Three Niche Philosophical Objections To Christianity

Two of them apply more broadly to theism

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The more one studies philosophy, the more one finds new puzzles and mysteries. Theists often claim that theism nicely resolves those mysteries. For example, only after carefully studying philosophy of mind would one discover the argument from psychophysical harmony, which turns out to be one of the best arguments for theism. The same is true of my anthropic argument for theism—discussed here.

But I think that the opposite is similarly true! When one studies philosophy, one also finds some arguments that strongly undermine theism—especially particular versions of it. Here, I’ll discuss three of those arguments.

The first argument is specific to Christianity and its belief in the trinity. Suppose that we are modal rationalists (which we really, really should be) and think that which things are possible is derivable a priori. For theism to be simple, it must follow from some basic property. There are two reasonable candidates for such a property: agency and perfection.

Theism posits an unlimited agent at the core of reality and likewise a perfect being. Theism posits that this is perfect. Thus, theism posits fundamentally either a maximal agent or perfection itself as the core of reality. If you’re a modal rationalist, you’ll think that one could deduce a priori what follows from pure perfection of from a maximal agent. But the trinity is obviously not derivable a priori from perfection.

If you knew that the fundamental thing was perfection itself, you would obviously not expect it to have three coequal and coeternal persons which are sort of like parts, but you can’t call them parts or you’re a heretic. Maybe one person, maybe infinite, but definitely not three. So if modal rationalism is true, it’s hard to see how theism could be simple.

This argument against the trinity is distinct from other ones. It’s consistent with the trinity being coherent and merely argues that the trinity cannot be said to plausibly follow from perfection itself. I don’t think this is a totally fatal objection—the Christian can just say that the trinity does follow from perfection perhaps for reasons we don’t understand or because it’s required for God to instantiate all types of love—but it has some force.

Another option that most Christians will reject given that it is, to quote a Catholic friend of mine, “very heretical” is to think there are infinity persons in the trinity. That seems more plausible—if persons of perfect goodness are good, then a supremely perfect being would have infinite persons of perfect goodness. One can also, like Dale Tuggy, be a unitarian.

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Michael Huemer has an argument for immortality in his paper Existence Is Evidence of Immortality (which Reddit confirms doesn’t contain any fallacies). He argues that if we are immortal, then it’s somewhat likely I’d be alive now, for I’d be alive for a reasonable percent of the years of the universe. In contrast, however, if we are not immortal, we’d only live for some finite time. But then the odds that we’d be alive during this time would be zero. I think this argument is basically right.

But the same argument can be made against most kinds of theism. According to them, we have a finite time on this Earth and then we have an infinite afterlife. But then the odds that I’d happen to be having these experiences now—which I’ll have for 0% of my total life—is zero. This is especially so if thirding is correct in sleeping beauty, for this means that versions of reality on which your current experiences occur more are more likely. But then you should think your current experiences repeat infinitely which is unlikely on theism. If halfing is right in sleeping beauty, however, you should also find it weird that you’re so early out of all the possible moments you could be in (there’s a paper on a similar idea that argues that if halving is correct the story isn’t so clear, but discussing that would get too complicated for this article).

I think this is an interesting puzzle, but not a super decisive argument against theism for the following reasons:

1. Even if theism makes it unlikely that my current experiences would infinitely loop (meaning they’d repeat infinitely), atheism does as well. For my experiences to loop, there probably has to be something like souls and an infinitely long-lasting universe, both of which are surprising on atheism.

2. Plausibly God could cause time to loop so that good experiences are experienced infinitely. Time doesn’t just happen once but instead infinity times. Thus, I’d have my current experiences infinitely.

3. This issue is sufficiently complicated and technical—with puzzles about anthropics and cardinalities of infinity—which makes it hard to be super confident on anything one concludes from it.

4. The various theodicies explain why God would cause one’s experiences to loop. For example, looping one’s experiences might cause soul-building or further the pursuit of the beatific vision.

5. It’s unclear how many times one’s current experiences would need to repeat for the world to be maximally good. But if it could be any number, then the odds of my current experiences existing would be high, because the existent years could be any subset of an infinitely large number of years. If one picks a random natural number, on average it would be greater than any finite number, which means that the possible first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and so on versions of my current experiences would be likely to be picked if my current experiences repeat a random number of times.

6. I’ve argued before that God would create all possible people, meaning that there would be Beth 2 (a large infinite) people having my experiences. This means that there aren’t actually more moments of experience if each person has infinity of my experiences, because the total number of experiences identical to mine would be Beth 2 still.

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Suppose one has the ability to create something that will eternally be of value. They can either create it now or in a million years. It seems better to make it now so that there will be more value for the next million years. If this is true then it’s hard to see why God would wait 13.8 billion years before, to quote Arif Ahmed, “handing out real estate and impregnating virgins.” More specifically, it’s hard to see why God would wait so long before creating people.

Here, I think there are two main solutions. First, you might hold that God sort of skipped through the time where there wasn’t stuff of value to get the stuff of value sooner. Surely this is within the power of an omnipotent being. Maybe he has our future selves split and go back in time or something—one version in the past and one in the future—and then experience the beatific vision in the past before humans ever were physically created. Second, you might hold that our existence predates our birth—which is already plausible—and thus there was no time that passed before our creation. You could also be a young earth creationist, but that view is obviously ludicrous.