The problem of evil argument only applies to a good God, though, right? So you should believe in, e.g., a morally indifferent God? That is the mostly frightening possibility, really.
But only a morally good God has a reasonable prior and explains the data, for the reason theism explains these facts is that creating all souls, fine tuning, and psychophysical harmony is good.
Seems more like the evidence supports a "lawful neutral" God who just likes order and coherence, but isn't particularly wedded to favoring good over evil.
Perfect being theism is more parsimonious for the reason I give both in this article and here https://benthams.substack.com/p/for-theism-part-2. Also, plausibly, a being powerful enough to create all Beth 2 agents, nice psychophysical laws, and various other things could also know all truths, but I think Parfit convincingly proved that if you were fully rational you'd always do what's best.
I didn't notice any argument for perfect being theism being more parsimonious. Are you assuming that "perfection" is a simple property, out of which omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence all fall? I think that's just bad metaphysics. Neutrality is simpler than having either direction of valence, and valuing one thing is simpler than valuing all and only objective goods.
But probably you shouldn't put much weight on vague intuitions of simplicity, relative to what actually fits the empirical evidence. Given the observable facts, it's just insane to think that an omnibenevolent God is more likely than a "lawful neutral" one who is amorally curious about conscious agency. The latter proposal has basically all the explanatory virtues of theism (such as they are), without any "problem of evil"-type costs.
Yes, that's one reason to think theism might be simple. Another reason is that God is maximally great, and having an unlimited amount of some irreducible thing is pretty simple (e.g. modal realism is pretty simple imo).
Simplicity is an important virtue. The theory naturalism is true plus all the specific things in the universe are what exist is a much better fit for the evidence than generic naturalism, however, it is no better because it's less simple. Having a theory be super simple such that it gets a lot of the initial prior is pretty important.
Generic theism also assumes rather than explaining psychophysical harmony. Why are God's mental states harmonious. Perfect being theism has an answer: because a maximally good being has harmonious mental states. It's also not clear why a neutral being would, for instance, make all possible agents, create a finely tuned universe with lots of specific things of value, and make psychophysical harmony.
That view also assumes rather than explaining why the fundamental stuff has certain causal properties.
Great post. But yes, you missed one! Matthew is evidence for God. I know you mentioned our existence, and the “I” in a general sense. But I mean Matthew’s specific attributes- kindness, compassion, fierce commitment to pursuing good, and passionate search for truth. When I see Matthew, I see God’s hope in his creation come to fruition. If anyone asks me to show evidence for God, I will show them Matthew.
I find the strongest arguments to be against Abrahamic theism. As far as I know, Abrahamic religions all vouch for the Old Testament being divinely inspired. However, the Old Testament makes innumerable historical claims which are overwhelmingly contradicted by existing geological and archaeological evidence:
- God created the universe 5800 years ago over 7 days.
- The human lifespan used to be hundreds of years.
- The earliest common ancestor of humanity (Adam) lived 5800 years ago.
- A global flood caused a mass extinction of all land animals 4500 years ago.
- Before around 4000 years ago (Tower of Babel), Hebrew was the only spoken language.
- Millions of Jews were slaves in Egypt for hundreds of years.
- An Egyptian Pharaoh and his army died by drowning.
- Giants, dragons, and maybe leviathans exist.
- The Jews forcibly conquered Israel around 1300 BCE.
- Israel's fruit were gigantic (a grape was the size of a person's head).
- The Persian King Darius's mother was Jewish and helped avert an adviser's attempt to exterminate the Jews.
This seems to assume that the Abrahamic religions are committed to a literal historicist reading of the Old Testament. But that's never been the standard view amongst Jewish and Christian theologians; rather, most of the great figures of these traditions accepted allegorical and non-literal readings of the Bible (see e.g. Philo, Origen, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Augustine, Maimonides, and so on). As for Muslims, they typically regard the Old Testament as corrupted and unreliable. So it seems clear that we should not dismiss the Abrahamic religions on the grounds that the OT does not relate literal history.
I have several problems with the defense from allegory.
