I find it telling that the argument from scale appears to have developed after light pollution took the stars away. The geocentric worldview was that we were at the bottom of a cone surrounded by greater and greater spheres, yet the idea that this was evidence against a designer appears to be totally non-existent.
Other than that, I’d like to see a toy model consistent with the standard model for particle physics which actually allows for a better life to non-life ratio than our actual laws.
Not going to rebut the entire post because that would be too long, but will talk about this paragraph because it summarizes the first part
"This first argument, therefore, is a colossal failure. It neglects the fact that God is not resource constrained, thus neglecting a feature of God shared across the world’s monotheistic religions, and assumes that God made the world for us alone, something we have no reason to accept and plenty of reason to reject."
I think you're missing the point of what atheists are criticizing. They *are* rebutting specific Christian and abrahamic claims about the purpose of the universe. The whole point of God being born human is a big metaphysical statement for Christians about his nature and what He cares about. To Christians, the universe does revolve around Earth, so to speak. You can dismiss this as the ramblings of backwards American yokels, but it's really a fundamental dimension of Christianity that you are wayyyyy too dismissive of.
What's more, I think you miss the point of why designers of any sort opt against efficiency: it's for extravagance (to signal wealth), or to create resilience. I find the former to below a higher being, and a latter a little silly. There's no need to build resilience into a system in which you are the author of the physics of the system. Unlike a scientist designing a giant petri dish for a bacterium, God could dictate the physics and constraints of the system itself, human designers can't. It's a bad metaphor.
the universe being big does not have a say in whether or not God cares about humanity. I don’t see a contradiction between the scale of the universe and the idea that God personally cares about people.
It doesn’t say conclusively, but it undermines the point that it does. If God’s humanity is a big part of His Person (per the Trinity), it’s very odd that God would make humanity (and all that humanity will ever see) a small tiny sliver of the observable universe. Especially when traditional theology had the earth as the center and the bottom of the universe, The universe’s bigness may not contradict BB or your conception of God, but it is a problem for the Christian God, given the Christian God’s nature as stated by the Christian Tradition (centering humans, being part metaphysically human, etc)
>A world with life on every planet, therefore, wouldn’t really have more life than one with life on every 10 billionth planet, assuming the cosmos is infinite.
We can repeat the shuffling people around experiment for an infinite amount of planets, meaning that God never actually gets to creating anybody, since there are an infinite number of planets left for him to exhaust before choosing 1 to create life on. So why would God choose a limited number of planets to create life on, rather than an unlimited (infinite) number? Shouldn't he be acting without limits? This argument can be used to argue for God's existence whether the measure is anywhere from 0 to infinity with respect to life sustaining planetary density.
There is a similar argument you sometimes hear, that if our lives are small and brief compared to the universe, then life cannot be meaningful. Thomas Nagel has this really great paragraph about that argument:
“What we say to convey the absurdity of our lives often has to do with space or time: we are tiny specks in the infinite vastness of the universe; our lives are mere instants even on a geological time scale, let alone a cosmic one; we will all be dead any minute. But of course none of these evident facts can be what makes life absurd, if it is absurd. For suppose we lived forever; would not a life that is absurd if it lasts seventy years be infinitely absurd if it lasted through eternity? And if our lives are absurd given our present size, why would they be any less absurd if we filled the universe (either because we were larger or because the universe was smaller)? Reflection on our minuteness and brevity appears to be intimately connected with the sense that life is meaningless; but it is not clear what the connection is.”
"Scientists create petri dishes to study bacteria, even though the petri dishes are incomprehensibly larger than the petri dish."
I think you meant something else instead of the last "petri dish"?
"The universe might be—and is guaranteed to be if it’s infinite—full of aliens."
I usually trust your intuition of infinite logic, but I think you're wrong to say "guaranteed" here. Even without any God, it's entirely possible to have an infinite lifeless universe with one relatively tiny area that has life. Consider the decimal form of the fraction 14/15 ≈ 0.93333... This decimal contains an infinite number of 3s, but a single 9. If all we know is that we live on the 9 and that the entire number is infinite, we can't assume there is a second 9 out there somewhere in all the infinite digits.
