I'm not sure how you get to God being good and an afterlife existing, from the fact that a God probably created the universe to contain conscious life.
I can think of many reasons why a simple, powerful being might decide to create a universe where conscious life can evolve. I'm not convinced of Nonmechanistic Rationalism, but I could probably think of reasons other than God being all good for why he might want to have people have this ability.
In general, it just seems suspicious that this God is so similar to the religious beliefs people have held for millennia. For this not to be a coincidence, we need a God who gave us some vague intuitions about him, but only enough so that various different religions exist on earth, all somewhat similar to each other, but clearly they can't all be right. And then he didn't really do anything else. He doesn't care whether we find out what kind of God is the real God, or he is content with us never being sure and lots of people being atheists. Wouldn't God either just make us believe in him completely, just not care what we think, or trust that we will figure out the truth eventually? Why only give us some vague inclination to be religious?
A good God is simpler, and only a perfect God naturally predicts all possible people exist.
It's not suspicious if you think God equipped people with faculties to recognize the divine. That's like saying "isn't it suspicious that you think there's an external world, as people have for centuries."
A good God can be derived from a single simple property like perfection, unlike an indifferent God. Also, an unlimited mind would be good because the good is desirable by definition. https://benthams.substack.com/p/10-ways-god-can-be-simple
This seems to be conflating "simplicity" in the sense of "easy to describe using human language that was designed to communicate about the sorts of things humans like to communicate about" and "simplicity" in the sense of "more likely to exist in the world without needing some powerful force (evolution, design) to cause its existence"
Going from the idea of God as the Creator to something similar to human conceptions of God is a VERY big step. Particularly when you consider the *properties* ascribed to God by popular religions, which all date from a time when the human perception of the universe was radically different than the modern.
And yet this radical change in human perception of reality did not lead to new conceptions of God like it had during the Axial Age. This seems strange. The only thing that makes sense to me is the sort of entity sufficient to be Creator would be something beyond our comprehension, and so we simply cannot make such a change. Attempting such plunges us into unbelief. Those who wish to retain the benefits of belief in a mythology wisely refrain from doing so.
Consider a simple omnipresent God, present throughout four-space. Such a God would have no concept of past or present nor of location. For it, all is here and now.
This is so totally different from our perceptions of these things we call time and place that it would be impossible to comprehend such an entity.
Oh the idea is just that God (indirectly) designed the general cognitive faculties that lead people to believe in God in part because he wanted them to know of his existence. It's not some like special extra divine sense organ!
1. God created and fine-tuned the universe so that intelligent life would exist?
2. God created and fine-tuned the universe so that humans would exist?
3. God has interfered with the universe's natural functioning since its creation (for example, to nudge evolution to produce us rather than something a bit less like us)?
How does that work? If they're general, how are they led to believe in God in particular? That would seem to imply that they're not entirely general. What I'm asking for is how this is supposed to work, cognitively speaking.
You put your finger on a really important point: There are two readings of reality, one tragic and one hopeful. The more one seriously reflects on suffering and evil, the harder it becomes to sustain a neutral middle reading. It's easy to dismiss the hopeful view as dishonest, head-in-the-sand wishful thinking. But the tragic reading of reality is often equally motivated by obtuse, uncurious cynicism. At least the hopeful reading doesn't typically mask itself in a veneer of fearless intellectual sophistication. You might enjoy W Norris Clarke's book 'The One and the Many.' Your points about Pan's Labyrinth reminded me of these passages:
"I am now faced with a radical intellectual choice between two ultimate alternatives on the meaning of my life: Either there exists a positive Infinite Fullness of being and goodness, […] and then my human nature becomes luminously and completely meaningful, intelligible, sense-making, and my life is suffused with hope of fulfillment. Or in fact, there exists no such real Infinite at all. And then my nature conceals in its depth a radical defect of meaningfulness, of coherence, an unfillable void of unintelligibility, a kind of tragic emptiness: a natural desire that defines my nature as a dynamic unity, but is in principle unfulfillable, incurably frustrated, "a useless passion," as Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist atheist puts it, oriented by its very nature toward a non-existent void, toward nothing real, kept going only by an ineradicable illusion [...] But what good reason can one have for choosing darkness over light, illusion over meaning, for not choosing the light? Only if the darkness is more intelligible? But this does not make sense! Why not then accept my nature as a meaningful gift, pointing the way to what is, rather than to what is not? […] This unique kind of "argument," based on my own inner experience, can lead me to a profoundly reasonable affirmation that a real Infinite must exist as my final end…" (227-228).
What this analysis misses is that propensity to be hopeful vs pessimistic is a psychological property of an agent. I can be in heaven and still be depressed, cursing my own and others' existence, and upset at all the evils that God allows to occur outside of heaven. If I'm not psychologically constituted to be moved by God's graces and all that, this emotional appeal is moot. And if I am psychologically constituted to like the universe better without a God, this emotional appeal is also moot. It's like telling a chocolate hater that all the furniture in heaven and the air you'll breathe will be made out of edible chocolate.
Sure, the propensity to be hopeful is a psychological property. But it isn’t just a psychological property. And besides, as rational agents, we are capable of reflecting on and influencing our psychological constitutions. The plasticity of our brains and malleability of our preferences has been well established.
To take your example, imagine heaven really was an eternity of eating chocolate. Wouldn’t it be pretty irrational to not at least try to learn how to like chocolate? There are any number of ways someone could attempt this:
-They could go to therapy to investigate whether or not they associate chocolate with some childhood trauma.
-They could undertake an intensive regimen of exposure therapy to accustom themselves to the taste of chocolate.
-They could try the highest quality chocolates available.
-They could educate themselves about the human palate and learn to identify and appreciate the intricate and perfectly balanced flavor profile of a well made chocolate.
-They could talk to chocolatiers and watch documentaries to learn about the passion and creativity that goes into making quality chocolate.
-Failing all of these, they could trust in God’s assurance that they will become capable of liking chocolate when they get to heaven
If someone refused to undertake these measures, they’d have no one to blame but themselves for not liking heaven. You write that you would be depressed and cursing your own existence and that of others etc even if you were in heaven. Do you realize that you’ve essentially described the psychological profile of demons? Are you really so sure that you haven’t made a mistake in your reasoning that even an omniscient being couldn’t give you a satisfactory answer? Do you think that your psychological constitution is so determined and unchangeable that it couldn’t healed or redeemed even in heaven?
>Sure, the propensity to be hopeful is a psychological property. But it isn’t just a psychological property.
I don't know what this means.
>And besides, as rational agents, we are capable of reflecting on and influencing our psychological constitutions. The plasticity of our brains and malleability of our preferences has been well established.
OK, somebody who's suicidal reflects and still ends up being suicidal. I think this is an empirical fact that happens every day, although probably your faith will prevent you from affirming it because there's some sort of wishful thinking among Christians that people can just e.g. cure themselves from cognitive blindspots, depression, autism, or other psychological defects just by praying or whatever. I don't think that's true, faith healing doesn't work, and God is pretty stupid to design the physical world such that there can be physical defects in peoples' brains that cause them not to be able to e.g. believe in God (consuming biased evidence), or rationally entertain God's existence (mental disabilities), or to appreciate heaven (just something I stipulated).
>To take your example, imagine heaven really was an eternity of eating chocolate. Wouldn’t it be pretty irrational to not at least try to learn how to like chocolate?
No, rationality is constituted by agents accomplishing their desires. Practically, you could make an appeal to someone's metadesire for pleasure by asking them to change their preferences. But imagine that heaven was an eternity of eating feces. you try as you might but you just can't appreciate the taste of eating shit, because your psychological profile is constituted by other brain modules that prevent you from consuming unsanitary and unhealthy food. This is the state of nature we find ourselves in - there are various causes outside of an agent's control that can and do sometimes prevent them from associating God with happiness or whatever.
>If someone refused to undertake these measures, they’d have no one to blame but themselves for not liking heaven.
Well, God kind of set up the link between people's physical bodies and their souls, right? It's God's fault that he designed a physical system like the brain that forces people to have beliefs and desires that prevent them from being a good Christian.
