Over 100 Arguments for God ANSWERED

Sup dogs welcome back to the majesty of reason i'm joe schmidt and today we're looking at over 100 arguments for the existence of god it's over 9 000. in particular i'm going to be answering over 100 arguments for the existence of god so if you're interested in god's existence philosophy of religion metaphysics the fundamental nature of reality apologetics counter-apologetics anything of that sort You're in for a special treat today [Music] so let's get some important notes down before we start the video so the first note is about the title so no no no i'm not

answering the arguments i'm discussing them i'm reflecting on them and i'm probing them i'm making this video to serve you guys to give you guys tools to think critically about arguments in philosophy of religion Then why you might ask that i title the video as i did well because it catches attention much better than a title such as how an extended philosophical investigation and critical examination into 100 plus arguments for the existence of god like such a title is way too pretentious it doesn't get people's attention and it just doesn't allow me to reach a

wider audience you have to play the youtube game if you want to reach that wider Audience and i of course want to serve as many people as possible with my content that's why i titled the video as i did and of course the very fact that i want to serve as many people as possible with my content gives you guys all the more reason to share my video with all your friends on social media so if you've got friends who think that certain arguments for god's existence succeed definitely share this video with them second note

So note that i've taken bullet pointed notes for each argument that we're going through and they're meant for me to verbally elaborate upon i haven't made some super elaborate or pre-planned script and i've done very little additional research for any of these arguments my notes even though they're bullet pointed and they're meant for me to expand upon in the video are extremely juicy okay so patrons have Full access to the notes it's actually 51 pages about 18 000 words of philosophical juiciness so definitely check out patreon link is in the description below if you want

to have access to those notes any patron level will be able to get access to those notes as well as loads of other goodies for my channel some very special goodies including access to unpublished research that i'm doing so yeah a third note note that i've examined many of these Arguments already in depth on my channel so you can see for instance my channel playlists i highly recommend you guys check those out fourth note i may skip some arguments here and there especially near the end but i promise it will be rare and i will

explain why and when i am skipping the fifth note criticisms of mine as a fifth note the criticisms that i'm going to be making of lots of these arguments are not intended to be Exhaustive firstly of the literature's criticisms that have been raised towards these arguments from various other philosophers but also not exhaustive even of my own criticisms okay they're also not meant to be representative of either those either i'm not giving a fully representative survey of the various criticisms one can offer towards them and nor am i claiming that the criticisms that i'm going

to be leveling In this video are knocked down right these are just reflections that i hope will serve you guys that'll allow you guys to think critically and probe these arguments with the lights of reason and experience a sixth note is that we all have to take some humble pie here we all have to try to cultivate intellectual humility in these sorts of domains a seventh note this video is quite long so i can give you guys tips for making it through the video firstly you can break The video up watch it over a span

of few days for instance you could watch or listen to it between classes or doing dishes or cooking or driving or doing laundry or whatever moreover you can put the video on 1.25 or 1.5 times speed that'll definitely help as well but i think the best thing to do is probably to break it up into different spells of watching the video as an eighth note if it's not already clear by now this is going to be a Commentary on a video produced by capturing christianity by cameron bertuzzi and cameron and chad mcintosh they basically went

through over 150 arguments for god's existence giving basically a survey of them and defending at least some of them and so i just wanted to give a commentary on all those so the video their video for on capturing christianity it's got over 30 000 views which is super cool i'm Going to be putting their video on 1.5 times speed within my video so that's just a heads up it's going to be on 1.5 times speed so if it's a little fast that is why and then finally the video that you're about to watch is going

to be absolutely epic so buckle up hello welcome to capturing christianity i've got dr chad mcintosh with me today we're giving you a hundred plus actually about 150 and i think it is exactly 150 arguments for god's existence we have Been working and by the way i mean you dr mcintosh you've been working on compiling this list of arguments for a long time we've been working on this stream for what it feels like months at this point and we were just talking about the fact that we could have even you know uh been preparing for

another like there's just there's so much to do and so much out there and so much to cover yeah if you're just starting this video you're Kind of like okay what what's gonna happen in this video basically we're gonna run through an overall outline of 150 arguments for god's existence and then we're also going to provide resources on what you can do if you want to learn more about that argument so this is going to be a very uh kind of overall an overview picture of each of these arguments we're not going going into detail

into how the premises are going to be defended or anything like That we're just basically outlining the arguments giving you resources if you're interested and you want to research any further and that's that's basically the overview so we're going to start with some comments we've got what 370 slides to to get through so there's a lot there's a lot for us to uh to get through all right well chad and that is also true of my video this is another reason why my video is going to be extremely long but of course it's going To

be extremely juicy as well alright so i just skipped chad's little personal anecdote and now we are on to some of the preliminaries so let's say a theistic argument is an argument for the conclusion that god exists or concludes or the conclusion that christianity is true because that entails god exists or it's an argument for the rationality of belief in god or practical commitment to god's existence or it's an argument that increases the Probability that god exists so i'm calling a theistic argument that satisfies any of those three criteria i guess the one aspect that

i might push back on in that definition is the rationality of practical commitment to that just doesn't seem to me to be a theistic argument sure in some sense it relates to theism maybe in terms of its practical commitment but it's not really an argument for theism but anyway it's a stipulative definition so we don't Really need to spend much time on this and so that's fine um now what is god let's say god is a personal being that has one or more attributes traditionally associated with god so omnipotence omniscience moral perfection necessary existence creator

designer of the universe one or more of those attributes let's for simplicity say say if we if we have an argument for a being that has one more of those attributes that's an argument for god Do we need this so occasionally i'm still i'm still going to be making criticisms that various conclusions are extremely far away from god as traditionally conceived within theism so again this is somewhat terminological but it's also a substantive point to make when you're looking at a conclusion of an argument that it doesn't get you anywhere near a traditional conception of

god even if it gets you maybe let's Say one attribute traditionally associated with god like there is some uncaused thing uh something along those lines but again like maybe that's one attribute traditionally associated with god but it's nothing unique to god there are boatloads of other world views that have something uncaused for instance so anyway that's another thing that we need to keep in mind as we go through my arguments arguments are going criticisms Be justified believe god exists no i don't think so but they're fun to think about and they can increase one's justification

for believing in god so in my research i the the literature on arguments for god's existence is so vast that you need to impose some sort of order on it and the order i like look at chad and bringing order out of chaos dividing traditional arguments from god's existence from non-traditional Arguments the traditional arguments are the more common arguments that you see in the literature and definitive literature and debates and the non-traditional arguments are a little less common uh but have sophisticated defenses no less so in total i think there are 14 categories of theistic

arguments seven in traditional and seven non-traditional and we're going to go through as many arguments uh in each of those categories As i could find i wanted to say though that also like these arguments are not just like random arguments that you're finding on uh facebook you know in random facebook groups these are pure that's right you know well it's hard to say what a good argument is uh so if we have i think the very next slide consider this the argument it's a novel argument let's call it the dixie argument either my cat is

named Lucifer or god exists my cat is not named lucifer so god exists okay look i think that's a sound argument for god's existence because i think both of the premises are true i think uh god exists and my cat is not named lucifer her name is dixie the problem is that's that's not an argument that any rational person would take seriously by contrast all of the arguments that we'll look at are arguments that are taken seriously by rational people Professional philosophers with phds who have published these arguments and the highest tier journal is a

peer review okay so just for you know handle on what is a good argument let's just say an argument that a rational person can take seriously okay so the list we're gonna look at it's not exhaustive uh there's some arbitrariness and how i categorize some of the arguments you know one argument can be categorized under Different different categories um most of the outlines are my own i tried my best to keep them simple and accurate i reached out to many of the philosophers who published these arguments to confirm that i've understood them correctly and heard

that from most of them um i want to keep the presentations brief which is risky that's the biggest risk in this because if you keep it brief it runs the risk of someone just dismissing it you know oh that's a dumb argument or Something like that yeah but but keep in mind look if you come up with an objection on the spot to one of these arguments it's very likely that this objection is dealt with or wrestled with in the paper that we're gonna be referencing okay in the publication the argument comes from so this

is more you can think of this more um as like you said an overview of the vast terrain of theistic arguments this is not our endorsements of any of these Arguments and this is not an apologetic per se this is not a cumulative case per se now when i was sharing the link to this video i saw a comment the top comment on the right uh it was by m jordan it said this what's the point of this video over 98 are not good arguments for god in my opinion there's only like three good arguments

for god but those good ones Still don't mean god exists now i want to respond to that because it prefaces what we're doing here very nicely what's the point in this video well it's a semi-comprehensive survey of theistic arguments outlined as teasers pointing to resources for you to go deeper uh on the arguments that pique your interest i also want to echo that in large part the purpose of my video here that you're listening to is to give a quasi-comprehensive list of responses That i myself find reasonably plausible to these sorts of arguments so that

it'll be your interest so that the criticisms will pique your interest and will not only allow you to pursue the specific arguments in depth further but also specific criticisms of the arguments further and i'm going to be pointing to you guys to various resources along the way both resources that i've created in terms of my playlists or my youtube videos but also Resources in terms of other people's videos and professional scholarly books and articles and so on published in response to and in criticism of the arguments that we're going to be considering okay uh that

said at the very end i do want to play around with the numbers a bit because a recent paper by ted poston called the argument from so many arguments lays out uh he gives a he is a method for Calculating the cumulative evidential force of many arguments put together so what i want to do is give estimates on the force of these arguments at the end uh where we have bad arguments which are just unsound they have a full premise we have weak arguments that are arguments that have premises that aren't obviously false but don't

obviously seem true either maybe they're just slightly more plausible than not we have strong arguments which have Premises which are quite plausibly true more plausibly true than not and then we have decent arguments that fall somewhere within that range of weak and strong arguments so at the end we'll put numbers to these and compare uh we'll calculate how many strong arguments do we need to be justified believing god exists how many weak arguments do we need to be justified and believing god exists or to have good evidence for god's existence so that actually is Probably

the most important aspect of this whole thing is the calculations that we're gonna do at the end so i know it's gonna be a long video but stick around uh because the end's gonna be the most fun when we get the tinkering toy with with so i actually don't think that that is the most important thing i think the most important thing is actually the contents of the arguments because as we're going to see boatloads of them aren't independent but Loads of them do face some quite serious challenges and so on so the stuff at

the end is purely a function of the content of the arguments themselves and as again as we're going to see they're actually not independent they're not going to satisfy lots of the criteria that you need in order to run the calculations that they're running at the end plus of course you have the cumulative case for atheism but we're going to cover that later on in this Video uh cameron i know you had some ideas about how to make this fun uh so cameron's face oh that was that's glorious i just want to see that again

cameron i know you had some ideas about how to make this fun uh so cosmological arguments here we go we're getting into the juicy stuff now All right well cosmological arguments uh are arguments for the conclusion that god is the ultimate cause ground or explanation of the universe or all of contingent or dependent reality and there's no better argument to start with than acquaintances first way uh the argument from the unmoved mover so we have coins this first way uh premise one some things are moved two whatever's moved is moved by another three there can't

be an infinite series Of movers and so the conclusion is there must be an unmoved mover and aquinas's stock phrase was and this is what all men mean by god so of course aquinas's first way is better i think understood as an argument from change and it's crucially reliant on an act potency analysis of change basically act refers to the various ways that things actually are so i'm actually seated you are actually listening to this video and so on whereas potency Refers to the various ways that things could be but are actually not so for

instance i could be singing but i'm actually not i could be using a zigzag compression but i'm actually not i could be bald but i'm not and so on and so on importantly though act and potency are conceived as different ways of being or modes of existence there's a real distinction between actual being and potential being potentials within this understanding are not nothing Potentials actually come with them ontological commitment to a way of being namely potential being it's a kind of middle ground as phaser puts it between full-blown actual being and sheer nothingness and it's

this metaphysical underpinning of the argument that i first would attack i'd first argue that at least by my lights it's not sufficiently motivated so fazer for instance gives an argument from change for the act potency distinction it's one Of his central arguments for it and i actually criticized this in one of my blog posts which i will link in the description so at least some of the central arguments for the act potency distinction for these different ways of being or modes of existence i don't find plausible of course i think that things are actually various

ways and i also think that things can be other ways than they in fact are but i Don't think that is i reject that this requires us to commit to some middle ground kind of being or existence somehow in between full-blown actual being and sheer nothingness on the other hand the second thing that i would say is that this metaphysical underpinning is arguably incompatible with eternalism or four-dimensionalist eternalism because under such a view all times and contents of times are equally actual they have an equal ontological status And moreover there is change over time even

within an eternalist four-dimensionalist type view but of course if there's change over time that is the contents of space-time in some sense change but everything and all the contents of space-time are equally actual well then change is not going to be the transition or reduction from potential being to actual being why does that matter i mean you could of course just reject Fundamentalist eternalism well it matters because this is an extremely contentious area within philosophy of physics philosophy of science and philosophy of time and while philosophers are roughly evenly split between let's say the primary

atheist view which is presentism and the primary bee theorist view which is four dimensionalist eternalism while philosophers are somewhat roughly split between those Actually more philosophers adopt for dimensionless eternalism so it's the formidable view and so one is going to be saddled with a quite serious burden if one has a metaphysical view or analysis of change which requires denying it you're going to have to get into stuff about general and special relativity various arguments from truth makers and various other things that philosophers have quite aptly defended in favor of eternalism third the act Potency analysis

of change requires pluralism about being that there are multiple distinct ways of being but i would reject pluralism and i would argue that you should reject it as well you can see for instance my video with trenton merricks i will link that in the description as well so that's the first thing that i do i'd reject the metaphysical underpinnings of the argument the second thing that i would do is i'd say well this conclusion Doesn't necessarily follow from the premises at least if we say that the unmoved mover is unmoved in all respects whatsoever while

each chain of actualizations of potential might be finite the terminus of a given chain might be unactualized in one respect or in respect of a particular causal power and yet actualized in various other respects or moved in various other respects that aren't relevant to that particular Causal power of the series so for instance consider that we might have a pot of water right the water is heated by let's say the bowl which is heated by the stove which let's suppose it's a fire stove which is heated by the fire now the relevant causal power of

the series here is something like the power to heat now all the secondary members in this series only non-first members the non-primary members have this power in a Derivative way the thing in the series with the kind of underrived power the power built into itself the capacity of itself to heat things is of course the fire and so we have a finite chain of actualizations of potential here and so the fire at least with respect to the chain of actualizations of potential concerning heat is going to be first it's going to be primary in this

particular series it Has that causal power in a kind of built in or under way yet the fire is perfectly able to be actualized in various other respects unrelated to its power to heat for instance you could carry the stove across the room and it would still be able to be the unactualized actualizer in that particular chain of let's say heatings but it would be actualized in various other respects and so you're not going to be able to get to a thoroughly Unactualized actualizer by means of this argument we should also note here that the

conclusion is extremely limited first it doesn't even entail that the unmoved mover or an actualized actualizer of a given per se chain of changes it doesn't entail that it's unchangeable even in respect to the causal power of the series let alone unchangeable in all respects whatsoever and so purely actual and it also doesn't even get you close to god naturalists Can easily accept that there is some unmoved mover let's say or unactualized actualizer there are boatloads of non-theist friendly first uncaused causes which we can even suppose is let's say necessarily existent and it's first and

so not dependent on or actualized by another and in fact i'm going to play for you guys a clip because i put together at least some proposals for this and there are various others but i put together at Least some proposals of this in my 3k ama video there are tons of nontheistic views about the intrinsic nature of character of the foundational fundamental necessarily existing concrete objects so you could explain existence in terms of any one of these views so roughly i'm going to get maybe 10 here so first it could be a collection of

very logical symbols so mateo banucci mateo he has he has a phd thesis published in 2018 and it's called endurance and part hood and it's freely available online i might say it's and he defensive view on which the foundation of reality is a collection of enduring myriological symbols so that's an option that's a non-thesis option non-sticky option again i'm going through different non-theater options here maybe ten or so of them a second way that you can go you could say it's a collection of physical symbols like Quarks or super strings or whatever a third thing

you could say is one more fundamental or foundational quantum fields it could be the universal wave function so again i advise people to check out listening and jill north they have some excellent work on this nay that's n-e-y she has actually a book published in 201 called the world in the wave function a methodist for quantum physics published with oxford university press so and there's a huge literature And fast physics on wave function monism okay that's the fourth one the fifth one is the universe as a whole that might be the foundational necessarily the same

concrete object so one could adopt for instance along these lines jonathan shaffer's priority monism he developed that in a paper chapter 2010 also freely available online i believe it's called something like monism the priority of the whole or something like that you can also take a six view which is the kind Of appian initial singularity which he discusses in his 2013 paper something like ultimate naturalistic origins and he's discussed it online and also i believe he's going to be discussing and fleshing it out maybe perhaps even a whole worldview in his forthcoming debatebook with kenny

pierce on is there a god a debate that's very true uh so that's a correct prediction uh so that's published with rutledge so that's the sixth view you could have an audient Initial singularity the seventh you have the neutral modus substance being the necessary concrete foundation so that's neither a physical is nor non-cyclic view the eighth thing you could have is you could have structure or structural relations being the necessary uh foundation now this falls in line with anti-structural realism you guys can check out the stanford encyclopedia philosophy article on structural realism for an introduction

to that but you know This is a respectable view in the philosophy physics and philosophy of science so that's a kind of context structural realism view that you could have a non-basic view of foundation a ninth thing you could have is a dynamic physical principle as the ultimate ground so david gunn i believe that you announced it he has a 2021 article in the philosopher's imprint available for free online for you guys to read it's entitled on the ultimate origination of Things and so he gives he argues at the ultimate ground the fundamental foundational necessary

self-existent object uh or group of objects that uh are these dynamic physical principles so definitely check that out attempt option is just a matter of energy matters flash energy you know you variously characterize that you can also have say an impersonal mindless absolutely simple you know ineffable one just this absolute absolutely simple impersonal Mindless it doesn't have knowledge of intentions but it's just this absolutely simple being you could say it's the pure actives of being itself you could say it is pure oneness you can say transcends all multiplicity all complexity all differentiation all distinctions whatsoever

including the distinction between the thought and the object of the thought so it's incapable of thought because that would build some kind of distinction it's incapable of you know Being some kind of conscious subject it's incapable of intention and so on i'm not claiming here that this is exactly potential's view but my point is just that this is a view that one could hold that is very similar to blatantness's view but you could render in a perfectly non-theistic way you could have a non-theistic being itself you've got a non-theistic absolutely simple principle that which is

just necessarily emanates everything say or Perhaps indeterminately gives rise to everything and it's just this utter unity utter oneness with no distinctions whatsoever no transparent distinctions no that would require cause under this view anything with any distinction whatsoever inside it would require calls on this view uh in his independence incidentally this is one reason why i always find it somewhat ironic when for instance trinitarian thomas say like oh we have the truly ultimate god oh and I'm just like uh no you actually have some kind of inner complexity with respect to the trinity now of

course they're going to want to try to claim that that doesn't entail any parts set aside whether or not that's true but it's still at least some sort of multiplicity you at least have a multiplicity of persons and then you could just point out that no then you don't have something that's truly ultimate you could go Further still ramp up the ultimateness to like 9 000 and you'll be able to get to this kind of impersonal neoplatonic one right because we can equally ask what explains the unity of this multiplicity of persons because we can

always say that in principle there needs to be some sort of extrinsic principle or extrinsic ground that explains the unity of the multiplicity of these trinitarian Persons or whatever so the truly ultimate view is a kind of atheistic view in which there is this impersonal absolutely simple neoplatonic one that is the foundation the ultimate ground of absolutely everything apart from itself and you might of course say oh well no i can i can explain the multiplicity of the trinitarian persons in terms of something else in god or maybe in terms of one of those persons

or or maybe in Terms of god as a whole and so on but then of course you're rendering yourself utterly susceptible to what the non-classical theists can equally then say about their god or what the naturalists can say about their foundation okay although there's some sort of complexity maybe even composition within their foundation there's something within that unified complexity that explains why it's all united together and so on so shout out From the rooftops that thomists don't actually have an ultimate god so yes anything with any distinction whatsoever inside it would require calls on this

view uh and it's independent being so yeah so that's another non-thesis view that you could take so i just went through 11 different non-theistic views of explaining existence in terms of one or more necessarily existing foundational objects so yeah check that stuff out the articles i mentioned and So on you can also check out three videos of mine discuss the question of you know ultimate origins and living existence actually all of these are in my contingency argument playlist so oh look at this pause oh my word let's just go forward there we go that's that's

much more uh aesthetically appealing anyway my point here is just that even if there's an unmood mover there are boatloads of non-theistic Accounts of what such an unmoved mover could or might be and indeed here's something interesting some of these even naturalistic accounts even physicalistic accounts are compatible with something being purely actual in the sense of firstly unchangeable in principle secondly being cross-world invariant so not varying in properties across worlds and thirdly being necessarily existent and independent and so it doesn't have any Potencies for change doesn't have any potencies for cross-world variants and nor does

it have any potencies for existence that could be actualized and so in that sense it would at least seem to be purely actual what view is this well again it would be versions of that wave function monism defended by people like alisson a and jill north that i was talking about one way that philosophers of physics and literature have conceived of this uh sweet generous physical Object physically described is that it is a non-spatio-temporal sui generous physical object that is the foundation of everything else under this view space-time would be in some sense emergent or

at least functionally realized by something more fundamental so space-time wouldn't be fundamental and there are actually physical results that suggest as much and even setting aside the physical results you can build out a metaphysical Worldview on which this thing features as the foundation of reality another thing to note is that this principle here this principle too that whatever is moved is moved by another or more accurately whatever is changed is changed by another arguably actually entails the thesis of existential inertia according to which at least some temporal concrete objects persist in existence in the absence

of external sustenance and in the absence of Sufficiently destructive factors this principle is essentially saying that whatever is changed is caused to change or at least whatever's change is caused to change by another but of course contra pose that that is equivalent to saying that whatever isn't caused to change by another is remaining unchanged that is the contraposition of it it's logically equivalent to that but then once you add that absences don't serve as causes right absences are Precisely the absence of something and so of course absences cannot serve as causes in order to cause

something something needs to actually exist and absences don't exist right they're the absence of things that exist and so absences can't serve as causes and so the absence of divine sustenance couldn't serve as something that causes let's say a temporal concrete object to cease to exist now ceasing to exist is it some sort some kind of change And so even if there's an absence of divine substance so long as there's an absence of things that could come along and destroy the thing that could cause it to change it's going to remain unchanged with respect to

its existence and so what that means is that it is going to persist in existence in the absence of things causally inducing its cessation of existence that is simply logically equivalent to this premise you might say the absence of divine Sustenance is what causes it to cease to exist right so we still have whatever changes and in particular whatever seizes is caused to cease but of course as i've pointed out that won't work because absences aren't causes absences are precisely the absence of something actual an absence of something is precisely there not being the thing

in question it's purely negative and yet causes are something that produces an effect it needs to be there in order to Produce something and if you deny that if you say that causes don't need to exist well then you can actually just say uh oh no there's actually some there's actually cause of movement there is an unmoved mover there's some sort of uh cause of motion in things but it doesn't actually exist pick your poison i'm just gonna give some shoutouts firstly to my argument from change playlist i go over this argument in a lot

of depth as well as the chapters of My forthcoming book with springer uh that is co-authored with philosopher physics daniel j linford on the first author he's the second author and it is entitled existential inertia and classical theistic proofs we have an entire chapter dedicated to aquinas's first way we also talked about pluralism about being and so on and finally check out the blog post that i have mentioned but now let's go on to the second Cosmological argument or at least let's hear what chad says on behalf of this right for understanding this argument and

other arguments which which reject an infinite series is the distinction between a series ordered per se and a series ordered per academy i've actually covered this in my video on i have a video aquinas's first way and analysis so i covered that in depth in there so you can check that out for a description of this What chad says here by way of clarification of the distinction there is not actually relevant to any of my critiques none of my critiques focus on the distinction between per se and per accident series and none of them focused

on the denial of infinite pearse series all right let's move on to argument number two aquinas's second way second wave from for the the distance of an uncaused cause some things are caused whatever is caused is caused by another There cannot be an infinite series of causes again that's a serious order per se so there must be an uncaused cause a series ordered per se very roughly speaking is a series in which each of the non-first or non-fundamental or secondary members wholly derive the relevant causal power so they don't possess the causal power of themselves

but they rather merely sort of transmit it they wholly derive it from without so Of course there are interpretive difficulties with respect to all of aquinas's ways many suggest that this is actually a version of the dante argument and i guess more generally my response to these sorts of arguments from sustaining causation for the existence of some sort of uncaused cause is going to come in terms of the existential inertia thesis something that i have already mentioned one thing in particular that i highly recommend You guys check out if you're curious about exploring existential inertia

in more detail is my blog post which is linked in the description so you think you understand existential inertia i go over so many different things like common mistakes in the debate the basics of existential inertia clarifying it like talking about its scope its modal register how it conceives of dependence and destruction various metaphysical accounts of it that is accounts which Render persistence non-brute that gives some kind of principled explanation for why inertially persistent things do in fact persist so looking at the relationship between existential inertia and relativity theory give a rigorous articulation of existential

inertia of course i flesh out the metaphysics of existential inertia in much more depth these various accounts which pinpoint that in virtue of which it obtains or explaining why initially persistent Things persist and of course various motivations for existential inertia as well as arguments against it in the literature and i go over these in tremendous detail and you can also find resources at the end of that but anyway we're not going to spend too much detail on it i would just say that if this argument is sort of demanding that let's say either composite things

or non-god things or things in which essence and existence are distinct or so on if they Require some sort of sustaining cause you will be able to level existential inertia as a defeater of that whether it's a rebutting defeater that is giving some positive reason to think that a relevant premise is false or an undercutting defeater that is showing why a relevant premise is insufficiently or inadequately motivated that's going to depend on the dialectical context and the next thing i'm going to say is that this conclusion is again extremely Limited right it's not going to

get you to god naturalists can easily accept that there's some sort of uncaused cause and we've already seen boatloads of non-theist friendly first causes but in any case let's continue all right aquinas's third way why don't i read this one because there's a lot to read here actually i'll take this off the screen so that people can see all the text here so promise number one whatever is Contingent at one time did not exist if everything is contingent then at one time nothing existed if at one time nothing existed then nothing would exist now something

does exist now so not every being is contingent so there is a necessary being uh seven either the necessary being gets its necessity from another or exists necessarily of itself from eight there cannot be an infinite regress of necessary beings that get their necessity from another and then The conclusion so there is a necessary being that exists necessarily of itself so uh premise number one whatever is contingent at one time did not exist if everything is contingent then at one time nothing existed if at one time nothing existed then nothing would exist now something does

exist now so not every being is contingent so there is a necessary being uh seven either the necessary being gets its necessity from another or exists necessarily of itself Versus eight cannot be an infinite regress of necessary beings that get their necessity from another and then the conclusion so there is a necessary being that exists necessarily of itself so the first thing to say here is of course to check out my video on aquinas's third way i actually go into a pretty in-depth analysis on what aquinas means by contingent and necessary and i give a

variety of criticisms of the argument But here's the too long didn't read or i guess too long didn't watch so premise one is very probably false and at the very least unmotivated yes i know that aquinas understood contingent and necessary differently than we do but at least as contemporary philosophers use the word contingent means can fail to exist but of course something that can fail to exist that doesn't entail that at one time in the actual world it does not in fact exist It could for instance just exist at all moments of time and yet

still be such that it is possibly absent from reality although not actually absent from some time or other so one way of interpreting aquinas on contingency with respect to the third way is that contingent things have a kind of built-in tendency or disposition toward decay something along those lines but even so i still claim that premise one even under that understanding Is very probably false even if something has a disposition or a tendency toward decay dispositions and tendencies require manifestation conditions to be met dispositions and tendencies are only manifested if their manifestation conditions are met

so for instance a match has a disposition or tendency to produce heat and flame rather than say cold and the smell of lilacs but of course It's only going to manifest that disposition or tendency if its manifestation conditions are met if for instance it's not wet around the environment we're in a relatively dry environment with enough oxygen and if the match is struck against the side of the matchbox or whatever those conditions need to be in place in order for that disposition or tendency toward heat and flame to become actual or to be actualized and

uh merely from the fact That something has such a disposition or tendency towards say decay it doesn't follow that at one time it will not or did not exist because again it might not be the case that those conditions were met all right so premise one again is is very probably false premise two i also think is very probably false and at the very least again unmotivated even if we grant that everything contingent at one time does not exist it doesn't follow that there would be some one time such That every contingent thing doesn't exist

at that time imagine a following scenario let's just suppose that 14 billion years ago the first contingent thing came into existence now suppose that that contingent thing lasted for 10 seconds and then at the end of that 10 seconds another contingent thing came into existence and then aft after that after 10 seconds had transpired a still further contingent thing came into Existence and so on and so on throughout the past up until the present now in this case we have everything being contingent and now in this case everything that's contingent is such that at one

time it did not exist now in this case it's true that everything contingent is such that at some time it doesn't exist but there isn't some single time at which nothing contingent exists it's still the case that at every time Something contingent or other exists so even if everything is contingent and even if we grant as we shouldn't that whatever is contingent at some time does not exist you simply cannot confer that there is some one single time at which nothing contingent exists the final thing that i will say with respect to this argument is

that the conclusion again doesn't get you to god naturalists can easily accept there's a necessarily existent foundational concrete object uh Foundational in the sense of it doesn't have its existence or even its necessity from some more fundamental concrete object and again i've already gone through various different proposals for that so we don't need to deliver the point here let's now move on to cosmological argument number four where can people go to find out more about aquinas's five ways like what's a good resource for that you know i struggled with this i didn't Really come up

with a good source uh anthony kenny has a good book on quince's five ways i mean you you mentioned that phaser here ed phaser you know yeah i mean if you're looking for a defensive aquinas on anything phaser's pretty much just as good of a source as any other okay well that's that's probably not true but if you want a high level source for these sorts of if you want a high level source for Investigating aquinas's various arguments further as well as aquinas's metaphysics check out john whipple's work that's w-i-p-p-e-l for instance you could go

to whipple's the metaphysical thought of saint thomas aquinas it's technical it's definitely not an introduction so if you want an introduction yeah i'd go with this but just be aware that the arguments that phazer presents in here are very implausible and succumb to various Objections but of course since you are a viewer of majesty of reason you already know that so let's continue uh as antoinette gilson he's he's pretty darn good it's etienne not antoinette it's a minor point and i think it that's that's probably french right so it's probably or something like that so

good on the five ways there are actually philosophers who are starting to defend Versions of the five ways that don't appeal to some of the more wrestling concepts that aquinas assumes one of them being my one of my advisors pg advisor scott mcdonald i think he's got a paper called aquinas's parasitic cosmological argument where it's an extended defense of the first way um uh using contemporary physics no that's just straight out false scott mcdonald published a paper called aquinas's Parasitic cosmological argument therein he argues that the first way fails and that it's parasitic that it

could only succeed if it relies on some other arguments in aquinas's work he argues that the first way fails firstly it doesn't go into modern physics and how it relates to that or he doesn't update the argument in terms of physics so here is aquinas's parasitic cosmological argument this is actually a very good article and i interact and Cite it heavily in my forthcoming manuscript existential nourishing classical theistic proofs but basically he's saying like yeah there's been some neglect of aquinas's ways in recent times one reason is that people think that it has certain devastating

criticisms among which it crucially depends on a kind of aristotelian physical theory or ancient cosmology and what scott mcdonnell points out is that those objections actually don't really Work you can free the argument from the trappings of ancient science and astrology he defends it against the most common philosophical criticisms of it from for instance anthony kenny but of course after defending the argument against some of those well-known criticisms that are misguided he argues that it still fails and in particular it fails as an independent proof of god's existence because it depends on other arguments in

aquinas's corpus and he Says commentators haven't adequately appreciated this the parasitical nature of it that's why it's called aquinas's parasitic cosmological argument it fails on its own to show that god exists that's what he's arguing he doesn't update it in light of modern science he points out that the argument really was never in the first place resting on for instance ancient science and cosmology like aristotelian physics let's move on to uh all right argument number four Samuel clark i haven't heard of this one so i'm really curious like just i guess i'll let you read

this one and then uh i'm gonna ask a question or two about it so an important distinction for this argument is the distinction between contingent things and dependent things everything that's contingent is dependent but not everything that's dependent is contingent i like this yeah so it's good to have these conceptually Distinct in our mind but we should at least know that it's highly controversial that everything that's contingent is dependent i myself at least am tentatively inclined to be sympathetic to that because i'm sympathetic to certain restricted versions of the principle sufficient reason in general i

tend to think that contingent things depend on other things but lots of philosophers aren't down with that they Aren't sympathetic to that and they reject that every single contingent thing whatsoever is dependent on another requires something else to explain why it exists something is contingent just in case it exists in some possible worlds but not all possible worlds so it exists in some but it doesn't exist in others by contrast something is necessary just in case it exists in all possible worlds that is it cannot fail to exist whereas a contingent thing can Fail to