That said, this doesn't detract from your larger point. Aliens in our universe seem very likely, just not guaranteed. And a large universe isn't "wasteful" even if it's only life is on Earth—if we are commanded to "be fruitful and multiply" it makes sense to have some space to multiply into.
"Well, if God can always create more—always double the number of universes—then he has to stop at some point."
Why must he ever stop, especially if God has no resource constraint? I think one of the most compelling intuitions for a creative God is one who continually and maximally creates. Physics leans that direction with ideas like bubble universes coalescing out of an infinitely-expanding inflaton field, or the many worlds interpretation with no wave function collapse but with an incredibly vast number of branching universes. With that kind of possibility, why would a creative God ever stop?
Again, this doesn't detract from your larger point. God has many options (infinite options?) for creating infinite people without putting them all right here.
Proposing that God spaced out life so that we wouldn't interact with any other seems to conflict with the idea in multiple theodicies that you find plausible which claim that connections are infinitely valuable. If positive connections are infinitely valuable, and there's value in gaining those connections in this world rather than the next, then connections with other species in this world are also infinitely valuable and spacing us out prevents those from forming. If God is infinitely powerful, he should also be able to allow us to form those connections without the potential for harm that you suppose while keeping the purportedly infinite benefits.
In fact, if God existed, we would expect there to be no sentient beings—at least not in a world like ours—because antinatalism is very likely true in our world. Here is a an excellent defense of antinatalism if you are not convinced yet : https://benjamintettu.substack.com/p/the-case-for-antinatalism
Petri dishes aren't arbitrary. They aren't simply an aesthetic biologists think bacteria would enjoy. They are necessary for the biologists project. Is this world necessary as it is for god's intent? Then god is not all powerful. That weighs on the side of the euthyphro problem answer that says morality is prior to deity. That renders deity irrelevant in discussions of virtue and the nature of the good.
I agree this doesn’t show that God is not all powerful. However, it does raise the often-ignored question of God’s Free Will. How does that look like? Does it even make sense to conceive it?
Is it that what God wants IS what is necessary (basically the Christian solution)?
If you want something then it it necessary that the world be a certain way for that want to be achieved. God is all powerful in that he can do all things that can be done. Even he can’t create a logical contradiction: as Lewis put it “Nonsense remains nonsense even if you speak it about God.” God can’t create a universe with both X and not-X, so if he wants a universe with X he can’t make a universe that is not-X. So the kind of universe God wants to create will need to have particular qualities to make whatever God want to exist exist.
The problem is with the “can do all things that can be done”. This is understood in our world because it usually means that someone else (sufficiently similar to you) could do it, in other contexts etc…Which can work as a definition of “can be done” but “not in this case, by you”.
However, in the case of God and His creation, it is assumed that this is the only creation he could make because it is the only one in perfect accordance with his plan. It would be weird to imagine that God just randomly chose from an infinity of equally acceptable creations. This implies that, in a way, he had no choice.
I am not generally disagreeing with you, but I think the solution lies more in the following thought: these questions simply lose their meaning when applied to God.
In other words, it’s non-sensical to say whether God could contradict himself because God is the origin of Logic itself. Contradictions only apply within his Creation and not to Him. It doesn’t mean anything to say God could/couldn’t have created something else because He is the origin of “all that is necessary” …or something like that.
Not sure if this is satisfactory but it seems more robust a view to me.
It's usually the most unintelligent scientists who try and read any theistic motivation into our knowledge of the universe. What we can actually say with confidence about the universe is this:
It is big.
It has been there for a while.
It will probably keep being there for an even longer while.
This says nothing about a creator or the creator's will in making it. The best way of actually knowing the latter would be to ask this creator.
Perhaps not directly related to the subject of the current post, but I wonder about something: In your conception of god, does he care whether people believe in him or not? Are there any consequences in the afterlife if you don't believe in him, or any rewards if you do?
"Similarly, a barren universe isn’t terribly unlikely on theism. If God didn’t place the various life-forms far apart, but instead packed them all together, likely many would violently colonize the others. Having space be a barrier keeping other life forms apart prevents aliens from wiping each other out, as well as bringing novel diseases to each other."
