I really don’t like the way these sort of arguments are made because it just relies on many facts about things that are really really out there - things we have very little empirical feedback loops to show that our reasoning isn’t making any crucial errors.
I’m skeptical of peoples’ (especially philosophers historically) to make armchair questions about the nature of reality.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t take answers to these questions seriously and whatever, but for some reason it seems like you are taking them significantly more seriously than I am. Isn’t it possible that, given where we are in science, we just don’t have the capabilities to answer these questions? I mean these seem like, irrespective of whether they are related to the concept of god, the hardest questions humans can possible answer.
I guess this is more of a methodology point, but I would like to know more about why you think you take arguments like these so seriously. To me, it seems similar (not the same, obviously) to the Greeks talking about what the world is made out of and other facts like that.
There are a few things that, given my current understanding (perhaps I will reach you’re level of pure enlightenment one day), I just disagree with - that we have access objective facts, psycho physical harmony seems to not apply to type a or type b physicalists, etc.
Psychophysical harmony does affect type B physicalism because it is an argument for dualism + theism once you submit that there is a conceptual gap between mental and physical (which type B physicalists do).
I read the original paper on why the authors thought this was the case but didn’t find it convincing then. Why do you think there being a conceptual gap is gonna make psychophysical harmony still an issue?
If there’s an epistemic gap, then there’s no reason to privilege harmony among the epistemic possibilities a priori. So on ~theism, the epistemic a priori probability of harmony being a necessary truth (as stipulated by Type B) is very low.
I think it’s analogous to the idea for the fine-tuning argument that just stipulating that the laws/constants are necessary truths doesn’t work (“Made by God” counter-objection). It explains the data, but has low (epistemic) prior probability.
Consider the fact that water is H2O. A priori there is no reason to priviledge this hypothesis compared to water being literally anything else. Does it mean that we should be extremely surprised that water turned out to be H2O and demand some kind of explanation? Should we, therefore, priviledge the hypothesis that universe is created by Poseidon - a god who really cares that water is H2O instead of something else?
While I think there might be some a priori considerations for ideally conceiving water (probably isn’t too complicated, probably doesn’t include rare/unstable isotopes etc.) I think your main point about the extremely low a priori probability of water’s being H2O and not, say, H2O2 is right.
The disanalogy is that psychological harmony is an extremely great good, while water’s being H2O as opposed to XYZ doesn’t seem to be. So in epistemic a priori possibility space, we didn’t get lucky that water is H2O, because if it was XYZ that would have been fine too. If we someone how found out that in possible worlds with “twin waters” composed of ~H2O, happiness is impossible or something, then I think that would be reason to believe in God.
So while the data supports the existence of an H2O-loving god relative to non-H2O-loving gods, I think the prior probability for a god that loves H2O is very low (much lower than for a god that wants humans to have psychophysical harmony).
I think some of these arguments are fine as a way to probabilistically reason about the nature of our existence, but I agree that they shouldn't be taken super seriously/conclusively.
It seems like whether or not God exists is a question inherently un-answerable by human beings, and these are just our best guesses.
I agree that we basically have no facts about it. I think we should believe from that/ act upon that these things aren’t real because of simplicity - credence is obviously going to be a harder question.
Your point about lack of feedback is important. Versions of these same arguments have been made for centuries, and some people are still making them, despite their being no more convincing now vs a thousand years ago.
Yea. I totally agree, and I do think the feedback loops is the most importnat part. Despite being interested in going into philosophy, it’s my largest contention with the field as a whole.
A did a lot of philosophy in undergrad too (sort of, went to St John's college which is a Great Books school so not typical philosophy undergrad). I think there's something valuable in having reality be able to push back against your ideas, to be able to say "you're doing it wrong". In philosophy, that's difficult because it's so abstract and things aren't typically tested. Maybe your colleagues will tell you you're off base, but that's just their opinion anyway and maybe they're wrong, not you. It's harder to repeatedly give old, tired, bad arguments when it comes to more concrete things, like when the rocket you built falls out of the sky, or when a GM beats you in chess.
