:(. Most theists think crazy things, but theism itself is very non-crazy--explains a lot all in one fell swoop, is very simple, and just has one serious problem (eeeeeeeeeeeeevil).
Though actually, have you heard: evil proves God? Why is that Frank? Well, to have a moral law you need what? A lawgiver. But who could be a lawgiver other than God.
The most obvious reason why you attend to support similar things is because you were part of similar social networks and you mutually influence your number. If you or other members of these groups at different social networks you would probably have different philosophical beliefs. Alternatively features of your personalities or other idiosyncrasies and how you've interacted with one another may very well have caused you to become friends or to like or respect one another. I suspect a great deal of our beliefs are driven by our social interactions not by rational reflection or the power of our intellect.
I don't think that explains the relevant data. Many of the people on the list thought of the views independently (e.g. Brian and Dustin both thought of psychophysical harmony independently, most of us independently converged on the nomological fine-tuning argument, and Robin Collins wasn't in an environment like the others).
I became an EA (ideologically) in high school, before EA (as a movement) existed, when I read a NYT op ed about charitable giving by Peter Singer and agreed with it. Before that I would have considered him almost literally the paradigm of my outgroup, because my first exposure to him was a wikiquote page that cited what he'd said about infanticide, which I thought was horrifying. (I actually wrote two novels around this time that were both sort of thematically about this, in different ways--one had a villainous character named with the last name "Singer." After I read the NYT piece, I also wrote a novel that was thematically about the Singer argument re: poverty and charitable giving, in a different way. Idk how I had so much time to write novels in high school.) I did go to a Mennonite school that, in theory anyway, placed a heavy emphasis on service to others and so forth, which might have softened me up to the message, I guess.
I also became a universalist in high school when I read an online essay by Keith DeRose. I had no prior opinion of him, except that he was probably smart since he was at Yale. My only exposure to universalism prior to this was indoctrination against it as a child, which at the time I of course accepted.
I invented the argument from psychophysical harmony as an undergrad after I read Jaegwon Kim's *Physicalism or Something Near Enough* in my spare time. Maybe you think I was corrupted by analytic philosophy at that point, though I recall, very early in my intro class the first semester, endorsing (though I did not know this was distinct position at the time) property dualism, and having a difficult time believing the professor when he later explained that eliminativism was a position people defended. I have some other stories a bit like this (I became a mereological nihilist as an undergrad when I went to a talk where the speaker briefly raised and dismissed it).
My current worldview, and also what I am presently doing with my life, is not only extremely different from from what I grew up with, but also very weird even by the standards of the communities I'm part of now. There could be some error theory about why I have the cluster of views I have (I think I even know the one I would endorse), but I'm pretty sure it's not because of social networks, etc., except in the trivial sense that I wouldn't have thought of certain things if I hadn't read someone else talking about them.
I was cool with EA before meeting Matthew Adelstein or Dustin Crummett.
I also did not believe in God a few years ago. But now I do believe in God.
I also flip flopped between deontology and Utilitarianism, moral realism and moral anti realism (you would know my moral anti realist phaze considering our chat a few years ago) before settling to moral realism and Utilitarianism.
I also flip flopped between political ideologies before settling to capitalism firmly.
Just an year and half ago, I was not a necessitarian and now I am a necessitarian.
>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.
