1. You admit that your belief in simplicity being a theoretical virtue is a brute fact. You take it as a matter of faith.
2. There is no reason why any limit is “arbitrary”. You’ve gerrymandered an arbitrary to mean that any limit whatsoever is arbitrary. There is no intrinsic reason for why any and all limits are arbitrary, you just say that they are. I find it strikingly clear that saying something is “finite” is more simple than saying it’s “infinite”, even though you could always say that lack of infinite was is an “arbitrary” limit
3. God is not simple. You posit that existence is a single perfectly good thing. But “good” is extraordinarily complex. According to you, everything in the Universe is a necessary component of what “good” means. Any definition of “good” which makes everything not just permissible but *necessary* must be quite complicated indeed. Your argument reminds me of the word games that K debaters sometimes play when they say that X and Y are the same because they use the same word, like “master”. You say that God is simple because you can use one word to describe him. But when you use a single word to describe God and to solve the problem of evil, the informational complexity of that word is far greater than how we might use it in everyday parlance.
4. Your conclusion that even a slight increase in arbitrariness makes something infinitely less likely is flawed. First of all, it’s incredible on its face. No one actually reasons like this in real life: “your explanation is 0.01% more arbitrary then mine, so I will be ignoring you” (and don’t say that meta-probabilities solve this. That’s not a defense of your theory, just an admission that one needs to have doubt in your theory in order to live in the real world). Second of all, all your examples are designed to miss the point. They all take the same mold: X law applies everywhere except for one specific thing. That’s *extremely* arbitrary. If you wanted minimal arbitrariness, you would use an example like “X law applies to half of the matter in the Universe”. That would be much much less arbitrary! So much so that it may be true with respect to certain laws around matter and antimatter. This claim is nothing more than a rhetorical trick.
5. Naturalism is not arbitrary. A multiverse theory with a core principle that physical laws are random is exceptionally non-arbitrary. You might ask why we would expect stuff to be randomly distributed, but randomness as an abstract fundamental property seems just as non-arbitrary as perfect goodness. You might say that this undermines induction, but you have still not read those papers on meta-induction, and it does not add more complexity to say that the initial laws are random, but once established, those laws obey induction. If you say that there’s no reason for that, I would say that it’s not *that* arbitrary, and that you’re just using blind faith in induction to undermine an argument, since you admit that there is no independent evidence that induction is true. I recall us debating on this subject!
Lastly, I hope you don’t get annoy at me for posting a long comment. You asked for it! >;(
1. No, it's not a matter of faith, there are various justifications. If you don't think simpler theories are likely you shouldn't trust induction, for more complicated theories where induction breaks are more numerous.
2. Do you think it would be problematic to suggest that space stops at 54893274894730278943270895032478950324789502347 meters across, if you don't find the notion of arbitrary limits coherent? If not, why not? As our intuitions suggest, theories where values are set to zero or infinity are better than when they're set to random numbers.
3. Goodness isn't complicated. It doesn't reduce. Calculating how good something is is complicated, but goodness itself is irreducible. And that's just one of the things I list.
4. We do reason this way in the world, as the examples I gave show. Why is it extremely arbitrary? It's just the idea that the laws stop working somewhere.
5. But that undermines induction for the same reason as modal realism.
Surely a theory does not have an infinitely lower prior probability if it is more arbitrary. If A has an infinitely lower prior probability than B, then no amount of evidence could make us believe A over B.
So if what you are saying is true, then we should stop believing that the speed of light is finite. The theory that it is infinite has one less arbitrary limit, and so has an infinitely greater prior. Sure, we have all sorts of evidence that the speed is finite, but it is only a finite amount of evidence, and so we will never have enough to believe that it is finite. But that is absurd!
This is wrong on several counts. First of all, it’s only the extra unexplained limit that I claim has a prior of zero. The speed of light is explained in terms of deeper physics. Second, if our particular speed of light has a prior of zero (something I’m doubtful of, because I think that your credence function in different speeds of light should be biased towards lower numbers) then upon seeing things appear to obey the speed oof light we’d get an infinite update—the odds that they’d seem to obey that particular speed are zero. Finally, the claim is that any particular arbitrary limit has a prior of zero, not that the collection of all of them has a prior of zero—your prior in there being a speed of light should be low but nonzero.
Sure, but the deeper physics will probably also have some arbitrary limits, which fix the speed of light. I am no physicist, so I don't know the details. Let me instead make a hypothetical: We have reached the end of physics, and are stuck between two fundamental theories. The one has a constant of a brute finite value, and the other has that constant at an infinite value (and thus has no arbitrary limit). It is possible to measure whether this constant is infinite or has a finite value. Given your position that the finite theory has an infinitely lower prior, no amount of observational evidence could make os believe it.
2)
To the above you will probably say that we get an infinite update in favor the arbitrary theory, if we observe that the constant is not infinite. But that is not the case. We should always assign non-zero, non-infinitessimal credences to our equipment malfunctioning, us hallucinating etc. So the update we get is only the probability space where such things are not the case, which is less than 1. Thus no amount of observational evidence could persuade us.
3)
Fair enough, let me then modify my example. We have two theories: That the physical laws apply universally across the universe, or that there is a cube-foot, where gravity is slightly weaker or something. I then discover that I have a cube-foot in my living room where gravity is slightly weaker. Scientists come to study it, and it becomes a tourist attraction and everything. Given your view, we should still not believe that there is such a cube foot in my living room, since we should have an infinitesimal or zero prior in there being such a cube foot there.
I will admit that I have a hard time seeing how else to distribute the priors in a case like the cube foot - it looks like we should have a uniform probability distribution over all possible cube feet in the universe, which is perhaps infinite, and so we should have a zero or infinitesimal prior in that particular cube foot. Maybe observing such a cube foot gives us evidence that the universe is finite and discrete, but that also seems absurd. So I am not certain where to land on the issue.
The one way speed of light is set by convention. You can read Einstein's 1905 paper "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies" or skim this page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_speed_of_light to learn more. The two way speed of light is a fundamental measured constant. It isn't derived from deeper physics.
I will make the same criticism I did before of you. You are effectively operating under a grade school level interpretation of how science works, what scientists do, and how scientific theory formation occurs. The reason you are operating under this paradigm is because entry level exposure to scientific practice is designed to make use of simplifying assumptions like essences, stories like the maverick solo scientist proposing a brand new theory and becoming all the rage, algebraic structures, 2 or 3 step derivations, and universal laws, because human society has a vested interest in motivating people to become scientists, rather than teaching newcomers exactly how many 100s of pages of differential equations Newton and Einstein wrote and abandoned trying to systematize observations and experiments on light. Science simply does not make use of prior probabilities or philosophical theories of arbitrary limits, and to the extent you use these to inform your metaphysics, you will probably be wrong on both counts.
I don't think this reasoning works. Suppose you randomly select a ball from an urn of infinite balls, each labeled with a different number. Before viewing the number, the prior probability that you have selected any particular ball is infinitely lower than the probability of not picking it. But upon viewing the number, you should believe you indeed picked that particular ball. So a finite amount of evidence can overcome an infinitely lower prior probability.
Well it's an infinite amount of evidence, in the sense that it's infinitely more strongly predicted on the hypothesis that you'll pick that number than its negation.
I think this can all be distilled down to humanity's lack of understanding regarding how the universe formed. We don't know why the laws of the universe are the way they are because we don't understand them enough. They seem arbitrary but are probably not. There is a reason the laws of gravity operate a certain way and not another, but our knowledge is incomplete. Asserting a god as fundamental is hand waving away all the questions about that god like why is there a god and not a god? How did the god come to be? Did this require another god or was the god the result of natural processes? And on and on.
I appreciate the steelmanning of this! I think the argument loses me, actually, at the beginning — that “theism” just means “the thesis that one of the fundamental things… exists without limit.”
I acknowledge, of course, that one can define a term in any way one wishes; it’s just that I think this is not at all what the great majority of normies mean when they say “I’m a theist” or “I believe God exists”. (Among other things, it doesn’t seem to distinguish theism from deism.)
If I’m making an error here, I’d appreciate knowing it!
I wasn't claiming that the terms had the same meaning. My claim was that, given that theism is just the idea that there's a perfect being, if you think there exists a single thing of unlimited goodness, that thing would be God (for God is the greatest conceivable being). Therefore, theism is simple, positing just one fundamental thing without limit. The definition of God is a being that's omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent--my claim was simply that you can deduce those from a simple property.
Oh, understood! I did a bad job of conveying what I was experiencing before, but I think I can do it better now: defining “theism” as merely “the belief in an unlimited fundamental thing” is itself distracting to me, because of personal past history.