I think the problem with this class of argument is you're just fine-tuning God. For instance, if you told me "God is a perfect mind, by which I mean God is the metaphysical instantiation of the set of all true propositions" then maybe that is kind of simple and you could make a case that it's a virtuous theory.
But if you have to keep adding on "and He has good reasons for behaving like He doesn't exist" etc etc etc then you really don't have a simple or virtuous theory anymore. A much simpler, more elegant theory is "That's just the way it is." I really don't see what this kind of conception of God does for you that is more theoretically elegant or powerful than "It is what it is."
I still can't understand the theist position that naturalism not having a plausible explanation for something today means the theory is destroyed by hypotheticals like gods.
When you list 10 things that you consider evidence for naturalism and say, "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," this is just a terrible way to reason about probability. It's the same way Conservapedia argues. (see here, for example: https://www.conservapedia.com/Counterexamples_to_Evolution)
If you really want to make a cumulative case in this way, you have got to consider the evidence for the other side and at least list the Bayes factors from both sources, rather than only listing those of the evidence for your own side of the case. Instead, you make the evidence against theism seem much weaker than it really is by positing as your prior hypothesis a gerrymandered explanation meant to get around it and acting like it can't be *that* unlikely, and you make the argument for your own side look stronger by listing it as a bunch of separate points that you claim are independent when they're clearly not (3 of your points are all about psychophysical laws, 6 are about physical laws, and multiple are practically just restatements of the exact same thing). You also state philosophically dubious claims as if they're just known facts that can be stated as definitive evidence for your theory.
This is not very convincing to me because you're essentially just saying, "If we ignore all the evidence for naturalism and only consider the evidence for theism, then theism comes out looking really likely!" But you can't ignore the evidence for naturalism by absorbing it into your conception of God - that just makes the theistic hypothesis much less likely. You seem to think that the prior probability of a God who rigs everything in the universe to almost always make naturalism look true (except, of course, for the things you think are evidence against naturalism) is only a little lower than the prior probability of God simpliciter. I think it is massively lower. I think that the difference is comparable to the difference in prior probability between "All emeralds are green" and "All emeralds are grue," or the difference between the prior probability of the external world existing and an Evil Demon giving us the sensation of a fake external world (funnily enough, the Evil Demon hypothesis could also explain all the evidence against naturalism). It is, after all, the same type of hypothesis as those two - one that posits that even though the world looks a certain way, it's actually because things are for some reason set up to look that way in the cases we observe despite not really being that way.
Part of this, perhaps, is that I don't find the "indifference theodicy" remotely plausible. I think it has a prior probability way less than 1 in 100,000. Like all theodicies, it totally understates what you can do with omnipotence: God could still create a lawful, apparently naturalistic universe that is way better than this one. And it also really overstates that value of living in a naturalistic world compared to living in a world where horrible things don't regularly happen.
You also overestimate the value of having a bad explanation compared to having no explanation at all. It's not that much of a knock against a theory if it doesn't explain something, unless the theory is meant to be really specific and explain that particular thing. "Naturalism" is about as unspecific as theories get. Really, it's not even a theory, just a broad class of theories - that's part of why its prior is so high. So naturalism alone doesn't have an explanation for much - we shouldn't expect it to. The fact that we haven't discovered an explanation for certain things yet is not strong evidence that a specific low-prior-probability theory is the explanation.
As I said, lumping all the evidence for naturalism into your hypothesis doesn't erase the evidence. There's no evidence for the existence of the external world over the Evil Demon, but the Evil Demon hypothesis can explain all of the weird stuff about the external world that we currently have no explanation for. Does that constitute a good argument for the Evil Demon?
No because the evil demon hypothesis makes it unlikely the world would look as it does—being stable, having other people, and so on. And an evil demon that does weird random glitches is an even worse explanation—not to mention evil demons are super complicated and arbitrary. None of that’s true of God—we can motivate him putting us in an indifferent world and just that one posit explains everything.
> No because the evil demon hypothesis makes it unlikely the world would look as it does
ED can explain this perfectly well. The ED wants us to believe we're in a normal, stable world, and so on. That's part of the deception.
