I appreciate you arguing for theism rather than Christianity, it has made me reconsider my staunch atheism which was largely a result of criticisms towards Christianity.
It seems to be (extremely stongly) that a perfect being wouldn't actualise a world which contains a gigantic amount of atrocious evil and suffering. Do any of those highly speculative, controversial and problematic considerations for theism have anything close to enough force to serve as defeaters to this initial seeming ? Absolutely not lol
And I think that any honest, non-brainwashed person would say the same
The issue that god being good keeps getting smuggled into these arguments when in many cases it is not necessary at all. We can posit other more reasonable given the world reasons why a deity would say create infinite worlds such as the sia argument needs. My prefers is that its teleological, in that it’s p ur purpose is to create and so it just keeps doing that.
This is proposition P : (can one seriously affirm to have more credence in argument from psychophysical harmony e.g. than in this lmao?)
«P — A perfect being—that is, a being who is perfectly good, perfectly loving, perfectly compassionate, omniscient, and omnipotent—would not actualize a world containing unimaginable quantities of atrocious suffering and of heinous and abhorrent evils.»
I’d say he suppresses the truth in his heart to be edgy and to follow his social group, plus he uses motivated reasoning. I have a hard time believing that he considers the case for God more persuasive than something like proposition P
Recently I've also been really drawn to (and writing about) purgatory as an eschatological view. The suffering we would undergo in purgatory is a good if it results in the infinite good of proximity to God. Do you think the existence of a standard Catholic God (including eternal hell) would be bad news?
I'd be curious what you think about the idea that the cosmological argument, insofar as it concludes with an uncaused cause with the power to produce our actual universe, actually constitues stronger evidence for something like God than we might otherwise think for the following reason: an uncaused cause with the power to cause our universe has very many powers, which inductively supports having some mental powers, and being mental plus having very many powers entails having very many perfections. Hence, this provides strong inductive support for something near enough to a perfect being.
Would you be sympathetic to something along those lines? :)
It's not clear that creating the universe gives especially strong evidence that it has many different powers, rather than just a single kind of power. But it's certainly some evidence.
I was thinking that the powers to produce different events that are partly probabilistically independent are also partly probabilistically independent, even if they are amiable to highly compressible law-like descriptions. That the first cause has the power to produce a certain event at one place and time that bears resemblance to another event at a different place and time is evidence that it can produce both of those highly similar events, but also that it can do other stuff. By way of analogy, the fact that many french revans are black is no less evence that all ravens are black just because it's also evidence that specifically all french ravens are black.
Maybe I'm confused, but that seems right to me at the moment!
You have these large arguments that cite tons of old posts, but you also say you're not interested in defending the arguments you made on old posts... seems a little dubious...
Anyway, although there's much to argue over here, the first thing I noticed that I disagreed with (and found it productive to argue over) was the sentence "Given that minds are one of the fundamental things, a mind without limits is simple." The latter does not follow from the former. Even if we agree for the sake of argument that your Mary's Room post shows that consciousness is non-physical, it remains the case that it has always been observed to correlate with complex physical structures. This seems to be a necessary feature, as minds to complex things like modelling the physical world. So it's not reasonable to expect a "mind without limits" to be simple, as no minds that we have observed have been simple, and especially not minds that are capable of doing complex things.
I said that I wasn't going to defend those arguments in this post, because that would take too long. I didn't express a general disinterest in defending the arguments I think are good.
The fact that minds *do* correlate with physical things doesn't mean they *must* correlate with physical things.
The reason it's simple is that it's just one of the fundamental elements of reality instantiated without limit.
Sorry, I wasn't clear, when I said "you're not interested in defending the arguments you made on old posts" I was referring to a comment you made on one of the comments I made on a previous post, where you said you would probably ignore a comment I had made on an even earlier post because you had too many posts to keep track of them all, or something like that. (Unfortunately I can't seem to find this comment now and Substack doesn't appear to have a search feature.) Are you saying now that if we have objections to the posts you cite in this post, you will respond to them? Should we write our objections here or in the previous posts?
It's true that "do" doesn't strictly imply "must", but it is a lot of evidence for it when it encompasses every observed instance of the phenomenon in question.
Why is a fundamental element of reality "instantiated without limit" simple? For example, matter is a fundamental element of reality, right? What would it even mean for matter to be instantiated without limit, let alone for that to be simple?
