>However, this attitude began to give way, ever so slowly, once I began teaching philosophy myself, during graduate school.
You’re not alone in that: both Edward Feser and C.S. Lewis became theists in part because they started teaching philosophy and found the old arguments stronger than they had supposed.
Don’t you agree that if you eventually adopt the view that God exists of metaphysical necessity — which has been the overwhelmingly dominant view among monotheists — then you’ll have to agree that the ontological argument is *sound* (even if not persuasive or dialectically effective)?
Certainly one who thinks God is necessary will have to accept that the modal ontological argument is sound. But that tells us nothing about whether it's dialectically effective.
I think you’re seriously overstating the dialectical inefficacy here: the pigs parody is obviously absurd, whereas the ontological argument can inspire the kind of reflection that can change a skeptical mind. I speak from experience, since it was the argument that first started to move me away from atheism. But a much more impressive example is that of Yujin Nagasawa, who literally became a theist due to the modal ontological argument. I think a view which entails that Nagasawa’s conversion to theism was irrational is prima facie implausible.
I thought Nagasawa's book on the ontological argument was massively in error. Certainly one can be convinced of the ontological argument if they're wrong about its force.
I think your take on this has the straightforward entailment that it was irrational of Nagasawa to become a theist as a result of the modal ontological argument (his one stated reason, initially). I think that’s a highly implausible entailment — and reason to reexamine your conviction about the argument’s awfulness.
Defenders of the ontological argument — many of whom have been well established non-dopes (like Anselm, Descartes, Goedel, and Plantinga) — have never held that God exists *by definition*. Rather, they’ve held that honest conceptual analysis reveals that the concept of God *just is* the concept of a being that exists necessarily, so that to wonder whether God exists is analogous to wondering whether there are any married bachelors. Making up some notion and then tacking necessary existence onto it is not analogous to what any proponent of the ontological argument has ever done.
It's almost always a mistake to talk about "the" ontological argument. There's Anselm's argument, Descartes' argument, Hartshorne's argument, Goedel's argument, Plantinga's argument, and others that I've forgotten, I'm sure. They bear a family resemblance, but there's no reason they all have to stand or fall together, and if you distinguish between, say, the Kalam, Thomistic, and Leibnizian cosmological argument, or the biological and physical fine-tuning arguments, you should distinguish between them.
(For my money, Anselm's is the weirdest and trickiest, Descartes' is the worst and responsible for the argument's bad reputation, Plantinga's is interesting but not dialectically strong, and Goedel's...might just succeed?)
I don't think the concept of God just is that of a necessary being. One can easily imagine a whole range of necessary beings other than God. But as there are different formulations, can you give the one you'd want to give, and I'll tell you where I think it isn't effective.
I actually can’t: a being without limits is the only sort of being which strikes me as a good candidate for a necessary being. This is one of the major considerations that pushed me towards theism.
Yes, the two are famously very closely related (and hard to disentangle at all in, e.g., Leibniz) — and the Contingency Argument was the second one that started moving me towards theism. The plausibility of the Contingency Argument raises the probability that the Ontological Argument succeeds insofar as it constitutes independent evidence that there’s some ultimate necessity.
I've had trouble wrapping my head around the argument from contingency - in particular, premises 3 and 4. It doesn't seem to me that facts about a necessary thing, which can't be otherwise, could ever fully offer an account of facts which could be otherwise. Nothing explains the "otherwiseness" that the contingent facts all have. If that makes sense.
The distribution axiom in modal logic, □(A→B)→(□A→□B), seems to capture this intuition. Ordinarily when we explain something we do so by offering a fact which, if true, entails the fact to be explained. Suppose B is the set of all contingent facts, and A is the set of facts about God which explain B. If A explains B, then the fact that A explains B ("A→B") is either necessary or contingent. But if this fact is necessary (□(A→B)) and A is necessary, then it follows (from the distribution axiom) that (□A→□B), and therefore B is necessary. But B is the set of all contingent facts - it is the least necessary thing in the world. So "A→B" must be contingent.
But then, if "A→B" is contingent, then A must explain it, since it explains all contingent facts. If A also explains that fact, then "the fact that this explanation works" is a new fact ("A→(A→B)"), which itself must be either necessary or contingent. This fact creates the same dilemma. If it is necessary (□(A→(A→B))), then we get □(A→B) and, consequently, □B, by the same logic as above. But this is once again unacceptable. So then "A→(A→B)" must also be contingent! But then, A must explain it, and we have some *third* fact ("A→(A→(A→B))"). And so on! This either continues forever, or it ends when one of these facts is necessary. But if any of the facts are necessary, all of them must be!
My suspicion then is that this whole notion of contingency is a product of what E.T. Jaynes calls the "mind projection fallacy", where we accidentally characterize our epistemological beliefs as ontological ones, which describe real properties of things. Perhaps instead of saying "the world could be otherwise," we should be saying, "the world could be otherwise, for all I know." But I'm not sure of this. It's something I've chewed on for a while.