> And an evil demon that does weird random glitches is an even worse explanation
Not if those "weird, random glitches" are the things you listed as arguments for God. After all, all of those "glitches" are just things that are necessary for us to live in (or appear to live in) a real, physical world.
> not to mention evil demons are super complicated and arbitrary.
Not any more complicated and arbitrary than "God + indifference hypothesis," which I think is ridiculously intrinsically implausible. For ED, we just have to posit one other mind and a motivation to deceive us into believing we live in a real, physical world. We don't have any tension between the ED's motives and the actual world we observe, whereas we do for God.
Do miracle claims count as evidence against this view? I was pretty convinced from your account (of Grosso's account) that this Joseph of Cupertino guy really flew. But why would God spoil the indifference of the universe just so some guy can fly?
Of course, the naturalist can't exactly cite this as evidence against the theist, because if the naturalist accepts miracle claims, his view is 100% cooked!
More generally though, there seems to be a tension between positing that God wants us to be in a broadly indifferent universe, but also claiming there's lots of super-strong evidence for God.
> But why would God spoil the indifference of the universe just so some guy can fly?
Great point, this is precisely why I have trouble incorporating witnessed and documented miracles into my reasoning about the world. And if, presumably, the "purpose" of these miracles is to notify humans of God's existence, why don't they happen more frequently?
>And if, presumably, the "purpose" of these miracles is to notify humans of God's existence, why don't they happen more frequently?
Presumably that is not their primary purpose, or else they would happen more frequently. If God exists we know he's the type of God that doesn't want to just prove to everyone that he exists. If he was, he'd just speak directly to every human in a way that is undeniable. Since he's not doing that, we should presume that if God is doing miracles the purpose of that miracle is not to let everybody know there is a God.
Sure, I just don't see any other purpose of such miracles, especially if you accept the theodicy in this article which says God has put us in a totally indifferent world.
As a Christian, I could imagine other purposes for such a miracle; but as a Christian I don't particularly hold to the indifferent world theodicy. I'm not strictly opposed, but the Christian God is a God who both made a universe that indifferently runs off specific rules, and is also a God who intervenes directly into that world with a plan in mind. The most notable intervention is, of course, the incarnation as Jesus. For a Christian every intervention God makes into the world is there for a purpose; to steer events in one way and not another. It may be that God made that monk fly because the ripple effects of him doing so, and of how it changed and affected everyone who knew him and saw him flying, were necessary to carry out God's ultimate purpose. Who knows how far the butterfly effect might go: you make one monk fly, and 1,000 years later you prevent atomic war.
C. S. Lewis wrote a bit about this problem, about miracles seeming arbitrary, in his book "Miracles":
"If we had grasped as a whole the innermost spirit of that ‘work which God worketh from the beginning to the end’, and of which Nature is only a part and perhaps a small part, we should be in a position to decide whether miraculous interruptions of Nature’s history were mere improprieties unworthy of the Great Workman or expressions of the truest and deepest unity in His total work. In fact, of course, we are in no such position.
...
"Now there is no doubt that a great deal of the modern objection to miracles is based on the suspicion that they are marvels of the wrong sort; that a story of a certain kind (Nature) is arbitrarily interfered with, to get the characters out of a difficulty, by events that do not really belong to that kind of story. Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author’s control.
"The reader may set his mind at rest. If I thought miracles were like that, I should not believe in them. If they have occurred, they have occurred because they are the very thing this universal story is about. They are not exceptions (however rarely they occur) not irrelevancies. They are precisely those chapters in this great story on which the plot turns. Death and Resurrection are what the story is about; and had we but eyes to see it, this has been hinted on every page, met us, in some disguise, at every turn, and even been muttered in conversations between such minor characters (if they are minor characters) as the vegetables. If you have hitherto disbelieved in miracles, it is worth pausing a moment to consider whether this is not chiefly because you thought you had discovered what the story was really about?—that atoms, and time and space and economics and politics were the main plot? And is it certain you were right? It is easy to make mistakes in such matters. A friend of mine wrote a play in which the main idea was that the hero had a pathological horror of trees and a mania for cutting them down. But naturally other things came in as well; there was some sort of love story mixed up with it. And the trees killed the man in the end. When my friend had written it, he sent it an older man to criticise. It came back with the comment, ‘Not bad. But I’d cut out those bits of padding about the trees’. To be sure, God might be expected to make a better story than my friend. But it is a very long story, with a complicated plot; and we are not, perhaps, very attentive readers."