exist and a possible world is just a total or complete or global way that reality could be this argument says um we don't even need to talk about contingent things all we need to do is focus on dependent things and the argument's off and running like in everyday language when someone hears the word contingent they're probably thinking of it in the dependence that is a very good point it's Unfortunate right because philosophers use it in a different way and that that has caused so much confusion on the internet and everywhere and it's very sad and

even sometimes philosophers get confused on this so yeah it's it's very unfortunate so there are dependent beings for any dependent being it neither depends on itself or depends on another nothing can depend on itself so all dependent things depend on another a series of dependent beings which depend On another can't be infinite if a series of beings which depend on another can't be infinite then the series of beings which depend on another must ultimately depend on an independent being so the series of beings which depend on another must ultimately depend on an independent being so

for me it's unclear whether premise 5 is true that the series of beings which depend on another cannot be infinite the relevant notion of dependence here is either synchronic Like at one time one thing is kind of deriving its existence from something else that is kind of sustaining it or else it's diachronic so something brought the thing into existence in the first place but then thereafter it kind of continues on of its own steam as it were now if the relevant notion of dependence at play here is synchronic then i think this argument is going

to be susceptible To a kind of existential inertialist style critique at least some contingent things may very well be such that they're only dependent in a diachronic sense not in a synchronic sense and so you wouldn't be able to get to a kind of concurrent foundation of reality if you're using this argument some kind of concurrent thing that sustains other things upon which the contingent things depend and i know we're not talking about contingent here i should just say Dependent things depend now by contrast if we're talking about a diachronic chain so maybe one thing

was brought into existence 10 years ago and that thing that brought it into existence maybe that thing was brought in still further 10 years ago maybe 20 years ago and so on but it's not clear at least to me why there couldn't be an infinite regress of that kind after all each member in the Series isn't wholly deriving its existence or even its causal power from without you might of course appeal to causal feminism or maybe certain kalam style arguments but then you no longer have an independent argument here this isn't an argument in its

own right it's going to be parasitic on the kalam argument which is another argument in the list so this argument would then fail as an independent argument in its own right We should also at least be wary of another potential quantifier shift problem so again even if each particular series of beings which depend on another must be finite such that each particular series of dependent beings terminates in at least one independent being it doesn't follow that there is some one single independent being that all dependent beings trace back to as its source or its foundation

in some sense that would be an obvious quantifier Shift fallacy merely from the fact that each person has a mother it doesn't follow that there is some single mother of all people and similarly merely from the fact that each chain is such that it has a first member it doesn't follow that there is some first independent member for all such chains that all such chains trace back to and what that means is that all we have here is like at least one independent being Maybe there are boatloads of them moreover we can't even conclude that

this independent being is necessary unless we add a further premise in here that every contingent thing is dependent and of course at least lots of non-theists are going to reject that because they're going to reject the kind of psr that that is expressing but also lots of non-theists aren't going to reject that so that's fine abby for instance wouldn't reject it i wouldn't Reject it and lots of other non-theists wouldn't reject that that brings us to the third point that i want to make here which is just that the conclusion doesn't get you to god

at all again the naturalist can easily accept it even naturalist who thinks that the foundation is contingent can accept that conclusion but again if even if we added that premise that everything contingent depends on another so that the independent thing or things collection Of things would have to be necessary you're still going to be very very very far away from god given the whole concoction of naturalist friendly necessarily existent concrete foundations that i specified earlier on in the video the clark's classic uh demonstration uh william rowe richard gayle and bruce rachenbach if you guys so

we're going to run through some of these really quickly so if you when you see these resources These these resource slides pause the video and then like jot down whatever you want because i can't i can't like put everything in the description this video all the different resources there's actually a limited amount of space but can you believe and we're already like hitting some really heavy philosophy here like i said these are not like this is not your brother's argument that he like came up when he was five years old and was trying to Share

it with his other friend when they were just randomly debating god's existence so these are very very serious i guess those five-year-olds who are debating god's existence i love it start them early some of these arguments like they weren't in this form right they weren't like deductive and like a syllogism like this or like a structured uh yeah deductive form so you had to do a lot of that work yourself so this is actually a huge resource process this is A huge resource okay all right let's uh so just uh why don't i read this

one because you read the last one all right so here it is cosmological argument ca just means cosmological argument we're gonna have to use some abbreviations here all right premise number one anything that exists has a sufficient reason for why it exists either in another contingent being or in a necessary being number two the world exists three therefore the world has a Sufficient reason for why it exists either in another contingent being or any necessary being but the sufficient reason for why the world exists cannot be and another contingent being since a the world just

is the collection of all contingent beings and b the sufficient reason for the collection cannot be in its parts individually or collectively so a sufficient reason for the world must be a necessary being outside the world and the conclusion therefore there Is a necessary being outside the world so premise one is deeply deeply questionable and it might depend on how we cash out sufficient reason so i take it here that we just mean some kind of adequate explanation for why something exists or at least some sort of explanation we can understand explanation in at least

two different senses one is a sense of mystery removal right so that's a kind of more epistemic sense in this Sense an explanation of some fact or object or phenomenon is something that removes mystery as to why that fact or phenomenon obtains or exists so it kind of removes mystery it removes puzzlement so that's a kind of epistemic sense it's kind of relative to what we find puzzling and uh what we find mysterious and whether or not something can satisfactorily remove that or at least mitigate it by contrast and this is the kind of Explanation

that i'm more interested in it's a more metaphysical notion of explanation and that would be maybe some extra mental or mind-independent feature of or fact about something being due to or coming from something else it's a kind of relation of dependence in some form or another so causation might be one such relation but there are going to be other relations you might have functional realization so in some sense the hardware as well as the various Inputs and outputs and rules by which the hardware is working might functionally realize a certain program and that might be

an explanation as to why the program exists so we have causation we have functional realization we have grounding style explanations so perhaps the structure of various atoms and subatomic particles ground the structure of dna and its various functions so that would be a grounding style Explanation and so on again this is not an exhaustive or comprehensive list of the various different explanatory relations that might structure reality but my point is just that we need to be careful to distinguish an epistemic sense of explanation as mystery removal and a metaphysical sense of explanation as some kind

of mind-independent dependence of one thing on another or another's another's what the hell is even that guy okay But anyway back to what i was saying so the reason why i think premise one is questionable is because i think even under both of those understandings or senses of explanation i just tend to think that self-explanation is incoherent nothing can explain itself i certainly think that this is pretty clear in the metaphysical sense i mean something would somehow have to depend on itself it would have to be both prior To and posterior to itself which seems

absurd it would either have to cause itself or ground itself or somehow functionally realize itself but of course then it would in some sense already have to be there it would already have to exist in order to have that relevant explanatory power in order to have that causal power or grounding power or whatever and so it would be both prior to itself and posterior to itself which to my mind Just doesn't make any sense and even in the epistemic sense i mean if i ask why does something exist and you respond oh because it exists

i'm just gonna think maybe you misunderstood my question maybe you're confused maybe you have a stroke maybe you're a new atheist which is kind of synonymous i guess with being confused that was a joke and note i didn't say an atheist i said a new atheist okay There's a distinction there but again you're not explaining anything if i ask why is p true why why is that and you just say oh because p is true like you're just i asked you why v is true give me some account give me some illumination explain to me

why it's true don't just reiterate back to me because it's true but yeah that's precisely what self-explanation is you have p explaining p or in the case of an object you have x explaining exit to my mind it Doesn't even make sense in the case of the epistemic sense of explanation and if that's the case well then it's false that anything that exists has a sufficient reason for why it exists or every fact has a sufficient reason because if self-explanation doesn't make any sense well then for any given case of explanation you can have one

thing being explained by another being explained by another being explained by another and so on ad infinitum now the Only way you can avoid that kind of ad infinitum extension of the explanatory links within this chain is if the the chain kind of wraps back around on itself but then of course you'd have a circular style explanation which ultimately amounts to a kind of self-explanation right you've a explaining b explaining c eventually going around to explaining a and in that case a is part of the explanation of why it is the case that a and

we've already Ruled out self-explanation as incoherent and so you're going to get this huge infinite chain of explanatory links within a chain now we can then just ask why is there that chain of course you can't appeal to anything within the chain because we're asking why there is that chain at all in the first place you know if i ask why are there let's say any trees at all in the first place it's no use responding because there's a tree you're appealing to something Within the very thing i'm trying to ask like why that's there

at all and so the whole infinitude of the chain would then be unexplained and so it would be false that everything has a sufficient reason for why it exists now of course you might say oh well that whole infinite chain is itself explained but then of course you're pausing another infinite chain and then we just focus on the whole shepang right but anyway my point is just that i think We have to restrict the psr in some manner or another maybe we're going to restrict it to contingent things maybe we're going to restrict it to

whatever but since premise 1 is not so restricted it says anything that exists has a sufficient reason for why it exists i think that i would probably reject premise one premise two moreover is highly questionable what is the world now down Here we get a definition it's the collection of all contingent beings but then why would we say that the collection of contingent beings itself exists why should we ontologically commit to collections well is there some collection of like let's say me my laptop you the eiffel tower donald trump's left ear your left big toe

and my phone as well as hillary clinton is there that collection okay maybe There's the set right but we're not talking about sets here we're not talking about abstract objects so what is this collection it's a very strange and spooky object indeed so i i'm actually quite skeptical that the world exists sure maybe each of those individual contingent things exist and indeed maybe there's the set containing them but what is this collection of them why should i think that that exists so anyway premise 2 is also highly Questionable and it seems to lead to various

implausibilities as i've been pointing out hume of course would reject 4b as well he'd say that no you can explain why there is that collection by citing just the parts of the collection i myself i don't know i don't really find that all that plausible i mean for starters you can focus on it like a cannonball right you can divvy up the Times in such a way that you have a fully internal explanation linking each second to a preceding half second to a preceding quarter of a second to preceding eighth of the second so you

can explain in some sense the trajectory of the cannonball just by focusing on like the snapshot moment right after it was shot right and each member of that series is going to be explained with reference to a preceding member so the velocity and the Position and the character of trajectory at any given point is going to be explained by reference to another point within that interval but of course even though each member is explained you still haven't explained why there is that whole trajectory in the first place and of course there is an explanation of

that and you have to go outside of the particular series you have to go to the chem which actually fired it in the first place moreover you Can focus on explaining types of things and hume wouldn't be able to answer and hume wouldn't be able to cite certain tokens of that type to explain why there are any tokens of that type in the first place again because that would be a kind of circular explanation another thing that i would say is that the conclusion here doesn't get you to god right naturalists can easily accept it

outside of this world is misleading right in some sense it suggests that It's like oh it transcends the universe or something maybe it's spaceless and timeless you know it's some sort of transcendent being but no remember the world is just here to find as the collection of all contingent beings so all you're saying when you're saying that it's outside the world is you're just saying that it's necessary it's not among the collection of contingent things this should really be crossed off because it's suggesting something that Might look suspiciously more like god than we're actually able

to get out outside the world just is equivalent in this context to being a necessary being so i think they should be crossed out and of course we've already seen how there are boatloads of naturalist friendly accounts of what a necessary foundational concrete being could be so anyway again we don't really have an argument for god here we have an argument for a Necessary foundation but of course it's an entirely separate question whether that necessary foundation is god and there are panoplys of workable naturalist friendly proposals of what a necessary foundation could be so again

this argument is not a successful argument for god's existence none of them thus far have been going to be a recurring theme by the way it's four and this was david hume's objection to the argument he thought that this argument Premise in particular committed the fallacy of composition uh if each part is contingent why should we think that the hole is contention if each part of an engine weighs i don't know a pound that doesn't follow that the engine weighs a pound the engine is gonna be a lot heavier than just a pound but now

compare a different example uh if each part of the wall each brick of The wall is red it does follow that the wall is red so the question is is contingency like color or is it more like weight and uh well i think it's more like color right it's not like weight a bunch of contingent things together don't add up their contingency to be like more contingency in the way in the same way that something lightweight things don't add up their weight to be more heavy right You don't get something that's more contingent just by

adding up contingent things so another another way of objecting would be if each part has an explanation uh why i think a whole must have an explanation and here uh here are a few examples to think that if we've explained each part that's not sufficient for explaining the whole richard gayle has has this charming example i'm modifying a little bit Imagine what chad is about to argue and again even if his argument succeeds what he's arguing for is the conclusion that explaining all the parts of something is not by itself sufficient that is it doesn't

guarantee an explanation for the whole but notice that hume can respond by saying yeah but sure that might be true in some cases right explaining all the parts doesn't thereby explain the whole but maybe in some other cases explaining All the parts does sufficiently explain the hole maybe if you are able to explain why each individual pebble is as it is on the sidewalk you've thereby explained why all the pebbles are there together as they are on the sidewalk so even if you can come up with some situations in which explaining the parts isn't sufficient

for explaining the whole it's an entirely separate question whether this extends to absolutely all cases of Explaining the parts and that explanation transferring to an explanation of the whole so that's something that hume could push back here so even if chad is able to give certain examples that show that it's not by itself sufficient that doesn't automatically generalize to absolutely every case of explaining parts and holes it could be the case that in principle sometimes when you explain the parts you don't thereby explain the whole but Other times you do have an explanation for the

whole when you simply explain the parts and nothing in chad's argument that he's about to give rules that out which he would need to do if he wants to give a successful response to the criticism in question again you can go back and forth and back and forth on these sorts of things i think probably the best move is just to focus on explaining why there are any Tokens of a given type at all ever so you could focus on the type being a contingent concrete object why are there any tokens of that type at

all ever and you're simply not going to be able to explain that in terms of some contingent concrete object because that would be a patently circular explanation we are asking why there is any such thing at all in the first place so you can't appeal to that very thing so that's probably the best move for the Theist at this juncture at least for the defender of leibniz's cosmological argument that there are five philosophers on that if we've explained each part that's not sufficient for explaining the whole richard gail has this charming example i'm modifying a

little bit imagine that there are five philosophers on a particular street corner in new york city and we want to know why There are five philosophers on this particular street in new york city well one of them is there because his grandma lives around the block and he's going to see her one is there because he's on the way to see a play one is there because he just wanted to get outside get some fresh air one is there and so on so they each have their own individual reason for being on that street corner

that by itself doesn't explain why there are five philosophers On this street corner that seems to that seems cry out for more explanation and the explanation there would be oh there's a meeting of the american philosophical association happening in new york city on this weekend uh you see how that works so there's something a little bit deeper yeah there's there's got to be some extra explanation for it yeah yeah so alexander cruz gets a different example he asks us to imagine imagine a Cannonball at rest at noon yeah so this is the example that i

was giving earlier so we can ask why is the cannonball moving one minute past noon well because it was moving half a minute past noon again even in that case even in the example that i gave and again i'm sort of responding to the point that i made earlier this is just one example of how in some cases you don't thereby explain The whole by simply explaining it to the parts it doesn't show that this is true for absolutely every case but if that's true then why was it moving a half a minute past noon

well because it was moving a quarter minute past noon why was it moving a quarter minute past new well because i was moving in the past so why is it moving at any time past noon is the question so even if it's movement at any one time is explained by a prior time it doesn't Explain why the cannonball is moving at all we need to eventually recourse to the fact that it was fired so those are two examples of of how even if we have an explanation of a part that doesn't necessarily mean we have

an explanation of the whole so we have a lightning and cosmological argument that's defended by stephen davis and bill craig everything that exists as an explanation universe exists so the universe has an explanation if The universe has an explanation it's god so god exists the key premise there is four which he points out is well let's just pause it there so firstly given what i said earlier i'm quite skeptical of self-explanation and of course if you're not able to have self-explanation if you're not able to have these kinds of circular explanations where one entity somehow

explains why it itself exists or some proposition or fact explains why it Itself obtains or is true then that first premise is going to end up being false so i'm going to say that premise is deeply contentious and arguably false given the reasons that i gave earlier against circular explanation or against self-explanation we should of course also note that lots of philosophers including theists are not going to accept the first premise that everything that exists has an explanation this is expressing a Generalized psr which we should at least note is monumentally contentious within metaphysics and

philosophy of religion that said i'm not going to challenge it here now a technical nitpick is on premise 2 one might think that the universe as some sort of concrete object in itself doesn't exist one might think that yes various spatiotemporal things exist but is there some one thing which is like the sum of them all or the collection of Them all that is somehow the universe it's questionable that doesn't really matter too much because you could probably just modify this and saying everything that exists or at least every collection of things that exist have

an explanation and then you could just say well the universe either exists or at the very least it's a collection of things that exist so you could probably go that route and that would be a way to salvage the argument and to Dispense with ontological commitment to this entity called the universe so we can set that criticism aside and then premise four i think is just i'm trying to find nice things to say here but i just find it utterly ludicrous to be honest it doesn't follow from the fact that the universe has an explanation

that that explanation is god that's just a blatant non-sequitur and i think the premise is just patently false again i went through both loads of Explanations earlier that could explain why there is the collection of let's say the spatial temporal things that there are it could be in terms of any number of those naturalistic concrete foundations each of those provide an explanation for why the universe exists some of them adduce something within the universe being metaphysically necessary and explaining all the contingent things within the universe some of them say That the universe itself would be

metaphysically necessary rather than there being something within the universe say a quantum field or a collection of fundamental particles being necessary still other explanations cite something outside the universe but which isn't at all god it could be some kind of impersonal neoplatonic one it could be the non-spatiotemporal universal wave function that people like alyssa nae and Jill north and various other philosophers have explored within the context of philosophy of physics it could be boatloads of things it could just be some sort of timeless quantum state or some sort of quantum entity it could be a

whole concoction of things that have nothing to do with god and so premise four i genuinely think it's ludicrous universe has an explanation it's god so god exists the key premise there is four which he points out is Logically equivalent to what the atheist has always maintained which is that if god does not exist the universe has no explanation it's just brute so what the atheist has always maintained that is just that is truly ludicrous what is this supposed the atheist what are you talking about sure perhaps some atheists in the history of thought have

maintained that yes okay cool but some atheists in the history of thought have also denied that No traction is made in this dispute by saying oh the atheist has always maintained this this is this is just ludicrous that is not a justification for the premise no it's not okay uh okay and let's move on to uh some resources for that one stephen t davis cosmological argument and the upstream status of belief in god and weyland craig's reasonable faith yeah he's dependent that one is it is an Exceedingly and perhaps embarrassingly weak argument but let's continue

a lot of his works he's defended that one so all right uh moving on so now we are on to uh number seven bruce the leibniz argument from alexander priest and i'll read this one because i just have such an affinity for alexander prus all right number one is every contingent fact has an explanation number two there is a contingent fact that includes all other Contingent facts number three therefore there is an explanation of this fact for this explanation cannot itself be a contingent fact and then the conclusion so the explanation of all contingent facts

is necessary so the first thing to say here is that i actually have a video dedicated expressly to this argument i went through in-depth bruce's chapter in the blackwell companion to natural theology it was more so an expository video but there was also some Examination interlaced with it so definitely check out that video i'm very proud of it i put in so much work to that video i think it's called the leibnizian cosmological argument or something it's in my contingency argument playlist but premise two here i think is false and i'm actually quite confident that

it's false there is no such contingent fact that includes all other contingent facts peruse treats a fact as a true Proposition so this is saying that every contingent true proposition has an explanation then there is essentially a bccf a big conjunctive contingent fact or big conjunctive contingent true proposition and that is a contingent proposition which is a conjunction whose conjuncts are all and only contingent propositions so if this is the contingent fact or contingent true proposition that includes all other contingent facts or contingent true Propositions but there cannot be a bccf and this is argued

quite forcefully in this paper published in philosophia published in 2016 by christopher tomaszewski called the principle sufficient reason defended there is no conjunction of all contingently true propositions so there cannot be such a bccf there cannot be a contingent fact that includes all other contingent facts so i just want to go through some of his Reasoning here so i just want to give you the rough idea of what christopher argues in this paper so he's attacking peter van inwagen's argument that the principle of sufficient reason entails modal collapse or entails necessitarianism according to which absolutely

every truth is a necessary truth and every object is a necessarily existing object and what tomochevsky argues is that one critical flaw in his argument lies in His assumption that there is such a thing as the conjunction of all contingently true propositions this is shown to follow from cantor's theorem and a property of conjunction with respect to contingent propositions of course one point christopher makes and i think this is an accurate point the psr by itself doesn't entail motor collapse it doesn't entail necessitarianism and vannenwagen's argument fails just even on this front the Principal reason

is that there can be explanations that don't necessitate what is being explained in other words that there can be explanations that don't strictly entail or determine or deterministically explain the fact to be explained so one way to see this is just in terms of probabilistic explanations if i flip a coin let's say it's a fair coin and it has a 50 percent chance of landing heads and a 50 chance of lending tails It's no surprise on a given occasion that it lands heads of course we don't have a deterministic explanation of why it lands heads

let's say and we don't have an explanation of white land's heads rather than tails but we can still give a non-deterministic non-necessitating explanation as to why it landed heads we can talk about the constitution of the coin how it has two different sides and how given the initial conditions and so on it could Have landed on one of the two sides this is one of the alternatives and it just so happened that it landed on this one we're not going to be able to explain again why it landed on the heads rather than tails in

this case but we can still cite factors that are explanatory relevant to it landing heads it isn't utterly inexplicable white landed heads because again we can still cite facts about the constitution of the coin the way that it's made the initial Conditions and so on similarly if someone asks why i went to go get a drink and the reason is because well i am thirsty that doesn't strictly entail that i'm going to go get a drink after all i might have had an even stronger desire to stay still but nevertheless it is explanatory relevant it

does at least offer some kind of explanation as to why i went to get a drink it's not a deterministic explanation maybe it's not Even a full or complete explanation but it still offers at least some kind of explanation as to why i went to get a drink okay so let's set aside that assumption though and the assumption that christopher is attacking is this first assumption let p be the conjunction of all contingently true propositions this assumes that there is or even could be such a conjunction of all continually true propositions but the problem is

that There are too many contingently true propositions to be formed into some kind of collection or some kind of conjunction and you can basically show this with cantor's theorem which is a pretty logically unassailable aspect of math of set theory so here's christopher's argument and again we're just going to be kind of brief here i just want to give you guys a sense of what it's like so he assumes for reductio that there is A conjunction of all contingently true propositions p here's the key premise for each non-empty collection of propositions which are conjuncts of

p there is a unique contingently true proposition to which it corresponds then it follows from one that every such contingently true proposition is a conjunct of p four from cantor's theorem you can actually conclude that there are Strictly more non-empty collections of propositions which are conjuncts of p then there are propositions which are conjuncts of p you can kind of see why this is an analog of cantor's theorem with respect to sets so kendra's theorem with respect to sets says that if you have a given set s the size or cardinality of the set of

all the subsets of s is strictly greater than the size or cardinality of s itself That is there are more subsets of s than there are members of s that's what kendra's theorem says and if you think about it a little bit you'll see why this is pretty much a corollary of that and so from two three and four you get that there are strictly more propositions which are conjuncts of p then there are propositions which are conjuncts of p that follows from two three and four but of course that's absurd right you're saying there

are More propositions which are conjuncts of p then there are propositions which are conjugates of p that's like saying there are more apples on the table than there are apples on the table no no okay so we conclude by reductio that there is no conjunction of all contingently true propositions so our assumption for reductio is false and again two is the key premise four is again just an unassailable mathematical Fact and one is assumed for reductio the rest just follow so premise two is to see why it's true says tomaszewski we begin by noting that

if just one contingently true proposition is a conjunct of another true proposition then that ladder proposition is also contingently true now let x i think that might be what is that is that a chi or something like that oh well i'm just going to say x now Let x be some such collection of conjuncts from p and let c sub x be the conjunction of all the propositions in this collection now consider c sub x and n where n is an arbitrary necessary proposition this conjunction will have the following form c1 and c2 and c3

and c4 and so on and n in this conjunction each c sub i is a proposition belonging to the collection in question and n is any necessary proposition one might like for example That two plus two equals four or the law of non-contradiction now we can see that c sub x and n is exactly the proposition which we have been seeking it is a contingently true proposition and it's unique for each collection c sub x additionally the inclusion of n in the conjunction ensures that c sub x and n is not logically equivalent to any

conjunction of atomic propositions in p And therefore must be included in p if it really is to be the conjunction of all contingently true propositions so basically what christopher has shown here is he's shown a procedure for finding a unique contingently true proposition that we can correspond to every collection of conjuncts from the big conjunctive contingent fact p and so basically what we've shown is That for each non-empty collection of propositions which are conjuncts of p we can construct a unique contingently true proposition to which it corresponds and that establishes premise two okay anyway check

out this article if you are interested in it further i know that's probably this is going to be the most complicated portion of this video so sorry about that but uh we're back we are back to the normal stuff now so anyway my point here no premise 2 is False there is no such contingent fact that includes all of the contingent facts as prus articulates it in his article as peruse articulates it in the article that this argument is based on a contingent fact is just a conditionally true proposition and so this is committing to

a bccf a big conjunction of contingently true propositions and there cannot be such a thing because there are too many contingent Propositions to be able to form a collection like that you could show that via cantor's theorem another thing to note is that this conclusion again doesn't get you anywhere near god the naturalist can easily accept absolutely every single one of these premises although they shouldn't accept two of course because it's false but the naturals can accept all of these premises and i've already gone through various proposals that the Naturalists can use for a necessary

concrete foundation or collection of objects within the foundation of reality and also just for kicks and giggles the psr doesn't detail motor collapse as we've seen that's a typical objection to the psr another typical objection of psr is that quantum mechanics falsifies it no in quantum mechanics we have indeterministic explanations of things the various indeterministic phenomena that you see In quantum mechanics like maybe a particle goes through the right slit as opposed to the left slit and there's no explanation to why it goes in one rather than another so there's no deterministic explanation of why

it goes in one there's no necessitating explanation y goes in one but there are still clearly there's still clearly an explanation of y equals in one if there were no explanation at all then you wouldn't be able to get this kind of consistently Regular uniform manifestation of different chances by which it goes through one or the other you wouldn't be able to calculate certain precise probabilities that'll go through one as opposed to the other the very fact that there's regularity and that we can study these things scientifically shows that actually there's some kind of intelligible

explanatory order here and so there are going to be Indeterministic explanations at play here assuming a copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics which is a highly contentious assumption in the first place anyway the quantum phenomena that people appeal to as somehow falsifying the psr the various events in question are law governed events and states that evolve from prior states of the quantum system you can explain it in deterministically in terms of the prior State of the quantum system together with various indeterministic or non-necessitating or stochastic laws of nature so these aren't utterly inexplicable there are explanations

here they're just not necessitating explanations so no the psr doesn't entail modal collapse no quantum mechanics doesn't falsify the psr um conceivability also doesn't falsify the psr sure or maybe you are able to conceive of a world in which some Contingent fact obtains without an explanation but conceivability doesn't entail possibility i can conceive of a world in which water is h3o or something like that but that doesn't mean water is possibly h3o and moreover i can conceive of a world in which the psr for contingent truths is true and of course the psr if true

would be necessarily true as a fundamental metaphysical principle and so if conceivability entailed or even provided evidence for Possibility well then we would have some weight of a reason here to think that it's possibly necessary that the psr is true in which case per s5 which is a pretty standard system of motor logic we'd be able to conclude that the psr is in fact true so there's a kind of symmetry problem if you think you've falsified the psr or at least gave an evidence against psr by means of conceivability i can just turn around and

give it an argument from Conceivability for the psr but anyway check out my contingency arguments playlist i just wanted to allay some worries that some people have for the psr so that i can at least do something to defend some of these arguments don't let it be said that i'm just trying to desperately find any objection that i can to these sorts of arguments no i'm actually defending certain premises in these arguments and eventually i'm going to defend some of The arguments but i'm actually defining some of the premises in these arguments against objections so

no i'm not just trying to desperately reach for objections any objection i can i want to serve you guys i'm not doing this to just refute or rebut or bolster some sort of tribe or anything like that no we're in this for truth we're in this for critical thinking we're in this to gain a better view of reality a better Picture of reality but anyway let's go on like the number one objection to this argument it's that the first premise is false and the first premise is what's called the strong principle of sufficient reason so

they're just going to want to deny that every contingent fact has an explanation there are there are group facts so some non-theists are going to say That also some theists are going to say that richard winburn for instance but as i've pointed out the non-theist doesn't have to do that and the criticisms that i leveled here don't rest on that this one is also actually available on bruce's website so if you just search for the title of this and also it's available as a medicine reason youtube video so i made a youtube video expressly dedicated

to this as i said earlier so definitely check that Out i'm very proud of it like i said okay enough of the plugs then it'll pull up and you can watch it for watch it you can read it for free if you want to uh to learn more about his argument and prince just like you need to know who he is if you don't you need to look him up you need to look at what the the sorts of things that he's saying i've even featured a couple of his talks on this youtube channel you

can go and watch one of them was on the argument from uni and Another one was a sort of newish argument for god's existence from uh paradoxes like the grumpy paradox that i discuss or that i've had other philosophers on to uh and check out my column playlist in that regard because i go over the grim reaper paradox and various other paradoxes and i critically examine them in tremendous detail with various other philosophers as well so definitely check that out argument number eight the gale so you Asked what uh sorry you guys what the strongest

objection to the previous argument was and it's the what what's called the strong principle of efficient reason well alexander peruse and richard gale try to come up with an argument based on a weak principle sufficient reason which is premise one here for any proposition p if p is true then possibly there is a proposition q that explains p so it's a little bit weaker than that that strong principle sufficient reason We encountered before uh premise two all okay let's stop it there no it's not so the first thing that needs to be said here is

the premise one here is not weaker than the strong principle of sufficient reason why is that well because this weak psr strictly entails the strong psr galen proofs have themselves admitted this it was shown by graham oppe in response to galen proofs and galen bruce Made another response to them in turn admitting that yes that's right this weak psr does entail the strict psr so to assert this is basically to assert the strong psr it's not weaker it's basically like saying possibly god exists if you're in system s5 that's actually not a weaker claim than

the claim that necessarily god exists it's just not a weaker claim here's the article from opi that i'm talking about on a new cosmological argument galen Proofs contend that their new ontale or new cosmological argument is an improvement yada yada yada however i note that their weaker version of the psr entails the stronger version of the principle which is used in more familiar arguments so that the alleged advantage of their proof turns out to be illusory moreover i contend that even if their arguments did rely on a weaker version of the principle sufficient reason non-theists

would still be perfectly Within their rights to refuse to accept the conclusion of the argument and the reasoning actually isn't that hard to follow so let's just get some definitions on the table and then i'll show you why that is the case so the first definition a possible world is a maximal composible conjunction of abstract propositions that's a little bit tricky but composable that means they're all jointly possible together conjunction right that's just like p and Q and r and s and you know that's a conjunction and then it's maximal in that for any proposition

p either p is in this conjunction or else the negation of p is in this conjunction so that's what maximal means just a more intuitive way of thinking about a possible world is just a complete or maximal way that reality could be and then the big conjunctive fact or bcf for a possible world is the conjunction Of all the propositions that would be true if that world were actual and then definition three the big conjunctive contingent fact where bccf for a possible world is the conjunction of all the contingent propositions that would be true if

that world were actual now we've already seen why there cannot be such a thing as the bccf but set that aside the weak principle sufficient reason or wpsr claims that for any proposition p if p Is true then it is possible for some proposition q to be true and to explain p and that's contrasted of course with the strong principle sufficient reason or spsr which claims that for any proposition p if p is true then there is a true proposition q which explains p alright so with all this in mind we can now look at

the one paragraph long proof so suppose that there is a world w prime which is such that the big conjunctive Fact for that world has no explanation in that world let the bcf for that world be p1 now consider the conjunctive proposition p1 and p1 has no explanation so that's a conjunctive proposition p1 and p1 has no explanation by hypothesis this conjunctive proposition is true in w prime hence by the weak psr there is a world w double prime in which this conjunction is true and Has an explanation so the conjunctive proposition that p1 and

p1 has no explanation has an explanation in w double prime but that's absurd if there is an explanation of why p1 obtains and has no explanation then there is an explanation for why p1 obtains hence p1 both has and lacks an explanation in w double prime contradiction So there can be no world w prime which is such that the bcf for w prime lacks an explanation in w prime what this tells us is that with the weak psr in hand literally any bcf for any world has to have an explanation you get the strong psr

from the weak psr and then richard gail and alexander prus published a response to oppie and others who had criticized their argument and yes galen prus in this article say yeah the weak psr does entail the strong psr So chad is mistaken that it's a weaker principle it strictly tells the stronger one and so to assert the weak psr is in part to assert the strong psr okay back to the video that is to say so it's a little bit weaker than that that strong principle sufficient reason we encountered before uh premise two all contingently

true propositions in the actual world form a big conjunctive proposition they use the term fact but Just for consistency i'll just use proposition vccp big conjunctive contention proposition uh possibly this premise three possibly there's a proposition q that explains bccp four q explains bccp only if q involves a necessary being and this is because if you were holding contingent q would be in bccp so q can't be contingent but necessary premise five there is a Proposition q that explains bccp that involves a necessary being and this follows from three and four uh and it's provable

in s5 modal system s5 which we'll talk about a little bit later uh the argument is this look if possibly q explains p and q explains p only if q is necessary then possibly q is necessary in other words if q is possible q is possibly necessary but if q is possibly necessary it allows in modal system s5 that it is Necessary so q premise 6 q explains vccp only if q reports a personal explanation and the reason here is that uh there's a distinction between personal explanations and scientific explanations scientific explanations are explanations in

terms of the laws of nature law like generalities personal explanations are explanations in terms of agents and their intentions so if we ask a question why is the water boiling you could give a scientific explanation in terms of the Mean kinetic energy the water molecules blah blah blah or you could give a personal explanation which is that i wanted to make some tea so we have this distinction between these two kinds of explanation well uh they point out galen cruz point out that because scientific explanations are just generalizations over all of consensual reality uh scientific

explanations must also be contingent so scientific explanations can't involve Only contingency propositions all of which are already included in bccp so no scientific explanation no proposition reporting a scientific explanation can't explain bccp so whatever proposition explains bccp uh this is the conclusion uh it must while it's uh premise 6 must report a personal explanation and so the conclusion there's a proposition q that explains bccp that involves a necessary being and reports a personal explanation okay so there are lots and lots and lots And lots of problems with this we already saw why one just strictly

entails the strong psr so no one who doesn't antecedently accept the strong psr would ever grant number one here but okay set that aside premise two is false nope they don't form a bccp you got cantor's theorem we already went through that so premise two is false another point premise one seems to commit to the existence of propositions which of course pose some quite serious Challenges for theism and especially classical theism in fact i think they're flatly inconsistent with classical theism if there are abstract propositions well some of them are going to be necessarily true

and hence necessarily existent but then there are necessarily existing things that are numerically distinct from god but of course that's incompatible with traditional classical theism to say that they're necessarily existent is to say That they cannot fail to exist and moreover they're distinct from god and so there are things distinct from god that cannot fail to exist but then it's false that god both creates everything distinct from him and is free to refrain from creating and that classical theism traditionally is strictly committed to firstly everything distinct from god being created by god and secondly god

being able to refrain from creating so this first premise is Going to cause significant challenges for the classical theist especially but also for traditional theists as felipe leon and i point out in our video from abstract to atheism so that's yet another problem another thing that i want to say is that it's not immediately clear that four is true um q explains bccp only if q involves a necessary being to be sure cue has to be some sort of necessary truth right it can't be within bccp because then it would be a Contingent truth and

then in some sense it would be explaining itself and so the thought goes contingent truths can't explain themselves i tend to think that nothing can explain itself but set that aside so q just needs to be a necessary truth but why does it need to involve or report or be about a necessary being i mean maybe there's some sort of necessary truth that explains why there is the big conjunctive contingent fact That there is without that necessary truth involving or making reference to or being about a necessary being which causely produces let's say the members

of the bccf in principle you might be able to explain why there are contingent things just by saying it is necessarily the case that some contingent things or other exist that's not saying that there is some particular contingent thing which necessarily exists that would Obviously be a contradiction it would then be both necessary and contingent which is absurd but rather it's saying necessarily some contingent object or other exists again i'm not saying that that's true but this argument would need to rule that scenario out and at least on the face of it it's not able

to rule that scenario out it would need to show why that couldn't be an explanation of the bccf And yet there's nothing in the argument and nothing that chad has said here that gives us any reason to rule that out and moreover it's still a necessary proposition explaining contingent propositions so we've gone outside of the set and moreover we've appealed to the very fact of necessity to be the kind of explanation and that's precisely what they're appealing to here after all it's the necessity of the being which is at least part of what the difference