>You write that you would be depressed and cursing your own existence and that of others etc even if you were in heaven. Do you realize that you’ve essentially described the psychological profile of demons?
It's also dumb for God to create demons - supernatural beings that aren't limited by e.g. physical causation in the brain that forces them to rebel against Christianity.
>Are you really so sure that you haven’t made a mistake in your reasoning that even an omniscient being couldn’t give you a satisfactory answer? Do you think that your psychological constitution is so determined and unchangeable that it couldn’t healed or redeemed even in heaven?
God could just manipulate people's minds, but then Christianity loses any putative benefits of the free will theodicy, and it makes it a practical joke that evil exists. Why doesn't God just make it psychologically impossible for us to be unhappy all the time? We have to wait until we die? Unlucky.
The propensity to be hopeful is also a rational property. We are capable of feeling that a situation will have a hopeful outcome. We are also capable of judging based on rational reflection whether a situation will have a hopeful outcome. These are separate faculties, and sometimes they conflict. This is the whole point of exposure therapy: to gradually help someone to recognize that their psychological constitution is out of touch with objective reality.
This is why it doesn’t make sense to conflate rationality with desire fulfillment. People can obviously have desires that we can easily recognize as irrational and harmful if acted on (e.g. pedophilia, sadistic torture). To the extent we are capable, we have a responsibility to change, or at least not act on such desires. Whether or not we are subjectively capable of doing so doesn’t change their objective moral and rational character.
And this is the problem with your scenario of heaven being like eating feces for all eternity. Eating feces does not contribute to human flourishing. Heavenly bliss would. A more accurate analogy would be: “Imagine that water tasted like vomit to you.” That would be awful, and it might not be your fault - but that doesn’t change the fact that water is necessary for survival and flourishing.
I’m not claiming we have an unlimited ability to adjust our preferences. The whole point of Christianity is that we are in absolute need a savior. Our predicament isn’t our fault, but that doesn’t thereby totally erase our responsibility to do what we can to cooperate with God’s efforts to solve it.
>These are separate faculties, and sometimes they conflict.
What you're making are a host of empirical claims that I'm not willing to accept. You might as well say "Everyone has a sensus divinitatis bestowed upon them by God." I don't think any of what Christian philosophers have presumed from the armchair about psychological faculties has come to fruition. Decades of neuroscience and cognitive science have not substantiated various postulates like moral faculties, rational faculties, intellectual faculties, or whatever else philosophers have postulated throughout the ages.
That was my point - God has apparently set up the world so that people's psychological profiles are accidents of their evolutionary history. This can result in, among other things, people psychologically wired to not believe in God because they don't find the evidence compelling, people who have existed before the various Christian historical claims and thus have never been able to hear about Christianity, people who are cognitively disabled to the point they can't entertain complex thoughts like "Christianity exists," and so on. In order to rectify all these issues, Christians have to make a lot of ad hoc assumptions that aren't well supported by any evidence, like that everybody has a divine sense or through faith healing they can overcome whatever challenge faces them.
>This is why it doesn’t make sense to conflate rationality with desire fulfillment.
I think there's various ways to construe rationality, but "objective" rationality is just another philosophical term of art that's not grounded in anything "objective" as you would put it, but is just a result of misinterpreting language. If I want to go the North Pole and I decide to accomplish my goal by walking across latitudinal lines, I am being irrational because I am frustrating my desires. I can't reach the North Pole by traveling solely along East-West lines - so my choice of action will not fulfill my desire of reaching the North Pole, that is, I am being irrational. Let's take a look at your putative examples of irrational goals next:
>People can obviously have desires that we can easily recognize as irrational and harmful if acted on (e.g. pedophilia, sadistic torture).
Right, but these are "irrational" insofar as most people don't want to live in a society where their own kids are raped or where they'll be subject to torture. It would be irrational to permit child rape because most people don't approve of child rape, that is, they have a preference against child rape. If most people didn't disapprove of child rape, then I'm not sure in what sense it would be "irrational" to construct social norms around proactively raping children. You're free to call this "irrational," but it bears no family resemblance to the other class of irrational things - actions that would frustrate the desires of a group of people.
>And this is the problem with your scenario of heaven being like eating feces for all eternity. Eating feces does not contribute to human flourishing.
Take the following analogy with dietary preferences: are feces "objectively" untasty? Nope, there's various animals and bacteria and so on that consume animal feces as part of their healthy diet. It doesn't make sense for feces to be "objectively" tasty or not - tastiness is a measure of a subject's preference for a specific dish. Calling something tasty independent of a subject's preference for it is incoherent - you're free to stipulate it, but if it has nothing to do with dietary satisfaction and doesn't seem to be discoverable in principle (or you have to resort to vague and slippery empirical statements you don't have evidence for like "Well I just have a faculty for detecting objective taste/reason/God), then I don't get why I or anyone else would care.
You're also still missing my point - I was arguing that the contingent ways in which God allowed humans to evolve actively frustrates the ability to communicate with him, due to various psychological defects under the Christian story being possible like e.g. somebody just not wanting to go to heaven or to meet God.
>Our predicament isn’t our fault, but that doesn’t thereby totally erase our responsibility to do what we can to cooperate with God’s efforts to solve it.
Yeah I didn't say that, I said it was God's fault that he was screwing other people over by letting the universe evolve so as to produce humans who are psychologically constituted as to be incapable of desiring a relationship with him (and various other faults). This was in response to your comment where you seemed to imply that all humans necessarily have the power to just choose to be faithful believers in God vs being edgy nihilists - which is an empirical claim that 1) Doesn't have much backing and that I 2) worried that the only way to make it plausible under your worldview is to construct a just-so ad hoc story where God secretly gives everybody the ability to communicate with him, it's just hidden away from human inquiry and not provable unless you already have Christian faith.
I don't think this has been particularly productive so I'll probably leave it at that.
I hope you’re having a good Saturday. If you think this conversation isn’t worth your time anymore that’s ok. I’m still interested so I will post this reply, but I won’t take it as a sign that I’ve ‘won’ if you don’t reply.
I do think we are nearing ‘agree to disagree’ territory with regard to psychology. I just don’t see why you’re so convinced that our psychological profiles are determined/outside of our control. There are entire branches of neuroscience and psychotherapy based on the fact they aren’t. Things like neuroplacticity, psychosomatic illness, and cognitive behavioral therapy give really strong evidence that we can exercise substantial influence over our psychological profiles just through our thinking.
And that’s just counting the natural empirical ways they can be influenced. If you aren’t willing to entertain the possibility of more spiritual or abstract concepts like rational faculties, grace etc. (which can also help us transcend our natural/psychological limitations) you’re entitled to take that approach, but that’s not a problem with my view.
You’re right that it is possible to construe rationality as being relative to someone’s desires or goals. But taking that view without supplementing it with considerations of things like telos, meta desires etc. has nihilistic and bizarre implications. As you admit, your view of rationality entails that eating feces and raping children is rational or irrational only as a matter of personal/group preference. I find that completely implausible - I hope you would at least affirm that a person who does these things is being rational but also immoral and acting against their ultimate self interest.
I’ve come to a similar conclusion, although I don’t agree with you that this god is necessarily good. People do have to expand their mind in terms of what a god might be though…possibly a teenage girl in her basement playing SimMilkyway.
But, as you allude to with the universal constants line, this universe has only two possible explanations; many worlds or a creator.
I don’t think there’s any reason to favour many worlds and, indeed, there are things in our day to day life that the presence of a creator explains better than the many worlds theory.
It could also be a brute fact, or its dependence could be cyclical, or it could be eternal. In general it could have any of the properties attributed to God - necessary existence or whatever else. It's not clear to me at all why positing a God with these properties over and above the universe would ever be more motivated than just positing the universe having these properties.
I agree that a god, any sort of god, would need explaining at some level and would be subject to similar constraints and arguments. You can see that creationist (used very broadly here) viewpoints simply kicks the can down the road. But I think think we're interested in if we are subject to a designed universe.