The contingency argument starts to make a little sense to me when you stipulate that an essential property of God is agency. A doesn't entail B; A decided B. A (necessary?) God can (unnecessarily) say "Let there be a universe" and create a contingent universe.
Where it doesn't make sense to me is just the idea that God could be necessary. What would be inconsistent about there being nothing at all, for example? And it doesn't seem like God can be fully specified by a set of necessary properties, or that any agent can. Couldn't God have been a different God? How then could the particular God we ended up with be necessary while a different God with the same properties is unnecessary?
For “A decided B” to be an adequate explanation of B, then we must also accept the fact “If A decided B, then B.” Which then runs into the same dilemma - did A decide “If A decided B, then B”? Does that entail it?
I presume that is a necessary fact about God? I don't exactly buy the contingency argument nor have I heard my addition to it from someone who does, it just seems that if you buy into the broadest notion of free will (which I'm also skeptical of) then a decision would be the sort of contingent fact that doesn't need another contingent fact to explain it, beyond the existence and circumstances of the decider, which this argument claims is not contingent.
It seems like 3-5 are variants of the same argument from consciousness, which also seems like the strongest of the lot. My "deist" take would be that (1) on a materialist conception of the world, our subjective selves are the result of a particular organization of matter, which itself must therefore have subjective attributes (which I take to be Russell's argument); (2) our consciousnesses demonstrate that subjective attributes of parts can combine to make a more complex greater subject (though we don't know how); (3) there is no reason to believe that this combination of subjects stops with us; (4) God is definitionally the limiting subject - perhaps the entire cosmos.
However, just as our own subjectivity is vastly more complex and surely unlike that of an individual neuron (whose own singular subjectivity is inaccessible to us), there is no reason to imagine that we can properly conceive of the consciousness of the God at the combined limit. Attributing purpose, agency, morality, love, etc. to this limiting entity attaches terms arising from our own limited perspective to something vastly greater and entirely unlike us. Certainly the operation of the cosmos from the big bang to the present seems to be governed by simple and unfeeling laws, though perhaps that conception leaves out something important. But if so, it seems unlikely that it would just happen to be the sorts of things that are important to humans, resulting from our particular evolutionary history as social creatures.
At root, this is the difficulty I have with all theist arguments. They assume, without foundation, that we can have some conception of God. The gods of the ancients are human creations to explain the mysteries of the world. Modern science has squeezed out the spaces occupied by those gods. We now know the mechanisms behind, e.g., lightning, earthquakes, disease, the movements of celestial objects, weather, our own origins, etc. We don't understand everything, so there are still gaps to stick God into, but I see no reason to imagine that we can know anything whatsoever about such a god.
It seems like 3-5 are variants of the same argument from consciousness, which also seems like the strongest of the lot. My "deist" take would be that (1) on a materialist conception of the world, our subjective selves are the result of a particular organization of matter, which itself must therefore have subjective attributes (which I take to be Russell's argument); (2) our consciousnesses demonstrate that subjective attributes of parts can combine to make a more complex greater subject (though we don't know how); (3) there is no reason to believe that this combination of subjects stops with us; (4) God is definitionally the limiting subject - perhaps the entire cosmos.
However, just as our own subjectivity is vastly more complex and surely unlike that of an individual neuron (whose own singular subjectivity is inaccessible to us), there is no reason to imagine that we can properly conceive of the consciousness of the God at the combined limit. Attributing purpose, agency, morality, love, etc. to this limiting entity attaches terms arising from our own limited perspective to something vastly greater and entirely unlike us. Certainly the operation of the cosmos from the big bang to the present seems to be governed by simple and unfeeling laws, though perhaps that conception leaves out something important. But if so, it seems unlikely that it would just happen to be the sorts of things that are important to humans, resulting from our particular evolutionary history as social creatures.
At root, this is the difficulty I have with all theist arguments. They assume, without foundation, that we can have some conception of God. The gods of the ancients are human creations to explain the mysteries of the world. Modern science has squeezed out the spaces occupied by those gods. We now know the mechanisms behind, e.g., lightning, earthquakes, disease, the movements of celestial objects, weather, our own origins, etc. We don't understand everything, so there are still gaps to stick God into, but I see no reason to imagine that we can know anything whatsoever about such a god.
It seems like 3-5 are variants of the same argument from consciousness, which also seems like the strongest of the lot. My "deist" take would be that (1) on a materialist conception of the world, our subjective selves are the result of a particular organization of matter, which itself must therefore have subjective attributes (which I take to be Russell's argument); (2) our consciousnesses demonstrate that subjective attributes of parts can combine to make a more complex greater subject (though we don't know how); (3) there is no reason to believe that this combination of subjects stops with us; (4) God is definitionally the limiting subject - perhaps the entire cosmos.
