What Does The Atheist Have Left?

...after the hypothesis of indifference theodicy torpedoes all their evidence!

There’s a common, if quite useless, kind of discussion in philosophy of religion that one will encounter if they spend any time on the internet. The atheist will start by raising the problem of evil, to which the theist will respond by noting that to have evil, you need a bunch of other stuff like minds, a fine-tuned universe, and psychophysical harmony, each of which arguably favor theism, to which the atheist will respond by claiming that each of these things understate the evidence—claiming, for instance, that a universe that’s almost entirely hostile to life isn’t finely-tuned. This never gets anywhere because one never considers the data points individually—they just ping-pong back and forth between different arguments on both sides.

Rather than going data point by data point, one should consider the most plausible versions of the various worldviews as a whole. Constantly responding to every bit of evidence by pointing to a few tangential bits of evidence that you think favor your side isn’t productive. Fortunately, I think that when we’re specific about the theistic hypothesis under consideration, things get much less messy and jumbled, and the overwhelming superiority of the theistic hypothesis becomes clear.

The theistic hypothesis that I aim to defend is one that I’ve discussed on various occasions. On this picture, God has a moral reason to put us in a broadly indifferent universe. Doing so, for the reasons described in the linked post, could serve great goods—spending time in a universe that is run according to natural laws rather than directly providentially ordered by God could serve various great goods, just as spending time apart from a loved one might strengthen one’s relationship with that loved one as one comes to appreciate the value of their relationship. This account is quite like the one given in Genesis 6:3, where God says “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever.”

I don’t claim that this theory is intrinsically very likely. I wouldn’t expect God to place us in such a universe—I’d expect he’d probably put us somewhere nearer to paradise. But it’s not terribly improbable, not totally out of the question. It’s the sort of thing we’d expect God probably not to do, but that he definitely could do.

I will need to make one more stipulation in order for the hypothesis to be able to accommodate much of the theistic data. It’s that God is willing to rig things to make sure that we can understand the broad truths of the world—truths about morality, theology, and science. This is, while not guaranteed, not incredibly unlikely. It’s certainly not beyond the question that God could have a reason for doing this.

So okay, that’s the theistic hypothesis under consideration. I claim that this theodicy completely takes the wind out of naturalism and that there is nothing favoring naturalism over theism combined with this theodicy. You see, once God wants to place us in an indifferent universe—a universe of predictable natural laws that he doesn’t interfere with (except perhaps on rare occasions to secure extremely valuable goods, such as, if Christianity is right, the salvation of all people)—the theistic hypothesis makes almost the same predictions as naturalism.

It predicts that God would rig things so that the universe has conscious agents who can understand the broad kinds of facts about our universe. Beyond predicting that, it doesn’t diverge from the predictions of naturalism. Given that it makes mostly the same predictions as naturalism, for it’s essentially the hypothesis that God would want us to spend some time in a naturalistic universe, there is not a single fact—and I truly mean this—that naturalism explains better than this theory. The naturalist has nothing to prefer it over this version of theism. All the facts naturalists appeal to—evil, the biological distribution of pleasure and pain, suffering moral patients, the scale of the universe—are explained just as well by this theory as by naturalism.

Now, I’ll admit: the theory suffers a bit from its low prior probability—it requires that God exists (though that has a high prior, as I’ve argued), is motivated to place us in an indifferent world, and wants to equip us with knowledge about the broad contours of the world. This is a general feature of specific theories—they explain the evidence better, but have lower prior probabilities. Still, I don’t think the stipulations are that unlikely, and they have various independent motivations, so the overall theory has a small but nontrivial prior probability.

But the theory absolutely crushes naturalism in terms of its explanation of the world. I’ve listed much more in this article that it explains, but just to briefly summarize a few of the things:

1. Why there is a physical universe (you need that for naturally arising agents).

2. Why there are laws.

3. Why the laws apply to the universe.

4. Why they produce interesting structures.

5. Why there’s fine-tuning.

6. Why there are psychophysical laws.

7. Why the psychophysical laws apply to the stuff that exists (why there happens to be both brains and the fact that brains produce consciousness).

8. Why there’s psychophysical harmony (you need harmony for agents that can know about the broad features of our world, or to have agents of any sort).

9. Why we have access to the non-natural facts (that’s part of having a broad understanding of the world).

10. Why the bits of the physical world interact.

Even if we assume (quite conservatively, in my view) that on naturalism these things are independent and each have a probability of 1/4, and that the prior probability of theism+the hypothesis of indifference theodicy is 1 in 100,000, theism comes up about 10 times likelier than naturalism. When we count the extra evidence and use more realistic numbers it might get even more extreme.

The problem for the naturalist is that the theist has a good explanation of the world and they do not. By just adding two stipulations to the hypothesis that there’s a God, we can easily explain everything in our world as well as naturalism. In contrast, the naturalist has no comparable explanation of the numerous things that theism explains well. They have no single feature that they can add to naturalism to explain the dozens of facts explained by theism. Naturalism has to take a beating, over and over again, from every new piece of evidence.

Imagine we see some good chess player make a blunder. If we see that the rest of his moves are really good, it makes sense to think that he’s a good player who just made a mistake. The naturalist is like one who concludes that the person is a terrible chess player—and then is left desperately scrambling when they try to explain good move after good move. By adding the auxiliary hypothesis that the good chess player made a blunder, we can explain all the relevant data—similarly, when we add the auxiliary hypothesis that I’ve described, we can explain all the relevant data. Theism, therefore, quite thoroughly crushes naturalism, for the best version of naturalism doesn’t really have anything going for it over theism. Theism can successfully explain the world, naturalism can’t.