As I allude to above, I don't think the god/creator is necessarily benevolent and there being one/a potential for an afterlife is necessarily a good thing. I can't think of anything worse than "dying", finding out, "hey, great news, you're not dead...that was a simulator", but that my wife and kids were just simulations and no longer exist. Never did exist.
But back to our current reality; largely due to the points regarding the constants of nature, it'd be spectacularly fortunate to find a universe such as our own (capable of producing life) if there were just one universe. All the possible ones that could have been pulled out of the hat.
That leaves two possibilities: we're part of the multiverse or there's a designer.
I know that "science" favours the multiverse, but when I've read into the idea more deeply I've found it's little more than faith itself. It even acknowledges it might never be testable. I'm certainly not saying it's wrong, or that some other "scientific" theory supplants it, but it's not Popper's science.
But if not multiverse, then creator. And I'm not picturing necessarily a white guy with a beard sitting on a cloud here, I'm picturing probably an AI generated universe.
How was it created? I'll touch on it, but don't think it's necessarily relevant here. If you haven't, have a quick wiki about Boltzman Brains. It's fascinating and I think the wiki article is quite brief. Essentially quantum mechanics allows a brain, your brain, fully functioning, to simply pop into existence. It'd have your memories, your current feelings, and would have a "reality" that it, itself, is creating. And then, instantly, be gone. Your existence (this very moment that you're wasting reading my waffle) is but a millisecond. Pfft, you're gone. Proponents of this argument end at the logical point that it is far more likely that you are a Boltzmann Brain than not.
Accepting that a Boltzmann Brain is possible, then it's also possible that an AI "mind" could materialise....and then create a trillion individuals in a universe. Or a trillion universes. You could imagine such a machine being omnipotent.
That's just one of, I'm sure, many possible theories. And then you ask, why was there a universe capable of creating a Boltzmann Brain in the first place! 😂
Anyway, interested to hear any of your thoughts. It's a fascinating discussion.
TLDR: purely in relation to this universe, it's either part of a multiverse or it was designed. If I had to bet, I think it's designed. But I'm only on that side maybe 60:40.
It is always a strange experience to read something which has a premise I agree with but at the end leaves me less certain of that premise.
My main problem with probabilistic arguments for God is when you say things like "what's the probability that things ended up exactly like this" the probability space is totally undefined. When you say the chance that we exist is similar to some unlikely thing, this could also point to a far higher number of attempts than you imagine.
This also causes trouble with things like "1% chance of infinite benefit" since the terms don't match..Throw that infinity in there and the problem says whatever you want.
This is also beyond the regular issue with Pascal's Wager where you're wagering only the God you know in the parameters you know.
It's true that it's hard to take the probability of reality as a whole on different theories because there is so much to reality. It makes sense to conssider the various features of reality that favor one theory over another one-by-one.
It's hard to precisely do the maths surrounding infinites, but there are certain obvious verdicts. For instance, if you offer me either a 20% chance of infinite reward or a 10% chance, I'd take the 20% chance, even though both have an infinite EV.
I don't know how that helps here. This still feels like a path to overfit models. Picking elements one by one also seems like a great way to inbreed those models by embedding a chosen infinity where you like, since slapping a big fat infinity on any part of the scale outweighs calculation.
While I have been enjoying this theme a lot I'm not really moved to change my intuition. Which is that God is just the whole amazing shebang. And that the concept of enlightenment refers to seeing your inseparability from it. Everything else about believing in God is actually social ritual. Including all the arguing and reasoning about it.
What I mean is that the universe is necessarily wild and to be part of it is to be part of the ultimate thing. Some people just call it God, or Allah, or something. It's just this wild unknowable thing that necessarily exists because it couldn't possibly not exist, under any circumstances at all.
> Consider the possibility that every wrong will be righted, that you will spend eternity experiencing infinite joy with your loved ones.
Yep, it's a nice thought. I used to believe in exactly this kind of God in my childhood. I can still invoke the state of my mind that I used to "communicate with God" - it's quite pleasant. I don't think I'd prefer to never have experienced this, I treasure my philosophical journey about the matter foundly. But neither I'd prefer to keep deluding myself that everything is basically okay and nothing bad has truly happened. For me it was part of growing up. The realization that we are the only light and the only darkness in the world. That everything is broken and we are the only ones who can make things right. This was my strongest "religious experience".
Back in the days I used to believe that God is good because I literally felt it in my bones. It was an observation as clear as any other. I knew that Heaven is real and Hell is not, because the God whom I speak t, whose presence I felt would never make things otherwise.
But if you simply arrive to the conclusion from the logical chain: I exist -> all possible people exist -> the creator of all possible people exist -> This creator is perfect goodness - regardless of validity of the previous steps the last one is flawed in a very particular and existentially terrifying way.
The creator can as well be perfectly evil, making all possible people just in order to torment them for eternity. Whatever metric you use for "simplicity" I don't think such outcome can be considered substantially more complicated than perfectly good God.
You don't at all fit my image of the kind of person who would fall into a view like this through wishful thinking or social pressure or anything like that — this is an example of someone who has reasoned themselves into beliefs which their past self (presumably) didn't expect they'd come to hold, via a fairly idiosyncratic route. I think that is rare and very very cool!
It sounds like the arguments that moved you most are (i) your ‘anthropic argument’ from observing you exist at all; and (ii) fine-tuning. And both (it seems to me) appeal to God being the overwhelmingly simplest explanation (such that the update from observing existence and fine-tuning overhwelmingly favours God). Does that sound right?
If so I'm curious on a couple points. You write:
>God is a very intrinsically likely sort of thing to exist, being very simple and lacking arbitrary limits. God is simply a mind without limits, and minds are quite simple. He’s the simplest sort of mind, much simpler than anything invoked in fundamental physics.
Can you say more about how and why “minds are quite simple”? I find myself unable to imagine anything I'd describe as a mind which isn't complex in some way, and certainly more complex by some kind of unconstrained cosmic generating process (like the kind discussed in Parfit's ‘Why anything? Why this?’ article in the LRB).
I have a similar question re your anthropic argument for God's existence. Wouldn’t it be the case that, on some kinds of modal realism, there are more ‘observer moments’ like yours than in the case where a perfect being creates every possible person? Since, surely, the collection of every possible world contains every possible person, plus even more degenerate observer moments like yours (like Boltzmann brains). I'm also unclear why God would choose to create every possible person. So if you’re using SIA to infer what world you’re in, why doesn't modal realism come out looking far more likely than theism?
I think that consciousness is fundamental, for the reasons I lay out here https://benthams.substack.com/p/against-dogmatic-physicalism. Fundamental things will tend to be simple, for they don't have parts or break down into simpler units. Therefore, if you can give a simple description of God's mind--by saying simply "a mind without limits--then it is intrinsically likely.
//Since, surely, the collection of every possible world contains every possible person, plus even more degenerate observer moments like yours (like Boltzmann brains)//
By definition you can't have more people than every possible person. So then the question just becomes: would modal realism predict more copies of my current person moment than theism? I think the answer is not obvious. If you buy my theodicy https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-theres-evil?utm_source=activity_item, then maybe theism predicts unsetly many person moments of mine, especially if you buy that the various moments would repeat. I thus don't think it's obvious whether anthropic considerations favor theism or modal realism, but I think theism is a much better bet because:
2) Because it undermines induction, there's no plausible modal realist story of how most people created will have experiences like mine. In contrast, on theism, maybe the vast majority of created people have experiences like mine (not exactly the same, but broadly a similar kind).
3) There are independent reasons to be a theist which are, to my mind, much more convincing than the independent reasons to be a modal realist.
Why would God create every possible person? Well, creating a person is good, God could create all possible person, so he'd have no reason to stop.
Notwithstanding the possibility that consciousness is not fundamental (as I suspect) your claim was that *minds* are simple, which makes me think of capacities like observing and reasoning and deciding and stuff. Those things do not seem ‘simple’ or ‘fundamental’ in the sense that matters, yet it seems to me not enough for God to be intrinsically likely on the grounds that mere consciousness is fundamental, since he presumably also needs to be doing observing and reasoning and deciding and stuff.