Do you see some important distinction between "I don't respond to comments on old posts" and "you also say you're not interested in defending the arguments you made on old posts"? What's the difference?
If there's some brand new objection on an old post, I'll usually address it. So in that sense, it's not as if I'm disinterested in engaging with arguments I've given previously. I just obviously, given that I get about 100 comments a day, can't respond even to the ones on old posts.
The current strategy among believers to convince non believers of the likelihood of God's existence runs as yours does, as if there is an accumulation of arguments and facts—such as fine-tuning—that puts the odds in the believer's favor. I prefer the stance of someone like Sean Carroll, who says, yes, it's possible, but there is no actual evidence (certainly not the experience of believers, certainly not the occurrence of "miracles"). Fine tuning supposes that we can comprehend odds in a near-infinite or near-infinite universe, which is unlikely. And you don't even address the issue of brute facts. Better to focus on the beauty and benefits of the experience of faith rather than rhetoric. And some of your arguments veer close to the ontological argument, which really in the end presupposes the existence of god. There is no credible argument of necessity. Who knows what's necessary in this big, strange place?
Well things could change if God announced him/it/herself and changed the evidence. But most of what is listed in that post is, in my opinion, rather like hearsay or indirect evidence. Where is the actual proof? And why, incidentally, must this be a matter of inference and such? Doesn't that seem odd?
My question is can hearsay and indirect proof ever alone make something likely to be true. Do you not understand the question, or are you intentionally dodging it?
Yes, sometimes, mostly in civil cases, but just as science cannot prove that God does not exist, believers cannot prove that God “likely” exists, or what the proof means. It just doesn’t rise to the necessary level of evidence. I’m actually a bit surprised that believers bother to make the argument, just as I’m a bit embarrassed by the worst arguments of atheists. Luis de Morales, in the Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, made the better argument with his painting La Piedad.
1. Probably an evil God would just make a torture world.
2. Belief in evil God is self-defeating because it gives us reason to distrust our cognitive faculties.
3. It's intrinsically very improbable that God would want evil, rather than paperclips, tuna, or any of the other things in the world. It's arbitrary and low probability. Good isn't the same way because on standard views, full rationality makes you want whatever is good.
1. And probably a good God would just make a happiness world, but accepting the good God theistic argument requires an explanation why that isn’t the case. Has there been any work explaining why all theodicies don’t run in reverse pairs; e.g. whether there is a directionality to the argument? Like if we say that God allows for suffering because it is necessary for higher order goods, why couldn’t an evil god allow for good because it is necessary for higher order evils? Etc (side note, although we struggle to conceive of ways to achieve certain higher order goods without suffering, why wouldn’t an all powerful deity, unless it is literally not possible even for them). Isn’t the most reasonable take, if you accept the other arguments, a form of morally neutral deity?
I follow "rationality = you want what is intrinsically good" but doesn't that just push the question back a step. Why is a being of infinite rationality more likely than a being of infinite irrationality? How do you decide which things are "fundamental" and just exist infinitely somewhere and which things are like paperclips, tuna, and apparently evil? This is the part of the argument I don't follow.
As far as #1 goes, my guess is it's insanely easy to come up with a "reverse theodicy" explaining "the problem of good" for evil god.
Whenever I read your pro-theism posts, I keep circling back to the credence you put on God existing: originally 64%, now bumped up to around 70% (the earlier number comes from an interview you did with Liron Shapira, and the latter one from a comment you left on a previous post you wrote). That feels kind of low given how the posts actually read. 70% means you think there's almost a 1-in-3 chance theism is false, which is a lot of probability to leave on the table.
If that's really where you land, I'd expect the writing to reflect that uncertainty, where you should spend more time on the strongest objections, more hedging, more "Here's where this might fall apart." But the tone reads a lot closer to 98% than 70%, and that gap gives me pause.
I think, to be honest its pretty reasonable. A paper full of constant hedging both isn't convincing and wouldn't be one I want to read quite frankly. If you're wrong, other people will rip your arguments to shreds, you dont need to do the work for them. Just ask Rawls.
Why should we think our morality is anything even comparable or analogous to God’s morality? Like this is where I think skeptical theism and apophatic theology are super strong but maybe don’t go far enough.
If I suggested that my capacity to understand reality compared to God was that of a mosquito to a human, I’d be understating things to the degree that I’m elevating myself to a demigod-like status.
