The Psychophysical Theists

Why are people who accept the argument from psychophysical harmony more likely to support effective altruism?

I’m not like other theists!

Most theists are theists for quite thoroughly banal reasons. They were raised in some religion, and never reflected much on it, remaining, through inertia, in the religious views they were raised with. Of the people that do think about arguments for theism, many of them are creationists, and most of the rest simply rehash tired William Lane Craig talking points. Many of them—eww—even like the moral argument.

Still, there is a group of theists that I find myself at home among—Amos Wollen, Dustin Crummett, Philip Swenson, Brian Cutter, Robin Collins, Apologetics Squared, Silas Abrahamson, subscriber to this blog Philip, and various others. Just as I consider effective altruists to be part of my tribe in some sense, at least when it comes to views on how one should give and what one should do with their life, I consider these people to be part of my tribe when it comes to philosophy of religion and various related topics. I thought, seeing as no one had described the group explicitly, I might do so. First I call the “group” the psychophysical theists because it is united by almost complete agreement about the success of the psychophysical harmony argument and more importantly, it sounds cool. Open to other suggestions for names, and curious to hear about other people who are part of the group.

I’ll give various commonalities that people in the group have. Note that these are not universal—many members of the group lack some of these things—but each of them are had by most members of the group. Just as a Republican might not support tax cuts but still supporting tax cuts is typical of Republicans, members of the group might lack a few of these, but have many of them in common. At the end, I’ll explain my theory of why this motley assemblage of views is correlated.

1. Members of the group are sympathetic to the argument from psychophysical harmony. This is an argument about the coincidental and fortunate pairing between the mental and the physical—read the linked paper if you want to read more. Nearly all of the group finds this argument convincing, finding there to be something quite striking about this pairing.

2. Members of the group find other arguments from harmony similarly convincing. Nomological harmony, to take a parallel harmony argument, is similarly widely favored by the group (albeit its support isn’t quite as significant as psychophysical harmony). The group tends to be convinced by arguments that have to do with fortunate pairings between things that didn’t need to be paired—the argument from moral knowledge would also be a harmony argument, noting the striking coincidence that our moral beliefs line up with the moral facts if there’s no God.

3. Members of the group are also convinced by the a priori fine-tuning argument. This argument is well-summarized here or here. In short, it’s very improbable that we’d get a universe that produces anything interesting—the simplest sets of laws simply produce a dormant and dull state that never produces anything of value. This fact doesn’t depend on any modern findings in physics but just the basic verdict that interesting structures tend to be complex and improbable. I know at least 4 members of this group—me, Dustin, Apologetics Squared, and Philip Swenson—have come up with this argument independently, and Robin Collins consistently presses the point when writing about fine-tuning. Cutter might have also come up with it independently—given how weird this fact is, I think this counts as a decent diagnostic criteria.

4. Members of the group are usually Christian. Of the people I listed, only Amos and I aren’t. This isn’t that surprising, because most theists interested in philosophy of religion are Christians.

5. The people I describe are sympathetic to theodicies involving connection-building. This was a funny coincidence—Collins has a theodicy about this, Dustin and Philip Swenson both think it’s a big part of the right theodical story, and so does (I think?) everyone else on the list. On this picture, part of the reason God allows us to suffer is so we can help each other out and strengthen our eventual relationships.

6. They also tend to be in favor of effective altruism. I know Philip Swenson is majorly sold on it, and gives some of his income to effective charities, Dustin works for an EA organization, and almost everyone else on the list does as well.

7. Members of this group are disproportionately sympathetic to the anthropic argument. While most people aren’t moved by it, everyone on the list I’ve raised it to has said either that it might work or that they think it probably does. No one is confident that the argument is wrong, and some are confident that it’s right.

8. The group is disproportionately universalist. Everyone on the list, as far as I can tell, either accepts or leans towards universalism, with the exception of Brian Cutter, who thinks it’s plausibleish but not super likely. Still, I get the sense Brian is way more sympathetic to it than most Catholics, and has his good judgment clouded by his unfortunate Catholicism.

9. Members of the group tend to be nearer to theistic personalists than classical theists. They tend to have a less ineffable notion of God, mostly not thinking he’s identical to his attributes.

10. The group thinks factory farming is bad! All the ones I’ve talked to about it are in agreement about this. They think it’s not just a bit bad, but one of the major tragedies of the world.

11. Members are disproportionately pluralist. While many Christians stress that Christ is the only way, people on the list are mostly sympathetic to the idea that God positively influences people in other ways and that, while Christians might have a special relationship with God, they’re not the only ones who do, and many who aren’t Christians in this life will be saved.

12. Finally, members of the group are less sold on deductive arguments for the existence of God. While some are sympathetic to some deductive arguments, they mostly believe in God because he’s the best explanation of a lot of things about the world, rather than because some phenomenon like change necessitates his existence.

13. Members of the group tend to be far away from Biblical inerrancy. I don’t know who if anyone on the list affirms Biblical inerrancy, and many—e.g. Dustin—seem to think the Bible is very far from inerrant, and has many bits that are false and bad.

So, why is it that these people have these things in common? What explains this odd web of correlations? Well, it’s no mystery why they’re mostly Christians—had analytic philosophy of religion mostly flowered in India, probably a lot of these people would be Hindus. But why is it that people who think psychophysical harmony works are more likely to, say, support effective altruism, think factory farming is wrong, and be a universalist. I think there’s a straightforward answer: the argument from psychophysical harmony is quite weird but is successful, so only people quite good at thinking about these subjects come to believe it. The reason those people believe the other things on the list is because those other things are also true.