To wit: a smart (Ivy-League-PhD) Catholic friend once argued “you believe in math, therefore, you can’t be an atheist!” (Maybe he said “order” or “reason” or “something”, instead of “math”? I’m not sure. None of those sound any less silly to me. Also, I’m an agnostic, not an atheist, but he bulldozed over that distinction, too.)
It felt that he was performing a motte-and-bailey, watering down the definition of “God” so I’d agree to it… even as his ultimate goal was to get me to believe in a very different-seeming God (personal, interventionist, etc.).
Anyhoo, I’m not saying there’s a mistake in your claims — just that for me (and maybe for others) using the word “theism” in this sense gets in the way of following the logic. (And know that I say this because I enjoy your substack, and want you to make your arguments powerfully!)
That's not how I'm intending to define theism. I'm defining theism as the idea that there's an all powerful, all good, all knowing being. My point is that all those properties can be deduced from some fundamental properties--goodness, the mind, etc--if you just don't place any limits on them, and for that reason theism is simple. If you say water reduces to H20, that doesn't mean when people use the word water they're consciously talking about H20, it just means you can provide a deeper explanation of what makes water water in terms of H20. I think the same thing with theism.
I agree people often do what you're talking about, where they define God as love and then say "of course I believe in love," and it's annoying. Hopefully I've made it clear why that's not what I'm doing.
I like your substack too! I especially enjoyed your convo with the flat earther.
I think the nature of prior probabilities merits more attention. As does probability itself (which has taken centuries to grasp and is still slippery!)
Prior probability comes from Bayesian Probability where you model uncertainty using a prior (before anything is known or whatever is known at the time -- this is subjective) and then calculating posteriors using Bayes theorem when you have new evidence.
The prior can be a uniform distribution, or a distribution calcuted from pre existing evidence or something purely subjective, but like all probability distributions they must sum to 1 and obey the laws of probability.
The role of the prior is short lived. It exists until the first evidence is gathered.
So, how may the prior about the size of the universe, say, be thought of? Let's assume the early humans of the African Savannah had somehow developed sophisticated probability theory but lacked any other mathematics or physics. They may well assign the size to "as far as the eye can see, so however far the sun or some stars are" and make some reasonable assumptions about "well if I could climb this mountain I could maybe see further up" and come up with a distribution. Let's assume in addition to probability theory they also had a sophisticated understanding of Cantor's infinity of infinities but still no physics. They may say the universe is equally likely to have a size that is any real number larger than what they can observe. After all why is a particular real number better than the other? Or maybe Laplace told them this is how to do priors. Or they may have someone among their ranks who had a "vision", let's say he climbed up a nearby mountain, and said a tablet was handed to him that said the size was 6000 miles in all directions from where he stood. And then the role of the prior is over. (2024 is late in the game for formulating uninformed priors or priors based on some "intuition", we know too much)
And then they start doing physics. And then they gather a thousand different pieces of evidence, updating their prior at each stage, and then discover cosmic background radiation, and then calculate size of the observable universe. With any prior distribution you will converge to the "true" size.
This is a long way of saying the role of priors when dealing with belief rather than frequencies is not of great significance.
One question I have: How exactly are you defining perfection as a fundamental thing? The other fundamental things that you list make some sense to me. They don't seem to reduce to anything simpler. But perfection to me seems to be less of a fundamental attribute and more of a mode of being.
For instance, although we typically think of perfect beings as being perfectly good, we might imagine that there exists a perfectly evil being, a being whose evil cannot possibly be surpassed, whose malice and villainy know no bounds.
We might also apply the word "perfect" to ordinary things. Although there is probably no "perfect tree", it's not impossible to imagine the sorts of qualities such a tree would have. And the same goes for a perfect anything else that we might conceive of.
I'm tempted to say that X is perfect when, for all ideal qualities Q that X could have, X has Q. Essentially, X is perfect when it lacks absolutely nothing that it would be ideal for X to have. I'm not confident in this definition, however, and I'm curious to hear how you would attempt to define it.
>Although there is probably no "perfect tree", it's not impossible to imagine the sorts of qualities such a tree would have.
Can you tell me what some of these qualities are and what mistake I would be making if I contradicted each of your stipulations? This discourse around perfection seems to me to be obviously unfruitful, much like ancient philosophy questions like "Is the beautiful more or less identical than the good?" because perfection isn't a property we ever discover when we cut up an object and look inside it. Instead, calling something perfect just means that the caller approves of it, or is using some relativized standard to judge it (like "The perfect apple will look very shiny"), and so talk of perfection divorced from these standards is like talking about height divorced from an object's size - it's clearly incoherent.
You're framing this as theism vs. naturalism, but it's masking the true divide, dualism vs. illusionist physicalism.
The idea that there's a radically simple phenomenon called "mind" is a lie that extraordinarily complex things called "brains" tell themselves because it's very useful for social interaction. Having a painter would in fact be a more complex explanation than having a painting exist by itself -- if we didn't have the theory of evolution by natural selection, plus evidence of sufficient time and conditions to have produced the particular extreme complexity of human painters.
Illusionist physicalism is self-contradictory that only survives based on playing word games. A mind can experience an illusion, but an illusion can't experience an illusion. If the mind is an illusion, who is experiencing it? Cogito ergo sum: the fact that I exist is the one fact I can know for certain. If your theory requires that I am an illusion (an illusion nobody is experiencing, apparently) then your theory must be wrong: it goes against the strongest empirical evidence we have.
Just because the grammar of natural language allows a question like "who is experiencing it?", doesn't mean that there must be some real answer. A brain does a bunch of extraordinarily complex computations. Among its many high-level functions is creating a massive oversimplification of itself that is useful for interfacing with other brains and for efficiently predicting what they're going to do.
Yes, it *seems* like I'm a singular subject of experience not composed of a massive network of low-level computations. Much like how it seems to the audience at a magic show that a woman is being sawn in half.
How can I believe anything if I don't exist? And if I don't exist, how can I believe that the brain creates a massive oversimplification of itself useful for interfacing with other brains? The only reason I would have to believe that is because my observations and experiences point me in that direction, or my rational inferences make the theory logical, yet if "I" am just a simplified simulation useful for interfacing with other brains then "I" have no reason to believe my observations or inferences have any truth value whatsoever. Really, I'm not capable of believing anything at all, but even if we ignore that I wouldn't have reason to believe it. If all empirical evidence is illusionary, then I have no reason to believe anything.
How can you put something in a shopping cart on Amazon if there literally isn't a shopping cart inside your monitor or cpu? I guess if the order button is fake too you will never receive an order either.
Can you link one, just one illusionist philosopher or proponent that believes this conjunction of claims: "The mind is an illusion," "An illusion can't experience an illusion," and "You are an illusion that nobody is experiencing"? Your comments read to me like somebody who has never read a single illusionist in their life and is just imagining what their position would be based off a superficial interpretation of the name "illusionism." Do you also think dualists fight each other with swords, or is your confusion limited to this one case?
Addendum: and there is no such strong convergent evidence to overcome the extremely low prior for the existence of the staggeringly complex thing that a computational device which could conceive of, desire, and create the universe (and then summarize itself with its own "mind" illusion) would have to be.
If I understand your argument correctly, you are essentially saying that fewer presuppositions (“arbitrary limits”) lead to a higher prior. This is true because there are fewer prior conditions, and each additional condition decreases the probability.
Your conclusion is incorrect however. An infinite universe is more likely than one that is some exact arbitrary number of meters in diameter. However, it is not more likely than a finite universe in general. There is only one infinite universe for any dimension you call infinite and an infinite number of possible finite universes (one for every value of diameter). Therefore, it is more likely the universe is finite.
Saying theism has fewer conditions (arbitrary limits) than naturalism is also incorrect. Using your definition of theism as belief in “one fundamental thing that exists without limit” or a perfect being, we can clearly see the issue. You say it is simple because it is one thing, one entity. However, you have smuggled in complexity without acknowledging the ontological cost of presupposing an infinitely complex being capable of creating the universe (much less one that is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, etc). Does that entity have parts? An environment? A brain? Organs? If so, then you will have to adjust your prior to account for all those arbitrary limits that define the god you believe in. And you can’t, because those would be fundamentally unknowable (transcending our physical universe) and you are back to faith, which we can define as assigning a value to a prior without sufficient evidence or accepting that something is true despite a low prior.
Of course, we can go the other way and continue removing attributes until god is just a force or some abstract concept of goodness. But how is that a god or perfect being? How is that different than a natural law that is just there?
