Your attempt to dissolve the fine tuning problem turns on a confusion between uninformative improbability and informative improbability.
There is a story about Richard Feynman coming to class and telling his students that he had just observed a miracle. He saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. As he enjoyed pointing out, the probability of seeing that plate was 1/26^3*10^3 (ignoring the question of whether the state had particular rules about the order of letters and numbers in license plates).
Now of course this is not miraculous at all because there is no way prior to seeing the license plate of specifying a macro-state that ARW 357 is a micro-instantiation of. It is only once Feynman sees the license plate that he can characterize ARW 357.
By contrast, if Feynman saw AAA 000, then that would indeed be surprising and would call for some special explanation. That is because there is a prior description of AAA 000 as the lowest possible value licence plate (taking A to be low and Z to be high). Of course, we have to be careful here or we get spurious miracles. (For starters, ZZZ 999 would have to be included in the class of instantiations of the macrostate that AAA 000 is also an instantiation of.) If we meet our local pharmacist on a trip to Disneyland, we have to be careful that we don't think of the prior description as "the local pharmacist" but "someone I know" since we would be just as surprised by the local baker and if we do that, then we might discover that there is nothing special to explain here.
So, there is nothing especially miraculous about the fact that the probability that someone would have my exact DNA is very low and I happen to have it. That is analogous to ARW 357. However, there is a need to explain the fact that I have a DNA that allows for a zygote to become an adult who can argue about the fine tuning problem. Natural selection provides that explanation, but it would be wrong to respond that there is just some way a sequence of DNA has to be.
The fine tuning problem arises because of all the ways the universe could be consistent with known physical laws, only a tiny minority are capable of having chemical reactions. This calls for either a designer explanation (usually theism) or a selection explanation (usually many worlds). It is not rationally acceptable to say the world just has to be some way, because there is a description (logically) prior to the instantiation.
Your argument that the designer hypothesis does not work because we don't know what the designer wants is also fallacious, because it confuses explanandum and explanans. A designer who wants there to be consciousness (or, from the panpsychist perspective, complex consciousness) is the explanation for why the knobs of the universe are so finely tuned. If the chances of this happening without either multiple worlds or a designer is 1/10^1000000000 (just to make up a number), then the probability that a designer would want finite conscious beings around just has to be better than this.
The point you think I'm confused about might be one I'm *wrong* about, but it's not something I'm just missing! My main point in the part about fine-tuning here was, as it was in our exchange on this (the response to the bit about the Lottery Owner's Nephew) and the previous things I've written about fine-tuning, was to explicitly cast doubt on *exactly* that premise.
Sorry about “confused”, since that is pretty passive aggressive. Can I just ask then whether you think there is any difference between Feynman seeing a licence plate ARW 357 and seeing one AAA 000? Or do you see that distinction and say it doesn’t apply at the cosmological level?
I'd have to think more about that particular example but I certainly agree with the more general point it's being used to make.
To go back to your example in our previous discussion, the lottery owner's nephew winning the lottery is more suspicious than just anyone winning the lottery because we have reason to think, given our general knowledge of human psychology, that the lottery owner would be likely to be biased in that direction. But I see no non-arbitrary reason to suppose that any being capable of cosmic fine-tuning would be default biased toward life as opposed to any other goal that would be instantiated by various kinds of non-life-allowing universes.
This is where I think the explanans/explanandum thing comes in. The first step of the fine tuning argument is just to say that the fact that the universe is capable of generating life (or even information) is a fact we need to explain. Once you accept that, and accept a "fine tuner" as one explanation, then we can infer the fine tuner is interested in the existence of life/information. The question of why the fine tuner is interested in the existence of life/information is just a separate question, but whether we can answer it or not is no problem for the fine tuning argument.
Right. That's the exact point where we're diverging. I don't think it's a fact in need of explanation in the absence of some such background assumption (which is why I thought your previous analogy was so helpful).
It's only an informative improbability on the assumption that, if there is a fine-tuner, it's something they'd fine-tune for. In the absence of that assumption, I can't for the life of me understand why it's supposed to be any more informative than e.g. whether or not the number of molecules in the universe is prime, or any number of other improbably instantiated descriptions that any number of lifeless or life-occupied universes would also fit.
If we had reason to think we had a prime number of fundamental entities in the universe, that would be a legitimate argument for thinking there is a tuner who is into primes. We don’t so there isn’t. I still don’t understand why you think the explanans is the explanandum.
I take it as a scientific discovery that the anthropic principle is massively explanatory (it constrains the cosmological parameters massively and we have no other equally powerful and simple way of doing that). The metaphysical problem is how to explain the anthropic principle itself.
If I understand your position it is that the massive explanatory power of the anthropic principle doesn’t need further explanation. The universe just happens to occupy the tiny portion of parameter space consistent with our existence. This would really be saying the stars are there to provide us light.