When C. S. Lewis became a theist he remained simply a theist for many months before finally becoming a Christian. Of all the religions Lewis thought only two were likely to be true: Christianity, or Hinduism. He explained it this way in his autobiography:
"The question was no longer to find the one simply true religion among a thousand religions simply false. It was rather, 'Where has religion reached its true maturity? Where, if anywhere, have the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?' With the irreligious I was no longer concerned; their view of life was henceforth out of court. As against them, the whole mass of those who had worshipped—all who had danced and sung and sacrificed and trembled and adored—were clearly right. But the intellect and the conscience, as well as the orgy and the ritual, must be our guide. There could be no question of going back to primitive, untheologised and unmoralised, Paganism. The God whom I had at last acknowledged was one, and was righteous. Paganism had been only the childhood of religion, or only a prophetic dream. Where was the thing full grown? or where was the awaking? (The Everlasting Man was helping me here.) There were really only two answers possible: either in Hinduism or in Christianity. Everything else was either a preparation for, or else (in the French sense) a vulgarisation of, these. Whatever you could find elsewhere you could find better in one of these. But Hinduism seemed to have two disqualifications. For one thing, it appeared to be not so much a moralised and philosophical maturity of Paganism as a mere oil-and-water coexistence of philosophy side by side with Paganism unpurged; the Brahmin meditating in the forest, and, in the village a few miles away, temple-prostitution, sati, cruelty, monstrosity. And secondly, there was no such historical claim as in Christianity. I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion—those narrow, unattractive Jews, too blind to the mythical wealth of the Pagan world around them—was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognisable, through all that depth of time, as Plato’s Socrates or Boswell’s Johnson (ten times more so than Eckermann’s Goethe or Lockhart’s Scott), yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god—we are no longer polytheists—then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not 'a religion', nor 'a philosophy'. It is the summing up and actuality of them all."
He expanded on the dichotomy between Hinduism and Christianity again in his speech "Christian Apologetics", which he gave to an audience of ministers:
"For my own part, I have sometimes told my audience that the only two things really worth considering are Christianity and Hinduism. (Islam is only the greatest of the Christian heresies, Buddhism only the greatest of the Hindu heresies. Real paganism is dead. All that was best in Judaism and Platonism survives in Christianity.) There isn’t really, for an adult mind, this infinite variety of religions to consider. We may 'salva reverentia' divide religions, as we do soups, into 'thick' and 'clear.' By thick I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of thick religions. By clear I mean those which are philosophical, ethical, and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Church are clear religions. Now if there is a true religion , it must be both thick and clear: for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly. And the only two religions that fulfil this condition are Hinduism and Christianity. But Hinduism fulfils it imperfectly. The clear religion of the Brahman hermit in the jungle and the thick religion of the neighboring temple go on side by side. The Brahman hermit doesn’t bother about the temple prostitution nor the worshiper in the temple about the hermit’s metaphysics. But Christianity really breaks down the middle wall of the partition. It takes a convert from Central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord. The savage convert has to be clear: I have to be thick. That is how one knows one has come to the real religion."
Of course Lewis had at least one thing in common with your psychophysical theists, and that was pluralism. In the same address he said:
"Of course it should be pointed out that, though all salvation is through Jesus, we need not conclude that He cannot save those who have not explicitly accepted Him in this life. And it should (at least in my judgement) be made clear that we are not pronouncing all other religions to be totally false, but rather saying that in Christ whatever is true in all religions is consummated and perfected. But, on the other hand, I think we must attack wherever we meet it the nonsensical idea that mutually exclusive propositions about God can both be true."
I didn't say anything about being a good person. But if you believe some proposition P, you think P is true. But if P is the sort of thing that's a bit hard to figure out, it's not surprising that the people who believe P believe lots of other true things. This best explains the correlations .
Yea a lot of this blog is self congratulatory. Maybe it's intended as a joke but I don't find it very funny or appealing. I wonder how much my disagreements with other philosophers are rooted in personality differences and differences in one's sense of humor.
Kane B put out a video recently where he outlined a skeptical argument to the effect that: Most people say they believe what they believe because it's "true," but most people are wrong about what they believe, so you need a variety of error theories that explain why those people aren't moved by the "truth" but instead by non-truth conducive state of affairs that mistakenly result in them believing they have the truth. Claiming you have the "truth" is self congratulatory because not only is it improbable probabilistically, but it's metaphysically odd for the buck to stop when you decide to call something you believe "true" (psychophysical harmony) but not when other people call their differring beliefs "true."