The first is that (at least in the Jewish tradition which I'm far more familiar with) historical theologians generally took the Old Testament's historical claims at face value. While it's true that some permitted allegorical interpretations of the Genesis story, I don't know of any who allegorized Noah's flood, the Tower of Babel, the Exodus, the Jewish conquest of Israel, etc, and I'd imagine they would have considered those who did so to be heretical. It seems more like as these historical claims become more dubious, modern theologians are moving the goalposts by searching for a reason to allegorize this history.
The second is that the Old Testament is written as a long historical narrative. It's unparsimonious to say that a bunch of the historical claims are factually true, another bunch are allegories, and it was divinely decided to string them all together such that the uninformed reader would interpret them all as factually true (as most readers did for most of history). It would be more parsimonious to say that like the mythologies of many ancient civilizations, the Old Testament is a partly mythological and partly historical story of the Jews, and is not divinely inspired.
Third, these justifications don't seem to satisfy the reversal test. Given a book, there has to be some way to gather evidence of whether or not it's divinely inspired. If archaeology discovered these facts, I would view it as evidence in favor of the divine inspiration of the Old Testament:
- The human lifespan used to be hundreds of years.
- The earliest common ancestor of humanity (Adam) lived 5800 years ago.
- A global flood caused a mass extinction of all land animals 4500 years ago.
- Before around 4000 years ago (Tower of Babel), Hebrew was the only spoken language.
- Millions of Jews were slaves in Egypt for hundreds of years.
So the fact that these are _false_ must be evidence that the Old Testament isn't divinely inspired. (I guess an apologist can say that this is evidence but consider it insufficient to reject the divine inspiration of the Old Testament.)
Lots of figures in the relevant traditions allegorized stories outside of Genesis. A classic example is St. Gregory of Nyssa's The Life of Moses, which is basically one long allegorical reading of the whole Torah. Gregory even explicitly denies the historicity of various stories (such as the killing of the Egyptian firstborns). And Maimonides allegorizes an enormous amount of scripture to bring it into line with his Aristotelian metaphysics (see e.g. his views on miracles and prophetic inspiration).
It's true that Jewish theologians generally still held to the historicty of things like the conquest of Israel, but it's hard to see why that matters; once you admit that it's permissible to allegorize, then why suppose that these particular events must be literal history?
The fact that the OT involves a mixture of real history and pious fiction is probably *some* evidence against its divine inspiration. But it surely isn't *definitive*, especially not on its own. If one thinks there are good reasons to accept Christianity or Judaism, then it seems like that could easily outweigh the oddity of the OT.
"So the fact that these are false must be evidence that the Old Testament isn't divinely inspired."
Sure, if E would be evidence for H, then not-E is evidence against H. But it might only be *very weak* evidence. Consider: if all the statues in Vatican City began to sing Ave Maria, that would be extremely strong evidence for Catholicism. But the fact that this doesn't happen provides only infinitesimal evidence against Catholicism.
I find most of Leon's list totally unpersuasive. Leon is great, but that list just feels like a stretch. Many of them are just "here's a random view of metaphysics that someone defended that's an alternative to theism." I feel the same way about Macintosh's list https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi7ANgO2ZBU
Argument #139 on Leon's list is the aloneness argument developed by Joseph Schmid (agnostic) and Ryan Mullins (Christian). If this is an argument for atheism, wouldn't any argument against any version of theism be an argument for atheism?
Argument #XXX = argument for Protestantism against Catholicism
Argument #YYY = argument for Catholicism against Protestantism
Wow! What a collection. These are the types of resources that make me want throw my hands up and say "I don't have time to evaluate this, guess I'll be an agnostic". Thanks for sharing this anyway. Do you have a personal favorite/one you think is underrated that you think I should check out?
Most of these I’ve never read and, realistically, will never get around to reading. I’m basic; I like Draper’s evidential argument from pain and pleasure.