Maker is between it and other things when it comes to requiring an explanation so premise 4 is actually quite questionable so so far we've seen that premise 2 is false premise 4 is questionable premise 1 is not actually weak after all it it strictly entails the strong psr in fact it's logically equivalent to it because the strong psr clearly entails this one so it's literally logically equivalent to a strong psr in which case No one who doesn't antecedently accept the strong psr would be inclined to accept this one a still further problem for premise one

is that it faces a symmetry problem you could equally well say well for any proposition p if p is true then possibly there is no proposition q that explains p right that seems equally modest you might say this one is just saying hey possibly there is an explanation of p and the other alternative principle which is Symmetrical is just saying hey possibly there is no explanation of p but importantly if for any true proposition that proposition is possibly unexplained that's incompatible with traditional theism because traditional theism says that any contingent thing whatsoever and hence any

contingent truth in any world is going to be dependent on god right all the worlds trace back to god as the creator of the contingent Things in those worlds right so you can't have some contingent thing or some contingent truth that's like free floating from god that is utterly independent of god that cannot happen that's not even a possibility under traditional theism under traditional theism god is essentially assay and essentially that upon which everything else depends if there are other things and so if it's even possible that let's say there's a contingent thing that's Not

explained by god or if it's at least even possible if there to be a contingent proposition which is not ultimately explained by reference to god well then traditional theism is false and so we have a symmetrical principle with one that is actually incompatible with traditional theism and given the symmetry between this first premise and that other one there doesn't seem to be any reason for preferring one over the other i mean you might just say oh you Know like how are you going to support this it's a possibility claim so you're probably going to talk

about oh conceivability oh imaginability oh i can't see any contradiction in it you're going to say things like that but again i can say the exact same things about there being no explanation for p right oh i can conceive of it oh i can imagine it oh i don't see any contradiction you know those sorts of things you can equally say those Admittedly i do think that there is some sort of symmetry breaker between them in terms of they're not actually being equally supported by actual experience so yes in our experience explicability and things being

explained is the norm rather than the exception and so perhaps that'll give us some inductive reason to prefer this first premise over the second one but at least in so far as there are modal claims i i don't i can't see any Modal reason that favors one over the other and if you're talking about being supported by actual experience and it's actually quite difficult to go just from our actual experience to talking about what is going to be the case in various other possible worlds possibly extremely remote possible worlds and the explanatory relations obtaining therein

so that's a potentially serious problem for premise one this kind of symmetry problem Also premise six is it false or at least unmotivated so let's actually look at the source material here a new cosmological argument by richard m gail and alexander prus so they just concluded that seven there is in the actual world of proposition q such that the actual world's big conjunctive fact contains p and q and the proposition that q explains p then they ask what kind of proposition Is q it is the burden of the remainder of our argument to flesh out

q we already know from seven that q explains p but just how does q explain p the only sorts of explanations we can conceive of are personal and scientific explanations in which a personal explanation explains why some proposition is true in terms of the intentional action of an agent and a scientific one in terms of some conjunction of law-like propositions be They deterministic or only statistical and one that reports a state of affairs at some time okay i need to find some kind words to say here because i'm very tempted to say some very mean

things here but uh no no these aren't the only two explanations that there are there are boatloads of other kinds of explanations to say that these are the only two kinds Of explanations just strikes me as so patently and obviously wrong okay calm down i need to calm down so here are a few other kinds of explanations firstly a metaphysical explanation one that cites neither the intentions of some personal agent but also not in terms of the evolution of a system and the state of the system at a given time governed by laws of nature

for instance i don't know how bruce is not bruce is literally an aristotelian he accepts That there is this thing called formal causality that there are forms and that these forms kind of unify the constituents and components of something they give a kind of organic unity and integrity they account for persistence over time and so on these are kinds of metaphysical explanations the form the form isn't like some intentional agent that is causing the various parts to be combined and nor is this some scientific explanation firstly in science you're Not going to find appeal to

substantial forms that's a metaphysical principle that that's a metaphysical principle of aristotelianism but secondly that's not in terms of the state of a system at some time being governed by either deterministic or statistical laws how do they not think of things like this i mean i just gave one example formal causality but there are boatloads of other kinds of metaphysical explanations some of them are in terms Of grounding right you can talk about how the structure the dna molecule is grounded in some more fundamental facts about chemistry and so on again this isn't a scientific

explanation in their sense because we're not talking about the state of a system at some time being governed over time by deterministic or statistical laws no we're talking about the relations between different levels of reality more fundamental things somehow grounding we're metaphysically Explaining non-fundamental things this is yet another kind of metaphysical explanation in terms of grounding there are explanations in terms of functional realization so some things like computer programs are functions that are realized by various pieces of hardware part of the explanation of why some program exists or why software exists is that there is

hardware that is either actually or even capable of realizing it or functionally Realizing it again we haven't here talked about law like states of some system at some time and nor are we necessarily talking about intentional agents we're talking about the functional realization of some program or some function or some pattern by some kind of hardware or something along those lines and it doesn't have to be hardware that humans themselves make maybe we're even talking about a brain Chemistry and functional spheres in the philosophy of mind again whether or not you even agree with those

functionalist fees and philosophy of mind it's just false that there is no explanatory payoff there they do have an explanation of why there are certain mental states in terms of functional realization by different brain states and so on again this is a kind of metaphysical explanation right this is Not something that you will find in science it's a metaphysical claim about the nature of the mind we're not talking about again some state of the system being governed by laws and nor are we talking about a personal explanation i mean how hard is it to come

up with these examples so that's just metaphysical explanations and there are boatloads of other kinds of explanations ethical explanations here's one At least partial explanation of why torturing an innocent person is wrong because of the badness of the suffering that the victim undergoes that's part of the explanation not saying it's the whole explanation but that's part of the explanation the explanation that i've just given doesn't cite the intentional action of an agent and nor does it cite some state of a system that's governed by deterministic or stochastic laws so ethical explanations are in here Mathematical

explanations are in here you can explain why for instance the pythagorean theorem is true in terms of more fundamental axioms like the parallel postulate together with the rules of inference within the euclidean system or whatever similarly you can offer boat loads of different explanations so suppose that i bet someone that i could find eight people such that they each have a unique day of the week on which they were born now i'm Guaranteed to fail what explains that well it's actually the pigeonhole principle that explains that that's a principle that's used in mathematics the basic

idea is that there are only seven possible slots here and so if i have eight things to fill within those slots there's no way to do that without at least one of the things i'm filling into the slots to be doubled up with another thing that's already in them this is a perfectly adequate explanation Of why i'm gonna lose my bet of why i'm gonna be sad later on because i lost this bet or whatever that's at least part of the explanation there but again it's a mathematical explanation we haven't cited states of a system

and plus deterministic or statistical laws and nor have we cited some kind of personal explanation in terms of intentional actions we've cited the pigeonhole principle in different mathematical facts so anyway i've just Gone through both loads of explanations here they have nothing to do with scientific explanations or personal explanations so this is so utterly false okay sorry you can see how page why am i so passionate about this anyway i just so painful so yes they have a premise here q is either a personal explanation or a scientific explanation some sort of conceptual truth in

parentheses Oh it is a conceptual truth that that is evidently false but anyway you know what's their reason for saying that it can't give a scientific explanation well the reason is because that q must contain some law like proposition as well as a proposition reporting a state of affairs at some time but such propositions seem to be contingent especially the latter and since they are contingent they are members of the bccf but then they would have to explain Themselves yada yada yada so their only reason for ruling out why it can be a scientific explanation

is literally because such propositions seem to be contingent nice i'm convinced thank you thank you thank you you've convinced me i'm now a bible-thumping christian thie like come on man such propositions seem to be contingent that's your only reason for this come on so anyway i guess my point here is just That they have not at all ruled out they haven't given us any reason whatsoever to think that there cannot be a scientific explanation which is non-contingent that is which is necessary perhaps some of the fundamental items investigated by science are themselves necessarily existent in

that case you could in principle have a scientific explanation of a relevant fact or perhaps even of the big conjunctive or even the big Conjunctive contingent fact but yet that that scientific explanation is not contingent it would be in terms of something necessary they have given us literally no reason to rule this out and again i've given various proposals for what a naturalist friendly foundation might be and some of those are going to be perfectly scientifically respectable ones of course like the neoplatonic one that's not going to be a scientifically Respectable one in the sense

that science of course doesn't cite that in its explanations but the ones in terms of like an a temporal wave function monism the ones in terms of foundational particles or maybe matter of energy or certain fundamental physical principles lots of those are going to be perfectly scientifically acceptable so anyway six is monstrously unjustified monstrously so And i would argue that it's very very very probably false given the boatloads of other explanations that we've just gone through firstly explanations that don't fall into that dichotomy of a personal or scientific explanation and secondly explanations that are perfectly

naturalist friendly that don't cite a personal explanation and yet that cite some sort of necessary foundation of reality but anyway my point is just that this conclusion here this doesn't Actually get you to theism i mean okay fine it gets you kinda close but you still could have all sorts of personal necessary non-god foundations of reality you could have a deistic view you could have some kind of god that's morally indifferent so maybe it's neither holy good nor wholly bad maybe doesn't even have any goodness or badness properties you could follow what draper calls an

aesthetic deism hypothesis so there's this Foundational being which is god-like but its preference structure doesn't really map on to goodness and badness but instead maps on only to aesthetic values so it just kind of wants to create a really cool story it doesn't really care if it's good or bad in the moral sense thereof but anyway my point is just that there are lots of hypotheses that this conclusion is perfectly compatible with that are non-theistic so my favorite one not my favorite but a really cool thing About the story you might pull back up here

is that gail is an atheist he's i don't know if he's agnostic technically but he's he's definitely not a theist he's a non-theist yet i just want you to note that he's developed this argument for god's existence with alexander bruce and he's defending the literature everything like that that to me shows a big difference between what happens in the philosophy world like the Academic world as opposed to what happens on youtube and debates on facebook and on twitter and stuff it's like in the philosophy world in academic world they're not afraid to steal man arguments

to attempt to better the other side's position and so it's just i don't know i find that really really interesting that gayle he's a nontheist himself yet he's defended this argument and developed the dialectic that way so i also find that interesting i mean One thing that we should note is that the very fact that he's not a theist shows us that while he has been kind of still manning this argument the very proponent of the argument doesn't really accept it right so that's something that's also important to note i mean that should give anyone

pause who's trying to use this sort of argument as an argument for god's existence or even something that lends credence to god's existence i think gayle's work is very Under-appreciated it's brilliant and his writing is superb i love gayle's writing moving on to cosmological argument and this is argument number nine so two philosophers cats and kramer they think that you can run a cosmological argument without the principle sufficient reason based on this principle and it's the principle of epistemic explanations i call it okay so kind of a mouthful there and if ppe given that one

there's a Possible explanation of the fact that f and two any possible explanation of the fact that f entails b it's reasonable to believe p here's an example the match is on fire any possible explanation of the fact of that fact entails that there's oxygen in the atmosphere so it's reasonable to believe that there's oxygen in the atmosphere okay so we can run the argument just for the audience note that giving an example that fits this schema Is by no means an argument to think that the schema is true nor is it a reason to

think that it's true chad knows this right i'm not attributing this claim to chad but my point is just that we should be quite weary even if there's one example that fits the schema doesn't mean that it's a good principle and i guess my question is why should we believe this principle uh of course you know we can look at the sources but again i'm not doing much Additional research in addition to what i've already done over the many years that i've been studying this sort of thing i'm not particularly familiar with this argument in

particular so i'm not going to do the additional research that would be required for me to like go to the chapter of paper and like read what the ppe is and like read the various motivations but i just will note that it's general form right it's Saying that if x is possible right if there's a possible explanation for the fact that f if some x is possible and x is obtaining entails y's obtaining right so any possible explanation of the fact tails p so we're saying if there's something that's possible and that possible thing in

any possible world in which that obtains p obtains well then it's reasonable to actually believe that p that p is true But i don't know this this structure is really weird in general it's not true that if x is possible if one thing is possible and that thing entails another thing oftentimes it's not reasonable to believe that that other thing obtains right so think think of this uh if a unicorn is possible and a unicorn's existence entails the existence of a single horned horse that can fly well then it's reasonable to Think that there are

single horned horses that can fly like what no just because x is possible it might not be actual right and so even if there's a possible explanation of the fact that p and such an explanation would entail p it's a further question as to whether or not it's reasonable to believe that p is in fact true right i mean sure p is going to be true in any possible world in which there is an explanation of the fact that p but We're still left completely in the dark given ppe as to whether or not there

is actually such an explanation of the fact that f and it's only if there is actually an explanation of the fact that f i would say there'll be a reasonable in concluding that p is in fact true otherwise we face the problem that i was just mentioning namely the problem with the unicorns and again the unicorns thing i wasn't giving like some explanation of certain facts i was just Pointing out that the abstract structure that ppe takes has various counter examples and then i translated the counter examples to the the ppe as i was just

explaining it right so even if there's a possible explanation of the fact that f we're left entirely in the dark as to whether or not there actually is an explanation of the fact that f and so it could just be these other possible worlds in which there are explanations Of f that p obtains and yet we're still entirely in the dark as to whether or not p obtains in the actual world because we're still entirely in the dark about whether or not there's an explanation of f in the actual world i guess my question is

why should we believe ppe okay but let's let's hear them flesh it out uh with ppe one the proposition that there's a unique necessary being who brought about the existence of Everything other than itself by willing that the other being should exist would if true explain why there are contingent beings there is a possible explanation of the fact that there are contingent beings and so one and two i'm sorry uh there was three here there is no proposition consistent with the claim that there are only contingent beings which if true would explain why there are

contingent beings but one and two together satisfy Ppe that's the principle given that one there is a possible explanation of the fact that there are contingent beings and two any possible explanation of that fact of the fact that there are continued beings entails p there is a necessary being it's reasonable to believe that p there is necessary so one two together just satisfies the main principle here we have premise three and the princess any possible explanation of the fact that there are contingent Beings entails that there is a necessary being and so the conclusion it's

reasonable to believe that there is necessary being so uh the same symmetry problem that we saw with the previous argument is gonna be afflicting premise two right we could equally well say well there's possibly no explanation of the fact that there are contingent beings that's a symmetrical premise and yet that would deliver the falsity of traditional theism as i explained Earlier and so we would need some sort of symmetry breaker favoring the second premise over the premise that i was just giving also premise three is arguably false i mean here's one such proposition right which

is consistent with the claim that there are only contingent beings and which if true would explain why there are contingent beings right here is one such proposition necessarily there are some contingent Things or other right that's compatible with their only being contingent things right every world could be populated by contingent things it would just be different contingent things in different worlds and yet if true it would seem to at least provide some sort of explanation as to why there are contingent beings right after all it is necessarily the case there had to be some contingent

beings or other that's why there are contingent beings because There had to be some contingent beings or other think of it this way the contrary is literally impossible under this particular proposed explanation so the contra it just couldn't have been the case that there weren't any contingent beings why are there no water molecules that are h3o well why because that couldn't have been the case and so similarly water is h2o because that simply must be the case it's part of the very nature of water to be that way and So similarly we could say it's

necessarily the case that there are some conditions or other it's part of the nature of modal space say to be occupied by some contingent things or other and supposing the contrary would simply be impossible and so we seem to have a false premise here in number three again i'm not saying that that explanation is in fact true nor am i saying that it's a better explanation than god my point is just that this is literally saying that There's no proposition which is consistent with the claim and that would if true explain why there are contingent

things so i'm just pointing out that if this proposition were true right then it would seem as though we have a kind of explanation at least some sort of explanation as to why there are contingent beings so again premise 3 is arguably false and of course this also shows that premise four is false right any possible explanation of the fact That there are contingent beings entails that there's a necessary being no i just gave an explanation that seems in principle epistemically possible and it's an explanation of the fact that they're conditioned beings and yet it

doesn't entail that there's a necessary being and all it says is that necessarily there are some contingent things or other that doesn't get you that there is some particular being which is such that It necessarily exists so premise four would also be false and finally the obligatory point that i'm going to make at this juncture the conclusion doesn't deliver you god it's perfectly compatible with naturalism they're perfectly naturalist friendly proposals for what the necessary foundation of reality could be humans is cosmological argument uh published in 1997 was instrumental in launching a lot of different cosmology

it's a very Influential cosmological argument and it's extremely logically tight okay so it has it's it's based on certain neurological axioms a few principles of causation and then the argument's often running it's similar to the leibnizian cosmological argument except with cause but not explanation okay so here are the neurological axioms meteorological just being study of parts and holes so uh axiom one x is a part of y if and only if anything that overlaps x overlaps y Overlaps just means uh they share a part in common axiom2 if there's a thing of type c then

there's an aggregate or sum of all such types three right so a2 seems deeply questionable by my lights if there's a thing of type c well then there's an aggregate or sum of all such types if you put this into the formal apparatus you're going to be existentially quantifying over aggregates or sums of types This is ontologically committing to there being aggregates of things or sums of things but why should i accept that maybe i only think that there are the things themselves there aren't these like aggregates or sums of things otherwise i'd have to

ontologically commit to there being some thing which is my left ear your right ear donald trump's left pinky toe the eiffel tower the state of new york and Jupiter minus one particular particle within jupiter's absolute center like what what no there is no such thing okay maybe the particular things that i just mentioned exist but there's no there's no aggregate of them or some of them that's somehow a thing in its own right no but maybe he'd be able to modify this axiom to say something different that doesn't ontologically commit to aggregates or sums x

is identical to y If and only if x is a part of y and y is a part of x four if a hole exists so do all of its parts and five if all of its parts of all parts of a whole exists so does the whole now these axioms of murals are not very controversial so this premise is extremely controversial given the debate about the metaphysics of composite objects and whether or not you know whether or not my myriological nihilism is true versus neurological universalism versus restrictivism and Other sorts of views so a2

is deeply controversial now as for a5 it's at least prima facie questionable i mean you might have all the parts of a watch in existence without having that watch in existence okay i guess you could avoid this by saying something like the spatial arrangement of those physical parts is itself one of the parts of the watch now that seems kind of odd right i mean when i'm listing off the parts of the Watch if you listen to me all the parts and you leave out the spatial arrangement am i going to say oh you missed

a part the spatial arrangement of like no that seems a little weird and it also seems kind of ad hoc but i guess it's a potential move but if you're not able to say that well then we seem to have a counter example to a5 on our hands i'm taking them for granted but again i could be missing something Right we have to have the requisite epistemic humility when we are evaluating these sorts of arguments especially when we haven't done extreme amounts of research into each and every single one of them a wholly contingent thing

is something that has no necessary parts it's entirely contingent nothing necessary about it okay three principles of causation next slide first only actual existent things Can be causes or effects seems pretty reasonable second a cause and its effect must be distinct cause can't overlap its effect and in third every holy contingent thing has a cause so with respect to this third one it's at least questionable prima facie many non-theists wouldn't grant this now i myself have some sympathies to principles like the psr as restricted to contingent things so i do think i would be willing

to grant that Every holy contingent thing has an explanation though i'm not convinced that the explanation needs to be a cause as i've already said there are lots of non-causal explanations it could be in terms of grounding or functional realization or logical and structural constraints or mathematical explanation or metaphysical explanation a moral explanation and so on my point is just that arguably there are lots of Non-causal explanations and so while i might grant that every holy contingent thing has an explanation it's at least not immediately clear to me that every holy contingent thing has to

have a cause as an explanation it could have lots of these other sorts of explanations maybe it's grounded but not caused maybe it's functionally realized by something more fundamental but not caused them and so on and so on Now the argument runs as follows next slide all parts of a necessary thing are necessary that follows from axiom four uh and k k is just uh system little logic and moto logic every concise thing has a holy contingent part the first and second axioms uh definition let c be the aggregate of all holy contingent reality uh

three if there are any contingent things c is holy contingent thing that Follows from a1 a3 the definition and limit one uh limit for if there are any contingent things c has a cause follows from limits three and the uh c3 which i think is just the difference c3 the third principles of causation every contingent thing overlaps at c and then we can derive from these theorem if there are any contingent things then the cosmos the sum of all holy contingent things has a cause that Is a necessary thing now okay so notice that this

argument is wholly reliant on all of the axioms and the causal principles that we just looked at right and i've already offered some reasons at least for being quite hesitant about a number of them for thinking that a number of them are questionable in particular in this context why should we ontologically commit to there being this thing which is the aggregate of all holy contingent things i mean for Starters that itself is a contingent thing so it would seem as though this aggregate would itself have to be one of the things within the aggregate so

you have this sort of like self-recursive kind of thing which is like included in itself and it's also included in itself again and so on like anyway it's quite it's quite odd you get into certain puzzles about that and also i mean you're ontologically committing To an aggregate of like potentially infinitely many things at least quadrillions upon quadrillions of things and i say why should we ontologically commit to such an aggregate that seems quite metaphysically profligate if you ask me i'm more inclined to more i'm inclined to more ontologically austere views of what there is

one thing that i do want to note is that i guess it's perfectly fine for him to Use it this way but it's slightly misleading to use the term cosmos here to talk about the sum of all holy contingent things because when you think like oh the cosmos has to have a cause you start thinking of something like transcending the cosmos so oh it'd have to be like spaceless and timeless and uh like no but the cosmos is just the sum of all holy contingent things it's entirely open question as to whether or not the

universe what we Normally think of as a cosmos includes some foundational layer which is necessarily existent under this technical definition here right this foundation of the universe which is itself in the universe wouldn't actually count as part of the cosmos we just have to note that it's slightly misleading these term cosmos here it might just be better to call it like the contingent sum or something like that or the big Conjunctive contingent sum or whatever but anyway setting that little slight misleading use of language aside it's not that big of a deal the thing that

i want to say is that this conclusion again this is the obligatory point is perfectly compatible with naturalism it doesn't give us theism and i would argue it doesn't really take us all that much closer atheism given that there are boatloads of perfectly naturalist friendly perfectly respectable views in Metaphysics on which there is some kind of natural necessarily existent foundation of reality i said it's a very tight argument and you can see how tight it is if you just look at my own simplification here premise one there are contingent things two the cosmos is the

sum of all holy contingent things now he's just defining the cosmos in that way yes but also you're ontologically committing to there being this sum of all holy contingent Things and that's very questionable three the sum of all holy contingent things now of course there's a way to reword the argument modify the argument so that you don't autologically commit to it you can just do this thing what's this fancy thing called plural quantification you can just quantify over a plurality of things which you're just literally quantifying over the things kind of considered together but you're

not ontologically Committing to some thing which is their sum or their aggregate so that's one way you could go here but then at least note that we're not talking about this argument anymore we've changed the argument so of course if you want to defend the argument by denying the argument that's fine uh fine by me uh but anyway i then i would just fall back on the various other responses that i've given that's what most of what we just covered uh when to establish and that is Derived that's not really premise that's derived from the

axioms and definitions uh four so the cosmos is a holy contingent thing five each holy contingent thing has a cause uh that's the key premise of the argument uh and then six so the cosmos has a cause that is not a contingent thing it's namely a necessary thing and i've already kind of given the responses here what's cool about this argument is if you accept the asymptoxions and you Accept those through those three principles of causation it all follows the conclusion follows okay thank you for telling me that it's valid okay yes if you accept

all the premises the conclusion follows uh only premise in this argument other than the fact that there are contingent things which isn't i mean that's pretty safe assumption the only premise of this argument is five right no but some of the axioms right an Axiom is just a postulate right you're not defending it it's just an assumption so there's also a sense in which that's a premise so if you deny one of the axioms that's basically also there being another premise there being another commitment here by which your argument is susceptible to attack and i've

already attacked some of the axioms for instance um i've attacked the one which ontologically ontologically commits to there being aggregates or sums so this Is slightly misleading what chad is saying here but yes i i've also given some reasons to at least be suspicious of this because we could still say that every holy contingent thing has an explanation but why does that explanation have to be a causal explanation there's a big question mark there holy contingent thing has a cause and he defends five by saying that he just appeals to empirical Science he says every

every success of common common sense and sciences uh is by reconstructing causal antecedents of things that we observe in nature see but that's not necessarily true lots of our explanatory practices as i've shown we don't cite causal explanations we also cite non-causal explanations including in science right arguably scientists when they're looking at certain structural explanations at a given Snapshot of time of less fundamental things being explained by more fundamental things for example uh certain chemical facts being explained in terms of more fundamental physical facts those are explanations in terms of grounding right that's not even

a causal explanation so we just everything that we see that's contingent is a cause so that's really the main premise there and this is a good example of and of course you know As i've said there could still be a cause even within the universe as we normally use the word like maybe the collection of physical things or maybe the collection of spatial temporal things there could still that's perfectly compatible there being something within the universe which is necessarily existent and being the cause of quote unquote the cosmos which just is the sum of all

wholly conditioned things again it's a slightly misleading Use of the term but it's fine because it's stipulative and as long as we're very clear that's fine but i've noticed a lot of unclarity not in coons not in chad but online right on the internets all right here we go here is uh argument number 11. should i read this one yeah go ahead so this one is from prison rasmussen's uh book i think i think this is their book necessary existence is that right that's right yeah Sorry i'm still catching my breath i shouldn't be this

out of shape uh all right promise one for any particular contingent concrete something that possibly causes something things there's an explanation of the fact that those things exist number two considering all the contingent concrete things that exist if there's an explanation of the fact that those things exist then there is a necessary concrete thing and then Conclusion as follows so there is a necessary concrete thing yeah so this is a very crisp argument it doesn't require you to ontologically commit to like sums or aggregates and other sorts of things there's a lot to be said

on behalf of this lots of non-theists will challenge premise one i've already said however that i'm quite sympathetic to it so we can set that aside premise two you might question i've Already gone through in one of the earlier discussions of the arguments if you remember i talked about how in principle there might be a way to explain why there are contingent things in terms of a necessary proposition where that necessary proposition doesn't involve or make any reference to something that's a necessary concrete thing and you could say for instance that it's necessarily the case

that there are some connected things or other Arguably that's going to be an explanation of the fact that those contingent things exist and yet there would be under this scenario no necessary concrete thing or at least it's consistent with there being no necessary concrete thing and so premise two here is potentially questionable and then the third thing that i want to say is that this conclusion doesn't deliver god of course right it's perfectly compatible with naturalism as we've seen There are lots of naturalist friendly views of the foundation i dare you to take a shot

every time i say that so this is emmanuel rutin's uh atomistic cosmological argument premise one there are objects never heard of him or this argument so i'm really he comes up again later so uh yeah we'll encounter him again two every composite object is ultimately composed of simple objects three every object is caused or is the cause of other objects another object The sum of all caused simple objects is an object the cause of an object is disjoint which means they don't share a part in common with that object every cause composite object contains a

cause proper part that's key premise uh seven there's all right so i have some sympathies with premise two here but i'm at least not entirely convinced yet i need to be able to rule out infinitely descending chains Of composition that's one thing to say now again i find it more plausible that chains of composition must be well-founded that you can't have an infinitely descended chain of composition so i tend to find that more plausible but i still am not sufficiently confident to like accept the premise yeah i would need to be given some strong reason

to think that infinitely descending chains of composition are Impossible premise three here seems false right i mean consider abstract objects um those don't seem to be caused and they are also not the causes of other things right abstract objects are non-causal they don't stand in causal relations but of course there's an easy fix here right you could just restrict quantification to concrete objects so that's not really a problem uh it's just a problem with the presentation premise four though is i guess Highly doubtful it seems to rest again on something like mythological universalism which is

deeply implausible at least by my lights why would the sum of all caused simple objects have to itself be an object there's this monolithic object out there which is like this super disjointed object which is like the aggregate or sum of all cos symbol objects no that seems really implausible for the same reasons that i've been going over earlier It's also not clear that five is true here that the cause of an object is disjoint with that object i guess it depends on what disjoint precisely means if it means wholly non-overlapping that is sharing absolutely

no parts in common well then it's not at all clear that the premise is true one thing could cause another thing to come to be by taking the fir one of the first things parts and making it be such that that Thing is also a part of the second thing that it brought into existence so maybe i can get like a piece of string and tie it to some of my hair and i make some sort of bow tie maybe i've just created another a new object which is like hair bow tie or something so

i was the cause of that but part of me is my hair right and so i was the cause of an object but part of me is itself part of the object that i caused right so i'm not Wholly disjoint from the thing that i caused it's also not clear that premise 6 is true either every caused composite object contains a caused proper part i mean why couldn't there be say 10 uncaused simple objects such as super strings or quarks or whatever where one of them causes all the others to take on a specific arrangement

or configuration thereby causally bringing about the existence of a new object with that Specific arrangement despite the fact that the object has no caused proper parts that that seems like an epistemic possibility you'd need to rule that out if you want to assert premise 6 here and then of course premise 7 doesn't deliver god it's perfectly compatible with naturals and they're lots of naturalist friendly etc so take another shot you can find his dissertation online by searching Emmanuel well the title of his dissertation is the resource a little concerned pause oh yes the fated cosmological