Strange that God didn't have similar scruples in keeping different human groups apart. After all, that resulted in endless wars, colonialism, genocides, ethnic cleansings, et cetera throughout human history. So, it's not obvious that this is actually a consideration for God in regards to keeping humans and aliens apart.
"On atheism, I’d think the most likely scenarios would be either no life—because life is too hard to get—or ubiquitous life, because life is easy to get. It’s surprising on atheism that the real situation is a mix of the two, where life is easy enough to get that it exists somewhere but hard enough to get that it’s rare."
Well, this might be a case of getting lucky. Let's use an example from gerontology/extreme longevity: With Christian Mortensen, Denmark had a man (well, Danish-born--he died here in the US) who lived to over age 115 and 8 months. However, it then took Denmark another 32 years to even see a man who reached age 110+, and that man died three months after his 110th birthday. (The difference between age 110 and 115.7 might not seem like much, but when you have 50% or more *annual* odds of dying at those ages, it really is quite considerable.)
I do find it interesting, though, that God could make life exist using much different chemical formulations than we have here on Earth. After all, he's God and therefore (almost) all-powerful: If he wants to design living beings that can survive on a different chemical combination than humans do, then he's certainly capable of producing them. But so far, we haven't actually found any extraterrestrial life.
>First of all, while human designers have some reason to avoid wastefulness, a designer that is totally unlimited in what he can create has no such reason.
This leaves us without a clue and incapable of understanding anything about God's psychology due to how unlike any other intelligence he is.
We absolutely can't say that the universe is big; big only has a meaning relative to something else. Take the case of a seriously stunted blue whale: tiny considered as a blue whale, enormous considered as an animal. Which is it? The universe looks big compared to a day's journey for a human being, but also the sun appears to go round the earth to a human being so what value is there in the human POV? There are surely arguments not even worth demolishing?
I find it telling that the argument from scale appears to have developed after light pollution took the stars away. The geocentric worldview was that we were at the bottom of a cone surrounded by greater and greater spheres, yet the idea that this was evidence against a designer appears to be totally non-existent.
Other than that, I’d like to see a toy model consistent with the standard model for particle physics which actually allows for a better life to non-life ratio than our actual laws.
“It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree.” - G. K. Chesterton
Not going to rebut the entire post because that would be too long, but will talk about this paragraph because it summarizes the first part
"This first argument, therefore, is a colossal failure. It neglects the fact that God is not resource constrained, thus neglecting a feature of God shared across the world’s monotheistic religions, and assumes that God made the world for us alone, something we have no reason to accept and plenty of reason to reject."
I think you're missing the point of what atheists are criticizing. They *are* rebutting specific Christian and abrahamic claims about the purpose of the universe. The whole point of God being born human is a big metaphysical statement for Christians about his nature and what He cares about. To Christians, the universe does revolve around Earth, so to speak. You can dismiss this as the ramblings of backwards American yokels, but it's really a fundamental dimension of Christianity that you are wayyyyy too dismissive of.
What's more, I think you miss the point of why designers of any sort opt against efficiency: it's for extravagance (to signal wealth), or to create resilience. I find the former to below a higher being, and a latter a little silly. There's no need to build resilience into a system in which you are the author of the physics of the system. Unlike a scientist designing a giant petri dish for a bacterium, God could dictate the physics and constraints of the system itself, human designers can't. It's a bad metaphor.
the universe being big does not have a say in whether or not God cares about humanity. I don’t see a contradiction between the scale of the universe and the idea that God personally cares about people.
It doesn’t say conclusively, but it undermines the point that it does. If God’s humanity is a big part of His Person (per the Trinity), it’s very odd that God would make humanity (and all that humanity will ever see) a small tiny sliver of the observable universe. Especially when traditional theology had the earth as the center and the bottom of the universe, The universe’s bigness may not contradict BB or your conception of God, but it is a problem for the Christian God, given the Christian God’s nature as stated by the Christian Tradition (centering humans, being part metaphysically human, etc)
>A world with life on every planet, therefore, wouldn’t really have more life than one with life on every 10 billionth planet, assuming the cosmos is infinite.
