I see two basic problems with this whole line of argument. Firstly, no matter how improbable X is a priori, a god who went out of his way to cause X must be even more improbable.
Secondly, you are appealing to nothing but your own intuitions about what we should or should not expect a priori, in realsm of physics where human intuitions are known to be shit. How likely it is for constants to fall in a range that permits life, or for simple laws to lead to the complex chemistry involved, those are things about which our intuitions are literally worthless. To even begin to explore that would require a level of mathematical reasoning that neither you nor I have achieved, and the people who have achieved it are mostly atheists.
I'm not talking about in the realm of physics--the entire point is that the probability of the physical laws is low. Physics can't settle the odds of there being laws at all.
With regard to the first thing, it's basically the same reason that Linda is more likely to be a bank teller than a feminist bank teller. Any time you add a qualification, you reduce a probability.
Look at it this way. There are some number of worlds where X is not true. There are some number of worlds where X is true by shear dumb luck. Call this number alpha. And there are some number of worlds where X is true because there is an all-powerful god who went out of his way to cause X to be true. Call this number beta. If we understand a god to be all-powerful, then there cannot be any worlds where god goes out of his way to cause X to be true and fails. Call the total number of worlds gamma. So P(X) is (alpha + beta) / gamma, and P(god) is just beta / gamma. So long as alpha > 0, P(X) > P(god). Even if alpha = 0, we just get P(X) = p(god). Hypothesizing a god cannot help us explain anything.
Surely P(X) > P(God), but that's irrelevant here! The point is comparing P(X | God) to P(X | ~God), so the probabilities of X given that God does or does not exist.
Intuitition pump: your argument can't be right, because it works as an argument against hypothesizing any near-perfect explanation.
Why wouldn't the odds of there being physical laws be within the realm of physics? That seems like a core question within the domain of physics to me. How else might such a question be addressed besides physics? Certainly a lay person's intuitions can't be more reliable that physics on this question.
Physics takes the laws of physics for granted. The prior probability of there being physical laws at all is a philosophical question. What physics problem could possibly tell us the odds of anything existing?
I'm not sure what you are asking for. What sorts of things exist and why is a core physics question. Cosmology is a subfield of physics. How is that not a physics problem?
Even if you think physics is incapable of tackling such a question, what on earth makes you think philosophers have anything to contribute to it? They don't have the mathematical sophistication to work with physical laws. They don't have any empirical data. Their intuitions, like all other human intuitions, have not been trained on any relevant data and are therefor useless. A question doesn't belong to the domain of philosophers simply for lack of belonging to someone elses domain. What could possibly bring such a question within the domain of philosophers?
The article makes sense, but uses a surprising sense of pessimism. When I think of pessimism in moral terms, it's more like "the world has an immense amount of disvalue" or "the bad in the world dominates", which doesn't track with the premise that our world is "overflowing with love and meaning and connection". Nevertheless, this doesn't change the conclusion so much: whether the world is good or bad, most of the properties you describe are surprising enough to make one suspect divine existence. However, I'm curious to know if you think that it's plausible God who mostly cares about creating suffering / disvalue? Not sure what article of your covers that (there may be one).
What about a God who is niether evilmaxing or goodmaxing? Wouldn't a God somewhere in-between be more likely given that the world contains both good and evil?
Surely, if the existence of valuable things and the nonexistence of disvaluable things are taken as evidence for some intentional, value-promoting God, then (to avoid special pleading) we must take the nonexistence of possible more-valuable things and the existence of disvaluable things as evidence against?
Which is to say, if there is some conceivable GLOP which is possible but nonexistent, and even more valuable than consciousness, then, on theism, it is absolutely staggering that consciousness exists instead of GLOP. We'd never expect that a priori, not in a million years. And the nonexistence of GLOP, and a trillion trillion conceivable things like it, should be taken as an absolute mountain of evidence against theism.