I wrote a post the other day (https://ohmurphy.substack.com/p/what-would-jesus-really-do) about how religion doesn't seem to actually provide much moral clarity (much agreement on moral questions like the trolley problem), which I take to be Bayesian evidence against it being true. Seems like something that could be on the list as an objection to the "People have generally true beliefs about morality, metaphysics, math, modality, and more" item as evidence for theism.
The main evidence I discuss in the post is the PhilPapers survey finding that theists pull the lever in the trolley problem at 67% and atheists pull the lever at 78%. To draw out the implications you can imagine three possible worlds (1) moral anti-realism and atheism is true, (2) moral realism and atheism is true, and (3) moral realism and theism is true. Grasping non-natural facts would be evidence for (2) and (3) at the expense of (1). I think the data from the survey is evidence against (3). I agree, on reflection, that my argument isn't necessarily in tension with the listed item. I do still think it is evidence though, albeit mostly independent evidence.
The degree to which we are right matters though. If I found that people were 50-50 on the answer to the trolley problem (or preferably on a real-world moral decision), then I would consider moral realism to be less likely than if 99% of people agreed on the answer.
That's true. But the fact that we have some basic capacity to grasp the facts is shocking on naturalism, and any theodicy will explain why so much goes awry.
I'm not saying the evidence would outweigh the grasping of non-natural facts, just that it is evidence. Of course, it also depends on your priors about the degree of agreement to expect under moral realism.
What do you make of the objection that many arguments for theism just regress the problem and so aren't arguments? For example, to explain fine tuning, you may think there are two alternatives: God and the multiverse. I believe the latter. But if you choose the former, I ask, who designed God? The same thing with goodness in the world. You can say "Wow, evidence for a God that wants good things to happen!" But that leaves you with the task of explaining why God would want good things to happen, which to me seems just as hard as the problem you started with. Where do I go wrong?
Btw, this argument comes from James Mill, JSM's father, and is cited in Bertrand Russel's Why I'm not a Christian.
I've argued elsewhere--e.g. in my article for theism part 2 https://benthams.substack.com/p/for-theism-part-2--that theism is simple. If so then it doesn't require complicated fine tuning. Furthermore, there aren't lots of manipulable constants that need to be finey tuned. If all the properties of God fall out of one fundamental property, then it provides an explanation of those properties.
Out of curiosity, how does a modal rationalist like you think about the question of God’s necessity? All of these arguments for God’s existence presuppose that God’s nonexistence is conceivable.
Divine hiddenness is only a problem for traditional theist views where people need to worship God, right? If God demands humans obey morality/something else instead, but doesn't care about worship from humans, it's reasonable to purport God to hide if it helps God do that, I think.
In the interests of transparency, I should note that the "giant ghost hypothesis" joke isn't mine, it's Richard Carrier's (his one and only legitimate contribution to the debate).
You've mentioned him in passing before, but if you haven't read David Bentley Hart's stuff, he's a great resource for the non Giant-Ghost brand of theism, especially "The Experience of God" (addressing basic premises of Classical Theism, as opposed to Giant Ghost-ism), The "Doors of the Sea" (addressing the problem of evil), and "That All Shall Be Saved" (addressing the fact that a God who sends people to Hell is evil, but a God who creates in order to unite souls with his transcendent goodness is good).
He also has a substack, where he's lately been doing a series on how the intrinsically intentional features of life and mental experience are really inexplicable on naturalism, but pretty sensible if one assumes that the deepest reality (God) is in fact already mental.
Also, for a theistic discussion of animal suffering, I highly recommend the last chapter of George MacDonald's "The Hope of the Gospel", called The Hope of the Universe.
> "Lots of people have religious belief, powerful religious experiences, and feel a deep connection with God."
It seems a bit ahistorical to treat this as evidence for theism. I gather that (vaguely animist) religious dispositions evolved long before monotheism in particular arrived on the scene, and aren't particularly surprising or difficult to explain naturalistically. Given that we're descended from animists, it's not at all surprising that people still have religious experiences, etc.
It's surprising that theism won out over animism. A theist can tell a nice story about this--just as our knowledge in mathematics and morality has grown over time, so too has our knowledge of the divine grown.