We can repeat the shuffling people around experiment for an infinite amount of planets, meaning that God never actually gets to creating anybody, since there are an infinite number of planets left for him to exhaust before choosing 1 to create life on. So why would God choose a limited number of planets to create life on, rather than an unlimited (infinite) number? Shouldn't he be acting without limits? This argument can be used to argue for God's existence whether the measure is anywhere from 0 to infinity with respect to life sustaining planetary density.
There is a similar argument you sometimes hear, that if our lives are small and brief compared to the universe, then life cannot be meaningful. Thomas Nagel has this really great paragraph about that argument:
“What we say to convey the absurdity of our lives often has to do with space or time: we are tiny specks in the infinite vastness of the universe; our lives are mere instants even on a geological time scale, let alone a cosmic one; we will all be dead any minute. But of course none of these evident facts can be what makes life absurd, if it is absurd. For suppose we lived forever; would not a life that is absurd if it lasts seventy years be infinitely absurd if it lasted through eternity? And if our lives are absurd given our present size, why would they be any less absurd if we filled the universe (either because we were larger or because the universe was smaller)? Reflection on our minuteness and brevity appears to be intimately connected with the sense that life is meaningless; but it is not clear what the connection is.”
"Scientists create petri dishes to study bacteria, even though the petri dishes are incomprehensibly larger than the petri dish."
I think you meant something else instead of the last "petri dish"?
"The universe might be—and is guaranteed to be if it’s infinite—full of aliens."
I usually trust your intuition of infinite logic, but I think you're wrong to say "guaranteed" here. Even without any God, it's entirely possible to have an infinite lifeless universe with one relatively tiny area that has life. Consider the decimal form of the fraction 14/15 ≈ 0.93333... This decimal contains an infinite number of 3s, but a single 9. If all we know is that we live on the 9 and that the entire number is infinite, we can't assume there is a second 9 out there somewhere in all the infinite digits.
That said, this doesn't detract from your larger point. Aliens in our universe seem very likely, just not guaranteed. And a large universe isn't "wasteful" even if it's only life is on Earth—if we are commanded to "be fruitful and multiply" it makes sense to have some space to multiply into.
"Well, if God can always create more—always double the number of universes—then he has to stop at some point."
Why must he ever stop, especially if God has no resource constraint? I think one of the most compelling intuitions for a creative God is one who continually and maximally creates. Physics leans that direction with ideas like bubble universes coalescing out of an infinitely-expanding inflaton field, or the many worlds interpretation with no wave function collapse but with an incredibly vast number of branching universes. With that kind of possibility, why would a creative God ever stop?
Again, this doesn't detract from your larger point. God has many options (infinite options?) for creating infinite people without putting them all right here.
Proposing that God spaced out life so that we wouldn't interact with any other seems to conflict with the idea in multiple theodicies that you find plausible which claim that connections are infinitely valuable. If positive connections are infinitely valuable, and there's value in gaining those connections in this world rather than the next, then connections with other species in this world are also infinitely valuable and spacing us out prevents those from forming. If God is infinitely powerful, he should also be able to allow us to form those connections without the potential for harm that you suppose while keeping the purportedly infinite benefits.
Yes, absolutely! Similar to the connections that different humans form when they meet humans that belong to different racial or ethnic groups!
In fact, if God existed, we would expect there to be no sentient beings—at least not in a world like ours—because antinatalism is very likely true in our world. Here is a an excellent defense of antinatalism if you are not convinced yet : https://benjamintettu.substack.com/p/the-case-for-antinatalism
Petri dishes aren't arbitrary. They aren't simply an aesthetic biologists think bacteria would enjoy. They are necessary for the biologists project. Is this world necessary as it is for god's intent? Then god is not all powerful. That weighs on the side of the euthyphro problem answer that says morality is prior to deity. That renders deity irrelevant in discussions of virtue and the nature of the good.
“Is this world necessary as it is for god's intent? Then god is not all powerful.”
That seems to be a fully general argument: no matter what form the universe takes you could make the same complaint.