So then it seems we only have any reason to give theism the time of day, if we have good reasons to suspect GLOP is impossible on all possible sets of natural laws! And I am aware of no such reasons...
I agree on theism it's weird that there isn't more good stuff. That's basically the problem of evil. But I think theists can give a unified explanation of all the evil more plausibly than atheists can give a unified explanation of the good.
Would you say there are reasons to believe that something like GLOP is not possible, on the space of all possible sets of natural laws? If so, what reasons are they?
What is this value you speak of? Is it some intrinsic, objective element of reality? Where is it located? Is it external to humans or internal? What has value? Where did it come from? How much value is in one square mile of Earth, or in one galaxy, or in one half of the known universe? Is there a valuon bouncing around with those all those quarks and gluons? Same question for 'meaning' and 'connection', to say nothing of their interrelatedness.
Also, every time I take a drive there are a million ways that it could end in tragedy. Yet, today it did not. What am I supposed to intuit from this, that Jesus took the wheel every time between the year I turned 15 and today? If there are a million ways it could go wrong, are there not quite a lot of ways it could go right? What insight do you have into universe formation that the rest of us need to learn that this could even meaningfully be quantified?
What is overflowing with love and connection? Is the whole universe overflowing with love? The love on planet earth seems rather an infinitesimal drop in an ocean of unliving matter, of significance to no one but ourselves, much like debating whether 'debt' should have a 'b' is only a concern to a smattering of linguists. Perhaps aliens will have love and connection. Perhaps not.
I get the sense that all these arguments are a project of yours to see if you can actually come up with something convincing. A noble project in that case (and the main reason I read the blog!), but one that maybe deserves more humility considering the terrible odds of success. The entire corpus of philosophy has been banging its head unsuccessfully against the God-proof wall for millenia. Maybe you'll be the one to find the unassailable evidence, but so far it's the usual bald assertions and 'my radio miraculously started working again!'
You fail to consider a possibility: this world was not created for value, but for the disvalue that exists alongside it. This world has far, far more suffering than joy if you look at the animal kingdom. Why would a God that wanted value allow disvalue to predominate in his universe? There is a possibility: perhaps God is evil. This would explain why he created so many miracles that make value possible: they also make disvalue possible, which is the ultimate goal. Now, you might object against this with a "problem of good": why is there so much value, even if disvalue predominates? Why would the evil God not just create us in hell to start off with? The answer, my good friend, is afterlife evil! Just as the problem of evil can be explained by saying we suffer finite mortal evils for infinite afterlife goods, I claim we have finite mortal goods that only exist to bring about infinite afterlife evils. The torture of eternal hell is all the more terrible when you had joy in life to compare it against! And not only do you suffer from your own torture, but from seeing everyone you came to love in life tortured alongside you! Every mortal good can be explained as merely a means to an end of greater afterlife evil. So, where does this leave us? It appears we live in a world where evil predominates over good, and where even the goods in this life could very well just be a setup for something much worse down the line. All the arguments you pose in favor of a supposedly good God apply equally well to an evil God, who would have a reason to bring about all these improbable miracles to make conscious disvalue possible. Maybe your arguments prove, or at least strongly suggest, there is a God. But an evil God fits with the evidence you have presented just as much as a good God, in fact, perhaps even better for this universe of unimaginable animal anguish. You therefore have theism. But at what cost?
It's a difficult thing to quantify, but it seems worth mentioning that most animal suffering, at least currently, is a result of human actions. Human agency is part of most theistic worldviews, and most theists would likely bite the bullet and say that the greater good brought about by free will is worth the suffering it entails.
That said, I agree with you that animal/child suffering is probably the best objection to theism.
"most animal suffering, at least currently, is a result of human actions."
I strongly disagree. Wild animal suffering outscales farmed animal suffering by multiple orders of magnitude. Even without humans, the majority of animals in nature would still suffer from being eaten and starving. Nature is really, really big, so any degree of average suffering within it is multiplied accordingly.
