While the Bayesian framework is intellectually rigorous, it ultimately masks subjective metaphysical assumptions behind a facade of mathematical certainty. The staggering 99.75% probability reveals more about the author's initial priors than it does about the objective existence of God.
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Hey everyone, welcome back to the majesty of reason. I'm Joe Schmid and today I'm joined once more by Dr. Nevin Kleimhagga from Texas&M University. Last time we talked about probability. What is probability? What's Nevin's theory of probability? I've linked that in the description so you can check that out and hopefully it'll pop up in the corner somewhere around here. Um that's going to be background for today's discussion.
Today we're talking about theism and Nevin's cumulative case for theism or something like that.
>> Great. Thank you and thank you for having me on again. So yeah, what I want to do is to walk through uh the how to think about the probability of theism in light of our total evidences. um the the big evidences that come up in the debate between theism and naturalism. Of course, as you know, Joe, there's well, you know, there's lots of new arguments like I'm not going to talk about psychophysical harmony and so on. Um but it might come up when we talk about consciousness. We'll see. Okay. Um but I've tried to, you know, go go through uh I want to go through like kind of the big ones that to me seem the most evidentially relevant. It's going to be very big picture and I want to do it as I said beforehand, I want to kind of do it in dialogue. Um get your intuitions on some things. So, this is uh much less neatly laid out. I've got some notes of things I want to talk about, but um it's it's more free pre free flowing than our last conversation. I think we'll probably spend the most time talking about um the intrinsic probability of theism and fine-tuning because that's where a lot of the things about probability that we discussed are most relevant and can for example in fine-tuning uh can apply to like some common objections to fine-tuning. Um so, I think we should spend a bit of time on that. But first, what I want to do is use this nice whiteboard here that I have in my office and say a little bit about how to think about um reasoning with multiple items of evidence. How we do that? Suppose that we've got two theories to start. The probability of theism and the probability I'm going to say source physicalism is the um main atheistic theory that I want to contrast this with. So that's Draper's term, but it's the theory that at the foundations of reality are um is is something physical rather than something mental or something that's both or something that's other. Okay, so that would include kind of straightforward materialism, but it could also include like a view that said that consciousness is like emergent and there is such a thing as um like mental substances, but that the um causal the root of causal reality is just physical stuff. Okay, so these are these are our two theories. So here's the odds form of base theorem.
Okay. So what I have drawn up here is um the probability of t theism versus the probability of sp source physicalism given two evidences u and f which I'm thinking of standing for the existence of a universe and the fine-tuning of that universe and um what the odds forum base theorem tells us is that the relative posterior odds so that is this thing here, this term that we're getting out of this equation that is equal to the relative prior odds. So this first term multiplied by two base factors for each successive item of evidence. The first one is the probability of the universe given theism versus source physicalism respectively.
The second one is the probability of fine-tuning given theism and source physicalism respectively. And and this is important um taking into account the evidence we've already considered namely that there is a universe. So um the way that the odds form works here is it lets us take successive account of multiple items of evidence and like the first two terms on the right hand side that's that would give us the probability of theism versus source physicalism just on the existence of a universe.
It gives us the relative odds given that one evidence. Then once we have that to take into account an additional item of evidence, then we just multiply through the base factor for that next item of evidence. In this case, the finetuning of the universe and and those probabilities that enter into that base factor are relative to the evidence we've already taken to account, namely the existence of the universe. So the odds form of base theorem is really nice because it lets us like keep our earlier calculation and then just um append to it this additional base factor that we we then multiply through to get the new odds given additional evidence. Okay, so that's the basic idea. Then one question that you face when you're addressing when you're confronting multiple items of evidence is well what order do I take these in? And that's where my theory of probability that we discussed last time can help us. Um so as we discussed in my view the basic probabilities are the probabilities of in a basian network a directed asyclic graph of um a variable conditional on its parents and um that's going to include the limit case like the root node of a graph. So the root node here would be the theism source physicalism other theories of ultimate reality. So those unconditional probabilities will be basic and then the probability of something that's directly explained by uh that variable that ultimate reality variable. So like the existence of the universe and then um things that are downstream from those and explained by those and theism or source physicalism respectively like oh what that universe looks like that it has these laws and constants initial conditions and so on.
Um and then we can bring in additional things like fine-tuning for discoverability. I want to talk about the existence of um conscious humans uh miracle reports, religious experiences and so on and try to fit those into that same framework. Now, we talked last time as well about how like my theory is kind of basic probabilities um could work in uh we laid it out in this very like rarified case, but then you know in real life reasoning we kind of move to a um abstracting away from a lot of those details. And so, you know, um there's a lot that we're going to be glossing over here. We're going to try to um simplify and and say things like well you know like we don't go into the details of like well here are all the particular evils in the world and so on. Those will be like kind of a jumble of where they come in the explanatory order but like that there is moral evil and natural evil of roughly this kind this kind you know that's how we tend to think of it in applying this to um reasoning about theism and rival theories. Uh, one other thing that I'll say there is that kind of this approach to here's how we go through the evidences like we take them roughly in their explanatory order. That is more or less how Swinburn proceeds in his cumulative case for theism. And so this isn't like like a radical new idea.
Here's how to think about these things.
But my theory does offer a kind of rationale for this that um isn't well recognized in the literature. I think and sometimes you you were at the conference with me at Swinburn um in honor of Paul Draper and so sometimes I think in his own theorizing Swinburn gets a little confused but I think that my theory gives kind of a good justification why this is how you should proceed. Um, and as we'll see, this does come up some in like the fine-tuning literature, for example. There's some confusion, some disagreement about like, well, how do you what order do you take evidences like that? Um, we have these laws and then these laws are fine-tuned in this way with the constants, like you know, what order do you take those in?
Um, and so my theory can help us there, I think.
>> Yeah, that's interesting. Is this like um a rational requirement in your theory to kind of update successively in order of like explanatory fundamentality? Um, or do you just think it's particularly fitting? I don't know. I I guess I asked because like when when you at least just look at the math, right? Like you could have taken U or F there in either direction and you could have just, you know, you could have done the probability of T times the probability of F given T times the probability of U given F and T, right? And you know, mathematically, provably those are going to be equivalent, right? Presumably. So like can can you just like at least say something about um the nature of this ordering like how exactly?
>> Yeah. Yeah. Right. So it's not a rational requirement in the sense that as you say if you do it in a different order and your math is consistent you're going to come to the same result.
>> Um the way I think of it is that you are not going to be able at least in normal cases you're not going to be able to intuitively see the values if you do it in a different order. at least not as well as you can see them when you do it in this natural order. So there is a different these are two different questions. One one question is what are the metaphysically basic probabilities and the other is um what probabilities are we most directly able to see the value of. So the first is like a question about grounding is a question about metaphysics. The second is a question about epistemology about our access to probabilities. But I think they're connected and I think that in normal cases that the basic probabilities are ones that we can directly see the values of and non-basic ones we can't. We have to calculate them. You know we talked last week about like the principle of not well whenever we had our previous conversation about the principle of indifference and you know you pointed out well we can use this in like cases besides the basic ones and I said yeah that's true. Um when we kind of intuitively see well everything cancels out and so on. Um and so that's something like that is you know what's going on when we um yeah kind of apply at this high level. uh but for the most part I think that it is going to be the case that taking things in this explanatory order is going to lead to values where we can we can see what they are more easily. So like in fine-tuning for example when we we take the laws as given and then we say well what's the probability that the constants would be in the life permitting range given single universe naturalism um then you know we can naturally apply the principle of indifference in the kind of way we talked about and say oh well the probability of this constant falling in the the range well that is that range is like one and 10 the 60 of the range of possible values um and so that's the probability so you can do that kind of thing whereas if you order them in a different way then suddenly it becomes quite unclear what the probability makes.
>> That makes sense. Okay. Well, then um where should we go from here?
>> Okay. So then next um so then next let me say how you would apply this to more than two theories because in a moment what I want to do is to to share a calculation that um involves that. So here the idea is um like you could just do a pie-wise like H you know hypothesis H1 versus H2 H2 versus H3 but you could also write it um call it once here and the way I'll do that is say let's just call O like a theory for other things besides theories of ultimate reality besides theism and source physicalism.
So then we have that these relative posterior odds for these three theories theism physicalism and other equals the prior odds times the base factors. Okay. So what we've done here is we're multiplying the relative prior odds for these three theories um times the base factors for our two evidences. And now we've just got three things. And that's what the the dot is the ratio of the probability of theism to the probability of source physicalism to the probability of other and the probability of a universe given theism to the probability of a universe given source physicalism etc. Um and then you know that would get us something at the bottom you know if we ended up like with one to two to three then that would tell us okay well so that sums up to six so the probability of theism would be one and six and so on. So you get the relative odds for our theories and if these are all the options then you normalize by the sum of all those relative odds.
So you take the um whatever you get for theism and then you divide it by the total and then that gives you your posterior probability for theism. That's the idea. Okay. All right. So now we're going to turn to uh to Microsoft Excel.
We're going to use Microsoft Excel to um calculate the probability of theism for us. that that that program than which none greater can be conceived.
What I've done here I've I've broken things into five theories. So theism, source physicalism, um limited theism, so something like traditional theism, but God has limited power or limited knowledge or isn't all good or something. Axiarchism. So this is John Lesley is the most famous proponent that says that goodness is itself causally efficacious and this is why the universe exists because it's good for it to exist. So that's a possible explanation of fine-tuning for example and then other which is just a catch all. Um so right now we're just assigning everything equal probability here. So the prior probability of each of these is equal and then all the evidences that I've listed here have equal probability on it on each theory. And then we multiply through we get the relative posterior odds and then the normalized probabilities. So to see just to give you a sense of um how changing things what changing things would do here I have to do an equal sign here so that Excel doesn't interpret this as a date.
Uh okay so then if we said oh the prior of source physicalism is like half as half as high as these other theories then you see how that affects things. Um so then it ends up with half as much relative probability at the end and then when we re reormalize we end up with um 29ths. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So 29ths for the that's right for the four other theories and one nth for um source physicalism. Um if then we said well you know I think that like theism makes um fine-tuning 100 times as probable as the other theories. Then you see what happens you know then you get down here. Okay.
Now the now theism has like 97% probability and so on.
>> Yeah. And I hope this is clear for the audience, but these are like ratios, right? Like uh these are not we're not saying it's like somehow it's like all of these assign a probability of 100% to the to to the data or like have a prior probability of 100%. Like of course you couldn't have theism and all these incompatible things all being 100% probable. So just for the audience uh these are like ratios like how well does theism do with respect to the data predicting them compared to the other hypothesis and then like what's like the ratio among the re relevant prior probabilities like just want to make that very clear for the audience.
>> That's exactly right. So this is um this is not normalized here. These these are unnormalized what I've just highlighted here. What that means is that we're looking at the ratio of the prior probabilities and of how well each of these explains the evidence in question.
And so, you know, I could put a hundred here. I could put a thousand here. And it still makes sense because all we're saying is that the fine-tuning data is a thousand times more probable on theism than it is on source physicalism. That it's equally probable on source physicalism, limited theism, etc. Um, and that's all coherent. You actually don't need to know the absolute probability of say fine-tuning on our different hypotheses.
All you need to know is the relative probabilities and that is enough to determine a unique posterior probability for each theory. So as long as these are exhaustive, as long as these are all the possibilities, then if you have the relative um base factors that is the relative probabilities of the evidence on these theories, then that will give you the absolute posterior probabilities for them. Um and this is really useful in some cases like fine-tuning. That's a case where we can like get some purchase on absolute probabilities at least like under um single universe naturalism for example. But like if you're looking at the prob problem evil uh you know like what's the absolute probability given source physicalism of um a universe with the kinds of evils we observe like I don't know uh but you know maybe you can get some purchase on the relative probabilities of that universe under source physicalism and other theism that's that's much more tractable. You can say things like, well, you know, I think that like a plausible theodysy that maybe there's like a 1% chance that like one of the going theies works and so I think it's like a hundred times evil's 100 times more probable given physicalism than whereas it's like generally unsurprising like the specifics of course surprising but you know something like this not you know not surprising given atheism and so I think it's a hundred times it was 100 times more probable source physicalism you know you can say that kind of thing without trying to come down on whatever you think the precise probabilities are which would be a intractable quantity to try to to measure. Okay. Yes. So so relative probabilities that's very important.
Okay. Um so does this background make sense before we move into trying to think through the priors and then then the um base factors for the evidences?
>> Yeah. No, I think that makes sense. So we're, you know, we're first going to try to look at um how probable the respective hypotheses are in relation to one another kind of independently of or precending from our uh contingent empirical knowledge of the world. Um you know, relative just to the collection of operatory truths. And then after we do that, we're just going to as it were successively update on different pieces of evidence and we're going to see how well the respective hypotheses predict them. Um and you know once we update on a particular piece of evidence once we as it were take into account its probabilistic effect we then as Nevin explained earlier we sort of put it in the background and then we have to assess how likely the the next successive piece of evidence is conditional on the respective theories together with that piece of evidence that we've already conditioned on.
>> Uh that's important to remember and then we just successfully do that. So I think uh I think that's all perfectly clear hopefully for the audience.