A case of proving too much? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_too_much
I agree this doesn’t show that God is not all powerful. However, it does raise the often-ignored question of God’s Free Will. How does that look like? Does it even make sense to conceive it?
Is it that what God wants IS what is necessary (basically the Christian solution)?
If you want something then it it necessary that the world be a certain way for that want to be achieved. God is all powerful in that he can do all things that can be done. Even he can’t create a logical contradiction: as Lewis put it “Nonsense remains nonsense even if you speak it about God.” God can’t create a universe with both X and not-X, so if he wants a universe with X he can’t make a universe that is not-X. So the kind of universe God wants to create will need to have particular qualities to make whatever God want to exist exist.
The problem is with the “can do all things that can be done”. This is understood in our world because it usually means that someone else (sufficiently similar to you) could do it, in other contexts etc…Which can work as a definition of “can be done” but “not in this case, by you”.
However, in the case of God and His creation, it is assumed that this is the only creation he could make because it is the only one in perfect accordance with his plan. It would be weird to imagine that God just randomly chose from an infinity of equally acceptable creations. This implies that, in a way, he had no choice.
I am not generally disagreeing with you, but I think the solution lies more in the following thought: these questions simply lose their meaning when applied to God.
In other words, it’s non-sensical to say whether God could contradict himself because God is the origin of Logic itself. Contradictions only apply within his Creation and not to Him. It doesn’t mean anything to say God could/couldn’t have created something else because He is the origin of “all that is necessary” …or something like that.
Not sure if this is satisfactory but it seems more robust a view to me.
It's usually the most unintelligent scientists who try and read any theistic motivation into our knowledge of the universe. What we can actually say with confidence about the universe is this:
It is big.
It has been there for a while.
It will probably keep being there for an even longer while.
This says nothing about a creator or the creator's will in making it. The best way of actually knowing the latter would be to ask this creator.
Perhaps not directly related to the subject of the current post, but I wonder about something: In your conception of god, does he care whether people believe in him or not? Are there any consequences in the afterlife if you don't believe in him, or any rewards if you do?
"Similarly, a barren universe isn’t terribly unlikely on theism. If God didn’t place the various life-forms far apart, but instead packed them all together, likely many would violently colonize the others. Having space be a barrier keeping other life forms apart prevents aliens from wiping each other out, as well as bringing novel diseases to each other."
Strange that God didn't have similar scruples in keeping different human groups apart. After all, that resulted in endless wars, colonialism, genocides, ethnic cleansings, et cetera throughout human history. So, it's not obvious that this is actually a consideration for God in regards to keeping humans and aliens apart.
"On atheism, I’d think the most likely scenarios would be either no life—because life is too hard to get—or ubiquitous life, because life is easy to get. It’s surprising on atheism that the real situation is a mix of the two, where life is easy enough to get that it exists somewhere but hard enough to get that it’s rare."
Well, this might be a case of getting lucky. Let's use an example from gerontology/extreme longevity: With Christian Mortensen, Denmark had a man (well, Danish-born--he died here in the US) who lived to over age 115 and 8 months. However, it then took Denmark another 32 years to even see a man who reached age 110+, and that man died three months after his 110th birthday. (The difference between age 110 and 115.7 might not seem like much, but when you have 50% or more *annual* odds of dying at those ages, it really is quite considerable.)
I do find it interesting, though, that God could make life exist using much different chemical formulations than we have here on Earth. After all, he's God and therefore (almost) all-powerful: If he wants to design living beings that can survive on a different chemical combination than humans do, then he's certainly capable of producing them. But so far, we haven't actually found any extraterrestrial life.
>First of all, while human designers have some reason to avoid wastefulness, a designer that is totally unlimited in what he can create has no such reason.
This leaves us without a clue and incapable of understanding anything about God's psychology due to how unlike any other intelligence he is.
This addresses the size of the universe. But what about the age of the universe?
We absolutely can't say that the universe is big; big only has a meaning relative to something else. Take the case of a seriously stunted blue whale: tiny considered as a blue whale, enormous considered as an animal. Which is it? The universe looks big compared to a day's journey for a human being, but also the sun appears to go round the earth to a human being so what value is there in the human POV? There are surely arguments not even worth demolishing?