Is this true? I guess it depends on how much you think things like wild fish and insects suffer. Most mammals and birds are farmed. Crazy but true—most of the inhabitable land on earth is being tiled for food or habitation for humans.
Thanks, didn't have the time to respond. As I said, it's hard to quantify, but it seems clear to me that given the scale of factory farming, and the fact that those animals are likely suffering at a much higher frequency than wild animals, it is in fact not true at all that wild animal suffering outscores farmed animal suffering by multiple orders of magnitude.
Also being eaten and starving are going to be a very small percentage of an animal's life. Being factory farmed is going to be a 100% unpleasant experience.
This remains a bad argument. The conditions for life seem improbable, so I postulate that a magic spirit whose origin is unexplained made these conditions because it wanted to. If you get ten royal flushes in a row, it is a bad idea to assume “perhaps a magic spirit cares specifically about my poker success!”
I think this take spends too much energy pointing out all of the improbabilities of life when that's not actually the heart of the debate. Most theists and atheists are in agreement about how ridiculously and astronomically improbable all the conditions that need to be met for life are.
The real discussion lies in what we believe could plausibly cause those conditions to arise. The theist believes the only (or by far most likely, at any rate) explanation is a force tipping the dice in humanity's favor.
The atheist believes the amount of non-life "misses" is balanced against the odds of one life "hit." How many countless configurations of our universe in its entire lifespan resulted in no life? How many configurations if you subscribe to a many worlds hypothesis, or an infinite timespan single universe hypothesis? These are what should be systematically categorized and then attacked.
We could get further into the weeds about what each of these views actually entail, but I'll leave this comment as light and digestible pop philosophy.
Mostly agree except when it comes to the possibility of there being stuff and laws but the laws doesn’t apply to the stuff. Laws aren’t these independent entities floating around. We should probably be Humeans/Lewisians about laws — they’re just whatever regularities best describe the behavior of the stuff.
The album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel is exalted, something really special grew in Jeff Mangum's heart, I'm glad it got created & recorded. My reverence for the album is cliche, it is in a small category of the most valuable aesthetic artifacts I've ever experienced(although I've not listened to much Bach, Beethoven, or Miles Davis & such whom I suspect created better works, Aesthetic Realism debates aside).
Jeff Mangum evidently has a Christian background, he's spoken in multiple interviews about attending church camps from the age of 11-17, He is obviously a profoundly spiritual person, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is oozing with spiritual(at least analogously religious) themes & symbolism. He's also vegan & something of an activist having performed at a benefit gig for an animal sanctuary & at occupy wall street, being spotted whilst attending a climate strike, & supporting Bernie Sander’s presidential campaign through Neutral Milk Hotel’s mailing list.
Some of my favourite lyrics of the album are sung in one of my favourite tracks of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea - Oh Comley:
“Soft silly music is meaningful magical,
The movements were beautiful, all in your ovaries.
All of them milking with green fleshy flowers,
While powerful pistons were sugary sweet machines.
Smelling of semen all under the garden”
Some explicitly theological lyrics were sung in Two Headed Boy part 2:
“God is a place where some holy spectacle lies” & “God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life”
I think a pessimist should take Schopenhauer’s advice here. Schoepy argues that this is the worst possible world because it maximizes the amount of suffering in it. A world with nothing would be a world with no suffering, but our world has a ton of suffering. The value you indicate largely helps to maximize said suffering.
I see two basic problems with this whole line of argument. Firstly, no matter how improbable X is a priori, a god who went out of his way to cause X must be even more improbable.
Secondly, you are appealing to nothing but your own intuitions about what we should or should not expect a priori, in realsm of physics where human intuitions are known to be shit. How likely it is for constants to fall in a range that permits life, or for simple laws to lead to the complex chemistry involved, those are things about which our intuitions are literally worthless. To even begin to explore that would require a level of mathematical reasoning that neither you nor I have achieved, and the people who have achieved it are mostly atheists.
Why think the first thing?