>> Great. Okay. Yeah. All right. So then um so let's think about the question of the unconditional probability of these different theories then to start. So so we talked last time about how I've been thinking about this recently where I think it makes a difference whether you're thinking of whether you think that these are um just brute contingencies or you think that the foundation of empirical reality is a necessary truth.
And so what I said what I said then was I'm coming around to the idea that if there contingencies then um it's every like specific way that ultimate reality could be is equally likely. Um and that's going to be bad news for theism because um the probability of uh a particular of of this very specific way of theism of ultimate reality being like an omnipotent omnicient etc god is going to be quite low. Um whereas I think if if things are metaphysically necessary at the foundation that things look different because I think it's a lot more plausible that a perfect god would be at the foundation than you know some kind of limited creator etc. Um so I'm going to kind of take that for granted because it's going to bias things against theism. You know if we said oh well if um we think that on the brute contingency possibility that um we should prefer simpler theories and that would be better for theism. But I'm I'm going to assume that's not the case here. uh just to to make the case harder for theism.
Um okay so then I guess there are two possibilities then so the one is that uh actually there are three possibilities. So so one possibility is you've got an infinite regress um in the empirical world. Um I don't think that's possible. Uh I know you've done a lot of work on this. Um so I don't know let let me give let me give I I I give this argument to you at at the conference too. But this argument does relate to my theory so of probabilities. it is it ties in there but but here's one reason why I don't think this is possible so I think that um it's possible that to assign probabilities to like claims about the world the empirical world but here's how I think you figure out the probability as as we were just talking about the probability of some scientific theory say well you ask how probable would that theory be given um higher order explanations of it and how probable are those higher order explanations and go a step up. How probable those higher order explanations? Well, for those probabilities, you need to look at like even more explanatory prior explanations and how probable they make the the higher order theories and then how probable they are. Now, you're off in a regress and you need some stopping point where you get to like ultimate explanations and you say, okay, these are if you want to call them intrinsic probabilities now where there's nothing more explanatory prior to them, at least not empirically.
um you know like abstract objects can be prior fine but now like anything that's prior to them is this like abstract stuff that's just fixed that has probability one and so then we're looking at probabilities relative to to those so this is a regress stopper if you don't have that then I think you just end up on a regress where you can't assign probabilities to empirical truths and so I think this is a problem for yeah like an infinite past for example >> yeah we did talk about this >> yeah you're itching to you're itching Well, I mean, we talked about this at the conference. I mean, you know, I thought I think my two reactions at the conference and, you know, you had we had some reasonable back and forth in this.
I mean, one one thought that I had was like, well, maybe there's some way in which uh one of the nodes at some point in the past can kind of like probabilistically screen off the other nodes in some way that >> uh so that we can get uh probabilities at least thereafter.
And I guess I floated another proposal where you know maybe we go with something like a Jonathan Schaffer style priority monism um where like you know the whole cosmos is explanatory basic or is at least more explanatory basic than the particular successive stages of it that are linked infinitely into the past. Um and then maybe we can sort of like somehow um determine the probabilities of the relevant stages by reference to um what they metaphysically depend upon, namely the priority moon cosmos and then that's not going to be like an infinitely descending chain or something like that. I think those are my two main pieces of feedback. Um >> yeah, I think the latter is coherent. Um but I think it's massively disisconfirmed because I think that if the you get a similar problem that if you think the um ultimate cause is contingent where if if I'm right that you should assign equal probabilities to all possibilities because then I think if priority monism is true then you should assign equal probabilities to like every maximally specific way that let's suppose that there's just a universe for simplicity like every possible arrangement of mass energy in the universe. um you know well then like the fact that we're in like a low entropy universe where like induction works for example becomes extremely surprising >> and so that that fact is evidence against priority monism and in favor of a view on which um what on which like this succession through time and so on is prior to the way that the universe as a whole overall of time is.
>> H that's interesting. What if I said that, you know, the cuz that seemed to rely on this sort of like indifference style reasoning and the the point about contingency, right? So what if I said like the priority monus cosmos is like metaphysically necessary or something like that or maybe has some sort of like deeper deeper essence or something like that which is metaphysically necessary and >> which somehow has like a a bias toward I don't know compactly specifiable mosaics of qualities in spaceime or something.
Uh yeah. Well, so this so two things. So if you say it's so if you just saying it's necessary doesn't solve the problem because then there's the question of like well how do we assign like um you we talked about this last time we can assign epistemic probabilities to necessary truths that are are not zero or one, right? Um and so how do we how do we do that? Well, it's plausible we should again be indifferent in that case even you know over what what the necessities are. Um unless you're like a modal realist or something, you say that like every possible universe exists, you know, but then you say you have again the same problem like what kind of universe do we find ourselves in um and then this is going to jump ahead a little bit to finetuning, but we should probably be like Bzman brain kind of observers in in a motor realist world um where where we observe like chaos. But the if you if you added the simplicity idea, okay, that helps, but I think there you get new problems. Um so you actually end up with a view that's close to like Draper's view of um how probabilities are determined where I I that is to say I think both have the same implication which is that you should um one one way to think of it is that I first described like the view where you don't wait by simplicity and I said then you you like you do things like in the possibility of induction is surprising. If you have a view where you do wait by simplicity then I think you get too much induction. So you get the view that for example um I flip I don't have my coin with me. You flip a coin twice, you know, and then it's going to get destroyed. Um well, the probability that it lands heads twice, it's a fair coin, but the probability that it lands heads twice is higher than the probability that it lands heads than tails because that's a simpler world.
It's more compactly describable, for example, in in that way of putting it.
Um the world where this coin lands heads twice, you know. Now, now maybe you say, well, you know, ways, coins, lands, that's not like a kind of thing, you know, it's not like rock bottom in my ontology. Okay, fine. Um, you know, then take like particles, but there's like a random process that like determines whether particles have charge or not.
This like property like charge and then um, you know, there's just like two particles produced and you know that both are charged end up becoming more probable than that like one is charged and one is not because that world is more compactly describable. or if that's not true for like two, it's at least true for like, you know, 10. Um, even though this process is by hypothesis random. Um, so I think you end up with Yeah. with with some results like that.
>> You know, of course, we could go back and forth and whatnot. And I have sympathies with some of your responses.
So, for purposes of a time, let's continue on with where you were going.
>> All right. All right. So, we'll note the objection and and we're just going to assume that there is a first cause here and then ask um yeah, what is it like?
So, um Okay. So the two possibilities either the first cause is contingent or it's necessary. If it's contingent like I said I think you know theism probably does pretty poorly. If it's necessary though then I think theism does very well. So here's one way to understand the hypothesis of theism and this is pretty similar to how how Swinburn or this this basically is how Swinburn lays it out. So Swinburn says that theism is the hypothesis that um ultimate reality is a person and a person that is unlimited with respect to power and knowledge and that is perfectly free.
And what he means by that what Sw means by that is that uh God is not influenced by like a rational desires. the only kinds of considerations God takes into account are um like those that uh like things that he knows to be to be reasons to do X or Y um through reason and and not like you know he doesn't have like desires for food or for sex or things you know that like come from our biological nature that kind of thing.
Okay. Now I think this is actually this is a really simple hypothesis. Um so if you think of a person like what is a person? Well, a person is um a thing that that has agency that can act. Um and what does that involve? Well, like one, you need power to be able to act, right? Um you need to be able to do things. So, we we say, okay, so God is is maximal in that respect. It's unlimited with respect to power. Can do anything that's possible. But then you also need you also need knowledge because you need to be able to act for reasons. So like a person is not a thing that kind of just has effects but that acts on the basis of reasons, right? um and and to act on the basis of reasons you need knowledge and so then God has is maximal with that with respect to that property too um having maximal knowledge and so always being able to see what are the reasons born against things and then the perfectly free bit is kind of that's that's like not an unlimited that's like a zero like there's none of this other kind of thing um to say that God's agency is perfect in this respect that he's only influenced by like the reasons that he recognizes and not by other kinds of considerations.
Um, so that's the kind of thing that I think um, you know, it's certainly not like obvious that if there's a metaphysically necessary foundation, it's not obvious to me that it has to be like that, but it's like plausible. I think that if the foundation of reality is something metaphysically necessary, that's the kind of thing that okay, I could see that. Um, whereas if you take like a kind of limited theism where God is very powerful but not all powerful, then it starts to look quite arbitrary.
And I want to think I want to say what why would that why would it be like metaphysically necessary that God um can do almost anything but he can't um you know do this these like very particular things and it's going to depend on the form of limited theism right um so like some might be more principle than others but at least the kind of going theories like you know like so like Philip Goff um you know says that like God is constrained with the like what kind of lawike universe he can create it seems and Um, and I I don't totally understand all the restrictions that go places on on God, but he thinks that like the laws are necessary for God in some sense. Um, you know, and that just that looks quite arbitrary. Um, and so I think any particular form is going to have pretty low probability.
So um you know given all that um I don't know how to balance it all off but you know maybe like let's say theism and limited theism um have I guess limited theism has higher probability on contingency theism I think does necessity let's say they'll cancel out and so that we end up with with equal priors we're going to have to keep in mind then the limited theism encompasses quite a lot when we go on to uh think about what it predicts because I haven't given a specific form of it um source physicalism Um, I think it doesn't look at all plausible to me that this would be true if necess if the foundation is necessary. Like physical things are the kinds of things that can be broken apart, that can change. Um, and so it looks much less plausible to me that that's going to be necessarily true. Axiarchism, I could see that being necessarily true. That's like that that's not crazy to me. Um, and other it seems like these are like theism, physicalism, axiarchism, those sound like kind of principal options.
Others a grab bag, so it's hard to say, but I, you know, we can give it um equal probability. Maybe we can give more.
I'll bump it up here. Um, because it's kind of catchall. Um, yeah. Does this sound um, so I'll get your your intuitions here before we move on, but um, >> yeah. Yeah. I mean I mean one thing to note is that um >> like I ideally we would want it to be such that like the whole analysis to be such that like it's pretty robust to uh lots of reasonable >> priors that we might assign. So I think the audience should at least keep that in mind like >> we're not exactly going for >> exact numerical precision and like these are definitely the correct things to assign like these are definitely correct ratios and what it's like what you might be going for is that like later on when we really like look at the evidence and assign like very plausible numbers for those you can see that the analysis is actually quite robust to reasonable initial assignments of prior probabilities. So that's one reason why we may not want to get too hung up on this sort of thing. I think like Yeah.
Yeah. What might want to make us get like hung up on this is if we had some reason to think that like theism specifically or like source physicalism specifically was like ludicrous absurdly unlikely from the get-go to the point that it's basically like prohibitively improbable. It's not going to be able to be it's it's low prior probability is not going to be able to be um sufficiently counterbalanced by evidence in its favor. Um and I think some of the reasons that you gave can kind of push back against that concern, you know, like at least if we follow a broadly Swinburnian approach to theism, you know, um we posit this uh fundamental agent, fundamental person, something like that, we characterize its features in seemingly simple, elegant, compactly describable ways. And in fact, some of them, some of the the attributes of this being seem to like entail others, as you were kind of pointing out. um they're not held to any like arbitrary degree or anything like that. Um they seem to like >> kind of coher with one another in important ways because they're all like valuable great making features and he doesn't have any like >> badm features or things like that. So I don't know it seems like pretty pretty coherent pretty non-arbit pretty simple you know just like a being of limitless intentional power and then you can sort of try to derive or at least probabilify lots of the other attributes on the basis of that. So like at least given that it would be odd or strange to me to basically say like the prior probability of this is essentially negligible you know like >> one in 10 to the power of let's say like 100 or something. um that just seems unduly biased. Uh >> I think that >> I think that um the really important thing I mean as we go through it we'll see at least if we end up numbers with anything like how I have been thinking about it. We'll see that um theism I think is massively confirmed by the empirical data over source physicalism.
Um I think the uh you know for my part I think the cover question is theism versus like limited theism and other supernaturalisms um where I I see those as potentially able to explain many if not all of the data and so the relative probabilities there might make more of a difference but for theism versus source physicalism the really yeah as you say the really important thing is that you don't just give an absurdly low prior probability to theism but let me say here um so I I think I left this yeah I left this point five here but I I think because on contingency Like I think physicalism is much more probable than theism and on even if on necessity it's not um and theism isn't a sure thing on necessity I think it does have a somewhat higher prior probability. So let's let's give it a initial boost of five five times greater. Let's say that >> yeah I also point to that one.
>> Yeah. Yeah. And I mean for the audience keep in mind that like basically um I don't want to get too technical. So for those of you who do know like the law of total probability here where we like we consider uh how likely it is how likely source physicalism would be conditional on um the foundation of reality being necessary times the probability of the foundation of reality being necessary and then we add that to um the probability of source physicist or whatever conditional on uh contingency times the probability that the foundation of reality would be contingent. And that's how we're sort of getting these. And so, um, so long as you're not like hopelessly, well, so long as you think that there's at least some chance that the foundation is necessary and that conditional on the foundation being necessary, theism does like somewhat okay, then, um, you're not going to be able to assign like a prohibitively low prior to theism. Um, and I just wanted to make that point as well that we're kind of relying on this like weighted average. Um, which I think is important to note like you don't even need to be super confident that the foundation of reality is necessary. you just think like, you know, maybe there's some non-negligible chance that that's the case and conditional limits being the case, theism is not negligibly uh probable. So, >> yeah. Yeah, that's right. And I didn't I figured it'd be too too much of a hassle to try to work out all of that. But so, one thing I'm looking at here, maybe I'm being a little unfavorable to source physicalism versus other here. Um so especially if reality's if alternate reality is contingent then I think source physical you know maybe you give a probability one half contingent on it being up contingent and a condition be contingent and I don't think it's going to make a difference anyway so I'll go ahead and give it bump it up to 10.