Ironically my concern here is sort of a reverse EAAN. It’s not clear to me that a bunch of our “moral intuitions,” even if granted to us directly by God, couldn’t exist as means to an end, where that end is a relatively mundane end that represents the tiniest sliver of God’s intentions for the multiverse. But even this is insufficiently humble, since it assumes a sort of consequentialism in God when God’s morality could reflect nothing any of our metaethical theories can grasp.
Certainly God's moral views differ from ours insofar as we are in error. And we often are. But I think we have a non-zero amount of moral knowledge. And all you need to get theism to predict all the evidence with much higher odds than atheism is that it's not terribly unlikely that God would make beings who can experience the goods on the objective list, in very great numbers.
Yeah I guess I’m departing from the evidence question (that’s my bad, since that’s what this post is literally about) and saying “okay, we accept theism is true, now what can we say about God?”
And at that point, speaking of “God would make beings who can experience the goods on the objective list” seems to be assuming God’s metaethics quite a bit, though that’s not to unfairly assign you certainty you explicitly didn’t express.
We can say that God is good, and so he wants you to do good things.
If OLT is right, then it's no t terribly unlikely that God would create creatures capable of experiencing the goods. And OLT is at least plausible, so the odds of this isn't terrible.
Impressive and exhaustive analysis that is food for thought.
Regarding your initial definition for God including goodness, I think that quality (along with evil) only applies to conscious actors within his creation attempting to align within his reality. Therefore, truly comprehending God's plan or purpose is imperative to fully understanding good and evil and their application to us.
I believe that a functional view of creation is essential to fully understanding God. This necessarily includes the existence of life and it's development of consciousness.
I believe that through evolution, life aligns with reality. However, initially that alignment was unintentional and involved random chance selected by survival over long periods of time. Once consciousness appeared, the timeframe for alignment was exponentially (logarithmically?) shortened.
However, consciousness did not transcend evolutionary forces, and in fact it amplified them and led to the mega evolution that humanity experienced over the last million or so years. One cause of this was the development of tools that in turn led to selection for those best able to wield those tools. Physical tools led to changes in physical form but also to brain changes. The tool of language is perhaps the most notable that led to physical changes to allow better speaking as well as brain changes to better process that.
Language also led to the development of our greatest tool of all: belief in God. A rapid acceleration in the development of language about 250,000 years ago corresponds closely to the first evidence of belief in God including ceremonial worship.
Individuals, families, tribes, states and civilizations that included religious worship survived over those that didn't. The atheists and agnostics were selected against, and science shows that process continues to this day.
This functional view of the universe does not prove the existence of God unless one applies the simple truth in the saying "the truth is in the pudding".
While I agree that theism is likely true, for many of the reasons you describe, though many of the accounts (like fine tuning for discoverability need a lot more work). However one crucial point.
Most important and something I think I’ve left as a comment on most of these religion war posts is that none of these arguments establish god is good. The problem of evil has still not been addressed.
The theodicies for getting around the problem of evil are obviously nonsense (unless you are a virtue ethicist, which tbf is the default for many religions). A god could get rid of all suffering without impeding free will(if it exists), and for any universe with suffering a god with trivial effort could make a strictly better universe with no suffering. There is no reason I can conceive of why this would violate the law of non-contradiction (the only law to which god is usually held to be bound).
That god is good keeps getting smuggled into these arguments where they are not needed and it both weakens the argument and is a weird attempt to try to steer what kind of theism we end up at in an abrahamic direction that doesn’t seem justified.
For an example of this, having read your paper on sia yesterday(which I very much enjoyed btw) you make this move. But it’s not needed, we don’t need a creator god to be good for him to want infinitely many people, especially given that the available evidence indicates that god probably isn’t good. A clearer premise to my thinking would be that a creator simply creates, maybe because they enjoy or it because it’s their purpose in some sense. This works just as well as an explanation I should think and doesn’t run into this problem (though it’s still a stipulated premise).
The argument for a good God is that it's parsimonious given the limitless mind route and then explains many different things well. E..g a good God would be predicted to want agents, a giant multiverse, and psychophysical harmony, so it predicts them better than alternatives.
1. we don’t seem to have (metaphysically deep) free will (as in no account can actually explain free will)
And more importantly
2. An all good god could still just weight all persons preferences such that no such omissions would occur without violating most accounts of free will (that aren’t metaphysically deep, such second order desire account and so on)
The theodicies just don’t seem to work. Either you have an account of free will fails in order to make the theodicy work, or you use an account that could be true and it fails. Maybe there is a way out of this but I can’t see it.