The “arbitrary limits” of naturalism is what we typically call evidence. We include them because they have been observed (e.g. we specify that light has a finite speed because that is what we observe). So even if you start with your theistic prior, the addition of empirical evidence to your reasoning will overcome any advantage you give the theistic prior over naturalism because you’re ultimately updating beliefs based on naturalistic evidence. You need the highest possible prior to believe in a god after natural evidence has been included. That is motivated reasoning. At some point, you’ll need to just assert that god exists to keep it in the model. This is basically what you’ve done here.
> For example, consider the theory that somewhere in the universe, there’s a 1 foot patch where the laws of physics don’t work. That theory is much worse than the theory that there is no such patch, even though there are infinite ways there could be such a patch. Because there are infinite patch theories which together are less probable than the theory that there’s no patch, each particular patch theory—according to which at some specific location the laws of physics don’t work—is infinitely less probable than the no patch theory, even though it’s only a bit less arbitrary.
If a theory is infinitely improbable, then if we flew around the entire universe and found a single one foot patch where the laws of physics don't work, we would have to discard the conclusion that there is a one foot patch where the laws of physics don't work. This obviously doesn't make any sense. Your logic, thus, fails.
No, because the theory that there is that one foot patch infinitely more strongly predicts the appearance of that one foot patch on that particular area.
If something has 0% probability, it would be impossible to update towards it on the basis of any evidence. You should not use "infinity" and "zero" (or its inverse cousin, 1) in probabilities, because it produces results that are mathematically impossible to adjust on the basis of evidence.
Well I think they're best thought of as infintesimals, but in Hilber's hotel, the odds you're in the first room are zero. Nonetheless, you can update towards it.
I'm going to bite the bullet: in Hilbert's hotel, because it is infinitely tall, there are infinitely many people who are under a fixed delusion that they are in Room 1. Any evidence that can occur due to error of mind or reason or misinterpretation or coincidence (i.e. any evidence) occurs infinitely many times. Thus, the probability that merely because you observe evidence of being in Room 1, you are actually in Room 1, is still 1/∞, i.e. zero.
1. There is no such thing as anything that is infinite. At least, you have no evidence or basis for positing that infinity or infinite things exist. "Infinite" is merely an idea with zero proof or examples or even possible calculations, explanations, or theories of how it COULD exist. So for you to say that it is more likely that a thing would be zero or infinite than to have have a limit, merely because you proclaim that a limit "seems" arbitrary is just completely wild/crazy. You're saying that it's more likely that a vague "being" exists that is infinite (even though there is no reason to think that anything infinite ever has or could exist in the first place) than that something exists exists with a limit. And the only reason you think it is more likely is that you believe a limit is always "arbitrary" in comparison to the non-existent and made-up idea of infinity. At least, that's how you just explained what arbitrary means -- that it "seems" arbitrary.
Which tells me that the concept of infinity just "seems" more likely to you than the concept of any given limit. Even though in reality everything (which is a lot of things) we have ever observed, tested, or conceived of a working theory for its function is finite, and nothing we have ever observed, tested, or come up with a working theory for is infinite, other than when you slap "God" on as a label and say that somehow fixes it.
You say it's more likely that something is either zero or infinity because that's somehow more simple, but every single observation we can make is that a thing being zero or infinity are literally the least likely possible values out of all possible values. What is the likelihood that the next winning powerball number is 87,956,341? Now what's the likelihood that the next winning powerball number is zero or infinity?
2. If I posit that the fundamental property of reality is a being that is all powerful, all knowing, and perfectly bad, is that more or less likely, in your way of calculating things, then that a being exists that is all powerful, all knowing, and perfectly good?
3. What if I posit that the fundamental property of reality is a being that is all powerful, all knowing, and both good and bad, but neither perfectly good nor perfectly bad? It seems to me that this would be more likely, as it fits the evidence by a factor of (insert really high number, but I won't say infinity).
1. How many numbers are there? There's also some mounting evidence from physics that space is infinite. And anyway, it's clearly more likely the world is infinite in size than that it is exactly 8437589327849327 feet across.
The only reason that anyone ever posits a specific limit is because they have actually MEASURED it and found that result. Or observed it or otherwise tested a formula that always works that gives that result. It's not as if they just pulled the number randomly out of thin air. If they did, THAT would be arbitrary. But they didn't, they came up with the number/limit based on experiments and measurements. So you're saying that a measured or tested limit finding a specific number is less likely than a hypothetical infinite, even thought we have zero proof that anything infinite has ever or could exist?
I'm sorry but to me this just reads as "infinity feels intuitive and satisfying to me and therefore it seems more likely than a number/limit that feels arbitrary and unsatisfying to me".
To me, I have no evidence or reason whatsoever to think that anything has ever been limitless or could be limitless or that the idea of limitless infinity is not just a semantic fiction residing in a human's head. But I have the evidence of everything around me being finite. So the evidence works out to nothing versus everything. Infinity is therefore the opposite of intuitive and I would never deem anything infinite to be more likely than anything finite. Even people like you who claim to (I think?) believe in the concept of infinity...it's hard to believe that you really do. How can you even conceive of such a thing?
You theory therefore depends upon accepting the existing of infinity in the first place. There's no theory without the prior that "infinite" is even possible. So now you've added a fundamental, have you not?
What exactly is the mounting evidence from physics that space is infinite? It doesn't seem to me possible in principle to prove this because we don't have a physical test that would terminate in a finite amount of time that proves the universe is infinite vs very large. Furthermore, if you accept the tenants of modern cosmology and relativity, there are parts of the universe right now that are leaving our future light cone, meaning we'll never be able to reach those places even if we traveled at the speed of light in their direction starting now. As time goes on, we lose physical access to more and more of the universe, further complicating your claim that there is mounting evidence that the universe is infinite.
The more I dig into BB's essays, the more I see a lot of "this just SEEMS more plausible" indicating he's got an emotional intuition for one reason or another. He finds the idea of an evil god, or at least a morally ambiguous or amoral one, entirely implausible and I find it the opposite. If I thought there was a god, I would be forced to conclude he was a huge jerk bc why else would you create a world where 99% of sentient creatures get to starve to death or be eaten literally alive, or watch their children eaten alive? Especially when we know that some organisms can live from just the sun, why would you even create this eating a sentient being that doesn't want to be eaten system, and then chuck a thousand trillion creatures through that shredder? Seems pretty evil to me, and the idea that it's not such a bad system seems like the view of the apex predator that humans happen to be. So the intuitions and things that "seem" plausible are just so entirely alien to me.
Similarly, the idea of infinity. Like okay, *maybe* the universe could be infinite? But can you really truly conceive of that? I not only can't conceive of that, it's hard for me to really conceive of someone actually conceiving of it. I CAN imagine a universe that just keeps expanding. Something about the idea of constant motion or growth makes sense in my human mind bound by physical limitations, and inevitably I have to make metaphors that arise from my physical reality. But just being infinite, meaning existing everywhere at every time both past and future and not moving or growing because it is already everywhere?? How can one possibly conceive of such a thing? Admittedly I don't have a genius physics brain. But tell me, can YOU conceive of something that has always existed and did not start and will never end and is everywhere? I sure can't.
I don't know if there was ever nothing and then something. But there could have always been some things, just different things. It's there being ONE particular thing existing always, and forever, that's hard for me. And I mean ALWAYS (which in itself is hard to conceive of).
But there being nothing but a couple particles and then increasing complexity and more and more particles and then atoms and molecules and cells and bacteria etc etc, that's all easy to understand. Simple things combining and turning into complex things is easy to conceive of bc we see it all the time. A tiny seed turns into a huge tree, a tiny egg and sperm turn into an adult human or elephant, something big and complex coming from something small and simple is commonplace.
Idk, I guess maybe there being nothing and then suddenly being something does not seem any more or less likely/weird than the other. Something about "nothing" is a bit more conceivable than infinite, to me. Perhaps this all comes down to physical and bodily metaphors, a la Philosophy of the Flesh. We know what nothing means...it's what we were before we existed...but infinite seems ungraspable to the human mind and perhaps that's because we are finite creatures.
// "While I’m very uncertain about the nature of prior probabilities" //
Understatement of the century.
// "But if this is right, then theism might just be infinitely far ahead of naturalism." //
It's not right.
// "If this is right, then naturalism is doomed." //
It's not right.
// "But still, if this is right, it’s bad news for athiesm." //
It's not right.
That's 3 times that this author started with a conditional statement with "if this is right" as the antecedent. It's less honest inquiry & more of a psychological trick to get readers to read the same thing repeatedly until they believe it.
