Opening Statement Caplan Debate

In which I argue for God

I’m debating Bryan Caplan about God today—here’s my opening statement.

Opening Statement 

My goal this afternoon is to make the case that a perfectly good, all-knowing, and all-powerful God exists. The arguments I will defend will be squarely in the realm of philosophy, where every one of them is taken seriously by a significant number of philosophers. I will defend four main contentions in order to make this case: First, the hypothesis that God exists is very initially plausible, before we even look at any particular evidence, because it is exceedingly simple and lacks arbitrary limits. Second, God is the best explanation of why rational conscious persons exist. Third, God is the best explanation of how it could be that we know objective facts about right and wrong, good and bad, and that the future will resemble the past. Fourth and finally, God is the best explanation of why you or I in particular exist, out of all the possible people that could have existed.  

Contention 1: God is an intrinsically probable theory 

In general, we should prefer theories that are more intrinsically probable. An intrinsically probable theory is a theory that is plausible even before we look at the evidence. For example, if a person gets a lot of royal flushes in poker, you should think they’re cheating, even though the hypothesis that a magical leprechaun gave them victory explains the data just as well, because it’s more intrinsically probable.  

Simpler theories are more initially plausible because they make fewer claims, and consequently face fewer ways to potentially go wrong than a complicated theory, which makes more claims. Scientists look for simpler theories rather than more complicated ones. The simplicity of string theory is one reason why it was so popular. 

God is an extremely simple hypothesis. Rather than, as naturalists do, positing that fundamental reality has a variety of different, disunified fundamental particles and laws and constants, it posits just one fundamental thing in order to explain everything: namely, perfection; unlimited goodness. God has one simple property—the property of being perfect. 

God is like the number infinity; he is simple not in that he’s easy to understand but in his ontological nature. A single being of unlimited goodness is God. Goodness doesn’t break down into simpler units because goodness is fundamental.  After all, when you say something is good, you’re not describing the natural features of something, like how much it weighs, or what color it is. So because goodness is fundamental, positing the existence of God is one of the simplest things you could posit—it involves believing that one of the fundamental things simply exists without limit. 

Furthermore, it is simpler to think that an infinite amount of a fundamental thing exists than to think that some random, arbitrary finite amount of it exists because it posits fewer arbitrary limits. A being of unlimited goodness is more likely than a being of limited goodness, just like there being no speed of light is initially more likely than the speed of light being some specific value. 

Finally, God is ontologically unique, unlike anything else, pure being itself.  Because of his uniqueness, he’s not just one specific way reality could be like some specific view of physics—he’s some much more fundamental thing. On theism, God isn’t just another being among many in reality. Reality is inside God, rather than God being inside of reality. Because God either exists or doesn’t, and theism is a radically unique hypothesis, I claim that the hypothesis that there’s a God starts out initially intrinsically plausible. Either reality stems from God or it stems from something limited—these are the only options, and it would be dogmatic to claim that either starts out on vastly superior footing. If theism and atheism are radically different views into the nature of reality, you shouldn’t think either of them starts much likelier than the other—you should just look at the evidence; at which better makes sense of the world. I claim that it is theism that makes better sense of the world. 

My second contention then is that God does a better job of explaining why rational conscious persons exist. Just like me getting a lot of good hands in poker would be evidence that I’m cheating, because it’s likely if I am cheating but unlikely if I’m not, conscious agents provide good evidence for God, because they’re very likely if God exists but unlikely if God doesn’t exist. Naturalism, the view that all that exists is the natural world, has no special reason built into it for predicting conscious people to exist; after all, there are infinitely many other ways the world could have gone that would have satisfied naturalism without involving interesting things of value happening. On the other hand, if we suppose that a perfectly good God exists, we have a specific reason to expect the world to contain valuable and interesting things like conscious persons, which are a prerequisite for anything good to happen.  Indeed, the naturalist account requires accepting the following series of unlikely events, none of which are intrinsically predicted by the theory:

1. There are basic physical things like bosons and fermions, that could very well have not existed.

2. There have to be laws governing the behavior of these physical things, even though the physical things could have existed without governing laws.  Given that laws could have existed without the physical stuff or physical stuff without laws, it’s odd that they both exist at the same time.  This is especially so because a world without laws is much simpler.  