Why is this evidence for theism? Doesn't natural selection provide an adequate explanation for the evolution of communication?
> Lots of smart philosophers are theists
If we take this line of evidence to be valid, I think this is evidence for atheism more so than theism. According to the philpapers survey, among philosophers, 72.8% accept or lean toward atheism, 14.6% accept or lean toward theism, and 12.6% believe something else.
> —The absence of any super clear evidence for a miracle.
Maybe add Hume's argument against miracles (or similar) as an addendum to that.
> —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).
What if all possible worlds exist, e.g., Nelson Goodman's worldmaking?
>—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.
I'm not an expert in parsimony or set theory, but it seems to me that a set/universe without a God/Giant ghost contains fewer elements than one that includes it.
>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).
This could be explained by evolution favoring anthropomorphization (though that could be explained by God deliberately designing evolution that way)
There are a lot more strong arguments against God, such as the omnipotence paradox, but those are maybe not the type of God you're defending here and the God/Giant Ghost you envision doesn't have those attributes that are often attacked.
> that there are laws, which seem to require explanation, seems maybe to cancel this out
Some (atheist) philosophers claim there are no laws of nature, though I haven't looked into these arguments myself.
> This is really hard to account for on naturalism.
Also, one more (rather weak) consideration. Most people (for all of human history?) are theists, which is evidence for theism, but also means that there were a lot more opportunities for arguments for theism to arise than ones for atheism (not to mention the censorship that those arguments would've faced). (Maybe they cancel each other out?)
Communication is evidence for theism even if you can tell a naturalistic explanation because theism predicts it with a higher probability. Evolution can explain language, but if God made a system specifically to facilitate language, that makes language even more likely.
Most philosophers of religion are theists which seems the most probative.
Whether theism is simpler will depend on contentious assumptions. I don't really know, but theism seems pretty simple. The common argument for naturalism being simpler that it posits fewer stuff is wrong, because theism only posits one fundamental thing, and that's how yu calculate complexity.
Evolution can explain religious experiences, but it's still more likely if there's a God. A God would be very likely to do this, while on atheism it's less likely. If all you knew was that evolution was true, you wouldn't be super confident that so many peopl would be religious.
The giant ghost is an omnipotent one. That's more parsimonious, doesn't posit arbitrary limits ,and best explains how God can make all agents and fine tune the psychophysical laws.
I think there are laws of nature and in particular things have causal properties which is what requires exlpanation.
I think the first six reasons for theism only hold if you ignore the anthropic principle. I might take some time looking into the rest of the claims, depending on the reception. Might be interesting to talk about now when religion isn't CW stuff :)
I see! I guess it comes down to number of chances. When it comes to things like sun-earth distance, you can simply point at the myriad of planet/sun combinations. But some things, like matter existing, would require multiverse-based reasoning.
And I guess we know too little about why our physical constants/laws are set the way they are, as well as the nature of the universe's creation, to be able to talk about the likelihood of multiverses and the way they potentially vary.
I can't shake an ugh feeling though - a god is exactly the kind of "common sense" explanation humans are likely to invent. The far reaches of the universe we've unveiled through science all seems "far out" to me, very unhuman. This is more of a vibe argument, not sure how to formalize it.
Thank you for taking the tie to compile this post, it made me think about things I haven't touched for ages.
The problem of evil argument only applies to a good God, though, right? So you should believe in, e.g., a morally indifferent God? That is the mostly frightening possibility, really.
But only a morally good God has a reasonable prior and explains the data, for the reason theism explains these facts is that creating all souls, fine tuning, and psychophysical harmony is good.
Seems more like the evidence supports a "lawful neutral" God who just likes order and coherence, but isn't particularly wedded to favoring good over evil.
Perfect being theism is more parsimonious for the reason I give both in this article and here https://benthams.substack.com/p/for-theism-part-2. Also, plausibly, a being powerful enough to create all Beth 2 agents, nice psychophysical laws, and various other things could also know all truths, but I think Parfit convincingly proved that if you were fully rational you'd always do what's best.
