense prayer did not have it grow back? It seems like you have to either be committed to the premise that God wants us to live in a universe that seems indifferent, and therefore avoids performing miracles, or admit that God is perfectly fine with making the universe not indifferent in certain cases, which immediately brings forward the question of why God didn't do so in other cases, including cases in which the cause for divine intervention seems stronger. Is there a value to an indifferent universe, in which case God shouldn't be performing miracles, or is God willing to intervene in the universe with miracles, in which case the justification for other evils under the pretense of an indifferent universe is undermined?
Good point, and this is something I've thought about a lot. My solution: it is not God who performs the miracles, but other supernatural beings!
And what supernatural beings would these be? Angels or saints that have dominion over smaller areas of human interest than the all-powerful and all-concerned God? It's an interesting theory, I'll give you that.
Yeah.