3. Then, the laws have to apply to the physical things. For example, you might have laws governing how fermions move but there not be any fermions. But this didn’t have to be the case: there could be laws but the laws wouldn’t apply to the things that happen to exist. It is therefore miraculous that the laws that govern behavior precisely line up with the things that do exist. It would be like coming across a random game board, finding a random rulebook, and discovering that the rulebook just happens to apply to the game. On top of this, the laws have to make the fundamental things work together. But this isn’t a guarantee—perhaps there could be fermions that only interact with bosons, but no bosons, so the fermions just sit around doing nothing.  That’s overwhelmingly more likely than any interaction between the things in the universe because the overwhelming majority of possible laws would be inapplicable just like only a small percentage of possible rules can apply to any particular game. 

4. Then the laws have to generate complexity. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of possible laws do not generate complexity, as Luke Barnes has shown. John Conway, made something called the game of life, which you can find online, which makes interesting things happen from simple arrangements of dots.  But he had to search through and reject tons of rules because nearly all fundamental rules don’t result in anything interesting happening. If you just made a random simple law to govern simple stuff, it would almost surely do nothing interesting. Chaos is likelier than order. For example, suppose all particles just moved in a straight line until they hit each other and then they bounced in a random direction. Or suppose they all moved in a circle at one mile per hour, or two, or three, or four—all of those would be much simpler than the laws of our universe.  If the laws were like that nothing interesting would arise. Almost all possible simple laws are like that.  In fact, there are an infinite number of laws simpler than those in our world. So we happened to get one of the very few possible sets of laws that would produce anything interesting, when perhaps 0% of the total laws would do that.  

5. Even once the laws are roughly like our laws, we have to get extremely lucky with the constants.  The constants of physics are how strong the laws are—for instance, how strong gravity is.  If you modify many of the constants of physics even slightly nothing interesting could arise—no atoms and certainly no complex life if the cosmological constant was weaker or stronger, or if gravity was weaker or stronger, even if they were only slightly weaker or stronger. This is well agreed upon among those that have studied it.  As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes “The initial entropy of the universe must have been exceedingly low. According to Penrose, universes “resembling the one in which we live” (2004: 343) populate only one part in 10^10^123 of the available phase space volume.”  Stephen Weinberg says that the cosmological constant has to be fine-tuned to one part in 10^120, which means that if it were stronger or weaker by 1/10^120 units, the universe would have fizzled.

6. Then on top of this, you have to have consciousness.  Consciousness is very mysterious—it seems like consciousness points to some reality beyond the physical.  Consciousness isn’t just about the behavior of matter, because even after you know how all the atoms move, you don’t know what’s being consciously experienced.  But if you grant this broad picture, you next have to suppose that there are laws that give rise to consciousness.

7. Then after that, there have to be the physical things that generate consciousness. This is far from guaranteed. We know that brains give rise to consciousness—but you still have to have brains to have consciousness. What are the odds that there’d both be laws that say brains give rise to consciousness and then brains would also exist?  

8. Then, even after you have laws that give rise to consciousness, they have to give rise to harmonious consciousness.  You could imagine there being laws that make our desires have no causal effects—so that when you want to raise your arm nothing happens.  It’s lucky that the consciousness laws give rise to rich, complex consciousness where we can interact in the world.  

Each step along the way is very improbable, yet the naturalist has to accept all of them occur. There are 8 steps, so even if each we assume conservatively that each one has a 1 in 10 chance of occurring, this still means the odds of all of them occurring is 1 in 10 million. Betting on naturalism is like a presumptuous gambler predicting that he’ll get lucky over and over again. Let’s compare the explanations: the theist thinks there are agents because God wants there to be, because agents are the only things of value. The naturalist thinks that there just happened, for no further reason, to be physical stuff, and laws to govern it, and the laws applied to the stuff that existed, and the laws happened to be able to generate complexity, and there just happened to be constants that generated complexity combined with the laws, then there also happened to be psychophysical laws, then there happened to be stuff that generates consciousness combined with the psychophysical law, and those laws happened to give rise to value, and then on top of that happened to be one of the 0% of harmonious psychophysical laws.

My third contention is that atheism struggles to explain certain types of knowledge—in particular moral knowledge.  To know things about some subject there has to be a relationship between one’s knowledge and the facts themselves. I can know there’s a table on the basis of seeing it because the table explains why I see it, but if I knew that I hallucinated the table, I wouldn’t be justified in believing in the table on that basis because the reason I see the table would be unconnected to its existence. But moral facts can’t make the difference to a purely mechanical process like the movement of atoms. Therefore, on atheism, we wouldn’t expect to have moral knowledge—to have moral knowlege, one needs a special non-physical faculty of intuition that directly interacts with the moral facts, that atheism struggles to explain.

