Two Dozen Or So Thoughts About Theism

This is what happens when you read Alexander Pruss's blog too much

Α

Alexander Pruss has an article in which he tries to partially defang the problem of evil. He starts by noting that nobody finds the problem of trivial evils convincing. Nobody says that hangnails or mosquito bites or people stubbing their toes disproves God. Why is this? His answer: because they’re so small, it seems plausible that they could be outweighed by greater goods.

But, Pruss claims, if theism is true then there are an infinite number of great goods. Many of these goods thoroughly outstrip even the horror of torture. Many of these goods may outclass torture as significantly as true love outclasses mosquito bites. But if this is so, then it seems we have an argument to defang the problem of evil.

1. The problem of trivial evils, like mosquito bites and toe stubs, isn’t convincing.

2. The normal problem of evil is no more convincing than the problem of trivial evil.

3. So the normal problem of evil isn’t convincing.

Spencer Case has another clever argument for premise 2. He argues initially that lots of small evils can add up to be as bad as a great evil. Therefore, even the most extreme torture is no worse than lots of people stubbing their toes. But if this is true, then explaining why extreme torture exists is no harder than explaining why so many people stub their toes.

I think, though, that the main premise to reject is premise 1. The problem of trivial evils is convincing. It’s not as emotionally powerful as the problem of tremendous evil, certainly. But as a purely intellectual problem, it seems almost as great.

When I was four, I scraped my leg a bunch of times, as almost all four-year-olds do. The theist has to say that this is either directly entailed by some great-making feature or that it was good all things considered. But neither of those seems plausible. If we consider just the tiny, trivial, mundane ills of the world, that you forget about after they happen, it’s hard to imagine that each of them adds up to a greater purpose.

As for Case’s argument, even if one great evil is no worse than a bunch of pinpricks, it might still be harder to explain. Pinpricks can be explained by a bunch of different things—torture, on the other hand, is just one event. To see this, suppose that each evil somehow generates 50 goodness points. Suppose that a pinprick causes 1 badness point and a torture causes 100,000 badness points. On this view, a God could allow pinpricks, for each serves a greater purpose, but wouldn’t allow torture.

I also think that premise 2 is dubious. Great evils could indeed be outweighed by sufficiently great goods. But there are some evils where it’s not at all plausible that they serve some greater purpose. In Rowe’s famous case, where a faun is trapped in a forest fire and burns to death, it’s not at all plausible that any greater goods come out of it.

Evil is so puzzling because it seems like whatever evil achieves could be achieved by God in other ways. If this is so, then it’s hard to see why he’d create so much evil, and limit the good he creates to such an extreme degree.

Β

The discussion of the problem of evil generally focuses on the bad things in the world. But I don’t think this is the most pressing version of the problem. Instead, the most pressing version asks why there’s so much bad and so little good. If all you knew was that God created a bunch of beings, you’d expect those beings to be made infinitely well off—perhaps sharing in the beatific vision or something. The fact that our world contains such limited goods is very surprising on theism.

Γ

Speaking of particularly puzzling versions of the problem of evil, the problem of psychophysical evil seems particularly puzzling. The psychophysical laws are the laws that govern the relationship between the physical and the mental. The best arguments for theism will claim that God designed these laws.

Problem: the psychophysical laws are deeply imperfect. Our capacity to experience pain far outstrips our capacity to experience pleasure. If God designed these laws, why not make the maximum amount of pain a human can experience far less than it currently is?

Theodicies about simulators and demons won’t explain this without undercutting the arguments from psychophysical harmony and moral knowledge. Fortunately, my soul-binding theodicy can help explain this. You might also adopt a theodicy that says demons sort of interfere with the psychophysical laws, not fully creating them, but subverting them somewhat to make them worse. Free will obviously can’t explain why we can experience such great agony. Neither can soul-building. No one thinks that people in North Korea torture camps experience less developed souls than they would have if they had been in slightly less pain.