I find these lines of argument intriguing, but not convincing. You're making bayesian arguments about statistical probability about a sample size of 1, but even that assumes that we understand enough about the universe to include it in the sample of what we are talking about.
Then in this post, you've extended probabilistic arguments so far as to pontificate about a higher being's motivation relating to morality - it's such an extreme reach that it's not convincing to me. It's giving philosophical arguments a sheen of scientific rigor that they don't earn. The best example of this is when you argued about the floating guy, I don't remember the specifics, but the guy who hundreds of people said floated. That's basically what I'm talking about.
I think it's an interesting line of inquiry, and if someone is extremely confident in atheism then they have a lot to respond to.
I might be reading this completely wrong — you’re a real grown up philosopher while I’m a dudebro who works at a grocery store — but is this saying that theism is experientially identical to naturalism? If God put us in a cold, indifferent universe and does not interfere with its laws, then we are, as a matter of human experience, still living as if there was no God. The historic claims of religion (like Christianity) are still untrue, and God is just a matter of philosophical inquiry but of no meaningful, personal significance.
Deism was pretty popular among intellectuals during the Enlightenment, FWIW. Such as with Voltaire, who wrote in book *Candide* in part to critique traditional conceptions of theism.
Wouldn't God have to rig the game in more ways than just giving humans certain rational faculties? For instance, if the universe was truly indifferent, we wouldn't expect it to be finely tuned in its physical and psycho physical constants and so on, no? Moreover, we wouldn't expect it to display beauty, or give rise to consciousness, etc. So wouldn't your theodicy then amount to "God has reason to make the world completely indifferent except for in all the ways in which theistic arguments tell us it isn't?"
Good post, I have some disagreements with the psychophysical harmony argument though.
1. It seems to be in opposition to the SIA argument you've used in the past. If god creates all infinite / all possible people, then most of them will be (way more) unharmonious, and thus god can no longer be used to explain the striking odds that we find ourselves to be harmonious.
2. I'll admit I've found the psychophysical harmony argument to be a lot better than I initially thought, but I come away thinking it supports liberal naturalism, directed naturalism, or axiarchism, even type A physicalism much better. Under these views, psychophysical harmony seems a lot simpler to explain. Naturalism Next's response to you was also pretty convincing.
All the evidence for theism you listed is just evidence for a creator, not a perfectly good creator. It seems more likely that whatever being created the universe isn't perfectly good, and possibly has some sort of Eldritch moral system that we can't comprehend.
A God who places you in an indifferent universe sounds a bit like a deadbeat dad, or worse, a sperm donor. Why would I care whether such a person exists? If I learned that my sperm donor died before I located them, the rational response would be mild regret, and if necessary, the quest for a less indifferent father-substitute.
You should discuss your theodicy with John Depoe on your YouTube channel. Your theodicy sounds a lot like his positive skeptical theism and I think it would be a nice discussion. It would also give you a chance to test it and see if Dr Depoe can possibly challenge it.
I really don’t like the way these sort of arguments are made because it just relies on many facts about things that are really really out there - things we have very little empirical feedback loops to show that our reasoning isn’t making any crucial errors.
I’m skeptical of peoples’ (especially philosophers historically) to make armchair questions about the nature of reality.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t take answers to these questions seriously and whatever, but for some reason it seems like you are taking them significantly more seriously than I am. Isn’t it possible that, given where we are in science, we just don’t have the capabilities to answer these questions? I mean these seem like, irrespective of whether they are related to the concept of god, the hardest questions humans can possible answer.
