God, Michael Huemer, and String Theory

...walk into a bar

Earlier today, I had a debate with Michael Huemer about whether a perfect being is probable. We’re both agnostics, being about 50/50 on a creator of some sort, but he thinks it’s probably limited if it exists, and I think it’s probably unlimited. I won’t comment in detail on the debate, given how many topics we covered, but I’ll say a few things.

One of the subjects that came up was psychophysical harmony, the miraculous harmonious pairing between the physical and the mental. The vast majority of ways the physical and mental could link up would produce radical disharmony, so it’s weird that they’re paired up appropriately. Huemer argued that, because mental states necessarily produce other mental states, any being with a complex psychology like ours would have to be psychophysically harmonious, and therefore the argument is diffused. This is, I think, wrong on a few counts:

1. I reject that there’s a necessary pairing between mental states and other mental states. It seems totally conceivable that after some mental state, there could be another random bizarre mental state. We do, after all, often have huge numbers of different mental states in response to similar stimuli.

2. Even if there are necessary pairings, there are lots of ways that there could be rich and varied psychologies with those mental states only weakly interacting with the world or not interacting at all. Even if mental states do cause things, there could be a physically similar world where they don’t cause things.

3. Most importantly, even if most beings with minds like us are harmonious, there are many beings that could exist with minds not like us. It’s weird that the psychophysical laws are able to produce complex minds like ours, rather than just random simple static. A multiverse doesn’t explain it, even if the multiverse varies the psychophysical laws, because we could be any of the disharmonious beings, so it’s weird that we lucked out and happened to be a harmonious being.

Another topic we discussed at some length was whether God was simple or coherent. I think the answer is probably yes, but maybe no. But, listening to a talk by Richard Swinburne after the debate, it struck me that this is true of a lot of our best scientific theories. String theory posits ten dimensions—that might be metaphysically impossible. Einstein’s view about time-bending seemed metaphysically impossible. Yet it’s worth accepting metaphysical weirdness if it explains the data. And theism does.

We also talked a bit about whether there were Beth 2 possible people. I think the answer is yes: Huemer disagrees. We agreed that there are Beth 2 possible worlds. But it seems that, absent introducing bizarre unexplained limits on modality, there could be a distinct ghost that haunts each world, so there must be at least Beth 2 souls.

Oh, also, I did an interview with the popular YouTube channel Capturing Christianity that you can see below. I think it went well, and the discussion with Dustin Crummett was very interesting. I’ve also had a bunch of other discussions recently with smart people on my YouTube channel—e.g. Brian Cutter—so check that out if you’re interested. d