I guess you could say that God's mind is not simple, but you can pin down that not-simple stuff by pointing to it with a simple concept, like “a (perfectly good, unboundedly powerful etc.) mind without limits”. And you might still favour God on priors for that reason. I feel out of my depth on what to say here, but I guess I don't see why that kind of simple “unbounded mind” concept has to pick out one mind, viz. God's. Probably there's lots written on this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On whether modal realism predicts more person moments, well, assume God does not create copies of people. Then I take it that theism does not predict more person moments like yours, since (suitable versions of) modal realism predict that all possible person moments are instantiated, and God cannot create more than that number without copying.
Maybe he does make 'copies' in some way, but then my mind goes somewhere like “why would he make so many copies of my life specifically, being as it is not the best possible life?”. In other words: maybe there is some benefit from completeness or variety to creating every possible person at all, but the problem of evil seems to bite when it comes to copies. When choosing the next person to create, does he really have to copy my life, with all its painful parts? Why not a better one?
A benevolent God is very simple—just one property: perfection—and explains why you exist out of all possible people (cause God would create all people). It also best solves the psychophysical harmony puzzle by deriving harmony from a more fundamental property!
Hm. Not sure if I can verbalize why, but those explanations aren’t the most convincing for me.
Personally, I’m more partial to focusing on God as Being itself rather that absolute perfection. Since God is everyone and everyone is God (in some sense) he has the perfect impartial “point of view of the universe” that philosophers like to talk about. That is, he weighs everyone's well-being equally because he IS everyone. And as you compellingly argued, if you weigh everyone’s well-being equally you end up with utilitarianism.
Does it mean that every mind gets their own God depending on their concept of perfection? Is the afterlife shared or per-mind? Do only believers get an afterlife? (After all it would be pretty shitty to force non-believers into one, and that would lead to a contradiction with their concept of perfection.)
Or God only creates minds that have a consistent concept of perfection? But it seems already that yours and mine cannot be reconciled.
Great to hear this update, Matthew. Welcome news in a sea of cynicism.
I wouldn’t want to diminish anyone’s horrible suffering and I certainly have known it by experience at times. But only at times. Most of my life and the lives of my many friends and family, beliving and non-believing, American and foreign, have a fair amount of daily goodness and only occasional horrible suffering. It seems a bit prejudicial to me that POE is given so much weight among the nonbelieving. Two worldviews don’t create two worlds. Is this place really so miserable for us on balance? Any way, I look forward to hearing more. (interacted with you some on X a while back, btw) wortmanbill. Will be praying for you.
Now that you have found the joy of believing in the good news of a good God, what do you think about the more specific claims of Christianity?
Jesus.
That he existed and that that he was executed is not really controversial.
Neither should be the fact that his followers quickly came to believe and declare that he had risen from the dead.
And soon they (it's not clear exactly how soon, but very early on), they came to think that He was, in fact, our Creator who had become one of us. And they believed that he died for many good reasons:
* To demonstrate that he does love us in a world where it often feels to people like he does not
* To set an example of how he wants us to live: sacrificially loving others
* And (this is more controversial, but is central to the message his follower began to teach) to be a type of substitute bearing our sins in our place
* And they believed and preached that only through faith in Jesus would we, by God's grace, gain the gift of eternal life while others would eventually perish
That's a lot. I don't expect you to have answers fully ready right now, or by tomorrow morning. But they are claims to think about. And they are claims that have dramatically changed our world and that many have been willing to live and die for. I believe that there is a lot of evidence to support those claims. The claims come from the same source and the same river from which you have borrowed many of your thoughts and expressions about God.
Well, I agree that a lot of it is really weird and hard to believe.
But you don't have to believe all of it in order to believe the central truth claims about the death and resurrection of Jesus. I'm arguing for the main truths of Christianity, not for the specific doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture. The main truths of Christianity do depend on the Bible, and they depend on it containing true revelation from God, but they do not depend on all of it being inerrant. It's ok that you are still not convinced. But keep seeking and learning! You seem to be very gifted at that. Peace.
Two attendant complexities for you to unravel. A friend of mine 51 old, half owns apartment bldng, works 38 hours a week plumbing and heating someone else's old restore apt.bldng, lives happily enough intensively gardening. Yesterday I asked and my friend was entirely unaware of the genocide . So, that speaks the word "peace" to the question of justice right? If you are steadily practical in solving one person's suffering into a defensible castle, as did my friend, who would ask him to fret and foam at the mouth, as have the rest of us over deaths we cannot stop? Secondly your assignment is to find that biologic mechanism by which humans are able to defuse animal antagonism. Is it splitting tribes into permanent mutual goodbyes, as the Dunbar number made conflicts too frequent? I believe the mechanism maybe, that autonomically deflates our aggressions- might be the 2 parties in a territorial argument both announcing their addresses. But we have no reason to suppose it disappeared from our equipmnt, what is our submission behavior?
I discovered your blog a couple weeks ago. It's been a real joy to see you steadily grow more and more confident when it comes to believing in God.
Your recent post on steelmaning Christianity was quite well-wrote, and it was a good read.
I... am curious if there is any more specific belief you would claim for yourself aside from theism. Your theism certainly seems closer to Christianity than it does, say, deism. Would you consider yourself... Unitarian?
I myself am a Christian, from a somewhat obscure Protestant branch.
I discovered your blog largely because I'm very sympathetic to utilitarian viewpoints. At the very least, I think our world could use more people who think from a "greatest good for the greatest number" utilitarian framework. It's quite nice to meet someone who is both an utilitarian and a theist, a rare combination in my experience.
Do you still think that your objections to deontological intuitions as explained by evolutionary benefit are powerful, given that you now think that the source of a priori moral intuition is God?
The utilitarian framework is extremely powerful that it can produce logical outputs from any inputs, which is also why it is so dangerous. Since religion gives you axioms of questionable accuracy, it's a terrible combination with utilitarianism. For example, a belief in heaven means we should eat meat, favoring shrimp and chicken over beef, since the former creates more souls which will ultimately experience the perfection of the afterlife. Arguably, we should try to produce these animals in as dense an environment as possible, since that lowers the cost per soul and allows us to produce more souls long-term. Any short-term suffering can be excused by their future eternity in heaven.
No, I don't think so. For one, I think every possible person gets created as per the anthropic argument, and so creating beings in miserable environments is actively bad. Dustin has a paper about why the conclusion you point to doesn't follow which I can try to point to.
Theism is the belief in a god that is all good, all knowing, and all powerful. Deism is the belief in a god with limited all x, no all x, or one or two all x.
And finally, the reductio against substance dualism is complete.
None of the minds we're aware of are "simple" even in ordinary language, let alone metaphysically unitary. Per Dennett's classic phrase, they're enormous "bags of tricks".
I'm not sure how you get to God being good and an afterlife existing, from the fact that a God probably created the universe to contain conscious life.
I can think of many reasons why a simple, powerful being might decide to create a universe where conscious life can evolve. I'm not convinced of Nonmechanistic Rationalism, but I could probably think of reasons other than God being all good for why he might want to have people have this ability.
In general, it just seems suspicious that this God is so similar to the religious beliefs people have held for millennia. For this not to be a coincidence, we need a God who gave us some vague intuitions about him, but only enough so that various different religions exist on earth, all somewhat similar to each other, but clearly they can't all be right. And then he didn't really do anything else. He doesn't care whether we find out what kind of God is the real God, or he is content with us never being sure and lots of people being atheists. Wouldn't God either just make us believe in him completely, just not care what we think, or trust that we will figure out the truth eventually? Why only give us some vague inclination to be religious?
A good God is simpler, and only a perfect God naturally predicts all possible people exist.
It's not suspicious if you think God equipped people with faculties to recognize the divine. That's like saying "isn't it suspicious that you think there's an external world, as people have for centuries."
Why is a good God simpler than a God who just doesn't have any particular relation to goodness one way or the other?