I didn't notice any argument for perfect being theism being more parsimonious. Are you assuming that "perfection" is a simple property, out of which omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence all fall? I think that's just bad metaphysics. Neutrality is simpler than having either direction of valence, and valuing one thing is simpler than valuing all and only objective goods.
But probably you shouldn't put much weight on vague intuitions of simplicity, relative to what actually fits the empirical evidence. Given the observable facts, it's just insane to think that an omnibenevolent God is more likely than a "lawful neutral" one who is amorally curious about conscious agency. The latter proposal has basically all the explanatory virtues of theism (such as they are), without any "problem of evil"-type costs.
Yes, that's one reason to think theism might be simple. Another reason is that God is maximally great, and having an unlimited amount of some irreducible thing is pretty simple (e.g. modal realism is pretty simple imo).
Simplicity is an important virtue. The theory naturalism is true plus all the specific things in the universe are what exist is a much better fit for the evidence than generic naturalism, however, it is no better because it's less simple. Having a theory be super simple such that it gets a lot of the initial prior is pretty important.
Generic theism also assumes rather than explaining psychophysical harmony. Why are God's mental states harmonious. Perfect being theism has an answer: because a maximally good being has harmonious mental states. It's also not clear why a neutral being would, for instance, make all possible agents, create a finely tuned universe with lots of specific things of value, and make psychophysical harmony.
That view also assumes rather than explaining why the fundamental stuff has certain causal properties.
Great post. But yes, you missed one! Matthew is evidence for God. I know you mentioned our existence, and the “I” in a general sense. But I mean Matthew’s specific attributes- kindness, compassion, fierce commitment to pursuing good, and passionate search for truth. When I see Matthew, I see God’s hope in his creation come to fruition. If anyone asks me to show evidence for God, I will show them Matthew.
I find the strongest arguments to be against Abrahamic theism. As far as I know, Abrahamic religions all vouch for the Old Testament being divinely inspired. However, the Old Testament makes innumerable historical claims which are overwhelmingly contradicted by existing geological and archaeological evidence:
- God created the universe 5800 years ago over 7 days.
- The human lifespan used to be hundreds of years.
- The earliest common ancestor of humanity (Adam) lived 5800 years ago.
- A global flood caused a mass extinction of all land animals 4500 years ago.
- Before around 4000 years ago (Tower of Babel), Hebrew was the only spoken language.
- Millions of Jews were slaves in Egypt for hundreds of years.
- An Egyptian Pharaoh and his army died by drowning.
- Giants, dragons, and maybe leviathans exist.
- The Jews forcibly conquered Israel around 1300 BCE.
- Israel's fruit were gigantic (a grape was the size of a person's head).
- The Persian King Darius's mother was Jewish and helped avert an adviser's attempt to exterminate the Jews.
- ...and far, far more.
To me, this disqualifies all Abrahamic religions.
This seems to assume that the Abrahamic religions are committed to a literal historicist reading of the Old Testament. But that's never been the standard view amongst Jewish and Christian theologians; rather, most of the great figures of these traditions accepted allegorical and non-literal readings of the Bible (see e.g. Philo, Origen, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Augustine, Maimonides, and so on). As for Muslims, they typically regard the Old Testament as corrupted and unreliable. So it seems clear that we should not dismiss the Abrahamic religions on the grounds that the OT does not relate literal history.
I have several problems with the defense from allegory.
The first is that (at least in the Jewish tradition which I'm far more familiar with) historical theologians generally took the Old Testament's historical claims at face value. While it's true that some permitted allegorical interpretations of the Genesis story, I don't know of any who allegorized Noah's flood, the Tower of Babel, the Exodus, the Jewish conquest of Israel, etc, and I'd imagine they would have considered those who did so to be heretical. It seems more like as these historical claims become more dubious, modern theologians are moving the goalposts by searching for a reason to allegorize this history.
The second is that the Old Testament is written as a long historical narrative. It's unparsimonious to say that a bunch of the historical claims are factually true, another bunch are allegories, and it was divinely decided to string them all together such that the uninformed reader would interpret them all as factually true (as most readers did for most of history). It would be more parsimonious to say that like the mythologies of many ancient civilizations, the Old Testament is a partly mythological and partly historical story of the Jews, and is not divinely inspired.