// "So…am I wrong?" //
How can I put this. You're not just wrong. You're wronger than wrong. If this was provided as some kind of paper within any philosophy department, then an F would be too high of a grade.
Let's start with the point that the author only focuses on simplicity and arbitrarily claiming what's arbitrary. If anything is arbitrary, then it's any person's particular conceptions of a god. Additionally, simplicity is only one metric or standard that's used to compare opposing hypotheses.
1. Testability - Theism fails as it's not testable.
2. Fruitfulness - Theism doesn't predict any previously unknown or unexplained events.
3. Scope - There's no larger or broader scope than theism. Theism arguably claims that it has the answer to anything & everything.
4. Simplicity - Theism fails here also. Yes, if you PRESUPPOSE theism, then everything fits nicely inside of theism. However, there's no good reason to presuppose theism due to the next criteria.
5. Conservatism - This is where we don't presuppose theism. Rather, we presuppose atheism & try to reach theism. This is the very point that the author attempts to dismiss right off the bat. In a world in which existing things all seem to be solids, liquid, gases, plasma, or combination thereof, then it's NOT conservative to posit that there's supernatural entities.
It's not a mistaken argument & the author brushes it aside to talk about simplicity instead of addressing all 5 criteria.
The argument essentially goes:
We all agree that solids, liquids, gases, plasma, & combination thereof exist. We can call this set of things an "atheistic sense of existence."
Theism accepts the "atheistic sense of existence" but attempts to add additional things none of which meet the standards, criteria, or requirements that were already set.
Here's the final nail in the coffin. Say we ascribe to a theistic sense of existence which postulates numerous supernatural entities. Which version, flavor, or form of theism & those supernatural entities? Talk about arbitrary!!! Why should one accept sin, afterlife, & heaven instead of karma, reincarnation, & nirvana or vice versa?
I take it that what you mean by 'arbitrary limits' is that the limits could have been different? But someone who viewed the fundamental physical laws, constants and initial conditions of the universe as metaphysically necessary would deny (by definition) that they could have been different and so would not view them as arbitrary.
No, arbitrary limits come when something is restricted in some way that seems arbitrary. It would be an arbitrary limit for the world to be 493058349083457324890753248795 feet across--stopping there for no deeper reason--even though you can always assert that that's necessary.
What do you mean it seems arbitrary? The only way I can make sense of something seeming arbitrary (in the sense youre using it) is that it could conceivably be different.
Lets presume the theist believes in whatever physical laws and particles the naturalist takes to be fundamental. I find it odd that the theist would claim that it is apriori more likely a God is fundamental than these laws and particles because the restrictions on them seem arbitrary, whereas there are no seemingly arbitrary restrictions on God.
The theist may claim that the naturalist cant explain why the physical laws/particles are restricted in the way they are, as opposed to the infinite number of ways they could have concievable been, but our ability to concieve of different physical laws tells us nothing about metaphysics. Specifically, it doesnt tell us that reality is such that any other laws could have existed. So the answer to the question, "why these laws with these restrictions as opposed to some other laws with other restriction?" may just be that these laws with these restrictions are metaphysically necessary.
I agree with you that simplicity is not about the number of things posited by a theory, but I think your understanding of fundamental things as those things which cannot be explained any further is wrong. I want to suggest that the fundamental things are the irreducible kinds of things posited by a theory. According to naturalism, there is one kind: nature. According to theism, there are two kinds: God and nature (to reject this is to commit the error of pantheism). True, God can explain nature, but natural objects are a fundamentally different kind of thing than God is, and so theists are positing two types of things which cannot be reduced to the other.
Why think it’s better to think of fundamental things as irreducible kinds rather than unexplainable kinds? Here’s a case which I think motivates this thought: imagine I put forward the theory of double theism. According to double theism, there are three irreducible kinds, Big God, Little God, and nature. However, each kind is explained by the previous: the double theist claims that Big God created Little God and that Little God created nature. So each kind posited by double theism is explained by another kind except Big God. I submit that double theism is less simple than theism. Both theories explain all but one irreducible kind in terms of others, but double theism posits three kinds whereas theism posits only two.
I’m using nature to mean something else than what you mean. By nature, I mean the created world.
I don’t deny that positing God can explain nature in either sense. What I do deny is that one fundamental thing explaining another is necessarily simpler than two fundamental things, neither of which explains the other.
This is because I think simpler theories are theories which posit less kinds of things. For instance, physicalism is simpler than dualism because the former posits only matter since mind is reducible to matter, but the latter posits both mind and matter. Now, you may think this is because in physicalism, the existence of matter explains the existence of mind, but I don’t think this is what is doing the work. Physicalism is simpler because it posits less kinds of things. A dualist could have a theory according to which matter explains mind, but where mind and matter remain distinct kinds (e.g., in epiphenomenalsim the physical states can explain the mental states, but they are nonetheless not the same kind of thing or reducible to one another).
Now here’s the setup for what I said before: is God the same kind of thing as natural objects are(objects in the created world).?Generally, the answer to this question is taken to be no. Natural objects cannot be reduced to God nor can God be reduced to natural objects. You can deny this (like Spinoza infamously did), but this view (the error of pantheism) is generally rejected from what I can tell.
So theism must posit two kinds of things. And I think naturalism is simpler than theism because it only posits one kind of thing (I try to motivate this with my double theism example).
>I don’t deny that positing God can explain nature in either sense. What I do deny is that one fundamental thing explaining another is necessarily simpler than two fundamental things, neither of which explains the other.
You're making the same mistake again: under theism nature is not a fundamental thing. Theism is one fundamental thing explaining a contingent thing, not one fundamental thing explaining another fundamental thing.
I think what you and OP mean by fundamental thing is not what simplicity is about. That’s why I put forward my own sense of fundamental thing (twice) and tried to motivate it.
A fundamental thing in this case is referring to a thing that exists without a cause, presumably having always existed. In that sense nature can "reduce" to God because God can casually explain the existence of nature.
If the arbitrary elements of our universe make naturalism infinitely unlikely, I think they also affect theism’s likelihood. In this piece, if I understand correctly, you argue that the whole kit and kaboodle follows from a theistic God, and so we don’t need to lower the odds of that world due to strange and arbitrary facts of the universe, but that strikes me as wrong. Yes, as much as Gods existence explains does not need to be accounted for here, but the universe as it is doesn’t very naturally follow from a maximally agentic/powerful/etc being, afaict. To extend to the painter analogy, if the painter were actually a non human being who was maximally density seeking, that is she wants to maximize how much mass is within a cubic meter of her, or some other random goal, I would be quite unsure of whether the painting came from her, or some place else. Of course, I am sure there are many arguments why the universe follows from maximally _____ beings, but that doesn’t strike me as obvious in the way your argument implies.
Whether God explains the universe has to do with explanatory power not simplicity. Of course, I disagree that theism poorly explains the universe, but that's a separate topic.
" Simple theories are probable, otherwise we cannot justify induction".
A God who can create everything except cheeseburger is improbable than a God who can create everything. But, you should also add that a God who can create only cheeseburger is probable than a God who can create 88 things.
That's how we use induction right??.
Imagine we found out about a particle that caused electrons. We won't inductively assume that that particle has every causal power. But if we find out that it has 99/100 causal powers it is reasonable to assume it has 100th power too. ( Prior to evidence)
Coming back to naturalism vs theism - All we know is whatever the fundamental entity is it caused the universe. So a probable theory would be with a fundamental reality that has power to cause the things similar to the universe.
My point is the type of simplicity God have is not the kind required to justify induction.
Further thoughts...
Uniformity / coherence will be a better criteria than simplicity.
By assuming uniform theories have more prior we can get that one should choose theories with
1. Less number of entity
2. Less kind of entity
3. Simple and elegant equations
4. Inductive justification
So a theory says fundamental reality is a physical entity with causal powers to create universe and similar items will be many time more probable than a God.
Other kind of perfections has nothing to do with justifying induction, therefore your argument won't hold.
You’re wrong.
1. You admit that your belief in simplicity being a theoretical virtue is a brute fact. You take it as a matter of faith.
2. There is no reason why any limit is “arbitrary”. You’ve gerrymandered an arbitrary to mean that any limit whatsoever is arbitrary. There is no intrinsic reason for why any and all limits are arbitrary, you just say that they are. I find it strikingly clear that saying something is “finite” is more simple than saying it’s “infinite”, even though you could always say that lack of infinite was is an “arbitrary” limit
3. God is not simple. You posit that existence is a single perfectly good thing. But “good” is extraordinarily complex. According to you, everything in the Universe is a necessary component of what “good” means. Any definition of “good” which makes everything not just permissible but *necessary* must be quite complicated indeed. Your argument reminds me of the word games that K debaters sometimes play when they say that X and Y are the same because they use the same word, like “master”. You say that God is simple because you can use one word to describe him. But when you use a single word to describe God and to solve the problem of evil, the informational complexity of that word is far greater than how we might use it in everyday parlance.