>> Yeah. And I mean that's the thing like once we see the evidence like we can basically come back and be like well you know in order to overturn the evidence like you'd have to assign some really implausible prior like right now we're just trying to get some you know kind of handwavy numbers but uh that's not really the point. Uh the point is to like later go back and see like whoa this analysis is really robust and that's kind of cool and interesting.
>> Okay so let's let's move on then. Okay so how likely do you think it is that God would create a universe Joe?
That's a good question. I mean, yeah.
Okay, that's a good question.
>> So, I don't know. Um, I mean, I can see >> I don't know like agents are often times creative. Uh, I can see lots of goods that could come about as a result of creating a universe, >> you know. Um, in a world in which God exists alone, he's just kind of like vibing there in his own basking in his own glory. And sure, while that's great, it's missing lots of other great things like loving relationships with creatures and like growth and virtue and knowledge and all that stuff.
>> Um, and just like a cool physical, beautiful universe.
>> So, I don't know. Like >> I would not want to be absurdly confident conditional on theism being true that God definitely wouldn't create um just cuz I could see lots of goods that God might want to actualize in creating. So yeah, I mean it's not very unlikely I would say.
>> Okay. So I'm hearing I'm hearing like 02. Is that fair?
>> That that sounds that sounds fine by me by by my lights. Yeah.
>> Okay. All right. All right. So we'll say 02. Okay. I think the probability should be similar on limited theism. I'm just going to assume that a limited limited god could create a universe. Um but it seems like the motivations would be roughly the same. Um and I think axiarchism too. Like if you think a universe is good, like most of the same kinds of reasons are going to apply.
>> So I feel like these these probabilities should be similar.
>> Yeah. I mean universe.
>> Yeah, that's true. I was going to say with aism like we might think that like the the posited mechanism by which like a universe gets created is like really weird and and kind of spooky and just >> utterly foreign to our everyday experience. So maybe that would actually like affect the prior probability given its postulated mechanism.
>> That's how I would think about it. Yeah, that should lead that should be leading us to lower the prior probability.
>> Yeah. So, I mean, maybe like 0.1 or something. I don't know.
>> Uhhuh. Yeah. Okay. Well, we can knock actually I'm happy to knock it down here. Uh, so we can we can knock the prior down. I mean, by the way, if if you think that there's like compelling arguments that like the traditional attributes of God are impossible or incoherent or something or any of those kinds of those kinds of arguments are going to come into the prior here. So, that's where like where those should impact um those should lead you to I I don't find any of those like super persuasive. think that you know look like if it's impossible to know what we'll freely do in the future well then like the version then like theism just implies that God doesn't know that um like you can still be a misha in a clearly meaningful sense so you know I don't think that I don't take those to be big worries but if you if you do then yeah you would apply that to the top line of this table here >> okay um so that's existence of a universe okay so finetuning then so this is this is a big one of course um and I put it in one row here but um it's helpful to think of it I think in terms of um two factors.
So here let me see here um so think of it in terms let me let me call these L and C. So L says that our universe has the laws that it does and then C says that it has the constants that the constants of those laws are in the life committing range.
Um, so as we talked about last week and as I imagine people are familiar with the outline of the finetuning argument that constants like the strength of gravity, the strength of electromagnetism, um, the cosmological constant which makes a difference to how fast the universe expands and all of these like um, it's a very small range of the possible range of values in which those constants allow for life. Um, but of course our our constants are in that range. Um, and not not just like human life or something, but like any kind of organized complexity, like you change the cosmological constant and the whole universe like flies apart before any complex matter can form. You change one of these other constants and like all you get is hydrogen or all you get is black holes or something. So, you know, you end up with universes that are very clearly not conducive to any kind of organized complexity. Okay. So, that's the basic um idea of the fine-tuning data. So then there's two two two ways that we can or two things that I think we could probably break this down into.
So one is like I said L universe has our laws and then C those laws have the constants they do. Um we said earlier that there are these objections to the fine tuning argument where people get tripped up like what order do you take things in? So like one objection that some people give um I think David Manley makes this objection he he I think he calls the data like fragility or something like our our universe is fragile. And what he means by that is that um like if things had been different then life or it had been very different then life wouldn't have existed. Um I know Paul Draper um uses it's not exactly the same but in his new book um he raises some similar kinds of considerations Josh Weissberg so several people raise objections that are kind of in this ballpark um that they they think and what it amounts to is like well first you take into account the fact that we exist they think and then like given that like how surprising is it that you have this fine tuning data that like our laws are fragile and so on and I think if you go that way you're just not going to be able to see like yeah you should get the same the math should work out, but you're not going to be able to see what the re relevant probabilities are. It's going to be very confusing. Um, and so I think no, look, you proceed this way and you say, um, first let's take into account L and then let's take into account C given L.
Taking into account L, I mean, plausibly that already raises the probability of theism. Um, because like our laws are quite simple and as it turns out, there is like this range in them that allows for life, but we don't really know what other laws are like. like we haven't investigated that in physics like we haven't run those computer simulations um to see what would like a universe with very different laws look like. So really I think the fair way to treat that is to just say look we don't know um and let's just assign equal probability on the different theories to to L that is confirming anything. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I mean, I am I actually do lean towards thinking that that if that that it'll favor theism because I mean, like >> I don't know.
>> Again, I don't I'm not able to put like a >> a rigorous measure on the relevant possibility space here. So, like I grant that, but >> I mean, come on. Like, there are so many conceivable law structures which would be >> utterly life prohibiting. I mean, you know, it just it's it's conceivable that it's just like a law that like spacetime is empty. Or it's conceivable that it's a law that there's a single electron and it just vibes for all of eternity. It just like basically pulsates pulsates every second or something like that. Or it's conceivable and do that for like infinitely many different kinds of fundamental particles. Do that for like fundamental fields. Like it's conceivable that there are laws which just specify in even in very simple terms how the universe is to be in ways that the law structures no matter how you fill out the constants are is just life prohibiting. Um and you know there are lots of law structures that are like way too complicated and would just give rise to just like a hopelessly chaotic universe etc. It's like I don't know you need like a sort of kind of special kind of law structure even which allows for certain content to be within a life permitting range. Uh so I don't know I think it's actually quite striking the form of the laws that we got. Um >> yeah well you're making my case for me.
Um yeah I mean I think I think what you say is very plausible. Um and so I kind of am thinking of this as a lower as like a worst case scenario for theism. um you know like let's let's just assume that like the laws don't make a difference one way or another and then you know even then let's see what the constants can do.
>> I'm fine with going with the worst case scenario. Yeah.
>> Yeah. But I I think what you say is very plausible. I mean another way you can think about it is so so there there's a related objection which is like some people call the illuminated range objection like well we've just looked at some ways of varying the laws like in particular varying constants usually one at a time but we we we have varied multiple ones at a time as like Luke Barnes discussed in his work and seeing what that does. Um, and you know, so we've just looked at this eliminated range. Well, we started in a place that's life permitting. So like we should expect other things being equal, then there going to be like more life permittingness in the range we've looked at than if we had like started in just a random place in in um in uh parameter space for like all the possible configurations of laws. So this this is another way of pushing the same point that actually probably if we were to like look at other laws or like varying 10 constants at a time in these radically different universes they'd probably be even less like permitting. I think that's what what we should expect.
Um but you know we we can't say for sure. Uh so one other thing to say here is that sometimes people take us like a datadam here. Some of the people I talked about they they like oh well there's this like fact that um yeah that the laws are fragile that they could have um that that uh like there's not a lot of life permitting range within them. Um and some people describe this as if it's like a contingent fact that God has control over. And I think this is very confused because like once you fix what the laws are, then it's just like a mathematical fact that um they have that it's only like in this small range that they allow for the kind of organized complexity that we talked about. It's just like a a deductive consequence of the laws um like what the range of possible values within them looks like. And now it's not one that we can ourselves deduce our priority with like pencil and paper. We have to use computer simulations because it's so complicated. But what the computer simulations are revealing to us are are these uh like mathematical facts about the consequence of the laws. So I don't think there's like another thing that you have to take into account. There's just like the laws and then um like we're in the life permitting range uh of the constant. So L, L, and then C. And I think that's that's it basically. Okay.
Um another objection that is maybe worth mentioning here is um that well God could have gotten like um life it through some kind of non-physical means.
So like electrons in love, right? that kind of thing. Um like giving consciousness to something non-physical.
Um I think of that so we we always as we talked about like with taking things into account successively we don't want to double count. Um so I think of that as maybe like relevant at this first stage like existence of a universe if you think like well like God would prefer to not do things physically. Um you know he would just make like angels or um you know like non additional non-physical beings. So like maybe that should lead us to like downgrade that there would be a physical universe in the first place.
But then like given that there is a physical universe um then um it's it's plausible to me that God is going to uh yeah that God's going to want to um do things um within it kind of like what we see in terms of you know complex conscious embodied life. Do >> you want to say that?
>> Yeah. No, that's interesting. Um, I was thinking that, you know, these alternative conceivable worlds in which, you know, we've got these electrons and love, it's not quite like a non-physical >> world, right? I mean, it is like physically embodied consciousness. So I was thinking that like the thought here is that even under theism, you know, it still seems super super unlikely condition on the law structures that the constants would fall within the narrow like biological life brooding range. uh just because like no matter where the constants fell, even if they fell outside the biological life pruning range and if if they fell let's say outside the cosmological constant where you basically just get like this diffused soup of particles which are like light years away um God still could have created valuable embodied conscious beings just associated with who are almost like souls embodied in the particles, right? And so like when they're a certain distance away from one another, they engage in heartfelt communication. when they take on a certain arrangement collectively, they like sing praises to God or whatever.
Um, and I think like the thought is that uh, you know, God could have could have achieved like conscious embodied creatures instantiating valuable forms of experience no matter which way the constants fell. I think that's like the basic thought, >> right?
>> Yeah. Good. So, so that's so um, that's that's helpful. So, you're right that if it is like the electrons suggestion specifically and that that that's physical obviously. Um, yeah. Yeah. And I mean my thought there is that I think well I guess a couple things to say. So um the range of like complex physical relations that those things could stand into each other is obviously um you know much much much much smaller than like you and I can stand into each other right or two uh two human beings. And so at least anything like the kind of physical mental connections that we have um it's things are going to look very very different. You know, now maybe you could have um you like beings that are more like pure, not quite pure, but you know, mostly thought where a lot of the stuff that they do is not um not physically manifested or determined. Um but it would be much harder to interact meaningfully in a physical space. So the physical space would look like much less important to me. Like what what's the purpose of this?
>> Um >> yeah, your your agency isn't really embodied in the physical world in the the way ours is. um you know the arts, civil society, they don't like significantly instrumentalize the environment in the way that we do.
>> Seemingly lots of less uh aesthetic value as well, at least if we're like anti-omalists about aesthetic value. Um >> uh and we >> Yes. So I mean that's one thing to say.
I think another thing potentially to say here is um >> so this view almost seems to like saddle theism with this view on which there are like fundamental psychophysical laws which can kind of vary independently of the relevant laws. And if that's the case, then actually we we could just take those to be um earlier on in our explanatory chain. We just update on the psychophysical laws first. Uh and so then uh >> I actually think like given given that they take on a very striking fortuitous character. They're like really harmonious like the causal roles of phenomenal states pair really nicely with their normative roles etc. And given that they like the psychophysis laws enable a kind of significant degree of knowledge about the world, agency etc. um they take on a very striking character that themselves plausibly favor theism.
>> And then once you take once you condition on them the character of the psychophysical laws then it becomes like even more surprising that like the physical world just happens to basically lead to the physical structures which like are harmoniously coordinated according to the psychophysical law. So it's almost like two updates in favor of theism. So that's another thing we might say. We basically put psychophysical laws in the background before going on to examine that the constants fall within the neural life permitting range.
>> Um >> yeah that's interesting. That's interesting. Um I think that with the like electrons in love objection that there um you know like one I think could turn your thought to say well that means that like in that in that world yeah like theism would be massively confirmed because you know there the psychophysical laws would need to um work out in this very particular way but um you know that's maybe maybe that's more evidence that like God would have created that kind of world and so then it would become a question of yeah is the psychophysical do we need these in our world or is is there or is is like does the complexity scale up where um it becomes harder to explain the psychophysical laws under naturalism or under source physicalism relative to theism in our world as well or is it kind of just like one thing where the explanatory difference is the same across >> yeah I just think these are like local pockets within the total space of conceivable psychophysical law regimes um each of which is like much better predicted by theism because like we're just focusing on little pockets of the ginormous space in which the laws indeed are profoundly harmonious allow for like meaningful agency, you know, they allow for knowledge about the world. Whereas like you go outside of these local pockets and like got like super jumbled and chaotic psychophysical laws or you have like hopelessly contemptably simple psychophysical laws that don't allow like basically any significant goods that uh consciousness enables, you know?
