The Comprehensive Case For God Summarized Extremely Quickly

Plus some implications

There are a lot of arguments for the existence of God. Some are super complicated, spawning complex webs of replies and counterreplies. Often it’s easy to get caught up in the nitty-gritty and miss the big picture. So here, I’m not going to respond to any objections (much as ignoring objections feels like undergoing a painful dental procedure). I’m just going to briefly summarize the comprehensive case for God. I will, however, link to where I defended the arguments in more detail, so look there for objections.

By “God” I mean an uncaused being with limitless power, knowledge, and goodness. I think such a being has a high prior probability (probability before examining specific evidence), because this being is simply a mind without limits. Given that the being has no fundamental limits, nothing constrains it, so it is omnipotent, and nothing limits its awareness, so it’s omniscient. Then, because it has a perfect grasp of morality, and suffers from no rational defects, it always does what’s best. If you see that something is desirable and you suffer no rational defect or contrary psychological inclination, then on plausible views, you’ll be automatically disposed to want it. One with perfect rationality wants everything that’s worth wanting.

Given that minds are one of the fundamental things, a mind without limits is simple. It’s simply one of the fundamental elements of reality instantiated without limit. An infinitely large space is simpler and more intrinsically probable than a space that’s exactly 10 quintillion meters across. Likewise, a God who knows every fact is more intrinsically likely than one who knows every fact but one. Likewise, a mind totally without limit is far more intrinsically probable than any mind subject to some arbitrary constriction.

Even if you’re a bit skeptical of this account, it’s plausible enough that the prior probability of theism is not outrageously low. If you think that there’s a 10% chance that an entity is simple, and you think its prior probability is 1% if it is simple, then its prior will be 1/1,000. The evidence for theism is strong enough that it should overcome even a low prior.

A fact is evidence for theism if the odds of it are higher given theism than atheism. If your DNA is at the crime scene, that is evidence for your guilt, because the likelihood that your DNA would be at the crime scene is higher if you committed the crime than if you didn’t. It’s not sufficient evidence, but it is evidence.

Here are some things that are likelier given theism than atheism—that theism nicely explains.

1. The laws line up with the things that exist. There might instead have been laws of the form “all Xs do A,” but no Xs. By default, it’s very surprising that the laws line up with the things that exist, just like by default it would be surprising if a random rulebook to a game lined up with the pieces of the game, unless this correspondence was designed.

2. We have laws capable of giving rise to interesting structure. By default, almost all laws devolve to random chaos or simple and valueless patterns.

3. We have finely-tuned constants, so that they fall in a narrow range needed for the formation of complex structure.

4. Some physical structures give rise to consciousness.

5. The structures that give rise to consciousness exist. If As are the only things that produce consciousness, but there are no As, then there’d be no consciousness. By default, if there’s no God, out of all the possible ingredients for consciousness, it’s pretty surprising that they happen to be ones that arise.

6. Consciousness pairs up harmoniously with the physical world. Most conceivable pairings would lead to nothing of much value.

7. As your existence illustrates, there is a giant multiverse with absolutely infinitely many people. Put another way: your existence is N times likelier if there are N times more people, so you should think the number of people that exist is the very most that there could be—and this is likelier if God exists than if God doesn’t exist.

8. Humans possess knowledge of morality, mathematics, the modal facts, right priors, and other non-physical facts.

9. We’re not radically deceived in our most basic and fundamental beliefs about the world, the way we’d be if we were Boltzmann brains or brains in vats.

These all strike me as very good. Each of the arguments above seems on its own enough to majorly raise the likelihood of theism. This next list has somewhat weaker arguments, but they’re still pretty good. Some more things God explains better:

1. Fine-tuning for discoverability. Robin Collins has argued that the constants are suspiciously tuned for us to be able to discover them and do science. This one is very powerful evidence against atheism if the physics works out, but I don’t know if it does.

2. Belief in God is widespread (a priori, given atheism, I wouldn’t have expected almost everyone in the world to believe in God).

3. A bunch of pretty credible miracles seem to happen all the time, mostly in religious settings.

4. Widespread religious experience (just ask: a priori would the atheist have expected people to routinely think they were interacting with the perfect creator of the universe? No. Would theists? More likely, because the perfect creator of the universe loves them.)

5. Time (a static world would have had no value).

6. Anything whatsoever exists.

7. Laws of nature, rather than particles that are impotent and do nothing, like sleepy Joe.

8. Intentionality (some mental states are about other things, which is a pretty weird feature of our world. No purely physical thing is about any other physical thing).