argument one thing to check out here is my clone playlist as well as my ongoing series with rationality rules another thing to check out is this philosophical disquisitions blog it's by a philosopher he has amazing posts on philosophy of religion and in particular he has this series index he's done tons Of series on the philosophical apologetics of william lane craig especially with respect to the column cosmological argument and he goes through professionally published articles and basically gives a kind of layman's summary of them in some sense i mean it's still somewhat technical but it's much

less technical than the articles themselves so for instance he looks at an article by wes morriston he develops the article a little bit Further he gives his own thoughts he summarizes the article it's amazing he talks about wes morrison's papers in response to it he's looked at justin scheeber's objection to the clown he's looked at landon hedrick's criticisms of hilbert's hotel he's done a post two posts on that he's done craig and the argument from successive edition apart on that he's done steven puryear and on finism the beginning of the universe and so on so

and of course he goes through a Bunch of different other things like the moral argument etc and again he's going through professionally published articles that are critically appraising the arguments from william lane craig and others i highly highly recommend checking out this post in particular but also of course the sub posts that are being linked here but back to the column so i actually find premise one plausible importantly though i think the arguments in favor of it actually aren't super Strong or super compelling i would want to probably say whatever begins to exist has an

explanation maybe not necessarily a cause there might be able to be something that has a front edge in terms of its temporal boundary but perhaps it's still explained by some ontologically prior thing but that doesn't cause it but still explains it so maybe it grounds it or it functionally realizes it or something but anyway setting aside that I i still find the principle reasonably plausible and like i said the arguments in favor of it actually don't don't strike me as super strong or compelling the main reason why i at least somewhat lean towards thinking it's

true is that it just strikes me as really plausible it is just generally confirmed in our experience and so that seems to both of those seem to give me some defeasible reason to accept the principle and i haven't yet come across a sufficiently Weighty defeater for these sorts of defeasible justifications but i will note though that there are lots of theism unfriendly principles that also strike me as true and that are also equally confirmed by experience and so on so that's a problem if someone wants to use the column to support theism but anyway i

go through that in my series with steven so definitely check that out and in fact using one of those principles that not only strikes me as Intuitively possible that it's also constantly confirmed in our everyday experience we could mount a parody cosmological argument against traditional theism so premise one every material object that begins to exist is made from some ontologically or temporally prior things or stuff premise two the universe is a material object that began to exist that's identical to the clone's second premise so the universe is made from some ontologically Or temporally prior things

or stuff but if that's true traditional theism is false right because then god isn't creating the universe x nihilo it's coming from some pre-existent things or stuff and that pre might be temporarily power but could also be ontologically prior it doesn't necessarily have to be a temporary prior things or stuff so if that's true of course traditional thesis is false right because if you don't have creation x neola then so It follows from that that traditional theism is false that first premise seems equally confirmed by the exact same reasons that favor this one that whatever

begins to exist as a cause it's intuitive it's supported by our inductive experience it's constantly confirmed in our experience it's proved fruitful in in science and it even undergirds lots of conservation principles and so on it nicely gives us an explanation of why the conservation Principles are true and so on down the list of the reasons for thinking that the first premise here is true there doesn't seem to be a symmetry breaker between this first premise and the premise that i just gave that could differentially support one or the other and in which case if

you're gonna accept this first premise it seems as though you have to accept the first premise that i just gave and with it deny traditional theism because after all That's all the other stuff is basically either had in common with the clown or else it's just itself a definitional commitment of traditional theism to christian x nilo so that's something that's very interesting and i find you know reasonably plausible as a kind of parody argument now what about premise 2 well i think the scientific case for it is really underwhelming to be honest you can see

the video in my column playlist Where it's on the channel digital gnosis it's with philosopher of physics daniel j linford and also phil helper or maybe it's halper he is the skydive he's the person behind the skydive field documentary that i did a video on it's like a three hour long video it's a response to trent horn but anyway they go through the scientific case and show why no the scientific evidence doesn't after all support that the universe itself began to exist at best all that We know is that our local spatiotemporal manifold began to

expand a finite time ago it's a further question as to whether or not it began to exist and it's also a further question as to whether or not there are other spatial temporal manifolds that precede our local spatial temporal manifold and i mean just to caution people who try to use the scientific evidence here as gramapi points out in a chapter published in 2020 in the book Contemporary debates and philosophy religion he points out that quote there is currently no widespread consensus among expert cosmologists about whether we live in something like a standard big bang

universe or whether our universe is part of an infinite ensemble of universes in a background to sitter space in which there is an infinite causal regress end quote so again there's just no widespread consensus among expert cosmologists about About the scientific case concerning premise two another thing to note here is that even if you could establish that the scientific evidence shows or gives us good reason to think that the past is finite it would only be able to show that firstly for physical time right but i mean craig himself thinks that there's metaphysical time he

thinks that god could for instance count up one two three and then create the universe and Then you know create along with it physical time but there would still be metaphysical time preceding that so even if you could show that physical time began to exist it's a further question as to whether or not there's a metaphysical time that's in some sense preceding physical time and that's infinitely long right so you're still not really going to be able to show that temporal things at least the collection of temporal things began to exist even If you could

show that this local spatial temporal manifold began to exist but anyway even ignoring that right past finitude still isn't sufficient for beginning to exist the universe could exist in a non-metric or amorphous or undifferentiated time prior to the beginning of metric time or some physical object could or the physical object could be timeless sans metric time that is timeless without metric time and then temporal synths So that's a kind of naturalist a naturalized cragian view or you could simply have a timeless phase or portion of some physical object in the temporal phase or portion of

that temporal and a temporal phase or portion of that physical object so again these are all ways that the universe could be past finite and yet not begin to exist because either it has some portion or phase of its life that's timeless and so The universe as such as an object didn't come into being at the first moment and again maybe the universe is timeless sans metric time and temporal sense or maybe the universe or maybe the universe exists in a kind of metrically amorphous or non-metrically amorphous or non-metric or undifferentiated time prior to the

beginning of metric time so that's a kind of swinburne paget mullins type view Naturalized of course my point is just that there are boatloads of proposals here where you could have a universe having a finite past and yet the universe doesn't begin to exist after all craig thinks that god has a finite past god came into time at the first moment of time but yet god didn't begin to exist for craig because then god would have to have a cause so the way that craig avoids this so the way that craig does This is you

know he has a very technical sense of beginning to exist and it doesn't include things that were timeless sans the beginning of time and temporal sense it also doesn't or at least shouldn't include things that existed in a kind of amorphous or undifferentiated time or non-metric time prior to the beginning of metric time and so on so anyway the scientific case is extremely underwhelming the philosophical case is also underwhelming The successive edition argument i did a video on that with wes morriston of course starting with a finite collection you can't of course successively add to

that collection finally many elements to get an infinite collection but that's of course not what's happening in the case of an infinite pass right you always have an infinite collection you're just adding one member to it and that of course is always going to be resulting in an infinite set because you Started with an infinite set and so again the fact that you can't start with a finite set and then successively add to get to an infinite set that tells us nothing about the infinite past you might say oh well you can't count two infinity

so how could you count down from infinity uh but of course there's a relevant difference there the reason you can't count to infinity or at least one reason why you can't count to infinity Is that the natural numbers that you're counting don't come to an end right there's no immediate predecessor to this number a left null i mean ilif no in some sense stands outside the series um so the numbers that you're counting are endless and so of course you can't get to the end of an endless series that's the reason why you can't count

to infinity but of course that reason is not present in the case of a beginningless past right Because there is an end to the beginningless past namely now there's a relevant difference between counting to infinity and counting down from infinity quote unquote whatever that means counting down through all the negative integers let's say from the past to the present there's a relevant difference and the relevant difference is that when you're trying to count to infinity the reason why you can't do that is because that would require coming to an end of An endless process but

obviously if it's an endless process then you can't come to the end of it but of course the past does have an end so you remove that barrier to being able to complete that well you might try to say oh but it doesn't have a beginning yes it doesn't but why should that impugn your ability to traverse it at the end it just bottoms out in a flat assertion as wes morrison points out in His ajp article published in 2021 and that i talked with him about on my channel so anyway this successive edition argument

is really underwhelming hoover's hotel and actual infinites is extremely underwhelming as well firstly it's not even absurd i don't share the intuitions in question of course you would be able to do the relevant manipulations it's precisely what we should expect secondly allegedly absurd implications result from manipulations Of the members right you're like manipulating members subtracting them in various ways and so on but of course you can't manipulate past days right the past is fixed it's over and done with you're not able to like transform past days in such a way that you could like manipulate

them subtract them and so on so there's a relevance analogy between hilbert's hotel in the past what makes the former assert is not present in the latter so there's relevant to Similarities such that you can't infer the absurdity of the latter from the absurdity of the former even granting that that is absurd which i wouldn't grant thirdly mathematical realism is i think arguably a straightforward counter example to the claim that there cannot be actual infinites also realism about propositions and so on i think there are quite plausible Arguments for mathematical realism and so on and

arguments for realism about propositions and of course if mathematical realism is true or realism about propositions is true well then there are infinitely many such mathematical objects or mathematical truths or infinitely many such propositions of course you might try as elaine craig does to go a nominal through but of course nominalism is monumentally controversial i'm not going To say that it's inconsistent or whatever but i do think there are plausible arguments for realism we're not going to get into that here i'm just giving you reasons why i reject the hilbert's hotel argument a fourth reason

is that well an endless future is also an actual infinite no it's not a potential infinite a potential infinite is a collection such that the number of members in the collection is finite but always Increasing but an endless future we're just talking there about how many days will occur we're not talking about how many days will have occurred at some arbitrary point selected in the future between that future point and the present that's not what we're talking about we're talking about just the number of days later than today or how many days will occur and

the answer there is obviously a left null infinitely many if it were only finitely Many if there were only finitely many days each of which is such that it will occur then eventually the future is going to come to an end right if there are only 10 days each of which will occur well then once you come to the end of the 10th day that's it that's the the future's done right everything is just going to blink out of existence because otherwise it wouldn't have been true way back when that there will be 10 more

Days no that was false and endless future is not at all a potential infinite it's an actual infinite i talk about all this in my video response to trent horn an actual infinite by the way is just a collection whose members can be paired in a one-on-one correspondence with the natural numbers it doesn't it doesn't require that all the members exist craig after all things the past if the past is beginningless is an actual infinite but he's a presenter so he Thinks the past doesn't exist what matters is that if the past is beginningless then

yes the collection of past days can be put into one one correspondence with the natural numbers but of course the same is literally true of an endless future right you can you can pair one with tomorrow two with the next day three with the following day four with the following day five of the following day such that each natural number is paired with a unique future Day and it literally mathematically follows from that it's undeniable that the number of future days that is days which are later than today can be put in one correspondence with

the natural numbers in which case they literally satisfy the definition of an actual infinite there is no getting around this so if actual infinites are impossible then an endless future is likewise Impossible in which case that would disprove christianity of course because christianity posits an endless future namely an endless after and namely an endless afterlife in heaven or hell if you're universalist it would just be heaven of course and you probably should be so anyway those are four problems for the hilbert's hotel argument there are many more arguments for causal phenotypism which likewise support Premise

arguments for causal fertilism which are taken to support premise two here those arguments usually rely on something like benedetti paradoxes but i think the best solution of benedictine paradox is recognizing that they have just a logically inconsistent abstract structure and that this structure actually isn't at all tied to causal or spatial considerations you can get thoroughly non-causal benefit paradoxes And what that shows us is that it's really the unsatisfiable pair which is what's driving the absurdities it doesn't have anything to do with infinite causal chains and of course you can construct future oriented benedi paradoxes

which likewise entail the impossibility of an endless future just imagine that each reaper swings its scythe if and only if no future rebirth swings its scythe and imagine also that the future is endless Such that as a reaper assigned to each day this is also a better day paradox you can actually derive a contradiction from the specifications that i just gave now you might of course say oh well how do the reapers know what's going to happen in the future that's a relevant difference no you can just add another picture of god who has four

knowledge and so the god can reveal to each reaper whether or not some reaper in its future Is going to do something if you're a theist you already think that god exists and has four knowledge of the future and can reveal things to people so that's no problem in the present context because after all they're trying to use this as an argument for theism so those are two responses to appeals to causal finitism in support of premise two here plus again pass finitude isn't sufficient for beginning to exist right i still further point to note

here so I've just gone through premise one and premise two here the conclusion here is perfectly compatible with naturalism it doesn't get you to theism some of the things that they say on behalf of bridging the gap here are just utterly implausible sometimes they say oh well the only immaterial things we know of are either mines or numbers but that is of course absurd it could be some timeless quantum field or maybe a non-spatial temporal universal wave or Maybe a non-spatiotemporal universal wave function that alyssa nae and jill north and various other philosophers have been

talking about or maybe it's the tao or maybe it's an impersonal conception of brahman or maybe it's an impersonal conception the platinian one or maybe it's even something we know not what of course if you're allowed to say oh well the only immaterial things that we know of or other minds or numbers i can also just equally say oh well the Only minds that we know of are embodied minds and yet given what defenders of the clone want to say the cause of the universe cannot itself be embodied and hence what i can conclude there

is that it therefore couldn't be a mind what sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander if you're just gonna say oh well the only two things that we know of are either this or this and given the nature of the case it could be one of them so it has to be the other well i can also Say the only minds that we know of are embodied and yet given the nature of the case at hand the cause we are supposing couldn't be embodied and hence it can't be in mind it's the same

sort of reasoning now you might now you might say oh no there's also a disembodied mind namely god but that's of course the very question i'd issue that would be a question begging response another thing to note here is that we can't even establish that the Cause of the universe in the sense of our local spatial temple manifold is immaterial it could very well be something that's material but that exists in a kind of non-metric or metrically amorphous or undifferentiated time allah swinburne paget mullens and so on or it could be timeless sans the beginning

of magic time and temporal synths or of course it could be just a timeless material thing i'm using material as anonymous with physical There they also say things like oh well the only way to get a temporal effect from a timeless cause is free will i say no you only need indeterministic causation so that the cause isn't sufficient for the effect and of course impersonal indeterministic causation is perfectly kosher we have perfectly kosher models of this from quantum mechanics and moreover there's nothing conceptually incoherent about it so no the timeless cause doesn't need Free they

also try to say oh that's enormously powerful it you know cause the universe to begin to exist no it doesn't need to be enormously powerful the only power it needs to have is to be able to initiate the first chain and then reality gets going on its own from there so no it doesn't need to be enormously powerful literally the only thing it needs to be able to do to cause the beginning of metric time in particular is just to cause the first Change it's literally all it needs to do maybe literally there's just some

indeterministic fluctuation within a field or something like that and then boom that starts the beginning of time that doesn't require it to be enormously powerful it literally needs only one power and it can be a perfectly benign and just really just utter lame power like being able to indeterministically cause some like fluctuation or whatever So i could go on and on and on about the clone but i'm not going to because i want to keep this video at least under 10 hours that's the goal but maybe i won't be able to meet it we'll see

at this rate i don't think i will but we'll see anyway that's just a basic rundown of the qualm there's so much more to say and if you want to see what i have to say check out my column playlist something has a cause two there are no calls or loops nothing calls itself Three nothing has infinite causal history and that's the burden of his book uh infinity causation paradox i think there it is so there is an uncaused cause that follows directly from one two and three um five there's if there's none cause cause

god exists six so god exists so premise five is false no it's not the case that if there's an uncaused cause god exists i've already gone through lots of natural friendly proposals for what a First cause might be so yes take another shot because i brought up the same point and also premise three here is deeply questionable i just mentioned it in my assessment of the preceding argument so on to the next one there you go and that one like you said is definitely the cosmological argument i'll let you take this one yeah so swindler

famously makes a distinction between two different kinds of inductive arguments good inductive arguments the first is what he Calls a p inductive argument and that's just when a piece of evidence makes a hypothesis more likely true than not so it pushes the likelihood of the hypothesis over uh half basically it makes it more likely true than that now by contrast there are c inductive arguments which are arguments where some piece of evidence just makes the hypothesis more likely not more likely than not it just it just increases the probability of the Hypothesis a little bit

okay so that's how he frames his cosmological argument he thinks the universe makes for a good c inductive cosmological argument so one the universe exists and is a certain way namely it's complex yet everything behaves in an orderly law-like way it is such as to be suitable a simple theater for humans and animals to evolve humans did evolve so as to be able to have true beliefs about the world and to Meaningfully act within it okay so if theism can explain why the universe exists and is this way better than naturalism can then the universe

that the universe exists and it is this way makes the ism more likely than naturalism well theism can't explain why the universe exists in this this in this way where better than naturalism can so the universe exists and is this way makes the ism more likely than naturalism now the main premise here is Going to be two oh yeah so premise two is arguably false i mean it just depends on whether by better explanation we are only taking into account likelihood ratios that is the ratio between the probability of the evidence given one hypothesis two

the probability of the evidence given the competing hypothesis right that's the likelihood ratio you're Basically just comparing how expected the data is on the hypotheses in question in terms of assessing explanations if we're just talking about the explanatory power of those explanations well then yeah we're only really going to be looking at the likelihood ratio but when we're assessing explanations we don't only look at explanatory power we also look at their simplicity and because of that we should be taking into Account the prior probabilities here the ratio of the priors there's kind of there's a

dilemma here suppose that we're only taking into account likelihood ratios when we're talking about a better explanation okay well then we might be able to grant premise two but then three here is going to be just clearly false because we can only conclude that theism is more probable than naturalism as such if the likelihood ratio Multiplied by the ratio of the priors is greater in favor of theism so even if the likelihood ratio with respect to the data in question favors theism it could still be that theism is less probable than naturalism so long as

the ratio of the priors favors naturalism to a sufficiently contracting degree and i think it arguably does given draperian reasoning you can see for instance his stanford encyclopedia of philosophy article entitled atheism And agnosticism it's a wonderful article so definitely check that out so that's the first one of the dilemma if we are only baking into what we mean by a better explanation that it only takes into account the likelihood ratios in that case premise three is false but if that's not what we're only taking into account the likelihood ratios we are also taking into

account the priors and then premise two is deeply Questionable right we're going to need to also take into account the prior probability of theism and compare it with naturalism what's more we also need a ceteris paribus clause for premise two that is a clause that is a clause to the effect of other things being equal that the universe exists and is the way it is makes the ism more likely than naturalism why is that well because even if the relevant data here favors theism over Naturalism lots of other data arguably favored naturalism over theism so

if you want to conclude that theism is more likely than naturalism you have to take into account our total evidence and at least one point to make at this juncture is that premise 3 here is at least contestable we can still ask why would god do all this why would he make a complex universe that behaves in an orderly Law-like way why would he make specifically humans and animals why would he make us evolve in this particular way and to meaningfully act within the world in the particular ways that we do right what is it

about god that leads us to expect that god would do these sorts of things right why would he create a universe like ours and so on you need to be able to give some reason for thinking that this is expected or at least not as surprising as it is on Naturalism now of course swinburne tries to do that but i'm just pointing out giving you guys tools for thinking critically about this sort of thing and moreover even if you could give such reasons like oh these things would be really valuable and god because he's perfect

would be inclined towards producing value i mean there are infinitely many other states of affairs that are super duper valuable but that don't involve humans and animals maybe God could create let's say some kind of heavenly realm where it's just like non-physical things and they're in a relationship with one another and they behave in an orderly law like way and they can be in relationship with god and act morally and so on why should we expect a physical universe as opposed to that one god could create some kind of simulation universe god could create some

kind of almost like a theistic idealist universe Maybe a kind of dream-like world in his own mind where he still has creatures and so on but they're not like physical beings my point is just that even if you can show that the particular array ensemble of things that we find in our universe the order the law-like stuff um the fact that it's a theater for us to meaningfully act and to have true beliefs and so on even if you can show that yeah all that's like really valuable and like god is inclined To valuable things

so he'd likely produce us or something like that or that's more expected on theism than under naturalism like even if we grant you those sorts of considerations it's actually still not clear that we'd be able to generate an expectation that they got to bring about this particular ensemble of values as opposed to the infinitely many other ensembles of values similar values that god could bring About god could for instance design the psychophysical laws in a different way such that the only things in existence are little particles like electrons and so on but the psychophysical laws

are super complex and they're such that like when an electron is a certain distance from another electron they experience a certain affection or love for one another then when they're a different distance they like communicate stuff to one another They communicate a secret to one another when they're still further distance they are singing praises to god or whatever you can consider these sorts of mental states as non-physical as many theists are want to do and of course god himself is not physical and has mental states so there's no ruling that out and so you could

have different psychophysical laws with a completely different physical universe and yet still manifest all these different values so why would Theism pick out this particular universe among the infinite array of other universes that have the similar or the same ensemble of values it's not clear that you can get the kind of predictive or explanatory value that this argument is promising with respect to theism and even if you could like okay maybe you just say god just desires to make this universe and he's gonna do it okay because he's omnipotent but then you're securing a high

likelihood only at the Cost of making your theory uh have a super low prior and of course the naturalist could posit just some like disposition on its foundation toward the kind of universe that we in fact see on the part of the naturalistic fundamental reality right in that case they could also get a high likelihood but they have a correspondingly low prior probability because they're almost building the data in to their priors furthermore lots of theaters are going To want to take a kind of skeptical theism within response to the problem of evil in fact

it's really difficult to avoid skeptical theism in light of the sheer utter horrors that we find in reality but once you have skeptical theism on board arguably it's going to be really difficult to generate expectations about the kind of universe that we would expect god to make after all god is this infinite intellect right he's aware of boatloads of reasons of Which we are unaware and the reasons that we are aware of aren't even representative of the total range of reasons that there are for god to act and forgot to create the kind of world

that he does and in that case it's hard to see how we could be justified in generating predictions precise expectations about what god would do again because god's ways are mysterious his ways are not our ways the range of reasons of Which we are aware that god might act upon are not representative of the range of reasons that god does act upon so even if you'd be able to block certain arguments from evil by means of this kind of skeptical theist response and arguably skeptical theism is gonna have to be taken in response to at

least some of these sorts of horrors because all the other theodicies look just utterly implausible in light of it that's gonna Hurt you that's gonna turn around and hurt you when it comes to these sorts of bayesian arguments in connection to these swinburne style arguments and other sorts of arguments and this will be a criticism that reverberates later on when we're talking about design and other sorts of things so at least keep that in mind even though i might not explicitly draw it out in certain later arguments but it's always something to keep in mind

anyway the Final thing i want to say here is that i'm still somewhat inclined to think that i guess in general intelligibility in large scale structure order harmony and beauty provides some evidence for theism over naturalism i do have reservations about what i said in light of stuff about skeptical theism and why would we expect god to bring about this particular ensemble of values given that there are arguably infinitely many other ways to bring about the same or at least Similar kinds of values that don't all resemble the kind of universe that we live in

but anyway i guess there's something still pulling me here about there's still some evidential force with respect to intelligibility and large-scale structure and order and harmony in favor of theism so i guess that's a positive thing i could say on behalf of the argument after giving that array of critical appraisals why i think naturalism can't explain why the Universe exists and is this way better than theism well again he draws on this distinction between personal explanations and scientific explanations um naturalism only has scientific explanations available to it it doesn't happen that's no no firstly this

distinction no just no there are boatloads of other kinds of explanations but yeah naturalists can cite boatloads of metaphysical Explanations of various large-scale features of the universe for instance they might explain laws of nature in terms of causal powers of things and causal powers in terms of the natures of those things this stuff is perfectly kosher by various naturalist lights of course lots of natural scientists got that but other naturalists can accept that and there are various other explanatory means you don't just have to give a kind of oh This scientific explanation citing the state

of a system plus laws governing its operation or evolution over time and so on like no there are boatloads of other kinds of explanations available and of course like you can say yo well theism has a person and so you know god can bring this about he can intend it or something like that but of course you still have all the same problems that i was just pinpointing about actually generating the expectation that god Would intentionally bring these various facts about the only thing that could explain the universe at the cosmological level is a personal

explanation so that's why theism is more prominent the universe makes is more probable than nationalism that's just false there are boatloads of other kinds of explanations so okay let's move on uh rule cosmo modal cosmological argument that should be fine go ahead Whatever cannot possibly exist from something else possibly exists from itself it's possible that a first causal potency exists now by first cause of potency he means the first cause but not necessarily one that exercises his causal power okay uh the first causal potency cannot possibly exist from something else so it's possible that a

first causal potency exists from itself what is non-existent cannot bring Anything into existence even if for occurring possibly what is non-existent could bring something else into exist could bring itself into existence it would not be altogether uncausable so it's not possible for something to exist from itself which does not actually exist from itself so our first causal potency does exist from itself all right premise one as stated here is just false Here's a counter example a square circle so something that is both a square and a circle at one at the same time in the

same respect or whatever so it's both square in a circle it has four sides and it also has zero sides a square circle cannot possibly exist from something else and yet it is false that a square circle possibly exists from itself So we have the antecedent satisfied here but the consequent is not satisfied a square circle cannot possibly exist from something else the reason being that it cannot possibly exist and so a48 cannot possibly exist from something else and yet obviously it's false that it possibly exists from itself because it's impossible it doesn't possibly exist

at all let alone possibly exist from itself so that's a straightforward counter Example and the same of course is true of other metaphysical impossibilities right other metaphysical impossibilities are going to be a counter example to premise one and of course no one who doesn't already accept theism would grant that god is a metaphysical possibility given the standard system of motor logic s5 so anyway that's that's premise one what about premise two i'd say it needs motivation why except that that's Possible you might appeal to conceivability you might try to appeal to these other sorts of

things but those things don't entail metaphysical possibility and it's at least questionable whether they provide evidence for it and moreover you're going to be facing a symmetry problem you could equally well say that it's possible that a first causal potency doesn't exist and of course that's going to be incompatible with traditional Theism so then we'd need some symptom breaker that breaks the epistemic parity with a t parody or symmetry between the different possibility premises here with respect to number two premise two premise three is also contestable right why can't something be first in this world

but non-first in another world now perhaps you might appeal here to an erythrian causal powers view of modality that could possibly help but we don't need to get into that further And of course the final thing that i want to note here is that the conclusion is perfectly compatible with naturalism so yes take another shot because there are perfectly respectable naturalist friendly accounts of a first causal potency that is fundamental that doesn't exist from something else a modal cosmological argument i feel like i should let you read this one again you're just crying so much

crown that i'm not familiar with It is impossible that anything prevent the existence of god that just is constantly agreeing with god for every individual all right so premise one we can ask what does prevent mean here i mean sure there isn't some like ghostly or spooky causal force that like restrains god preventing him from bathing in the realm of being and instead tethering him to the realm of Non-being in other words there is nothing that's like exerting some sort of causal influence so as to prevent god from existing or like causally pre-empting his existence

but so what right things can be impossible despite there being nothing that's exerting some causally preventative force right water cannot be h3o but it's not as though there are like water fairies that exert some causal influence to prevent water from Ever being h3o so anyway it sort of depends on what we mean by prevent here if we mean something again that exerts some sort of causal influence to like preempt or prevent something from existing then that's going to make no headway whatsoever in establishing the possibility of the thing in question because there are lots of

impossibilities that don't have some sort of cause of force preventing them By contrast if we mean something broader as i think is actually indicated by premise two here just in terms of like something that explains why god doesn't exist well then there are bone loads of explanations that you can offer for why god doesn't exist or the naturalists can offer that the atheists can offer here's one god is impossible the naturalist already thinks we learn this from the modal ontological argument debate the Naturalist already thinks that god is impossible it is not possible that god

exists it is necessarily false that is just that is a perfectly kosher explanation of why god doesn't exist that's all you need to cite as to why for instance there are no square circles such things would be contradictory and moreover contradictory things cannot exist so square circles cannot exist and that's what explains why they don't exist You might say its contradictoriness explains why it doesn't exist but by itself that's not going to get you to it you have to add the further principle that contradictory things cannot exist it's only by adding that further claim that

you're able to derive that the square circle cannot exist so again ultimately you're appealing to the impossibility of something to explain why it doesn't in fact obtain and so premise one here would then be false It's perfectly possible that something prevent the existence of god in the sense of it's perfectly possible for there to be an explanation for the non-existence of god at least by the atheists lights and of course you can't non-question beggingly assume that the atheist is wrong here in an argument for god's existence so again no headway is made in this argument

in establishing or justifying or giving any reason whatsoever for why god exists but anyway Let's continue because i have more things to say the fact that x exists or a fact that x does not exist it is possible that there is an explanation for the fact that x exists uh for the fact that x exists uh that must be typo and the fact that x does not exist that's a version of the psr so suppose for reductio that god does not exist four it is possible that there's an explanation for the fact that god does

not exist Five it is not possible that there is an explanation for the fact that god does not exist six is it is and is not possible that there's an explanation for the fact that god does not exist which is a contradiction uh so we reject the premise that we assumed which is three god does not exist and so it's false that god does not exist yeah so premise two here is deeply questionable it's not at all clear why We need to explain why something doesn't exist no i said it's not all clear why we

need to explain why something doesn't exist of course we can often give such an explanation but it's not clear why there needs to be such an explanation as a kind of metaphysical principle plausibly we simply need to explain why things exist now i think chad said that the arguments were valid which is interesting because the argument here is invalid right five doesn't follow from One it says from one but no five doesn't follow from one you'd have to add it only follows if we add a premise to the argument namely that the only way for

there to be an explanation for the fact that god doesn't exist is if something prevents god's existence so the argument without that remiss is just facially invalid and of course it's lacking the premise as it is here suppose now that we add this premise well in that case i think the argument Is a hopeless failure for this added premise is just false at least by my lights if god doesn't exist his non-existence is plausibly explained by the metaphysical impossibility of god's existence as i pointed out earlier consider again why are there no square circles well

because to be a square is to have four sides and to be a skirt circle is to have no sides and it's metaphysically impossible for something to have four sides and no sides done We've explained why there are no square circles there's no need for some existing thing that somehow prevents square circles from existing that one is super confusing i have to think about that a lot well this one james ross right that's that's the guy argument number 18 christopher weaver's modal cosmological argument let's skip this argument because it's virtually identical to rasmussen yeah i

mean i just want to say number Two has the problem like why should we ontologically commit to there being sums indeed why should we ontologically commit to there being facts but there's also again there's another symmetry problem for premise one here we could equally say there's possibly no cause right you could say if there's a sum of purely contingent facts it possibly has a cause you could equally well say oh well it possibly doesn't have a cause and that Of course would be incompatible with traditional theism as i've explained earlier premise two is deeply implausible

as we've seen why does there have to be like the righteous have to be this thing that is the sum of purely contingent facts that just seems implausible and of course the conclusion here is perfectly compatible with naturals because there are perfectly respectable naturalist friendly proposals of the foundational Necessarily existent layer of reality take another shot it is possible that there is a purely contingent totality event that has a cause it is impossible well first of all events are things that contain only contingent things according to them so i think one is true well they

give three reasons uh follows from a principle of general principles causality um there's nothing about a totality of purely contingent uh events that's different From other purely contentious events uh it's inductively safe it's conceivable whatever conceivable is possible so they get some arguments for one okay it is impossible that a cause of a purely contingent totality event is purely contingent three if one and two then it's possible that there is a cause that isn't truly contingent four if three then it's then there is a necessary thing that can be a cause and So five there

is a necessary thing that can be a cause yeah again there's a symmetry problem for premise one here you could equally well say it's possible that there is a purely contingent totality event that lacks a cause and of course that as i've argued that's going to be incompatible with traditional theism and take another shot the conclusion here is perfectly compatible with naturalism now let's go back and just Listen to some of the reasons that he said favor number one because they could at least potentially break symmetry between one and the uh symmetrical possibility premise well

first of all events are things that contain only contingent things according to them so i think one is true well they give three reasons uh follows from a principle general principle of causality well it depends on what reasons favor that General principle of causality but i guess in principle that could be a symmetry breaker between one and the symmetrical possibility premise it just it depends on the reasons that they offer because symmetry might rearrange for those reasons there's nothing about a totality of purely contingent uh events that's different from other purely content events uh it's

inductively safe you could well you could say there's nothing about Purely contingent totality events with respect to possibly lacking a cause that's different from other contingent events that also possibly lack causes so you can equally say the same thing safe it's conceivable it's inductively safe so i guess he means that inductively in our experience the contingent events in our experience are such that they possibly have a cause so we can at least inductively generalize defeasibly That i guess every contingent event including including of course a condition totality event would likewise possibly have a cause yeah

so that probably does provide at least some weight of a reason for breaking symmetry between the cases suitable as possible so they give some arguments for one okay it is impossible whatever is conceivable is possible i can also conceive of a Purely contingent totality event that lacks a cause so that doesn't break symmetry it seems that we really only have an inductive symmetry breaker here to be honest and inductive generalizations are extremely weak you can get so much inductive support for principles around here that are incompatible with traditional theism there's lots of inductive support for

saying that every concrete material object has a material cause in the sense Of some things or stuff from which it is made but of course that's incompatible with traditional theism according to which krishna next knew that was true so again i mean inductive generalization you're going to have what sauce for the sausage again are you going to be able to justify a boatload of other principles that are not going to be friendly to theism so of course that might be able to give some weight of a reason breaking Symmetry in favor of one firstly it's