So basically like every physical state is paired with like a simple sensation of the feeling of tid bath water or like a presentation of a visual patch of fuchsia or you know like or like just like a ringing noise or something like that which is paired with every physical state. So I just think like what we're doing is we're just like we're focusing on localized pockets within the ginormous space of conceivable psychophysical law regimes and we're noticing that like oh in those localized pockets you have a highly orderly harmonious intelligible coherent psychophysical law regime and then you're saying like yeah if if this if the physical world happened to be coordinated with that in either of these ways then we would just get a significant boost for theism in both cases. Anyway, I know the stuff gets very complicated, but I was just saying one way the theist might go in response to this is to put the psychophysical laws in the background before examining the >> Yeah, that's interesting. So, let me um I'm going to retype this one. Maybe we can come back to this like nature of conscious experience like maybe we can talk about it there.
Um but let me say so with respect to like electrons and love objection and so on. So, what we're looking at now is the probability of fine-tuning under theism.
That's the term that that's going to be relevant to. So this would be like an argument that maybe it's not that high because like God could have gotten the same thing in other ways and you know so and and of course this doesn't need to be that high because the probability of source physicalism is so low and we'll cover that in a moment >> but like it's certainly not not obvious that God would do things exactly in this way. I think the probability is going to be lower than like 02 here. Um, but like taking into account the potential strength of some of these kinds of objections, I think like probability of like one in uh a thousand, maybe one in 10,000 seems to me. Um, like I think I'm happy to grant the critic that.
>> Yeah. I mean, it would be strange, you know. I mean, that that seems fine to me. It would be strange to think that it's like one in 10 to the 120 say or something like that. Just I think I think that's clearly wrong. I think that's clearly wrong. Yeah.
>> Yeah. And especially because I think we should have like some degree. So this is another potential response to the electrons and love thing. Um I think we should have some degree of like >> some degree of confidence. Not we shouldn't be like o extremely overconfident that God wouldn't do the following. Like maybe God attends to the broad kinds of worlds or kinds of creatures he might create where like you know one kind of creature is like a very simple >> physical world but like very complicated um conscious experiences associated with that very simple physical world where it's just like simple particles. Uh it's not like you know complex biologically embodied beings who instrumentalize their environment in certain ways. Um and then another kind of world is like the purely non-physical world right where it's just like angels or whatever like an idealist world. Uh and then a still further kind of the world is like the kind of world that we got where um it's not just like that contemptably simple physical stuff but like it's you know biologically embodied consciousness. Um and so so long as you think that like you know conditional on God attending to these it's not super unlikely that God would attend to kinds of worlds like that and conditional on him attending to kinds of worlds like that. It's then not like hopelessly unlikely on the order of 10 to 120 that God would choose this like kind of biologically embodied organism. So um I think that's right. So, so, so like one way methodologically to think about this is like what's the probability that there's like some like really good reason that God would have for preferring this kind of physical universe. Um, and if you think well the probability is one in a thousand or one in 10,000, well then that's like your probability for um this observation under theism. Um, so you know, as long as Yeah, as long as even if it's not not too interestingly probable, like that, you know, that like auxiliary hypothesis about what's valuable in the world or what kinds of things God cares about, that's going to end up being part of what's confirmed by this package.
>> I just want to hammer this home for the audience because people miss this so so often. The point is not that this auxiliary hypothesis has to be very likely conditional on theism. It just doesn't have to be like prohibitively unlikely. Like overwhelmingly, absurdly, grotesqually, pathetically unlikely. That that's all that we're going for here.
>> Um >> Oh, and in fact, one one other thing.
Sorry, I'm excited. One other thing. Um like the very moves that lots of these critics like to make like to emphasize like oh you know like divine psychology is difficult and whatnot like those very moves should urge us to a kind of epistemic humility whereby we don't assign these overwhelmingly extreme credences about um you know what exactly God would be likely to do. And in order to criticize the fine tuning argument um >> by projecting what we were just saying you'd basically have to be like overwhelmingly confident that God definitely would not do what we're saying. Um, so basically it's like going against the very spirit of some of the divine psychology concerns that lie in the background here of our of the objectors.
>> I think that's right. And this relates to maybe we can when we get to evil, we can see if we can talk about skeptical theism at all. But I think that you actually look at how the math works out and some skeptical theist ideas along the lines of, you know, we shouldn't be too confident what God would do. They actually point in different directions.
Well, not quite different directions, but they have a different impact for like fine-tuning and and for evil.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay. Okay, so let me I want to turn to the things besides physicalism and then come back to that. So um axiarchism I think I I want to treat as like equivalent to theism for its predictive power here. It looks to me like kind of the same considerations are going to apply like if this is in fact the best universe then um or you know at least in its basic structure or something then like axiarchism is going to lead to lead us to expect it to the same degree. uh limited theism though I do want to treat differently here and the reason for that is that um it's not easy to get a finely tuned universe you have to know what a finely tuned universe looks like and you have to be able to make one um and you know again limited theism encompasses a lot of different ideas about what the parameters are for the power and knowledge etc of a creator but um I think it's not obvious that uh that that a limited god is going to be able to do that so Um like if we with like our intelligence were to just start somewhere in parameter space and you know investigate and try to figure out like what how can we like get a combination of laws and constants that allows for life like that would take a really long time like we because it's so unlikely right um you know so like we we we started the investigation where the life is and so you know we can we can construct such a universe um but uh like from first principles like you need to be really smart like much smarter than we are right um so you need If not omniscience, you need like uh something that's that's not too far away. And then omnipotence too, depending on what you're doing in limiting power, you know, you need that you need God to be able to like finally tweak the, you know, each each constant and so on. So I think it's it's not obvious that a limited god would be able to pull this off. So let's give this um so this is one in 10 to the four. I think limited theism I'm going to say like one in 10 to the seven. You don't object. So one in 10 million. um other I don't know how to think about this but I'm going to give it the same as limit theism you know it's going to be like yeah other kinds of supernaturalisms or things that are yeah like non-physicalist theories and I'm inclined to think that similar kinds of problems of like how hard this is to get and so on are going to afflict those as well just like limited theism okay um so then that leaves the probability under source physicalism so that's the big one and here and here by the way we Yeah, trying to come up with something like rough absolute probabilities. That's how I've been proceeding. Um, okay. So, you you you see numbers thrown around here like 1 and 10 to the 120 and one and 10 to the 10 to the you know one 123 or whatever that number for entropy is that um that John Lesley comes up with. Um and I think well okay let me say a few things.
So let me first see if there's other objections that I want to like head off um to like assigning a low probability then I'm going to try to come up with a probability. I don't in in like thinking about this epistemically I don't think even like one I think even one in 10 to 120 is probably too low um because like allowing for uncertainty about a possible like multiverse theory and so on um but I still think the that the evidence is quite compelling but before I do that so you've got a couple of objections here I so one objection as you know to the finetuning argument very bad objection they're all bad but but this one is is very bad um is that like oh there's only this universe right so the probability is fun of getting a finely tuned universe. Okay, that's just like frequentism. You know, we talked about that last time. You know, frequentism is no good. Okay, that's a bad a bad argument. Okay, next. Um then there's like entropic the entropic principle that um well, we couldn't have found ourselves in anything but a finely tuned universe. Um so like it's a precondition of our existence that the universe has to be finely tuned. I'm like, well, yes, that's right. But, you know, let's look at our total evidence and our total evidence includes the fact that we exist um in a finely tuned universe and you can't just take that for granted. So we talked last time about like objective basianism as like the view that probabilities are rational degrees of belief and on something like that um this objection might make sense but um I think that's a problem for that kind of view that it doesn't allow for as we talked about that it doesn't allow for like probabilities non-extreme probabilities um of facts that uh are entailed by our existence um and that it doesn't allow like probabilities conditional on things that nobody could have as evidence. And so I think then that when you adopt um my view of probability as you should, then you think of probabilities as these relations of support that hold independently of like people's minds.
Well, look, there's just no problem in saying that um yeah, the probability that that we exist is less than one. And so that we exist in some kind of universe is going to be confirming um theism and other other theories that predict it.
>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean I I don't have much to say with respect to some of these anthropic point. I mean they're just it's just bad reasoning. You know suppose you're brought >> confusion about probability I think.
>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean you're brought before firing squad 100 professional marksmen pointing their rifles at you. Someone shouts 3 2 1 fire. The shots ring out.
You survive. Like clearly that's like very strong evidence that there was some sort of conspiracy or intentional missing hypothesis even though you couldn't have observed a world in which they don't miss. So we we know that this this sort of reasoning has to go wrong.
So yeah, I I we don't need to spend too much time on that.
>> Okay, great. Um okay, so we we talked last time then about Okay, we talked last time about um the objection that well if you like assigned an equal uh if you're indifferent over like the strength of gravity squared rather than the strength of gravity then you know your probabilities would be different.
And I said well you know we want to be indifferent over like the actual laws and not um these other possible laws that are um like could be fundamental in some other universe. So that that's what I say there. Um so then that's that lets you do this kind of calculation for you say well the range of possible values of um the strength of gravity you know it's like um the range within the total range possible range that allows for life is like 1 in 10 to the 60 or something whatever the number is and then you say okay so then the probability of that particular constant being fine-tuned under social physicalism is one in 10 to the 60. Okay well there there are a number of reasons why maybe we shouldn't be quite so quick. Um so one is that like our science might be wrong. Um and like the fine tuning data is pretty well confirmed. Um you know I think that uh it's it's like it's very well confirmed.
We should be very confident in it. Am I like you know so so take like the take that absurd number for entropy from from John Lesley. Like is my confidence that scientists haven't made a mistake in calculating these things? Like do I think it's like one minus one over um 10^ the 10^ the 123? Well, no.
Like I think it's more likely than that that like there's a mistake somewhere.
Like I'm not that confident. I'm not that confident that I have hands. I think um right so like I'm not at all sympathetic to external world skepticism. Um so okay. So I think that's going to be like an upper bound where some Yeah, that's going to be a bound is like the possibility that uh there's just an error somewhere. Um but you know maybe I'm like maybe I think that um yeah the probability of an error is less than one in 10 to the 60 or so like I'm pretty confident in um in the findings of modern physics. Um so something like that might be uh you know we might be able to get that low. Um but it is certainly possible. Well, let me let me let me clarify that it's it's it's much more likely than that that like we're wrong about a particular constant because um you know for one thing we're not certain which constants are fundamental and you know progress is made on those things. So so when you see like discussions of the finetuning argument usually people will say well there's like maybe around 20 fundamental constants um but you know that estimate could change um and we we might be able to derive some from others. Um now now some of them by the way like the cosmological constant that's not fundamental that's determined by other things but what's peculiar in that case is that um the other things like all cancel out in such a way that you end up with a value that's very close to zero.
Um and the the factors that contribute to that are all like on the order of one um of 10 excuse me to the power of 120.
So you're like adding a bunch of like positive and negative numbers and then they all like cancel out. So you end up with this number very close to zero and that's what makes that surprising one one reason that that's so that's interesting but it's it's important because the way that these different constants are calculated is different and so that gives you more confidence.
It's like kind of a robustness check that like okay if you think that like the way that we uh I don't know like which constants um it are going to be fundamental where we're just going to like kind of take a flat distribution over all the possible values but you know say the strength of gravity is like that u you know what if you think well maybe we aren't calculating the probability of the strength of gravity in the right way well what's going on in the case of the cosmological constant is very different um you know and and what's going on in the case of another constant is going to be different again and so like as long as one of these like as as long as we're, you know, doing things roughly right, thinking about it roughly right in the case of one of these. And as long as, you know, one of these, we don't end up being able to like reduce it to something else, um, then the argument is still going to going to be strong. And so I think of what's going on with like the multiple constants. I think of that more as like a robustness check that yeah, that like you're not going to be able to get out of this by, you know, the physics just getting better or something.
Um, so that that's how I think of the import of that.
Then in terms of yeah what's the probability like yeah 1 in 10 to the 60 or whatever that we should assign here.
I I think then we do need to start thinking about the multiverse. So, um there are the kind of the the most simple multiverse theories I have I think have serious problems um that say like inflationary cosmology that you're going to get you get like bubble universes and then they have each their own uh let's say the laws stay the same for simplicity but they each have their own constants and then you know eventually you get one that's finally tuned. Okay, so two problems. So one um the multiverse probably itself has to be fine-tuned. It might not be to exactly the same degree as this universe. You might make some progress, but you're not going to get um something like a physical multiverse that can produce that um without a substantial degree of fine-tuning. And then second, you get anthropic problems about locating ourselves within that space in that the vast majority of observers in that kind of multiverse are bolts brains, which is to say that they are um like they pop into they're like the universe is very are very high entropy. They're like chaos. And then you just get this like observer that pops into existence, this like local this local structure, this local bit of order, this local island of order, and then pops out of existence.
Um, and even if we allow for the possibility that like we are bold spawn brains, if we are bolt brains, we're ones that currently are having very ordered experiences and most bold brains are not like that. So like I'm not begging any questions about the external world here. Most bolt brains, they have these just like chaos.
Like it's just madness. then you know they pop out of existence and that's not what we're experiencing right so um that we would be having experiences anything like the ones that we do is very unlikely um it's it's massively unlikely on those kinds of um multiverse theories because the vast majority of observers are are not like that um are are not like don't have observations like the ones we're having so Robin Collins gives I think a nice analogy of um a scrabble board so like if you um you you you like rerun this experiment a ton of times where you like dump the high the entire bag of Scrabble tiles out onto a board.