I guess this is more of a methodology point, but I would like to know more about why you think you take arguments like these so seriously. To me, it seems similar (not the same, obviously) to the Greeks talking about what the world is made out of and other facts like that.
There are a few things that, given my current understanding (perhaps I will reach you’re level of pure enlightenment one day), I just disagree with - that we have access objective facts, psycho physical harmony seems to not apply to type a or type b physicalists, etc.
Psychophysical harmony does affect type B physicalism because it is an argument for dualism + theism once you submit that there is a conceptual gap between mental and physical (which type B physicalists do).
I read the original paper on why the authors thought this was the case but didn’t find it convincing then. Why do you think there being a conceptual gap is gonna make psychophysical harmony still an issue?
If there’s an epistemic gap, then there’s no reason to privilege harmony among the epistemic possibilities a priori. So on ~theism, the epistemic a priori probability of harmony being a necessary truth (as stipulated by Type B) is very low.
I think it’s analogous to the idea for the fine-tuning argument that just stipulating that the laws/constants are necessary truths doesn’t work (“Made by God” counter-objection). It explains the data, but has low (epistemic) prior probability.
Doesn't it prove too much?
Consider the fact that water is H2O. A priori there is no reason to priviledge this hypothesis compared to water being literally anything else. Does it mean that we should be extremely surprised that water turned out to be H2O and demand some kind of explanation? Should we, therefore, priviledge the hypothesis that universe is created by Poseidon - a god who really cares that water is H2O instead of something else?
While I think there might be some a priori considerations for ideally conceiving water (probably isn’t too complicated, probably doesn’t include rare/unstable isotopes etc.) I think your main point about the extremely low a priori probability of water’s being H2O and not, say, H2O2 is right.
The disanalogy is that psychological harmony is an extremely great good, while water’s being H2O as opposed to XYZ doesn’t seem to be. So in epistemic a priori possibility space, we didn’t get lucky that water is H2O, because if it was XYZ that would have been fine too. If we someone how found out that in possible worlds with “twin waters” composed of ~H2O, happiness is impossible or something, then I think that would be reason to believe in God.
So while the data supports the existence of an H2O-loving god relative to non-H2O-loving gods, I think the prior probability for a god that loves H2O is very low (much lower than for a god that wants humans to have psychophysical harmony).
It's important because there are huge downstream implications for the nature of right and wrong.
I think some of these arguments are fine as a way to probabilistically reason about the nature of our existence, but I agree that they shouldn't be taken super seriously/conclusively.
It seems like whether or not God exists is a question inherently un-answerable by human beings, and these are just our best guesses.
I agree that we basically have no facts about it. I think we should believe from that/ act upon that these things aren’t real because of simplicity - credence is obviously going to be a harder question.
Your point about lack of feedback is important. Versions of these same arguments have been made for centuries, and some people are still making them, despite their being no more convincing now vs a thousand years ago.
Yea. I totally agree, and I do think the feedback loops is the most importnat part. Despite being interested in going into philosophy, it’s my largest contention with the field as a whole.
A did a lot of philosophy in undergrad too (sort of, went to St John's college which is a Great Books school so not typical philosophy undergrad). I think there's something valuable in having reality be able to push back against your ideas, to be able to say "you're doing it wrong". In philosophy, that's difficult because it's so abstract and things aren't typically tested. Maybe your colleagues will tell you you're off base, but that's just their opinion anyway and maybe they're wrong, not you. It's harder to repeatedly give old, tired, bad arguments when it comes to more concrete things, like when the rocket you built falls out of the sky, or when a GM beats you in chess.
I think the problem with this class of argument is you're just fine-tuning God. For instance, if you told me "God is a perfect mind, by which I mean God is the metaphysical instantiation of the set of all true propositions" then maybe that is kind of simple and you could make a case that it's a virtuous theory.
But if you have to keep adding on "and He has good reasons for behaving like He doesn't exist" etc etc etc then you really don't have a simple or virtuous theory anymore. A much simpler, more elegant theory is "That's just the way it is." I really don't see what this kind of conception of God does for you that is more theoretically elegant or powerful than "It is what it is."