A good God can be derived from a single simple property like perfection, unlike an indifferent God. Also, an unlimited mind would be good because the good is desirable by definition. https://benthams.substack.com/p/10-ways-god-can-be-simple
This seems to be conflating "simplicity" in the sense of "easy to describe using human language that was designed to communicate about the sorts of things humans like to communicate about" and "simplicity" in the sense of "more likely to exist in the world without needing some powerful force (evolution, design) to cause its existence"
Going from the idea of God as the Creator to something similar to human conceptions of God is a VERY big step. Particularly when you consider the *properties* ascribed to God by popular religions, which all date from a time when the human perception of the universe was radically different than the modern.
And yet this radical change in human perception of reality did not lead to new conceptions of God like it had during the Axial Age. This seems strange. The only thing that makes sense to me is the sort of entity sufficient to be Creator would be something beyond our comprehension, and so we simply cannot make such a change. Attempting such plunges us into unbelief. Those who wish to retain the benefits of belief in a mythology wisely refrain from doing so.
Consider a simple omnipresent God, present throughout four-space. Such a God would have no concept of past or present nor of location. For it, all is here and now.
This is so totally different from our perceptions of these things we call time and place that it would be impossible to comprehend such an entity.
How is perfection simple? I imagine it's only simple backwards.
Just one property.
When defined in terms of itself. What is the perfect version of something undefined that isn't just "the pleroma"?
Do you think God did equip people with "faculties to recognize the divine"?
Yes
Okay. Could you say a bit more about this faculty? What is it? How does it work? And do I have it?
Oh the idea is just that God (indirectly) designed the general cognitive faculties that lead people to believe in God in part because he wanted them to know of his existence. It's not some like special extra divine sense organ!
Do you believe that:
1. God created and fine-tuned the universe so that intelligent life would exist?
2. God created and fine-tuned the universe so that humans would exist?
3. God has interfered with the universe's natural functioning since its creation (for example, to nudge evolution to produce us rather than something a bit less like us)?
How does that work? If they're general, how are they led to believe in God in particular? That would seem to imply that they're not entirely general. What I'm asking for is how this is supposed to work, cognitively speaking.
You put your finger on a really important point: There are two readings of reality, one tragic and one hopeful. The more one seriously reflects on suffering and evil, the harder it becomes to sustain a neutral middle reading. It's easy to dismiss the hopeful view as dishonest, head-in-the-sand wishful thinking. But the tragic reading of reality is often equally motivated by obtuse, uncurious cynicism. At least the hopeful reading doesn't typically mask itself in a veneer of fearless intellectual sophistication. You might enjoy W Norris Clarke's book 'The One and the Many.' Your points about Pan's Labyrinth reminded me of these passages:
"I am now faced with a radical intellectual choice between two ultimate alternatives on the meaning of my life: Either there exists a positive Infinite Fullness of being and goodness, […] and then my human nature becomes luminously and completely meaningful, intelligible, sense-making, and my life is suffused with hope of fulfillment. Or in fact, there exists no such real Infinite at all. And then my nature conceals in its depth a radical defect of meaningfulness, of coherence, an unfillable void of unintelligibility, a kind of tragic emptiness: a natural desire that defines my nature as a dynamic unity, but is in principle unfulfillable, incurably frustrated, "a useless passion," as Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist atheist puts it, oriented by its very nature toward a non-existent void, toward nothing real, kept going only by an ineradicable illusion [...] But what good reason can one have for choosing darkness over light, illusion over meaning, for not choosing the light? Only if the darkness is more intelligible? But this does not make sense! Why not then accept my nature as a meaningful gift, pointing the way to what is, rather than to what is not? […] This unique kind of "argument," based on my own inner experience, can lead me to a profoundly reasonable affirmation that a real Infinite must exist as my final end…" (227-228).
What this analysis misses is that propensity to be hopeful vs pessimistic is a psychological property of an agent. I can be in heaven and still be depressed, cursing my own and others' existence, and upset at all the evils that God allows to occur outside of heaven. If I'm not psychologically constituted to be moved by God's graces and all that, this emotional appeal is moot. And if I am psychologically constituted to like the universe better without a God, this emotional appeal is also moot. It's like telling a chocolate hater that all the furniture in heaven and the air you'll breathe will be made out of edible chocolate.
Hi TheKoopaKing,
Sure, the propensity to be hopeful is a psychological property. But it isn’t just a psychological property. And besides, as rational agents, we are capable of reflecting on and influencing our psychological constitutions. The plasticity of our brains and malleability of our preferences has been well established.
To take your example, imagine heaven really was an eternity of eating chocolate. Wouldn’t it be pretty irrational to not at least try to learn how to like chocolate? There are any number of ways someone could attempt this:
-They could go to therapy to investigate whether or not they associate chocolate with some childhood trauma.
-They could undertake an intensive regimen of exposure therapy to accustom themselves to the taste of chocolate.
-They could try the highest quality chocolates available.
-They could educate themselves about the human palate and learn to identify and appreciate the intricate and perfectly balanced flavor profile of a well made chocolate.
-They could talk to chocolatiers and watch documentaries to learn about the passion and creativity that goes into making quality chocolate.
-Failing all of these, they could trust in God’s assurance that they will become capable of liking chocolate when they get to heaven
If someone refused to undertake these measures, they’d have no one to blame but themselves for not liking heaven. You write that you would be depressed and cursing your own existence and that of others etc even if you were in heaven. Do you realize that you’ve essentially described the psychological profile of demons? Are you really so sure that you haven’t made a mistake in your reasoning that even an omniscient being couldn’t give you a satisfactory answer? Do you think that your psychological constitution is so determined and unchangeable that it couldn’t healed or redeemed even in heaven?
>Sure, the propensity to be hopeful is a psychological property. But it isn’t just a psychological property.
I don't know what this means.
>And besides, as rational agents, we are capable of reflecting on and influencing our psychological constitutions. The plasticity of our brains and malleability of our preferences has been well established.
OK, somebody who's suicidal reflects and still ends up being suicidal. I think this is an empirical fact that happens every day, although probably your faith will prevent you from affirming it because there's some sort of wishful thinking among Christians that people can just e.g. cure themselves from cognitive blindspots, depression, autism, or other psychological defects just by praying or whatever. I don't think that's true, faith healing doesn't work, and God is pretty stupid to design the physical world such that there can be physical defects in peoples' brains that cause them not to be able to e.g. believe in God (consuming biased evidence), or rationally entertain God's existence (mental disabilities), or to appreciate heaven (just something I stipulated).
>To take your example, imagine heaven really was an eternity of eating chocolate. Wouldn’t it be pretty irrational to not at least try to learn how to like chocolate?
No, rationality is constituted by agents accomplishing their desires. Practically, you could make an appeal to someone's metadesire for pleasure by asking them to change their preferences. But imagine that heaven was an eternity of eating feces. you try as you might but you just can't appreciate the taste of eating shit, because your psychological profile is constituted by other brain modules that prevent you from consuming unsanitary and unhealthy food. This is the state of nature we find ourselves in - there are various causes outside of an agent's control that can and do sometimes prevent them from associating God with happiness or whatever.
>If someone refused to undertake these measures, they’d have no one to blame but themselves for not liking heaven.
Well, God kind of set up the link between people's physical bodies and their souls, right? It's God's fault that he designed a physical system like the brain that forces people to have beliefs and desires that prevent them from being a good Christian.
>You write that you would be depressed and cursing your own existence and that of others etc even if you were in heaven. Do you realize that you’ve essentially described the psychological profile of demons?
It's also dumb for God to create demons - supernatural beings that aren't limited by e.g. physical causation in the brain that forces them to rebel against Christianity.
>Are you really so sure that you haven’t made a mistake in your reasoning that even an omniscient being couldn’t give you a satisfactory answer? Do you think that your psychological constitution is so determined and unchangeable that it couldn’t healed or redeemed even in heaven?