Δ

Pruss has another blog post about why he isn’t much troubled by the problem of evil. He notes that if theism is true, we’re basically infants, having lived zero percent of our total life. The soul-building that happens now will last an eternity, and thoroughly outstrip the badness of our agony. Thus, the evils now are like the evils in a dream—fleeting and temporary. As such, if they provide any long-term benefits, they would be infinitely worth it.

I think this helps partially defang the problem of evil but is insufficient. The problem is that it’s really hard to see how the evils of this world cause a greater good that couldn’t be caused in any other way. Maybe some contribute to soul-building, but most of them don’t at all. For example, when people get painful migraines, that doesn’t contribute to soul-building.

Furthermore, I’m worried that this might lead to skepticism. If each of the evils serves some greater purpose, why try to get rid of things like malaria and parasites? If each of the evils are like a bad dream that we learn from, well, you wouldn’t want to eliminate a bad dream that someone learns from.

Ε

Pruss has an argument for theism that is, I think, pretty interesting:

1. P(the universe has low entropy | naturalism) is extremely tiny.

2. P(the universe has low entropy | theism) is not very small.

3. The universe has low entropy.

4. Therefore, the low entropy of the universe strongly confirms theism over naturalism.

Low-entropy states have low probability. So, (1) is true. The universe, at the Big Bang, had a very surprisingly low entropy. It still has a low entropy, though the entropy has gone up. So, (3) is true. What about (2)? This follows from the fact that there is significant value in a world that has low entropy and given theism God is not unlikely to produce what is significantly valuable. At least locally low entropy is needed for the existence of life, and we need uniformity between our local area and the rest of the universe if we are to have scientific knowledge of the universe, and such knowledge is valuable. So (2) is true. The rest is Bayes.

One attractive feature of this argument is that it avoids the multiverse objection. Even if there were a multiverse, we could still exist as Boltzmann brains. Thus, a multiverse is insufficient to explain why we live in a low entropy world. Furthermore, Pruss notes that you can’t explain low entropy by appealing to more fundamental laws because:

The law of nature suggestion is more plausible in the case of some fundamental constant like the mass of the electron than it is in the case of a continually changing non-fundamental quantity like total entropy which is a function of more fundamental microphysical properties. Nonetheless, the suggestion that the initial low entropy of the universe is a law of nature has been made in the philosophy of sceince literature. Suppose the suggestion is true. Now consider this point. There is a large number--indeed, an infinite number--of possible laws about the initial values of non-fundamental quantities, many of which are incompatible with the low initial entropy. The law that the initial entropy is low is only one among many competing incompatible laws. The probability given naturalism of initially low entropy being the law is going to be low, too. (Note that this response can also be given in the case of standard fine-tuning arguments.)

I don’t know enough about physics to know if the claims about low entropy check out. But my sense, from what I’ve heard, is that they do. This version of the fine-tuning argument thus seems pretty promising, albeit a bit speculative.

There might be a broader fine-tuning argument from Boltzmann brains. It just seems easier to get consciousness by the random fluctuation of matter than by having a developed civilization. Most possible worlds where I exist are ones where induction breaks down. We have no reason to think that simpler worlds would have induction work.

Ζ

Many theodicies, and traditional accounts of theism, seem to require that God’s goodness is in a class all its own. God is not just slightly better than other beings—he’s his own unique kind of thing, far superior to anything else. For a while I found that a bit weird. It seemed more intuitive that greatness would come in degrees, and the greatest conceivable being would only be slightly greater than the second-greatest conceivable being.

Of course, this puzzle doesn’t arise if you believe in divine simplicity, for instance. But divine simplicity seems incoherent.

However, I think there’s an easy way out of this puzzle. God is infinitely great. Each infinite is far greater than that which comes before it. Aleph null is infinitely bigger than any finite number, yet infinitely smaller than Beth 1. There is no number that is almost as big as aleph null. So if God is pure, infinite perfection, he would plausibly far outclass anything else. There’s no being half or a quarter as great as God.

Η

People often press the argument from divine hiddenness. They argue that if there is a God, it’s surprising that he’d be hidden from so man people. Why would a God who loves us not make his existence known?