not clear that that's enough to salvage the argument with enough plausibility but secondly induction is quite weak and there are lots of theism incompatible principles that are likewise supported by induction so induction really isn't going to cut much here all right press one for any positive state of affairs that can begin to obtain it is possible for there to be something external to it that causes it To obtain feel free to like add anything that you want because you've been you've been doing that as you have been listing out the arguments number two it is

possible for there to be a beginning of the positive state of affairs of its being the case that there exists contingent concrete things three if one and two are true then it is possible that there is a necessary concrete thing from his force so it is possible that there is a necessary Concrete thing five it is possible that there is a if it is possible that there is a necessary concrete thing then there is a necessary concrete thing and then the conclusion so there is a necessary concrete thing so the same symmetry problem is arguably

going to be afflicting premise one you can equally well say for any positive state of affairs that can begin to obtain it's possible for there to be nothing external to it that causes it to Obtain and of course that is again going to be incompatible with traditional theism according to which anything that begins to obtain is gonna have to ultimately be causally explained by god also i think premise 2 is insufficiently motivated why would you think it's possible this is a really grand modal claim about stuff extremely far removed from our ordinary experience conceivability here

and things like that just really aren't Gonna cut it by my lights moreover given an aristotelian or powers-based or branching theory of modality two here actually entails that there must be such a beginning like it's necessarily the case that there is such a beginning because suppose that it were both possible for there to be a beginning of contingency and for there to be no beginning of contingency suppose that those are both individually possible Well then in the world in which there's no beginning of contingency let's say conditionally contingency kind of spans the infinite past well

then there would be no way to branch off from that infinite past contingency world to the world where contingency actually begins to exist and similarly vice versa right there would be no way to go from the world in which contingency begins to exist and somehow branch off from that world that shares a history with that World that branches off into the world that has an infinite past populated by contingent things and so given this kind of aristotelian powers-based or branching theory of modality on which something is possible on which something is possible only if there's

something actual with the causal power to kind of bring about that branch well then premise two is only going to be true if it's necessarily the case that there's a Beginning of contingency that there is a beginning of the positive state of affairs if it's being the case that there exists contingent concrete things and in that case two actually isn't so modest after all is it no that's basic this is basically again the same dialectic that comes up in modal ontological arguments they're basically saying something like uh well it's like possible that god exists but

of course that strictly entails that god exists in System s5 which is of course the one they're they're using here the same applies to two right two is only true if it's necessarily the case that there's a beginning of contingency so anyone who doesn't antecedently accept that it's necessarily the case that contingency begins would never grant that second premise and similarly just with the modal ontological argument stuff i can equally well give a symmetrical premise here which is going to be incompatible With this second one so i can say it's possible for contingency to have

no beginning and given the branching actualist theory of modality if that's true well then there actually cannot be such a beginning and so we therefore have two incompatible possibility premises with a kind of epistemic symmetry between them the first one the one that is basically captured in premise 2 here is that possibly contingency has a beginning And then the the reverse symmetry premise which is incompatible with that is that possibly contingency does not have a beginning and so the question is why should we accept the first one over the second one without a symmetry breaker

this argument here just fails and of course you're not gonna be able to appeal to like conceivability and so on because i can equally well conceive of contingency not having a beginning And so on so i don't really think we should be sanguine about this argument and of course take a shot because this conclusion here is perfectly compatible with naturalism argument this requires a little bit of descartes okay so i just wanted to point that out um oh this is one of the most painful arguments of the bunch um well actually it's it's not um

donation here uh Because he's got some terminology uh so premise one is there must be in the cause of an idea at least as much formal reality as the idea contains objective reality now what it means by objective reality is the idea as it is represented in the mind now a formal reality by contrast is the object's actual extra mental reality so here's an example an idea according to the card is like a painting the objective reality is the painting itself whereas the formal Reality is what the painting is of in the world like the

landscape the actual landscape so the formal reality of the painting is more real than the objective reality of the painting and the objective route more okay so i reject that they're like degrees of reality so something's like more real than another thing something either exists or it doesn't i'm sorry even just this distinction i mean i i just reject It so i mean the whole argument is just it's like starting the race with cutting your legs off but okay reality can never be as great or as perfect as the thing itself okay so uh two

i have the idea of god three my idea of god is the effect of some cause four the idea of god has an infinite objective reality so the idea of god has a cause with it with infinite formal reality no finite substance such as myself can be the cause of my idea of god only an infinite Substance can be the cause of my idea of god so god exists yeah so premise one seems to me just entirely unmotivated firstly why must there be in the cause of an idea at least as much formal reality as

the idea contains objective reality the atheist could equally well say no this premise is false precisely because firstly we have the idea of god secondly God doesn't exist so there's nothing with infinite formal reality and yet our idea of god is an idea of an infinite being so it contains infinite objective reality or whatever so the atheist could just say no i mean this argument itself inspires a counter-example to its first premise but anyway premise one i just reject the metaphysics underlying this argument and secondly premise one i just don't see any reason to believe

it personally Uh it seems unmotivated and also it seems just extremely implausible i can represent super high cardinalities in my mind like a lef not not a left null but like aleph quadrillion my idea seems to contain like a left subtrillion objective reality maybe is there some reality with like aleph sub trillion formal reality what does that even mean like How are we like quantifying formal reality like how much reality something has this is just ludicrous okay sorry anyway i recognize that i am not a descartes scholar so there may very well be things that

i am alighting here that i am overlooking so yeah let's just move on oh well actually let's not move on because premise six here is just i think obviously false right a finite substance could be the cause of one's idea of god We can do this thing called abstraction and negation right so we see various finite limited things around us and we can come up with a concept of the infinite and the unlimited just by abstracting firstly from the various finite limited things to the concept of finitude limitation and so on and then just negating

those right saying no it's not fun to simplify it down to bare bones it would be i have an idea of a perfect being god ideas like other Things have causes some by other ideas some by extra mental realities the ideas are of three my idea of god cannot have been caused by other ideas of my own and the idea here is that uh god the idea of god is innate in me i am implicitly aware of god as a perfect being because i am aware of myself as an imperfect being uh so the conclusion

is so my idea of god is caused by the experimental reality it is an idea of namely that which actually possesses a perfection God yeah so i would say premise two here needs modification i'd say some by other ideas some by experimental realities the ideas are of and some by experimental realities the ideas are not of right so oftentimes ideas come to us cause that are caused in us by things that the ideas aren't of so it's not like other ideas Of ours cause it and it's not like we ourselves cause it but it's also

not the things that the ideas are of that cause it rather it's just other things that just maybe like remind us some way and some subconscious process kicks off or whatever i also think premise three is just false i've already shown a strategy as to how one's idea of god could be caused in some sense by other ideas of Your own together with various intellect of operations you have ideas of finitude you can gain that by your own powers of abstraction you just look around us and you see various things that are limited in finite

various ways then you just negate that to say not finite so infinite not limited so unlimited and so on and so that's how you can start to have an idea of god it's this unlimited being and then you can say it's unlimited in Knowledge and power and so on and you know we see knowledge and power and so on in our experience so i think just three is just clearly false um and then of course we have parody problems here so i could say hey i have the idea of a maximally evil god ideas have

causes in terms of other ideas or in terms of what they're of they're intentional objects but of course my idea of an evil god couldn't be caused by other ideas of my Own right after all an evil god that has infinite objective reality and so it has to be caused by something with infinite formal reality so there's an evil god because it's either caused by other ideas of mind which it can't be or it's caused by the thing that it's of namely it's intentional object and of course this is an idea of an evil god

so it's caused by an evil god so there's an evil god and of course if that's true traditional Theism is false because untraditional theism god himself isn't evil and moreover god doesn't create another god which is evil so of course that's true that traditional theism is false so traditional theism is false looks like we've got an argument against god's existence here complicated argument uh but uh once you understand the scholastic terminology he uses it's pretty interesting we got one more cosmological argument to Cover one everything has a cause two if everything has a cause then

the universe has a cause so the universe has a cause and it's god there you go and for the resources here uh you can find this argument defended by uh no one ever so i'm actually glad that chad included this because i see people talk about oh the cosmological argument and they literally present something like this Like everything has a cause it causes me so much pain every time i see it so um yeah anyway i'm glad that we're making fun of this because it deserves as much derision as it can possibly get dude like

the royal society institute of philosophy or something like that posted a video the other day with julian bajini or whatever and he's a professional philosopher and he was talking about the Cosmological argument and of course he gives he gives an argument one of the premises is everything has a cause i'm like oh my gosh this is so painful it's like he should be embarrassed like julian bajini if you're watching this you should be embarrassed you can tell that i've been recording and it's very late at night so lots of stuff is coming out but no

thinker in the history of traditional cosmological arguments has Defended an argument seriously with this first premise everything has a cause i mean okay maybe you're maybe like your five-year-old dog defensive premise like that but no serious thinker within the theistic tradition has ever put forward any argument remotely like this and yet you still see like crash course philosophy you know hank green or whatever making videos where he talks about the cosmological argument and of course one of his premises is like Everything has a cause of course he's like attributing this to aquinas it's like this

is so absurd like how can you get away with this and of course it has like millions of views or whatever so it's like it it's so pathetic like how how do you get away with that anyway sorry off my high horse we're actually done with the cosmological arguments we're on argument number 21 and this one is from anselm before getting into the various ontological arguments i do want To say firstly to check out my ontological arguments playlist therein i go through the modal ontological argument i explain in tremendous detail i look at symmetry breakers

i look at the possibility premise i look at anselm's ontological argument i look at girdles ontological argument look at descartes ontological argument and so on so definitely check out my ontological arguments playlist and in fact rather than go through This sort of more faithful to the text version of anthem's argument this is the classic ontological argument from and selling and crosslogging let's just get that one and go to the source so i'm not going to skip it i think premise one is false because god doesn't exist in my understanding no the idea of god exists

in my understanding so that's one problem a second problem is that in order to avoid equivocation in this argument the sense of god used Throughout the argument needs to be uniform okay so suppose it means the idea of god well then the conclusion of course doesn't entail that god exists it only means that the idea of god exists in reality but now suppose that it means like god himself that is the being god god himself that omnipotent omniscient morally perfect created the universe whatever in that case however premise one is quite overtly question begging it

is Equivalent to saying that there exists an x such that x is god and x is in the understanding and x is not in reality but of course to say this is to simply say in part that god exists you're saying there exists an x such that x is god and so premise one assumes the very thing in need of demonstration now of course this is not actually fully faithful to anselm's text in order to get eight validly following you have to say god does in fact exist In the understanding and then you go on

to say okay suppose he only exists in the understanding but not in reality and then you go on to conclude by reductio that no it's actually false that god exists only in the understanding but not in reality and since he does in fact exist in the understanding he must also thereby exist in reality so you need an additional premise here to the effect that god does in fact exist in the understanding so that's really the Additional premise that i was targeting when i said firstly that if that's false because god doesn't exist in my understanding

the idea of god exists in my understanding so it has a false premise but even setting that aside we have to talk about equivocation and in the argument we either mean the idea of god or god himself if we mean the idea of god well then that has to be consistent throughout and in which case the conclusion doesn't actually get us God's existence it gets us that the idea of god exists in reality but of course if we mean god himself well then the first the implicit zeroth premise that god does in fact exist in

the understanding says that there exists an x such that x is god and x is in the understanding but of course no atheist would ever grant that there exists an x such that x is god so they would never grant that premise and josh rasmussen actually really Nicely makes this point so this is a review of a book the book is a.d smith's anselm's ontological argument so this is josh writing here he says and somewhat canterbury thought that belief in god can be based upon reason itself he sought to prove god's reality by reasoning about

the concept of god god by definition is the greatest thinkable being no greater being is even conceivable now a being is surely Greater if it exists in reality than if it exists merely in one's imagination so the greatest thinkable being exists in reality and therefore god exists in reality the classical argument feels like clever trickery is it well nearly every philosopher since anthem is considered the argument fallacious strangely however isolating the precise place where the argument falters has proven rather tricky part of the difficulties That anselm offers more than one version of his argument and

objections to one version don't necessarily apply to all the others but such multiplicity not withstanding many philosophers think that when we clearly express anselm's argument in any of its forms using the language of contemporary logic we find an ambiguity in the term god suppose the term god is understood as a name that actually picks out an existing entity then the argument is circular because The first premise assumes that god exists alternatively we may understand the term god as expressing the concept of god then the problem is that no mere concept qualifies as the greatest thinkable

being so the argument is unsound in any case just about everyone theist and atheist alike agrees there is something wrong with anselm's classic argument so anyway that's a simple dilemma that Kind of afflicts anselm's ontological argument this point about equivocation we might try to avoid that by saying that we're just using one sense of god but that we're talking about different ways or modes of being in which one single entity can exist right it can exist in a conceptual way or it can exist in a real way so it's one in the same entity and

it simply enjoys different modes or ways of being now firstly this is facially implausible That just seems just deeply impossible at least by my lights and it's actually borderline unintelligible this talk about modes and ways of being but secondly it assumes ontological pluralism and yet we should reject ontological pluralism ontological pluralism is the thesis that there's more than one way of being or mode of existence there are different kinds of existence some things really exist but other things don't really exist but only Like conceptually exist i don't know it's really hard to make sense of

and it's really impossible and i had trent merricks on my channel again to talk about why we should reject that view and thirdly as a third response to this i'm gonna say if it's one and the same being in each case well then god himself albeit god himself existing in a conceptual mode of being depends upon my mind but then a mode of being of god is dependent right and yet god is identical To whatever god has per divine simplicity and and some of course accepted divine simplicity and so god is identical to any mode

of being that he has and so god is identical to this conceptual mode of being assuming again that the argument is talking about one and the same being just existing in different ways which it has to if it's to avoid equivocation but in that case god is dependent because that conceptual mode of being Depends on my mind and moreover god is identical to this conceptual mode of being because he's identical to everything that he has but of course that's incompatible with traditional theism god is not a dependent being and moreover god would then be something

intrinsic to but distinct for me and so god would be a part of me and yet that's incompatible with classical things and god isn't a part of anything in creation Lots of epiphanicists might even reject this number three they might say no god is so transcendent that we can't even conceive of him so that's another mode of criticism here's a still further mode of criticism premise two here is false existence in reality is greater than existence in the understanding alone i think that that is straightforwardly false and let's look at alexander prus explain why so

alexander prus he says it makes no sense to talk of the greatness Of a non-existent being except hypothetically as the greatness it would have if it existed when we compare the greatness of things we compare what the things would be like if they existed thus when we say that thor is greater than hermes we mean something like this if thor existed he would be greater than hermes would be if hermes existed and to exist is to exist in reality but now take the crucial claim in anselm's argument that It is greater for e but now

take the crucial claim in anselm's argument that it is greater for x to exist in mind and into reality but now take the crucial claim in anselm's argument that it is greater for x to exist in mind and in reality than just in mind this claim is simply false when we understand it in the hypothetical way for we need to compare the greatness of the x that exists in mind and reality to the greatness that the x that exists Only in mind would have if it existed in reality but that's the same greatness so anselm's

original ontological argument has a just a clearly false premise premise too at least by my lights moreover a still further criticism of anselm's ontological argument derives from the distinction between encoded and attributed properties and to bring out this point we are going to listen to what i say in my 3k ama So this isn't actually my 3k ama it's it's a clip from my 3k ama but it's actually my video for ontological arguments in 12 minutes i've put it on 1.5 times speed and this is the criticism from the distinction between encoded and attributed properties

a third problem that i would say is uh one that app is written on he makes a distinction between encoded and attributed properties he talks about this in his standard cyclopedia Philosophy article on hodgkin's argument so opi writes following anthem we might say that since you understand the expression smallest really existing martian there is and you're understanding at least one smallest really existent martian however in saying this it must be understood that we're not actually predicating properties of anything we aren't supposing that there is something which possesses the properties of being a Martian really existing

and being no larger than any other martian in other words we must be able to have a concept of or entertain the idea of a smallest real existing martian without believing that there really are any smallest martians indeed more strongly must be able to entertain the concept of a smaller existing martian and to recognize that the property of really existing is part of this concept while nonetheless maintaining that there are No smallest existent martians it'll be useful to introduce vocabulary to mark the point which is being made here we could princess disinguise between the properties

which are encoded in an idea or concept and the properties which are attributed in positive atomic beliefs which have that idea or concept as an ingredient the idea really exists in santa claus encodes the property of real existence but it is perfectly possible to entertain this idea without Attributing real existence to santa claus that is without believing the santa claus really exists we can modify this distinction and sounds argument on the one hand the idea being then which no greater can be conceived encodes the property of real existence this is what the radical argument from

anselm establishes if it establishes anything at all on the other hand it is perfectly possible to entertain the idea of a being then which no greater can be Conceived and to recognize that this idea encodes the property of real existence without attributing real existence to a being then which no greater can be conceived that is without believing that being that which nobody can be conceived really exists okay so those are my three main issues i mean there are more but those are my three myths you can see my video ontological arguments with time engagement but

those are my three main issues the first Objection is that no god doesn't exist in your understanding the idea of god exists in your understanding so the implicit premise here is false another objection was that in order to avoid equivocation you have to precise by what you are meaning by god and you either mean the idea of god or god himself in the first case the conclusion doesn't get you god's existence but in the second case the argument is blatantly question begging so that's the second Response the third response is that it seems rely on

ontological pluralism but we should reject ontological pluralism a fourth criticism is someone might who is inclined to apophatic theology might reject premise three they might say that god isn't after all conceivable the fifth objection is that no premise was false that was bruce's point about hypothetical greatness so that's a fifth response a sixth response is this distinction between encoded and Attributed properties that opi makes and applies to the argument and now here's the seventh response everyone pronounces it differently but what guanalo or gonolo guanola's greatest conceivable island parody now i actually used to think this

argument failed but one of grandma's recent publications published in 2017 actually seems to have convinced me that no it doesn't actually fail so uh suppose that the greatest Conceivable island which of course the fool who denies such a thing denies the reality of such a thing understands of course and of course whatever is understood exists in the understanding so the greatest conceivable island exists in the understanding now suppose that the greatest conceivable island exists in the understanding but not in reality well existence in reality is greater than existence in the understanding alone And moreover having

all the properties of this greatest conceivable island plus existence in reality can be conceived right i can certainly conceive of this island existing so a being having all of this island's properties plus existence in rally is greater than this greatest conceivable island because again we're assuming that the greatest conceivable island only exists in the understanding and yet we can conceivable one that exists in the Understanding and in reality and yet that would be better so an island greater than the greatest conceivable island can be conceived but that of course is absurd then you'd be conceiving

of something greater than literally the greatest conceivable island that's just incoherent and so it's false that the greatest conceivable island exists only in the understanding but not also In reality and since it does exist in the understanding it must also thereby exist in reality boom we've proved a greatest conceivable island so here is the 2017 article from grama opie that i am talking about i believe this is published with palgrave mcmillan i think it's in some sort of reference book that they publish yeah macmillan interdisciplinary handbooks anyway he contributed a chapter to one of the

handbooks anselm's argument we Can equally construct a parody here's the parody that he goes through i'm not going to go through it because i basically just gave one now grandmother then points out how i mean it just seems obvious that there's a kind of epistemic parity with the t between them there's a kind of symmetry between them now opi also addresses the reason that i was hesitant to think that gonolo's Greatest conceivable island objection succeeds so it's sometimes said that gonolo's objection fails because there is and can be no such thing as an island then

which no greater island can be conceived for example planning a says the idea of an island then which it is not possible that there be a greater is like the idea of a natural number than which it is not possible that there be a greater or the idea of a line than which none more crooked is possible there Neither is nor could be a greatest can there neither is nor could be a greatest possible number indeed there isn't a greatest actual number and the same goes for islands no matter how great an island is no

matter how many nubian maidens and dancing girls adorn it there could always be greater one with twice as many for example the qualities that make for greatness in islands number of palm trees amount and quality of coconuts for example have no intrinsic Maximum that is there is no degree of productivity or number of palm trees or of dancing girls such that it is impossible that an island display more of that quality so the idea of a greatest possible island is an inconsistent or incoherent idea it's not possible that there is such a being it's this

response that the great making properties of an island don't have any intrinsic maxima But there are a number of problems with this here are six replies so first surely at least for christians they want to say that god's being trinitarian is one of god's great making features what you think that that makes god worse or doesn't even at all contribute to his value no that's one of the central aspects of christianity but then the number of divine persons in which god exists likewise admits of no intrinsic maximum planning his response Here would equally apply to

the greatest conceivable being at least with respect to christianity because this great making feature of god namely the number of divine persons that's a quantitative feature it's the number of divine persons and so just like the amount of coconuts or the number of coconuts as he should have said it's not an amount an amount is a mass noun rather than a count now and he should have said the number of coconuts i myself make that Mistake quite often but anyway set that aside the number of coconuts that's a quantitative attribute it doesn't have any intrinsic

maximum you could always in principle have one more coconut let's say you could just add one to the number of coconuts maybe it's a hundred thousand you could have a hundred thousand in one but of course the exact same is true of the number of divine persons that's a quantitative attribute god exists in Exactly three persons not four not five not six not seven and so the number doesn't admit of any intrinsic maximum similar things can be said about the strengths of god's reasons and desires so god desires some things more than he desires others

for instance he desires that at least some people be saved more than that he desires that no people be saved he desires to bring about great goods more than he desires not to bring About great goods and so on if you deny this if you say that all of god's desires are like literally infinitely intense then you completely gut theism of its explanatory power then you're not gonna be able to generate any predictions whatsoever because literally anything that god could potentially desire he desires to an unlimited degree and so we are left completely in the

dark as to what he would in fact do because his preference structure Wouldn't then generate any predictions about which among the infinitely many things that he could desire like the infinitely many goods that could possibly obtain we have no guidance here whatsoever moreover a perfectly rational being would have a preference or desire structure which tracks objective values and the relative weights of them so some worlds are going to be objectively more valuable than others so some possible Worlds are such that they have lots of people living very happy and flourishing lives whereas some other worlds

are going to have only a couple people living very very mild lives the former world is much more valuable than the latter world and so a perfectly moral and perfectly rational being should have a preference structure or desire structure which is such that the perfect being desires the world that's better than the Other world it desires it more than the other one it would be absurd to say that god desires these two equally that would just be absurd and so god's desires and the very strengths of reasons for which he acts those also in some

sense emit of degrees and these are moreover great making features of god it is a great making future of god that he has a perfectly rational perfectly good preference structure that accurately maps and tracks the objective values of Things and how they compare with one another and so the exact same thing that planning is pointing out here with respect to islands is also true of god various great making features of god are also such that they are degreed or quantitative and they don't admit of an intrinsic maximum god doesn't hit that intrinsic maximum because sometimes

to be perfectly rational you have to desire some things more than others or the degree to which you have reason to do One thing is stronger than the degree to which you have reason to do another thing so that's the first response it's just that the exact same point that planning is making with respect to islands also applies to at least the christian god and i've argued the theistic god more generally with respect to strengths of reasons and desires second planning here is seeming to suggest that the coherence of an idea requires the possibility of

its referent Right he's saying no there neither is nor could be a greatest possible number and he's trying to conclude from this that no the idea is either inconsistent or incoherent or whatever but if a condition on being a coherent idea is the possibility of its referent or if the coherence of an idea requires the possibility of its referent then the coherence of the idea of the greatest conceivable being similarly requires the possibility of a greatest conceivable Being but we already know by the emotological argument that the possibility of a greatest conceivable being implies its

actuality and so anselm's argument per planning as reply here would require the coherence of the idea of the greatest conceivable being which in turn would require the possibility of such a being which in turn given the standard system of motologic s5 would require its actuality but of course in that case affirming the Coherence of the idea is simply to beg the very question at issue it is to simply assume the existence of the greatest conceivable being in an argument attempting to demonstrate that very thing a third response is another reason for thinking that it's unclear

how god's various great making attributes could hit intrinsic maxima so for instance the intrinsic maximum of justice and mercy it's difficult to see how god could hit their intrinsic maxima You would think that a maximally just judge would not be lenient in any sense it would divvy up punishments and rewards to people exactly in proportion to their merit or what they deserve but of course that's precisely what mercy doesn't do mercy gives in some sense less punishment than deserved or perhaps more reward than deserved So a maximally merciful judge it would seem would not be

a maximally just judge and so it doesn't seem to be the case that god could hit the intrinsic maxima of justice and mercy there would seem to have to be some kind of trade-off between the two at the very least this is a potentially problematic aspect of planning his response on behalf of anselm's argument in response to the guanolo parody anyway that's the third point the fourth Point in response to planning is that it's unclear whether admitting of higher quantities or degrees of grape making features would automatically make the island better perhaps there's an ideal

unique concoction of quantities and degrees of great making features maybe there is actually a precise number of coconuts in a precise size of the island and so on which is the ideal unique concoction of quantities and degrees which render it the best possible indeed The best conceivable island nothing planica says rules this out and that he would need to rule it out in order for his defense of the argument to succeed fifth we can just modify the island example in the following way instead of focusing on the greatest conceivable island we can focus on the

island that is the greatest conceivable simply with respect to its existential status that is the way in which it exists and whether it exists this completely avoids The intrinsic maximum point because we're not talking about the greatest conceivable island as such we're talking about that island which is simply the greatest conceivable with respect to its existential status and you're going to be able to conclude that the island in question exists but you're also going to be able to prove the existence of basically anything you can talk about that unicorn which is the greatest conceivable simply

with respect To its existential status and so if the unicorn which is the greatest conceivable with respect to its existential status didn't exist well then we could conceive of one that is better with respect to its existential status which is absurd this is the greatest conceivable unicorn with respect to its existential status and so we can prove the existence of basically anything so it seems that's the fifth response the sixth response is that the Example of an island is entirely tangential we can pick out something which actually does seem to have intrinsic maxima for its

great making features so consider a solo omniscient being a solo omniscient being is a necessary being who by nature has exactly one ability to know the truth values of propositions given this the idea of the greatest conceivable solo omniscient being is Perfectly coherent unlike an island which has various great making capacities that admit of higher quantities in degrees a solo omniscient being has only one great making capacity and that capacity has an intrinsic maximum namely omniscience that is knowing the truth value of every proposition and we can then run the argument with a solo omniscient

being we can run a period with a solo omniscient being it Exists in the understanding because you understand it whenever is understood exists in the understanding and moreover it would be a better solomondish should being if it exists in reality than if it just existed in the mind and so if it didn't also exist in reality we could conceive of a greater solo omniscient being than the greatest conceivable solo omniscient being which of course is absurd and hence such A thing actually exists in reality but that of course is just that's an absurd parody just

like the greatest conceivable island of parody for starters it implies that god isn't the only necessary omniscient being which is incompatible with traditional theism and moreover we can also now prove infinitely many such beings we can just consider a solo omniscient minus one being which is being just like a solo omniscient being that is simply by Nature unable to know one specific truth this being two has great making features not admitting of an intrinsic maximum it's impossible for such a being to know that specific truth that it doesn't have and so it's no mark against

its greatness as a sole omniscient minus one being that it doesn't know it so again we still have absurd parodies in the neighborhood even if we grant planning this point about okay fine maybe islands have great making features which admit Of greater quantity or greater degree and that this somehow debarrs there from being a coherent idea of the greatest conceivable island even if we granted in that which i've argued that we shouldn't we can still run parity arguments that generate absurdities so here's what opie says in response to planning note however that it is supposed

to be uncontroversial that the words that then which no greater can be conceived are understood if you're going to enter into Controversial philosophical arguments about whether words are in some technical sense coherent for example whether they refer to something that could possibly exist then it is controversial whether the words that then which no greater can be conceived are understood there are plenty of controversial philosophical arguments for the conclusion that the words that then which no greater can be conceived are incoherent in relevant technical Senses it is for example highly controversial whether the words that then

which no greater can be conceived refer to something that could possibly exist and i add here that no atheist would ever grant that it's even possible given what we know from the modal ontological argument debate it's also worth noting that it is controversial whether considerations about an intrinsic maximum suggest that there is a more Serious worry about the coherence of the words that island then which no greater can be conceived than there is about the coherence of the words that being then which no greater can be conceived on the one hand greatness for islands involves

trading off a whole lot of considerations including size eco-diversity population and so forth an island then which no greater can be conceived will not be too large nor too crowded with palm trees nor too crowded With people that there is no intrinsic maximum to size or number of palm trees or population provides no reason to suppose that we cannot coherently speculate about islands than which no greater islands can be conceived on the other hand if that then which no greater can be conceived is to hit intrinsic maxima for every attribute that it has then those

intrinsic maxima must be possibly jointly co-instantiated But for example there is a serious question as to whether something can be both maximally merciful and maximally just moreover there are attributes that do not hit intrinsic maxima that at least some philosophers want to ascribe to that which no greater can be conceived for example that it consists of three persons and i add that it has certain degrees of and i add that it has certain weights or degrees of desires and strengths of Reasons it is perhaps also worth observing that in an everyday sense we do understand

the words the greatest possible number we must first understand the words in order to be able to see that there can be no such thing and in fact i want to note here that this actually plausibly provides a counter example to anselm's claim that whatever is understood exists in the understanding i understand the greatest possible number Does it follow that there actually exists a greatest possible number in my understanding okay if it does what number is it tell me tell me tell me anselm's argument fails quite drastically and so in addition to the plethora of

objections that i've already leveled to anselm's argument i think i leveled six or seven i don't think the response from there being no intrinsic maxima from planning i don't think that that succeeds And i also just gave it like a seventh or an eighth response to anselm's argument by means of a counter example which is that we have to understand the greatest possible number we have to understand that phrase in order to be able to see that there can be no such thing but of course given anselm's argument whatever's understood exists in the understanding so

it would follow that there like literally exists the greatest Possible number in my understanding and that just seems absurd no there's no such number in my understanding there cannot be such a number in any sense whatsoever whether in my understanding or in reality just no anyway let us continue a simplified version next a being then which no greater can be conceived exists at least in the mind promise to it is greater to exist in reality than to exist only in the mind Three so a being which no greater can be conceived exists not only in

the mind but also in reality and then the conclusion so god exists now basically everything that i said in with respect to the previous version applies here you still have the point about existing in the mind versus existing in the in reality see it's still the point about ontological pluralism you have the point that no the greatest conceivable being doesn't actually exist in my mind the Idea exists in my mind you have the point about encoded versus attributed properties you the point about no premise two being false with bruce's criticism you have parodies concerning the

greatest conceivable islands and solar omniscient beings and so on and so on and so on and so this faces the same problems there you go classic and sonian cosmological argument yeah this is actually the argument the version of the Ontological argument that most atheists on youtube actually target which is interesting we're gonna see because there's so many different versions they kind of attack the oldest and the easiest to respond to which is something that's interesting because you guys are including this in a list of 150 even though it's pretty much almost universally agreed that it

just utterly fails and of course they go at the end and they plug in like oh 150. It's like oh like no like you guys are including arguments that are almost universally agreed to fail i mean i know that they said take seriously like they said at the beginning that flushers take this seriously i guess that's in a sense like yes philosophers take this argument seriously in the sense that they grapple with it they try to find where precisely it goes wrong but most philosophers don't take it seriously in The sense of thinking that it

does or even could succeed so yeah you could complain about internet atheists really just objecting to anselm's ontological argument but don't then turn around and use this as a kind of apologetic and i know they said at the beginning that they're not per se advancing these arguments as an apologetic and they also don't say the beginning that they accept all of them of course But near the end of course but i do want to play around with the numbers and then they start like showing how oh it's incredibly difficult to reject god's existence given all

this stuff like come on okay so jumping forward from insult to descartes there's a famous quote by descartes which is that i clearly see that existence can no more be separated from the essence of god than can it's having three angles equal to two right Angles be separated from the essence of a triangle or the idea of a mountain from the idea of a valley so there is no less absurdity in thinking of a god a supremely perfect being who lacks existence than in thinking of a mountain without a valley so he gives this argument

uh no this is again the distinction between encoded and attributed we can recognize that encoded within the idea or concept of god is existence and indeed necessary existence Yeah sure that's part of the definition of god but that doesn't at all commit you to saying that in a positive atomic belief attributing existence or even necessary existence to god i could again give the example the smallest really existent martian by definition this martian exists right it's the smallest really existent martian so it's part of its very definition to exist but that just means existence is encoded

in this idea or this concept or this description It doesn't mean that we have to attribute existence in a positive atomic belief or a positive atomic claim to the smallest really existent martian and of course there are no martians so there is no smallest real existent martian despite the fact that i can clearly see that existence can no more be separated from the essence of what it is to be a smallest really existent martian again scholars don't really take descartes ontological arguments seriously apart From trying to find the interesting ways in which it fails and