God could just manipulate people's minds, but then Christianity loses any putative benefits of the free will theodicy, and it makes it a practical joke that evil exists. Why doesn't God just make it psychologically impossible for us to be unhappy all the time? We have to wait until we die? Unlucky.
Hi TheKoopaKing,
The propensity to be hopeful is also a rational property. We are capable of feeling that a situation will have a hopeful outcome. We are also capable of judging based on rational reflection whether a situation will have a hopeful outcome. These are separate faculties, and sometimes they conflict. This is the whole point of exposure therapy: to gradually help someone to recognize that their psychological constitution is out of touch with objective reality.
This is why it doesn’t make sense to conflate rationality with desire fulfillment. People can obviously have desires that we can easily recognize as irrational and harmful if acted on (e.g. pedophilia, sadistic torture). To the extent we are capable, we have a responsibility to change, or at least not act on such desires. Whether or not we are subjectively capable of doing so doesn’t change their objective moral and rational character.
And this is the problem with your scenario of heaven being like eating feces for all eternity. Eating feces does not contribute to human flourishing. Heavenly bliss would. A more accurate analogy would be: “Imagine that water tasted like vomit to you.” That would be awful, and it might not be your fault - but that doesn’t change the fact that water is necessary for survival and flourishing.
I’m not claiming we have an unlimited ability to adjust our preferences. The whole point of Christianity is that we are in absolute need a savior. Our predicament isn’t our fault, but that doesn’t thereby totally erase our responsibility to do what we can to cooperate with God’s efforts to solve it.
>These are separate faculties, and sometimes they conflict.
What you're making are a host of empirical claims that I'm not willing to accept. You might as well say "Everyone has a sensus divinitatis bestowed upon them by God." I don't think any of what Christian philosophers have presumed from the armchair about psychological faculties has come to fruition. Decades of neuroscience and cognitive science have not substantiated various postulates like moral faculties, rational faculties, intellectual faculties, or whatever else philosophers have postulated throughout the ages.
That was my point - God has apparently set up the world so that people's psychological profiles are accidents of their evolutionary history. This can result in, among other things, people psychologically wired to not believe in God because they don't find the evidence compelling, people who have existed before the various Christian historical claims and thus have never been able to hear about Christianity, people who are cognitively disabled to the point they can't entertain complex thoughts like "Christianity exists," and so on. In order to rectify all these issues, Christians have to make a lot of ad hoc assumptions that aren't well supported by any evidence, like that everybody has a divine sense or through faith healing they can overcome whatever challenge faces them.
>This is why it doesn’t make sense to conflate rationality with desire fulfillment.
I think there's various ways to construe rationality, but "objective" rationality is just another philosophical term of art that's not grounded in anything "objective" as you would put it, but is just a result of misinterpreting language. If I want to go the North Pole and I decide to accomplish my goal by walking across latitudinal lines, I am being irrational because I am frustrating my desires. I can't reach the North Pole by traveling solely along East-West lines - so my choice of action will not fulfill my desire of reaching the North Pole, that is, I am being irrational. Let's take a look at your putative examples of irrational goals next:
>People can obviously have desires that we can easily recognize as irrational and harmful if acted on (e.g. pedophilia, sadistic torture).
Right, but these are "irrational" insofar as most people don't want to live in a society where their own kids are raped or where they'll be subject to torture. It would be irrational to permit child rape because most people don't approve of child rape, that is, they have a preference against child rape. If most people didn't disapprove of child rape, then I'm not sure in what sense it would be "irrational" to construct social norms around proactively raping children. You're free to call this "irrational," but it bears no family resemblance to the other class of irrational things - actions that would frustrate the desires of a group of people.
>And this is the problem with your scenario of heaven being like eating feces for all eternity. Eating feces does not contribute to human flourishing.
Take the following analogy with dietary preferences: are feces "objectively" untasty? Nope, there's various animals and bacteria and so on that consume animal feces as part of their healthy diet. It doesn't make sense for feces to be "objectively" tasty or not - tastiness is a measure of a subject's preference for a specific dish. Calling something tasty independent of a subject's preference for it is incoherent - you're free to stipulate it, but if it has nothing to do with dietary satisfaction and doesn't seem to be discoverable in principle (or you have to resort to vague and slippery empirical statements you don't have evidence for like "Well I just have a faculty for detecting objective taste/reason/God), then I don't get why I or anyone else would care.
You're also still missing my point - I was arguing that the contingent ways in which God allowed humans to evolve actively frustrates the ability to communicate with him, due to various psychological defects under the Christian story being possible like e.g. somebody just not wanting to go to heaven or to meet God.
>Our predicament isn’t our fault, but that doesn’t thereby totally erase our responsibility to do what we can to cooperate with God’s efforts to solve it.
Yeah I didn't say that, I said it was God's fault that he was screwing other people over by letting the universe evolve so as to produce humans who are psychologically constituted as to be incapable of desiring a relationship with him (and various other faults). This was in response to your comment where you seemed to imply that all humans necessarily have the power to just choose to be faithful believers in God vs being edgy nihilists - which is an empirical claim that 1) Doesn't have much backing and that I 2) worried that the only way to make it plausible under your worldview is to construct a just-so ad hoc story where God secretly gives everybody the ability to communicate with him, it's just hidden away from human inquiry and not provable unless you already have Christian faith.
I don't think this has been particularly productive so I'll probably leave it at that.
Hi TheKoopaKing,
I hope you’re having a good Saturday. If you think this conversation isn’t worth your time anymore that’s ok. I’m still interested so I will post this reply, but I won’t take it as a sign that I’ve ‘won’ if you don’t reply.
I do think we are nearing ‘agree to disagree’ territory with regard to psychology. I just don’t see why you’re so convinced that our psychological profiles are determined/outside of our control. There are entire branches of neuroscience and psychotherapy based on the fact they aren’t. Things like neuroplacticity, psychosomatic illness, and cognitive behavioral therapy give really strong evidence that we can exercise substantial influence over our psychological profiles just through our thinking.
And that’s just counting the natural empirical ways they can be influenced. If you aren’t willing to entertain the possibility of more spiritual or abstract concepts like rational faculties, grace etc. (which can also help us transcend our natural/psychological limitations) you’re entitled to take that approach, but that’s not a problem with my view.
You’re right that it is possible to construe rationality as being relative to someone’s desires or goals. But taking that view without supplementing it with considerations of things like telos, meta desires etc. has nihilistic and bizarre implications. As you admit, your view of rationality entails that eating feces and raping children is rational or irrational only as a matter of personal/group preference. I find that completely implausible - I hope you would at least affirm that a person who does these things is being rational but also immoral and acting against their ultimate self interest.
I’ve come to a similar conclusion, although I don’t agree with you that this god is necessarily good. People do have to expand their mind in terms of what a god might be though…possibly a teenage girl in her basement playing SimMilkyway.
But, as you allude to with the universal constants line, this universe has only two possible explanations; many worlds or a creator.
I don’t think there’s any reason to favour many worlds and, indeed, there are things in our day to day life that the presence of a creator explains better than the many worlds theory.
Ergo, there’s a creator. Hallelujah.
It could also be a brute fact, or its dependence could be cyclical, or it could be eternal. In general it could have any of the properties attributed to God - necessary existence or whatever else. It's not clear to me at all why positing a God with these properties over and above the universe would ever be more motivated than just positing the universe having these properties.
I agree that a god, any sort of god, would need explaining at some level and would be subject to similar constraints and arguments. You can see that creationist (used very broadly here) viewpoints simply kicks the can down the road. But I think think we're interested in if we are subject to a designed universe.
As I allude to above, I don't think the god/creator is necessarily benevolent and there being one/a potential for an afterlife is necessarily a good thing. I can't think of anything worse than "dying", finding out, "hey, great news, you're not dead...that was a simulator", but that my wife and kids were just simulations and no longer exist. Never did exist.
But back to our current reality; largely due to the points regarding the constants of nature, it'd be spectacularly fortunate to find a universe such as our own (capable of producing life) if there were just one universe. All the possible ones that could have been pulled out of the hat.