To be fair, some attributes like opposing factory farming and engaging in effective altruism by donating money to effective charities are correlated with being a good person.
Even though I mostly come on here to tell you things don't make sense to me, I am basically what you describe above. I was raised as an atheist and converted to Catholicism a couple of years ago, but most of your points I either agree with or don't quite understand but am not opposed to. The most convincing argument I know for God is mathematics. I was abd before I left grad school, but you don't even need a lot of math to see it. The natural extension of counting groups of things (multiplication) is intrinsically related to .. gravity? Probability? The relationship of speed to acceleration? Wow.
Oh, and other than Catholicism, I'm not really part of a social group that believes any of this. Most of my friends are non-believers, and my Catholic friends are not usually into this type of thing.
> the striking coincidence that our moral beliefs line up with the moral facts if there’s no God
Doesn’t this straightforwardly undercut your claims (made elsewhere, if I’ve understood you correctly) that moral intuitionism is independently justifiable without appealing to the existence of God?
I mean - if you justify moral intuition on general, non-theistic epistemological grounds, then any such justification ought to explain how, far from being a striking coincidence, our ability to form correct moral beliefs is only to be expected.
It seems you want to claim that the existence of god is necessary for claiming how moral intuitionism *can* be true, but that it need play no part in establishing *that* it is true - have I got you right?
I'm confused by the nomological argument. This seems like a very basic objection, so I apologize in advance if I'm missing something, but I didn't see this addressed in the first several pages of the paper.
The paper begins, "Our universe is governed by laws that match its contents." Soon after, it clarifies: "Or the world might have had any of countless other kinds of law-state mismatches—laws dictating the behavior of schmarged particles with states consisting only of configurations of charged particles, laws dictating the behavior of charged particles but no states involving charged particles, and so on."
So I understand this matching is supposed to be a 1-1 correspondence between the physical laws that govern the universe and the objects that exist in the universe. We can then divide the argument into two parts:
A. Every existing object in the universe is governed by physical laws.
B. Every physical law in the universe applies to some existing objects.
But only A can actually be proven. B, by definition, can never be empirically observed. For example, how would you prove that there are no physical laws governing the behavior of schmarged particles, if (by assumption) no such particles exist?
Perhaps I misunderstood and the nomological argument is actually just A? But that sounds somewhat less convincing than having a perfect match.
I am not good at empathy. I never donated to any charity, and I also don't understand PPH, and it looks like PPH requires empathy because it requires thinking about people as something other than machines. Here is your connection.
FWIW the specific reason I have always been atheist was that I don't like people, and it is really unlikely that the Biggest Thing Ever would be something like a human. Give me something impersonal - Jedi Force, Chi, the Tao etc. but personhood really sucks. A person is basically a machine that gets random moods. Eww.
1,2,3, go together as they recognize that the world is surprising, out of the space of all possibilities. 7 (the anthropic argument) is arguably similar in some respects—being far more okay with taking evidence from basic facts about the world and the way we see the world. I think 12 is connected to 9, a little, as I think many of the arguments for classical essence=attributes theism feel pretty deductive-argument-y.
8 (universalism) is clearly tied to 11 (pluralism). These feel like they belong in some sort of category with 6 (EA), 10 (factory farming), and 5 (connections theodicy), though that's harder to articulate.
That leaves only Christianity and inerrancy as separate. If disagreeing with inerrancy is often motivated by things like thinking genociding the canaanites was bad, then that is arguably linked to the second part cluster, too.
So what I'm seeing overall is that most of this list flows from one epistemic intuition (basic facts about what the world looks like can be good evidence), and one ethical intuition (badness has largely to do with suffering). Personally, I'm significantly more swayed by the first set of things than the second.
It's not clear to me why those two things tend to go together, but I think it's a lot more like 2 things going together than 13 things going together.