9. Mental causation.

10. Reason.¹

Now, some more miscellaneous features that theism maybe explains a bit better but don’t have a ton of force on their own:

1. Souls.

2. Love.

3. A very beautiful natural world.

4. Haecceities.

5. Language.

6. Scott Alexander’s post on John Rawls, the song What I Wouldn’t Do, and Mitch Hedberg’s joke, “I haven’t slept for 10 days... because that would be too long.” (could naturalism explain such amazingly good things?).

7. A physical world.

8. Design in biology (read the linked article for more; I’m not making any Behe-style non-credible scientific claims—nothing I’m saying conflicts with standard science).

9. The laws of nature being conducive to abiogenesis and complex chemistry more broadly.

10. The fortuitous correspondence between objective list goods and goods that are conducive to pleasure.

11. The fact that the universe is discoverable and investigable by science.

12. The infinite size of the universe, according to plausible theories of physics.²

13. Moral motivation.³

Three notable things about this case. First, there are a lot of different considerations. So if atheism keeps taking hit after hit from each extra fact, it’s in rough shape. Second, while the considerations aren’t entirely probabilistically independent, many are at least largely independent. For example, a solution to fine-tuning probably doesn’t explain consciousness.

Third, many of the considerations are quite forceful. Not all of them, certainly; the twelve non-jokey miscellaneous considerations at the end generally don’t have a ton of force. But each of the first nine strikes me as very forceful. In the days of my atheism, I felt like I had to say something pretty hand-wavy and improbable about each of them. It’s more likely that there’s a solution to the problem of evil than to all nine of those arguments, some of which seem individually about as forceful as the problem of evil. The next ten also strike me as pretty good.

If God exists, that is the best news in the universe. It means that there is a being of limitless knowledge, power, and goodness, who made all things. It means, with very high likelihood, that we will all spend forever in paradise with our loved ones—that reality is, on the whole, infinitely good. It means that when we do good things for other people, this might strengthen our connections with them for all time, so that our reasons to help are even stronger than they might otherwise be.

In the afterlife, there is no limit to the joys that a perfect God can bestow on us. We will experience joys so great that a single second of them would be worth all the misery so far in human history. Yet these will not end, nor lessen, nor slowly fade to oblivion. They shall continue, forever, and be experienced alongside those we love most. Each second will outshine the darkest earthly tortures more thoroughly than a supernova outshines a shadow.

Yet God’s existence also raises the likelihood that we will be on the hook for our malfeasance—that we may one be held accountable by God for our decisions. The existence of God makes our actions far more significant than they would otherwise be. It means our wrongdoing is much worse than it would otherwise be, and our right actions are much better.

While we should love God, we should also approach God with some measure of fear and trembling, as we would if our innermost life was on full display before the world’s most virtuous person, whose relationship with us was of infinite value. The bad things we do even though we know deep down that they’re wrong—failing to give our money to effective charities, prioritizing our own desires over doing what we know to be right, failing to carefully follow the evidence when it is inconvenient or conflicts with our preexisting judgments—are things God knows about, that we may one day have to answer for.

This is not a reason to think that God’s existence is bad news. It’s the opposite. God is so limitlessly perfect that anything that might strain our relationship with him, even slightly, is infinitely terrible. While I don’t think there’s an eternal hell, there might be a temporary hell—a period where we suffer for the purpose of our purification, akin to purgatory.

The world’s religions standardly hold to at least this, and it wouldn’t be surprising if the process of us becoming more virtuous and regretting our previous wicked ways was painful. Even if it’s not painful, so long as it merely takes time, it costs us infinitely, because every second with God is of infinite value. And while I expect the afterlife to be a place where we are made smarter, more virtuous, and more forgiving, the good things we do for each other in this life will resound forever.

There is good reason to think that God exists. This is the best possible news. But it is a reason not to be complacent and to act in the ways that we think a perfect being would approve of. For one day, we may come face to face with such a being, and there, our excuses will not carry much weight.

1. The most forceful version of this argument may be largely subsumed by other considerations. Victor Reppert notes that you need the following ingredients for reasoning, many of which are surprising on naturalism, though many are already part of the list:

1. States of mind have a relation to the world we call intentionality, or aboutness.

2. Thoughts and beliefs can be either true or false.

3. Human can be in the condition of accepting, rejecting, or suspending belief about propositions.

4. Logical laws exist.

5. Human beings are capable of apprehending logical laws.

6. The state of accepting the truth of a proposition plays a crucial causal role in the production of other beliefs, and the propositional content of mental states is relevant to the playing of this causal role.

7. The apprehension of logical laws plays a causal role in the acceptance of the conclusion of the argument as true.

8. The same individual entertains thoughts of the premises and then draws the conclusion.

9. Our processes of reasoning provide us with a systematically reliable way of understanding the world around us.

2. This is the Anthropic argument’s little brother.

3. In theory, there could have been beings who understood morality but felt no motivation to follow it.