I agree that it would explain things very well if it wasn’t contradicted by the readily available evidence of evil. A god which creates for some sort of teleological reason would explain all of those things equally well I think, and not be contradicted by readily available evidence. In fact it seems more likely, because it I would think better predicts how low population density the universe is. A good god would seem to predict per your arguments a more population dense universe.
Isn't your utilitarianism untenable if there is a big Sky Daddy who gets to tell us what's good and evil? Unless you think he's a utilitarian too, in which case there are some aspects of reality that seem a bit confusing.
This omnipotent entity that “knows everything“ requires an infinite amount of computation and storage. Computation emits heat and storage requires space.
You think God’s a computer? What’s the argument in support of the claim that an omnipotent entity who’s also omniscient requires an infinite amount of storage and computation?
Yes all interactions can be considered computation. But it was when multicellular animals evolved nervous systems that computation really got going and the software acquired causal capability. See Kevin Mitchell on that.
If your fairy godfather knows everything about everything then that is going to require one hell of a data centre.
Since you are dodging the question, I'll ask you again: what's the argument in support of the claim that an omnipotent entity who's also omniscient requires an infinite amount of storage and computation?
OK, you got me. It's not *truly infinite* (unless the universe is). You might be able to get away with 10^800 bits of memory to hold the physical states of 10^80 baryonic particles but there's a hell of a lot of quantum vector states as well that are near enough to infinite to just throw in the towel and call it infinity. A separate structure (god) that can predict and control the whole universe requires a computational engine that is at least as complex as the universe. That's a whole other 'mirror' universe, that clearly does not exist. Now if you cop out and say "the universe is god and so it IS the computer" you are just positing animism and provide zero contribution to the argument.
Give it up man, there is no god, there is no Jesus and you'll just have to grow up and take responsibility for your own life.
Interestingly, this theodicy came up in one of my MA theology classes last semester and there was a pretty clear generational divide on how people judged it.
Our professor, a devotee of Rahner, thought it seemed like unnecessary mythologizing while most of the younger students (most of whom are Dominican student brothers) thought it seemed likely given the broader Christian meta-narrative about creation and the fall.
Jean Danielou speaks of the angels/demons in this way, as do Maimonides and Aquinas (and, frankly, most of the Christian tradition that I’ve seen deal with the subject of angels comprehensively)
Interesting idea. Personally I lean towards gnosticism, i.e. the idea that the world was created by intelligence, but the intelligence was not benevolent or good so out material world is flawed and causes suffering upon us. Do you have any thoughts on the hypothesis of imperfect God?
Thanks for this. In your previous piece you mentioned that under SIA it most likely infinitely many people exists. Does it mean you believe that actually infinitely many people exist right now? I think it has some pretty important implications
We won't or can't know anything about "God" or the possibility of a higher perfect entity until we as deeply flawed humans collectively transcend the Tamasic existence of earthly bondage to which our consciousness and stunted spirituality is tethered - for most of us that would be ten million lifetimes. All else is epistemological blathering and tautological deadends of twisted logic.
Wow, Don, you understand neither physics nor biology. When you ask "why don't the laws of nature change?" all you can be told is that they appear to have not done so, but not necessarily why that is the case, because we don't understand physics enough yet to answer your question. So you are free to consider it a decision of a supernatural mind, but we won't. And the scientific community does not set much store by the questions inspired by Aristotle, because we ask better, more productive questions. And don't get stuck believing that men and women inherently possess different numbers of teeth.
I appreciate you arguing for theism rather than Christianity, it has made me reconsider my staunch atheism which was largely a result of criticisms towards Christianity.
It seems to be (extremely stongly) that a perfect being wouldn't actualise a world which contains a gigantic amount of atrocious evil and suffering. Do any of those highly speculative, controversial and problematic considerations for theism have anything close to enough force to serve as defeaters to this initial seeming ? Absolutely not lol
And I think that any honest, non-brainwashed person would say the same
The issue that god being good keeps getting smuggled into these arguments when in many cases it is not necessary at all. We can posit other more reasonable given the world reasons why a deity would say create infinite worlds such as the sia argument needs. My prefers is that its teleological, in that it’s p ur purpose is to create and so it just keeps doing that.
Matthew isn’t dishonest or brainwashed. He was an extremely confident atheist before studying these arguments as in depth as he has said.
This is proposition P : (can one seriously affirm to have more credence in argument from psychophysical harmony e.g. than in this lmao?)