I’m just curious, how do you reconcile your theism with your utilitarianism? While there are various theories of theodicy I know you’ve laid out, such as suffering leading to some sort of soul-building, none of them seem to square with a God who is a utilitarian. If God were a utilitarian, it seems logical that he would maximize utility by creating an infinite number of minds experiencing an infinite amount of pleasure for an infinite amount of time. And yet, we can see from the experience of our own minds that such a world is not what we live in. So how do you assume both that God is real and that utilitarianism is the correct moral theory, when our experience shows that God, if he exists, is not a utilitarian?
But still, this universe really doesn't seem like one which is optimized for utility, even in a non-hedonic sense. Assuming that you still view suffering as an innate negative, there is such a preponderance of suffering which has no soul-building purpose that it boggles the mind. I know you've written before about the suffering of the average animal in nature, why would God allow the vast majority of consciousnesses that exist be short and incredibly painful, without even higher cognition to make any meaning of the suffering? We might be able to conceive of a utilitarian God allowing the suffering experienced by humans due to our higher mental faculties allowing it to lead to some higher good, but what of the suffering of the vast majority of minds in existence that suffer horribly towards no higher end? God, if he is real, still doesn't seem like much of a utilitarian, to put it mildly.
He argues somewhere that God would want to put us in an indifferent universe because sometimes you can build a strong relationship with another person when you're away from them or don't think they exist or whatever else that's supposed to be relevantly like God being an absent father to humans.
The indifferent universe argument still doesn't work in my opinion, because while that might explain the reason for humans being allowed to suffer, it doesn't justify the widespread and extreme suffering of lower animals whose minds aren't complex enough to form a relationship with God. We would have to countenance a universe where God allows the vast majority of consciousnesses to suffer horribly, with only a tiny minority being advanced enough to derive a higher purpose or relationship with God from that suffering. So the question isn't why is the universe indifferent to humans, it's why is the universe indifferent to the r-strategists who pointlessly suffer and die by the trillions.
The arguments you put forth here: https://benthams.substack.com/p/moral-realism-is-true are unconvincing. “X is bad because people tend to think it is” is just repeatedly appealing to a popular consensus. No measurable facts present.
“I shouldn’t do x because people think it is bad and they will do y to me in return preventing me from doing z” still assigns no truth value to X.
I'm not appealing to consensus but intuitions. Intuitions, however, are how we know pretty much everything--you can't justify beliefs about any subject absent relying on how things appear except maybe that you're conscious or something.
You're making the move old sense data theorists used to make - everything we know is due to sense data, so doubting sense data is absurd. But most people reject sense data theory today and don't think its truth or falsity has any important or necessary epistemic consequences. Intuitions are just another drop in the sea of philosophers postulating queer mental predicates that they ambiguously identify with existing sensory perceptions and with some underspecified mental postulate - the inner world, the visual field, an intellectual seeming - in order to claim that belief in the latter is just as justified as belief in the former, which everyone agrees exists and so you must be irrational for questioning the methodology or postulates of the theory. Intuitions are not what powers human inquiry in the same way sense data aren't what power human inquiry.
I don’t fully trust my senses being accurate. But if they aren’t accurate, anything goes, so there is little point in continuing further down that path.
I've noticed this as well, but I didn't know the list was that long and specific!
When you're a theist you'll join the list!
never!!!!!!!
:(. Most theists think crazy things, but theism itself is very non-crazy--explains a lot all in one fell swoop, is very simple, and just has one serious problem (eeeeeeeeeeeeevil).
Though actually, have you heard: evil proves God? Why is that Frank? Well, to have a moral law you need what? A lawgiver. But who could be a lawgiver other than God.
The most obvious reason why you attend to support similar things is because you were part of similar social networks and you mutually influence your number. If you or other members of these groups at different social networks you would probably have different philosophical beliefs. Alternatively features of your personalities or other idiosyncrasies and how you've interacted with one another may very well have caused you to become friends or to like or respect one another. I suspect a great deal of our beliefs are driven by our social interactions not by rational reflection or the power of our intellect.