I still can't understand the theist position that naturalism not having a plausible explanation for something today means the theory is destroyed by hypotheticals like gods.
It's called "The God of the Gaps Argument", but reversed.
When you list 10 things that you consider evidence for naturalism and say, "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," this is just a terrible way to reason about probability. It's the same way Conservapedia argues. (see here, for example: https://www.conservapedia.com/Counterexamples_to_Evolution)
If you really want to make a cumulative case in this way, you have got to consider the evidence for the other side and at least list the Bayes factors from both sources, rather than only listing those of the evidence for your own side of the case. Instead, you make the evidence against theism seem much weaker than it really is by positing as your prior hypothesis a gerrymandered explanation meant to get around it and acting like it can't be *that* unlikely, and you make the argument for your own side look stronger by listing it as a bunch of separate points that you claim are independent when they're clearly not (3 of your points are all about psychophysical laws, 6 are about physical laws, and multiple are practically just restatements of the exact same thing). You also state philosophically dubious claims as if they're just known facts that can be stated as definitive evidence for your theory.
This is not very convincing to me because you're essentially just saying, "If we ignore all the evidence for naturalism and only consider the evidence for theism, then theism comes out looking really likely!" But you can't ignore the evidence for naturalism by absorbing it into your conception of God - that just makes the theistic hypothesis much less likely. You seem to think that the prior probability of a God who rigs everything in the universe to almost always make naturalism look true (except, of course, for the things you think are evidence against naturalism) is only a little lower than the prior probability of God simpliciter. I think it is massively lower. I think that the difference is comparable to the difference in prior probability between "All emeralds are green" and "All emeralds are grue," or the difference between the prior probability of the external world existing and an Evil Demon giving us the sensation of a fake external world (funnily enough, the Evil Demon hypothesis could also explain all the evidence against naturalism). It is, after all, the same type of hypothesis as those two - one that posits that even though the world looks a certain way, it's actually because things are for some reason set up to look that way in the cases we observe despite not really being that way.
Part of this, perhaps, is that I don't find the "indifference theodicy" remotely plausible. I think it has a prior probability way less than 1 in 100,000. Like all theodicies, it totally understates what you can do with omnipotence: God could still create a lawful, apparently naturalistic universe that is way better than this one. And it also really overstates that value of living in a naturalistic world compared to living in a world where horrible things don't regularly happen.
You also overestimate the value of having a bad explanation compared to having no explanation at all. It's not that much of a knock against a theory if it doesn't explain something, unless the theory is meant to be really specific and explain that particular thing. "Naturalism" is about as unspecific as theories get. Really, it's not even a theory, just a broad class of theories - that's part of why its prior is so high. So naturalism alone doesn't have an explanation for much - we shouldn't expect it to. The fact that we haven't discovered an explanation for certain things yet is not strong evidence that a specific low-prior-probability theory is the explanation.
But there is no evidence for naturalism over theism plus that theodicy/
As I said, lumping all the evidence for naturalism into your hypothesis doesn't erase the evidence. There's no evidence for the existence of the external world over the Evil Demon, but the Evil Demon hypothesis can explain all of the weird stuff about the external world that we currently have no explanation for. Does that constitute a good argument for the Evil Demon?
No because the evil demon hypothesis makes it unlikely the world would look as it does—being stable, having other people, and so on. And an evil demon that does weird random glitches is an even worse explanation—not to mention evil demons are super complicated and arbitrary. None of that’s true of God—we can motivate him putting us in an indifferent world and just that one posit explains everything.
> No because the evil demon hypothesis makes it unlikely the world would look as it does
ED can explain this perfectly well. The ED wants us to believe we're in a normal, stable world, and so on. That's part of the deception.
> And an evil demon that does weird random glitches is an even worse explanation
Not if those "weird, random glitches" are the things you listed as arguments for God. After all, all of those "glitches" are just things that are necessary for us to live in (or appear to live in) a real, physical world.
> not to mention evil demons are super complicated and arbitrary.