For simplicity, let's suppose every letter like lands on a square. Um, you know, like one in a trillion boards, maybe you get like a nicely laid out um, uh, game where like everything follows the rules and like all the words connect and so on. But most boards are not like that. Most boards um, you know, you have like a bunch of chaos and maybe you have the word is.
>> Yeah.
>> Somewhere, right? and the word am. These like really short words. And so, you know, if observers are like words, well, the vast majority of of words in that like space of possible um scrabble boards are these like islands of order in a sea of chaos. Yeah. Rather than these like nicely ordered thing where everything fits together, which is the kind of experience that we have.
>> Yeah. I think uh I've seen another analogy here which I like. Um you know, a multiverse explanation of fine-tuning.
It's kind of like positing hordes of monkeys that are typing on a on typing on typewriters to sort of explain why some of them typed an entire work of Shakespeare. Uh now, while some of them will type an entire work of Shakespeare, like way more often than that, they're going to type up like a sentence of Shakespeare.
>> So, if you think of like your current experiences or whatever as like a sentence of Shakespeare, then you should just be like shocked under the multiverse hypothesis that you find yourself in a massive pocket of extreme order. Um, right. Yeah. Yeah. In other words, you should be you should basically be shocked to find that you're not a Boltzman brain, >> right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Shocked that people Yeah. that you know, not just this one person dies, but everybody dies or everybody gets married. I'm taking the analogy too far.
>> Okay. So, yeah. Um, yeah. Right. So, so I think we're on the same page there. U So, this is a problem for um most multiverse theories, I think. But I think you can't rule it out a priori that there could be a multiverse theory that doesn't have this problem. Um so like um I think a really interesting theory is like Lee Mullen's evolutionary cosmology theory which says that um like you get uh new universes through black holes and then like inside of a black hole you get like a new universe or there's like this bounce and you get a new universe and then it like slightly varies the parameters from its parent.
Um and that would lead like over time universe like the space of universes would kind of optimize for black hole production.
Um, and that doesn't correlate. The one problem is it doesn't seem from what we know, it doesn't correlate exactly with what optimizes for life, but it's much closer at least than um, you know, what you get just kind of with a random universe. A lot of the things that So, I mean, one of the one of the hardest things is getting stars.
That's that's kind like that's one of the prerequisites um for life. That's like kind of the like one of the big kinds of order that most like most universes do not have stars. Um, and so, but you know, you got you got stars.
It's not too hard then to get black holes. Not not too relatively hard. Um so you'd have something like an explanation for some kind of order in the universe. I mean maybe this is maybe it's helpful to say here that like fine-tuning for I I said for life but um it could be that whatever caused the finetuning of the universe like it's fine tuning for some is like aimed at some kind of ordered complexity that is not conscious life and conscious life is a side effect. And this would be an example of a theory that that said that.
Um yeah. Yeah. So, I think that's like an interesting theory, but it looks like it needs quite a bit of fine-tuning at the start. Um, and like I said, it looks like it doesn't totally line up. Um, like I think we've made some empirical observations that that are surprising given this theory of like how large stars get, for example.
>> Um, but I think but I don't I don't want to rule out that there's like some multiverse theory out there that could do this.
>> Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. I don't I don't think we should sort of like rule that out. Opriori. Um, but at least in the case of Smullen's account, like I'm I guess my understanding, and I could be mistaken here, my understanding is that like a lot of if not most physicists don't like it cuz like the thought is that it seems to be self undermining in some way. Like the universes that are most efficient at generating black holes won't be ones in which life evolves, but ones where like black holes just predominate at the very beginning of their development, like way before life could have could evolve. So basically like over time um observers observers in this kind of multiverse will just be completely like weeded out.
Um and as you said like it seems to require well one might think it seems to require like a lot of fine tetuning to get like a stable universe to begin with which >> harbors enough complexity to get black holes to begin with. So um >> yeah I think I think that with respect to the first problem I think the best I think I think you're right it is a big problem but that's like an area where it's as a non-expert um I think like well there's some chance that people could be mistaken in their calculations or like maybe there are um you know like I don't know like maybe um maybe like humans in the future will be able to produce like Dyson spheres that end up collapsing into black holes and so um you know like selecting for consciousness ends up like you end up with more black holes. This is all extremely speculative obviously, but like I uh so it's not like well worked out, but I I could see something I could see the probability of some theory like that being true like not uh you know insanely insanely low. So okay, so tell me if this seems fair to you, but I'm I'm going to give this one and 10 the 20. Okay. So like that's that's roughly my estimate that there's like some theory whether it's Mullins or something else like some kind of multiverse theory that um can account for uh the data without falling into these worries about bolts brains um and and that doesn't have you know insane degrees of fine tuning itself requires.
>> Yeah. Yeah. That that's a big ask. So I think yeah one no I mean like a bit that's a big ask of a like of a multiverse theory that it not generate those sorts of things and generate life from universes and not have a massive degree of fine-tuning. Um >> so I mean I don't exactly know what what numbers we should put here but what you said seems serviceable for present purposes.
>> Okay. All right. So we'll go with that.
Okay. All right. Well you see that's already making that's making a big difference here. Um so the I mean that basically that basically settles it as far as the sort of cynicalism. Um this this here so that this this one's easier to see. So onee that's what this means is is 1 over 10^ the 19. So like already what that's done to the this is unnormalized. This is not normalized but uh the number for source physicalism that we end up with is 1 over 10 the 19.
The number for theism is like uh close to one over 10,000 or something. Um, so you see, we've already got this massive discrepancy.
Um, and we'll see. I don't think we're going to overcome it, but that's that's the Yeah, that's that's where we end up with fine tuning for life. Okay.
Anything else you want to talk about with the standard fine tuning argument?
>> Well, listen, I mean, look, we could go on ages upon ages upon ages talking about fine tuning. So, we should probably just move on even though there's so much more that could be said in like defending against objection or raising objections. So, you know, for the audience, we don't pretend to have settled the disputes here. Certainly not.
>> Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, one thing I mean, I tried to say that like because I think I think you can't overstate the fine-tuning argument in that like I said like there is like I don't have I don't have an a specific alternative explanation to offer you that's as good as theism. I don't think there is one. But like I think we should have some epistmic humility um and say like look like there might be a multiverse theory out there. I think a single universe theory I I think it's just like I don't see one that's going to be able to do the work but like a multiverse theory maybe um that that can solve these problems. But yeah, it's going to be quite improbable I think.
But that's how I would think of the upper bound for source physicalism.
Okay. But then discoverability. So then this is the next. So this is like Robin Collins recent work um that finds that even within the space of life permitting universes, the space of universes that are um discoverable where like we can do science um is fairly low. And um the idea here this is like less harder to operationalize than than life, you know.
So what do you mean by discoverable?
There are some examples that I think are quite compelling. Um the most compelling one is the um strength of the cosmic microwave background radiation where this depends on I don't remember the details but it's like the ratio of photons to berons at the beginning of the universe or something and um if you alter this ratio um then it makes the um cosmic background radiation um stronger weaker but um like within within like there's a large range of this ratio that's light emmitting at least but you know within in that um you can change you can influence how strong the public microwave background is. And the CMV is like our main source of evidence for the big bang. So if we didn't have that like we probably wouldn't have discovered the big bang or at least wouldn't be able to know as much about it as we do. But what Collins found in his calculations that this this is actually optimized that like the cosmic microwave background is like if you change this ratio in either direction then you would end up with a weaker CMV.
Okay, that looks pretty surprising, right? Um, so I think that's pretty good evidence. And then there are like he's got like nine other examples. That's the one that I think is the most compelling.
Um, I think he thinks that like the discovery of the Hig Bosson also thinks had to be pretty finely tuned. Um, so this one's a bit harder to put a number on. I don't think you're going to get like one in 10 to the 10 to the 20, but you know, maybe you get like um that the probability under source physicalism.
Let's say it's like one uh one in 10,000. Um so that's 10 to the 4. Um and under theism it's not a sure thing that like God would make a discoverable universe but um it's not doesn't seem to be that surprising.
>> Yeah. Remember we we've already put in our background that there that God has fine tetuned he's made it a physical universe and he's fine tuned it for life. Um >> yeah exactly. So he's got some special interest in like conscious beings, right? I mean, I guess there is the possibility I said like you could get fine-tuning for like starves or something that had else is a side effect. So like maybe god's after beauty or something that you know we're just a side effect like maybe that's compatible with the above but it's like at least a plausible explanation for why we have the thing so far a fine a fine-tuned universe for life is that um that God is interested in us in particular. So what do you say one one and a one in 50 here? Okay. And I think uh limited theism, I don't know, hard to say. You've got the same problems for like knowledge and power. But, you know, if the limited god can do can fine-tune for life, maybe it's like um maybe that god can likely fine-tune for discoverability. So, maybe I'll just make that happen as likely.
>> Yeah. Yeah. We do have to yeah, we do have to keep into account that this being has enough knowledge and power to be able to like know exactly where to put the constants in order to get >> right at least a significant degree of complexity and cosmic evolution and whatnot. Um, >> yeah, >> axiarchism I think it's hard to say. I think it depends on exactly what you think like the kind of goodness is being optimized for. If it's something more like beauty, then um yeah, maybe discoverability is surprising. Um but again it's not like uh like you could certainly see how like if if what is being aimed at like actically is conscious humans then maybe fine-tuning isn't surprising again. So I might give that the same.
>> H >> does that seem right?
>> Yeah I think it would just depend on how exactly we flesh out the axeric hypothesis. Maybe we would want to like do some sort of like weighted average among the various plausible aims of this like fundamental meta law and then once we do that like I I don't think we're going to be like way far off here with this estimate.
>> I think Yeah, I think that's right.
Yeah. Or order of magnitude, right?
>> Yeah. Or some orders. I mean again like the whole point is to be relatively robust by the end. So >> yeah. Right.
Um other I might give this a little I I'm not sure what another good explanation would be. Um whereas like limited theism I can kind of see the connection but I don't know maybe this maybe this is too low. Maybe I'll just make it half as half as likely as limited theism and axiarchism. As you said we're being try to go some rough numbers here. Um okay does that seem fair for this line before I move on?
>> I think that's fine.
>> Okay. All right. So cons consciousness then. So, we talked a bit about this, but um I think I think this is pretty strong evidence again. Um given the things we've gotten so far, like what's the probability, let's start with the first line, that God would make humans conscious rather than like um automata that are just, you know, these physical things. Um I think it's pretty likely. I mean, it's we built into the hypothesis of theism that God is conscious like that God is a person. That's how I understand a person. um you know I understand it's part part of personhood and so that he would want beings like that and he's kind of set everything else up seems like with that aim in mind. So I'd say this is pretty likely I'm going to say five. Do you want to object to that or does that seem fair before we go on to how unlikely is this on other things?
>> Yeah, that seems fine by my likes. I mean again like it does it does seem like actually kind of bizarre if if God like brings it about that there are like these organisms like us who are like engaging in things which like third personally look like relationships you know doing various things like it looks like they're behaving intentionally but he like wouldn't grace them with consciousness or anything like that. I don't know >> obviously experiences like as I was relating but not Yeah.
>> Yeah. And consciousness just enables most if not all forms of value we might think. Um, so >> it would just >> I think we should be not at all gobsmacked under theism that God might create conscious creatures. I mean, one thing to note here is that there is like the bare fact that there even are conscious creatures and then there's the fact that their conscious lives take on a seemingly striking fortunate coincidental character.
>> Right. Right. Yeah.
>> I would want to like maybe update on those separately separately. So, we first updated on like the fact that there are any conscious beings at all.
And then like given that there are conscious beings, let's look at the character of their consciousness and see if it's striking, fortuitous, seemingly lucky um in ways that kind of cry out for explanation.
>> Um >> okay. Well, let's do that. Let's let's add in a a psychophysical harmony line here. Okay. So, um but so I think this is going to be pretty close to one, I think, on theism. Um like that God makes us conscious. Like God's not going to want to just Right. Not making things match up, right?
>> Like Yeah. Like literally like our experience is just like the tepid bath water. That's all that it is. We're just like vibing or something.
>> I'll be generous. I'll I'll be generous.
I'll make a point five again.
>> Okay.
>> Okay. But so so um source physicalism then? Yeah. Um are is there going to be consciousness in the first place? I think it's going to be pretty unlikely.
um that I think it's going to be a lot more likely like again the kinds of explanations that we like the kind of explanation for fine-tuning that we said well maybe this works was like optimizing for black holes right not for life. So like under source physicalism the universe is not in any even analogical sense aiming at um at consciousness and so it it looks like pretty surprising that we're going to end up with consciousness. it does look like it's going to have to be epenominal or something. Um, you know, so maybe there's like some, you know, I mean, I'm sympathetic to dualism and the arguments for dualism, but you know, maybe there's some explanation I don't see for why you have to have consciousness. I guess I guess that if I were like had to go into this camp, I would would have to say there's that something like that is true, but it doesn't seem plausible to me anticly.
>> Yeah. And I mean, again, we got to keep in mind that we're working with like epistemic probabilities here. And I don't know, so I I shouldn't say too much about this because I have a paper under review on it, but like it seems um >> I don't know, the psychophysical laws might have conceivably failed to match or apply to the physical contents of the universe in like lots of different ways.