I don't think that explains the relevant data. Many of the people on the list thought of the views independently (e.g. Brian and Dustin both thought of psychophysical harmony independently, most of us independently converged on the nomological fine-tuning argument, and Robin Collins wasn't in an environment like the others).
I became an EA (ideologically) in high school, before EA (as a movement) existed, when I read a NYT op ed about charitable giving by Peter Singer and agreed with it. Before that I would have considered him almost literally the paradigm of my outgroup, because my first exposure to him was a wikiquote page that cited what he'd said about infanticide, which I thought was horrifying. (I actually wrote two novels around this time that were both sort of thematically about this, in different ways--one had a villainous character named with the last name "Singer." After I read the NYT piece, I also wrote a novel that was thematically about the Singer argument re: poverty and charitable giving, in a different way. Idk how I had so much time to write novels in high school.) I did go to a Mennonite school that, in theory anyway, placed a heavy emphasis on service to others and so forth, which might have softened me up to the message, I guess.
I also became a universalist in high school when I read an online essay by Keith DeRose. I had no prior opinion of him, except that he was probably smart since he was at Yale. My only exposure to universalism prior to this was indoctrination against it as a child, which at the time I of course accepted.
I invented the argument from psychophysical harmony as an undergrad after I read Jaegwon Kim's *Physicalism or Something Near Enough* in my spare time. Maybe you think I was corrupted by analytic philosophy at that point, though I recall, very early in my intro class the first semester, endorsing (though I did not know this was distinct position at the time) property dualism, and having a difficult time believing the professor when he later explained that eliminativism was a position people defended. I have some other stories a bit like this (I became a mereological nihilist as an undergrad when I went to a talk where the speaker briefly raised and dismissed it).
My current worldview, and also what I am presently doing with my life, is not only extremely different from from what I grew up with, but also very weird even by the standards of the communities I'm part of now. There could be some error theory about why I have the cluster of views I have (I think I even know the one I would endorse), but I'm pretty sure it's not because of social networks, etc., except in the trivial sense that I wouldn't have thought of certain things if I hadn't read someone else talking about them.
How long were the novels?
Probably like 40,000-60,000 words? Not that long *for novels.*
I was cool with EA before meeting Matthew Adelstein or Dustin Crummett.
I also did not believe in God a few years ago. But now I do believe in God.
I also flip flopped between deontology and Utilitarianism, moral realism and moral anti realism (you would know my moral anti realist phaze considering our chat a few years ago) before settling to moral realism and Utilitarianism.
I also flip flopped between political ideologies before settling to capitalism firmly.
Just an year and half ago, I was not a necessitarian and now I am a necessitarian.
>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.
When C. S. Lewis became a theist he remained simply a theist for many months before finally becoming a Christian. Of all the religions Lewis thought only two were likely to be true: Christianity, or Hinduism. He explained it this way in his autobiography:
"The question was no longer to find the one simply true religion among a thousand religions simply false. It was rather, 'Where has religion reached its true maturity? Where, if anywhere, have the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?' With the irreligious I was no longer concerned; their view of life was henceforth out of court. As against them, the whole mass of those who had worshipped—all who had danced and sung and sacrificed and trembled and adored—were clearly right. But the intellect and the conscience, as well as the orgy and the ritual, must be our guide. There could be no question of going back to primitive, untheologised and unmoralised, Paganism. The God whom I had at last acknowledged was one, and was righteous. Paganism had been only the childhood of religion, or only a prophetic dream. Where was the thing full grown? or where was the awaking? (The Everlasting Man was helping me here.) There were really only two answers possible: either in Hinduism or in Christianity. Everything else was either a preparation for, or else (in the French sense) a vulgarisation of, these. Whatever you could find elsewhere you could find better in one of these. But Hinduism seemed to have two disqualifications. For one thing, it appeared to be not so much a moralised and philosophical maturity of Paganism as a mere oil-and-water coexistence of philosophy side by side with Paganism unpurged; the Brahmin meditating in the forest, and, in the village a few miles away, temple-prostitution, sati, cruelty, monstrosity. And secondly, there was no such historical claim as in Christianity. I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion—those narrow, unattractive Jews, too blind to the mythical wealth of the Pagan world around them—was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognisable, through all that depth of time, as Plato’s Socrates or Boswell’s Johnson (ten times more so than Eckermann’s Goethe or Lockhart’s Scott), yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god—we are no longer polytheists—then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not 'a religion', nor 'a philosophy'. It is the summing up and actuality of them all."