That leaves two possibilities: we're part of the multiverse or there's a designer.
I know that "science" favours the multiverse, but when I've read into the idea more deeply I've found it's little more than faith itself. It even acknowledges it might never be testable. I'm certainly not saying it's wrong, or that some other "scientific" theory supplants it, but it's not Popper's science.
But if not multiverse, then creator. And I'm not picturing necessarily a white guy with a beard sitting on a cloud here, I'm picturing probably an AI generated universe.
How was it created? I'll touch on it, but don't think it's necessarily relevant here. If you haven't, have a quick wiki about Boltzman Brains. It's fascinating and I think the wiki article is quite brief. Essentially quantum mechanics allows a brain, your brain, fully functioning, to simply pop into existence. It'd have your memories, your current feelings, and would have a "reality" that it, itself, is creating. And then, instantly, be gone. Your existence (this very moment that you're wasting reading my waffle) is but a millisecond. Pfft, you're gone. Proponents of this argument end at the logical point that it is far more likely that you are a Boltzmann Brain than not.
Accepting that a Boltzmann Brain is possible, then it's also possible that an AI "mind" could materialise....and then create a trillion individuals in a universe. Or a trillion universes. You could imagine such a machine being omnipotent.
That's just one of, I'm sure, many possible theories. And then you ask, why was there a universe capable of creating a Boltzmann Brain in the first place! 😂
Anyway, interested to hear any of your thoughts. It's a fascinating discussion.
TLDR: purely in relation to this universe, it's either part of a multiverse or it was designed. If I had to bet, I think it's designed. But I'm only on that side maybe 60:40.
You write really well. I’ve really enjoyed following your journey here and it has largely mirrored my own. Peace!
Thank you!
It is always a strange experience to read something which has a premise I agree with but at the end leaves me less certain of that premise.
My main problem with probabilistic arguments for God is when you say things like "what's the probability that things ended up exactly like this" the probability space is totally undefined. When you say the chance that we exist is similar to some unlikely thing, this could also point to a far higher number of attempts than you imagine.
This also causes trouble with things like "1% chance of infinite benefit" since the terms don't match..Throw that infinity in there and the problem says whatever you want.
This is also beyond the regular issue with Pascal's Wager where you're wagering only the God you know in the parameters you know.
It's true that it's hard to take the probability of reality as a whole on different theories because there is so much to reality. It makes sense to conssider the various features of reality that favor one theory over another one-by-one.
It's hard to precisely do the maths surrounding infinites, but there are certain obvious verdicts. For instance, if you offer me either a 20% chance of infinite reward or a 10% chance, I'd take the 20% chance, even though both have an infinite EV.
I don't know how that helps here. This still feels like a path to overfit models. Picking elements one by one also seems like a great way to inbreed those models by embedding a chosen infinity where you like, since slapping a big fat infinity on any part of the scale outweighs calculation.
While I have been enjoying this theme a lot I'm not really moved to change my intuition. Which is that God is just the whole amazing shebang. And that the concept of enlightenment refers to seeing your inseparability from it. Everything else about believing in God is actually social ritual. Including all the arguing and reasoning about it.
I'm not following.
What I mean is that the universe is necessarily wild and to be part of it is to be part of the ultimate thing. Some people just call it God, or Allah, or something. It's just this wild unknowable thing that necessarily exists because it couldn't possibly not exist, under any circumstances at all.
I think you’re getting at the Buddhist insight of interbeing, with a pinch of religious dualism. If that’s the case I think your view is really cool!
I'll take that, thanks, despite my ignorance of Buddhism (or any other religious tradition).
> Consider the possibility that every wrong will be righted, that you will spend eternity experiencing infinite joy with your loved ones.
Yep, it's a nice thought. I used to believe in exactly this kind of God in my childhood. I can still invoke the state of my mind that I used to "communicate with God" - it's quite pleasant. I don't think I'd prefer to never have experienced this, I treasure my philosophical journey about the matter foundly. But neither I'd prefer to keep deluding myself that everything is basically okay and nothing bad has truly happened. For me it was part of growing up. The realization that we are the only light and the only darkness in the world. That everything is broken and we are the only ones who can make things right. This was my strongest "religious experience".
Back in the days I used to believe that God is good because I literally felt it in my bones. It was an observation as clear as any other. I knew that Heaven is real and Hell is not, because the God whom I speak t, whose presence I felt would never make things otherwise.
But if you simply arrive to the conclusion from the logical chain: I exist -> all possible people exist -> the creator of all possible people exist -> This creator is perfect goodness - regardless of validity of the previous steps the last one is flawed in a very particular and existentially terrifying way.
The creator can as well be perfectly evil, making all possible people just in order to torment them for eternity. Whatever metric you use for "simplicity" I don't think such outcome can be considered substantially more complicated than perfectly good God.
You don't at all fit my image of the kind of person who would fall into a view like this through wishful thinking or social pressure or anything like that — this is an example of someone who has reasoned themselves into beliefs which their past self (presumably) didn't expect they'd come to hold, via a fairly idiosyncratic route. I think that is rare and very very cool!
It sounds like the arguments that moved you most are (i) your ‘anthropic argument’ from observing you exist at all; and (ii) fine-tuning. And both (it seems to me) appeal to God being the overwhelmingly simplest explanation (such that the update from observing existence and fine-tuning overhwelmingly favours God). Does that sound right?
If so I'm curious on a couple points. You write:
>God is a very intrinsically likely sort of thing to exist, being very simple and lacking arbitrary limits. God is simply a mind without limits, and minds are quite simple. He’s the simplest sort of mind, much simpler than anything invoked in fundamental physics.
Can you say more about how and why “minds are quite simple”? I find myself unable to imagine anything I'd describe as a mind which isn't complex in some way, and certainly more complex by some kind of unconstrained cosmic generating process (like the kind discussed in Parfit's ‘Why anything? Why this?’ article in the LRB).
I have a similar question re your anthropic argument for God's existence. Wouldn’t it be the case that, on some kinds of modal realism, there are more ‘observer moments’ like yours than in the case where a perfect being creates every possible person? Since, surely, the collection of every possible world contains every possible person, plus even more degenerate observer moments like yours (like Boltzmann brains). I'm also unclear why God would choose to create every possible person. So if you’re using SIA to infer what world you’re in, why doesn't modal realism come out looking far more likely than theism?
Great post.
Thank you, that's very kind. Just to be clear, those are two big ones, but there are a few others. The two others that moved me most were: 1) psychophysical harmony https://philarchive.org/archive/CUTPHA and 2) moral knowledge (plus other kinds of a priori knowledge) https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-brain-has-a-special-faculty-of.
I think that consciousness is fundamental, for the reasons I lay out here https://benthams.substack.com/p/against-dogmatic-physicalism. Fundamental things will tend to be simple, for they don't have parts or break down into simpler units. Therefore, if you can give a simple description of God's mind--by saying simply "a mind without limits--then it is intrinsically likely.
//Since, surely, the collection of every possible world contains every possible person, plus even more degenerate observer moments like yours (like Boltzmann brains)//
By definition you can't have more people than every possible person. So then the question just becomes: would modal realism predict more copies of my current person moment than theism? I think the answer is not obvious. If you buy my theodicy https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-theres-evil?utm_source=activity_item, then maybe theism predicts unsetly many person moments of mine, especially if you buy that the various moments would repeat. I thus don't think it's obvious whether anthropic considerations favor theism or modal realism, but I think theism is a much better bet because:
1) Modal realism undermines induction https://benthams.substack.com/p/modal-realism-undermines-induction?utm_source=publication-search
2) Because it undermines induction, there's no plausible modal realist story of how most people created will have experiences like mine. In contrast, on theism, maybe the vast majority of created people have experiences like mine (not exactly the same, but broadly a similar kind).
3) There are independent reasons to be a theist which are, to my mind, much more convincing than the independent reasons to be a modal realist.
Why would God create every possible person? Well, creating a person is good, God could create all possible person, so he'd have no reason to stop.
Thanks for the reply!