I'm not talking about in the realm of physics--the entire point is that the probability of the physical laws is low. Physics can't settle the odds of there being laws at all.
With regard to the first thing, it's basically the same reason that Linda is more likely to be a bank teller than a feminist bank teller. Any time you add a qualification, you reduce a probability.
Look at it this way. There are some number of worlds where X is not true. There are some number of worlds where X is true by shear dumb luck. Call this number alpha. And there are some number of worlds where X is true because there is an all-powerful god who went out of his way to cause X to be true. Call this number beta. If we understand a god to be all-powerful, then there cannot be any worlds where god goes out of his way to cause X to be true and fails. Call the total number of worlds gamma. So P(X) is (alpha + beta) / gamma, and P(god) is just beta / gamma. So long as alpha > 0, P(X) > P(god). Even if alpha = 0, we just get P(X) = p(god). Hypothesizing a god cannot help us explain anything.
Oh it's true that P(X) is less than P(God and X). But If P(X) is high given God and low given ~God then X is strong evidence for God.
ok, I will grant you that this point is not doing any real work.
Surely P(X) > P(God), but that's irrelevant here! The point is comparing P(X | God) to P(X | ~God), so the probabilities of X given that God does or does not exist.
Intuitition pump: your argument can't be right, because it works as an argument against hypothesizing any near-perfect explanation.
Why wouldn't the odds of there being physical laws be within the realm of physics? That seems like a core question within the domain of physics to me. How else might such a question be addressed besides physics? Certainly a lay person's intuitions can't be more reliable that physics on this question.
Physics takes the laws of physics for granted. The prior probability of there being physical laws at all is a philosophical question. What physics problem could possibly tell us the odds of anything existing?
I'm not sure what you are asking for. What sorts of things exist and why is a core physics question. Cosmology is a subfield of physics. How is that not a physics problem?
Even if you think physics is incapable of tackling such a question, what on earth makes you think philosophers have anything to contribute to it? They don't have the mathematical sophistication to work with physical laws. They don't have any empirical data. Their intuitions, like all other human intuitions, have not been trained on any relevant data and are therefor useless. A question doesn't belong to the domain of philosophers simply for lack of belonging to someone elses domain. What could possibly bring such a question within the domain of philosophers?
The article makes sense, but uses a surprising sense of pessimism. When I think of pessimism in moral terms, it's more like "the world has an immense amount of disvalue" or "the bad in the world dominates", which doesn't track with the premise that our world is "overflowing with love and meaning and connection". Nevertheless, this doesn't change the conclusion so much: whether the world is good or bad, most of the properties you describe are surprising enough to make one suspect divine existence. However, I'm curious to know if you think that it's plausible God who mostly cares about creating suffering / disvalue? Not sure what article of your covers that (there may be one).
I don't think that's plausible https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-evil-god-challenge?utm_source=publication-search. Here are some thoughts, but my biggest objection is that a God who is Evilmaxxing seems about as implausible as a God who is paperclips-Maxxing--there's just no reason to choose evil over anything else.
What about a God who is niether evilmaxing or goodmaxing? Wouldn't a God somewhere in-between be more likely given that the world contains both good and evil?
I've noticed, from your quotes, that you have a good taste in music.
Maybe anachronistic now, but Neutral Milk Hotel used to be philosophy undergrad required reading.
EDIT: deleting comment. It’s time to move on. This whole thing has become counterproductive. Best wishes.
Seconded. I really don't want to be the Blog Comment Anti-Theist.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/08/22/turtles-down/
Surely, if the existence of valuable things and the nonexistence of disvaluable things are taken as evidence for some intentional, value-promoting God, then (to avoid special pleading) we must take the nonexistence of possible more-valuable things and the existence of disvaluable things as evidence against?