However, it seems that there’s an opposite argument in this vicinity. Suppose all you knew was that there was no God. You wouldn’t expect huge numbers of people to believe in a perfect God, including professional philosophers. It would be particularly surprising that so many people feel that they have an intricate and personal relationship with this God, valuing their supposed relationship with him more than any other person.

Nonresistant non-belief is quite surprising on theism. But widespread belief is surprising on atheism. Nonresistant non-belief is surprising because it’s hard to see why God wouldn’t have a relationship with people who are open to one. But it’s similarly hard to see why, if there is no God, so many would seem to have a relationship with God.

Θ

My friend Ben Watkins has an interesting argument for theism from the existence of moral agents. He claims that, since theism entails that there will be at least one moral agent, the existence of moral agents is evidence for theism.

I accept that moral agents provide evidence for theism. But this seems to—quite straightforwardly—commit the fallacy of understated evidence. It’s true that P(there being at least on moral agent)|theism>P(there being at least on moral agent)|atheism. But the evidence we have is more specific. It’s that there are moral agents like us. The odds of that are certainly not 1 conditional on theism. It’s not so clear that God would make moral agents that are as flawed as us.

Ι

Lots of people have arguments for the trinity. Most of these strike me as nuts. Sijuade, for example, claims that God would have three persons because that’s required for perfect love. There are three types of love—self-love, love of another, and two people working together to love a third. The first is straightforward enough, the second occurs when two people fall in love, the third occurs when two people work to raise a child. God would need to be tripartite to instantiate all three.

It seems, however, that we can argue for the trinity from higher-order evidence. Suppose that the number of persons in God was chosen randomly. It would be super unlikely that there would be any plausible explanation of why that particular number was chosen. If the trinity had 4, 5, 6, or 658 persons, for example, there would be no philosophical explanation of why that number in particular.

So the fact that there are some arguments people can give for the trinity is surprising if it was just made up out of whole cloth. Thus, a Christian might claim, the best explanation of the number of persons in the trinity happening to be a number that can be philosophically defended is that that really is the number of persons in the trinity.

I don’t buy this, though. The arguments for the trinity are too weak.

Κ

Here’s a weird theodicy: evils occur to allow us to tell fun stories in the afterlife. Currently, where I live, it’s around zero degrees. I recently quipped “it isn’t any degrees. I like it better when it is some degrees.” Suppose I tell that quip an infinite number of times in the afterlife, and each time people laugh (uproariously, as they often do at the hilarious things I say). That would mean that the benefits of the cold infinitely outstrip the costs. Perhaps the evils of this world allow us to tell funny or interesting stories in the afterlife. I’ll list some objections in quotes before responding to them:

1. “Why wouldn’t God just allow us to know the stories without having us go through the experiences”: Stories are generally more compelling when told from a first-person perspective. You don’t know what people in the afterlife will find funny.

2. “Why wouldn’t God implant fake memories in us?”: That seems bad. Knowledge is good, arguably, so being deluded forever seems bad.

3. “What about all the small evils like toe stubs?”: It may be that those are inevitable consequences of various features like predictable natural laws similar to ours which are required for good stories. Or maybe those will actually feature in good stories. You don’t know what stories angels will find funny or interesting. Furthermore, if the odds of you telling a story about each particular event is non-zero, then in infinity years, you’ll tell infinite stories about each event.

4. “It doesn’t seem like stories about, for example, people being raped and then murdered are good stories”: Maybe people will learn valuable lessons from them. Perhaps internalizing the immense human capacity for evil will make each of one’s infinity years in the afterlife slightly better—maybe they’ll be a bit less cynical. Alternatively, these might follow from features like free will that are required for good stories.

5. “Many humorous stories can’t add up to outweigh the horror of extreme suffering”: I think this is false. If you think this, you basically have to deny transitivity. Infinite stories, each of slight value, add up to be of infinite value. Alternatively, some of the stories might be meaningful and really improve people’s lives.

Λ

Here’s another explanation of evil: maybe spending time in an unfortunate state is valuable in the long run. I didn’t really enjoy elementary school. Yet I’m glad my life contained my elementary school experiences. Similarly, if I could relive a day of elementary school just to recall what it was like, I would. So maybe our current lives are like that. God allows us to experience things that aren’t great because a life is richer, in total, if it’s more varied, even if part of it is crappy.