However, just as our own subjectivity is vastly more complex and surely unlike that of an individual neuron (whose own singular subjectivity is inaccessible to us), there is no reason to imagine that we can properly conceive of the consciousness of the God at the combined limit. Attributing purpose, agency, morality, love, etc. to this limiting entity attaches terms arising from our own limited perspective to something vastly greater and entirely unlike us. Certainly the operation of the cosmos from the big bang to the present seems to be governed by simple and unfeeling laws, though perhaps that conception leaves out something important. But if so, it seems unlikely that it would just happen to be the sorts of things that are important to humans, resulting from our particular evolutionary history as social creatures.
At root, this is the difficulty I have with all theist arguments. They assume, without foundation, that we can have some conception of God. The gods of the ancients are human creations to explain the mysteries of the world. Modern science has squeezed out the spaces occupied by those gods. We now know the mechanisms behind, e.g., lightning, earthquakes, disease, the movements of celestial objects, weather, our own origins, etc. We don't understand everything, so there are still gaps to stick God into, but I see no reason to imagine that we can know anything whatsoever about such a god.
All versions of god are either an untestable force or a personified untestable force. No version of god has ever been demonstrated to be possible, much less plausible, much less probable, much less actual.
You've thought about this much more than I have but, superficially, several of the arguments feel like assessments of probability-- once we accept that the mechanics of nature and evolution are not _required_ to support conscious human life, we have to wonder how _probable_ is that outcome?
The strength of that as an argument for theism will depend significantly on how _improbable_ the existence of God sounds. The more improbable, the less force any of the arguments about probability have.
The Anthropic Principle just doesn’t really seem to explain the thing that needs explaining: why there’s a fine-tuned universe at all, given all the other ways the universe could have been. Yes, you shouldn’t expect to exist in a non-fine-tuned universe, but the fact of your existence doesn’t undercut the need to explain why there’s some fine-tuned universe.
That's a question of perspective. Consider two different ways of asking the question. If you start from, "why does the universe exist in a way that appears finely tuned to support intelligent life?" that's a big, complicated question which looks like it will have an important answer.
If you start from, "why do humans observe that they live in a universe finely tuned to support intelligent life?" The obvious answer is, "there is no alternative; it couldn't be otherwise."
You're arguing that the first question is "the thing that needs explaining" but I'm not convinced that's true. I think the second framing sufficiently resolves the issue.
Lets say a man is abducted by the mafia (because he owes them quite a bit of money) and told that they are going to kill him. He pleads for his life, saying that he'll find a way to get them their money. The mob boss tells him that he's not unmerciful: if he can draw the ace of spades from a deck of cards at random, with just one draw, then they'll give him another six months to pay up. Otherwise he's going to sleep with the fishes!
So he draws a card and what do you know, it's the ace of spades! They throw him into an alley and he's free to go.
Now lets say the man's buddy hears the story the next day and says "What are the odds? Hey, I bet that they were never planning on killing you, they just wanted to scare you into paying up. They must have stacked the deck: I bet it was all aces!"
Now is it reasonable for the man to reply "Such an explanation is unneeded. If I was going to draw a card other than the ace of spades then I wouldn't be here to observe it. It couldn't be otherwise! The fact that I'm alive resolves the issue"? I would say no. Sure, he wouldn't be alive to consider the question of why he is alive if he had been killed, yet it remains that case that drawing an ace of spades is improbable, and the theory that they stacked the deck is more probable. It would be silly to discount the stacked deck theory because of the anthropic principle.
You're smuggling in some assumptions with that scenario. You are introducing the mafiosos who, necessarily have agency. They make decisions about (a) who to kidnap, (b) what deal to offer them, (c) what deck of cards to use, and (d) whether to keep their word and not kill him after he has drawn the ace of spades.
Regardless of whether the deck was fair or not, all of those choices invite speculation about their motives and decision making (consider, for example, the possibility in which he drew the 2 of Spades, they pulled out their guns, pointed them at him and then said, "we're going to be merciful, we'll give you 6 months anyway.")
If the story instead was that he was hit by lightning, and survived, it makes sense to discuss of the odds of surviving a lightning strike, but that wouldn't, by itself, suggest that there was an agent who made decisions with the intention of helping him survive the lightning strike.
I'm not sure why it matters that the example is about agents. It remains the case that the fact that the man is alive does not exhaust the explanation of *why* he is alive. The fact that he is alive is no rebuttal to his friends hypothesis that the deck was stacked.
And I would say that getting hit by lighting and surviving is slightly more probable if an agent exists that can make decisions with the intention of helping him. Not very much more probable (after all, 90% of people struck by lighting survive) but it is more probable than the alternative. If there was such an agent who had decided to protect him then he would be expected to survive a lightning strike 100% of the time, while if there wasn't such an agent we would only expect him to survive 90% of the time. It's not so much more probable that I would believe God saved him from dying just based on that (especially if I was an atheist to begin with), but it is a tiny bit more probable.