4. Your conclusion that even a slight increase in arbitrariness makes something infinitely less likely is flawed. First of all, it’s incredible on its face. No one actually reasons like this in real life: “your explanation is 0.01% more arbitrary then mine, so I will be ignoring you” (and don’t say that meta-probabilities solve this. That’s not a defense of your theory, just an admission that one needs to have doubt in your theory in order to live in the real world). Second of all, all your examples are designed to miss the point. They all take the same mold: X law applies everywhere except for one specific thing. That’s *extremely* arbitrary. If you wanted minimal arbitrariness, you would use an example like “X law applies to half of the matter in the Universe”. That would be much much less arbitrary! So much so that it may be true with respect to certain laws around matter and antimatter. This claim is nothing more than a rhetorical trick.
5. Naturalism is not arbitrary. A multiverse theory with a core principle that physical laws are random is exceptionally non-arbitrary. You might ask why we would expect stuff to be randomly distributed, but randomness as an abstract fundamental property seems just as non-arbitrary as perfect goodness. You might say that this undermines induction, but you have still not read those papers on meta-induction, and it does not add more complexity to say that the initial laws are random, but once established, those laws obey induction. If you say that there’s no reason for that, I would say that it’s not *that* arbitrary, and that you’re just using blind faith in induction to undermine an argument, since you admit that there is no independent evidence that induction is true. I recall us debating on this subject!
Lastly, I hope you don’t get annoy at me for posting a long comment. You asked for it! >;(
1. No, it's not a matter of faith, there are various justifications. If you don't think simpler theories are likely you shouldn't trust induction, for more complicated theories where induction breaks are more numerous.
2. Do you think it would be problematic to suggest that space stops at 54893274894730278943270895032478950324789502347 meters across, if you don't find the notion of arbitrary limits coherent? If not, why not? As our intuitions suggest, theories where values are set to zero or infinity are better than when they're set to random numbers.
3. Goodness isn't complicated. It doesn't reduce. Calculating how good something is is complicated, but goodness itself is irreducible. And that's just one of the things I list.
4. We do reason this way in the world, as the examples I gave show. Why is it extremely arbitrary? It's just the idea that the laws stop working somewhere.
5. But that undermines induction for the same reason as modal realism.
You should discuss this argument in the casual argument server at some point.
Surely a theory does not have an infinitely lower prior probability if it is more arbitrary. If A has an infinitely lower prior probability than B, then no amount of evidence could make us believe A over B.
So if what you are saying is true, then we should stop believing that the speed of light is finite. The theory that it is infinite has one less arbitrary limit, and so has an infinitely greater prior. Sure, we have all sorts of evidence that the speed is finite, but it is only a finite amount of evidence, and so we will never have enough to believe that it is finite. But that is absurd!
This is wrong on several counts. First of all, it’s only the extra unexplained limit that I claim has a prior of zero. The speed of light is explained in terms of deeper physics. Second, if our particular speed of light has a prior of zero (something I’m doubtful of, because I think that your credence function in different speeds of light should be biased towards lower numbers) then upon seeing things appear to obey the speed oof light we’d get an infinite update—the odds that they’d seem to obey that particular speed are zero. Finally, the claim is that any particular arbitrary limit has a prior of zero, not that the collection of all of them has a prior of zero—your prior in there being a speed of light should be low but nonzero.
1)
Sure, but the deeper physics will probably also have some arbitrary limits, which fix the speed of light. I am no physicist, so I don't know the details. Let me instead make a hypothetical: We have reached the end of physics, and are stuck between two fundamental theories. The one has a constant of a brute finite value, and the other has that constant at an infinite value (and thus has no arbitrary limit). It is possible to measure whether this constant is infinite or has a finite value. Given your position that the finite theory has an infinitely lower prior, no amount of observational evidence could make os believe it.
2)
To the above you will probably say that we get an infinite update in favor the arbitrary theory, if we observe that the constant is not infinite. But that is not the case. We should always assign non-zero, non-infinitessimal credences to our equipment malfunctioning, us hallucinating etc. So the update we get is only the probability space where such things are not the case, which is less than 1. Thus no amount of observational evidence could persuade us.
3)
Fair enough, let me then modify my example. We have two theories: That the physical laws apply universally across the universe, or that there is a cube-foot, where gravity is slightly weaker or something. I then discover that I have a cube-foot in my living room where gravity is slightly weaker. Scientists come to study it, and it becomes a tourist attraction and everything. Given your view, we should still not believe that there is such a cube foot in my living room, since we should have an infinitesimal or zero prior in there being such a cube foot there.
I will admit that I have a hard time seeing how else to distribute the priors in a case like the cube foot - it looks like we should have a uniform probability distribution over all possible cube feet in the universe, which is perhaps infinite, and so we should have a zero or infinitesimal prior in that particular cube foot. Maybe observing such a cube foot gives us evidence that the universe is finite and discrete, but that also seems absurd. So I am not certain where to land on the issue.
The one way speed of light is set by convention. You can read Einstein's 1905 paper "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies" or skim this page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_speed_of_light to learn more. The two way speed of light is a fundamental measured constant. It isn't derived from deeper physics.
I will make the same criticism I did before of you. You are effectively operating under a grade school level interpretation of how science works, what scientists do, and how scientific theory formation occurs. The reason you are operating under this paradigm is because entry level exposure to scientific practice is designed to make use of simplifying assumptions like essences, stories like the maverick solo scientist proposing a brand new theory and becoming all the rage, algebraic structures, 2 or 3 step derivations, and universal laws, because human society has a vested interest in motivating people to become scientists, rather than teaching newcomers exactly how many 100s of pages of differential equations Newton and Einstein wrote and abandoned trying to systematize observations and experiments on light. Science simply does not make use of prior probabilities or philosophical theories of arbitrary limits, and to the extent you use these to inform your metaphysics, you will probably be wrong on both counts.
I don't think this reasoning works. Suppose you randomly select a ball from an urn of infinite balls, each labeled with a different number. Before viewing the number, the prior probability that you have selected any particular ball is infinitely lower than the probability of not picking it. But upon viewing the number, you should believe you indeed picked that particular ball. So a finite amount of evidence can overcome an infinitely lower prior probability.
Well it's an infinite amount of evidence, in the sense that it's infinitely more strongly predicted on the hypothesis that you'll pick that number than its negation.
Sorry I was responding to Silas before you had responded; my comment is in reference to his and not yours.
I know, I was just clarifying.
It’s not an infinite amount of evidence though. My point is that a finite amount of evidence can be infinitely strong.
Oh yeah agreed.
Excellent article. I agree with you.
I think this can all be distilled down to humanity's lack of understanding regarding how the universe formed. We don't know why the laws of the universe are the way they are because we don't understand them enough. They seem arbitrary but are probably not. There is a reason the laws of gravity operate a certain way and not another, but our knowledge is incomplete. Asserting a god as fundamental is hand waving away all the questions about that god like why is there a god and not a god? How did the god come to be? Did this require another god or was the god the result of natural processes? And on and on.
I appreciate the steelmanning of this! I think the argument loses me, actually, at the beginning — that “theism” just means “the thesis that one of the fundamental things… exists without limit.”
I acknowledge, of course, that one can define a term in any way one wishes; it’s just that I think this is not at all what the great majority of normies mean when they say “I’m a theist” or “I believe God exists”. (Among other things, it doesn’t seem to distinguish theism from deism.)
If I’m making an error here, I’d appreciate knowing it!
I wasn't claiming that the terms had the same meaning. My claim was that, given that theism is just the idea that there's a perfect being, if you think there exists a single thing of unlimited goodness, that thing would be God (for God is the greatest conceivable being). Therefore, theism is simple, positing just one fundamental thing without limit. The definition of God is a being that's omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent--my claim was simply that you can deduce those from a simple property.
Oh, understood! I did a bad job of conveying what I was experiencing before, but I think I can do it better now: defining “theism” as merely “the belief in an unlimited fundamental thing” is itself distracting to me, because of personal past history.
To wit: a smart (Ivy-League-PhD) Catholic friend once argued “you believe in math, therefore, you can’t be an atheist!” (Maybe he said “order” or “reason” or “something”, instead of “math”? I’m not sure. None of those sound any less silly to me. Also, I’m an agnostic, not an atheist, but he bulldozed over that distinction, too.)