Notwithstanding the possibility that consciousness is not fundamental (as I suspect) your claim was that *minds* are simple, which makes me think of capacities like observing and reasoning and deciding and stuff. Those things do not seem ‘simple’ or ‘fundamental’ in the sense that matters, yet it seems to me not enough for God to be intrinsically likely on the grounds that mere consciousness is fundamental, since he presumably also needs to be doing observing and reasoning and deciding and stuff.
I guess you could say that God's mind is not simple, but you can pin down that not-simple stuff by pointing to it with a simple concept, like “a (perfectly good, unboundedly powerful etc.) mind without limits”. And you might still favour God on priors for that reason. I feel out of my depth on what to say here, but I guess I don't see why that kind of simple “unbounded mind” concept has to pick out one mind, viz. God's. Probably there's lots written on this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On whether modal realism predicts more person moments, well, assume God does not create copies of people. Then I take it that theism does not predict more person moments like yours, since (suitable versions of) modal realism predict that all possible person moments are instantiated, and God cannot create more than that number without copying.
Maybe he does make 'copies' in some way, but then my mind goes somewhere like “why would he make so many copies of my life specifically, being as it is not the best possible life?”. In other words: maybe there is some benefit from completeness or variety to creating every possible person at all, but the problem of evil seems to bite when it comes to copies. When choosing the next person to create, does he really have to copy my life, with all its painful parts? Why not a better one?
Their souls are elsewhere!
How do you get that God is good? Could an evil God exist, or at least one motivated by non-moral considerations?
A benevolent God is very simple—just one property: perfection—and explains why you exist out of all possible people (cause God would create all people). It also best solves the psychophysical harmony puzzle by deriving harmony from a more fundamental property!
Hm. Not sure if I can verbalize why, but those explanations aren’t the most convincing for me.
Personally, I’m more partial to focusing on God as Being itself rather that absolute perfection. Since God is everyone and everyone is God (in some sense) he has the perfect impartial “point of view of the universe” that philosophers like to talk about. That is, he weighs everyone's well-being equally because he IS everyone. And as you compellingly argued, if you weigh everyone’s well-being equally you end up with utilitarianism.
"and explains why you exist out of all possible people (cause God would create all people)"
Can you elaborate on this? It's hard to follow.
https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-anthropic-argument-for-theism
Does it mean that every mind gets their own God depending on their concept of perfection? Is the afterlife shared or per-mind? Do only believers get an afterlife? (After all it would be pretty shitty to force non-believers into one, and that would lead to a contradiction with their concept of perfection.)
Or God only creates minds that have a consistent concept of perfection? But it seems already that yours and mine cannot be reconciled.
Great to hear this update, Matthew. Welcome news in a sea of cynicism.
I wouldn’t want to diminish anyone’s horrible suffering and I certainly have known it by experience at times. But only at times. Most of my life and the lives of my many friends and family, beliving and non-believing, American and foreign, have a fair amount of daily goodness and only occasional horrible suffering. It seems a bit prejudicial to me that POE is given so much weight among the nonbelieving. Two worldviews don’t create two worlds. Is this place really so miserable for us on balance? Any way, I look forward to hearing more. (interacted with you some on X a while back, btw) wortmanbill. Will be praying for you.
Do you believe that God wants humans to worship God in some way?
Now that you have found the joy of believing in the good news of a good God, what do you think about the more specific claims of Christianity?
Jesus.
That he existed and that that he was executed is not really controversial.
Neither should be the fact that his followers quickly came to believe and declare that he had risen from the dead.
And soon they (it's not clear exactly how soon, but very early on), they came to think that He was, in fact, our Creator who had become one of us. And they believed that he died for many good reasons:
* To demonstrate that he does love us in a world where it often feels to people like he does not
* To set an example of how he wants us to live: sacrificially loving others
* And (this is more controversial, but is central to the message his follower began to teach) to be a type of substitute bearing our sins in our place
* And they believed and preached that only through faith in Jesus would we, by God's grace, gain the gift of eternal life while others would eventually perish
That's a lot. I don't expect you to have answers fully ready right now, or by tomorrow morning. But they are claims to think about. And they are claims that have dramatically changed our world and that many have been willing to live and die for. I believe that there is a lot of evidence to support those claims. The claims come from the same source and the same river from which you have borrowed many of your thoughts and expressions about God.
Grace and Peace
Still not convinced, I just think that a lot of the stuff in the Bible is really weird, hard to believe, and intrinsically improbable.
Well, I agree that a lot of it is really weird and hard to believe.
But you don't have to believe all of it in order to believe the central truth claims about the death and resurrection of Jesus. I'm arguing for the main truths of Christianity, not for the specific doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture. The main truths of Christianity do depend on the Bible, and they depend on it containing true revelation from God, but they do not depend on all of it being inerrant. It's ok that you are still not convinced. But keep seeking and learning! You seem to be very gifted at that. Peace.
Two attendant complexities for you to unravel. A friend of mine 51 old, half owns apartment bldng, works 38 hours a week plumbing and heating someone else's old restore apt.bldng, lives happily enough intensively gardening. Yesterday I asked and my friend was entirely unaware of the genocide . So, that speaks the word "peace" to the question of justice right? If you are steadily practical in solving one person's suffering into a defensible castle, as did my friend, who would ask him to fret and foam at the mouth, as have the rest of us over deaths we cannot stop? Secondly your assignment is to find that biologic mechanism by which humans are able to defuse animal antagonism. Is it splitting tribes into permanent mutual goodbyes, as the Dunbar number made conflicts too frequent? I believe the mechanism maybe, that autonomically deflates our aggressions- might be the 2 parties in a territorial argument both announcing their addresses. But we have no reason to suppose it disappeared from our equipmnt, what is our submission behavior?
I discovered your blog a couple weeks ago. It's been a real joy to see you steadily grow more and more confident when it comes to believing in God.
Your recent post on steelmaning Christianity was quite well-wrote, and it was a good read.
I... am curious if there is any more specific belief you would claim for yourself aside from theism. Your theism certainly seems closer to Christianity than it does, say, deism. Would you consider yourself... Unitarian?
I myself am a Christian, from a somewhat obscure Protestant branch.
I'd say at this point, I'm just a generic theist.
Thanks for the quick reply.
I discovered your blog largely because I'm very sympathetic to utilitarian viewpoints. At the very least, I think our world could use more people who think from a "greatest good for the greatest number" utilitarian framework. It's quite nice to meet someone who is both an utilitarian and a theist, a rare combination in my experience.
Yeah it is weirdly rare. Being a hedonist makes solving the problem of evil harder, but being a utilitarian doesn't.
I disagree that hedonism makes solving the problem of evil harder. It makes it no harder than other views.
Do you still think that your objections to deontological intuitions as explained by evolutionary benefit are powerful, given that you now think that the source of a priori moral intuition is God?
Yeah, God used evolution which distorted reasoning.
Isn’t this a bit problematic? Couldn’t God use evolution without distorting our reasoning?
The utilitarian framework is extremely powerful that it can produce logical outputs from any inputs, which is also why it is so dangerous. Since religion gives you axioms of questionable accuracy, it's a terrible combination with utilitarianism. For example, a belief in heaven means we should eat meat, favoring shrimp and chicken over beef, since the former creates more souls which will ultimately experience the perfection of the afterlife. Arguably, we should try to produce these animals in as dense an environment as possible, since that lowers the cost per soul and allows us to produce more souls long-term. Any short-term suffering can be excused by their future eternity in heaven.
No, I don't think so. For one, I think every possible person gets created as per the anthropic argument, and so creating beings in miserable environments is actively bad. Dustin has a paper about why the conclusion you point to doesn't follow which I can try to point to.
A deist?
Theism is the belief in a god that is all good, all knowing, and all powerful. Deism is the belief in a god with limited all x, no all x, or one or two all x.
Do you deny that there is a hell?
And finally, the reductio against substance dualism is complete.
None of the minds we're aware of are "simple" even in ordinary language, let alone metaphysically unitary. Per Dennett's classic phrase, they're enormous "bags of tricks".