The most naturalistic friendly explanation is that there are in fact a plenitude of justice universes and so of course the one we observe had anthropic parameters.
The other possibility is that there is a tuner who obscurely has the goal of promoting the existence of conscious beings. I agree this raises theodicy problems but it genuinely does solve a real problem without requiring a plenitude of universes.
The problem with the cards analogy for the fine tuning argument is that for cards you know the underlying processes. For the universe, there is no reason to assume some big "deck of universes" and ours happened to get picked. Maybe this idea comes from the fact that string theory is consistent with a gargantuan number of combinations of physical constants. The multiverse people say: actually all of those universes exist and we are in one with constants that support life. Yes, we won the lottery, but some universe had too! Goff rejects this and assumes some sort of creator for reasons I don't understand (I haven't read his book). But, I don't see any reason to assume a "deck of universes" with a random dealer. That presupposes a probabilistic process for picking universes that precedes the universe, but why would that process exist?
I'm a Marxist Christian, but with a pantheist view. I don't see Jesus as some savior as in either the classical atonement theology nor Goff's "love infusion" concept.
Jesus was the inheritor of the messianic vision of the Hebrew prophets that the chosen people were destined to gift the world with a glorious transformation into a society of peace, justice, and abundance.
The Roman Empire was the antithesis of the envisioned messianic age. Jesus prophesied that the Empire would fall due to its oppressive regime's inability to bring about the messianic destiny. He further gathered a movement that marched from the Galilee to Jerusalem arriving in the Passover season to protest the Roman occupation and the Judean collaborators.
That's the practical reason Pilate ordered his execution, Jesus was a rebel rabbi who threatened the stability Rome imposed.
The mythology about original sin and Jesus being a sacrificial lamb were just post hoc allegories to heighten the significance of the Jesus Movement. Ultimately, the myth was literalized and fused with Greco-Roman mythology to produce orthodox Christianity.
I consider Jesus to be a predecessor to Marxism given his hostility to the wealthy classes of his day. Maybe not the first Communist, but certainly an early exemplar.
I have been reading Marx’s dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus and it seems to me that Marx was a panpsychist avant la lettre. Marx approves of Epicurus’s deviation from Democritus precisely in that Epicurus posited freedom/non-determination to matter at its most basic, thereby allowing for freedom at higher levels of organization. Marx doesn’t explicitly talk about a first-person perspective but that’s the vibe of the thing. And then in Theses on Feuerbach he attacks contemplative materialism both for its implicit dualism because the « educator « forgets that he too is a product of circumstances and needs to be educated.
This one is a bit of shooting a fish in a barrel. I’m still waiting for Ben, whose work I admire, to explain the difference between an “ethnostate” as a term applied to Israel but not, for example, France or any number of countries. Ben has stated that he knows in his bones or his soul that an ethnostate is bad but isn’t it the default of a country?
There is a difference between a country that sociologically has an ethnic majority and a country that is legally defined as being for an ethnic majority.
Pantheism, at least, seems like a pretty straightforward move from panpsychism (or, more clinically, neutral monism). If all third-party observable processes have a first-party-phenomenal expression, then surely this would be true of the physical universe or multiverse, and you might as well call the universe/multiverse from a first person perspective “God”.
I am not sure pantheism suffers from the problem of evil since God in this sense isn’t designing the world but is just the world experiencing itself. We could even call this God “good” by way of just affirming existence as such rather than asserting that all physical or moral evil has to be. We probably would also want to deny God is good as well as affirm it, but that is just negative theology (expressed by Anselem among others).
I am less sure how you go from pantheism to panentheism (or really what the latter view is). The attractive feature of neutral monism is that it avoids all the puzzles of distinct substances without going all the way to eliminative materialism. If we bring in an ideal God who is distinct from the universe then we are back to the same problems, including theodicy.
I don’t see why Goff couldn’t have had his heretical Christianity with pantheism. There is no drop dead argument for thinking human religious experience is or at least can be some kind of communication with the universe as expressed as mentality analogous to some possible experience our cells-as-expressed mentality might have with us. But it is an attractive idea. Of course that religious experience would be “through a glass darkly” and would be understood in accordance with historically-determined ideology. But Spinoza or Hegel suggested how we could reformulante any historical spiritual tradition in a way perfectly compatible with a naturalist account of all human realities including religion.
I am not sure Neil’s argument works. Panpsychism implies that all physical wholes have *some* mentality, but of course animals with memories and behaviours or humans with linguistic conceptualisation have more complex phenomenologies than molecules. And even the existence of molecules is unbelievably unlikely if we just allow the universe to have unconstrained physical constants and initial conditions.
So it still works as an explanation for why the universe has the unlikely qualities necessary for chemical reactions that it was designed by a being interested in having more complex phenomenologies than those that would be exhibited by just any old quantum field (or whatever the truly basic physical reality is).