With the stacked deck example we're talking about something much more improbable than surviving a lightning strike: if the deck was stacked we would expect him to draw the Ace 100% of the time, but if it wasn't we would expect him to draw it 2% of the time. That makes the stacked deck hypothesis a lot more probable than the alternative.
With the fine tuning argument the odds are even more stacked. Just with the cosmological constant alone we're talking about odds of 1 in 10^120th power that it would end up that way be chance.
My general point though is not the actual probabilities, but that the anthropic argument does not exhaust the discussion. Yes, you wouldn't be alive to observe this thing if it had happened otherwise: yet we can still speculate on how it happened that way. If the anthropic principle really did exhaust the question, then it would lead to some counterintuitive results: for instance, your existence would not be considered evidence that your parents had sex.
That's a good summary. I generally agree with how you've laid out the discussion, so let me focus on a few points of agreement or disagreement.
I think you're correct to say that the anthropic principle doesn't exhaust the discussion. It still makes sense to consider, and research the underlying circumstances which lead to our existence.
What I would push back against is any assumption that the answers to those questions will necessarily be satisfying or reveal some significant truth about our place in the universe. If you like, think about the anthropic principle as an intuition prompt which provides a framework in which we can acknowledge and consider the possibility that "random chance" is a perfectly viable answer to the questions.
On that note, when you say, "With the fine tuning argument the odds are even more stacked. Just with the cosmological constant alone we're talking about odds of 1 in 10^120th power that it would end up that way be chance." I'm not convinced that our knowledge of physics and cosmology are sufficient to make that statement with confidence. We can create certain models which point to that conclusion but one other possibility is that our models are wrong. Reading the SEP entry on "fine-tuning", for example, I am convinced that there are both real questions to ask, and that our knowledge is clearly incomplete: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fine-tuning/
Even if our knowledge is sufficient to estimate the odds, consider, for example, this passage, "It is indeed uncontroversial that being improbable does not by itself automatically amount to requiring a theoretical response. ... Leslie concedes that improbable events do not in general call for an explanation, but he argues that the availability of reasonable candidate explanations of fine-tuning for life—namely, the design hypothesis and the multiverse hypothesis—suggests that we should not “dismiss it as how things just happen to be”"
Why questions are always either How?, which is empirical - for science, or From what intent?, which presupposes a mind. No version of either requires an answer that supports any version of god.
Yes: if you think the prior probability of God’s existence is sufficiently low, then you could grant that there’s a bunch confirmatory evidence for theism while denying that, all things considered, God’s existence is more probable than not. But I’d say that it’s a mistake to ascribe such a low prior to God, considering (a) that God is actually a pretty familiar kind of entity (a mind with various powers) and (b) that most people — including lots of really smart, non-insane people — have had no trouble believing in God.
I appreciate your reply (and the original post) because I can recognize the logic, but you're starting from a very different perspective. In the spirit of trying to figure out how that different perspective affects the presentation of the logic, I would take issue with your phrase "confirmatory evidence for theism." I would describe several of those as, "evidence compatible with theism" with is not the same thing as confirmation.
(Part of why I mentioned probability in my original comment is because I think the Anthropic Principle argument has some force -- "Anthropic reasoning has been used to address the question as to why certain measured physical constants take the values that they do, rather than some other arbitrary values, and to explain a perception that the universe appears to be finely tuned for the existence of life" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle )
Confirmatory evidence for a hypothesis H is evidence that, all else being equal, raises H’s probability. Evidence that’s merely compatible with H does nothing to raise the probability of H and thus is a totally different notion (it’s compatible with Relativity Theory that I’m wearing a blue shirt, but my wearing a blue shirt is zero evidence for Relativity Theory).
That's a helpful clarification. My knee-jerk reaction is to say, for example, that The Argument From Psychophysical Harmony, for example, doesn't raise my probability for the truth of theism, but I think that's an overstatement on my part, and that you are correct that it should raise the probability at least slightly.
(and the comparison with Relativity is interesting, in that the acceptance of the theory was driven by finding small and very specific cases in which relativity would lead to different predictions than classic Newtonian mechanics and observing those outcomes. I'm not sure how Theism would lead to different predictions than, say, the Anthropic principle -- which says that human consciousness, as we experience it, may be unlikely, but it is a precondition of our being able to notice and observe anything at all).
>However, this attitude began to give way, ever so slowly, once I began teaching philosophy myself, during graduate school.
You’re not alone in that: both Edward Feser and C.S. Lewis became theists in part because they started teaching philosophy and found the old arguments stronger than they had supposed.
I think the ontological argument fails for reasons I give here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y-iuBo7EXnXVH9O0J3nETKQMI7KU5U8O2FMdszA3fVA/edit?usp=sharing
Don’t you agree that if you eventually adopt the view that God exists of metaphysical necessity — which has been the overwhelmingly dominant view among monotheists — then you’ll have to agree that the ontological argument is *sound* (even if not persuasive or dialectically effective)?