Third, these justifications don't seem to satisfy the reversal test. Given a book, there has to be some way to gather evidence of whether or not it's divinely inspired. If archaeology discovered these facts, I would view it as evidence in favor of the divine inspiration of the Old Testament:
- The human lifespan used to be hundreds of years.
- The earliest common ancestor of humanity (Adam) lived 5800 years ago.
- A global flood caused a mass extinction of all land animals 4500 years ago.
- Before around 4000 years ago (Tower of Babel), Hebrew was the only spoken language.
- Millions of Jews were slaves in Egypt for hundreds of years.
So the fact that these are _false_ must be evidence that the Old Testament isn't divinely inspired. (I guess an apologist can say that this is evidence but consider it insufficient to reject the divine inspiration of the Old Testament.)
Lots of figures in the relevant traditions allegorized stories outside of Genesis. A classic example is St. Gregory of Nyssa's The Life of Moses, which is basically one long allegorical reading of the whole Torah. Gregory even explicitly denies the historicity of various stories (such as the killing of the Egyptian firstborns). And Maimonides allegorizes an enormous amount of scripture to bring it into line with his Aristotelian metaphysics (see e.g. his views on miracles and prophetic inspiration).
It's true that Jewish theologians generally still held to the historicty of things like the conquest of Israel, but it's hard to see why that matters; once you admit that it's permissible to allegorize, then why suppose that these particular events must be literal history?
The fact that the OT involves a mixture of real history and pious fiction is probably *some* evidence against its divine inspiration. But it surely isn't *definitive*, especially not on its own. If one thinks there are good reasons to accept Christianity or Judaism, then it seems like that could easily outweigh the oddity of the OT.
"So the fact that these are false must be evidence that the Old Testament isn't divinely inspired."
Sure, if E would be evidence for H, then not-E is evidence against H. But it might only be *very weak* evidence. Consider: if all the statues in Vatican City began to sing Ave Maria, that would be extremely strong evidence for Catholicism. But the fact that this doesn't happen provides only infinitesimal evidence against Catholicism.
Felipe Leon has a compilation of arguments for atheism that might be worth exploring if you’re not already familiar with it: https://exapologist.blogspot.com/2023/03/200-or-so-arguments-for-atheism.html?m=1
Stephen Maitzen also has a paper on divine hiddenness and the demographics of theism that gives an interesting perspective on hiddenness.
I find most of Leon's list totally unpersuasive. Leon is great, but that list just feels like a stretch. Many of them are just "here's a random view of metaphysics that someone defended that's an alternative to theism." I feel the same way about Macintosh's list https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi7ANgO2ZBU
Argument #139 on Leon's list is the aloneness argument developed by Joseph Schmid (agnostic) and Ryan Mullins (Christian). If this is an argument for atheism, wouldn't any argument against any version of theism be an argument for atheism?
Argument #XXX = argument for Protestantism against Catholicism
Argument #YYY = argument for Catholicism against Protestantism
The Eliakim typological argument against theism.
Wow! What a collection. These are the types of resources that make me want throw my hands up and say "I don't have time to evaluate this, guess I'll be an agnostic". Thanks for sharing this anyway. Do you have a personal favorite/one you think is underrated that you think I should check out?
Most of these I’ve never read and, realistically, will never get around to reading. I’m basic; I like Draper’s evidential argument from pain and pleasure.
I wrote a post the other day (https://ohmurphy.substack.com/p/what-would-jesus-really-do) about how religion doesn't seem to actually provide much moral clarity (much agreement on moral questions like the trolley problem), which I take to be Bayesian evidence against it being true. Seems like something that could be on the list as an objection to the "People have generally true beliefs about morality, metaphysics, math, modality, and more" item as evidence for theism.
The basic datum is that we have a generic capacity to grasp non-natural facts. I think the thing you point to is just subsumed under the POE.