It felt that he was performing a motte-and-bailey, watering down the definition of “God” so I’d agree to it… even as his ultimate goal was to get me to believe in a very different-seeming God (personal, interventionist, etc.).
Anyhoo, I’m not saying there’s a mistake in your claims — just that for me (and maybe for others) using the word “theism” in this sense gets in the way of following the logic. (And know that I say this because I enjoy your substack, and want you to make your arguments powerfully!)
That's not how I'm intending to define theism. I'm defining theism as the idea that there's an all powerful, all good, all knowing being. My point is that all those properties can be deduced from some fundamental properties--goodness, the mind, etc--if you just don't place any limits on them, and for that reason theism is simple. If you say water reduces to H20, that doesn't mean when people use the word water they're consciously talking about H20, it just means you can provide a deeper explanation of what makes water water in terms of H20. I think the same thing with theism.
I agree people often do what you're talking about, where they define God as love and then say "of course I believe in love," and it's annoying. Hopefully I've made it clear why that's not what I'm doing.
I like your substack too! I especially enjoyed your convo with the flat earther.
I think the nature of prior probabilities merits more attention. As does probability itself (which has taken centuries to grasp and is still slippery!)
Prior probability comes from Bayesian Probability where you model uncertainty using a prior (before anything is known or whatever is known at the time -- this is subjective) and then calculating posteriors using Bayes theorem when you have new evidence.
The prior can be a uniform distribution, or a distribution calcuted from pre existing evidence or something purely subjective, but like all probability distributions they must sum to 1 and obey the laws of probability.
The role of the prior is short lived. It exists until the first evidence is gathered.
So, how may the prior about the size of the universe, say, be thought of? Let's assume the early humans of the African Savannah had somehow developed sophisticated probability theory but lacked any other mathematics or physics. They may well assign the size to "as far as the eye can see, so however far the sun or some stars are" and make some reasonable assumptions about "well if I could climb this mountain I could maybe see further up" and come up with a distribution. Let's assume in addition to probability theory they also had a sophisticated understanding of Cantor's infinity of infinities but still no physics. They may say the universe is equally likely to have a size that is any real number larger than what they can observe. After all why is a particular real number better than the other? Or maybe Laplace told them this is how to do priors. Or they may have someone among their ranks who had a "vision", let's say he climbed up a nearby mountain, and said a tablet was handed to him that said the size was 6000 miles in all directions from where he stood. And then the role of the prior is over. (2024 is late in the game for formulating uninformed priors or priors based on some "intuition", we know too much)
And then they start doing physics. And then they gather a thousand different pieces of evidence, updating their prior at each stage, and then discover cosmic background radiation, and then calculate size of the observable universe. With any prior distribution you will converge to the "true" size.
This is a long way of saying the role of priors when dealing with belief rather than frequencies is not of great significance.
One question I have: How exactly are you defining perfection as a fundamental thing? The other fundamental things that you list make some sense to me. They don't seem to reduce to anything simpler. But perfection to me seems to be less of a fundamental attribute and more of a mode of being.
For instance, although we typically think of perfect beings as being perfectly good, we might imagine that there exists a perfectly evil being, a being whose evil cannot possibly be surpassed, whose malice and villainy know no bounds.
We might also apply the word "perfect" to ordinary things. Although there is probably no "perfect tree", it's not impossible to imagine the sorts of qualities such a tree would have. And the same goes for a perfect anything else that we might conceive of.
I'm tempted to say that X is perfect when, for all ideal qualities Q that X could have, X has Q. Essentially, X is perfect when it lacks absolutely nothing that it would be ideal for X to have. I'm not confident in this definition, however, and I'm curious to hear how you would attempt to define it.
>Although there is probably no "perfect tree", it's not impossible to imagine the sorts of qualities such a tree would have.
Can you tell me what some of these qualities are and what mistake I would be making if I contradicted each of your stipulations? This discourse around perfection seems to me to be obviously unfruitful, much like ancient philosophy questions like "Is the beautiful more or less identical than the good?" because perfection isn't a property we ever discover when we cut up an object and look inside it. Instead, calling something perfect just means that the caller approves of it, or is using some relativized standard to judge it (like "The perfect apple will look very shiny"), and so talk of perfection divorced from these standards is like talking about height divorced from an object's size - it's clearly incoherent.
You're framing this as theism vs. naturalism, but it's masking the true divide, dualism vs. illusionist physicalism.
The idea that there's a radically simple phenomenon called "mind" is a lie that extraordinarily complex things called "brains" tell themselves because it's very useful for social interaction. Having a painter would in fact be a more complex explanation than having a painting exist by itself -- if we didn't have the theory of evolution by natural selection, plus evidence of sufficient time and conditions to have produced the particular extreme complexity of human painters.
So the mind is a lie, but everything it perceives is real?
Illusionist physicalism is self-contradictory that only survives based on playing word games. A mind can experience an illusion, but an illusion can't experience an illusion. If the mind is an illusion, who is experiencing it? Cogito ergo sum: the fact that I exist is the one fact I can know for certain. If your theory requires that I am an illusion (an illusion nobody is experiencing, apparently) then your theory must be wrong: it goes against the strongest empirical evidence we have.
Just because the grammar of natural language allows a question like "who is experiencing it?", doesn't mean that there must be some real answer. A brain does a bunch of extraordinarily complex computations. Among its many high-level functions is creating a massive oversimplification of itself that is useful for interfacing with other brains and for efficiently predicting what they're going to do.
Yes, it *seems* like I'm a singular subject of experience not composed of a massive network of low-level computations. Much like how it seems to the audience at a magic show that a woman is being sawn in half.
How can I believe anything if I don't exist? And if I don't exist, how can I believe that the brain creates a massive oversimplification of itself useful for interfacing with other brains? The only reason I would have to believe that is because my observations and experiences point me in that direction, or my rational inferences make the theory logical, yet if "I" am just a simplified simulation useful for interfacing with other brains then "I" have no reason to believe my observations or inferences have any truth value whatsoever. Really, I'm not capable of believing anything at all, but even if we ignore that I wouldn't have reason to believe it. If all empirical evidence is illusionary, then I have no reason to believe anything.
How can you put something in a shopping cart on Amazon if there literally isn't a shopping cart inside your monitor or cpu? I guess if the order button is fake too you will never receive an order either.
Can you link one, just one illusionist philosopher or proponent that believes this conjunction of claims: "The mind is an illusion," "An illusion can't experience an illusion," and "You are an illusion that nobody is experiencing"? Your comments read to me like somebody who has never read a single illusionist in their life and is just imagining what their position would be based off a superficial interpretation of the name "illusionism." Do you also think dualists fight each other with swords, or is your confusion limited to this one case?
Addendum: and there is no such strong convergent evidence to overcome the extremely low prior for the existence of the staggeringly complex thing that a computational device which could conceive of, desire, and create the universe (and then summarize itself with its own "mind" illusion) would have to be.
If I understand your argument correctly, you are essentially saying that fewer presuppositions (“arbitrary limits”) lead to a higher prior. This is true because there are fewer prior conditions, and each additional condition decreases the probability.
Your conclusion is incorrect however. An infinite universe is more likely than one that is some exact arbitrary number of meters in diameter. However, it is not more likely than a finite universe in general. There is only one infinite universe for any dimension you call infinite and an infinite number of possible finite universes (one for every value of diameter). Therefore, it is more likely the universe is finite.
Saying theism has fewer conditions (arbitrary limits) than naturalism is also incorrect. Using your definition of theism as belief in “one fundamental thing that exists without limit” or a perfect being, we can clearly see the issue. You say it is simple because it is one thing, one entity. However, you have smuggled in complexity without acknowledging the ontological cost of presupposing an infinitely complex being capable of creating the universe (much less one that is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, etc). Does that entity have parts? An environment? A brain? Organs? If so, then you will have to adjust your prior to account for all those arbitrary limits that define the god you believe in. And you can’t, because those would be fundamentally unknowable (transcending our physical universe) and you are back to faith, which we can define as assigning a value to a prior without sufficient evidence or accepting that something is true despite a low prior.
Of course, we can go the other way and continue removing attributes until god is just a force or some abstract concept of goodness. But how is that a god or perfect being? How is that different than a natural law that is just there?
The “arbitrary limits” of naturalism is what we typically call evidence. We include them because they have been observed (e.g. we specify that light has a finite speed because that is what we observe). So even if you start with your theistic prior, the addition of empirical evidence to your reasoning will overcome any advantage you give the theistic prior over naturalism because you’re ultimately updating beliefs based on naturalistic evidence. You need the highest possible prior to believe in a god after natural evidence has been included. That is motivated reasoning. At some point, you’ll need to just assert that god exists to keep it in the model. This is basically what you’ve done here.