Certainly one who thinks God is necessary will have to accept that the modal ontological argument is sound. But that tells us nothing about whether it's dialectically effective.
I'd similarly say the argument:
1) God exists or pigs fly
2) Pigs don't fly
3) So God exists
Fails, even though it's sound.
I think you’re seriously overstating the dialectical inefficacy here: the pigs parody is obviously absurd, whereas the ontological argument can inspire the kind of reflection that can change a skeptical mind. I speak from experience, since it was the argument that first started to move me away from atheism. But a much more impressive example is that of Yujin Nagasawa, who literally became a theist due to the modal ontological argument. I think a view which entails that Nagasawa’s conversion to theism was irrational is prima facie implausible.
I thought Nagasawa's book on the ontological argument was massively in error. Certainly one can be convinced of the ontological argument if they're wrong about its force.
I've discussed this in more detail here https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35209337-maximal-god?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=Jsz0MtSS2Z&rank=1
I think your take on this has the straightforward entailment that it was irrational of Nagasawa to become a theist as a result of the modal ontological argument (his one stated reason, initially). I think that’s a highly implausible entailment — and reason to reexamine your conviction about the argument’s awfulness.
Why is that highly implausible? Lots of people believe all sorts of things for bad reasons.
Defenders of the ontological argument — many of whom have been well established non-dopes (like Anselm, Descartes, Goedel, and Plantinga) — have never held that God exists *by definition*. Rather, they’ve held that honest conceptual analysis reveals that the concept of God *just is* the concept of a being that exists necessarily, so that to wonder whether God exists is analogous to wondering whether there are any married bachelors. Making up some notion and then tacking necessary existence onto it is not analogous to what any proponent of the ontological argument has ever done.
It's almost always a mistake to talk about "the" ontological argument. There's Anselm's argument, Descartes' argument, Hartshorne's argument, Goedel's argument, Plantinga's argument, and others that I've forgotten, I'm sure. They bear a family resemblance, but there's no reason they all have to stand or fall together, and if you distinguish between, say, the Kalam, Thomistic, and Leibnizian cosmological argument, or the biological and physical fine-tuning arguments, you should distinguish between them.
(For my money, Anselm's is the weirdest and trickiest, Descartes' is the worst and responsible for the argument's bad reputation, Plantinga's is interesting but not dialectically strong, and Goedel's...might just succeed?)
I don't think the concept of God just is that of a necessary being. One can easily imagine a whole range of necessary beings other than God. But as there are different formulations, can you give the one you'd want to give, and I'll tell you where I think it isn't effective.
I actually can’t: a being without limits is the only sort of being which strikes me as a good candidate for a necessary being. This is one of the major considerations that pushed me towards theism.
Well this now just sounds like the contingency argument!
Yes, the two are famously very closely related (and hard to disentangle at all in, e.g., Leibniz) — and the Contingency Argument was the second one that started moving me towards theism. The plausibility of the Contingency Argument raises the probability that the Ontological Argument succeeds insofar as it constitutes independent evidence that there’s some ultimate necessity.
> But a thing existing by definition doesn’t necessarily exist
I agree entirely! This simply can’t be allowed, otherwise we risk dangerous consequences, such as the Ganvil corrolary:
1. The “Ganvil” is defined as “the existent anvil falling towards your head.”
2. The Ganvil exists. (True by definition).
3. The Ganvil is falling towards your head (True by definition).
4. Therefore, LOOK OUT! (Follows from 2 and 3).
I've had trouble wrapping my head around the argument from contingency - in particular, premises 3 and 4. It doesn't seem to me that facts about a necessary thing, which can't be otherwise, could ever fully offer an account of facts which could be otherwise. Nothing explains the "otherwiseness" that the contingent facts all have. If that makes sense.
The distribution axiom in modal logic, □(A→B)→(□A→□B), seems to capture this intuition. Ordinarily when we explain something we do so by offering a fact which, if true, entails the fact to be explained. Suppose B is the set of all contingent facts, and A is the set of facts about God which explain B. If A explains B, then the fact that A explains B ("A→B") is either necessary or contingent. But if this fact is necessary (□(A→B)) and A is necessary, then it follows (from the distribution axiom) that (□A→□B), and therefore B is necessary. But B is the set of all contingent facts - it is the least necessary thing in the world. So "A→B" must be contingent.
But then, if "A→B" is contingent, then A must explain it, since it explains all contingent facts. If A also explains that fact, then "the fact that this explanation works" is a new fact ("A→(A→B)"), which itself must be either necessary or contingent. This fact creates the same dilemma. If it is necessary (□(A→(A→B))), then we get □(A→B) and, consequently, □B, by the same logic as above. But this is once again unacceptable. So then "A→(A→B)" must also be contingent! But then, A must explain it, and we have some *third* fact ("A→(A→(A→B))"). And so on! This either continues forever, or it ends when one of these facts is necessary. But if any of the facts are necessary, all of them must be!