The main evidence I discuss in the post is the PhilPapers survey finding that theists pull the lever in the trolley problem at 67% and atheists pull the lever at 78%. To draw out the implications you can imagine three possible worlds (1) moral anti-realism and atheism is true, (2) moral realism and atheism is true, and (3) moral realism and theism is true. Grasping non-natural facts would be evidence for (2) and (3) at the expense of (1). I think the data from the survey is evidence against (3). I agree, on reflection, that my argument isn't necessarily in tension with the listed item. I do still think it is evidence though, albeit mostly independent evidence.
We’re right way more than we’re wrong
The degree to which we are right matters though. If I found that people were 50-50 on the answer to the trolley problem (or preferably on a real-world moral decision), then I would consider moral realism to be less likely than if 99% of people agreed on the answer.
That's true. But the fact that we have some basic capacity to grasp the facts is shocking on naturalism, and any theodicy will explain why so much goes awry.
I'm not saying the evidence would outweigh the grasping of non-natural facts, just that it is evidence. Of course, it also depends on your priors about the degree of agreement to expect under moral realism.
What do you make of the objection that many arguments for theism just regress the problem and so aren't arguments? For example, to explain fine tuning, you may think there are two alternatives: God and the multiverse. I believe the latter. But if you choose the former, I ask, who designed God? The same thing with goodness in the world. You can say "Wow, evidence for a God that wants good things to happen!" But that leaves you with the task of explaining why God would want good things to happen, which to me seems just as hard as the problem you started with. Where do I go wrong?
Btw, this argument comes from James Mill, JSM's father, and is cited in Bertrand Russel's Why I'm not a Christian.
I've argued elsewhere--e.g. in my article for theism part 2 https://benthams.substack.com/p/for-theism-part-2--that theism is simple. If so then it doesn't require complicated fine tuning. Furthermore, there aren't lots of manipulable constants that need to be finey tuned. If all the properties of God fall out of one fundamental property, then it provides an explanation of those properties.
What's your current credence in theism?
Bounces around a bit--slightly below half. Perhaps 40%?
Out of curiosity, how does a modal rationalist like you think about the question of God’s necessity? All of these arguments for God’s existence presuppose that God’s nonexistence is conceivable.
I think God, if he exists, is either contingent or necessary on account of some ontological argument--probably mine or Godel's.
Divine hiddenness is only a problem for traditional theist views where people need to worship God, right? If God demands humans obey morality/something else instead, but doesn't care about worship from humans, it's reasonable to purport God to hide if it helps God do that, I think.
In the interests of transparency, I should note that the "giant ghost hypothesis" joke isn't mine, it's Richard Carrier's (his one and only legitimate contribution to the debate).
You've mentioned him in passing before, but if you haven't read David Bentley Hart's stuff, he's a great resource for the non Giant-Ghost brand of theism, especially "The Experience of God" (addressing basic premises of Classical Theism, as opposed to Giant Ghost-ism), The "Doors of the Sea" (addressing the problem of evil), and "That All Shall Be Saved" (addressing the fact that a God who sends people to Hell is evil, but a God who creates in order to unite souls with his transcendent goodness is good).
He also has a substack, where he's lately been doing a series on how the intrinsically intentional features of life and mental experience are really inexplicable on naturalism, but pretty sensible if one assumes that the deepest reality (God) is in fact already mental.
https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/
I read his substack a lot, though too much of it is paywalle.d
Fair enough. I think his books are also worthwhile.
Also, for a theistic discussion of animal suffering, I highly recommend the last chapter of George MacDonald's "The Hope of the Gospel", called The Hope of the Universe.
> "Lots of people have religious belief, powerful religious experiences, and feel a deep connection with God."
It seems a bit ahistorical to treat this as evidence for theism. I gather that (vaguely animist) religious dispositions evolved long before monotheism in particular arrived on the scene, and aren't particularly surprising or difficult to explain naturalistically. Given that we're descended from animists, it's not at all surprising that people still have religious experiences, etc.