He expanded on the dichotomy between Hinduism and Christianity again in his speech "Christian Apologetics", which he gave to an audience of ministers:
"For my own part, I have sometimes told my audience that the only two things really worth considering are Christianity and Hinduism. (Islam is only the greatest of the Christian heresies, Buddhism only the greatest of the Hindu heresies. Real paganism is dead. All that was best in Judaism and Platonism survives in Christianity.) There isn’t really, for an adult mind, this infinite variety of religions to consider. We may 'salva reverentia' divide religions, as we do soups, into 'thick' and 'clear.' By thick I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of thick religions. By clear I mean those which are philosophical, ethical, and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Church are clear religions. Now if there is a true religion , it must be both thick and clear: for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly. And the only two religions that fulfil this condition are Hinduism and Christianity. But Hinduism fulfils it imperfectly. The clear religion of the Brahman hermit in the jungle and the thick religion of the neighboring temple go on side by side. The Brahman hermit doesn’t bother about the temple prostitution nor the worshiper in the temple about the hermit’s metaphysics. But Christianity really breaks down the middle wall of the partition. It takes a convert from Central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord. The savage convert has to be clear: I have to be thick. That is how one knows one has come to the real religion."
Of course Lewis had at least one thing in common with your psychophysical theists, and that was pluralism. In the same address he said:
"Of course it should be pointed out that, though all salvation is through Jesus, we need not conclude that He cannot save those who have not explicitly accepted Him in this life. And it should (at least in my judgement) be made clear that we are not pronouncing all other religions to be totally false, but rather saying that in Christ whatever is true in all religions is consummated and perfected. But, on the other hand, I think we must attack wherever we meet it the nonsensical idea that mutually exclusive propositions about God can both be true."
"Everyone who agrees with me is a good person because they are smart and agree with me" is a classic Matthew take.
I didn't say anything about being a good person. But if you believe some proposition P, you think P is true. But if P is the sort of thing that's a bit hard to figure out, it's not surprising that the people who believe P believe lots of other true things. This best explains the correlations .
You:
> I didn't say anything about being a good person.
Also you:
> Why are people who accept the argument from psychophysical harmony more likely to support effective altruism?
So again, saying "people who agree with me are so cool!!!"... not very impressive.
Well people who don't support effective altruism don't think it makes one better to support it.
Yea a lot of this blog is self congratulatory. Maybe it's intended as a joke but I don't find it very funny or appealing. I wonder how much my disagreements with other philosophers are rooted in personality differences and differences in one's sense of humor.
Do you think it's self congratulatory to, say, believe in psychophysical harmony?
If not, is it fine to think it's probably true?
If not, is it fine to think that because it's true, if the people who believe it tend to believe other true things, maybe there's a correlation?
Kane B put out a video recently where he outlined a skeptical argument to the effect that: Most people say they believe what they believe because it's "true," but most people are wrong about what they believe, so you need a variety of error theories that explain why those people aren't moved by the "truth" but instead by non-truth conducive state of affairs that mistakenly result in them believing they have the truth. Claiming you have the "truth" is self congratulatory because not only is it improbable probabilistically, but it's metaphysically odd for the buck to stop when you decide to call something you believe "true" (psychophysical harmony) but not when other people call their differring beliefs "true."
To be fair, some attributes like opposing factory farming and engaging in effective altruism by donating money to effective charities are correlated with being a good person.