Which is to say, if there is some conceivable GLOP which is possible but nonexistent, and even more valuable than consciousness, then, on theism, it is absolutely staggering that consciousness exists instead of GLOP. We'd never expect that a priori, not in a million years. And the nonexistence of GLOP, and a trillion trillion conceivable things like it, should be taken as an absolute mountain of evidence against theism.
So then it seems we only have any reason to give theism the time of day, if we have good reasons to suspect GLOP is impossible on all possible sets of natural laws! And I am aware of no such reasons...
I agree on theism it's weird that there isn't more good stuff. That's basically the problem of evil. But I think theists can give a unified explanation of all the evil more plausibly than atheists can give a unified explanation of the good.
Would you say there are reasons to believe that something like GLOP is not possible, on the space of all possible sets of natural laws? If so, what reasons are they?
What is this value you speak of? Is it some intrinsic, objective element of reality? Where is it located? Is it external to humans or internal? What has value? Where did it come from? How much value is in one square mile of Earth, or in one galaxy, or in one half of the known universe? Is there a valuon bouncing around with those all those quarks and gluons? Same question for 'meaning' and 'connection', to say nothing of their interrelatedness.
Also, every time I take a drive there are a million ways that it could end in tragedy. Yet, today it did not. What am I supposed to intuit from this, that Jesus took the wheel every time between the year I turned 15 and today? If there are a million ways it could go wrong, are there not quite a lot of ways it could go right? What insight do you have into universe formation that the rest of us need to learn that this could even meaningfully be quantified?
What is overflowing with love and connection? Is the whole universe overflowing with love? The love on planet earth seems rather an infinitesimal drop in an ocean of unliving matter, of significance to no one but ourselves, much like debating whether 'debt' should have a 'b' is only a concern to a smattering of linguists. Perhaps aliens will have love and connection. Perhaps not.
I get the sense that all these arguments are a project of yours to see if you can actually come up with something convincing. A noble project in that case (and the main reason I read the blog!), but one that maybe deserves more humility considering the terrible odds of success. The entire corpus of philosophy has been banging its head unsuccessfully against the God-proof wall for millenia. Maybe you'll be the one to find the unassailable evidence, but so far it's the usual bald assertions and 'my radio miraculously started working again!'
You fail to consider a possibility: this world was not created for value, but for the disvalue that exists alongside it. This world has far, far more suffering than joy if you look at the animal kingdom. Why would a God that wanted value allow disvalue to predominate in his universe? There is a possibility: perhaps God is evil. This would explain why he created so many miracles that make value possible: they also make disvalue possible, which is the ultimate goal. Now, you might object against this with a "problem of good": why is there so much value, even if disvalue predominates? Why would the evil God not just create us in hell to start off with? The answer, my good friend, is afterlife evil! Just as the problem of evil can be explained by saying we suffer finite mortal evils for infinite afterlife goods, I claim we have finite mortal goods that only exist to bring about infinite afterlife evils. The torture of eternal hell is all the more terrible when you had joy in life to compare it against! And not only do you suffer from your own torture, but from seeing everyone you came to love in life tortured alongside you! Every mortal good can be explained as merely a means to an end of greater afterlife evil. So, where does this leave us? It appears we live in a world where evil predominates over good, and where even the goods in this life could very well just be a setup for something much worse down the line. All the arguments you pose in favor of a supposedly good God apply equally well to an evil God, who would have a reason to bring about all these improbable miracles to make conscious disvalue possible. Maybe your arguments prove, or at least strongly suggest, there is a God. But an evil God fits with the evidence you have presented just as much as a good God, in fact, perhaps even better for this universe of unimaginable animal anguish. You therefore have theism. But at what cost?
It's a difficult thing to quantify, but it seems worth mentioning that most animal suffering, at least currently, is a result of human actions. Human agency is part of most theistic worldviews, and most theists would likely bite the bullet and say that the greater good brought about by free will is worth the suffering it entails.
That said, I agree with you that animal/child suffering is probably the best objection to theism.
"most animal suffering, at least currently, is a result of human actions."