how that relates to essences and existence and so on premise one if i cannot conceive of x without y then y belongs to the nature of x two i cannot conceive of a supremely perfect being without existence so existence belongs to the nature of a supremely perfect being uh four if existence belongs to the nature of a supremely perfect being the supreme Perfect being exists five supremely perfectly exists so premise four is false here's one way to see it if i cannot conceive of x without y then y belongs to the nature of x i

cannot conceive of a smallest really existent martian without existence if you're conceiving of the smallest really existent martian then if you haven't conceived of it as existing then you failed to conceive of it because i specified in that idea that It's the smallest really existent martian therefore existence belongs to the nature of a smallest really existent martian what it is to be a smallest really existent martian is to really exist that's part of its definition it's part of its content as an idea or concept or definition premise 4 if existence belongs to the nature of

a smallest real existent martian then the smallest really Existent martian exists oh a smallest real existent martian exists whoa we just proven the existence of martians no more or less included because of historical importance and i should note that spinoza and lightning's also have their own spins on the oncological argument but their versions look pretty similar to descartes just outlined and as a general point there's no strict logical entailment from the former to the latter you're not able to go simply From the fact that some property p belongs to x's nature that it is true

that there exists an x such that x is p all you're saying when you're saying that p belongs to x's nature is that is that necessarily if x exists then x is p so all you're saying there is that hey if there is such a thing as x then it has to be p right it's a condition on being that thing that it is p but that Doesn't of course commit you to there actually being an x that is p uh so let's go ahead and move on okay so i'm actually going to be a

little bit short with this one because premise one has quite an obvious objection well two quite obvious objections firstly you have the symmetry problem for this one you can also say it's possible that the greatest conceivable being doesn't exist and of course then you can run through Pretty much the exact same argument and get that no it doesn't exist and what malcolm is allegedly showing here is that we are going essentially from the possibility of this thing to its necessary existence but then of course you could just say well no it's possible that it doesn't

exist and then you're actually going to be able to conclude its impossibility so you can equally well run an argument saying it's possible that the greatest conceivable Being doesn't exist and then you can conclude that there is no such being and indeed there cannot be such a being and so what that means is that why why the heck should we accept premise one as opposed to that symmetrical premise that it's possible that no greatest conceivable being exists you can't appeal to conceivability of these other sorts of things like oh well i can at least conceive

of there being a world in which the greatest conceivable being Exists because i can also conceive of a world in which it is true that there is no such greatest conceivable being so anyway there's a symmetry problem for this first premise you can run a reverse argument with an incompatible conclusion that has a possibility premise that is equally as modest as this premise and that is at least as intrinsically probable as this premise and i would argue that it's actually more intrinsically probable and the second Problem again is just like listen no one who isn't

antecedently inclined to theism would be willing to grant this first premise without without being given some other independent argument in favor of it because to grant that it's possible that a great conceivable being exists we know that that just is to grant that the greatest conceivable being actually exists so no atheist would ever grant this first premise and indeed you would Antecedently have to reject atheism in order to even be in a position to accept this first premise as avi points out if you accept the principles of modal logic that support the inferential moves in

the argument and you agree that there's an unsurpassably great being or that there's a greatest conceivable being then you'll of course think that the argument is sound but contrary wise if you accept the principles of modal logic that support the inferential moves in The argument and you agree with those who deny that there's an unsurpassably great being or with those who deny that there's a greatest conceivable being then you will think that the argument is unsound once we have both of these arguments before us that it's possible that such a being exists and it's possible

that it doesn't exist it's obvious that neither of them provide provides anyone with any reason to change their views about Whether there's an unsurpassably great being it just doesn't give anyone any additional reason to think that god exists whether or not you think the argument is sound is just gonna entirely be a function of your pre-existent commitments whether or not you are a theist or an atheist and so it's just dialectically toothless the same is going to be going pretty much for every single modal ontological argument unless of course you're providing an Independent reason a

symmetry breaker an independent argument that favors one possibility premise over the other so anyway because of the implausibility of at least lots of these modal arguments we are going to be skipping them in the sense of just going through yeah here let's look at this one because this one actually is actually interesting so anyway here is anselm's or at least a construction of ants almost persuasion 3 argument i know some People say per slogan five formulation where planet go and others sort of distill the ant sounds other argument down into this either god's existence is

logically impossible or is logically necessary if god's existence is logically impossible the concept of god is contradictory the concept of god is not contradictory so god's existence is logically necessary yes i think premise one is false by my lights logical impossibility is a matter Of a sentence either being of the form p and not p or else logically entailing by dint of its formal structure a sentence of the form p and not p given this i simply reject that either god's existence logically entails the statement of the form p and not p or god's non-existence

logically entails a statement of the form p and not p so i don't think either of those is strictly logically inconsistent i think this is a question of metaphysical Possibility and metaphysical necessity not logical impossibility and logical necessity logical impossibility and logical necessity are matters of the form of sentences whether or not they are either of the form p and not p or else entail by dint of their logical structure by dint of their abstract form some statement of the form p and not p but i think god's existence is a metaphysical matter it's a

question that isn't going to be settled by purely Logical grounds you're gonna have to go to different metaphysical principles and so on and you're gonna have to ask is god's existence metaphysically possible and i think yes god's existence is either metaphysically impossible or metaphysically necessary that is either god exists in all possible worlds or he exists in none and where a possible world is just a total or complete way that reality could be but i reject premise one and i think It's really implausible that a strict logical contradiction is going to be entailed either from

god's existence or god's non-existence provided that you can give like a consistent specification of what you mean by god premise three here is actually somewhat difficult to justify so it really does depend on your concept of god but we should at least be wary that it is somewhat difficult to justify since there's always the looming epistemic possibility that there's a Contradiction that you simply haven't yet discovered we have to keep in mind the distinction between not seeing a contradiction within a concept or being able to tease out a contradiction from a concept and actually positively

seeing that there is no contradiction that's a crucial distinction there's a distinction between not seeing a contradiction or not being aware of some contradiction and actually seeing that there is no contradiction and being Aware of the fact that there is no contradiction and it's difficult to disentangle those so even if even if you don't see a contradiction in a concept it doesn't follow that it doesn't actually have a contradiction it doesn't even follow that you see that there is no such contradiction and of course i think that this argument is susceptible of parity we could

just talk about atheism no i'm not even talking about naturalism or not even Materialism we could be thinking of some sort of mystical non-theistic neoplatonism but my point is just let's just talk about atheism just the strict denial that there is such a thing as a god let's say an omnipotent omniscient morally perfect creator of the universe or whatever so i can then say atheism is either logically necessary or logically impossible but atheism is logically Impossible only if it entails a contradiction but atheism doesn't entail a contradiction so we can conclude that atheism is logically

necessary and you see here start this ontological argument is starting to push into more contemporary terrain uh which we'll get into formulation of anselm's other arguments and it's all right so look at premise 7 here this Is why i'm going to skip this one it says it's not the case that necessarily a perfect being does not exist this is literally saying it's possible that a perfect being exists and of course i've already went through why this is just the dreaded possibility premise this is going to face a symmetry problem and moreover no non-theist would ever

grant this without being given some further independent reason madels look it's possible that a perfect Being exists okay it's possible that perfect being doesn't exist so this suffers from the same problem so let's continue anselm's other argument amen where he discovers a third argument uh in anselm and it goes like this is the next slide here if anything that cannot be conceived to be caused can be conceived to exist it actually exists god can be conceived to exist but cannot be conceived to be caused therefore god actually exists so The person who wrote the book

may have anticipated what i'm about to say but at least primophasia i reject premise one consider the following this is a concept that i'm going gonna give you an uncaused unicorn okay that's the concept is it's a unicorn that is essentially uncaused now i can't conceive this thing to be caused because then it would be a caused uncaused Unicorn that just no no that doesn't make any sense so i can't conceive this thing to be caused i don't know what it would be for an uncaused unicorn to be caused that's a contradictory so i can't

conceive of an uncaused unicorn to be caused and yet i can conceive of an uncaused unicorn to exist it's not that difficult i can conceive of unicorns to exist and i can conceive of there being absolutely nothing within A given reality that could cause it to exist so i can conceive of an uncaused unicorn does it follow that an uncaused unicorn actually exists no it doesn't all right so i reject premise one at least primophasia also it's not 100 clear to me that i cannot conceive god to have a cause again it might depend on

your conception of god but hey if god is trinitarian well then it seems as though i can conceive of a unitarian being Or something like the neoplatonic one that causally sustains the three divine persons together into a unified single godhead i don't know there doesn't seem to be anything incoherent about that now of course you might you know pack into your definition of god okay god is uncaused okay fine that would be a way to get around it but then of course i i'd probably fall back on my point about yeah i could still just

equally bake into a Definition of a unicorn but it's an uncaused unicorn then we have a counter example to premise one also arguably this seems to prove too much it would seem to be able to deliver us polytheism for instance so i could run the argument with the theistic hindu god with the unitarian christian god with the muslim god with the trinitarian god with abinitarian god with a tetritarian god with non-classical theistic god with the classical theistic god and so on because All these things are different descriptions of god they will be assay they can't

be conceived to be caused they're perfect perfect beings aren't causally dependent on another so i can't conceive them to be caused and yet i can conceive all these things to exist it's not as though like hinduism is inconceivable or unitarian christian theism is inconceivable or islam the truth of islam is inconceivable or the truth of judaism is inconceivable or a Binary god is inconceivable no not at all so i can conceive these things to exist and moreover they cannot be conceived to be caused does it follow that the hindu god exists that the unitarian christian

god exists that the muslim god exists that the trinitarian god exists that the minitarian god exists and all this infinities of gods the non-classical theos god the classical thesis no that doesn't at all follow so again this argument would be Able to prove too much firstly this seems to be a counterexample to that first premise but even if we didn't grant it as a counter example we we would then seem to be able to prove the existence of this whole concoction of gods and note by these various gods i mean the being satisfying exactly that

description so i'm not just talking about like the reference here maybe there's some some sense in which let's say the judaic God and the christian god even though they characterize god differently their expressions are still picking out referring to the one being that exists in reality assuming god exists of course but that's not what i'm talking about when i say the islamic god the judaic god the the trinitarian god the theistic hindu god i'm actually talking about a being satisfying exactly that description and moreover i can conceive of being satisfying exactly that Description i i

cannot conceive each such being to be caused and i can conceive them to exist and so it would follow that each such being satisfying exactly those descriptions actually exists and of course you'd be able to prove an actual infinity of gods and so on so anyway i think that this is a very implausible argument now we can we can skip if you're interested in this argument uh look at Uh a.d smith's book uh anselm okay so there could possibly be something divine i think you know what i'm going to say in response to this uh

yes it faces a symmetry problem and of course no one who is intended to see inclined to theism would grant that there's possibly something divine let's just define some crucial terms here maximal excellence is a being has Maximal excellence if it's omniscient omnipotent and perfectly good a being has maximal greatness if it has maximal excellence in all possible worlds okay all right with that other way with those uh definitions out there there is a possible world in which a maximally great being exists you know what i'm going to say in response to that firstly no

one who isn't already a theist would grant that premise secondly you have the symmetry problem there's a Possible world in which no maximum great being exists which in turn gets you that a maximally great being is actually impossible and actually with this reverse premise you might actually try to give symmetry breakers for that first premise but they're also reverse symmetry breakers you can say hey if something's good then it's at least possible then you could say mental privacy is good thoughts being private to ourselves that's good so then you Could say it's possible that we

have private thoughts but of course if god exists and our thoughts aren't private right uh there is an omniscient being that is privy to them and so then possibly god doesn't exist and then you'll be able to conclude that god doesn't exist you could also take the possibility of gratuitous evils i can conceive of a world in which there's pretty much nothing but horrendous suffering for like tons upon tons upon Tons of conscious beings for their entire lives but of course in that world god couldn't exist because no divine being would allow such a world

where there's only such horrific evils and no goods accruing they're from and so given that i can conceive of this world you know there doesn't seem to be a contradiction and so on i'd be able to conclude that it's a possible world and of course that means possibly god doesn't exist and of course hence god Doesn't exist i'm not actually claiming to endorse these sorts of justifications for the reverse possibility premise but my point is just that even though there are certain proper justifications on behalf of the possibility premise in the modal ontological argument which

we are going to get to later in this video there are also proper justifications for the reverse modal ontological argument premise that possibly god doesn't exist so you need To be aware of those two if there is a possible world in which a imaginary great thing exists then imagine the great thing exists in all possible worlds including the actual world and then the conclusion so imaginable gravity exists in all possible worlds including the key insight that planet is known for when it comes to the anthological argument you know the objection to optological arguments the Biggest

suggestion is oh existence is not a profession you can't you can't infer that god exists from uh from the idea that existence is greater well planning is key insight is that well fine existence might not be a perfection but necessary existence is uh so that that's his key insight and granted that you can distill biblical arguments into a very very simple argument that has basically just One premise and it's that god possibly exists because if god exists god it's pretty much universally agreed that god exists necessarily but it follows immediately uh in two modal systems

modal system s5 and b that if something is possibly necessary it is necessary uh so if god possibly exists god exists so we have the simple simplified breakdown the symbols you can get possibly exists so god exists and the considering discussion on ontological arguments Takes this basically for granted it says yes this is what it boils down to does god possibly exist well some of the contemporary discussions on it there is actually quite substantive debate in the metaphysics of modality as to whether or not s5 accurately captures metaphysical modality people shouldn't take that for granted

there are lots of objections like nathan salmon for instance has an objection to s5 and so on and various other authors Do as well so we should at least keep that in mind that the modal systems that undergird the inference from possibly necessary to necessary uh it is possibly necessary that p therefore it is necessarily the case that p those aren't all together uncontroversial we should at least keep that in mind and we have uh arguments for and against that key possibility premise possibly gotta make Sense but as a good fake gesture if you're not

convinced that it follows that god exists from it's even being possible that god exists here are two ways to derive that next slide so the first way is in s5 and the second way is in the weaker system b and so there are two ways you can do this one is by offering what i'm gonna call defense and the other is by offering uh what i'll call it demonstration you actually try to prove that it's possible God exists rather than just argue uh give an argument for why it's possible to exist arguments for the possibility

premise which we'll look at uh we have bruce's motivational center of our lives defense we have benjamin arbor's cumulative credence razor argument we have the actually i'm not going to say anything on these now because each of these are going to be showing up at various points within the rest of the videos so defense onto missile defense We'll look at all those and then we have lastly a phenomenal defense which i couldn't resist putting in there because uh it's my own defense which uh just got accepted for publication so if i could run through that

really quickly so the phenomenal defense uh depends on a view in philosophy just known as phenomenal conservatives which is that if it appears to you that p then your premium factor justified believing p now this applies I argue that this applies to appearances of possibility too but with a qualification so if something appears possible to you that just means that you don't see anything contradictory or unclear about it but if something appears impossible to you then presumably you do see something contradictory or unclear about it so here's an example suppose there's a barber who shaves

all and only those men in town who do not shave themselves you Might think oh that seems possible appears possible but when you think about it a little bit harder uh you start running into troubles if the barber who's a man in town does not shave himself well that means he must shave himself which is contradiction okay so hence i propose the following modal principle i am primophile justified just justified at face value uh in believing p is possible based on its appearing possible To me if and only if it's reasonable to believe that if

p were impossible it would probably appear impossible upon further reflection just like in the barber example uh so i apply this to the ontological argument and say look it appears possible that god exists uh it's reasonable for me to believe that if it were impossible that god exists it would probably appear to me that it's impossible that god exists on for the reflection but it doesn't uh i i when i Further reflect on god's existence nothing seems impossible or unclear about that contradictory about that so i'm justified to believe god possibly so there is a

lot to say here this is again in one of chad's papers and i actually looked at the paper a long while back so i forget the specific details and the objections that he considers so i'm just going to be giving my thoughts here and i don't claim that chad isn't aware of these sorts of responses or whatever but These are my comments from my current epistemic vantage point so first premise one is at least potentially quite problematic i mean for starters do we really have seemings or appearances of these grand metaphysical claims extremely remote from

our ordinary experience that are like highly ramified and highly theory-laden it's not clear that we do when i pick out like certain particular claims hey torture is bad or something like that Well yeah that appears to me to be true and indeed arguably that appears to be to be necessarily true but if you're getting into like really highfalutin highly theoretical claims like torture is necessarily bad in virtue of this particular consequentialistic moral theory developed by this one particular person in this paper or whatever i started to think no i don't really have a seaming or

an appearance of that i mean yes i have a seeming or Appearance of the necessary badness of torture or something like that but when you start to get really highly ramified or highly theory-laden these uh like super specific theory-laden descriptions of the phenomenon in question ones that are very remote from ordinary experience and so on it's really hard for me to see how we actually have positive appearings and seemings with respect to the truth of such highly ramified theory-laden claims and how would you distinguish Having this let's say appearance or this seeming from it from

simply not having the appearance of god's impossibility there's a distinction between it appearing to be the case that god possibly exists versus simply not having the appearance of god's impossibility for me phenomenologically speaking i don't know how to differentiate those let's talk about a concrete example before we discovered that water is h2o And someone was considering the claim that water is h3o they might have said oh yeah it appears to me that water is possibly h3o is is that actually a positive appearance to them or are they simply lacking the appearance that waters being h3o

is impossible they simply don't have the appearance or don't have the seaming of its being impossible that water is h3o they don't have some positive seaming they've got this like gigachad Brain that they're like zooming into some like modal space fact or something like that like no they don't have the positive seaming that water is possibly h3o they simply lack the seaming that water is not possibly h3o so anyway that's really at least by my lights what seems to be happening with respect to this case of the first premise it's another problem with this argument

a lot of people don't even have that appearance i don't really have that Appearance it doesn't appear to me that god possibly exists it might not appear to me that god is impossible but again that's completely separate as i've been explaining and moreover i mean how do you distinguish this modal appearance from its simply appearing to you to be the case that something very much like god but crucially distinct from him perhaps in a way that you can't even grasp exists how do you distinguish these sorts of appearances so anyway Lots of these questions make

me extremely hesitant to accept premise one and i think it's potentially quite problematic for that reason moreover with respect to this premise one what do we mean by god what it what precisely is this appearance what's its content uh if you're saying by god here we mean an omnipotent omniscient morally perfect necessary thing which you would need to say because this is a in the context of the modal ontological Argument so you need to have the possibly necessary does it really does it really appear to you that it's possibly the case that such an omnipotent

domination morally perfect necessarily existent thing exists i mean it starts to become super unclear whether this thing is possible once you flesh out its various attributes once you say like okay by god i mean something that's omnipotent omniscient morally perfect and so on and Of course then you're asking hold on a second what's omnipotence and then of course you get into the weeds of trying to analyze omnipotence like oh he could do anything well can he make a square circle okay no he can do anything metaphysically possible well it's metaphysically possible to sin okay he

can do anything metaphysically possible consistent with his nature uh but then consider mick ear which uh has only one causal power like scratching its ear That thing can do anything metaphysically possible consistent with its nature but yeah and it's not an epitome so like you can start to get into all these different weeds once you start fleshing out what we mean by god it becomes extremely unclear whether such a thing is possible like i just start to throw out my hands and say listen absent further considerations i have no clue whether such a thing is

metaphysically Possible and the appearance of its possibility or its impossibility or whatever those go away with like further specifications of what exactly we're talking about so anyway i think premise one is potentially very problematic and by my lights premise two is actually also questionable and indeed implausible by my lights we're in the context of highfalutin highly theoretical claims highly theoretic matters extremely far removed from ordinary experience in a Domain that intersects basically every single area of human inquiry god's existence that touches as this video points out through all its arguments it touches epistemology metaphysics ethics

logic sociology linguistics anthropology economics even like it touches all these different domains so it's a firstly a highly theoretic matter secondly it intersects basically every single area of human inquiry and so why then should We think that impossible things in this domain in the domain of philosophy of religion and in particular god's existence why should we think that they would probably appear impossible to us on reflection think about how many impossible things are such that it is extremely difficult to discover their impossibility and even when we do discover their impossibility it still doesn't really seem

or appear to us as a kind of phenomenological appearing They don't appear or seem to us as impossible apart from going through those kind of long complicated derivations so for instance in one of my classes we did certain proofs of the soundness and completeness of first order propositional logic now it's necessarily the case that first order propositional logic is sound and complete so it's impossible for it not to be Sound and complete but i don't have any appearings on that whatsoever and the only reason why i accept it is because of these like super complicated

derivations in arguments that we need to go through so this is a case where the domain is highly theoretic and abstract now in such contexts it doesn't seem to be the case that let's say the unsoundness and incompleteness would even appear to me as impossible if they were impossible Which they in fact are of course but why think that the case of god would be any different to this case both are highly theoretic domains highly abstract domains they intersect with lots of really complicated areas of human inquiry and so on why then should we think

that if god's existence were impossible it would probably appear to you that it's impossible upon for the reflection think also about the falsity of girdles and Completeness theorems or the truth or falsity of goldbox conjecture or again russellian set paradoxes like fraga and cantor and piano and so on they didn't see the contradiction in the relevant systems even when they reflected on the relevant systems and so on think about whether p equals np in the context of mathematics and so on like there are so many different cases where things that are impossible wouldn't appear to

us to be impossible upon Reflection despite the fact that they are impossible it seems as though god would be more like these cases than others given the highly abstract nature of this given how it intersects with so many different domains of human inquiry and so on i mean the most brilliant minds on earth haven't figured out the impossibility of boatloads of things like this even on extremely protracted and intense Reflection and so what i say is why think god is any different if anything it seems that god would be even more difficult to be discovered

as impossible even if he were impossible given again that it intersects so many different domains of inquiry and is intertwined with the entirety of one's world view i've given some reasons for being really hesitant about premise one i've given reasons to think that premise two is implausible and also we can think of a Kind of symmetry argument here i could equally well run the following argument hey it appears to me that god possibly doesn't exist it's reasonable for me to believe that if it's impossible that god doesn't exist it would probably appear to me that

it's impossible that god doesn't exist upon reflection so i'm prime officially justified in believing that god possibly doesn't exist and of course that supports the reverse modal ontological argument Again you might try to say oh no like it's not reasonable for you to believe that if it's impossible that god doesn't exist it would probably appear to you to be impossible that god doesn't exist upon for the reflection because this is such a complex domain and so on like yeah okay once you say that that's precisely what i'm going to be saying in response to this

second premise here i do think symmetry is going to arise in this context That's the first point with respect to symmetry but secondly we don't even have to focus on god's possibly not existing it appears to me that gratuitous evils are possible or i could say that it appears to me that it's possible for uh there to be a world in which there are boatloads of conscious beings that just suffer horrendously uh and there are no goods accruing they're from from their extreme suffering given chad's definition that he said earlier where It's like appearing to

you that it's possible he said something like oh it doesn't seem to be contradictory it doesn't seem to be impossible it doesn't seem to me to be the case that this sort of suffering-filled world is impossible and so it appears to me that this would be possible and then i go on to say oh it's reasonable for me to believe that if gratuitous evils are impossible then it would probably appear to me that they're impossible upon for the Reflection so i'm prime if they should justify them believing that gratuitous evils and this kind of horrendous

world are possible and yet in such a world god doesn't exist because no perfectly loving god would allow such a world where there are horrendous evils that don't have any goods accruing there from and so i'm prematurely justified in believing god possibly doesn't exist which of course supports the reverse modal ontological argument and the final Point let's say we even granted this third thing you are prima facie justified and believing god possibly exists well firstly that's completely conditional on you having this seeming or appearing in the first premise lots of people don't seem to have

it and secondly it's only a prima facie justification so this is just lending some sort of super defeasible support to it it could easily be overturned by boatloads of considerations all you Would need is some sufficiently weighty consideration against god's existence perhaps even a prima facie consideration which serves as a defeater for this just prime facial justification but anyway i'm just talking about my vantage point on the epistemic landscape so that i can hopefully serve you and help you guys think critically about these sorts of questions so let us continue yeah that's kind of interesting

it's my own defense yeah Premise and we have got quicker yeah so now let's move on to demonstrations of the possibility premise no you just have various axioms that no atheist would ever grant but okay let's set that aside um personally i'm a little bit sad and you know i can't really blame them but i'm a little bit sad that the umlaut is not there the girdle by the way my mother's maiden Name is like ghetto it's spelled differently but that spelling might have actually changed when a bunch of german immigrants came to the united

states oftentimes they changed their names to make them kind of like americanized so for instance my mom's maiden name has a oe which is the americanized version of the oh umloat so who knows maybe i'm related to girdle no i i don't know it's at least epistemically possible it appears to me Possible therefore there's a possible oh my goodness never mind so it depends on some definitions and some axioms and he derives from the definitions and axioms three theorems t1 t2 t3 and rather than go through all of those let me just say that t1

t2 and t3 do follow from the definitions and axioms no one disputes this this has been demonstrated many times over even by computers okay so t1 and t1 t2 t3 follow from the definitions And a one three a five the question is whether the axioms are true uh and because the definitions are just like you can just make any kind of definition that you want right and and and so the drama really concerns the first two axioms what is a positive property that is uh that's the question and is it a property that's better to

have than not is it a property that doesn't detract from excellence but it's opposite does so there's some debate here about that Well alexander prus of course he has a simplified version of so i do want to comment on this specifically so firstly this a2 says that positive properties entail only positive properties now again as chad said there are lots of difficulties here with trying to pin down what exactly a positive property is but it's something like a perfection it's something like a great making Feature a feature that makes its possessor greater maybe it necessarily

makes its possessor greater than it otherwise would have been had it lacked the feature or something like that but uh there are potential counter examples to this that positive properties entail only positive properties so for example consider various love manifesting virtues these seem to be positive they seem to be great making features and yet lots of Them actually entail boatloads of negative properties consider for instance courage courage is a virtue but it strictly entails there being at least some sort of actual or purported threat to one so one can in some sense be threatened in

some way and that is not a positive property being susceptible to being threatened in some kind of way but anyway my point is just that there are at least some reasons for Caution with respect to a2 that positive properties entail only positive properties but really i think that there are certain fundamental problems with gerdelian ontological arguments and really i think it's probably going to go down to a3 that the atheist is just going to reject it consider that the in the relevant notion of entailment here is that one property entails another property just in case

necessarily if x has the first property then x also Has the second property with that in mind intuitively the property of being godlike is not going to be positive by the atheists lights because with that understanding of entailment at play right necessarily if anything is god-like then trivially it follows that it has literally every single property whatsoever because the atheist thinks that being godlike is an impossible property nothing can instantiate that property and so it is Trivially true that necessarily everything that has the property of being godlike also has the property of being p for

any property p right this is a conditional with a necessarily false antecedent and so what that means is that the conditional as a whole is necessarily true no matter what you plug in for the consequent prop and so what that means is that being godlike entails being super duper vicious and super duper horrendous and also wanting to Torture people as much as you can wanting to maximize torture it entails all of these sorts of things and so in that case no that's not a positive property and moreover if we keep in mind a2 and if

we accept yeah fine it's a condition on positive properties that they entail only positive properties well then of course no atheist is going to accept this we already know given modal ontological argument considerations that the atheist doesn't Grant that being godlike is possible they actually think it's impossible but in that case it's going to entail literally every single other property including negative properties and so no given a2 it's not going to be a positive property so no atheist i think should be willing to grant a3 and they are perfectly well within their epistemic rights in

rejecting it as i pointed out again whether or not you think this argument succeeds is going to be Entirely a function of whether or not you are already a theist you go to my four ontological arguments in 12 minutes because i explain the basics of girdle's ontological argument and the basic thrust of my objection uh which i've sort of been articulating here so the basic idea here and i'm simplifying a bit for ease of exposition is as follows so note this is an important note a property p entails another property q just in case necessarily

there is Nothing that exemplifies p but fails to exemplify q okay so here's the argument one perfections don't entail imperfections two the property being a necessarily existing perfect being is a perfection three so the property being a necessarily existing perfect being is possibly exemplified that follows from one and two well why does it follow from one or two of you my best well suppose the property being a necessarily Existing perfect being is not possibly exemplified that is suppose that the conclusion there is false well that implies that the property in question entails everything every property

including any imperfection right which contradicts premise one that perfections don't entail imperfections so if premise one is true you can actually get that in conjunction with premise two that premise three is true now uh why does the impossible exemplification of being A necessarily existing perfect being why does that entail every property well because if p for some property p if that's not possibly exemplified that is if it is necessarily the case that p is not exemplified well then obviously it is necessarily the case that there is nothing that exemplifies p but that also fails doing

them by q for any queue any arbitrary queue you want if there cannot be anything that exemplifies p well then obviously there cannot be anything that Both exemplifies p but also is such that it fails to exemplify q for any queue precisely because there cannot be anything that exemplifies p suppose as such and that applies to any property q whatsoever including imperfections and so if the property being a necessarily existing perfect being were impossible well then it would entail everything including imperfections but by premise two the property being a necessarily existing perfect being is a

perfection And remember by premise one perfections don't entail imperfections so you can actually infer that the property being necessarily existing perfectly is possibly exemplified but here's premise four so it's possible that there's a necessarily existing perfect being right to say that the property being necessarily existing perfect being is possibly explicit is just to say that there's some possible world in which something exemplifies that and the only Thing that examines it is obviously necessarily this incredibly being so it's possible there's some possible world where there's a necessarily existing performance being followed by s5 that there's a

necessarily existing perfect being i don't find this argument convincing i don't premise one is supposed to be either a definitional truth or else undergraduate by the intuition that if something is truly a perfection well then there shouldn't be Some tag along property that is imperfect or something like that you know that would just seem to compromise the initial property status as a perfection if it is accompanied by some kind of imperfection if it thereby makes something perfect in addition to making it perfect for now so uh supposedly grant premise one i'm fine with granting from

this one that perfections only entail perfection i do have some hesitations for the same reasons that i Just articulated in particular when i consider love manifesting virtues they seem in some sense be positive and yet they seem to entail various properties that are not themselves positive someone might try to say okay well no the property of being courageous is not itself positive maybe that's a complex property and it's composed of various more fundamental properties and maybe you can disentangle those such that some of them are positive and Others are negative and that can really account

for the intuition that courage is positive so someone might try to evade that point there but anyway my point is just that there are some points of hesitancy here for me with respect to that premise that positive properties only entail other positive properties that would just seem to compromise the initial property status as a perfection if it is accompanied by some kind of imperfection if it thereby makes Something perfect in addition to making it perfect for now so uh supposedly grandparents one i'm fine with granting premise one that perfections only entail perfections or at least

perfections don't entail imperfections i mean a lot of people say that that's definitely true like they just mean by perfection that it doesn't detail any perfection so it's a condition on being a perfection but it doesn't deal in perfection but i say upon granting this we can see that No atheist should be convinced by premise two at all for an atheist already thinks that the existence of a necessarily existing perfect being is impossible right remember the modern logical argument if the atheist granted the possibility of a necessarily existing perfect being then they thereby be committed

to its actuality so and thus no one who isn't already convinced that atheism is false should grant from us too and thus no one who doesn't Already accept the conclusion should be premised too in short the argument should not convince any atheist since by atheists lights the property being a necessarily existing perfect being is impossible and hence entails everything including imperfections given that perfections cannot entail imperfections it obviously follows that being a necessarily existing person being is not a perfection contra premise two okay so that's my rundown of the basics of Ontological arguments so basically

you would already antecedently have to be a theist in order to be in a position to justifiably accept that the property of being god-like or the property of being a necessarily existing perfect being or whatever is positive so for purposes of space and time i'm actually not going to go through gram opie's portion of his chapter here on The gerdelian ontological argument although i highly recommend you guys check it out it's not very long it spans from look the bottom of age 58 through 59 through 60 and then the very very top of page 61.