Give him some time. He is still young.(and sharp)
Even though I mostly come on here to tell you things don't make sense to me, I am basically what you describe above. I was raised as an atheist and converted to Catholicism a couple of years ago, but most of your points I either agree with or don't quite understand but am not opposed to. The most convincing argument I know for God is mathematics. I was abd before I left grad school, but you don't even need a lot of math to see it. The natural extension of counting groups of things (multiplication) is intrinsically related to .. gravity? Probability? The relationship of speed to acceleration? Wow.
Oh, and other than Catholicism, I'm not really part of a social group that believes any of this. Most of my friends are non-believers, and my Catholic friends are not usually into this type of thing.
> the striking coincidence that our moral beliefs line up with the moral facts if there’s no God
Doesn’t this straightforwardly undercut your claims (made elsewhere, if I’ve understood you correctly) that moral intuitionism is independently justifiable without appealing to the existence of God?
I mean - if you justify moral intuition on general, non-theistic epistemological grounds, then any such justification ought to explain how, far from being a striking coincidence, our ability to form correct moral beliefs is only to be expected.
It seems you want to claim that the existence of god is necessary for claiming how moral intuitionism *can* be true, but that it need play no part in establishing *that* it is true - have I got you right?
I'm confused by the nomological argument. This seems like a very basic objection, so I apologize in advance if I'm missing something, but I didn't see this addressed in the first several pages of the paper.
The paper begins, "Our universe is governed by laws that match its contents." Soon after, it clarifies: "Or the world might have had any of countless other kinds of law-state mismatches—laws dictating the behavior of schmarged particles with states consisting only of configurations of charged particles, laws dictating the behavior of charged particles but no states involving charged particles, and so on."
So I understand this matching is supposed to be a 1-1 correspondence between the physical laws that govern the universe and the objects that exist in the universe. We can then divide the argument into two parts:
A. Every existing object in the universe is governed by physical laws.
B. Every physical law in the universe applies to some existing objects.
But only A can actually be proven. B, by definition, can never be empirically observed. For example, how would you prove that there are no physical laws governing the behavior of schmarged particles, if (by assumption) no such particles exist?
Perhaps I misunderstood and the nomological argument is actually just A? But that sounds somewhat less convincing than having a perfect match.
I am not good at empathy. I never donated to any charity, and I also don't understand PPH, and it looks like PPH requires empathy because it requires thinking about people as something other than machines. Here is your connection.
FWIW the specific reason I have always been atheist was that I don't like people, and it is really unlikely that the Biggest Thing Ever would be something like a human. Give me something impersonal - Jedi Force, Chi, the Tao etc. but personhood really sucks. A person is basically a machine that gets random moods. Eww.
I think there are a few things going on here:
1,2,3, go together as they recognize that the world is surprising, out of the space of all possibilities. 7 (the anthropic argument) is arguably similar in some respects—being far more okay with taking evidence from basic facts about the world and the way we see the world. I think 12 is connected to 9, a little, as I think many of the arguments for classical essence=attributes theism feel pretty deductive-argument-y.
8 (universalism) is clearly tied to 11 (pluralism). These feel like they belong in some sort of category with 6 (EA), 10 (factory farming), and 5 (connections theodicy), though that's harder to articulate.
That leaves only Christianity and inerrancy as separate. If disagreeing with inerrancy is often motivated by things like thinking genociding the canaanites was bad, then that is arguably linked to the second part cluster, too.
So what I'm seeing overall is that most of this list flows from one epistemic intuition (basic facts about what the world looks like can be good evidence), and one ethical intuition (badness has largely to do with suffering). Personally, I'm significantly more swayed by the first set of things than the second.
It's not clear to me why those two things tend to go together, but I think it's a lot more like 2 things going together than 13 things going together.
https://youtu.be/B-4K6-tPNho?si=tNZdjNLcd2UGSAzy
Graham Oppy, the physical atheist responds to psychophysical harmony
Has Collins talked about psychophysical harmony somewhere?