I strongly disagree. Wild animal suffering outscales farmed animal suffering by multiple orders of magnitude. Even without humans, the majority of animals in nature would still suffer from being eaten and starving. Nature is really, really big, so any degree of average suffering within it is multiplied accordingly.
Is this true? I guess it depends on how much you think things like wild fish and insects suffer. Most mammals and birds are farmed. Crazy but true—most of the inhabitable land on earth is being tiled for food or habitation for humans.
Thanks, didn't have the time to respond. As I said, it's hard to quantify, but it seems clear to me that given the scale of factory farming, and the fact that those animals are likely suffering at a much higher frequency than wild animals, it is in fact not true at all that wild animal suffering outscores farmed animal suffering by multiple orders of magnitude.
Also being eaten and starving are going to be a very small percentage of an animal's life. Being factory farmed is going to be a 100% unpleasant experience.
Seems like you picked the wrong verse from in the aeroplane over the sea. Isn't
"What a beautiful face
I have found in this place
That is circling all 'round the sun
And when we meet on a cloud
I'll be laughing out loud
I'll be laughing with everyone I see
Can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all"
more thematically fitting?
I considered that one but the lined around it didn’t fit well
This remains a bad argument. The conditions for life seem improbable, so I postulate that a magic spirit whose origin is unexplained made these conditions because it wanted to. If you get ten royal flushes in a row, it is a bad idea to assume “perhaps a magic spirit cares specifically about my poker success!”
I think this take spends too much energy pointing out all of the improbabilities of life when that's not actually the heart of the debate. Most theists and atheists are in agreement about how ridiculously and astronomically improbable all the conditions that need to be met for life are.
The real discussion lies in what we believe could plausibly cause those conditions to arise. The theist believes the only (or by far most likely, at any rate) explanation is a force tipping the dice in humanity's favor.
The atheist believes the amount of non-life "misses" is balanced against the odds of one life "hit." How many countless configurations of our universe in its entire lifespan resulted in no life? How many configurations if you subscribe to a many worlds hypothesis, or an infinite timespan single universe hypothesis? These are what should be systematically categorized and then attacked.
We could get further into the weeds about what each of these views actually entail, but I'll leave this comment as light and digestible pop philosophy.
Mostly agree except when it comes to the possibility of there being stuff and laws but the laws doesn’t apply to the stuff. Laws aren’t these independent entities floating around. We should probably be Humeans/Lewisians about laws — they’re just whatever regularities best describe the behavior of the stuff.
The album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel is exalted, something really special grew in Jeff Mangum's heart, I'm glad it got created & recorded. My reverence for the album is cliche, it is in a small category of the most valuable aesthetic artifacts I've ever experienced(although I've not listened to much Bach, Beethoven, or Miles Davis & such whom I suspect created better works, Aesthetic Realism debates aside).
Jeff Mangum evidently has a Christian background, he's spoken in multiple interviews about attending church camps from the age of 11-17, He is obviously a profoundly spiritual person, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is oozing with spiritual(at least analogously religious) themes & symbolism. He's also vegan & something of an activist having performed at a benefit gig for an animal sanctuary & at occupy wall street, being spotted whilst attending a climate strike, & supporting Bernie Sander’s presidential campaign through Neutral Milk Hotel’s mailing list.
Some of my favourite lyrics of the album are sung in one of my favourite tracks of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea - Oh Comley:
“Soft silly music is meaningful magical,
The movements were beautiful, all in your ovaries.
All of them milking with green fleshy flowers,
While powerful pistons were sugary sweet machines.
Smelling of semen all under the garden”
Some explicitly theological lyrics were sung in Two Headed Boy part 2:
“God is a place where some holy spectacle lies” & “God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life”
I think a pessimist should take Schopenhauer’s advice here. Schoepy argues that this is the worst possible world because it maximizes the amount of suffering in it. A world with nothing would be a world with no suffering, but our world has a ton of suffering. The value you indicate largely helps to maximize said suffering.