Uh so you know, the psychophysical laws might have paired phenomenal states only with physical substrates that like never actually come to exist. So you might need it you might need to have a certain degree of integrated information that's just like never instantiated or a certain degree of like global access among relevant subsystems that's never instantiated or you know they the psychopysical laws might have paired phenomenal states only with certain like functional states that that no system >> ever realizes. Uh but like that's not the sort of like I I think there is kind of almost like a harmony between like the physical contents of the universe and the psychophysical laws just like in such a way that the the the laws actually match the conditions of the universe so that they sprinkle consciousness around at all like it's I think that in and of itself is kind of surprising and then given that they sprinkle consciousness around at all we can further ask how surprising is it that they would sprinkle it around in a very fortuitous kind of harmonious way.
So I actually do think that yeah this is um pretty epistemically improbable conditional on source physicalism.
>> So what do we think like one and 10 to the five for consciousness and one in one and 10 to the four for um >> harmony.
>> Yeah. I mean I maybe go the other way around but it really doesn't matter in in the end.
>> Yeah. Well, which we do. Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> Um okay. Yeah. I think like you know once we have consciousness then I mean I don't know what it is but you know I I I guess if I it would make me think well consciousness like had to be there for some reason and so maybe there is like some explanation. I don't see why it had to line up. Um you know so so maybe that's why I was inclined to do them in that direction. Okay. So then limited theism. Um, yeah, it's hard to think about again, but um I think again I'm inclined to say it does look a little bit worse on consciousness, but you know, once we get like fine-tuning for life and discoverability, well, at that point that kind of does look like the limited creator is going to be aiming at consciousness and probably can bring it about, but it's not a sure thing because like consciousness is a different kind of thing than um uh you know like a finely tune universe.
>> Yeah. like you know the limited creator now has to have like the power to like make minds right so like can it do that I don't know um so let me get let me give this uh like 05 does that seem fair I think and given that I think techysical harmony I think you've got the things you need for that now like to to be cap for the go for the creator to be capable of it >> yeah like what if it can make consciousness then presumably it can make it harmonious >> yeah axiarchcism again it's hard to say I I think I would tend to think of it as similar to limited theism like yeah if this would maybe optimize more for beauty or something would it want um which maybe that's for limit theism but would it want that's metaphorically would would axis it wants consciousness and then could it produce it um but I don't know maybe I'd say like I'll be generous I'll give 0.1 um other I don't know let's say 0.1 um that seems too generous 05 Psychophysical harmony. I'm not sure that psychophysical harmony really distinguishes between these like other supernatural theories. Seems to me like once you've got consciousness then probably whatever brought that about is also going to bring about the harmony.
>> But maybe not for like >> with other I would suspect. Yeah. I don't know. I think other might be way lower. But I don't know. Yeah, >> the other is kind of hard cuz it's a catch-all and you're just going to have to like >> get some sort of like reasonable carving up of the relevant possibilities and do some sort of like weighted average of them.
>> That's right. That's right. And one way you can think of it to get a rough idea is like well the evidences we've done already are kind of narrowing down the parameter space of like what this how we should spell out this hypothesis, >> right? Like it's basically it predictions are going to like align suspiciously with like theism's predictions >> like we did I mean we did that with theism, right? where we we like you know we started off with the bare hypothesis but then we've been saying well you know these evidences tell us that like God is after life and like wants to make life the universe discoverable to us. Okay well that all points towards consciousness right so like we've done the same thing with theism and kind of narrowing down the kind ofistic god that we that we think is supported by the evidence so far.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay. Okay. So religious experiences then um so taking this as kind of just the bare fact like people have mystical experiences of various sorts. Um and um you know yet not like assuming that any particular kind of a um I think this is this is some decent evidence for some kind of supernaturalism but doesn't really support theism over other possibilities. So you know it's I mean it's not super surprising that God would want to reveal himself through mystical experiences. Um and if the limited god can do like the things we talked about so far yeah okay. Um maybe this would be the case maybe for other two actism it looks maybe kind of surprising I don't know if you can have my mystical experiences of like the form of the good um but maybe you can let's say that's like 05 um there are you can give naturalistic explanations of religious experiences so I don't think this is like super like super compelling but it's like more surprising right that like people would have experiences as of um as of god or something numinous and so on. If transcendental, if uh natural is misrum, I guess, you know, maybe the consciousness and psychical harmony kind of bump this up a little bit. Like, well, things are already kind of weird.
So, you know, maybe you got some weirdness here, too. But I'll give it 052. Okay. So, um miracle reports. Um so, this this is another one that I think is quite compelling. Um, and in particular, I think I think the evidence for uh the miracles in the New Testament is very strong. Um, so I'm I'm not just a theist, I'm a Christian. And I think there's very good evidence um for the Christian miracles. There's you also have under this rubric like you have contemporary miracles and so on. And um I'm less sure what I think about all of those. So I think I'm just going to set that aside. But um yeah, in terms of this is again this is a very big topic like pineetuning. We could do a whole video just on this. But um to give like some you know sense of why why I think the evidence in favor of um the New Testament is very strong. So um some of this is it's going to be indirect. So, you know, you've got like um you've got like William Lane Craig style minimal tax argument for the resurrection say um and I think that really undersells the case because I there's quite a lot more data than that that um supports the historicity of the New Testament which of course includes miracles but includes a lot of other stuff too. Um so here are here are like a few points for why I think that. Um so first on the question of authorship every ancient source who comments on the matter agrees that the gospels were written by their traditional authors. Uh Matthew and John by the disciples of those names. Mark by a disciple of Peter as a record of Peter's preaching and Luke by a companion of St. Paul by that name St. Luke. That's true up until the fourth century that everybody agrees on that who comments on it. And there like seven people or so who affirm this. Not not not all of them mention all the names but many but uh you get you get all of them between them. Um and any counterarguments here like from contemporary scholarship they tend to rely on like very what strike me as very subjective judgments about what a particular author would have been like writing at a particular time would have been likely to write. Those always strike me as very speculative. Um, and like I tend to trust the testimony of ancient sources above those things just like I trust the testimony of ancient sources on like the authorship of Plato's dialogues and um, you know, anything like that. Um, so then that suggests that um, these that the gospels were written by authors who would be in a good position to accurately report the life of Jesus as either eyewitnesses themselves or people who talk to eyewitnesses like the author of Luke who whoever it was the author tells us. But but Luke but St. Luke would be somebody in this position. The author tells us that he talked to multiple sources um and tried to get an account of these things that have been fulfilled among us. Um okay. So then that's kind of a background that suggests um that gives some reason to expect liability. But then you get a lot of evidences I think both external evidences from like concurrence of um historical details that we can check up on in the gospels and acts. So Acts is usually taken to be written by by St. Luke as well or or by the same author as Luke. Um so we get these like external concurrences. So for example um the value of a dinarius that like a dinarius is worth a day the value of a day's labor like that's attested to like in another source. Um and that's the kind of thing that you know somebody writing in the second century in a different part of the Roman Empire like it would be kind of surprising if they got that right. Or like various geographical details um you know uh things that were are confirmed by archaeology like location of buildings and so on. There's a lot of these kinds of things. Um, and then there's also uh like more general correspondencies like um there's this really really interesting correspondences of frequency of names in the New Testament and in other ancient sources from that period in in that place. So for example, the most common female name in the New Testament is Mary. Um there are six Marys. It was also the most common female name in Judea um at that time like as confirmed by other sources. Um and and you have that like concurrence more generally with like common names um kind of middling like the most common names middling names of middling frequency really rare names. You see that they kind of line up like in the New Testament and say in Josephus or in um actually not well not so much specifically. So Josephus actually has uh is actually actually Josephus matches less well but there are good reasons for that because he talks about like the the Herod the family the the Herodian family a lot. Um matches less well those female names in particular. I was I was reviewing a manuscript on this recently.
Um with mail names actually with mail names maybe it does look better. Um but you know Josephus plus like various other sources including um uh yeah including a lot of different things um that you get this name matching frequency comes up pretty well which is is surprising. It's not the kind of thing that you get if you look at like Ben her or like a novel about that period like it's nothing like this. Um and and if you look at like the um the non-cononical gospels like the Gnostic gospels, they're nothing like this. Um even at even at a super superficial level, like they don't talk about whenever whenever an event takes place, it's always in Jerusalem.
Whenever a disciple uh like plays a role in the story, it's like it's somebody famous like Peter or John. Um there's lots more like detail of um like places people in um in the canonical gospels.
Um, and then there's also like undesigned coincidences um and and internal evidences like this where like different details of um multiple gospels seem to line up. So um I'll just mention one of these that is maybe strikes me as the most compelling. Um so it's in three three different gospel well four all four gospels have the story of the feeding of the 5000. Um and that is um it's it's outside the passion. It's the only I think the only event that's in all four gospels and um three of them like combine for this this one undesigned coincidence in that I think all four gospels tell us um this detail that Jesus turns to one of his disciples and he asks them where should we buy bread for all these people before the miracle he asks them this um but only the gospel of John in in chapter 6 tells us that he addresses this question to a particular disciple namely Philillip who's mentioned like maybe 10 times in the gospels so he's not a particularly ly frequently named disciple. Um, meanwhile, Luke 9 is the only place that tells us where the feeding took place.
It tells us it took place in Bethada, but John doesn't tell us that. And in a different part of John, so okay, so it's two gospels, but it's two different two different parts of John. In a different part of John, actually two different parts, John's gospel mentions that Philip is from Betha.
So you see how these all fit together.
If John and Luke are independently reporting history, there's this historical event, this miracle that took place, um, and and they're both reporting that, well, you know, John leaves out where the miracle took place.
Luke leaves out who Jesus turned to, and it doesn't tell us, like elsewhere in the gospel, um, that Philip is from Betha. Um, but these all fit together on the the historical hypothesis. It makes sense that Jesus would ask someone from Betha where to buy food if they were in Betha. So I think you get those kinds of details um that suggest um reliability of the gospels including like this is a miracle report like the feeding of the 5000 including with respect to miracle reports um and then you've got you know kind of traditional arguments for the resurrection that that people have probably heard of great style apologetics like um evidence for the empty tomb the appearance of Jesus to the apostles and the conversion of St. Paul and so on. And I think those all raise the probability of that miracle in particular. But you know, against this broad backdrop, I think there's like really good evidence for um yeah, for this broader Christian case that includes miracles as part of it. Okay. So, put a number on that. Um I'll I'll try to put some numbers here and then you can if you want to come back on anything you can or we can we can move on. But um I'm going to say this is like like we were talking about with Evil. This is a case where I I'm not going to try to say, well, what's the exact probability of um uh things coming out exactly that way on theism, but I'm I'm going to say that like what we have here is like 10 times more probable to put the equal sign. 10 times more probable on theism than source physicalism. This all sounds like very surprising to me that uh everything would look so reliable for this this miracle worker um in the New Testament otherwise. Um, limited theism. I don't know. Maybe it's the same. Um, maybe again, I'll bump it down. I'll bump it down by an order of magnitude because you need like a God that could raise Jesus from the dead. Um, if if you're buying into that as like one of the salient miracle reports here and that's it's not obvious that God couldn't be able to do that.
Gooff struggles with this. So he says that like his limited god um he has to have like a particular non he has a particular like heterodox interpretation of the resurrection in order to to get that. So I'll bump I'll bump limited theism down there. Then axiarchcism I don't look I think this like basically eliminates axiarchism from serious contention if you know if you are persuaded by the things I've said of course um doesn't look to me like it can explain this other I don't know 10 times the five like may maybe there's like some other form of supernaturalism that can do this but it's going to look pretty surprising um because it looks like so this isn't just it's not just like miracles occur but if I'm right then you got evidence for like particular miracles that look like a deity having a particular intention of like validating Jesus's message and so on. Um so like just some kind of like there's some spiritual force or something that's not going to do it for you. You got to have like a something like a a designer or a deity with intentions. Um and then then that's going to be maybe a limited god can do it but um yeah I think that the traditional theistic god is going to be the best. I guess like one thing I wanted to ask you here Nevin is um maybe a more philosophical argument that um some people in the audience might be thinking about. So, you know, I'm I'm wondering how you would respond to, I guess, like Hume's argument against uh miracles, you know, like he thinks that >> Sure.
>> Well, hey, like uh you know, we got a lot of, you know, miracles seem to sort of in some way contravene the laws of nature or suspend the laws of nature in some way just like go against the regular uniform course of nature. And his thought is like, you know, we have a lot of evidence for those uniformities. And yeah, we also know that testimony according to Hume is very often mistaken, exaggerated, deceptive. you know, there's memory distortion, there's cognitive biases, there's various things like that.
>> Um, so I take it that the basic thought is that like we should only accept miracle reports if like >> the falsehood the the falsehood of the testimony would be even more improbable than the event being reported. And I think like Hume thinks that at least in practice that condition is never going to be met. um just given that that humans are so prone to mistakes in these areas and given how much evidence we have for the uniformity of nature and and uh the laws of nature just not being suspended. So what do you make of the human argument?