My suspicion then is that this whole notion of contingency is a product of what E.T. Jaynes calls the "mind projection fallacy", where we accidentally characterize our epistemological beliefs as ontological ones, which describe real properties of things. Perhaps instead of saying "the world could be otherwise," we should be saying, "the world could be otherwise, for all I know." But I'm not sure of this. It's something I've chewed on for a while.
The contingency argument starts to make a little sense to me when you stipulate that an essential property of God is agency. A doesn't entail B; A decided B. A (necessary?) God can (unnecessarily) say "Let there be a universe" and create a contingent universe.
Where it doesn't make sense to me is just the idea that God could be necessary. What would be inconsistent about there being nothing at all, for example? And it doesn't seem like God can be fully specified by a set of necessary properties, or that any agent can. Couldn't God have been a different God? How then could the particular God we ended up with be necessary while a different God with the same properties is unnecessary?
For “A decided B” to be an adequate explanation of B, then we must also accept the fact “If A decided B, then B.” Which then runs into the same dilemma - did A decide “If A decided B, then B”? Does that entail it?
I presume that is a necessary fact about God? I don't exactly buy the contingency argument nor have I heard my addition to it from someone who does, it just seems that if you buy into the broadest notion of free will (which I'm also skeptical of) then a decision would be the sort of contingent fact that doesn't need another contingent fact to explain it, beyond the existence and circumstances of the decider, which this argument claims is not contingent.
It seems like 3-5 are variants of the same argument from consciousness, which also seems like the strongest of the lot. My "deist" take would be that (1) on a materialist conception of the world, our subjective selves are the result of a particular organization of matter, which itself must therefore have subjective attributes (which I take to be Russell's argument); (2) our consciousnesses demonstrate that subjective attributes of parts can combine to make a more complex greater subject (though we don't know how); (3) there is no reason to believe that this combination of subjects stops with us; (4) God is definitionally the limiting subject - perhaps the entire cosmos.
However, just as our own subjectivity is vastly more complex and surely unlike that of an individual neuron (whose own singular subjectivity is inaccessible to us), there is no reason to imagine that we can properly conceive of the consciousness of the God at the combined limit. Attributing purpose, agency, morality, love, etc. to this limiting entity attaches terms arising from our own limited perspective to something vastly greater and entirely unlike us. Certainly the operation of the cosmos from the big bang to the present seems to be governed by simple and unfeeling laws, though perhaps that conception leaves out something important. But if so, it seems unlikely that it would just happen to be the sorts of things that are important to humans, resulting from our particular evolutionary history as social creatures.
At root, this is the difficulty I have with all theist arguments. They assume, without foundation, that we can have some conception of God. The gods of the ancients are human creations to explain the mysteries of the world. Modern science has squeezed out the spaces occupied by those gods. We now know the mechanisms behind, e.g., lightning, earthquakes, disease, the movements of celestial objects, weather, our own origins, etc. We don't understand everything, so there are still gaps to stick God into, but I see no reason to imagine that we can know anything whatsoever about such a god.
It seems like 3-5 are variants of the same argument from consciousness, which also seems like the strongest of the lot. My "deist" take would be that (1) on a materialist conception of the world, our subjective selves are the result of a particular organization of matter, which itself must therefore have subjective attributes (which I take to be Russell's argument); (2) our consciousnesses demonstrate that subjective attributes of parts can combine to make a more complex greater subject (though we don't know how); (3) there is no reason to believe that this combination of subjects stops with us; (4) God is definitionally the limiting subject - perhaps the entire cosmos.
However, just as our own subjectivity is vastly more complex and surely unlike that of an individual neuron (whose own singular subjectivity is inaccessible to us), there is no reason to imagine that we can properly conceive of the consciousness of the God at the combined limit. Attributing purpose, agency, morality, love, etc. to this limiting entity attaches terms arising from our own limited perspective to something vastly greater and entirely unlike us. Certainly the operation of the cosmos from the big bang to the present seems to be governed by simple and unfeeling laws, though perhaps that conception leaves out something important. But if so, it seems unlikely that it would just happen to be the sorts of things that are important to humans, resulting from our particular evolutionary history as social creatures.
At root, this is the difficulty I have with all theist arguments. They assume, without foundation, that we can have some conception of God. The gods of the ancients are human creations to explain the mysteries of the world. Modern science has squeezed out the spaces occupied by those gods. We now know the mechanisms behind, e.g., lightning, earthquakes, disease, the movements of celestial objects, weather, our own origins, etc. We don't understand everything, so there are still gaps to stick God into, but I see no reason to imagine that we can know anything whatsoever about such a god.
It seems like 3-5 are variants of the same argument from consciousness, which also seems like the strongest of the lot. My "deist" take would be that (1) on a materialist conception of the world, our subjective selves are the result of a particular organization of matter, which itself must therefore have subjective attributes (which I take to be Russell's argument); (2) our consciousnesses demonstrate that subjective attributes of parts can combine to make a more complex greater subject (though we don't know how); (3) there is no reason to believe that this combination of subjects stops with us; (4) God is definitionally the limiting subject - perhaps the entire cosmos.