«P — A perfect being—that is, a being who is perfectly good, perfectly loving, perfectly compassionate, omniscient, and omnipotent—would not actualize a world containing unimaginable quantities of atrocious suffering and of heinous and abhorrent evils.»
I’d say he suppresses the truth in his heart to be edgy and to follow his social group, plus he uses motivated reasoning. I have a hard time believing that he considers the case for God more persuasive than something like proposition P
Recently I've also been really drawn to (and writing about) purgatory as an eschatological view. The suffering we would undergo in purgatory is a good if it results in the infinite good of proximity to God. Do you think the existence of a standard Catholic God (including eternal hell) would be bad news?
Not overall, because the goodness of heaven is supposed to infinitely outweigh the pains of hell.
This is a very nice summary!
I'd be curious what you think about the idea that the cosmological argument, insofar as it concludes with an uncaused cause with the power to produce our actual universe, actually constitues stronger evidence for something like God than we might otherwise think for the following reason: an uncaused cause with the power to cause our universe has very many powers, which inductively supports having some mental powers, and being mental plus having very many powers entails having very many perfections. Hence, this provides strong inductive support for something near enough to a perfect being.
Would you be sympathetic to something along those lines? :)
It's not clear that creating the universe gives especially strong evidence that it has many different powers, rather than just a single kind of power. But it's certainly some evidence.
Fair enough yeah!
I was thinking that the powers to produce different events that are partly probabilistically independent are also partly probabilistically independent, even if they are amiable to highly compressible law-like descriptions. That the first cause has the power to produce a certain event at one place and time that bears resemblance to another event at a different place and time is evidence that it can produce both of those highly similar events, but also that it can do other stuff. By way of analogy, the fact that many french revans are black is no less evence that all ravens are black just because it's also evidence that specifically all french ravens are black.
Maybe I'm confused, but that seems right to me at the moment!
You have these large arguments that cite tons of old posts, but you also say you're not interested in defending the arguments you made on old posts... seems a little dubious...
Anyway, although there's much to argue over here, the first thing I noticed that I disagreed with (and found it productive to argue over) was the sentence "Given that minds are one of the fundamental things, a mind without limits is simple." The latter does not follow from the former. Even if we agree for the sake of argument that your Mary's Room post shows that consciousness is non-physical, it remains the case that it has always been observed to correlate with complex physical structures. This seems to be a necessary feature, as minds to complex things like modelling the physical world. So it's not reasonable to expect a "mind without limits" to be simple, as no minds that we have observed have been simple, and especially not minds that are capable of doing complex things.
I said that I wasn't going to defend those arguments in this post, because that would take too long. I didn't express a general disinterest in defending the arguments I think are good.
The fact that minds *do* correlate with physical things doesn't mean they *must* correlate with physical things.
The reason it's simple is that it's just one of the fundamental elements of reality instantiated without limit.
Sorry, I wasn't clear, when I said "you're not interested in defending the arguments you made on old posts" I was referring to a comment you made on one of the comments I made on a previous post, where you said you would probably ignore a comment I had made on an even earlier post because you had too many posts to keep track of them all, or something like that. (Unfortunately I can't seem to find this comment now and Substack doesn't appear to have a search feature.) Are you saying now that if we have objections to the posts you cite in this post, you will respond to them? Should we write our objections here or in the previous posts?
It's true that "do" doesn't strictly imply "must", but it is a lot of evidence for it when it encompasses every observed instance of the phenomenon in question.
Why is a fundamental element of reality "instantiated without limit" simple? For example, matter is a fundamental element of reality, right? What would it even mean for matter to be instantiated without limit, let alone for that to be simple?
In general I don't respond to comments on old posts. I already probably spend way too much time responding to comments!
Do you see some important distinction between "I don't respond to comments on old posts" and "you also say you're not interested in defending the arguments you made on old posts"? What's the difference?
If there's some brand new objection on an old post, I'll usually address it. So in that sense, it's not as if I'm disinterested in engaging with arguments I've given previously. I just obviously, given that I get about 100 comments a day, can't respond even to the ones on old posts.
I see, so the novelty of the objection is the distinguishing feature in your mind. Fair enough...