Now, even if you don’t believe in moral knowledge, other problems exist in this vicinity. For example, atheism struggles to justify induction. Induction is the drawing of inferences about the future from the past—for example, inferring that the future will be like the past. To justify induction, one must think that worlds where the future is like the past are inherently more likely—otherwise, our inferences about the past give us no reason to think the future will be similar. But facts about the inherent likeliness of various worlds aren’t physical facts—as such, we can’t draw justified inferences about them on atheism.

My last argument is that theism best explains why you, in particular exist.  Suppose that God exists.  Well then we’d expect God to create every possible person.  God is maximally good and would do the best thing.  Creating someone is good if you can give them a good life—which God can do—so God would create all possible people.  This means that if theism is true, then it would be guaranteed that you’d exist.  

In contrast, if atheism is true, it’s very unlikely that you’d exist.  The number of possible people was shown to be Beth 2 by David Lewis—and I think it’s even more. What is Beth 2?  Well, some infinites are bigger than others—the smallest infinite is beth 0, beth 1 is bigger than that, Beth 2 is bigger than that.  Beth 2 is a really big infinity—it’s even more than the number of numbers.  No atheist has ever had a plausible view on which there are Beth 2 people that exist.  Even if the universe is infinitely big, even if there’s an infinite multiverse, that would still only have beth 0 people, which is 0% of Beth 2.  So then on atheism, only 0% of possible people would exist, which makes my existence in particular extremely improbable. 

Now I know what you’re thinking: where are all the people? If every possible person exists, why don’t we see them? Well I didn’t say God would make everyone in this universe.  My view is God would create every possible person and put them in the universe that’s best for their moral and spiritual development.  We don’t actually know if other people exist in other universes, so saying that they don’t would be begging the question.  

This argument is a bit complicated, so I want people to be clear on the structure. You exist. Your existence is more likely if more people exist just like any particular number is more likely to be drawn from a hat if more total numbers are drawn from a hat. So from the fact that you exist, you get infinitely strong evidence that every possible person exists. Atheism has no plausible story of why every possible person would exist, while theism naturally predicts it—Bryan and I are both pro-natalists, agreeing it’s good to create a person and give them a good life. God, as the ultimate pro-natalist, would create every possible person in his infinite goodness.  

Why think that the existence of more people is more likely given that you exist? Note that the conclusion that your existence gives you a reason to think every possible person exists is even accepted by many atheists like Ken Olum and Joe Carlsmith. There are many reasons for this view: let me sketch just two.  First, it follows from the straightforward probabilistic reasoning I gave before.  If there are more people, it’s likelier that I’d be one of them.  

Secondly, if you deny this, you get absurd results.  For instance, you get the result that the world will probably end soon, because if a universe with more people is no more likely to have me, while a universe with fewer people guarantees that I’d be earlier in the universe, then I should think the universe won’t last long.  This is called the doomsday argument and can be shown to follow from any view that doesn’t say that more people existing is more likely.  

From this, one can get even crazier results.  Imagine Adam and Eve are in the garden and considering having sex.  They don’t know that they’re the first people.  So they think “if the first people have many offspring, it’s super unlikely that we’d be the first two people, because we could be any of the many offspring.”  Suddenly, God tells them that they’re the first two people.  Now, because they’re the first two people, and that’s unlikely if the first people have many offspring, they get extremely strong evidence that the first people will not have many offspring, and consequently that they won’t have many offspring.  Thus, they can be confident that, for instance, if God tells them he’ll make many offspring from them unless they get a royal flush in poker, that they’d get a royal flush, because they’ve already gotten super strong evidence that they won’t have many offspring.  But clearly, this is crazy.  

So the challenge is this: the arguments I’ve given show that one should think that every possible person gets created, because only that makes it likely that you or I, in particular, would get created out of the Beth 2 possible people—remember Beth 2 is a huge infinity.  If only a few billion or trillion or even a small infinity people get created, the odds I, in particular, would be created would be zero.  What is the atheistic view on which every possible person gets created?  

In summary then, I’ve argued that theism is initially probable because of its simplicity, absence of arbitrary limits, and ontological uniqueness, its explanation of the existence of conscious agents, its explanation of moral knowledge, and its explanation of why you in particular exist. Unless there are similarly strong reasons to accept atheism, I submit, theism is the more rational option. Just as one should believe in evolution because it explains so much about biology, one should believe theism because it best explains almost everything about the world. 

Thanks for listening everyone, thank you Bryan for doing the debate, and most of all, thank you God for creating all that is.