According to Dr Jordan Peterson, atheism is just another religion (or religious belief) as is just about every deeply held political alignment. Based on what we’ve seen this election cycle as well as most in my lifetime, I can’t dispute that. Nobody thinks they are a zealot, but everyone around them can see it if they are, especially those who disagree.
The claim that "atheism is just a religion" has always struck me as an odd one. It is obviously intended to be disparaging of atheism. But that only works if "being a religion" is a bad thing, and the people making the claim presumably don't think it is!
If "being a religion" means taking a position on a theological question, then atheism is trivially a religion, but that is no criticism of it. If we use "being a religion" to mean taking a position in an unreasoned or fanatical way, then we are just engaged in a very cheap and question-begging form of anti-religious polemic. Further, an atheist can happily concede that many (maybe even all) the people who agree with them are unreasonable or fanatical without it having any implication whatsoever for the existence of God. Indeed, one might even argue that the existence of so many illogical and bigoted atheists is incompatible with a benevolent omnipotent creator.
I find your Fine-Tuning counter argument interesting. Let me see if I can delineate my own intiitions against the Fine-Tuning Argument, as I don't think I've seen them anywhere just yet.
Folks in favor of the argument almost always come from the position of the improbability of current conditions, given the narrow band of narrow variables "required" for these conditions to arise. Because of that perceived improbability, they often assume purpose or intelligence in achieving those variables. But this is exactly the same argument, in kind, as Ray Comfort was making about the shape of a banana. Because we, as humans, find a thing useful, it follows that it must have been created for our use. I think the the error in thinking here is obvious. But there is also an argument to be made against the "improbable" part of the claim: We live, by all rational, scientific evidence, in a deterministic universe. That is to say, everything that has or will ever exist is bound by the law of cause and effect. (Even devoutly religious folk tend to believe this, albeit often substituting a supernatural cause.) If we live in a deterministic universe, then what has happened did so because, given the previous causes, it was the only thing that could have happened. It does not matter, in the slightest, that, if the constant of whatever were half a whatever in either direction life wouldn't exist, because there is no way for any of those measurements to ever have been any different. (Unless, one wishes to posit entirely different universes, with different physics and chemistry. By all means, have fun, if that's your rabbit hole, but be forewarned, that way madness lies...) In short, things - *waves hands wildly at surrounding everything* - things are this way because it is the only way they could be. (Don't come at me with that "but Free Will" nonsense unless prepared to prove Free Will even exists. Another subject, for another time, but not one, the existence of which, should be taken for granted as much as most folk do.) The Fine-Tuning Argument is, in essence, a post hoc etiology; mythology masquerading as mathematics to justify a belief in this view of the supernatural. It takes a view of what is, and insists that this state of affairs is purposeful, (purposeful, here to mean 'directed toward a future goal' - Although, in most religious arguments, that goal is us. Go figure.)
Anyway, not certain I've completely nailed down my thinking about it, or that I've explained it understandably here, but I'm going to drink more coffee and get on with my day now. Thanks for the post. I can always count on you to provide stimulating mental fodder.
Atheism has its (well known) problems too - if mathematicians need axioms then so do philosophers. Otherwise if I pick my moral axioms and you pick yours who is to say which are right? If it doesn’t matter, then logically the conclusion is that nothing matters which is desperately close to nihilism! OK if you’re a pessimist but I’m an optimist!
Apologies for leaving a second long comment, but I couldn't refrain.
I was raised in a decidedly non-classical branch of Christianity—one inspired by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. There are at least three sects of Swedenborgian Christianity, and I was raised in the largest of the ones I know about. I'm an atheist now, but I still think Swedenborg resolved some of the questions here more effectively than many who have attempted them since.
For example, Swedenborg's book, Divine Providence, is an expansive answer the question of why god allows suffering. It boils down to a sort of "long arc of the universe bending towards justice," and defends this at length.
He also addressed the question of hell with a concept called "ruling love." Briefly, the idea is that our actions and intentions in this life are manifestations of our ruling love. Regardless of what we might profess, what we intend and what we do in this life define what we care about most. That is what "ruling love" means, and Swedenborg's claim is that our ruling love is the basis upon which we will be judged when we die.
The heaven or hell that await us after death, according to Swedenborg, are defined by ruling loves. Immoral, corrupt, and violent people are deemed thus through their acts, and the "hell" to which they are bound is a place full of like people. That is primarily what makes it hellish.
Anyway, his writings—particularly Divine Providence, True Christian Religion, and perhaps Heaven and Hell—are worth a look insofar as they relate to the topic at hand here.
A Swedenborg argument for god who allows suffering goes along these lines:
1. God exists and loves his creation, including us humans, unconditionally
2. Because god loves us, god has given us free will
3. Because of our free will, we can be awful to each other
4. God's divine providence is guiding all of creation towards goodness and beauty, even though we are acting independently and freely
5. Divine providence still allows terrible things to happen and innocents to suffer, but god ensures that it will, on balance, serve the greater good where all will ultimately flourish in heavenly eternity, and any suffering that happens during our earthly lives fades to literal insignificance against eternity.