> For example, consider the theory that somewhere in the universe, there’s a 1 foot patch where the laws of physics don’t work. That theory is much worse than the theory that there is no such patch, even though there are infinite ways there could be such a patch. Because there are infinite patch theories which together are less probable than the theory that there’s no patch, each particular patch theory—according to which at some specific location the laws of physics don’t work—is infinitely less probable than the no patch theory, even though it’s only a bit less arbitrary.
If a theory is infinitely improbable, then if we flew around the entire universe and found a single one foot patch where the laws of physics don't work, we would have to discard the conclusion that there is a one foot patch where the laws of physics don't work. This obviously doesn't make any sense. Your logic, thus, fails.
No, because the theory that there is that one foot patch infinitely more strongly predicts the appearance of that one foot patch on that particular area.
Infinitely more strongly predicts it? So there's a 0% probability of measurement error?
There's a 0% probability of any particular measurement error because there are infinity different conceivable measurement errors.
If something has 0% probability, it would be impossible to update towards it on the basis of any evidence. You should not use "infinity" and "zero" (or its inverse cousin, 1) in probabilities, because it produces results that are mathematically impossible to adjust on the basis of evidence.
Well I think they're best thought of as infintesimals, but in Hilber's hotel, the odds you're in the first room are zero. Nonetheless, you can update towards it.
I'm going to bite the bullet: in Hilbert's hotel, because it is infinitely tall, there are infinitely many people who are under a fixed delusion that they are in Room 1. Any evidence that can occur due to error of mind or reason or misinterpretation or coincidence (i.e. any evidence) occurs infinitely many times. Thus, the probability that merely because you observe evidence of being in Room 1, you are actually in Room 1, is still 1/∞, i.e. zero.
1. There is no such thing as anything that is infinite. At least, you have no evidence or basis for positing that infinity or infinite things exist. "Infinite" is merely an idea with zero proof or examples or even possible calculations, explanations, or theories of how it COULD exist. So for you to say that it is more likely that a thing would be zero or infinite than to have have a limit, merely because you proclaim that a limit "seems" arbitrary is just completely wild/crazy. You're saying that it's more likely that a vague "being" exists that is infinite (even though there is no reason to think that anything infinite ever has or could exist in the first place) than that something exists exists with a limit. And the only reason you think it is more likely is that you believe a limit is always "arbitrary" in comparison to the non-existent and made-up idea of infinity. At least, that's how you just explained what arbitrary means -- that it "seems" arbitrary.
Which tells me that the concept of infinity just "seems" more likely to you than the concept of any given limit. Even though in reality everything (which is a lot of things) we have ever observed, tested, or conceived of a working theory for its function is finite, and nothing we have ever observed, tested, or come up with a working theory for is infinite, other than when you slap "God" on as a label and say that somehow fixes it.
You say it's more likely that something is either zero or infinity because that's somehow more simple, but every single observation we can make is that a thing being zero or infinity are literally the least likely possible values out of all possible values. What is the likelihood that the next winning powerball number is 87,956,341? Now what's the likelihood that the next winning powerball number is zero or infinity?
2. If I posit that the fundamental property of reality is a being that is all powerful, all knowing, and perfectly bad, is that more or less likely, in your way of calculating things, then that a being exists that is all powerful, all knowing, and perfectly good?
3. What if I posit that the fundamental property of reality is a being that is all powerful, all knowing, and both good and bad, but neither perfectly good nor perfectly bad? It seems to me that this would be more likely, as it fits the evidence by a factor of (insert really high number, but I won't say infinity).
1. How many numbers are there? There's also some mounting evidence from physics that space is infinite. And anyway, it's clearly more likely the world is infinite in size than that it is exactly 8437589327849327 feet across.
2. Less likely, as I explain here https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-evil-god-challenge?utm_source=publication-search
3. Less likely because it's more complicated to specify--it's not just specifiable as a perfect being, so you'll have to granularly specify its desires. Also, it will less well explain much of the data, and require arbitrarily building in psychophysical harmony https://philarchive.org/archive/CUTPHA#:~:text=Roughly%2C%20psychophysical%20harmony%20consists%20in,another%20in%20strikingly%20fortunate%20ways.
The only reason that anyone ever posits a specific limit is because they have actually MEASURED it and found that result. Or observed it or otherwise tested a formula that always works that gives that result. It's not as if they just pulled the number randomly out of thin air. If they did, THAT would be arbitrary. But they didn't, they came up with the number/limit based on experiments and measurements. So you're saying that a measured or tested limit finding a specific number is less likely than a hypothetical infinite, even thought we have zero proof that anything infinite has ever or could exist?
I'm sorry but to me this just reads as "infinity feels intuitive and satisfying to me and therefore it seems more likely than a number/limit that feels arbitrary and unsatisfying to me".
To me, I have no evidence or reason whatsoever to think that anything has ever been limitless or could be limitless or that the idea of limitless infinity is not just a semantic fiction residing in a human's head. But I have the evidence of everything around me being finite. So the evidence works out to nothing versus everything. Infinity is therefore the opposite of intuitive and I would never deem anything infinite to be more likely than anything finite. Even people like you who claim to (I think?) believe in the concept of infinity...it's hard to believe that you really do. How can you even conceive of such a thing?
You theory therefore depends upon accepting the existing of infinity in the first place. There's no theory without the prior that "infinite" is even possible. So now you've added a fundamental, have you not?
What exactly is the mounting evidence from physics that space is infinite? It doesn't seem to me possible in principle to prove this because we don't have a physical test that would terminate in a finite amount of time that proves the universe is infinite vs very large. Furthermore, if you accept the tenants of modern cosmology and relativity, there are parts of the universe right now that are leaving our future light cone, meaning we'll never be able to reach those places even if we traveled at the speed of light in their direction starting now. As time goes on, we lose physical access to more and more of the universe, further complicating your claim that there is mounting evidence that the universe is infinite.
The more I dig into BB's essays, the more I see a lot of "this just SEEMS more plausible" indicating he's got an emotional intuition for one reason or another. He finds the idea of an evil god, or at least a morally ambiguous or amoral one, entirely implausible and I find it the opposite. If I thought there was a god, I would be forced to conclude he was a huge jerk bc why else would you create a world where 99% of sentient creatures get to starve to death or be eaten literally alive, or watch their children eaten alive? Especially when we know that some organisms can live from just the sun, why would you even create this eating a sentient being that doesn't want to be eaten system, and then chuck a thousand trillion creatures through that shredder? Seems pretty evil to me, and the idea that it's not such a bad system seems like the view of the apex predator that humans happen to be. So the intuitions and things that "seem" plausible are just so entirely alien to me.
Similarly, the idea of infinity. Like okay, *maybe* the universe could be infinite? But can you really truly conceive of that? I not only can't conceive of that, it's hard for me to really conceive of someone actually conceiving of it. I CAN imagine a universe that just keeps expanding. Something about the idea of constant motion or growth makes sense in my human mind bound by physical limitations, and inevitably I have to make metaphors that arise from my physical reality. But just being infinite, meaning existing everywhere at every time both past and future and not moving or growing because it is already everywhere?? How can one possibly conceive of such a thing? Admittedly I don't have a genius physics brain. But tell me, can YOU conceive of something that has always existed and did not start and will never end and is everywhere? I sure can't.
Happy to have a conversation about this if you want to come on the pod and argue.
It may be embarrassing to get owned by a smarty-pants college kid, but I could try.
I don't know if there was ever nothing and then something. But there could have always been some things, just different things. It's there being ONE particular thing existing always, and forever, that's hard for me. And I mean ALWAYS (which in itself is hard to conceive of).
But there being nothing but a couple particles and then increasing complexity and more and more particles and then atoms and molecules and cells and bacteria etc etc, that's all easy to understand. Simple things combining and turning into complex things is easy to conceive of bc we see it all the time. A tiny seed turns into a huge tree, a tiny egg and sperm turn into an adult human or elephant, something big and complex coming from something small and simple is commonplace.
Idk, I guess maybe there being nothing and then suddenly being something does not seem any more or less likely/weird than the other. Something about "nothing" is a bit more conceivable than infinite, to me. Perhaps this all comes down to physical and bodily metaphors, a la Philosophy of the Flesh. We know what nothing means...it's what we were before we existed...but infinite seems ungraspable to the human mind and perhaps that's because we are finite creatures.
// "While I’m very uncertain about the nature of prior probabilities" //
Understatement of the century.