However, just as our own subjectivity is vastly more complex and surely unlike that of an individual neuron (whose own singular subjectivity is inaccessible to us), there is no reason to imagine that we can properly conceive of the consciousness of the God at the combined limit. Attributing purpose, agency, morality, love, etc. to this limiting entity attaches terms arising from our own limited perspective to something vastly greater and entirely unlike us. Certainly the operation of the cosmos from the big bang to the present seems to be governed by simple and unfeeling laws, though perhaps that conception leaves out something important. But if so, it seems unlikely that it would just happen to be the sorts of things that are important to humans, resulting from our particular evolutionary history as social creatures.
At root, this is the difficulty I have with all theist arguments. They assume, without foundation, that we can have some conception of God. The gods of the ancients are human creations to explain the mysteries of the world. Modern science has squeezed out the spaces occupied by those gods. We now know the mechanisms behind, e.g., lightning, earthquakes, disease, the movements of celestial objects, weather, our own origins, etc. We don't understand everything, so there are still gaps to stick God into, but I see no reason to imagine that we can know anything whatsoever about such a god.
https://kaiserbasileus.substack.com/p/there-is-no-god-argument-from-processing
Igntheism subsumes all agnostic, deist, and theist arguments, but also: https://kaiserbasileus.substack.com/p/to-grok-god
All versions of god are either an untestable force or a personified untestable force. No version of god has ever been demonstrated to be possible, much less plausible, much less probable, much less actual.
You've thought about this much more than I have but, superficially, several of the arguments feel like assessments of probability-- once we accept that the mechanics of nature and evolution are not _required_ to support conscious human life, we have to wonder how _probable_ is that outcome?
The strength of that as an argument for theism will depend significantly on how _improbable_ the existence of God sounds. The more improbable, the less force any of the arguments about probability have.
The Anthropic Principle just doesn’t really seem to explain the thing that needs explaining: why there’s a fine-tuned universe at all, given all the other ways the universe could have been. Yes, you shouldn’t expect to exist in a non-fine-tuned universe, but the fact of your existence doesn’t undercut the need to explain why there’s some fine-tuned universe.
There's only one way the universe can be, and it never began. It's just one big infinite causal happening. No evidence supports any alternative.
That's a question of perspective. Consider two different ways of asking the question. If you start from, "why does the universe exist in a way that appears finely tuned to support intelligent life?" that's a big, complicated question which looks like it will have an important answer.
If you start from, "why do humans observe that they live in a universe finely tuned to support intelligent life?" The obvious answer is, "there is no alternative; it couldn't be otherwise."
You're arguing that the first question is "the thing that needs explaining" but I'm not convinced that's true. I think the second framing sufficiently resolves the issue.
Lets say a man is abducted by the mafia (because he owes them quite a bit of money) and told that they are going to kill him. He pleads for his life, saying that he'll find a way to get them their money. The mob boss tells him that he's not unmerciful: if he can draw the ace of spades from a deck of cards at random, with just one draw, then they'll give him another six months to pay up. Otherwise he's going to sleep with the fishes!
So he draws a card and what do you know, it's the ace of spades! They throw him into an alley and he's free to go.
Now lets say the man's buddy hears the story the next day and says "What are the odds? Hey, I bet that they were never planning on killing you, they just wanted to scare you into paying up. They must have stacked the deck: I bet it was all aces!"
Now is it reasonable for the man to reply "Such an explanation is unneeded. If I was going to draw a card other than the ace of spades then I wouldn't be here to observe it. It couldn't be otherwise! The fact that I'm alive resolves the issue"? I would say no. Sure, he wouldn't be alive to consider the question of why he is alive if he had been killed, yet it remains that case that drawing an ace of spades is improbable, and the theory that they stacked the deck is more probable. It would be silly to discount the stacked deck theory because of the anthropic principle.
You're smuggling in some assumptions with that scenario. You are introducing the mafiosos who, necessarily have agency. They make decisions about (a) who to kidnap, (b) what deal to offer them, (c) what deck of cards to use, and (d) whether to keep their word and not kill him after he has drawn the ace of spades.
Regardless of whether the deck was fair or not, all of those choices invite speculation about their motives and decision making (consider, for example, the possibility in which he drew the 2 of Spades, they pulled out their guns, pointed them at him and then said, "we're going to be merciful, we'll give you 6 months anyway.")
If the story instead was that he was hit by lightning, and survived, it makes sense to discuss of the odds of surviving a lightning strike, but that wouldn't, by itself, suggest that there was an agent who made decisions with the intention of helping him survive the lightning strike.
I'm not sure why it matters that the example is about agents. It remains the case that the fact that the man is alive does not exhaust the explanation of *why* he is alive. The fact that he is alive is no rebuttal to his friends hypothesis that the deck was stacked.