I'm not a student of philosophy, but it seems to me that the usual arguments for and against the existence of god all suffer from the same flaw. Namely, all the propositions put god into a human box with human parameters, presumably in order to test the propositions with various forms of "what might a human-like god do?"
It seems like a fallacious way to approach the question of a being who is supposedly eternal, omnipresent, all-powerful—i.e. decidedly, fundamentally apart from humanness.
For example, to dismiss the possibility of god because, as you say, "our world is full of things an all-powerful being would be able to stop" is to see those things through the lens of our fleeting lives. But if you presume that god is an eternal being or force and perhaps that we are also eternal beings (e.g. we have souls that will exist forever after death), then any amount of suffering that's less than infinite is literally insignificant. A millennium of suffering still becomes effectively zero next to infinity. Why should we expect god to prevent or relieve something that has literally no significance at all?
And then the proposition that follows this, that "an all-good being would presumably want to stop [those things]" is, as you note, often defended with some version of "well, god works in mysterious ways." Many scoff at that, but again, it seems to me that an eternal, omnipresent, all-powerful being would be beyond human understanding by definition. Of course god is mysterious. How could we possibly imagine the mind of an eternal, omnipresent, all-powerful being? We force it into a human-like box so that we can scoff and dismiss.
Goff's attempt to resolve these problems by way of a god-with-limitations is thin gruel.
As an aside, I am an atheist myself, but I would not presume to claim that god does not exist. I would only go so far as to say there is insufficient evidence to claim god exists. If god does exist, then expecting that I could understand god would be like expecting a sea slug to understand me.
There's more I want to address, but this is getting long already, so I will perhaps come back with another comment.
This is an interesting post regarding the existence and nature of deity. I might suggest incorporating the 20th-century school of “process theology” as a possible solution. Process theology would include thinkers such as Charles Hartshorne and Schubert Ogden.
Further, there is a minority interpretation of Jesus over against the Augustinian/Anselm atonement theory. The philosopher, Abelard, proposed understanding Jesus as an empowering example for living a life pleasing to God and to others.
I wonder if Goff’s approach to theodicy is the most sensible one. Leibniz proved that it is a necessary implication of an all-powerful, benevolent God that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The obvious modus tollens is that since we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, God (a) does not exist, (b) is not all powerful or (c) is not benevolent.
The apparatchiks like AP and WCR respond by saying God’s benevolence should not be subject to human standards, which allows a « benevolent » God who would torture most of humanity eternally because they got their theology wrong. Goff is on the right track to disagree with this approach.
Goff abandons (b). The problem with this is he still wants a creator who can fine tune the universe so that it can give rise to human-level phenomenology. Anything capable of that is going to be so close to omnipotence (interpreted, Aquinas and Leibniz style as capacity to do anything not impossible) as makes no difference.
What might work is to introduce a distinction between logical impossibility (the classic round square which Aquinas denied God could make) and cosmological impossibility (which can just be defined as the constraints a creator faces). This would be easy for contemporary analytic philosophy since everyone agrees that modal logic can be instantiated with multiple semantics of possibility/necessity as long as they relate in the standard ways. We would already accept a distinction between epistemic, physical and logical necessity/possibility so what is one more?
Goff’s position could then just be restated as that there are more limits on what is cosmologically possible than we as finite beings not tasked with creating universes might be aware of, and these might include that phenomenologies like our own can’t develop any other way than through natural selection over aeons. This doesn’t rule out in principle better understanding of what constraints there are on cosmological possibility or why those constraints exist (which is the real problem since once you accept theism any apparently better universe must be cosmologically impossible).
As a classical theist, I'm fascinated by arguments for limited theism and atheism, so thank you for this.
My question is, doesn't the "problem of evil" assume the universal categories of good and evil? Can an atheist make such a claim? This isn't to say that atheists can't be moral, or that they can't have a rigorous ethical system, but on what basis can they claim morality is as universal a category as the color yellow?
"If God exists, why does this God not make the world look like we think it should look" is a much less compelling argument against God, in my opinion.
The theist can surely get away with saying that the property “good” as predicated of God is only analogous to the same property as human beings would attribute it to each other. But if “good” means the *opposite* of what it would mean as attributed to a human being, then there is a problem. And the God of substitutionary atonement theology would be morally worse than the most abusive human parent because even the worst parent doesn’t torture their children *eternally*.
1) I don't think atheists have to say there aren't things that are objectively right/wrong/good/bad, 2) even if they did, it's not clear why the problem of evil couldn't be framed as an internal critique of theism (e.g., "Given that YOU take X, Y and Z to be objectively wrong/bad because an all-PKG God dislikes them, why are there so much of X, Y and Z in the world?")