Μ

People often think that evolution refutes arguments from design. If we didn’t know about evolution, we’d have no explanation for how life is so grand and varied. But because know about evolution, we know how we get life like us.

But this doesn’t seem to me to be right. It’s surprising that there is a process like evolution that gets beautiful, wonderful, and interesting things. This would be like arguing against the inference that a building was designed on the grounds that a crane was used. That there exists some process that generates complex intelligent life is surprising on atheism but predicted on theism.

Ν

People often claim that simple physical laws provide evidence for theism. But I disagree. If naturalism is true, then, because fundamental stuff is generally simple, the physical laws would have to be simple. But if theism were true, they could be super complicated, for they’re not fundamental. Simple things can bring about complex processes, and there’s no good reason, if theism is true, why a God would make the laws so simple.

Furthermore, designers generally don’t make things simple. The laws in Harry Potter aren’t simple at all. And there’s a straightforward reason for that: JK Rowling doesn’t care about simplicity, she cares about making a good story. But God doesn’t care about simplicity—he cares about making things of value—so on theism, it’s super surprising that the fundamental laws are so simple.

Ξ

I was recently talking with a Catholic friend about theology. On his view, if someone is a major advocate of, for example, modalism, and becomes a staunch proponent of it, they’ll likely go to hell. (Modalism says that the persons in the trinity are parts of God and is apparently very heretical). This seems nuts! Why punish someone infinitely for advocating and professing something that they believe to be true that is, not evil, but just a mistaken metaphysical view?

I remain confused about Catholic heresies.

Ο

The argument from motion proceeds in roughly the following way. First, it argues that change is the actualization of potential. When something changes it goes from a way it can be (a potential) to being actually that way. For instance, when I move my arm, my arm goes from potentially upright to actually upright.

It then claims that to be actual one must be actualized by something else. If A changes B at some time T, either A must be the first thing in the causal chain or A must have been changed by something else. All this gets us to an unchanged changer, an unactualized actualizer. They then say that it can’t have any potentials, and limits are potentials, so it must be perfect and unlimited.

But I don’t get how they derive the bolded sentence. The argument establishes that there’s something that actualizes other things without being previously actualized. But beyond that something has that property, how do they derive anything else? When I read Feser, for instance, it seems that the answer just involves being slippery with language.

For this reason, I don’t think the argument from motion works. However, I’d be curious to hear if I’m missing anything.

Π

I think Pascal’s wager just clearly works. Pretty much all of the objections are bunk. One should only resist it if their credence in God is almost zero. Now, my credence in an infernalist God is almost zero, but my credence in it being possible to get the beatific vision one second faster if I follow the most plausible religion in this life is not.

Ρ

The argument from consciousness to theism is a pretty potent piece of evidence for theism. If God exists, the odds that there would be conscious creatures are very high, for they’re a prerequisite for anything to have value. If God doesn’t exist, however, the odds are very low. There would have to be psychophysical laws and physical structures that give rise to consciousness, neither of which are likely.

Σ

I don’t find the argument from divine hiddenness to be especially problematic. Or, more specifically, I think it is problematic, but it’s the same problem as the problem of evil. Hiddenness is bad because it’s a bad thing, and it’s hard to see why God would allow it. But that’s the same as the problem of evil. If God has a reason to allow the rape of children, people to be tortured, tsunamis to kill lots of people, and agony to be as extreme as it is, it seems reasonably likely that he’d have a reason to remain hidden. Given the counter-argument from hiddenness that I gave earlier, I think that once one conditionalizes on evil, and accounts for the total evidence, hiddenness probably slightly favors theism.

Υ

The two best theist blogs on the internet are Aron Wall’s blog Undivided Looking and Alexander Pruss’s blog (another place to find good theistic articles is under the articles Dustin wrote for Capturing Christianity). One point that Aron Wall has made is that the charge that arguments commit the supposed “God of the gaps fallacy,” is ludicrous. Every time one uses some phenomenon to explain some data, there will be a gap that they argue is best filled in by positing the explanation.