so anyway i recommend checking that out and and we can skip it because abby makes basically the exact same criticism that i just made in the video that i just played it's basically the exact same criticism Uh go this argument which has just depends on three axioms uh if you want to move on to this next slide so there you have some resources on google's argument so bruce's improvement uh just depends on those three actually we have the exact same worries afflicting a two here one might think that intuitively there are some positive properties that

entail other properties that are not themselves positive but in any case the point for present purposes is that once You recognize this sort of entailment claim here once we already grant this then no one who doesn't already accept that something necessarily exists would ever grant that necessary existence is positive because if they don't accept that necessary existence is even possible if they think that it's impossible well then clearly necessary existence is going to entail literally every property as we've seen this is just the principle of explosion And in that case necessary existence wouldn't and indeed

couldn't be positive because it would entail everything and so it would entail properties that are not themselves positive and so necessary existence wouldn't be positive so what this means is that you're really only in a position to justifiably accept a3 if you already antecedently accept that something necessarily exists these arguments do nothing to move the dialectic they don't Give people any reason to accept their conclusions whether or not you accept one of the axioms that goes into them is entirely a function of whether or not you antecedently accept their conclusions so uh which jointly entail

the theorem there is a necessarily existing being that essentially has p which is all positive property so there you go so go to gold's main insight is that oh we can prove that god Possibly exists uh by this by this idea that he has all positive perfections nadal follows suit with his own argument of course you can prove anything as long as you have the desired axioms and of course as i've argued here we've been given no reason to accept what has been proved precisely because whether or not one accepts one of the axioms is

entirely a function of whether one is already antecedently committed to the very conclusion in question and this Is his celebrated middle protection argument which is in the black well companion he has two definitions here uh property is a perfection only if it's necessarily better to have than not uh something has a property of being supreme if only if it's impossible for something to be greater and impossible for there to be something else then which is not greater okay so from these two definitions uh he has this argument a property is a professional only if This

negation is not perfections entail only perfections the property of being supremely perf uh being supreme is a perfection so it's possible that supreme being exists and he derives four in good alien fashion from one through three uh so one yes which is why this suffers the exact same problem that we've been facing no one who doesn't already grant the existence of some a supreme being would ever grant that a supreme being is a perfection if We hold of course that it's a condition on being perfections that they entail only perfections why is that well because

anyone who doesn't think that there is a supreme being given modal ontological argument considerations thinks that there cannot be such a thing and if there cannot be such a thing well then trivially the property of being supreme entails absolutely everything including imperfections and so it wouldn't be a Perfection per premise too so again this does nothing to make any headway in the dispute between theists and atheists and morvert gives agnostics absolutely no reason to accept the conclusion one through three jointly entail four five if it is possible that supreme being exists the supreme being exists

six so supreme being exists what's noteworthy about nadal's argument is that it doesn't depend on s5 or b uh like the other items do he instead Appeals to what's called the barking formula in modal logic which is that if possibly something has f then there's something that pop that is possibly f see that that seems to me just absurd so consider the property of essentially being a unicorn i think it's somewhat plausible that unicorns are possible they're metaphysically possible evolution presumably could have gone such a way that there are equine-like beings so like Horse-like beings

that have a single horn okay that's uh that's all i'm gonna define as a unicorn so it's possible that there's something with the property of essentially being a unicorn does it follow that there actually is something which is such that that thing is possibly essentially a unicorn no no it doesn't Right so i take it that firstly there are no things which are such that they are essentially unicorns because there are no unicorns secondly suppose that there is something that could possibly be essentially a unicorn well then it's actually existent but it's not a unicorn

but then it's not essentially a Unicorn right and it couldn't essentially be a unicorn because to be essentially unicorn is to be such that you cannot exist without being a unicorn and so given that nothing that actually exists is in fact a unicorn it simply follows that nothing that exists could be essentially a unicorn because then it would accidentally be a non-unicorn and hence it's being a Unicorn would likewise be accidental it wouldn't even be essential to it so that's a little bit of a complicated chain of reasoning but if you think through you can

see that this barcan formula is just absurd moreover the barcan formula if true would be necessarily true it's one of these fundamental principles of modal logic but it's just obviously incompatible with traditional theism traditional theism says god could have refrained From creating for instance so go to that world in which in which god doesn't create anything apart from himself that world is just god there existing alone but it's still true in that world that it's possible that something is a human or it's possible that something is a dog from that world right god could still

create those things but it doesn't follow that in that world there actually exists something which is Possibly a dog because suppose that that did follow well in that world the only thing that exists is god and so it would follow that god is possibly a dog okay that's absurd no god is not possibly a dog no that that's just ludicrous again that goes against traditional thesis so if you want to accept the barcan formula okay i mean firstly it's false but secondly if you want to accept it fine But just you're gonna have to get

rid of traditional theism that's the barking formula in kind of a rough way so he derives uh five using the barking formula um and so he concludes that a supreme being exists and if you wanna go to the next slide i'll just show so one thing that's interesting we might think that knowledge of some fact is a perfection so Knowledge of some fact is a perfection i'm going to say a property as a perfection only if it's negation is not i'm gonna say perfections only entail perfections moreover i'm gonna say the property of knowing that

god doesn't exist is a perfection why is that again this is knowledge think about it intuitively right intuitively if you know something right i'm not saying that someone does in fact Know that god doesn't exist and i'm not even saying that god doesn't exist i'm just saying the property of knowing that god doesn't exist is a perfection because after all this is knowledge that's a great making feature to have knowledge right so the property of knowing that god doesn't exist is a perfection and so you can conclude from the fact that perfections entail only perfections

and the property of knowing god doesn't Exist is a perfection you can conclude that it's possible that there's a state of affairs in which someone knows that god doesn't exist but of course knowledge is factive it entails truth so if i was there's a possible state of affairs is there a possible world in which god doesn't in fact exist and of course if god possibly doesn't exist we've been learning throughout this that if possibly god doesn't exist then of course god doesn't Exist and so we have a gerdelian ontological argument for atheism now of course

how are you going to respond to this as a theist hmm maybe you're going to reject that the property of knowing that god doesn't exist is a perfection and why is that well because you're going to go through the exact same reasoning that i just went through earlier you're going to say well no to say that that's a perfection given this Second premise here that perfections entail only perfections to say that the property of knowing that god doesn't exist is a perfection is to basically antecedently grant that the property of knowing that god doesn't exist

is possible but of course no theist would ever grant that that is possible because the grant that that is possible is to grant that god is possibly non-existent which in turn is to grant that god doesn't exist so no One who doesn't already antecedently accept atheism would ever accept my premise there so yes that's the response that the theist should and i think would probably give but then of course that's literally the exact same response that the atheist is giving here with respect to premise three that's the exact same response i've been developing here you

can see that i think that this argument is just so implausible gerdelian ontological arguments more Generally they all seem to suffer from this fundamental problem and we also have this parody argument and the way that the theaters try to get around that it seems the only plausible way for them to get around that is to say no that property is not a perfection or at least we've been given no non-question begging reason to think that is a perfection precisely because to say that it is a perfection is to assume that it's possible but of course

No theist would ever grant that property that knowing that god doesn't exist no theist would ever grant that that's even possible in the first place but similarly no atheist would ever grant that the property of being godlike or the property of being a perfect being or the property of being a supreme being no atheist would ever grant that that's possible in the first place and hence no atheist would ever grant that the property of being supreme is a Perfection it's the same response yo his derivation that's how he does it so premise two there is

the barkin formula bernstein's argument which again is a demonstration of the possibility premise or an attempted one he defines a perfection as a property that in no way detracts from a being's greatness uh but it's compliment does it's opposite does so he has this argument suppose for reductio it's impossible that something Has all perfections if it's impossible that something has all perfections then there is profession that is efficient for not having some other perfection namely the one with which it is inconsistent if a property is sufficient for not having some perfection then that property is

efficient for being imperfect if a property is sufficient for being imperfect then it is not perfection so there is some perfection that is efficient for not having some Perfection falls from one and two so there is some perfection that is sufficient for being imperfect three and five and we have a contradiction here there is some profession that is not a perfection and so that means our starting assumption must be false and so he can conclude possibly something has all perfections right so this argument suffers from essentially the same problem that all the other ones do

because this is a still further version Of the gerdelian type ontological arguments so let's look at premise four we could just take this as conditional or definitional of what a perfection is so if a property is sufficient for being imperfect then it's not a perfection this is equivalent to saying that if a property is a perfection then it doesn't entail imperfections but once again now this is the exact same thing that we've Been seeing it's basically saying well perfections don't entail imperfections or perfections don't entail being imperfect but once you grant that no atheist would

grant that any uniquely divine property is in fact a perfection because we already know per modal ontological argument considerations that the atheist doesn't grant that such properties are even possibly exemplified the atheist doesn't grant that the property of being god is perfect or that The atheist doesn't grant that the property of being god is possible or that the property of being omniscient is possible or that the property of being omnipotent is possible or that whatever we already know that and so we know then in conjunction with four that none of these things are perfections because

again a condition on being a perfection is that it doesn't entail imperfections and yet the atheist thinks that all these various things are impossible and Hence they entail literally everything including imperfections and so the argument is dialectically toothless we're not going to be able to get that any uniquely divine property is a perfection under this and so and so again granting premise 4 this conclusion is going to be basically have nothing to do with god and whether or not you think it has something to do with god is already just going to be a function

of whether you are antecedently Committed to theism or not the non-theist granting for right to say possibly something has all perfections well you already don't think that omniscience is among the perfections you don't think that omnipotence is among the perfections and so on so to say that possibly something has all perfections then for the atheists it's just going to be something like yeah it's possible that there's something which Has the best collection of grape-making properties that there is to be had under an atheistic world view and that's going to be nowhere near god it's going

to be like literally nothing close to god and there's no guarantee that necessary existence is even going to be in there think of it this way given that atheists think that the property of being god the property of being omniscient and so on given that They think that these things are impossible they also think that they entail everything including that they entail that their possessor is imperfect in various ways and that it doesn't have all perfections and so this conclusion here for the atheist right is going to be nowhere near god because the conclusion here

possibly something has all perfections well that clearly couldn't be god Because if it were god again by the atheist lights whatever is god that entails that entails literally everything because it's a necessarily uninstantiated property and so it entails that the thing doesn't have all perfections and so then this thing would have all perfections and not have all perfections which is absurd and so it can't be god right and so what this means is that whether or not you think that this conclusion gets you to god or Anything near god is already going to be a

function of your antecedent commitments to theism or atheism these guardian style arguments are basically working on a subtle trick i'm not saying that it's an intentional manipulation or anything like that an intentional trick but they are all just relying again on basically two claims firstly this claim about property entailment that a perfection does not entail imperfections where Perfection only entails other perfections and secondly that something like the property of being god or at least some property that is only unique necessarily unique to god is a perfection those two alone suffice to capture the basic thrust

of pretty much all of these gerdelin ontological arguments once we admit that it is a condition on being a perfection that it entails only other perfections no atheist would ever Grant that any divine property is a perfection because no atheist would ever grant that any divine property is even possible in the first place and it would be a condition given one it would be a condition on being a perfection that it is possible in the first place all of this in essence still boils down to whether or not you think that god or at least

some uniquely divine property is possible in the first place and we've Already seen that you're making no headway in the dispute by simply saying oh it is possible and of course no atheist would ever grant that god or any uniquely divine property is indeed possible in the first place there's one argument left for ontological so let's get that right now let's wait okay uh yeah so here's the uh for the resources for that one from bernstein okay then this one is the most recent From what i understand yeah yeah pretty much and nagasawa's main insight

is this it's that we shouldn't start with separate ideas of what it means to be omniscient what it means to be omnipotent or morally perfect and so on and then add all those concepts together to get god he says instead uh we should just define god as the being that has the maximum consistent set of Knowledge power goodness and so on so whatever being has that maximal naturally consistent set that is god uh so he defines two properties real maximal excellence which is having a maximal consistent set of knowledge power and goodness and real maximal

greatness which is real maximal excellence in every possible world and he has this argument it runs exactly like planning his argument except that we Avoid the problem of whether or not the concept of god is logically consistent because that's just built into the the argument now there's a possible rule that's real maximally real maximality a real national grade being exists that's just now no this is something that's actually always quite triggered me about nagasau's argument there are several problems of the argument itself but firstly nagasawa defines this being as a being which has the maximal

consistent Collection of great making features but consistency isn't sufficient for possibility it's logically consistent to say that water is h3o there's nothing in the abstract logical form or structure of that sentence which is either of the form p and not p or entails a statement of the form p and not p but it's a further question as to whether or not it's metaphysically possible so it doesn't matter at all whether or not you're defining this being as having the Maximal consistent set of grape making features what matters is whether or not it has the maximal

composible collection of great making features so all you really need to do is modify wherever he just said consistent and insert composible but that's just one thing that has always extremely bothered me about this maximal god approach sort of thing this premise here actually doesn't follow if you're defining a maximally great being as one with Maximal consistent because the mere fact that it's great making features all consistent doesn't entail that there is a possible world a metaphysically possible world in which such a being exists that would only be true if you defined it as a

maximal composible collection in any case though i still think this is quite implausible the reason is because why should we think that this maximal impossible collection of properties is Anything better than like a super virtuous embodied sentient organism or something like that in fact unless one antecedently assumes that naturalism is false one can't rule that out so yet again the argument isn't going to be at all convincing to naturalists one would only be inclined to accept that the being at which it arrives is a divine like being if one is antecedently a theist moreover premise

two there is also Deeply questionable why think necessary existence is found in a collection that is overall better than absolutely every single other collection of properties there could be that include a mere contingent existence again the naturalist will probably reject this right if there's a naturalistically acceptable necessary being then it's going to be something like a universal wave function or maybe a collection of particles or maybe some quantum state or Something maybe the initial state of the universe or whatever it's going to be something like that but that's going to be nowhere near as great

as someone like gandhi or mother teresa or josh rasmussen or etcetera etcetera etcetera nelson mandela or whatever pick your favorite person i'm going to put in josh rastas in there josh rafterson is still much greater much more valuable than this necessarily existing quantum field Or whatever and so even if necessary existence is a great making feature why think why think that necessary existence is going to be found in the greatest composable collection of great making features no there's actually arguably there's going to be a better collection of great making features namely the ones that josh

rasmussen exemplifies that he instantiates but a Necessary existence isn't going to be among them one cannot conclude from the possibility of a maximally composible set of great making features had by some being you're not going to be able to get from its possibility to its actuality because in order to do that you need necessary existence and yet it's not at all clear that necessary existence would be included in the greatest maximally compostable set of making features and it would seem as though Only those who already interestingly reject something like naturalism would ever be inclined to

accept that here's a way to illustrate nagasaki's point when i was in middle school i i played i'm a big wrestling fan progressing fan and i played this uh i forget which one was out there i think was just called like smackdown or something but the smackdown game you could create your own character and you could make him super fast you could make Him super strong you could make him super agile uh it's super tough he couldn't really move around much and he was just play player mode and then you would decrease strength in tandem

with increasing agility speed and so forth until you reach some maximum of each of the individual characteristics uh for an ideal character so that's basically what nagasawa is doing here he's saying rather than maximize each individual attribute uh let's just bring them all Down to wherever they're at wherever they need to be to all be sort of mutually consistent seems to me like the question then would be like would that being whatever that being is what that being exists necessarily that is definitely one question uh which is the second criticism that i just raised exists

necessarily yeah maybe my question would be well yeah so chad almost glossed over that but that was a really good point from cameron Again it's crucial that you have necessary existence within this collection but the naturalist again is probably going to think that no the greatest compossible collection of great making features is not going to include necessary existence it's going to be something like josh rasmussen or maybe some other sentient being which is like super duper good but not necessarily existent what if the magically consistent set of Attributes is just really unimpressive yeah this is

also a good point right why i think it's anything like god rather than i think he's going to point out like some like zeus-like character or maybe even some like super virtuous embodied sentient organism again like josh rasmussen what if it's just like uh like what if it amounts to like no more than like a zeus type being what if it even again the natural things is probably gonna amount to nothing more Than something like a really good embodied sentient organism or something like that um would we consider that god at that point and i

asked eugene about this actually in preparation and he said well it's on the atheist it's on the critic to show that the maximally consistent set of attributes would be a very unimpressive non-god-like being no it's not nagasawa is the one here offering the positive argument for god's Existence the onus is on nagasawa who's offering the positive argument to give us some reason to think that this being would be godlike after all he's the one claiming to give an argument for god's existence all i need to do is say no here are some other epistemic possibilities

why think that you can rule those out give me some reason to rule this out it'd be absurd for him to turn around and say oh no you need to give me some reason to rule those out Like what no you're the one offering a positive argument here you're the one trying to justify god's existence you're the one who needs to rule out these other possibilities because if you don't then your argument fails your argument fails as an argument for god's existence it'd be equally compatible with there being these other just mundane great beings like

josh rasmussen or something so anyway no this is a burning shifting maneuver it is an illicit Burden-shifting maneuver the onus is on nagasawa to show that this thing would be like god the onus is not on the detractor to show why it wouldn't be like god design arguments consider a banana okay just kidding uh we have aquinas's fifth way the first thing that i want to say here is to see my video arguments for classical theism part one out of two i give an extended critical examination of Both loads of arguments for classical theism in

that video as well as part two out of two now you might ask well what about that three-part series on arguments against classical theism some of which i'm defending but others of which i am harshly criticizing well that's a work in progress i haven't forgotten about it i just have to do a ton of research for the next ones including reading all up on impassability and so on just give me Some time eventually i'll get there but in the meantime of course i'm producing this sort of content let's just listen to chad explain aquinas's fifth

way twice his fifth way whatever has ends or goals is either intelligent or is directed by intelligence efficient causes in nature have ends or goals and work together towards the goal of harmony and order three efficient Causes in nature are not intelligent so definition causes in nature are directed by intelligence so i will say that premise one just by my light seems implausible suppose we are realists about biological function so various organs have real objective mind independent functions so for instance maybe it's the function of the heart to pump blood or something like that well

The first thing to say is that that's perfectly consistent with there being no intelligence behind it perhaps evolutionary history is principally determinative of function or perhaps we have a naturalistic neo-aristotelian view on which the ends or goals are dictated by or follow from the essence or nature of the thing in question with no appeal to intelligence necessary so anyway premise one just seems false to me you could easily have ends or goals In the sense of a kind of directedness toward a specific effect that isn't due to some kind of intelligence governing it more generally

my main problem for the argument can be cast in terms of a dilemma by ends or goals we either mean a mere dispositional directedness towards something or else a sense that like definitionally implies some kind of intention behind them if it's the latter then i think premise Two here is clearly false no efficient causes in nature don't have those kinds of ends or goals and no naturalist would ever grant that but under the first sense i think premise one is then false the mere fact that something has a disposition towards something doesn't entail that like

there's some sort of intelligence behind it no just given its nature it's disposed toward this particular effect right given the nature of salt and i can give you i can give You a chemical explanation of this given the nature of salt it has a disposition to dissolve when placed in water right and so there's some sort of directedness toward dissolving once placed in water so it's a kind of disposition towards that thing this doesn't require there to be some mind behind it or there's some intelligence that's like directing the salt to like to dissolve when

it's in water no so anyway i just find premise one at least implausible moreover i find Premise too questionable i don't even think efficient causation implies dispositional directedness there are lots of perfectly coherent views on which there's efficient causation but there aren't dispositions secondly efficient causation certainly doesn't imply intentional directness i don't think it implies dispositional directedness but nor do i think it implies any intentional directedness that is something which when the Efficient cause produces its effect somehow is intending that or governing it in some way that is intelligent the final thing that i want

to say is that the conclusion for is actually compatible with various atheistic views it's probably not compatible with naturalistic views but it's compatible with various atheistic views for example an intelligent but morally indifferent creator as well as infinitely many other non-theistic views But anyway let's continue we have a simplified version which is just that uh next slide intelligence underlying teleology there's irreducible genealogy imminent to the natural world and all throughout the natural world so intelligent underlying natural world okay right i mean i also again this is going to suffer from a lot of the same

problems design and biology uh let's begin with the origin of organic life now at this point in cameron's stream Chad started making some really wild claims i myself was going to go on a tangent with respect to those claims but i found someone else who did a really nice tangent for me so that i don't have to go on the tangent so anyway i'm going to be playing this video it's called significantly less than 100 arguments for god it's from this channel that i haven't even heard of them before seeing this but um and i'm

also not endorsing this video i am endorsing the clip that I'm going to be playing for you but i'm not endorsing the video itself design and biology uh let's begin with the origin of organic life i don't know about you cameron when i was in high school they were still teaching the miller experiment yes in the same way that they teach about pasteur's experiment which is even older almost like teaching about the first groundbreaking experiment that led to a whole new field of research is an Important step in teaching how we got to the scientific

ideas that we have today the miller experiment oh let's see if i remember it is it's always a good sign when someone is trying to refute something that they can't even remember there's an experiment the main guy was named miller but he had some solution that they thought resembled like prebiotic soup uh of of earth's early atmosphere i don't think Now i don't i have no clue if i was taught it but now i remember hearing about it and so what he did is just basically shoot uh like bolts of electricity into this pre-violent suit

and he was able to synthesize amino acids and this was touted as being this groundbreaking groundbreaking experiment that is a clue to how life originated they simulated what they thought was the early earth environment and discovered that under Plausible prebiotic conditions amino acids can form this wasn't just touted as being a groundbreaking experiment it was a groundbreaking experiment it was a completely successful experiment and when the sealed vials were examined decades later with more sensitive equipment the scientists were able to identify 14 amino acids compared to miller's original five and on top of that there

was a sister experiment run also by miller around the same time Whose results were never published but its vials were also sealed and a modern examination yielded 22 amino acids from that one many with attach hydroxyl groups which would make them more susceptible to reacting and developing into an even larger diversity of molecules as time goes on so yes they got the early earth atmosphere wrong but they demonstrated that amino acids can form naturally and our more recent re-examination has demonstrated a Certain amount of stability in the resulting acids and since we have also found

amino acids that have formed naturally in some pretty harsh conditions as well like on meteorites it is now well-established science that amino acids can form naturally and this well-established science had its beginnings in the miller yuri experiment which you seem to be implying is somehow irrelevant uh which has since just been completely Abandoned you know what at the beginning of the stream they were making a big deal about how they're using peer-reviewed publications as their sources for all of these arguments and you can find more information in the literature and cameron was mentioning how they've

been preparing for this presentation for months now you'd think that in such a well-prepared presentation where they pride themselves on their use of peer-reviewed literature They would have at least spent some of the time in scientific literature when it's relevant as well as the philosophical literature because the five seconds that it would have taken to google miller yuri modern research would have taken you straight to a paper that was published in my my favorite journal pinas in 2017 which shows that a miller urey style experiment can produce rna nucleobases in the future please do some

very basic research before speaking Definitively about how useless one of the most groundbreaking experiments of the 20th century was i'm pretty sure he's trying to set up a life can't come from non-life therefore god style argument right now but let's just think for a moment can we really trust someone's scientific opinion on whether or not simple life could develop from the chemistry of the early earth when they aren't even passingly familiar with the history of origin of life research Anyway we have an argument for in biology from from organic life given what we know complex

organic life in the universe could not have originated naturalistically um if given what we know complex organic ironic life could not have originated naturalistically it's reasonable to believe that it originated supernaturalistically so it's reasonable to believe that complex organic life originated supernaturalistically so premise one Here is ambiguous between two readings first it could be we don't know how complex organic life could have originated naturalistically that's one reading the second reading is that we do know that complex organic life could not have originated naturalistically now under that first understanding premise one is true but premise two

is just obviously false it doesn't follow from the fact that we don't currently Know how complex organic life could have originated naturalistically it doesn't follow from that it's reasonable to believe that it originates supernaturalistically we also don't know currently what the precise naturalistic causes are of autism or dark matter and so on but that clearly doesn't license us to conclude that it's reasonable to think that these things are somehow supernaturally brought about no that's just absurd so under the first reading Premise two is obviously false but under the second reading of premise one then premise

one is obviously false no we don't know that complex organic life couldn't have originated naturalistically if we do know that publish your results you would become famous in the scientific community publish your results in the journal nature or something go do it collect your nobel prize so anyway i think under either plausible Interpretation of this first premise this argument is just so utterly implausible now i will say also that this all just somewhat makes god look incompetent it's like god made a system with various purposes in mind for example to harbor intelligent life and yet

he did such a bad job that he had to supernaturalistically intervene to make sure that intelligent life can develop like it's as if i wanted to make an ice Skating arena i built it and i was like oh crap the water in this arena won't freeze since i built the arena in such a way that the arena is 35 degrees rather than below 32 degrees so i had to go out and like buy ice sheets to intervene and implant in the system that just seems to show like a lack of foresight i don't know it

seems to indicate at least an incompetent god that isn't necessarily an argument it's just something that's Always struck me as odd about this sort of thing it's like seriously god's designing this like wonderful universe and so on but like he needs to supernaturalistically intervene to like zap life into it like come on but in any case let's continue and so we have some resources here there's a classic book uh faxton bradley olsen the mystery of life's origin uh which is dated and meyer's signature and cell in some respects isn't it Before there was life there's

divine intervention argument now for this you need to sort of begin by imagining earth before there was life now you can run the argument so just imagine earth no life and now let's snag given that god intervenes to produce life on earth there's no chance at all that there will be no benefit there'll be no life on earth the probability of the content god intervenes to produce life on earth and life does not occur is Zero okay that seems true two if god does not intervene to produce life on earth the probability that life will

occur here is very low it is just as reasonable to bet that god will intervene to produce life on earth as that he won't the subjective probability here is around 50 50. let's just take that for argument pretty pretty conservative assumption oh that is the most oh that is so impossible It's a conservative estimate the subjective probability maybe maybe it's a conservative estimate for chad's probability but for anyone who isn't even a theist and even those who are like oh my gosh there'll be life on earth uh we know that because there is life on

earth so it's very likely that god will intervene to produce life on earth it's probably argument for god's producing life on earth this is painful so this is a classic case of Likelihood ratio rigging so imagine that i argue as follows well given that god intervenes to bring about susan's winning the lottery there is no chance at all that susan fails to win the lottery if god does not intervene to bring about susan's winning the lottery well then the probability that susan wins the lottery is extremely low suppose she has like one ticket out of

hundreds of billions of tickets in a fair lottery And then i go on to say oh well it's just as reasonable to bet that god intervenes to bring about susan's winning the lottery as that he doesn't but susan does in fact win the lottery we suppose that she's the winner so it's very likely that god intervenes to bring about susan's winning the lottery no this is just absurd yes of course we can rig a hypothesis so that the likelihood ratio significantly favors it yeah of course if your hypothesis is that god Intervenes to produce life

on earth well then yeah the likelihood ratio is definitely going to be favoring that hypothesis over pretty much any other hypothesis but this is only done at the cost of making the prior probability of your hypothesis ludicrously unlikely this is assuming that god exists god has a character which leads him to desire to intervene desire to produce a universe and indeed produce a universe including Earth and indeed not only including earth but producing life on earth all of these claims you're building in so much immodesty into your hypothesis why why does god have this particular

desire to intervene and produce life on earth oh maybe because life is super duper valuable but like why on earth it could be any other planet he could have non-physical beings he could have whole concoctions of different forms of life in different universes and so on so like The prior probability among this like infinite array of possible ways that god could bring about the concoction of values only a small sliver of those is actually god's intervening to produce life on earth so even if it's super duper valuable and god's desires track value why would you

think that god intervening to produce life on earth is any more probable than any of these other infinitely many other Scenarios that god could produce that involve that similarly involve either life of some kind but a very different form of life on a very different forms of planets in a different very form a very different universe or perhaps sentient life which isn't even physical maybe it's in the mind of god or maybe it's electrons in love with different psychophysical laws there's a whole panoply of different ways that god could Produce relevantly similar values again i'm

not saying these questions are unanswerable obviously but again those answers are just building in more theses into your hypothesis you're making it more and more complex and you're driving its prior probability lower and lower and lower so i think really premise three is just absurd honestly there are infinitely many other ways god could secure the relevant goods and so it's Not as reasonable to bet that god will intervene to produce life on earth as that he won't firstly this is assuming that god exists as opposed to the boatloads of other non-theistic worldviews of which naturalistic

materialism isn't the only one there are boatloads including ones that include something like god but that isn't theistic so you might have an aesthetic deism hypothesis that paul draper develops you have both Loads of other hypotheses so even among those hypotheses with god in them it's going to be a very small fraction of the probability space and even within that probability space wherein god exists in only a small sliver of that small fraction of the probability space will there be worlds in which god intervenes to produce life on earth because in lots of those other

worlds within this small portion of the probability space in Which god exists he either doesn't create anything at all or he just creates a physical universe with no life or that life that he does create is super duper different and it's on different sorts of planets and so on or maybe he creates various different fundamental particles and has different psychophysical laws where they all enter in different relationships with one another and they sing praises to god or maybe he produces Just non-physical minds that are in some sort of non-physical realm that engage in relationships with

one another and so on so anyway no the hypotheses with god in them are only a small fraction of the probability space the total probability space of hypotheses and moreover the ones that have got in them it's only a small slice of those that include god intervening to produce life on earth so design in biology we have organic structures as an Analogical argument analogical arguments in general are pretty weak some things in nature resemble human artifacts two human artifacts are the product of intentional design three so we should infer that things in nature that reasonable

human artifacts are also products of intentional design if there are things in nature that are the products of intentional design god exists so god exists and as an analogical argument analogical arguments In general are pretty weak uh so it's not difficult to poke a lot of holes in this as you or at least as you can gather that hume does but what more careful scholars on on paley's design argument have pointed out is that a more faithful version of paley's argument isn't really analogical it's deductive okay so that's our after version let's look at the

number 35 um before we go on to number 36 because this is Apparently an argument in its own right number 35 even though it's vulgar and he seems to be saying that no it's not very strong so um but anyway let's still examine it i i think evolution probably does serve as a defeater for the inference from one and two to three evolution provides us an explanatory rich exceptionally empirically confirmed account of the appearance of design notice the Appearance of design without actually invoking a designer itself to account for the appearance of design in other

words we have a perfectly naturalistically acceptable explanatory rich exceptionally empirically confirmed account of various things in nature that resemble human artifacts and yet the account there doesn't require a deucing anything like an intentional designer so i think evolution arguably does Provided a feeder for the inference from one and two to three moreover i think parody arguments abound i can say some things in nature resemble incompetent or evil human artifacts there are certain parasites that sting their caterpillars they to paralyze them and then they lay their eggs inside of them and then of course the eggs

develop and grow and so on all the while the caterpillar is just paralyzed and then of course the eggs Hatch and then the wasp babies or whatever the larvae or whatever they're called they eat their way out not only of their eggs but also of the caterpillar so they eat the caterpillar alive and they burst through its skin later on so yeah lovely isn't it no so some things in nature resemble incompetent or evil human artifacts this this whole system of predation where the norm is either like starving or somehow being frustrated or just trying

to Survive and not get eaten alive by some other predator lots of things in nature actually resemble incompetent or evil human artifact these are the sorts of things that humans do when they create weapons and so on to harm each other so i've only covered the evil thing but incompetent things as well so consider the recurrent laryngeal nerve it goes down and like instead of the distance between the larynx and the brain which is where it's supposed to go just from The brain to the larynx the distance is only something like what a few inches

or something like that uh but no it actually goes down down down into the chest around an artery and then up up up up up up back up into where your larynx is now in the case of us that's not much of a detour but in the case of giraffes i think it's something like a 30 feet detour So this is something in nature that resembles an incompetent human artifact some human artifacts are just ludicrously inefficient and moreover incompetent or evil human artifacts are the product of incompetent or evil intentional design so given those two

premises that i just gave in my parody argument we can conclude via the same inference rule here we should infer that things in nature that resemble incompetent or evil Human artifacts are also the products of incompetent or evil intentional design and then the next premise if there are things in nature that are the products of incompetent or evil intentional design then since god is the designer of nature god is at least partly incompetent or evil and of course if that's true then theism is false hence theism is false so we seem to have an equally

powerful argument against theism on our hands here Moreover even if we granted that various design-like features of organisms in nature in the natural world provide some confirmatory evidence for theism there are various more specific facts about design-like features of of the natural world that strongly favor naturalism over theism so for instance there is teleological evil where it seems as though the very design plan of some organisms includes causing some sort of languishing or some sort of profound Suffering in other organisms predators come to mind parasites come to mind viruses come to mind and so on

so various more specific facts about the teleological directness that we find in nature seem very surprising on theism compared to naturalism even if the general fact of teleological directedness in nature and complexity and so on favors theism over naturals and which i've argued it doesn't seem to but what more careful scholars on on Paley's design argument have pointed out is that a more faithful version of his argument isn't really analogical it's deductive and it'll go like this if x is designed like then x can only be the product of intentional design some things in nature

are designed like so those things are products of intentional design yeah so i'd probably just reject one i think it's probably false if x is designed like the next can only be the Product of intentional design no we can give you a perfectly coherent naturalistic explanation citing evolution by natural selection and so on for the emergence of things are designed like that doesn't require intentional design moreover consider snowflakes they're designed like but to say that they can only be the products of intentional design like no unless you think that god is like Tinkering with the

clouds and so on to make those of course the very question i issue though is whether or not there is a designer so a contemporary version a defense of paley would be michael b he style arguments from irreducibly complex organisms and such organ oh my goodness such arguments appealing to irreducible complexity and intelligent design have been subjected to immense critical scrutiny from evolutionary biologists and so on and in fact there was a court Case on this and prophet they brought in professional biologists and so on and the jury found that no actually this is kind

of pseudoscience so i don't really take intelligent design all that seriously but i tend to focus more on philosophy than this sort of thing in general and at least feasibly we should defer to relevant expert consensus when we ourselves are not among the experts and in this case the expert consensus really Is against irreducible complexity and so on that's a pretty significant weight of a reason to be very skeptical of those sorts of considerations but anyway let's listen to bruce's analogical argument this is analogical design argument okay so bruce has this argument dna is like

an intentionally designed computer program uh intentionally designed computer programs have intelligent designers so uh if dna is like an intentionally Designed computer program it too probably has intelligent designer so dna probably has an intelligent designer and he's got a lot of interesting arguments in defense of this argument i haven't looked at this source and so i'm guessing that he addresses the objections that i'm going to be raising but i will still raise them nonetheless because i'm just giving a commentary based on my epistemic vantage point So i think premise three is arguably defeated by evolution

evolution gives us a perfectly coherent naturalistic account and an explanatory powerful naturalistic account or at least it can be supplemented with a kind of naturalistic account wherein you don't deduce an intelligent designer behind the process wherein you can get the appearance of things being designed including the appearance of things being designed like a computer program the Very fact that this is an explanatory powerful and naturalistic friendly option on the table by my lights gives us at least an undercutting defeater for premise three and of course we have a parity argument similar to the one that

i offered earlier i can say dna is like an evilly or incompetently intentionally designed computer program like birth defects childhood cancer yeah that is certainly like an incompetent or evenly intentionally Designed computer program imagine a computer program which is such that when you run it on your computer your child gets brain cancer so dna is like an incompetently or evenly intentionally designed computer program and moreover incompetently or evenly designed computer programs have incompetent or evil intelligent designers and so third premise if dna is like an incompetently or evenly intentionally designed computer program then it too