It's surprising that theism won out over animism. A theist can tell a nice story about this--just as our knowledge in mathematics and morality has grown over time, so too has our knowledge of the divine grown.
Thanks for this. Couple things:
> —We can communicate.
Why is this evidence for theism? Doesn't natural selection provide an adequate explanation for the evolution of communication?
> Lots of smart philosophers are theists
If we take this line of evidence to be valid, I think this is evidence for atheism more so than theism. According to the philpapers survey, among philosophers, 72.8% accept or lean toward atheism, 14.6% accept or lean toward theism, and 12.6% believe something else.
> —The absence of any super clear evidence for a miracle.
Maybe add Hume's argument against miracles (or similar) as an addendum to that.
> —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).
What if all possible worlds exist, e.g., Nelson Goodman's worldmaking?
>—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.
I'm not an expert in parsimony or set theory, but it seems to me that a set/universe without a God/Giant ghost contains fewer elements than one that includes it.
>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).
This could be explained by evolution favoring anthropomorphization (though that could be explained by God deliberately designing evolution that way)
There are a lot more strong arguments against God, such as the omnipotence paradox, but those are maybe not the type of God you're defending here and the God/Giant Ghost you envision doesn't have those attributes that are often attacked.
> that there are laws, which seem to require explanation, seems maybe to cancel this out
Some (atheist) philosophers claim there are no laws of nature, though I haven't looked into these arguments myself.
> This is really hard to account for on naturalism.
You can be an atheist without being a naturalist
> —There are finely tuned constants
What do you think of Sean Carroll's argument? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR79HDEf9k8 (I'm not sure if you addressed this in your post; I haven't read that one)
Also, one more (rather weak) consideration. Most people (for all of human history?) are theists, which is evidence for theism, but also means that there were a lot more opportunities for arguments for theism to arise than ones for atheism (not to mention the censorship that those arguments would've faced). (Maybe they cancel each other out?)
Communication is evidence for theism even if you can tell a naturalistic explanation because theism predicts it with a higher probability. Evolution can explain language, but if God made a system specifically to facilitate language, that makes language even more likely.
Most philosophers of religion are theists which seems the most probative.
Whether theism is simpler will depend on contentious assumptions. I don't really know, but theism seems pretty simple. The common argument for naturalism being simpler that it posits fewer stuff is wrong, because theism only posits one fundamental thing, and that's how yu calculate complexity.
Evolution can explain religious experiences, but it's still more likely if there's a God. A God would be very likely to do this, while on atheism it's less likely. If all you knew was that evolution was true, you wouldn't be super confident that so many peopl would be religious.
The giant ghost is an omnipotent one. That's more parsimonious, doesn't posit arbitrary limits ,and best explains how God can make all agents and fine tune the psychophysical laws.
I think there are laws of nature and in particular things have causal properties which is what requires exlpanation.
I addressed most of Caroll's arguments.
I think the first six reasons for theism only hold if you ignore the anthropic principle. I might take some time looking into the rest of the claims, depending on the reception. Might be interesting to talk about now when religion isn't CW stuff :)
I don't think the anthropic principle required for the argument succeeds. https://mindmatters.ai/2021/10/are-we-just-biased-thinking-the-universe-is-fine-tuned-for-life/#:~:text=just%20an%20accident%3F-,According%20to%20the%20Weak%20Anthropic%20Principle%2C%20if%20things%20weren't,just%20the%20way%20things%20are.
I see! I guess it comes down to number of chances. When it comes to things like sun-earth distance, you can simply point at the myriad of planet/sun combinations. But some things, like matter existing, would require multiverse-based reasoning.
And I guess we know too little about why our physical constants/laws are set the way they are, as well as the nature of the universe's creation, to be able to talk about the likelihood of multiverses and the way they potentially vary.
I can't shake an ugh feeling though - a god is exactly the kind of "common sense" explanation humans are likely to invent. The far reaches of the universe we've unveiled through science all seems "far out" to me, very unhuman. This is more of a vibe argument, not sure how to formalize it.
Thank you for taking the tie to compile this post, it made me think about things I haven't touched for ages.