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Steelmanning Atheism

Steelmanning Atheism

A lengthy defense of a view I don't hold

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Bentham's Bulldog
Jun 11, 2025
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Steelmanning Atheism
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1 Introduction

I’m a theist! I think God exists, created the universe, fine-tuned the constants, made harmonious psychophysical laws, and loves you (yes you!) This is the single most awesome fact about the world!

But lots of people disagree with me about this. I like to think that my theism is rational, but maybe not. So to test how well I understand the best case for atheism, I thought I’d do my best to steelman atheism! I’ll describe the best reasons, in my judgment, to be an atheist as well as give my best responses to some of the theistic arguments I’ve promoted in the past. This is a rare glimpse of what an atheist Bentham’s Bulldog might look like—hope you enjoy!

2 The prior of God

When evaluating some theory about how the world is, we should look at two things. First, the prior probability of that theory: how likely it is before considering the evidence. The theory that I am cheating in poker has a higher probability than the theory that a fairy rigged the deck, even though they both can explain my extraordinary stream of luck. This is because its prior is higher. Next, one should look at the evidence—we’ll do that later.

I think God’s existence has an extremely low prior. Absurdly low!

There are infinite ways that the world could be. Infinite possible deities, sets of laws and initial conditions, and many more things too weird to grasp. The prior probability of any of these should be infinitesimal. When there are infinite possible options, you shouldn’t start out very confident in any of them.

Belief in God came largely out of ancient polytheistic belief—wherein people believed in many feuding deities like Zeus and Poseidon. Over time, belief in a bunch of feuding limited gods was replaced by belief in a single supreme God who calls the shots. But what are the odds that the random outshoot of ancient Paganism would happen to be the most intrinsically likely way for the world to be? It would be quite a miracle for such a thing to be true!

Now, theists like the scoundrel who writes the Bentham’s Bulldog blog often claim that God has a high prior probability because of his simplicity and non-arbitrariness. Such a claim is almost too confused for one to know where to begin.

First of all, there are many equally simple and non-arbitrary theories. The theses that there’s simply maximal instantiated value (this is called axiarchism), every possible world (modal realism), a maximally evil God, the set of all physical objects, and maximal beauty, are all equally simple and non-arbitrary.

Second, theism is of quite doubtful coherence. Don’t even get me started on the obviously ludicrous notion of classical theism—where God is supposed to be identical to each of his attributes, like his knowledge that the world has at least three onions. Joe Schmid’s dispatched that view quite persuasively, to my mind.

But even theism of the normal sort is of doubtful persuasion. For example, God’s supposed to know everything. Everything—all infinite truths. But for every truth that God knows, it’s true that he knows it. So he knows some truths A and B, knows he knows A and B, knows he knows that he knows A and B and so on forever. Is this regress coherent? It’s unclear!

In addition, because there’s no set of all truths, God knows a number of things too large to be a set. Can one know so many things that there’s no set of all things that they know? One’s beliefs are gathered together in a way rather like being causally bundled—certainly causal finitists should be doubtful of this idea.

In addition, God’s supposed to be the best possible thing. Is there a best possible thing? It seems that for every possible thing there is, it could be made better simply if it acquired the disposition to make more good stuff. God could be improved upon if he simply made more good stuff. For that reason, the notion that there’s some uniquely best thing—supreme over all—is quite doubtful.

Now, I’m not claiming this is obviously incoherent. But there’s enough that’s doubtful about God—enough philosophical hoops that must be jumped through for him to even be in the running as an explanation—that the prior in his existence must not be very large.

Third, the path towards establishing that God is simple is very dubious. Generally the scoundrel called Bentham’s Bulldog argues that he’s simple because he’s a limitless mind. On account of his total absence of limits, there’s nothing constraining what he knows or can do. But this is very doubtful.

  1. It requires that minds are the sorts of things that can be unlimited.

  2. It requires that being unlimited is a joint carving property. While some fundamental things may be simple on account of being infinite in the property that it possesses, limitlessness in the sense needed for the argument is quite distinct. God doesn’t just possess the property of mind to an infinite degree—he’s unlimited in some other qualitative sense.

  3. It requires that accounts of simplicity on which simplicity is about the length of the mathematical description of some entity are false. Being unlimited and infinite does not lower a thing’s Kolmogorov complexity.

  4. It requires that morality is objective and non-natural—that there are moral facts that an omniscient being could infallibly know.

  5. It requires some odd thesis about motivation, according to which a limitless mind would thereby be motivated to follow the good. Seems equally plausible that a person’s motivations depend on their desires. There’s no guarantee that wisdom alone will make a creature virtuous.

Each of these seems doubtful to me. Let’s be very generous and grant them each 1/2 probability. Well, the odds they’re all correct is 1/32. So even putting aside the challenges to theism in terms of coherence, there’s only a 1/32 chance that theism is even on the table as a potentially parsimonious theory.

Now, there are other routes that people go to establish that God is simple. But these are equally dubious. For instance, lots of people say God is simple because he just has one property: perfection. But perfection isn’t a joint-carving property. There are no fundamental perfection facts that don’t reduce to facts about goodness.

Besides merely instantiating some property—like perfection—to a high degree doesn’t make a thing simple. The most complicated state of affairs wouldn’t be simple just because it maximally instantiates the property of being complicated. Simplicity is about the component parts of a thing, not the higher-level properties it instantiates. If the most beautiful state of affairs is highly complicated and disjointed, it wouldn’t thereby be simple.

Theism seems to commit the core error that’s ubiquitous throughout history—assuming that agency is natural and simple when it’s quite the opposite. The ancients peered up at the stars and assumed some designer must be behind them. Turns out the simplest—and now universally agreed upon—explanation was in terms of natural processes. At some point, when you’ve witnessed agential explanations for unknown phenomena be wrong over and over again, you should begin to question them! The best explanation of these repeated error is that humans have an innate tendency to overattribute things to agents—something we independently know from psychology! You shouldn’t ignore this bias in assigning your priors.

For these reasons, I think theism has a vanishingly low prior. It’s the kind of explanation that’s been wrong repeatedly, is of doubtful coherence, and has no plausible claim to simplicity.

3 Evil

The world is filled with horrifying, gut-wrenching evil. Billions of sentient beings die every second. Thousands of children die of preventable disease every day. For billions of years, animals have been suffering and dying—in numbers we cannot fathom, across time scales we cannot fathom.

Such a thing is obviously incompatible with the existence of a perfect God.

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