>> Let me say two things one general and one specific. So the general thing is that I think it's a general principle that Hume's principle it can't be right and and you see this um you can just see this from uh the way probability works that there's not as long as there's a nonzero probability of some particular miracle occurring. There's going to be some quantity of evidence that is sufficient to raise the probability that that miracle has occurred above 0.5.
um you know, unless you have like some really weird ad hoc limits on like how much more likely um like testimony can be given the truth of an event than a falsehood or something or like if if you've got enough independent witnesses like probabilistically independent um where where you think that like that S testified that like A testified that P doesn't change the probability that B testified that P and so on. You've got like enough of that. Um then here we go. Come on.
Let there be light. Okay.
So if you you got you got enough of that then like you can just you can just multiply like through the you know odds form base theorem like we're talking about and then you're going to end up with the with posterior odds where the the probability the miracle occurred is greater than it didn't occur. So that's that's one thing to say as a general note. Um, another thing to say at a general note is like Hugh's principle would rule out the possibility of like new scientific discoveries where you know like we um find like a counter example to like Newton's physics or something because look we haven't observed any in the past um and this is like this universal generalization but you know look we found that oh actually here's this like observation we've made that uh where um Newtonian physics fails but of course we have made such observations and we you know we update or scientific theories.
Um, so that's like a a kind of concrete reason to think that that this principle can't be right. Um, one more thing as kind of an aside, but Hume's own Hume's language actually changes between different editions of the um the inquiry. So in earlier editions he says that um no amount of I forget the exact language but that like no amount of testimony or no amount of probability um can ever amount to a proof of miracles. In later editions he says has ever amount to.
So he actually kind of I think in the text as a whole is kind of ambiguous between the stronger and the weaker reading, but I think partly in recognition of some contemporary critics of his um that that really pushed him on the in principal claim he he weakens his language a little bit in the later editions. Um okay but then even the even the um claim that like has ever amounted to a proof. That's why I think it's helpful to like not take a uh like thousand mile up view, but where where you just describe things at these very Yeah. Yeah, if you describe things at this like very general level like you did like well people are mistaken you know there's this love of wonder as he talks about and so on like yeah those things are all true and those are like reasons that yeah like if you know if somebody walks walks up to me and says you know like I saw a man levitating versus somebody walks up to me and says like um you know I saw like a fire um a block down from here like obviously I'm going to be like more skeptical of the first than the second right um like there for you know there there are a number of reasons that's going to be true. So like yeah you take these things on board but then you look at the specifics not just like oh people are sometimes mistaken people have a tendency to confabulate wild stories and so on but you look at the specifics of in this case the New Testament and you say well you know what's the probability that you would get like what look like like um very careful uh reliable historians or people writing history where you know you have these concurrences with external events that we can check up on and you have like these the concordance within the structure of the gospels and we have like the matching up of names and so on and um you know and then that these people tell us um that these miracles occurred well that I think is less likely that that would all happen kind of by chance or by you know as a result of the kinds of factors that Hume talks about like they can't really explain why you end up with something like that I think as well as the hypothesis that Jesus worked miracles one one other thing to say is that with respect to the like general course of nature Sure. Yeah, that's like going to be relevant to miracles in general. But when you're looking at a specific claim, then um the probability that a specific miracle occurred can't be less than the probability that God exists times the probability that God uh intends to work that particular miracle.
And there could be like much more reason in a particular case to think that God would want to work a particular miracle than there is to think that like in another case the laws of nature would be suspended. like um you know God does not have any particular reason to make this pencil levitate when I throw it up.
Okay, no miracle occurred, right? It did it did not you know no laws of physics were violated. Try again. Okay. Right.
So you know that like your anticedent expectation there should have been like okay very low probability that this pencil is going to levitate in the air when heaven throws it off. Um now with respect to take the resurrection like yeah like the prior probability that Jesus would be resurrected even if God exists you know we we can grant that that's low but it's not going to be as low as like the pencil levitating even though in some sense it's like harder to like bring a person back to life than to um to to levitate a pencil like maybe like you had to suspend more natural laws or something. Um e even given that there's a whole lot more reason that we can see for God to raise Jesus from the dead. like, well, Jesus claimed to be a messenger from God and it would make and and he predicted he prophesied his resurrection and it would make sense for God to validate his message by uh by resurrecting him and you know so kind of with this background then that particular miracle becomes more likely and and so Swinburn makes this kind of argument and you know Swinburn says that well like there are reasons that God would want to reveal himself through the incarnation and so on. So, you know, maybe that I don't know what the prior probability of the resurrection is, but you know, like if it's one in 10 one in 10,000 or something rather than, you know, one in a billion or whatever the chance of, you know, things being suspended for my my pencil to levitate.
It's going to be quite a bit higher and it's it's going to be higher than just kind of the chance of like a random law of nature being suspended at some time.
>> Yeah. So, this I think would be a topic for a whole another video. So, let's move on to the problem of evil.
>> Okay. So, then let's talk about the problem of evil. So evil and hiddenness are the two um two things that I have put here as cases for atheism. And if at the end Joe if you want to mention anything else that you think we should consider we can. But um with respect to these um yeah I think as we talked about earlier uh it's going to be easier to say like well how much more likely is evil given say source physicalism than theism. Um and um I think you know a few things to say here. Um I think evil is some evidence against theism. I don't think that there's any explanation that I find completely compelling of of evil given theism. But I think that there are a lot of theodys theodyies that have some plausibility.
And so then in kind of the way we were talking about earlier on with like well what's the probability that God would make a fine-tuned universe uh that's fine-tuned for like complex embodied life uh well if you think there's like some explanation that has even if it has a probability of one in a thousand then that's going to um be the probability of this observation. So similarly here um like I think that the the soul soulmaking theodysy for example John Hick soulm theodysy I think it's not like too crazy like I think I can get my head around that okay yeah um moral evil natural suffering that those that God may allow those because they're conducive to forming our characters in a particular way. Um and so for example um like Hick says that uh you an objection here is like well God could have made us with our characters perfectly for to begin with but Hick Hick says well I think this is true that it's more valuable to have characters that are formed through one's own reactions in um a world with suffering where you kind of um achieve yourself. you have this achievement of um becoming morally better, of overcoming obstacles, of becoming more courageous, becoming more loving and so on. He thinks that that's more valuable than having these like readymade. Um or at least that there's you maybe we could even make it weaker that there's like something uniquely valuable about the having these um character traits be the product of one's own action. Well, even if the prob let's say the probability of that is like 1%.
That that there's something like uniquely valuable about that. Well, okay, then there's like a 1% chance of a world with something like the kind of evils that we observe.
So, that's one thing to say. Um, let's see other things to say. So there are like worries about suboptimality of the world that well um there are like other worlds that are better in the sense that um the like some total of value in the world is higher because there are like more happy people in them or something. And I've written on this I've suggested that um on plausible principles it's actually not the case. Well, what's going to be the case is there's going to be like a lot of incommenserability among different worlds where yes, there are other worlds where like people have say more pleasurable lives, but I'm not sure that their lives are all things considered better in those worlds. I think plausibly our lives and the lives in those other worlds are incommensurable with each other. Um and I also suggest in in those papers um that God if um that there's no barrier to like God in our world creating however many possible people it's possible to create. Maybe he has to use multiple universes to do that. And so I'm not sure that there are other worlds if you think that God needs to maximize the number of people. I'm not sure there are other worlds with more people than this one. So that kind of way of running an argument for evil I think doesn't work. But you know that said I do still think that evil is somewhat surprising.
um it's not like clear what the purposes for it are. So, you know, I wouldn't want to take that kind of thought and say, okay, so evil has no force. Um and then I would appeal to like, well, maybe there's a theodysy like the soulmaking theodysy or something similar that can explain things. Maybe it has like a 1% chance. So, I'm going to say, well, evils of the kind we observe maybe like 100 times more probable on source physicalism than on theism. Um, I could talk about the other other things here in a moment, but do you want to come back on any of that, Joe, before I do? I >> mean, so I think that, yeah, this is another thing that's often missed in debates about the problem of evil, which is just that like, you know, the theistic story doesn't need to actually be very probable. Um, you know, like, you know, the theist can just say like, yeah, I'm going to take an evidential hit here. You know, I'm going to add some auxiliary hypotheses to theism. The point is like you know the full disjunction of all the theodysies I might say >> just doesn't seem like hopelessly improbable conditional on theism and together with theism it like you know makes the data at least not too terribly surprising and so you know we can like get get glimpses of some reasons that God might have and then you know there are these points about epistemic humility like we shouldn't be like too surprised if there's some reason that God may have of which we're not currently aware um and that's like a version of skeptical theism which is very mild and moderate and doesn't actually threaten natural theology.
That's something that's very important to note.
>> I mean I you know personally I would be inclined to give a bigger base factor than 100 um here >> but it wouldn't be you know it wouldn't be like overwhelmingly higher for the reasons that I said. Um >> okay well let's let's be I mean I I could be generous. Let's make it Let's make it one,000.
>> Okay.
>> Or one. Oh, wait. This is a This is 100,000. One in 100,000. Okay. I can do that. U one other thing I'll say in in line with what you just said is that Yeah, it's kind of like weak skeptical theism. So, I I've written I I have another article that's uh again strong skeptical theism, which I I think leads to agnosticism. Um if you say what what what this form of skeptical theism says is we should we have no idea what the relevant what the relative probabilities of evil given theism and atheism are. I think if you think that then you should think that we just have no idea what the posterior probabilities of theism and atheism are. But I think we have some idea though. But uh the kind a kind of weaker skeptical theism is as you say is like well we shouldn't be like too confident in any particular like worked out hypothesis of what God would do or the kinds of reasons that God would have. Um like we should think yeah like maybe you know all that matters is like getting as much pleasure as you can and you know some form of like hedonistic utilitarianism is true. That might be the case. Maybe there's like something to this soulmaking idea where the goal of like is to like perfect our characters and ultimately be united to God and um it's better to do that under our own free will than to kind of just be created that way. And you know, you go through a bunch of possibilities and um you know, if each of those have a probability of 1% or one in a thousand or one in 10,000, then as long as there's like one or two that can can predict evil, um you know, then yeah, you get that um the probability of something like the evil we observe under theism is yeah, it's only one in 10,000 or whatever it is.
>> Yeah. Can I get your brief at least briefly your thoughts on like a response to Hick's point about like ready-made virtue versus cultivating virtue? I know some people say here that like, well, I don't know, maybe that value judgment kind of conflicts with value judgments that theists oftentimes make about God, you know, like because God has, as it were, readym made virtue. He didn't have to cultivate his virtue. So, what do you make of that response?
>> Yeah, good. Um, well, so it partly it was partly with that kind of thought in mind that I said that I kind of backed off a little bit and said, well, maybe not better, but like valuable in a unique way.
Um, so maybe there's something good about this like being that's perfect in itself that you know uh doesn't have to like work to get there and that is is like eternally perfect. Maybe there's also something valuable in uh you know in the process in the struggle and you know in becoming perfect and both of those things are valuable in their own way. Maybe God would desire to create like finite beings that like come to to better approximate the kind of goodness that he has and you know that can can come closer to union with him and so on.
Um so I think that uh yeah I think that's what that's what I would say that that it's not too implausible that each of these is valuable in their own way.
>> Well then what about limited theism axiarchism and other for evil?
>> Okay. Yeah. So um so this is where like limited theists like Goth will will um will make their case that like evil is more plausible um under limited theism.
I think it's not I think it's not obvious. Um yeah uh I think like yeah you can you can get something here like you can get some confirmation of limited theism. Um but look we've already got a limited god that can like finally tune the universe. Yes. You know that >> can control the psychophysical laws.
>> Yeah. Psychophysical laws, right? Yeah.
>> Um and you know that uh can like manifest in religious experiences that can do miracles, you know, including like the resurrection, you know, if you buy what I said there. Okay. So like that God can't, you know, avoid the Holocaust or whatever, you know, your your paradigm of the Lisbon earthquake, whatever, you know, you think, oh, like God would have prevented that. Um then yeah, it doesn't look to me like it's going to be that plausible that that God couldn't do that. Um, and a lot of evils too are kind of built into, you know, we, as we talked about back here, like with electrons and love and so on, you know, they're kind of built into the possibility of um, like when you have these complex embodied beings and you get things like possibility of injuries and um, you know, of like uh, cutting bodies up and so on. And um, so it's it's not like that doesn't guarantee you suffering in the kind we observe, but it like gets you some of the way there. Um, and so some of that's already built in.
And so to avoid that, you might need God to create just a very different kind of universe or non-physical world or something. Um, so yeah, I think the limited God, it's not clear to me that it does that much better.
Like I like naturalism. Yeah. Like I think this is a world with the kinds of like if you take, you know, taking everything else for granted so far, a world with the kinds of um evils that we observe like I I think the way that Raper lays out his case in his classic essay, pain and pleasure is is is good.
that you know evolution by natural selection would lead us to expect roughly the kind of pain and pleasure that we observe that seems pretty plausible. Um but under limited theism yeah I think you have like most of the same kinds of reasons as on theism to think that that God would allow this. So so I'll give it I'll give it 10 you know I'll say it's 10 times less likely on theism and limited theism does that seem fair.
>> My audience knows that I'm I'm very critical of limited theism stuff. Uh, and I think that's actually generous, but we can be generous to limit these.
>> Okay, we'll be gener we'll be generous.
We'll be generous. Yeah. Um, and then axiarchism.