Ben,
Your attempt to dissolve the fine tuning problem turns on a confusion between uninformative improbability and informative improbability.
There is a story about Richard Feynman coming to class and telling his students that he had just observed a miracle. He saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. As he enjoyed pointing out, the probability of seeing that plate was 1/26^3*10^3 (ignoring the question of whether the state had particular rules about the order of letters and numbers in license plates).
Now of course this is not miraculous at all because there is no way prior to seeing the license plate of specifying a macro-state that ARW 357 is a micro-instantiation of. It is only once Feynman sees the license plate that he can characterize ARW 357.
By contrast, if Feynman saw AAA 000, then that would indeed be surprising and would call for some special explanation. That is because there is a prior description of AAA 000 as the lowest possible value licence plate (taking A to be low and Z to be high). Of course, we have to be careful here or we get spurious miracles. (For starters, ZZZ 999 would have to be included in the class of instantiations of the macrostate that AAA 000 is also an instantiation of.) If we meet our local pharmacist on a trip to Disneyland, we have to be careful that we don't think of the prior description as "the local pharmacist" but "someone I know" since we would be just as surprised by the local baker and if we do that, then we might discover that there is nothing special to explain here.
So, there is nothing especially miraculous about the fact that the probability that someone would have my exact DNA is very low and I happen to have it. That is analogous to ARW 357. However, there is a need to explain the fact that I have a DNA that allows for a zygote to become an adult who can argue about the fine tuning problem. Natural selection provides that explanation, but it would be wrong to respond that there is just some way a sequence of DNA has to be.
The fine tuning problem arises because of all the ways the universe could be consistent with known physical laws, only a tiny minority are capable of having chemical reactions. This calls for either a designer explanation (usually theism) or a selection explanation (usually many worlds). It is not rationally acceptable to say the world just has to be some way, because there is a description (logically) prior to the instantiation.
Your argument that the designer hypothesis does not work because we don't know what the designer wants is also fallacious, because it confuses explanandum and explanans. A designer who wants there to be consciousness (or, from the panpsychist perspective, complex consciousness) is the explanation for why the knobs of the universe are so finely tuned. If the chances of this happening without either multiple worlds or a designer is 1/10^1000000000 (just to make up a number), then the probability that a designer would want finite conscious beings around just has to be better than this.
The point you think I'm confused about might be one I'm *wrong* about, but it's not something I'm just missing! My main point in the part about fine-tuning here was, as it was in our exchange on this (the response to the bit about the Lottery Owner's Nephew) and the previous things I've written about fine-tuning, was to explicitly cast doubt on *exactly* that premise.
Sorry about “confused”, since that is pretty passive aggressive. Can I just ask then whether you think there is any difference between Feynman seeing a licence plate ARW 357 and seeing one AAA 000? Or do you see that distinction and say it doesn’t apply at the cosmological level?
I'd have to think more about that particular example but I certainly agree with the more general point it's being used to make.
To go back to your example in our previous discussion, the lottery owner's nephew winning the lottery is more suspicious than just anyone winning the lottery because we have reason to think, given our general knowledge of human psychology, that the lottery owner would be likely to be biased in that direction. But I see no non-arbitrary reason to suppose that any being capable of cosmic fine-tuning would be default biased toward life as opposed to any other goal that would be instantiated by various kinds of non-life-allowing universes.
We can rule out accidental death without knowing the motive of the murderer.
This is where I think the explanans/explanandum thing comes in. The first step of the fine tuning argument is just to say that the fact that the universe is capable of generating life (or even information) is a fact we need to explain. Once you accept that, and accept a "fine tuner" as one explanation, then we can infer the fine tuner is interested in the existence of life/information. The question of why the fine tuner is interested in the existence of life/information is just a separate question, but whether we can answer it or not is no problem for the fine tuning argument.
Right. That's the exact point where we're diverging. I don't think it's a fact in need of explanation in the absence of some such background assumption (which is why I thought your previous analogy was so helpful).
It's only an informative improbability on the assumption that, if there is a fine-tuner, it's something they'd fine-tune for. In the absence of that assumption, I can't for the life of me understand why it's supposed to be any more informative than e.g. whether or not the number of molecules in the universe is prime, or any number of other improbably instantiated descriptions that any number of lifeless or life-occupied universes would also fit.
If we had reason to think we had a prime number of fundamental entities in the universe, that would be a legitimate argument for thinking there is a tuner who is into primes. We don’t so there isn’t. I still don’t understand why you think the explanans is the explanandum.
I take it as a scientific discovery that the anthropic principle is massively explanatory (it constrains the cosmological parameters massively and we have no other equally powerful and simple way of doing that). The metaphysical problem is how to explain the anthropic principle itself.
If I understand your position it is that the massive explanatory power of the anthropic principle doesn’t need further explanation. The universe just happens to occupy the tiny portion of parameter space consistent with our existence. This would really be saying the stars are there to provide us light.