The current strategy among believers to convince non believers of the likelihood of God's existence runs as yours does, as if there is an accumulation of arguments and facts—such as fine-tuning—that puts the odds in the believer's favor. I prefer the stance of someone like Sean Carroll, who says, yes, it's possible, but there is no actual evidence (certainly not the experience of believers, certainly not the occurrence of "miracles"). Fine tuning supposes that we can comprehend odds in a near-infinite or near-infinite universe, which is unlikely. And you don't even address the issue of brute facts. Better to focus on the beauty and benefits of the experience of faith rather than rhetoric. And some of your arguments veer close to the ontological argument, which really in the end presupposes the existence of god. There is no credible argument of necessity. Who knows what's necessary in this big, strange place?
Is the implication that without actual evidence Gods existence can’t be more likely than not?
Yes. It’s the less likely option.
Necessarily? Or just in this instance?
Well things could change if God announced him/it/herself and changed the evidence. But most of what is listed in that post is, in my opinion, rather like hearsay or indirect evidence. Where is the actual proof? And why, incidentally, must this be a matter of inference and such? Doesn't that seem odd?
My question is can hearsay and indirect proof ever alone make something likely to be true. Do you not understand the question, or are you intentionally dodging it?
Yes, sometimes, mostly in civil cases, but just as science cannot prove that God does not exist, believers cannot prove that God “likely” exists, or what the proof means. It just doesn’t rise to the necessary level of evidence. I’m actually a bit surprised that believers bother to make the argument, just as I’m a bit embarrassed by the worst arguments of atheists. Luis de Morales, in the Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, made the better argument with his painting La Piedad.
Why is god more likely to be limitlessly good instead of limitlessly evil?
1. Probably an evil God would just make a torture world.
2. Belief in evil God is self-defeating because it gives us reason to distrust our cognitive faculties.
3. It's intrinsically very improbable that God would want evil, rather than paperclips, tuna, or any of the other things in the world. It's arbitrary and low probability. Good isn't the same way because on standard views, full rationality makes you want whatever is good.
1. And probably a good God would just make a happiness world, but accepting the good God theistic argument requires an explanation why that isn’t the case. Has there been any work explaining why all theodicies don’t run in reverse pairs; e.g. whether there is a directionality to the argument? Like if we say that God allows for suffering because it is necessary for higher order goods, why couldn’t an evil god allow for good because it is necessary for higher order evils? Etc (side note, although we struggle to conceive of ways to achieve certain higher order goods without suffering, why wouldn’t an all powerful deity, unless it is literally not possible even for them). Isn’t the most reasonable take, if you accept the other arguments, a form of morally neutral deity?
I follow "rationality = you want what is intrinsically good" but doesn't that just push the question back a step. Why is a being of infinite rationality more likely than a being of infinite irrationality? How do you decide which things are "fundamental" and just exist infinitely somewhere and which things are like paperclips, tuna, and apparently evil? This is the part of the argument I don't follow.
As far as #1 goes, my guess is it's insanely easy to come up with a "reverse theodicy" explaining "the problem of good" for evil god.
Whenever I read your pro-theism posts, I keep circling back to the credence you put on God existing: originally 64%, now bumped up to around 70% (the earlier number comes from an interview you did with Liron Shapira, and the latter one from a comment you left on a previous post you wrote). That feels kind of low given how the posts actually read. 70% means you think there's almost a 1-in-3 chance theism is false, which is a lot of probability to leave on the table.
If that's really where you land, I'd expect the writing to reflect that uncertainty, where you should spend more time on the strongest objections, more hedging, more "Here's where this might fall apart." But the tone reads a lot closer to 98% than 70%, and that gap gives me pause.
It’s just a writing style thing, frankly I learned to write like that as well. It’s more engaging and it’s a pain to hedge all the time.
That would be understandable from, say, a lawyer or a politician. From a philosopher, not so much.
I think, to be honest its pretty reasonable. A paper full of constant hedging both isn't convincing and wouldn't be one I want to read quite frankly. If you're wrong, other people will rip your arguments to shreds, you dont need to do the work for them. Just ask Rawls.
Thanks, appreciate high-level “recaps” like this.
Why should we think our morality is anything even comparable or analogous to God’s morality? Like this is where I think skeptical theism and apophatic theology are super strong but maybe don’t go far enough.
If I suggested that my capacity to understand reality compared to God was that of a mosquito to a human, I’d be understating things to the degree that I’m elevating myself to a demigod-like status.