I This is a problem for Axiarchism and this is generally recognized that it doesn't look like it has a better explanation than theism uh for evil. Um maybe I don't know maybe you can say like axiarchism just fixes like the the basic facts and it doesn't um fix the uh you know it doesn't like intervene the form of the good doesn't like intervene in things. So, it's something more like dism. Um, I guess you could have that kind of view. So, maybe maybe we can give it something. Um, I don't know. We could be generous here, too. Maybe I'll give >> Yeah, if if we're being generous to limit theism, might as well be generous here.
>> Yeah. Um, wait, does that Yeah, evil.
Okay. Um, other I don't know. As as before, I don't know how to think about this, but I think kind of like axarism or limited theism. I I think it's probably not going to do better than neither of those. So we'll give it enough about >> especially given all the other stuff that it's had to predict at this point.
>> Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's true.
Yeah. Okay. Hiddenness finally. Um well, so what is the datam, right? So some people run the argument from hiddenness like well there's like not evidence for God or there's like like God is hidden or something. Well, you can't assume that. I think that's false. Like look look all the things we talk about, right? Okay. But so so you gota so so what's the what's the data? Um well okay something like um many people do not have religious experiences many people are not aware of God you know something like that like that's true um uh you know I think I mean this this is true I think I think some people that like some people uh it's rational for them to be atheists and that I don't think they that their own personal evidence that they have available to them supports theism. I think that's true. Um so okay, how surprising is this on theism? Um maybe it's a little bit surprising. Um but again like especially if um like you have like if say you're a universalist as as as John Hick is for example well while he was living he later stopped being an orthodox Orthodox Christian and became like a religious pluralist and so on but the the early hick who came up with the soulmaking theodysy the the 19 1967 hick um so he was a universalist Christian um and so if that's your view then um like people are not going to be condemned eternally to hell because they like didn't have the opportunity to know God in this life or something. So, I think that takes a lot of the teeth out of worries about divine hiddenenness.
>> All right, y'all. Editorial Joe here.
Oh, would you look at that? Sleepy Joe.
Sleepy Joe Biden always sad and snoozing next to nefarious. Okay. Anyway, I wanted to add an editorial note. Uh I should have said in the discussion at this point that I actually think non-universalist views like annihilationism and infernalism can also mitigate the evidential force of hiddenness if they maintain that you know one could only be annihilated or damned on the basis of non-belief if one is culpable for that non-belief. So while I agree that divine hiddenness is basically decisive against theistic views which say there are you know some people who are condemned to hell on the basis of non-belief for which they're not culpable. I don't think annihilationism or infernalism as such makes sinist more difficult for the theist. At least I don't think it adds any difficulty over and above whatever independent difficulties you might have with annihilationist or infernalist views on which people are punished for sins of thought and deed for which they're actually culpable. A similar editorial comment should be understood as implicit when we go on to mention Steven Mason's stuff about geographic distribution in just a moment. Okay, back to Levido.
>> Now, you might still think it's somewhat surprising that God, you know, God wouldn't reveal himself. Hicks says um well like if God revealed himself perfectly to us and that would like undermine our free will. Swinburn says something similar. I'm not totally convinced by that um like because it seems like intention was say um like on the Christian view the revelation of St. Paul like you know St. Paul had this like blinding vision and so on, but we don't think that under history will um >> Yeah. I mean, yeah.
>> Yeah. Right.
>> The disciples. I mean, >> yeah.
>> So, I I don't I don't buy that particular response, but it doesn't seem wild to me that there would be some reason. Um and once we've got like evil and suffering, >> Yeah. that's the crucial point.
>> Yeah. You know, I'm not sure it adds that much additional confirmatory way.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Like if God allows the Holocaust, which we've already taken into account, like maybe he would allow people not to believe in him for at least a finite period of their existence, maybe like 0% of their total existence.
>> Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, um so I'll be I think this is generous, but I I'll give this a probability of one in 100 on theism. Generous to the skeptic.
We'll say that. Well, the probability is one obviously on well, not obviously, but uh it's going to be near one on fiscalism presumably. Um uh >> I mean here we do we should also keep in mind like you know there's the bare fact that there are people who they don't believe in God. There are people to whom God is hidden as it were. Um but there's also like you know the demographics of it like the particular distribution of it which uh Stephen Mason has pointed out you know. So if we wanted to update on both of those like maybe we could say you know maybe we could even be generous and say that there was an evidential hit and then there's a further evidential hit. I I still think that a lot of the theatical type moves in response to the problem of evil will also apply to both of these forms of the hypnosis data. But >> yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah. So there's a distribution and so on. I guess I take that to be the real force of that I take to be from worries about hell and so on. Um and if if you're taking that out of the picture or taking out an eternal hell out of the picture, then um it doesn't move me that much. As you say with the Odyssey, like it's clear that God like leaves things to kind of develop on their own for the most part. And one way that that's going to happen is in terms of like people spreading Christianity or um you know the development of uh of natural theology and so on in different places.
So then you you've got an explanation for like geographic distribution.
>> Yeah. like the I mean you know Dustin Kman has this paper like we are here to help each other like you know there's lots of goods that can come about as a result of like us helping each other gain knowledge about God things like that or um and then us having like difference making responsibility as to whether or not other people come to have a relationship with God well I'll I'll just leave it at that >> well I'm impressed we I didn't know if we would get through this >> we're almost done >> yeah we're almost done almost there okay so axiarchism I think the probability is one as well or it's close to one because there is no god um well at least on the version of you could have I should have said this you could have a version of axiarchism that says that like God exists because it's good for him to exist, right?
>> Yeah. But I'm I'm like assuming like atheistic axiarchism here. Um maybe I should just make that explicit for our final tally here.
>> Yeah, that could that could affect its prior like it could decrease its prior some because we might think that it's like at least reasonably likely conditional on like bare axiarchism that theism would be true because I mean that's like the best possible being. I mean come on.
>> That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think that is right. Uh and I might have been implicitly taking that into account in my >> that's fair there. Um >> well yeah part of the prior part of the dent there was that it used a weird like a very implausible and weird kind of like mechanism by which it brings things about. So that's like one aspect and then another aspect >> right. Yeah. Oh that's true. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. All right. All right. We'll we'll dig it by half. Well, but then again, maybe the weird thing that that's only under the space of where it's like atheism is true, right? Because if I guess the good things could come about as a result of God, >> but then fundamentally speaking, it would actually trace back to the axaric law, which is almost like >> Yeah. I don't know. It it would depend.
Maybe maybe just like Yeah. Make it just like a little bit smaller than what we originally had it.
>> All right. All right. Okay. We'll knock we'll knock it down to 120. As you say, this isn't going to make a big difference.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
>> You can you can already see where things are going. Um Okay. So other um yeah I don't know um let's let's do limited theism first probably just give it the same um okay so limited theism hiddenness yeah like what like a limited god doesn't have the power I don't know it does again given everything we've done so far um I mean maybe if like can't avoid all evils maybe that makes it a little more plausible um >> but you know seems like limited god would want to would want to reveal himself for the same reasons so I don't know I'll give this point one Does that seem fair?
>> I think it would just depend on what exactly the form of limited theism is that we've so massively confirmed at this point. Um, >> right. Yeah. Yeah.
>> At least relative to the limited theism probability space, which is small at this point, but >> Right. Well, let me let me let me be generous just to see what it does. Let's say five because I mean as as you see, we're going to end up with like theism massively probable here. But let's just like give give limited theism a running chance here to see what this does. Okay.
All right. So now we're done. Okay. So what does it what does this give us?
Okay. Theism has a relative posterior relative posterior odd odds odd of five.
That's unnormalized. Okay, this is like five in 10 to the 29. Um, okay. 0125.
Okay, that's a normal number. Um, here we have another one of these crazy low numbers like one in 10 the nine and then other again pretty low. Um, okay. Well then then what we do here's here's how the math works just so so people can understand the math. So this sums up this um row here for normalization. And then what we're going to do is so it's like five point etc. Then what we're going to do is divide this row by um that outcome. So like this here is um B12. So that's the relative odds for theism to these other things over the total over the sum of all of these over that denominator. And then that's going to get us our posterior probability.
Make sense?
>> Yeah.
>> Okay. So, theism ends up at 99.75%.
Um, source physicalism ends up with basically a probability of zero like 1 in 10 to the 30. Um, and and it's very low for axiarism and other as well. And really limited theism is what comes out here is okay. There's like a >> a fighting chance.1% chance. Yeah, there's like a there's like a two point a a um zero a 0.25% chance yeah of limited theism. Um so this is really the one in like the way that I think about all this that limited theism and other you know maybe we can spell something else out here that that could could do similarly well. I don't know. Um but this is where I think I have the greatest kind of metal level uncertainty where I think okay this is going to be kind of sensitive to these questions about prior probability. Like if you said I think a limited theism is 100 times more probable than theism which you know you could make the case for that. Um well then you end up with um it ending up with a probability of of 02.
If you say I think it's 10,000 times more probable then it ends up being the theory that is that does the best right?
That ends up being like quite highly probable. Um, so I I gave them equal probabilities to start, but if you think that there's a case for limited theism being much more probable than theism uh anticcedently, then um depending on how you make all the rest of this work out exactly, you could end up with that uh being the winner.
Um but this is more or less how I see it. I think yeah, I gave them equal probability to start. I think that there are these evidences like fine-tuning I think supports um traditional theism um discoverability a little bit more um consciousness a little bit more and um miracle reports I think um as well and then you've got some counterbalance from people that hidden this but I think not not enough to make limited theism for it to make up those those losses but yeah in my in my view from looking at these evidences I think the um yeah the case for theism of some form against like source physicalism is overwhelming and any kind of doubt I would have here is going to be like meta level of uh like have I messed something up or am I you know am I just confused am I thinking about this but when I try to think through a first order look through all these evidences I think theism ends up um very clearly much more probable than any kind of materialism or source physicalism >> yeah and I think um we both recognize that you know this this analysis it does as you just kind of illustrated it sensitively depends on what numbers one puts and whatnot. So, you know, we're obviously not pretending that this is like the final word and all the disputes like basically the spreadsheet like just like concludes debates like >> argumentumatic Excel.
>> Right. Right. Exactly. Um but um you know that was interesting. Do you have any sort of like concluding comments before I kind of close this out? I mean I know that there's a lot that can be said and we already said a lot but >> yeah I guess the last thing I'll say about like the cumulative case and uncertainty is that I I do see like the multiple evidences that are at least largely independent from each other. I think again they give a kind of robustness where like maybe you know what we said about consciousness is just not right and like actually there's a very like obvious materialist explanation of consciousness that you know we're just confused about and you know psychophysical harmony and consciousness just aren't any evidence for theism. um even if that's the case, it doesn't change the conclusion. Like even so, um the the fine-tuning and miracle reports um and other things that we looked at, they end up um overwhelmingly supporting theism. Um so you need like um you need to uh yeah, you need something that's going to undermine like kind of four or five independent largely independent lines of argument to to undermine this case. I think um and if I'm right about what I said about evil like the problem of evil is not going to do it. I think that you because it's it's going to be even the force of the argument from evil. I mean so I'm just looking because I still got the spreadsheet up here. I mean it was already outweighed by like fine-tuning substantially. Um and then it was outweighed on my analysis by miracle reports. Again this is you know quite substantial. Uh it's probably I mean I thought this was generous. I was being generous to you here, but um the but but rel yeah I think consciousness maybe would be like roughly the same order of magnitude um so yeah really I think what you need to defeat this would be some kind of general argument that uh something's gone wrong quite generally and not just like well here's this evidence he gets or you need more evidences for um for naturalism but I really don't uh I'm not sure what those would be the problem of evil seems like the best thing and then >> not just not just more pieces of evidence but more ones that are independent of evil right because like a lot of a lot of are just like, "Ah, here's a bad thing.
Oh, there's another bad thing. Oh, there's another bad thing." Or like, "Here's another class of bad things."
>> And those like once like if there is a theistic explanation of the evils that we've already taken into account, yeah, this additional thing, it's not really going to have much confirmatory for us.
>> Well, um, thanks Stephan for coming on and giving the audience a glimpse into your cumulative case for theism. Um, for the audience, please check links in the description to Neon's work. I know we mentioned some stuff on skeptical theism. He's got a paper on that. Um, mentioned a lot of stuff. I'll I'll put links to some of his papers in the description.
>> Yeah, it's all it's all on my website.
It's all on full papers.
>> Amazing. Yes. So, please audience check that out. Um, of course, you know, if you made it to this point in the video, like clearly you're like a mega fan of Majesty of Reasons. So, of course, smash that like button, turn on that little bell for notifications so you get notified when my videos come out.
Consider supporting me on Patreon. Link to that is in the description. And so is a link to onetime donations. Hey, you guys tip waiters for bringing you extra bread sticks. So, I'm not bringing mere bread sticks. I'm trying to help you better understand the fundamental nature of reality with caution and care and love and philosophical rigor. So, if you tip waiters, I think you're morally obliged to tip me. So, okay. Um, >> you're also in the mail. I want to address, >> right? Yeah. Exactly. You can like look up I mean, you've got a university address, so you guys can look up on Texas&M University. Just like send him hundreds of dollars. Like, I'm sure he would he would accept that. Anyway, thanks Deon for coming on. Um, and uh, yeah, as always, what better way to end is there than I'm Joe Schmid.
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