The most naturalistic friendly explanation is that there are in fact a plenitude of justice universes and so of course the one we observe had anthropic parameters.
The other possibility is that there is a tuner who obscurely has the goal of promoting the existence of conscious beings. I agree this raises theodicy problems but it genuinely does solve a real problem without requiring a plenitude of universes.
The problem with the cards analogy for the fine tuning argument is that for cards you know the underlying processes. For the universe, there is no reason to assume some big "deck of universes" and ours happened to get picked. Maybe this idea comes from the fact that string theory is consistent with a gargantuan number of combinations of physical constants. The multiverse people say: actually all of those universes exist and we are in one with constants that support life. Yes, we won the lottery, but some universe had too! Goff rejects this and assumes some sort of creator for reasons I don't understand (I haven't read his book). But, I don't see any reason to assume a "deck of universes" with a random dealer. That presupposes a probabilistic process for picking universes that precedes the universe, but why would that process exist?
I'm a Marxist Christian, but with a pantheist view. I don't see Jesus as some savior as in either the classical atonement theology nor Goff's "love infusion" concept.
Jesus was the inheritor of the messianic vision of the Hebrew prophets that the chosen people were destined to gift the world with a glorious transformation into a society of peace, justice, and abundance.
The Roman Empire was the antithesis of the envisioned messianic age. Jesus prophesied that the Empire would fall due to its oppressive regime's inability to bring about the messianic destiny. He further gathered a movement that marched from the Galilee to Jerusalem arriving in the Passover season to protest the Roman occupation and the Judean collaborators.
That's the practical reason Pilate ordered his execution, Jesus was a rebel rabbi who threatened the stability Rome imposed.
The mythology about original sin and Jesus being a sacrificial lamb were just post hoc allegories to heighten the significance of the Jesus Movement. Ultimately, the myth was literalized and fused with Greco-Roman mythology to produce orthodox Christianity.
I consider Jesus to be a predecessor to Marxism given his hostility to the wealthy classes of his day. Maybe not the first Communist, but certainly an early exemplar.
I have been reading Marx’s dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus and it seems to me that Marx was a panpsychist avant la lettre. Marx approves of Epicurus’s deviation from Democritus precisely in that Epicurus posited freedom/non-determination to matter at its most basic, thereby allowing for freedom at higher levels of organization. Marx doesn’t explicitly talk about a first-person perspective but that’s the vibe of the thing. And then in Theses on Feuerbach he attacks contemplative materialism both for its implicit dualism because the « educator « forgets that he too is a product of circumstances and needs to be educated.
This one is a bit of shooting a fish in a barrel. I’m still waiting for Ben, whose work I admire, to explain the difference between an “ethnostate” as a term applied to Israel but not, for example, France or any number of countries. Ben has stated that he knows in his bones or his soul that an ethnostate is bad but isn’t it the default of a country?
There is a difference between a country that sociologically has an ethnic majority and a country that is legally defined as being for an ethnic majority.
Pantheism, at least, seems like a pretty straightforward move from panpsychism (or, more clinically, neutral monism). If all third-party observable processes have a first-party-phenomenal expression, then surely this would be true of the physical universe or multiverse, and you might as well call the universe/multiverse from a first person perspective “God”.
I am not sure pantheism suffers from the problem of evil since God in this sense isn’t designing the world but is just the world experiencing itself. We could even call this God “good” by way of just affirming existence as such rather than asserting that all physical or moral evil has to be. We probably would also want to deny God is good as well as affirm it, but that is just negative theology (expressed by Anselem among others).
I am less sure how you go from pantheism to panentheism (or really what the latter view is). The attractive feature of neutral monism is that it avoids all the puzzles of distinct substances without going all the way to eliminative materialism. If we bring in an ideal God who is distinct from the universe then we are back to the same problems, including theodicy.
I don’t see why Goff couldn’t have had his heretical Christianity with pantheism. There is no drop dead argument for thinking human religious experience is or at least can be some kind of communication with the universe as expressed as mentality analogous to some possible experience our cells-as-expressed mentality might have with us. But it is an attractive idea. Of course that religious experience would be “through a glass darkly” and would be understood in accordance with historically-determined ideology. But Spinoza or Hegel suggested how we could reformulante any historical spiritual tradition in a way perfectly compatible with a naturalist account of all human realities including religion.
I am not sure Neil’s argument works. Panpsychism implies that all physical wholes have *some* mentality, but of course animals with memories and behaviours or humans with linguistic conceptualisation have more complex phenomenologies than molecules. And even the existence of molecules is unbelievably unlikely if we just allow the universe to have unconstrained physical constants and initial conditions.
So it still works as an explanation for why the universe has the unlikely qualities necessary for chemical reactions that it was designed by a being interested in having more complex phenomenologies than those that would be exhibited by just any old quantum field (or whatever the truly basic physical reality is).
