I’m an atheist, largely because I think the problem of evil blows theism totally to smithereens. However, I do think some of the arguments for god are surprisingly compelling. Here I’ll present one of them called the argument from actually existing value. It is the best version of the moral argument — much better than the very bad standard moral argument and it is, I think, even better than the argument from moral knowledge.
Now, god is not a good explanation of morality, because morality is definitely necessary and does not depend on god. However, the particular valuable things existing are best explained by god. Suppose we think that the following things are intrinsically valuable.
Pleasure.
Knowledge
Friendship.
Achievements.
Romantic relationships.
Kindness.
Being moral.
Desire fulfillment.
Now, in all possible worlds, even godless ones, the statement “pleasure is good” would be true. But only some possible worlds would have pleasure. If there is a god, the odds of these things existing is near 100%. But if there is no god, then the odds of them existing is very low — what are the odds that the various morally significant things would happen to exist? This is exacerbated by considerations about how strange many of these things are — take pleasure, for example. It’s a very strange fact that many of our feelings feel objectively good.
Even if we think that the odds of these things existing given atheism is 1%, it’s about 100% given theism, so they would increase our credence in theism 100 fold. That’s a pretty damn powerful argument.
Now, I make one controversial assumption here, which is that I assume moral realism. However, I’ve argued for this at length before. Additionally, this argument certainly has an edge over the standard moral argument which also has to assume moral realism, but combines is with a bizarre confused account of the ontology of goodness.
One way that I think people could object is by claiming that there are vast numbers of types of value that humans will never experience — of a totally different ontological category. Thus, the probability of lots of value obtaining is reasonably high; there’s way more value that could obtain than currently exists. This is, however, less parsimonious — it requires positing large numbers of different undiscovered types of intrinsic value. Even if one thinks this is true, it may undercut the argument somewhat, but it should still have some evidential force. Additionally, it seems intuitively that value could only be had by sentient, intelligent beings, so it’s hard to imagine exactly what types of objective goods we could be missing out on.
One could object that, because there are lots of different types of value, this understates the evidence for atheism. On theism, we’d expect to be able to have more types of value than we experience. This is plausibly true, though this is sufficiently distinct to be a different argument. (To clarify the argument, it would say that the limited range of good experiences we can have which occupies a minuscule slice of the total modal space is surprising on theism).
I think this atheist counterargument may have more force than the original argument. However, the atheist counterargument doesn’t undercut the original argument — it just raises a different consideration; one which could be raised even if the evidence described here weren’t counted. Thus, it shouldn’t be thought to undercut the argument from actually existing value.
Overall, I think this argument is pretty good and does move me a bit in favor of theism. However, it’s nowhere near enough to overcome evil or hiddenness.
Wouldn't this just be the fine tuning argument, but instead of fine-tuning for life, it's fine-tuning for the instantiation of morally good things?