Not any more complicated and arbitrary than "God + indifference hypothesis," which I think is ridiculously intrinsically implausible. For ED, we just have to posit one other mind and a motivation to deceive us into believing we live in a real, physical world. We don't have any tension between the ED's motives and the actual world we observe, whereas we do for God.
Right sure then the demon explains the data but has a low prior an no significant explanatory advantage.
The stuff I listed for God isn't weird glitches but basic features of the world--e.g. laws, consciousness, etc.
Want to discuss this over discord at some point? My discord is omnizoid.
But the demon would explain those same things too. So whatever explanatory advantage God has the demon also has.
Do miracle claims count as evidence against this view? I was pretty convinced from your account (of Grosso's account) that this Joseph of Cupertino guy really flew. But why would God spoil the indifference of the universe just so some guy can fly?
Of course, the naturalist can't exactly cite this as evidence against the theist, because if the naturalist accepts miracle claims, his view is 100% cooked!
More generally though, there seems to be a tension between positing that God wants us to be in a broadly indifferent universe, but also claiming there's lots of super-strong evidence for God.
> But why would God spoil the indifference of the universe just so some guy can fly?
Great point, this is precisely why I have trouble incorporating witnessed and documented miracles into my reasoning about the world. And if, presumably, the "purpose" of these miracles is to notify humans of God's existence, why don't they happen more frequently?
>And if, presumably, the "purpose" of these miracles is to notify humans of God's existence, why don't they happen more frequently?
Presumably that is not their primary purpose, or else they would happen more frequently. If God exists we know he's the type of God that doesn't want to just prove to everyone that he exists. If he was, he'd just speak directly to every human in a way that is undeniable. Since he's not doing that, we should presume that if God is doing miracles the purpose of that miracle is not to let everybody know there is a God.
Sure, I just don't see any other purpose of such miracles, especially if you accept the theodicy in this article which says God has put us in a totally indifferent world.
As a Christian, I could imagine other purposes for such a miracle; but as a Christian I don't particularly hold to the indifferent world theodicy. I'm not strictly opposed, but the Christian God is a God who both made a universe that indifferently runs off specific rules, and is also a God who intervenes directly into that world with a plan in mind. The most notable intervention is, of course, the incarnation as Jesus. For a Christian every intervention God makes into the world is there for a purpose; to steer events in one way and not another. It may be that God made that monk fly because the ripple effects of him doing so, and of how it changed and affected everyone who knew him and saw him flying, were necessary to carry out God's ultimate purpose. Who knows how far the butterfly effect might go: you make one monk fly, and 1,000 years later you prevent atomic war.
C. S. Lewis wrote a bit about this problem, about miracles seeming arbitrary, in his book "Miracles":
"If we had grasped as a whole the innermost spirit of that ‘work which God worketh from the beginning to the end’, and of which Nature is only a part and perhaps a small part, we should be in a position to decide whether miraculous interruptions of Nature’s history were mere improprieties unworthy of the Great Workman or expressions of the truest and deepest unity in His total work. In fact, of course, we are in no such position.
...
"Now there is no doubt that a great deal of the modern objection to miracles is based on the suspicion that they are marvels of the wrong sort; that a story of a certain kind (Nature) is arbitrarily interfered with, to get the characters out of a difficulty, by events that do not really belong to that kind of story. Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author’s control.
"The reader may set his mind at rest. If I thought miracles were like that, I should not believe in them. If they have occurred, they have occurred because they are the very thing this universal story is about. They are not exceptions (however rarely they occur) not irrelevancies. They are precisely those chapters in this great story on which the plot turns. Death and Resurrection are what the story is about; and had we but eyes to see it, this has been hinted on every page, met us, in some disguise, at every turn, and even been muttered in conversations between such minor characters (if they are minor characters) as the vegetables. If you have hitherto disbelieved in miracles, it is worth pausing a moment to consider whether this is not chiefly because you thought you had discovered what the story was really about?—that atoms, and time and space and economics and politics were the main plot? And is it certain you were right? It is easy to make mistakes in such matters. A friend of mine wrote a play in which the main idea was that the hero had a pathological horror of trees and a mania for cutting them down. But naturally other things came in as well; there was some sort of love story mixed up with it. And the trees killed the man in the end. When my friend had written it, he sent it an older man to criticise. It came back with the comment, ‘Not bad. But I’d cut out those bits of padding about the trees’. To be sure, God might be expected to make a better story than my friend. But it is a very long story, with a complicated plot; and we are not, perhaps, very attentive readers."