No, unfortunately, and I don't know his view on EA or nomological harmony, but he meets everything else on the list.
I’m just curious, how do you reconcile your theism with your utilitarianism? While there are various theories of theodicy I know you’ve laid out, such as suffering leading to some sort of soul-building, none of them seem to square with a God who is a utilitarian. If God were a utilitarian, it seems logical that he would maximize utility by creating an infinite number of minds experiencing an infinite amount of pleasure for an infinite amount of time. And yet, we can see from the experience of our own minds that such a world is not what we live in. So how do you assume both that God is real and that utilitarianism is the correct moral theory, when our experience shows that God, if he exists, is not a utilitarian?
I'm not a hedonic utilitarian. I think there are goods other than pleasure.
But still, this universe really doesn't seem like one which is optimized for utility, even in a non-hedonic sense. Assuming that you still view suffering as an innate negative, there is such a preponderance of suffering which has no soul-building purpose that it boggles the mind. I know you've written before about the suffering of the average animal in nature, why would God allow the vast majority of consciousnesses that exist be short and incredibly painful, without even higher cognition to make any meaning of the suffering? We might be able to conceive of a utilitarian God allowing the suffering experienced by humans due to our higher mental faculties allowing it to lead to some higher good, but what of the suffering of the vast majority of minds in existence that suffer horribly towards no higher end? God, if he is real, still doesn't seem like much of a utilitarian, to put it mildly.
He argues somewhere that God would want to put us in an indifferent universe because sometimes you can build a strong relationship with another person when you're away from them or don't think they exist or whatever else that's supposed to be relevantly like God being an absent father to humans.
The indifferent universe argument still doesn't work in my opinion, because while that might explain the reason for humans being allowed to suffer, it doesn't justify the widespread and extreme suffering of lower animals whose minds aren't complex enough to form a relationship with God. We would have to countenance a universe where God allows the vast majority of consciousnesses to suffer horribly, with only a tiny minority being advanced enough to derive a higher purpose or relationship with God from that suffering. So the question isn't why is the universe indifferent to humans, it's why is the universe indifferent to the r-strategists who pointlessly suffer and die by the trillions.
He thinks the anthropic argument proves God creates every possible person and gives them an infinitely good afterlife.
These clowns write articles about “moral facts”? A moral fact only exists where God can be said to have made them.
Nope, false https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-i-dont-buy-the-moral-argument?utm_source=publication-search
The arguments you put forth here: https://benthams.substack.com/p/moral-realism-is-true are unconvincing. “X is bad because people tend to think it is” is just repeatedly appealing to a popular consensus. No measurable facts present.
“I shouldn’t do x because people think it is bad and they will do y to me in return preventing me from doing z” still assigns no truth value to X.
I'm not appealing to consensus but intuitions. Intuitions, however, are how we know pretty much everything--you can't justify beliefs about any subject absent relying on how things appear except maybe that you're conscious or something.
You're making the move old sense data theorists used to make - everything we know is due to sense data, so doubting sense data is absurd. But most people reject sense data theory today and don't think its truth or falsity has any important or necessary epistemic consequences. Intuitions are just another drop in the sea of philosophers postulating queer mental predicates that they ambiguously identify with existing sensory perceptions and with some underspecified mental postulate - the inner world, the visual field, an intellectual seeming - in order to claim that belief in the latter is just as justified as belief in the former, which everyone agrees exists and so you must be irrational for questioning the methodology or postulates of the theory. Intuitions are not what powers human inquiry in the same way sense data aren't what power human inquiry.
Then what does power human inquiry?
Idk, and it's too big a topic to attempt to answer holistically in a comment.
Facts only rely on the intuition that what we observe is true.
Why do you trust induction?
I don’t fully trust my senses being accurate. But if they aren’t accurate, anything goes, so there is little point in continuing further down that path.