The Evidence For And Against Theism

Stacking it up

1 The evidence

The evidence for theism is roughly the following:

—Theism has a decent prior (unclear how high the prior is exactly, but not too low).

—The contingency argument might work (helps do work to boost the prior).

—Physical stuff exists (it’s not clear exactly what this favors—whether you knew there was a God or not, I don’t really know how likely you’d think it would be that physical stuff would exist).

—It does stuff. (This favors theism a lot. There could be laws governing stuff without stuff existing at all. The fact that there is stuff and it’s governed by laws is a weird coincidence, yet conditional on the existence of God and stuff, it’s basically guaranteed it would follow laws, for matter that just sits around doing nothing has no value).

—The laws apply to the constants.

—The universe hangs together and stuff interacts. (Huge evidence, as the link explains).

—The stuff it does is useful and interesting, rather than just fizzling out. (Also strong evidence—most possible laws don’t result in anything interesting happening. A multiverse doesn’t solve this because a multiverse just is a set of laws—but most laws don’t get anything as interesting as a multiverse).

—There are finely tuned constants (This some more evidence. To avoid it, you probably need a multiverse or something similar. But even after something interesting happens, it’s not super likely that there would be a multiverse).

—The universe is in a low entropy state (this is weird but I don’t know enough to know what to think).

—The laws are of oddly varied strength. (Decent evidence).

—Life originated and went through the many steps required to get intricate and complex creatures like us (this article has some egregious abuse of Bayes, and I don’t know much about the details of the biology, but it makes the basic point). (This is not a ton of evidence—it’s not so clear why God would work through dividing cellular machines to make life, but it’s some evidence still).

—There are the necessary ingredients for evolution.

—There are psychophysical laws (More extremely powerful evidence. If all you knew was that there was a multiverse, you wouldn’t expect there to be new fundamental laws, with no deeper explanation, that give rise to consciousness).

—There are souls that remain consistent over time. (This isn’t too weird but is somewhat weird—only theism nicely avoids skeptical scenarios once one posits the existence of souls).

—You in particular exist. (This is quite strong evidence—theism predicts everyone would be made, atheism predicts only a few would).

—There’s psychophysical harmony. (Probably the strongest evidence so far. Nearly all possible psychophysical laws are chaotic and random and don’t generate harmony.

—The stuff that the psychophysical laws make conscious exists (the psychophysical laws make brains conscious and then there happen to be brains). (Another piece of evidence—even after there are laws that say ‘such and such physical arrangements give rise to consciousness’ it’s odd that there are those arrangements).

—People have generally true beliefs about morality, metaphysics, math, modality, and more. (More strong evidence, as the article explains. This is really hard to account for on naturalism).

—Lots of people have religious belief, powerful religious experiences, and feel a deep connection with God. Lots of smart philosophers are theists. (This is one more strange strange thing. So far, we’ve established that there are conscious creatures that have interesting inner lives. But if all you knew was that there were conscious creatures that had interesting inner lives, you wouldn’t expect a huge portion of them to believe strongly in God).

—There are pretty convincing miracle reports (e.g. Rainbow Body, Joseph of Cupertino, Our Lady of Zeitoun, maybe the resurrection). (This is not super convincing in part because theism doesn’t predict it with super high confidence. Why in the world would God use miracles to make a random Saint fly a few times, to his own embarrassment, or make Mary appear atop a Church).

—The world has lots of beauty, happiness, knowledge, capacities for forming valuable relationships, and love—it contains most of the things that could be on the objective list. (This is some evidence, but not too much, conditional on the other stuff).

—There are many convincing NDEs and other unexplained events (Dale Allison documents this well in his book Encountering Mystery).

—You’re not in a skeptical scenario.

The evidence for atheism is mostly the following (I’m going to include arguments, not just evidence in the world—e.g. I’m going to count the potential inconsistency of divine attributes).

—This isn’t technically something that you update on, but theism most likely has a low prior probability. (I’m not sure exactly what I think about this. There’s a case to be made that theism is simple. Goodness is a fundamental property that doesn’t reduce to other stuff. But if you take a fundamental property and have an unlimited amount of it, that’s very parsimonious).

—There are lots of evils (natural evils, teleological evils, bizarre absence of goods, gratuitous suffering in the psychophysical laws, and many more). (Ridiculously strong evidence, by far the strongest piece of evidence so far).

—Divine hiddenness. (A bit more evidence, though if there’s an explanation for evil, it probably covers hiddenness as well. After we update on evil, this and widespread theistic belief+experience+a sense of a relationship with God probably roughly cancel out).

—The absence of any super clear evidence for a miracle. (This probably roughly cancels out the positive evidence from miracles).

—Potentially inconsistent divine attributes. (Eh—Idk, haven’t looked into this enough).

—The universe is big and old—conscious beings with valuable experiences are a flash in the pan. (Some evidence, though the article I give has some plausible explanations of this).

—If Huemer is right about infinity, which he might very well be, then a God of infinite power is probably impossible. (I don’t really know how much evidence this is—I don’t have well-formed thoughts on the infinite).

—The anthropic stuff maybe makes it weird that we’re so early. (This is, I think, strong evidence).

—The fundamental physical laws are simple (because fundamental stuff must be simple, atheism basically entails this, unlike theism). (Not a ton of evidence—that there are laws, which seem to require explanation, seems maybe to cancel this out).

—There are a lot of weird bits of theistic metaphysics.

2 Some thoughts

Is there anything I missed? I think I covered basically all of the evidence that I find significantly moving in favor of either theism or atheism. I didn’t include the Kalam, moral argument, argument from motion, etc, because I don’t find any of those at all convincing.

A classical theist friend of mine—who runs this great blog—once joked that those of us who think the deductive arguments for theism fail, but just think it’s a pretty plausible explanation of lots of things, endorse the giant ghost hypothesis. We think that positing a giant, very powerful, nice ghost is a good explanation of lots of things. This is sort of true. A perfectly good magic ghost explains a lot and is pretty simple.

The other thing that this makes clear is that the strength of the evidence for and against theism is pretty absurd. The evidence favoring theism might be stronger than the evidence for any other philosophical view—but the same is true of the evidence against theism. As a result, if there’s an evidence against theism that hinges on controversial assumptions—e.g. one that assumes a philosophical view like hedonistic utilitarianism that you’re only around 2/3ds confident in—it will be totally subsumed by the enormous mountains of evidence on both sides.

I think it’s worth trying to put numbers on these things. In general, if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing with made up statistics, as Scott Alexander argues convincingly. These won’t be super precise, but they can help give a sort of general sense of the strength of the evidence.

The most important takeaway: if you don’t find the problem of evil to be a ridiculously strong argument, you should probably be a theist.