Ironically my concern here is sort of a reverse EAAN. It’s not clear to me that a bunch of our “moral intuitions,” even if granted to us directly by God, couldn’t exist as means to an end, where that end is a relatively mundane end that represents the tiniest sliver of God’s intentions for the multiverse. But even this is insufficiently humble, since it assumes a sort of consequentialism in God when God’s morality could reflect nothing any of our metaethical theories can grasp.
Certainly God's moral views differ from ours insofar as we are in error. And we often are. But I think we have a non-zero amount of moral knowledge. And all you need to get theism to predict all the evidence with much higher odds than atheism is that it's not terribly unlikely that God would make beings who can experience the goods on the objective list, in very great numbers.
Yeah I guess I’m departing from the evidence question (that’s my bad, since that’s what this post is literally about) and saying “okay, we accept theism is true, now what can we say about God?”
And at that point, speaking of “God would make beings who can experience the goods on the objective list” seems to be assuming God’s metaethics quite a bit, though that’s not to unfairly assign you certainty you explicitly didn’t express.
We can say that God is good, and so he wants you to do good things.
If OLT is right, then it's no t terribly unlikely that God would create creatures capable of experiencing the goods. And OLT is at least plausible, so the odds of this isn't terrible.
Impressive and exhaustive analysis that is food for thought.
Regarding your initial definition for God including goodness, I think that quality (along with evil) only applies to conscious actors within his creation attempting to align within his reality. Therefore, truly comprehending God's plan or purpose is imperative to fully understanding good and evil and their application to us.
I believe that a functional view of creation is essential to fully understanding God. This necessarily includes the existence of life and it's development of consciousness.
I believe that through evolution, life aligns with reality. However, initially that alignment was unintentional and involved random chance selected by survival over long periods of time. Once consciousness appeared, the timeframe for alignment was exponentially (logarithmically?) shortened.
However, consciousness did not transcend evolutionary forces, and in fact it amplified them and led to the mega evolution that humanity experienced over the last million or so years. One cause of this was the development of tools that in turn led to selection for those best able to wield those tools. Physical tools led to changes in physical form but also to brain changes. The tool of language is perhaps the most notable that led to physical changes to allow better speaking as well as brain changes to better process that.
Language also led to the development of our greatest tool of all: belief in God. A rapid acceleration in the development of language about 250,000 years ago corresponds closely to the first evidence of belief in God including ceremonial worship.
Individuals, families, tribes, states and civilizations that included religious worship survived over those that didn't. The atheists and agnostics were selected against, and science shows that process continues to this day.
This functional view of the universe does not prove the existence of God unless one applies the simple truth in the saying "the truth is in the pudding".
While I agree that theism is likely true, for many of the reasons you describe, though many of the accounts (like fine tuning for discoverability need a lot more work). However one crucial point.
Most important and something I think I’ve left as a comment on most of these religion war posts is that none of these arguments establish god is good. The problem of evil has still not been addressed.
The theodicies for getting around the problem of evil are obviously nonsense (unless you are a virtue ethicist, which tbf is the default for many religions). A god could get rid of all suffering without impeding free will(if it exists), and for any universe with suffering a god with trivial effort could make a strictly better universe with no suffering. There is no reason I can conceive of why this would violate the law of non-contradiction (the only law to which god is usually held to be bound).
That god is good keeps getting smuggled into these arguments where they are not needed and it both weakens the argument and is a weird attempt to try to steer what kind of theism we end up at in an abrahamic direction that doesn’t seem justified.
For an example of this, having read your paper on sia yesterday(which I very much enjoyed btw) you make this move. But it’s not needed, we don’t need a creator god to be good for him to want infinitely many people, especially given that the available evidence indicates that god probably isn’t good. A clearer premise to my thinking would be that a creator simply creates, maybe because they enjoy or it because it’s their purpose in some sense. This works just as well as an explanation I should think and doesn’t run into this problem (though it’s still a stipulated premise).
Here's my preferred theodicy https://marcsandersfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Omission-Theodicy-4-17-25.pdf
The argument for a good God is that it's parsimonious given the limitless mind route and then explains many different things well. E..g a good God would be predicted to want agents, a giant multiverse, and psychophysical harmony, so it predicts them better than alternatives.
Oh yeah I’ve seen that one but given that
1. we don’t seem to have (metaphysically deep) free will (as in no account can actually explain free will)
And more importantly
2. An all good god could still just weight all persons preferences such that no such omissions would occur without violating most accounts of free will (that aren’t metaphysically deep, such second order desire account and so on)
The theodicies just don’t seem to work. Either you have an account of free will fails in order to make the theodicy work, or you use an account that could be true and it fails. Maybe there is a way out of this but I can’t see it.