// "But if this is right, then theism might just be infinitely far ahead of naturalism." //
It's not right.
// "If this is right, then naturalism is doomed." //
It's not right.
// "But still, if this is right, it’s bad news for athiesm." //
It's not right.
That's 3 times that this author started with a conditional statement with "if this is right" as the antecedent. It's less honest inquiry & more of a psychological trick to get readers to read the same thing repeatedly until they believe it.
// "So…am I wrong?" //
How can I put this. You're not just wrong. You're wronger than wrong. If this was provided as some kind of paper within any philosophy department, then an F would be too high of a grade.
Let's start with the point that the author only focuses on simplicity and arbitrarily claiming what's arbitrary. If anything is arbitrary, then it's any person's particular conceptions of a god. Additionally, simplicity is only one metric or standard that's used to compare opposing hypotheses.
1. Testability - Theism fails as it's not testable.
2. Fruitfulness - Theism doesn't predict any previously unknown or unexplained events.
3. Scope - There's no larger or broader scope than theism. Theism arguably claims that it has the answer to anything & everything.
4. Simplicity - Theism fails here also. Yes, if you PRESUPPOSE theism, then everything fits nicely inside of theism. However, there's no good reason to presuppose theism due to the next criteria.
5. Conservatism - This is where we don't presuppose theism. Rather, we presuppose atheism & try to reach theism. This is the very point that the author attempts to dismiss right off the bat. In a world in which existing things all seem to be solids, liquid, gases, plasma, or combination thereof, then it's NOT conservative to posit that there's supernatural entities.
It's not a mistaken argument & the author brushes it aside to talk about simplicity instead of addressing all 5 criteria.
The argument essentially goes:
We all agree that solids, liquids, gases, plasma, & combination thereof exist. We can call this set of things an "atheistic sense of existence."
Theism accepts the "atheistic sense of existence" but attempts to add additional things none of which meet the standards, criteria, or requirements that were already set.
Here's the final nail in the coffin. Say we ascribe to a theistic sense of existence which postulates numerous supernatural entities. Which version, flavor, or form of theism & those supernatural entities? Talk about arbitrary!!! Why should one accept sin, afterlife, & heaven instead of karma, reincarnation, & nirvana or vice versa?
Sorry, this comment is just too confused to be worth responding to.
I take it that what you mean by 'arbitrary limits' is that the limits could have been different? But someone who viewed the fundamental physical laws, constants and initial conditions of the universe as metaphysically necessary would deny (by definition) that they could have been different and so would not view them as arbitrary.
No, arbitrary limits come when something is restricted in some way that seems arbitrary. It would be an arbitrary limit for the world to be 493058349083457324890753248795 feet across--stopping there for no deeper reason--even though you can always assert that that's necessary.
What do you mean it seems arbitrary? The only way I can make sense of something seeming arbitrary (in the sense youre using it) is that it could conceivably be different.
Lets presume the theist believes in whatever physical laws and particles the naturalist takes to be fundamental. I find it odd that the theist would claim that it is apriori more likely a God is fundamental than these laws and particles because the restrictions on them seem arbitrary, whereas there are no seemingly arbitrary restrictions on God.
The theist may claim that the naturalist cant explain why the physical laws/particles are restricted in the way they are, as opposed to the infinite number of ways they could have concievable been, but our ability to concieve of different physical laws tells us nothing about metaphysics. Specifically, it doesnt tell us that reality is such that any other laws could have existed. So the answer to the question, "why these laws with these restrictions as opposed to some other laws with other restriction?" may just be that these laws with these restrictions are metaphysically necessary.
I agree with you that simplicity is not about the number of things posited by a theory, but I think your understanding of fundamental things as those things which cannot be explained any further is wrong. I want to suggest that the fundamental things are the irreducible kinds of things posited by a theory. According to naturalism, there is one kind: nature. According to theism, there are two kinds: God and nature (to reject this is to commit the error of pantheism). True, God can explain nature, but natural objects are a fundamentally different kind of thing than God is, and so theists are positing two types of things which cannot be reduced to the other.
Why think it’s better to think of fundamental things as irreducible kinds rather than unexplainable kinds? Here’s a case which I think motivates this thought: imagine I put forward the theory of double theism. According to double theism, there are three irreducible kinds, Big God, Little God, and nature. However, each kind is explained by the previous: the double theist claims that Big God created Little God and that Little God created nature. So each kind posited by double theism is explained by another kind except Big God. I submit that double theism is less simple than theism. Both theories explain all but one irreducible kind in terms of others, but double theism posits three kinds whereas theism posits only two.
Nature isn't fundamental--it is explained by God. And nature is a label that refers to a complciated and arbitrary set of physical laws.
I’m using nature to mean something else than what you mean. By nature, I mean the created world.
I don’t deny that positing God can explain nature in either sense. What I do deny is that one fundamental thing explaining another is necessarily simpler than two fundamental things, neither of which explains the other.
This is because I think simpler theories are theories which posit less kinds of things. For instance, physicalism is simpler than dualism because the former posits only matter since mind is reducible to matter, but the latter posits both mind and matter. Now, you may think this is because in physicalism, the existence of matter explains the existence of mind, but I don’t think this is what is doing the work. Physicalism is simpler because it posits less kinds of things. A dualist could have a theory according to which matter explains mind, but where mind and matter remain distinct kinds (e.g., in epiphenomenalsim the physical states can explain the mental states, but they are nonetheless not the same kind of thing or reducible to one another).
Now here’s the setup for what I said before: is God the same kind of thing as natural objects are(objects in the created world).?Generally, the answer to this question is taken to be no. Natural objects cannot be reduced to God nor can God be reduced to natural objects. You can deny this (like Spinoza infamously did), but this view (the error of pantheism) is generally rejected from what I can tell.
So theism must posit two kinds of things. And I think naturalism is simpler than theism because it only posits one kind of thing (I try to motivate this with my double theism example).
>I don’t deny that positing God can explain nature in either sense. What I do deny is that one fundamental thing explaining another is necessarily simpler than two fundamental things, neither of which explains the other.
You're making the same mistake again: under theism nature is not a fundamental thing. Theism is one fundamental thing explaining a contingent thing, not one fundamental thing explaining another fundamental thing.
I think what you and OP mean by fundamental thing is not what simplicity is about. That’s why I put forward my own sense of fundamental thing (twice) and tried to motivate it.
A fundamental thing in this case is referring to a thing that exists without a cause, presumably having always existed. In that sense nature can "reduce" to God because God can casually explain the existence of nature.
That is not what reduction is.
If the arbitrary elements of our universe make naturalism infinitely unlikely, I think they also affect theism’s likelihood. In this piece, if I understand correctly, you argue that the whole kit and kaboodle follows from a theistic God, and so we don’t need to lower the odds of that world due to strange and arbitrary facts of the universe, but that strikes me as wrong. Yes, as much as Gods existence explains does not need to be accounted for here, but the universe as it is doesn’t very naturally follow from a maximally agentic/powerful/etc being, afaict. To extend to the painter analogy, if the painter were actually a non human being who was maximally density seeking, that is she wants to maximize how much mass is within a cubic meter of her, or some other random goal, I would be quite unsure of whether the painting came from her, or some place else. Of course, I am sure there are many arguments why the universe follows from maximally _____ beings, but that doesn’t strike me as obvious in the way your argument implies.
Whether God explains the universe has to do with explanatory power not simplicity. Of course, I disagree that theism poorly explains the universe, but that's a separate topic.
You might be wrong ..
" Simple theories are probable, otherwise we cannot justify induction".
A God who can create everything except cheeseburger is improbable than a God who can create everything. But, you should also add that a God who can create only cheeseburger is probable than a God who can create 88 things.
That's how we use induction right??.
Imagine we found out about a particle that caused electrons. We won't inductively assume that that particle has every causal power. But if we find out that it has 99/100 causal powers it is reasonable to assume it has 100th power too. ( Prior to evidence)
Coming back to naturalism vs theism - All we know is whatever the fundamental entity is it caused the universe. So a probable theory would be with a fundamental reality that has power to cause the things similar to the universe.
My point is the type of simplicity God have is not the kind required to justify induction.
Further thoughts...
Uniformity / coherence will be a better criteria than simplicity.
By assuming uniform theories have more prior we can get that one should choose theories with
1. Less number of entity
2. Less kind of entity
3. Simple and elegant equations
4. Inductive justification
So a theory says fundamental reality is a physical entity with causal powers to create universe and similar items will be many time more probable than a God.
Other kind of perfections has nothing to do with justifying induction, therefore your argument won't hold.