And I would say that getting hit by lighting and surviving is slightly more probable if an agent exists that can make decisions with the intention of helping him. Not very much more probable (after all, 90% of people struck by lighting survive) but it is more probable than the alternative. If there was such an agent who had decided to protect him then he would be expected to survive a lightning strike 100% of the time, while if there wasn't such an agent we would only expect him to survive 90% of the time. It's not so much more probable that I would believe God saved him from dying just based on that (especially if I was an atheist to begin with), but it is a tiny bit more probable.
With the stacked deck example we're talking about something much more improbable than surviving a lightning strike: if the deck was stacked we would expect him to draw the Ace 100% of the time, but if it wasn't we would expect him to draw it 2% of the time. That makes the stacked deck hypothesis a lot more probable than the alternative.
With the fine tuning argument the odds are even more stacked. Just with the cosmological constant alone we're talking about odds of 1 in 10^120th power that it would end up that way be chance.
My general point though is not the actual probabilities, but that the anthropic argument does not exhaust the discussion. Yes, you wouldn't be alive to observe this thing if it had happened otherwise: yet we can still speculate on how it happened that way. If the anthropic principle really did exhaust the question, then it would lead to some counterintuitive results: for instance, your existence would not be considered evidence that your parents had sex.
That's a good summary. I generally agree with how you've laid out the discussion, so let me focus on a few points of agreement or disagreement.
I think you're correct to say that the anthropic principle doesn't exhaust the discussion. It still makes sense to consider, and research the underlying circumstances which lead to our existence.
What I would push back against is any assumption that the answers to those questions will necessarily be satisfying or reveal some significant truth about our place in the universe. If you like, think about the anthropic principle as an intuition prompt which provides a framework in which we can acknowledge and consider the possibility that "random chance" is a perfectly viable answer to the questions.
On that note, when you say, "With the fine tuning argument the odds are even more stacked. Just with the cosmological constant alone we're talking about odds of 1 in 10^120th power that it would end up that way be chance." I'm not convinced that our knowledge of physics and cosmology are sufficient to make that statement with confidence. We can create certain models which point to that conclusion but one other possibility is that our models are wrong. Reading the SEP entry on "fine-tuning", for example, I am convinced that there are both real questions to ask, and that our knowledge is clearly incomplete: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fine-tuning/
Even if our knowledge is sufficient to estimate the odds, consider, for example, this passage, "It is indeed uncontroversial that being improbable does not by itself automatically amount to requiring a theoretical response. ... Leslie concedes that improbable events do not in general call for an explanation, but he argues that the availability of reasonable candidate explanations of fine-tuning for life—namely, the design hypothesis and the multiverse hypothesis—suggests that we should not “dismiss it as how things just happen to be”"
That is the crux of the debate, to some extent.
Why questions are always either How?, which is empirical - for science, or From what intent?, which presupposes a mind. No version of either requires an answer that supports any version of god.
Yes: if you think the prior probability of God’s existence is sufficiently low, then you could grant that there’s a bunch confirmatory evidence for theism while denying that, all things considered, God’s existence is more probable than not. But I’d say that it’s a mistake to ascribe such a low prior to God, considering (a) that God is actually a pretty familiar kind of entity (a mind with various powers) and (b) that most people — including lots of really smart, non-insane people — have had no trouble believing in God.
I appreciate your reply (and the original post) because I can recognize the logic, but you're starting from a very different perspective. In the spirit of trying to figure out how that different perspective affects the presentation of the logic, I would take issue with your phrase "confirmatory evidence for theism." I would describe several of those as, "evidence compatible with theism" with is not the same thing as confirmation.
(Part of why I mentioned probability in my original comment is because I think the Anthropic Principle argument has some force -- "Anthropic reasoning has been used to address the question as to why certain measured physical constants take the values that they do, rather than some other arbitrary values, and to explain a perception that the universe appears to be finely tuned for the existence of life" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle )
Confirmatory evidence for a hypothesis H is evidence that, all else being equal, raises H’s probability. Evidence that’s merely compatible with H does nothing to raise the probability of H and thus is a totally different notion (it’s compatible with Relativity Theory that I’m wearing a blue shirt, but my wearing a blue shirt is zero evidence for Relativity Theory).
That's a helpful clarification. My knee-jerk reaction is to say, for example, that The Argument From Psychophysical Harmony, for example, doesn't raise my probability for the truth of theism, but I think that's an overstatement on my part, and that you are correct that it should raise the probability at least slightly.
(and the comparison with Relativity is interesting, in that the acceptance of the theory was driven by finding small and very specific cases in which relativity would lead to different predictions than classic Newtonian mechanics and observing those outcomes. I'm not sure how Theism would lead to different predictions than, say, the Anthropic principle -- which says that human consciousness, as we experience it, may be unlikely, but it is a precondition of our being able to notice and observe anything at all).