According to Dr Jordan Peterson, atheism is just another religion (or religious belief) as is just about every deeply held political alignment. Based on what we’ve seen this election cycle as well as most in my lifetime, I can’t dispute that. Nobody thinks they are a zealot, but everyone around them can see it if they are, especially those who disagree.
The claim that "atheism is just a religion" has always struck me as an odd one. It is obviously intended to be disparaging of atheism. But that only works if "being a religion" is a bad thing, and the people making the claim presumably don't think it is!
If "being a religion" means taking a position on a theological question, then atheism is trivially a religion, but that is no criticism of it. If we use "being a religion" to mean taking a position in an unreasoned or fanatical way, then we are just engaged in a very cheap and question-begging form of anti-religious polemic. Further, an atheist can happily concede that many (maybe even all) the people who agree with them are unreasonable or fanatical without it having any implication whatsoever for the existence of God. Indeed, one might even argue that the existence of so many illogical and bigoted atheists is incompatible with a benevolent omnipotent creator.
I find your Fine-Tuning counter argument interesting. Let me see if I can delineate my own intiitions against the Fine-Tuning Argument, as I don't think I've seen them anywhere just yet.
Folks in favor of the argument almost always come from the position of the improbability of current conditions, given the narrow band of narrow variables "required" for these conditions to arise. Because of that perceived improbability, they often assume purpose or intelligence in achieving those variables. But this is exactly the same argument, in kind, as Ray Comfort was making about the shape of a banana. Because we, as humans, find a thing useful, it follows that it must have been created for our use. I think the the error in thinking here is obvious. But there is also an argument to be made against the "improbable" part of the claim: We live, by all rational, scientific evidence, in a deterministic universe. That is to say, everything that has or will ever exist is bound by the law of cause and effect. (Even devoutly religious folk tend to believe this, albeit often substituting a supernatural cause.) If we live in a deterministic universe, then what has happened did so because, given the previous causes, it was the only thing that could have happened. It does not matter, in the slightest, that, if the constant of whatever were half a whatever in either direction life wouldn't exist, because there is no way for any of those measurements to ever have been any different. (Unless, one wishes to posit entirely different universes, with different physics and chemistry. By all means, have fun, if that's your rabbit hole, but be forewarned, that way madness lies...) In short, things - *waves hands wildly at surrounding everything* - things are this way because it is the only way they could be. (Don't come at me with that "but Free Will" nonsense unless prepared to prove Free Will even exists. Another subject, for another time, but not one, the existence of which, should be taken for granted as much as most folk do.) The Fine-Tuning Argument is, in essence, a post hoc etiology; mythology masquerading as mathematics to justify a belief in this view of the supernatural. It takes a view of what is, and insists that this state of affairs is purposeful, (purposeful, here to mean 'directed toward a future goal' - Although, in most religious arguments, that goal is us. Go figure.)
Anyway, not certain I've completely nailed down my thinking about it, or that I've explained it understandably here, but I'm going to drink more coffee and get on with my day now. Thanks for the post. I can always count on you to provide stimulating mental fodder.
Atheism has its (well known) problems too - if mathematicians need axioms then so do philosophers. Otherwise if I pick my moral axioms and you pick yours who is to say which are right? If it doesn’t matter, then logically the conclusion is that nothing matters which is desperately close to nihilism! OK if you’re a pessimist but I’m an optimist!
Apologies for leaving a second long comment, but I couldn't refrain.
I was raised in a decidedly non-classical branch of Christianity—one inspired by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. There are at least three sects of Swedenborgian Christianity, and I was raised in the largest of the ones I know about. I'm an atheist now, but I still think Swedenborg resolved some of the questions here more effectively than many who have attempted them since.
For example, Swedenborg's book, Divine Providence, is an expansive answer the question of why god allows suffering. It boils down to a sort of "long arc of the universe bending towards justice," and defends this at length.
He also addressed the question of hell with a concept called "ruling love." Briefly, the idea is that our actions and intentions in this life are manifestations of our ruling love. Regardless of what we might profess, what we intend and what we do in this life define what we care about most. That is what "ruling love" means, and Swedenborg's claim is that our ruling love is the basis upon which we will be judged when we die.
The heaven or hell that await us after death, according to Swedenborg, are defined by ruling loves. Immoral, corrupt, and violent people are deemed thus through their acts, and the "hell" to which they are bound is a place full of like people. That is primarily what makes it hellish.
Anyway, his writings—particularly Divine Providence, True Christian Religion, and perhaps Heaven and Hell—are worth a look insofar as they relate to the topic at hand here.
A Swedenborg argument for god who allows suffering goes along these lines:
1. God exists and loves his creation, including us humans, unconditionally
2. Because god loves us, god has given us free will
3. Because of our free will, we can be awful to each other
4. God's divine providence is guiding all of creation towards goodness and beauty, even though we are acting independently and freely
5. Divine providence still allows terrible things to happen and innocents to suffer, but god ensures that it will, on balance, serve the greater good where all will ultimately flourish in heavenly eternity, and any suffering that happens during our earthly lives fades to literal insignificance against eternity.