I agree that it would explain things very well if it wasn’t contradicted by the readily available evidence of evil. A god which creates for some sort of teleological reason would explain all of those things equally well I think, and not be contradicted by readily available evidence. In fact it seems more likely, because it I would think better predicts how low population density the universe is. A good god would seem to predict per your arguments a more population dense universe.
Isn't your utilitarianism untenable if there is a big Sky Daddy who gets to tell us what's good and evil? Unless you think he's a utilitarian too, in which case there are some aspects of reality that seem a bit confusing.
If utilitarianism is the right view then God would be a utilitarian.
God is false on purely thermodynamic grounds.
Say more?
This omnipotent entity that “knows everything“ requires an infinite amount of computation and storage. Computation emits heat and storage requires space.
God's not a computer, not physical, and not bound by physical laws. He is, in fact, their creator (on the standard theistic picture).
Yes, it seems also that it wouldn't be possible for it to do things like access memories infinitely way back.
And also a brain?
How would it interact with the world?
Where would it be?
You think God’s a computer? What’s the argument in support of the claim that an omnipotent entity who’s also omniscient requires an infinite amount of storage and computation?
Yes all interactions can be considered computation. But it was when multicellular animals evolved nervous systems that computation really got going and the software acquired causal capability. See Kevin Mitchell on that.
If your fairy godfather knows everything about everything then that is going to require one hell of a data centre.
Since you are dodging the question, I'll ask you again: what's the argument in support of the claim that an omnipotent entity who's also omniscient requires an infinite amount of storage and computation?
OK, you got me. It's not *truly infinite* (unless the universe is). You might be able to get away with 10^800 bits of memory to hold the physical states of 10^80 baryonic particles but there's a hell of a lot of quantum vector states as well that are near enough to infinite to just throw in the towel and call it infinity. A separate structure (god) that can predict and control the whole universe requires a computational engine that is at least as complex as the universe. That's a whole other 'mirror' universe, that clearly does not exist. Now if you cop out and say "the universe is god and so it IS the computer" you are just positing animism and provide zero contribution to the argument.
Give it up man, there is no god, there is no Jesus and you'll just have to grow up and take responsibility for your own life.
Existence of all powerful all good being seems pretty unlikely considering all the avoidable natural suffering that exists?
I agree the problem of evil is a good argument though I think it's outweighed by the positive evidence. For my favorite theodicy see https://philarchive.org/archive/CUTTOT and https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-archon-abandonment-theodicy?utm_source=publication-search
Interestingly, this theodicy came up in one of my MA theology classes last semester and there was a pretty clear generational divide on how people judged it.
Our professor, a devotee of Rahner, thought it seemed like unnecessary mythologizing while most of the younger students (most of whom are Dominican student brothers) thought it seemed likely given the broader Christian meta-narrative about creation and the fall.
Jean Danielou speaks of the angels/demons in this way, as do Maimonides and Aquinas (and, frankly, most of the Christian tradition that I’ve seen deal with the subject of angels comprehensively)
Interesting idea. Personally I lean towards gnosticism, i.e. the idea that the world was created by intelligence, but the intelligence was not benevolent or good so out material world is flawed and causes suffering upon us. Do you have any thoughts on the hypothesis of imperfect God?
Yep, see section 6 https://benthams.substack.com/p/god-best-explains-the-world
Thanks for this. In your previous piece you mentioned that under SIA it most likely infinitely many people exists. Does it mean you believe that actually infinitely many people exist right now? I think it has some pretty important implications
Yes, throughout the multiverse. They're not all here on Earth!
We won't or can't know anything about "God" or the possibility of a higher perfect entity until we as deeply flawed humans collectively transcend the Tamasic existence of earthly bondage to which our consciousness and stunted spirituality is tethered - for most of us that would be ten million lifetimes. All else is epistemological blathering and tautological deadends of twisted logic.
Wow, Don, you understand neither physics nor biology. When you ask "why don't the laws of nature change?" all you can be told is that they appear to have not done so, but not necessarily why that is the case, because we don't understand physics enough yet to answer your question. So you are free to consider it a decision of a supernatural mind, but we won't. And the scientific community does not set much store by the questions inspired by Aristotle, because we ask better, more productive questions. And don't get stuck believing that men and women inherently possess different numbers of teeth.