It’s not a fallacious “evolution of the gaps” to infer the existence of evolution on the grounds that it nicely explains why we have goosebumps and there are so many transitional fossils. The same is true of arguments from ignorance. If you don’t know why something happens, but some theory explains it, that will count in favor of the theory.

Φ

I recently read The Man Who Could Fly: St. Joseph of Copertino and the Mystery of Levitation. I left the following review on GoodReads:

I am an atheist. On account of this, I am committed (theologically, one might say) to the view that there are no miracles. Of course, one could always, in theory, think that there are demons or something like that while atheism is true, but that view is quite implausible. My view, according to which miracles do not occur, is not the best explanation of the life of Joseph of Copertino, though, of course, I think it's the best explanation of other evidence.

In this work, Grosso presents the evidence that Joseph flew. He spends quite a lot of time on fairly contorted theological speculation of little interest to me, which is why I give this only four stars. But the evidence that Joseph flew is quite strong--deniers of miracles have to contort themselves explaining it away, while believers in miracles can follow the most direct version of the evidence.
The book describes about 150 eye-witness accounts, many of them sworn under oath all greatly consistent. One tells, for example, of Joseph flying up to the top of a cross after being overcome with a particularly intense religious vision about the cross. The sources describe Joseph's flying as utterly common and banal--none of the relevant sources seemed to doubt that he did this, they only doubt why.

Now, perhaps people were mistaken. But this is a rather hard thing for many hundreds of people to be consistently mistaken about, over the course of 30 years, all across Italy. How does one get confused about whether a person flies? There might be ambiguous cases where a person jumps and seems to linger in the air a second longer than is normal, yet this clearly has a naturalistic explanation. But that's not what happened with Joseph--there are various reports of him flying, flagrantly, in broad daylight. He expressed considerable embarrassment about this fact, and various churches shunted him around, describing him as disruptive.

Christian apologists like to argue, on historical grounds, for the resurrection of Jesus. Yet perhaps they should look to Saint Joseph if they want evidence for a Christian miracle. This is, in my view, quite better attested than the resurrection--the evidence supports more strongly that Joseph rose than that Jesus did so from the dead.

I'm left fairly confused about the case of Joseph. Every natural explanation sounds utterly bufoonish and terribly implausible (some skeptics have claimed that he just jumped up and down and people got confused). In addition, in explaining this, I'm left with the feeling of a pre-Newtonian, adding epicycles to my theory to try to explain some surprising event. Though all theories will have some epicycles :).

My sense is that Our Lady of Zeitoun is another pretty convincing miracle.

Χ

I don’t know anything about physics, so this might be very confused, but hear me out! The standard model has 17 fundamental particles. But if these really are fundamental, then positing that these are fundamental not parsimonious, for it posits randomly 17 things with no deeper explanation. Theism, in contrast, can explain these particles in terms of something more fundamental: a perfect mind.

Ψ

Origin essentialism becomes super wonky if combined with theism. If origin essentialism is true, one’s origin is an essential feature of them. What this means is that they couldn’t have been born elsewhere. Suppose that origin essentialism is true and there’s a machine that makes babies before chucking them into the ocean. Do those babies get a good afterlife, a bad afterlife, or no afterlife? There are three answers, each deeply weird:

1. A good afterlife: on this view, this machine is super fortunate because it’s infinitely good for the babies.

2. No afterlife: this view is weird! If God can make them infinitely well off, why would he just arbitrarily snuff them out after they died as babies.

3. A bad afterlife: this is obviously evil.

You might think that we preexist our birth. This is somewhat plausible, but most origin essentialists can’t affirm it. If you think one is fundamentally an animal, for instance, as the animalists do, then it’s incoherent that we preexist our birth. Dustin has a paper about this.

Ω

I think that evil is strong evidence for theism. If all you knew was that God existed, you wouldn’t expect there to be as much evil as there is. But I think similarly, the vast amounts of good—love, beauty, language, knowledge, achievements, and happiness—is evidence for theism. This is likely conditional on theism, while unlikely conditional on atheism.