I find these lines of argument intriguing, but not convincing. You're making bayesian arguments about statistical probability about a sample size of 1, but even that assumes that we understand enough about the universe to include it in the sample of what we are talking about.
Then in this post, you've extended probabilistic arguments so far as to pontificate about a higher being's motivation relating to morality - it's such an extreme reach that it's not convincing to me. It's giving philosophical arguments a sheen of scientific rigor that they don't earn. The best example of this is when you argued about the floating guy, I don't remember the specifics, but the guy who hundreds of people said floated. That's basically what I'm talking about.
I think it's an interesting line of inquiry, and if someone is extremely confident in atheism then they have a lot to respond to.
I might be reading this completely wrong — you’re a real grown up philosopher while I’m a dudebro who works at a grocery store — but is this saying that theism is experientially identical to naturalism? If God put us in a cold, indifferent universe and does not interfere with its laws, then we are, as a matter of human experience, still living as if there was no God. The historic claims of religion (like Christianity) are still untrue, and God is just a matter of philosophical inquiry but of no meaningful, personal significance.
Theism would then be akin to Deism, no?
I guess?
Deism was pretty popular among intellectuals during the Enlightenment, FWIW. Such as with Voltaire, who wrote in book *Candide* in part to critique traditional conceptions of theism.
I really need to read Candide. I tried in highschool but was too stupid then.
You needed to do so if you wanted to pass the test about it. At least you did in my own high school.
And Yes, it’s an excellent book and a relatively short one. I would thus highly advise you to read it!
I shall!
Making up an answer doesn’t help to understand. It just feels like knowledge.
Wouldn't God have to rig the game in more ways than just giving humans certain rational faculties? For instance, if the universe was truly indifferent, we wouldn't expect it to be finely tuned in its physical and psycho physical constants and so on, no? Moreover, we wouldn't expect it to display beauty, or give rise to consciousness, etc. So wouldn't your theodicy then amount to "God has reason to make the world completely indifferent except for in all the ways in which theistic arguments tell us it isn't?"
Good post, I have some disagreements with the psychophysical harmony argument though.
1. It seems to be in opposition to the SIA argument you've used in the past. If god creates all infinite / all possible people, then most of them will be (way more) unharmonious, and thus god can no longer be used to explain the striking odds that we find ourselves to be harmonious.
2. I'll admit I've found the psychophysical harmony argument to be a lot better than I initially thought, but I come away thinking it supports liberal naturalism, directed naturalism, or axiarchism, even type A physicalism much better. Under these views, psychophysical harmony seems a lot simpler to explain. Naturalism Next's response to you was also pretty convincing.
All the evidence for theism you listed is just evidence for a creator, not a perfectly good creator. It seems more likely that whatever being created the universe isn't perfectly good, and possibly has some sort of Eldritch moral system that we can't comprehend.
Yes most religions assume some better afterlife to explain why their deity is not an indifferent asshole.
A God who places you in an indifferent universe sounds a bit like a deadbeat dad, or worse, a sperm donor. Why would I care whether such a person exists? If I learned that my sperm donor died before I located them, the rational response would be mild regret, and if necessary, the quest for a less indifferent father-substitute.
> 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.
Strong evidence that "explain everything" is a useless standard here.
You should discuss your theodicy with John Depoe on your YouTube channel. Your theodicy sounds a lot like his positive skeptical theism and I think it would be a nice discussion. It would also give you a chance to test it and see if Dr Depoe can possibly challenge it.
You've covered atheism, yes.
But I fail to see any mention of acausal/retro-theism.
QED, your argument is invalid!!!
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Do you not worry that your HoI theodicy shares the same “YEC” problem you attribute to Naturalism (as in your recent interview w/ Pat Flynn)?