I'm not a student of philosophy, but it seems to me that the usual arguments for and against the existence of god all suffer from the same flaw. Namely, all the propositions put god into a human box with human parameters, presumably in order to test the propositions with various forms of "what might a human-like god do?"
It seems like a fallacious way to approach the question of a being who is supposedly eternal, omnipresent, all-powerful—i.e. decidedly, fundamentally apart from humanness.
For example, to dismiss the possibility of god because, as you say, "our world is full of things an all-powerful being would be able to stop" is to see those things through the lens of our fleeting lives. But if you presume that god is an eternal being or force and perhaps that we are also eternal beings (e.g. we have souls that will exist forever after death), then any amount of suffering that's less than infinite is literally insignificant. A millennium of suffering still becomes effectively zero next to infinity. Why should we expect god to prevent or relieve something that has literally no significance at all?
And then the proposition that follows this, that "an all-good being would presumably want to stop [those things]" is, as you note, often defended with some version of "well, god works in mysterious ways." Many scoff at that, but again, it seems to me that an eternal, omnipresent, all-powerful being would be beyond human understanding by definition. Of course god is mysterious. How could we possibly imagine the mind of an eternal, omnipresent, all-powerful being? We force it into a human-like box so that we can scoff and dismiss.
Goff's attempt to resolve these problems by way of a god-with-limitations is thin gruel.
As an aside, I am an atheist myself, but I would not presume to claim that god does not exist. I would only go so far as to say there is insufficient evidence to claim god exists. If god does exist, then expecting that I could understand god would be like expecting a sea slug to understand me.
There's more I want to address, but this is getting long already, so I will perhaps come back with another comment.
This is an interesting post regarding the existence and nature of deity. I might suggest incorporating the 20th-century school of “process theology” as a possible solution. Process theology would include thinkers such as Charles Hartshorne and Schubert Ogden.
Further, there is a minority interpretation of Jesus over against the Augustinian/Anselm atonement theory. The philosopher, Abelard, proposed understanding Jesus as an empowering example for living a life pleasing to God and to others.
I wonder if Goff’s approach to theodicy is the most sensible one. Leibniz proved that it is a necessary implication of an all-powerful, benevolent God that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The obvious modus tollens is that since we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, God (a) does not exist, (b) is not all powerful or (c) is not benevolent.
The apparatchiks like AP and WCR respond by saying God’s benevolence should not be subject to human standards, which allows a « benevolent » God who would torture most of humanity eternally because they got their theology wrong. Goff is on the right track to disagree with this approach.
Goff abandons (b). The problem with this is he still wants a creator who can fine tune the universe so that it can give rise to human-level phenomenology. Anything capable of that is going to be so close to omnipotence (interpreted, Aquinas and Leibniz style as capacity to do anything not impossible) as makes no difference.
What might work is to introduce a distinction between logical impossibility (the classic round square which Aquinas denied God could make) and cosmological impossibility (which can just be defined as the constraints a creator faces). This would be easy for contemporary analytic philosophy since everyone agrees that modal logic can be instantiated with multiple semantics of possibility/necessity as long as they relate in the standard ways. We would already accept a distinction between epistemic, physical and logical necessity/possibility so what is one more?
Goff’s position could then just be restated as that there are more limits on what is cosmologically possible than we as finite beings not tasked with creating universes might be aware of, and these might include that phenomenologies like our own can’t develop any other way than through natural selection over aeons. This doesn’t rule out in principle better understanding of what constraints there are on cosmological possibility or why those constraints exist (which is the real problem since once you accept theism any apparently better universe must be cosmologically impossible).
As a classical theist, I'm fascinated by arguments for limited theism and atheism, so thank you for this.
My question is, doesn't the "problem of evil" assume the universal categories of good and evil? Can an atheist make such a claim? This isn't to say that atheists can't be moral, or that they can't have a rigorous ethical system, but on what basis can they claim morality is as universal a category as the color yellow?
"If God exists, why does this God not make the world look like we think it should look" is a much less compelling argument against God, in my opinion.
The theist can surely get away with saying that the property “good” as predicated of God is only analogous to the same property as human beings would attribute it to each other. But if “good” means the *opposite* of what it would mean as attributed to a human being, then there is a problem. And the God of substitutionary atonement theology would be morally worse than the most abusive human parent because even the worst parent doesn’t torture their children *eternally*.
1) I don't think atheists have to say there aren't things that are objectively right/wrong/good/bad, 2) even if they did, it's not clear why the problem of evil couldn't be framed as an internal critique of theism (e.g., "Given that YOU take X, Y and Z to be objectively wrong/bad because an all-PKG God dislikes them, why are there so much of X, Y and Z in the world?")