Probably has an incompetent or evil intelligent designer so we can conclude that dna probably has an incompetent or evil intelligent designer but that's true then theism is false since according to theism the designer of dna is god and god is not in any respect incompetent or evil so it follows that theism is false so yet again we seem to have a parody argument which is just as plausible as this one if not more plausible that delivers the Falsity of theism and design and biology and here we have information information here just means specified complexity a

complex arrangement or a pattern that uh that has function or that has meaning okay and the argument would go information is inherent through the building blocks of life so it's not so it's not like proof said that that there's something like information no this argument says no there is information and inherits the Building blocks of life information is the product of intelligence if information is inherent to the building blocks of life then the building blocks of life themselves are the byproduct of intelligence so the building blocks of life are the byproduct of intelligence and it

just depends upon what we mean by information if we just mean and i know he gave a number of different meanings for it he put out there like specified complexity He mentioned functions and he also mentioned meaning none of these are equivalent they're not interchangeable so how we assess this argument depends on what we mean by information if we just mean features of something that certain functions take as input to produce output then premise one is plausible there is in some sense input to certain functions that let's say ribosomes perform and they provide an output

together with Trna and other sorts of things that go into transcription and translation particularly as i was just talking about a translation so premise one would then be plausible but premise three is just false for there to be ribosomes and for ribosomes to perform this function to take some input value perform some operation and then output something that doesn't require there to be intelligence not at all at the very least no atheist would Ever grant that that requires intelligence but of course if we mean something like meaningful or interpreted features of symbols then yeah premise

three is probably true meaning and interpretation do seem to presuppose something like intelligence but then premise one will be false at least by the naturalist slights my point here is just that we don't have anything here that would or should convince Someone who isn't already convinced of theism so i don't think this argument gives anyone any reason to accept theism now the next thing to note is of course evolution i think we can explain why these various sorts of functions which take inputs perform some operation on them and give some output i think you can

have a perfectly coherent naturalist friendly evolutionary explanation of the origin of these sorts of things now of course The first or first collection of rna-like molecules or dna-like molecules of course couldn't have been produced by natural selection but then of course you're starting to get into the origin of life arguments and we've already covered those now for lots of these arguments i'm being intentionally brief because i just don't really take into the intelligent design stuff all that seriously like god can create a universe in which all sorts of beautiful and Complex structures organically and naturally

emerge but oh man that bacteria flagellum that requires god to step in and inject some of his divine juices and so god's over here just like tinkering with bacterial flagella but no no you know those starving children no no help for them it's like okay and building blocks would be things like genes genes expressions proteins dna so let's go to tenets argument from cosmic Teleology and fr tenet he was the richard swinburn of suitable for intelligent moral dissipates almost all swinburne's arguments so we have uh one the universe is conspicuously suitable for intelligent moral beings

in many ways and he has these uh six different ways uh there's just one universe with necessary ingredients for life those ingredients have come together at least in one place on earth to make an environment not just habitable but Conducive to flourishing uh some of those right let's just pause there one a is questionable why i think there's only one universe i mean you can you could say it but you know publish your results right that revolutionize the scientific community yeah so one a is at least questionable i don't think we have sufficient reason to

accept it with respect to 1b yes there's a sense in which the Environment we have it's certainly hospitable and conducive to flourishing in some ways but it's also extremely conducive i would argue far more conducive to languishing languishing predominates 99 of all species have gone extinct and even the species that are extant the norm when you look around is nature red in tooth and claw things ripping each other to shreds things causing suffering to other things Things starving limitations of resources overproduction of offspring such that most offspring die young and so on so i think

it'd be better to say that the environment is more conducive to the languishing of most organic lives and the flourishing of very very few organic lives the lucky few who get to live a long and at least relatively flourishing life those worlds flourishing inhabitants find the world intelligible being Intelligible they also find it beautiful and all these facts together suggest the unfolding of a plan behind which there is purpose of intelligence so all these facts are these are all facts about the universe which well one thing that we should say is if they're a suggestive

of a plan which is doubtful in itself the plan seems to be morally indifferent at the best it seems morally and different given the predominance of languishing as i mentioned so too the Universe is conspicuously suitable for intelligent moral beings in many ways then should be regarded as a theater for the lives of intelligent moral agents designed by god so the universe should be regarded as a theater for the lives of intelligent moral agents designed by god yeah so i guess my question here is why should we accept two of course i know i can

read tenant but my point for this video is that i really haven't been Doing additional research for it additional to what i've already done for the past years or whatever i'm still gonna say why should we accept premise two we can only conclude to god as a designer on our total evidence and it's not at all clear that our total evidence in concert with the priors of theism and atheism supports theism and indeed a lot of the features of the universe of this purported moral theater that was designed for us A lot of the features

of this seem to count against a theistic origin they seem to be conspicuously badly arranged for starters like consider the fact that 99.99999 nine percent of this theater is like a death trap of course that doesn't disprove god's existence of course it's not incompatible with god's existence but of course if for instance you had a father designing a house for the purpose of giving it to his son but then when The sun goes in this house is like as big as these giant mansions and so on but the sun goes in and he can only

stay on the first floor out of the hundred floors and if he even goes to any other floor he dies immediately like we would conclude that something went wrong with the dad or something either it's not a loving dad or the dad is maybe some pulling some prank or trick or something like that because The vast vast vast majority of this uh theater that was supposed to be for the kid is devastatingly inhospitable it's a death trap anywhere the kid goes except for this really small portion of it would suffocate the kid let's say just

as such a mansion is not what we would expect from a perfectly good and effective father with respect to designing a mansion for the sun It seems that this is not at all what we would expect from a perfectly good and perfectly efficient god if he's designing a theater for the lives of intelligent moral agents so there are various features of the universe not mentioned here that seem to count against a theistic origin you can pick out certain evidential chips and say oh well those might favor theism over naturals but of course you have to

look at your total evidence in any case Here's how i think this argument could be improved you could just say that theism better predicts a universe conspicuously suitable for intelligent moral beings compared to naturalism such that the data in question evidently confirms theism over naturalism and that isn't implausible i guess a remaining worry is why i think theism predicts this or at least predicts it better than naturalism as i've pointed out elsewhere in this video it seems god could secure The relevant goods in infinitely many other ways and the other remarkable thing about this argument

is he was ahead of his time in that it presupposes compatibility with evolution almost no one prior to tenant was making design arguments that presuppose compatibility with evolution fine tune arguments so we have fundamental constants and laws of the universe yeah so we have examples of the fundamental constant laws of universe fine structure Constant electromagnetic interaction alpha gravitation uh the weak nuclear force proton electron mass ratio density and speed of the expansion of the universe examples of fine-tuning which i'm sure most of your viewers will be very familiar with so maybe better rather than to

go through these examples they can just pause it later and look at them and we have several different ways we can run a Fine-tuning argument based on this data one would be bioluminescent and okay note that these are all just various different versions of essentially the same argument basically so they're not going to be independent of one another and so they're not going to satisfy what you would need to satisfy in order to run the stuff that they run at the end the fine tuning of the universe is either due to a chance physical necessity

or design it's not due to Either chance or necessity so it's due to design and that of course is uh craig's favorite way of formulating the argument which is okay so firstly i'm going to say premise one is a false trichotomy perhaps it's due to some disposition on the part of a fundamental naturalistic reality this is neither chance nor physical necessity nor design or perhaps it's due to metaphysical necessity that's neither Chance nor physical necessity nor design and so on so i think premise one is just false but anyway set that aside i would argue

that premise two is under-motivated of course the reason why he rules out chance is because he as in craig the reason why he rules out chances because that would be enormously improbable so he argues but one thing to say here is is it i'm going to point out later some of erin Lucas's work in particular his paper naturals and fine-tuning and flies the various probability calculations within the fine-tuning data it seems are based on keeping the law structures constant and just simply varying the constants that's what is the epistemically illuminated region and yes arguably in

the epistemically illuminated region only a very small proportion of the universes within that epistemically Illuminated region can support life but it's a far too hasty generalization to go from that to saying that all universes whatsoever even when you vary the structure of those laws would likewise have a very small proportion of life permitting universes to life forbidding universes that's just a far too ac generalization and yet that's the fraction that you would need to calculate it seems in order to run The improbability style argument here moreover when you're rejecting this chance hypothesis because it's enormously

probable that's only a reason for rejecting chance in favor of design if it's also not enormously improbable on the design hypothesis and if the prior probability of the design hypothesis isn't far lower than that of the chance hypothesis and it's not at all clear whether these conditions are met with respect to that first condition And as i've emphasized throughout this there seemed to be infinitely many ways that god could secure the relevant goods of our created order that don't involve fine-tuning a physical universe maybe god could have some sort of simulation maybe god could have

some sort of dreams in his mind maybe god could just have particles that are like millions of light years away but yet the psychophysical laws are different so that when they're in a certain distance From each other they have a certain relationship and when they are other distance away from each other they sing praises to god when they emit certain waves or when they change spin maybe they grow in their relationship with god or whatever insert any sort of sci-fi story you want we could all be non-physical beings in some sort of non-physical realm and

so on there are boatloads of ways to secure the relevant goods and it's not all Clear why god would choose to secure these goods or these values in a way that involves fine-tuning the universe as opposed to doing all these other sorts of things many of which aren't even possible under naturalism as for ruling out physical necessity well the the main reason that craig gives her ruling this out is oh well it's not physical assessing because well there's no reason to think so but of course that's burden shifting the onus of Justification is on him

to rule that out to give us some reason to think it's false you can't just say oh well there's no reason to think it's true explaining it from william dempsey's book the design inference ah i was just gonna say that this this version actually has some benefits that not many people know about and so there's one in particular i'm thinking about right now which is in that the other versions like you see from robin collins and even i think luke Barnes might be susceptible to this is that there's this question in the um evil literature

about skeptical theism skeptical theism is this idea that we can't really be confident about what god would do uh in this world in terms of like what he would allow what what kind of horrendous evils he would allow us and whatnot so there's a question of like how much do we really know about what god would intend or would do and so this actually if we Think about that response to the problem of evil in terms of a response to these kind of design arguments which seem to look at what god is intending to do

with nature then it would seem to actually cut both ways so it'd make us skeptical about these arguments from evil but then it would also seem to make us skeptical about these arguments from design because we're not really sure what god's intentions are but i wanted to the reason why i'm even bringing this out And talking about this is because this version i i uh studied this a little a couple years back and i discovered that this version by craig is kind of clever because it doesn't actually involve that at all it just says fine-tuning

the universe is either due to chance physical necessity or design fine-tuning is not due to either chance or physical necessity so fine-tuning is due to design so what's sort of interesting about this version of the fine-tuning Argument is that it avoids all those types of concerns which is interesting it's also it's very uh craig is very careful when he formulates his arguments because this is completely compatible with his views on problem of evil and what he thinks we can no that's mistaken let's suppose we have the following scenario so i give the first premise the

ticket that won the lottery is either ticket number One or it's ticket number two or it's ticket number three or it's ticket number four or and so on throughout 100 million let's say but this is my second premise the ticket that won the lottery isn't number two and it also isn't number three oh and it's also not number four and it's also not number five and so i go through these individually and why well i say oh because each is individually enormously improbable and So we have really good strong reason to reject each of those

individually and then i can conclude from that that ticket number one won so ticket number one i can literally conclude that that's the one that's the winner and i can do this even before the winner is chosen now this is a patently absurd kind of reasoning just because you can do this disjunction then go try to attack each disjunct apart from one of the disjunctions and Try to reject them you have to ask do your objections against that also target the one disjunct that you're not leveling the objection toward and you also have to see

if there are additional problems afflicting the disjunct that you didn't target that don't inflict all those other disjuncts so basically it's a problem for the justification for the second premise at least the justification for the Second premise in relation to trying to rule out the other hypotheses in relation to the one that you're trying to favor and so similarly if craig would go through and say oh well it's not due to chance because that's enormously improbable but of course you could say the exact same thing with respect to his design hypothesis you can talk about

why that's super duper improbable you can talk about the considerations that i Just leveled with respect to there being infinitely many ways that god could secure the relevant goods that don't involve fine-tuning the physical universe and so on or you could raise considerations of saying well we don't even know what god would do given skeptical theism and so that probability is inscrutable and so it's actually in no better position than the chance hypothesis because it's literally inscrutable what the probability would Even be and so the exact same style of objections that craig is leveling to

the chance hypothesis would equally be able to be leveraged toward the design hypothesis such that you could equally justifiably say the fine tuning of the universe is either due to chance physical necessity or design it's not due to design it's not due to physical necessity therefore due to chance like so no this isn't a benefit of craig's argument in fact and i'm not accusing Craig of intentionally doing that but if anything it's subtly masking the deeper complexities if anything it's making it seem as though you can get a swifter inference to design than is actually

required and so in that sense it's actually kind of deceptive no i'm saying that the note i'm saying that the argument is deceptive not willingly craig or not even his use of the argument if this argument just popped into being uncaused as craig Thinks is absurd if this argument just popped into existence uncaused it would still be a deceptive argument just because it's like deceptively simple so i'm not attributing bad intentions to anyone my point is just that this argument is deceptive in that it hides these considerations that i've been bringing to the fore here

and so i think cameron is wrong skeptical theism does attack this because it shows that the way that craig Goes to try to rule out these hypotheses here for a second premise would equally apply to his design thing such that we could equally well say fine-tuning is not due to design or physical necessity or whatever or it's not due to design or chance therefore it's due to physical necessity or whatever again it's similar to the ticket argument that i was just giving the argument is kind of deceptive i say hey it's either one or number

two or number three or number four or Whatever throughout 100 million but then i go through the various hypotheses and say oh no it's definitely not number two what that's super duper improbable that only has a one and a hundred million chance you're like 99.9999 whatever super duper confident that that isn't true and so you're saying we could be really really confident so we can rule that one out and then you go through you do the same thing with number three number four number five and then it Follows logically and inescapably that ticket number one

wins no that sort of reasoning is ludicrous why is that well because the exact same justifications that you gave as to why you're ruling out number two and why you're ruling out number three and why you're ruling out number four would equally apply to your ticket number one and the same thing as i've pointed out goes for this justification that greg offers on behalf of his second premise There's no avoiding considerations of prior probability and considerations of the likelihood ratios there's no avoiding the fact that skeptical theism might still bear on this sort of argument

if we compare that to the other formulations um which all have as central point that given that the universe permits the existence of intelligent conscious agents uh despite how easily it might not have that significantly Raises the probability of theism being true and so the first one is just a quick base argument uh the probability that uh we have the evidence of fine tuning given our background knowledge k and this is false is very low the probability that we have this evidence if the ism is true is very high so that means that the probability

that this is true is uh much more likely than it's uh probability that's not being true given the evidence so the probability of being Triggered in the units is high one thing that i want to note is that it's not entirely clear that premise one is true though it's at least somewhat plausible now i want to give some reasons for thinking that this is not exactly clear so the first one and obviously we're not going to go through this whole video in fact i just want to make you guys aware of it it is a

discussion on real a theology between aaron lucas and other members of the relay theology team with Respect to his paper on naturalism fine-tuning and flies and he talks about the difficulties in establishing this first premise you can also find his paper naturalism fine-tuning and flies by searching up that title the next thing that i want to look at is oh my goodness this is so long ago wow 20 20. um so on crusade against ignorance i did a video and i talked a little bit about the fine-tuning Argument i talk about this particular objection and

i just basically articulate it for a popular audience and again this is going to be on 1.5 times speed so the first objection is okay so just the justification for the probability of the evidence given naturalism is being low is restricted to the following ratio so it's the possible life permitting universes with our law structures divided by the total possible universes with our law structures and The reason this is true what we do is we when we do this by treating evidence we keep the law structures constant like for instance the gravitational equation it's something

like the gravitational force equals big g times mass one uh times magnitude like the inverse distance or whatever um something like that and so what we do is we keep the form or the structure of that equation the same and we just alter Different uh constants or values we alter that g for instance uh the gravitational constant or various other things like the cosmological cause but we keep the long structures the same so what we're doing is we're we're looking at possible well at least that's symmetrically possible there's a further question of whether there's a

physical possible but that's not relevant to a daisy art because we're talking about our episode so the possible liberating Universes without structure by telepathic verbs structures yeah that's quite a small ratio i'm not going to contest the physics i'm not physicist you know cool but but the low value of this ratio neither means nor entails a low value for the following ratio and a low value for the following ratio is what is required fine tuning argument and this ratio is possible like permitting universes divided by total possible universes notice that we don't Have the sort

of with our law structures proviso so for if life-threatening universes took a large portion of the space of total possible universes then our universe's supporting life wouldn't be all that surprising right because then this would be a kind of a high uh at least not a low not an exceedingly low um ratio and that's regardless of the value of the first ratio and so this in turn provides an undercutting defeater since we have no Reason to believe that the reference class is possible universes sharing our law structures is representative of the class of all possible

universes right so if we wanted to infer from this ratio as being low to this ratio being low we would have to say that this reference class the reference class with our laws our law structures the denominator here is representative of the total the class of total possible universes this reference class uh the denominators Would have to be one would have been represented the other way no reason for thinking that's true now flies walls and guns oh my this is where leslie's finally comes up i'm borrowing ideas from from aaron lucas that he developed naturals

and functioning flies so imagine that we're in a dark room and there's an illuminated portion on the wall uh perhaps by a flashlight or something and on the wall there's a there's a little Fly okay there's like one slide it takes up a small portion on this let's you know let's say there's or maybe one meter in radius uh a circle on the wall that's illuminated and you hear a gunshot and you look at the wall and the fly's dead like the bullet hit the fly okay and so clearly we would think that there must

be an intent behind that shot right there must have been designed there That's true regardless of whether or not this illuminated region the amount or number of flies in this illuminating region compared to the or the area of the fiesta cup within this illuminated region compared to the area of the limited region itself even if we have no reason to think that that ratio of the areas is representative of the whole entire wall like even the whole entire wall is covered in flies it's still in for design and so even though we have no Reason

to think that the illuminati portion is representative of the wall we still want to design and so hence we can fill in for design in the case of fine tuning but um as aaron lucas philosopher and lucas points out the entrance to design or intention in case of the fly analogy is underpinned by represent background experience of flies and walls for instance we know that flies don't travel in packs like that we generally know that um you know flies on the wall There aren't usually thousands upon thousands of them um we know about the behavior

of um people we know that they don't like flies so our infant's design and intention here is underpinned by a lot of background experiences walls that's that's why we can infer design even though we don't have a reason to think representative but notice the background knowledge allows us to infer that the academically eliminated universes that is to say the universes With our law structures are representative of all possible universes and so i mean in addition to this criticism there are also uh this analogy between them so uh when god's choosing among the possible universes with

different possible structures it would be absurd to say that there's like some sort of illumination on our law structures as opposed to different law structures entirely that themselves could for instance there's no like Illuminated flashlight region that would attract the eye of a designer in the case of leslie's uh fly analogy um that that's the restrictive objection and then of course miley cyrus uh weighing in on the philosophy debate which is obviously a tribute to uh 100 yeah so um anything oh i guess this is the last one so robin i mean this is kind

of a big concession he says uh cool because they're Considering one reference class of possible law structures it is unclear how much weight to attach to the values of epistemic probabilities one obtains using this reference class hence one cannot simply map the epidemic probabilities obtained in this way on to the degrees of belief we should have at the end of the day and he said that is the teleological argument and he's referencing the sort of um the the representativeness of our reference Class to the total number or to the total possible universe is that reference

class because we don't have any reason that's representative so hot hudson is a brilliant philosopher really awesome dude so he argues that uh skeptical theism provides an undercutting theater for a fine-tuning so skeptical isn't uh robots not rule i guess sessions it defeats the fine-tuning argument specifically premise two so let's go back to premises Is not low so the functioning of the thesis is not low and what this requires is we have to have to know about the preference structure of god skeptical theism is roughly the proposition that for all we know there are many

facts and we can call these iceberg facts and i'll explain in a second there are many facts about the range of goods evils their their values or weights the necessary connections among them and god's reasons for acting of which we are unaware are The the samples of such goods evils their values and so on the sample that we are aware of uh we just have no reason to think that that sample is representative of the total uh range of possible goods evils their values their weights the connections among them and those reasons for acting so

we can start thinking this is like an iceberg for all you know we we're just in the dark about whether the goods and evils and the connections Among them that we have access to that we've absolutely access to we just have no reason if they're we have we're completely in the episode as it were about whether they make up just the tip of an iceberg of like a huge range of goods evils their values the connections among them and this for instance provides some would argue another cutting the future for various um problems of evil

right because people say like oh this is an instance of Gratuitous evil and people like oh well you know how you know i mean for all we know we're just we only have access to a small portion of goods evils or values and connections among them so for all we know god could have great reasons and great goods that come out from this so it's sort of like the bottom of the iceberg of which we're unaware without the epidemic position to to arbitrary but if that's true right skeptical this is true well then we're simply

not in a Position about to know about the large-scale axiological structure of reality and hence we are not in a position to know the probability that god would actualize the world with our law structures right it's the axiological structure of our reality like the distribution and perfusion and intensity of goods and evils and their values the connections among them and so on and so forth if that is very negative right if our world the actual world has An axiological structure overall that's quite negative then actually god wouldn't actualize it he'd actually say something else or

he refrained from doing it but giving simple season we're simply not in a position to know about the skills of exological structure reality uh for all we know there are so many bad things and of course good things as well there's so many bad things which are completely unaware that uh make it such that god would Definitely not actually work with our law structures and so it's certified undercutting defender for that premise about the probability of the evidence given theism so chemical theorem provides us with problems with the defender but also the existence of moral

conscious rational creatures i mean for all we know say the scheduled theist for all we know even though this is a great good perhaps it's going to bring about a huge range And for the profusion of horrendous evils in the future perhaps there are necessary connections of which we're unaware uh that would you know bring such evils about and so even if even under the supposition that more things like us are incredibly valuable and that god would want to bring about and would have the desire and the power to bring about to bring creatures like

us that our last structure bound for all we know such law structures or and or the Existence of creatures like us have necessary connections to profound evils of which are unaware um and so skeptical theism is really going to undercut this probability right we're not really in an epic position to make judgments about god's desires uh and his full range of reasons evolution so here's another objection to defining argument um so the probability of l given p seems quite low especially in relation to the probability of l star given pb so what Do i mean

by here so pb is there is a perfect being which creates the world that's what pb means um l is excuse me l is basically hypothesis that the actual world's class of law is l is such that given l a necessary condition for the development of embodied conscious rational moral agents like us is hundreds of millions of years of profound agony predation parasitism disaster extinction languaging carnivory and suffering um l-star by contrast is That the actual world's class of law is al-star in contrast to classifies l is such that given all star moral agents can

or will develop without the precondition of hundreds of millions of years of suffering intuitively the probability of l given that the perfect being is that which designed the universe that seems quite low seriously if out of all the possible all the seemingly possible especially epidemic possible because that's the beginning We're playing with the fine-tuning argument given all the possible um law structures um why on earth would a perfect being choose one that involves in the very creative act such horrendous suffering if you read up i mean on a bunch of these fires in australia it's

it's so sad um i get frustrated when i read it uh i mean upwards i kid you not the amount of animals that are burned alive from that the number of animals the Number actually in the hundreds of millions i believe that i mean i saw an article and it's like thousands of koalas i think it's actually now in the tens of thousands of koalas that are burned alive and this is just day think about the uh the hundreds of years of years of things like this um and that's only in australia i mean and

five mass biological thinking events throughout the course of evolutionary stream in the six that we're actively Causing guys i mean yeah i don't know it's just it seems that the actual world's class of laws is one that we definitely would not expect a perfect being to create and so the probability that uh even the law structures that we have is is quite low on the supposition that perfect being created as opposed to um a different set of loss structures that give rise to a much more benign much more flourishing process of development one not involving

the Languishing of non-moral sentient agents for 100 million now of course again this will take us into really difficult muddy waters i will say right now because the proponent of the fine tuning argument will probably say okay fine even if it's like super duper low probability right that you would get l conditional on pb it's even much much much lower On naturalism el conditional unnaturalism so that's something that they'll probably say at this juncture but now we're getting i don't know we're getting into really tricky value judgments i don't know it strikes me as extremely

implausible that this would be the lost set of law structures that a perfect being would choose given that it involves all this sort of stuff rife within the very creative process of This being the rife within its very bringing about of the goods that are purportedly its intention and is that as low as the probability of l conditional and naturalism well part of what makes that difficult is the distinction between the epidemic illuminated region and non-epistemically illuminated region ones but also i don't know it's just not clear and i guess in criticizing the fine-tuning argument

all i need to do is Show that it's at least not clear which one is going to be lower so that would be enough to provide an undercutting to feeder for the fine-tuning argument i just wanted to say that i do think that that's probably a response that proponents of fine-tuning argument would make to what i said in the video at this particular juncture and i think there's going to be reasonable disagreement on which of those probabilities is going to be lower Anyway i did mention skeptical theism there so if you want to know the

place where i'm getting that the hud hudson thing definitely check out this particular video right here why is it playing no stop playing stop okay a critical evaluation of the fine-tuning argument for the existence of god by hud hudson it's very good that is not hud hudson thank you leanne for the introduction here's a picture of hud hudson and it's It's a wonderful talk he's such a great public speaker oh my goodness so yeah you won't regret listening to this all right but back to the argument so i've been looking here at both really both

premises one and two but let's look at two in a little bit more detail so at least for starters i think it's really impossible that the probability here is very high to improve this argument you should just change it to not very low or you could say nowhere near as low as This very low value that would be a way to improve this kind of argument it's difficult to justify how it's super duper high without just building into your hypothesis that god desires to bring about let's say a fine-tuned universe but then of course the

prior probability of hypothesis suffers so even though you're increasing the likelihood ratio between your hypothesis and your rival hypothesis you're only doing that by Correspondingly lowering your prior but even after we make that change to saying that this is not as exceedingly low as this there are still various problems that i want to raise for this argument so one of them comes from this paper it's entitled divine fine-tuning versus electrons in love by neil cinebabu i think that's how you pronounce it in this article he's offering a new objection to the fine-tuning argument For god's

existence which arises from the metaphysical possibility of alternative psychophysical laws that permit a wider range of physical entities to have minds i would actually argue that all you need here is the epistemic possibility so i would actually argue that you don't even need the stronger claim of metaphysical possibility section one presents the fine-tuning argument according to which divine Creation best explains why the physical constants permit intelligent life section two presents the objection that under sufficiently mind-friendly psychophysical laws any physical constants permit intelligent life section 3 explains that proponents of the argument can't deny the metaphysical

possibilities such psychophysical laws because they must accept a non-physical god with the mind and then section 4 considers a version Of the argument restricted to universes with actual psychophysical laws and responds that there's no reason god would favor such universes so of course he begins by laying out the probabilistic version the fine tuning argument it has two premises as he articulates it first premise is fine tuning for intelligent life to exist as is the case the fundamental physical constants must have values within very narrow life-permitting ranges premise Two divine probability raising if fine-tuning is true

it's more probable that god set the values of the constants than that they took those values without god's intervention conclusion so god probably exists fine-tuning includes both the easily verifiable claim that intelligent life actually exists and the scientifically supported claim that this requires the fundamental physical constants to take values within a very narrow range divine Probability raising concerns the low probability of intelligent life without divine intervention and the higher probability of intentional life with a god god's existence makes the existence of intelligent life more probable because minds are necessary for moral value and a good

god would care about creating a morally valuable universe that's the basic idea behind the argument then it gets into the objection From mind-friendly psychophysical laws so what neil argues in here is basically that he's attacking the first premise of the argument that fine-tuning premise what he says is that intelligent life is possible under a wide range of physical constants because it's metaphysically possible and i would say because we're concerned only with epistemic possibility with these basin arguments you could actually say because it's epistemically possible that Psychophysical laws could be much more mind-friendly than those that

obtain in actuality even if the physical constants permitted no atoms other than hydrogen the psychophysical laws could permit protons and electrons to instantiate morally valuable mental states including those involved in feeling pleasure having friends and falling in love we're not saying that these things actually do experience pleasure having friends and falling in Love and nor are we saying that in a universe like ours they do we're saying if you alter the psychophysical laws the laws that connect physical states to mental states and if you add an omnipotent god into the picture god would be able

to create all sorts of different universes with all sorts of different psychophysical laws that radically diverge from the actual world's psychophysical laws and the kind Of actual universe that we find ourselves in as neil points out the possibility of fine-tuning depends on the metaphysical impossibility of psychophysical laws much more friendly to minds than those of our world only on the assumption that psychophysical laws must have their actual values is it true that intelligent life couldn't exist in a universe with the strong nuclear force is at less than 25 percent of its actual Value and atoms

more complex than hydrogen can't be formed actual psychophysical laws require complex biological structures like brains for mental states to be realized universes with no atoms larger than the one proton one electron combination of hydrogen lack the raw material that these biological structures require but under more friendly but under more mind-friendly psychophysical laws protons and Electrons themselves could have mines like ours these laws could dictate that these particles have sensory experiences of all the forces other particles exert on them with the forces most strongly affecting them giving rise to the psychology of belief and then intentional

action protons and electrons could yearn to be together feeling delight to the presence of the other as their opposite charges draw them closer when they formed a hydrogen atom they Could fall in love when whenever two electrons were a prime number of centimeters apart they could have the mental states involved in heartfelt communication about their histories and so on and so on and so on right you can fill out whatever story you really want here so consider collins's argument right collins characterizes the kind of intelligent beings whose existence divine fine-tuning is supposed to explain as

finite vulnerable embodied Moral agents and as embodied conscious beings it can make morally significant choices but such beings can easily be realized in universes with the strong nuclear force at less than 25 percent of its actual value and mind-friendly psychophysical laws micro-physical particles are spatially finite and sufficiently mind-friendly psychophysical laws will give them whatever sort of finite minds one pleases as for vulnerability Microphysical particles are physically vulnerable to destruction and nuclear reactions or in interactions with antimatter psychological laws psychophysical laws that allow them to love will also make them emotionally vulnerable a proton that is

attracted to an electron may be heartbroken if that electron goes away with another proton and he basically just goes through that like yeah you can secure moral agency in principle again these only need to be Epistemic possibilities in short there's plenty of room for psychophysical laws to be more mind friendly than ours universes whose physical constants prevent any particularly complex structures from forming still have enough structure to instantiate minds if the psychophysical laws are mind-friendly enough the large region of modal space with mind-friendly psychophysical laws permitting happy microphysical particles reveals Intelligent life not to be

an astonishingly improbable thing demanding a divine explanation as it might be if fine-tuning were true so again this is targeting that first premise this fine-tuning premise that for intelligent life to exist for there to be intelligent conscious agents that instantiate these sorts of values that go to be interested in producing the fundamental physical constants have to have like super narrow Values because only in that way can you get these like complex structures like brains and so on but of course that assumes that you're holding fix these super duper narrow psychophysical laws but of course it's

epistemically possible that you can alter these psychophysical laws in whole concoctions of ways and so actually modal space is going to be populated with bunches of different worlds which of course wouldn't support structures like our Brains and things like that but that would nevertheless support conscious sentient moral agents and hence support the values that god would be interested in producing and as i explained earlier on in the video this actually might create certain problems for this premise here that the probability of the evidence of fine-tuning given theism and the fact that the universe permits the

existence of embodied conscious agents is very High it could potentially challenge that because again as i've been explaining there are arguably boatloads of different ways that god could secure the relevant goods that he was allegedly trying to secure by means of this finely tuned universe that we find ourselves in there are boatloads of ways that he could do that in boatloads of other universes or even ones that aren't fine-tuned for our specific complex life if the psychophysical laws could be Different which it seems epistemically possible that they could god could still create life in those

sorts of universes and intelligent embodied conscious agents in those worlds and so it's actually not at all clear why god would prefer this sort of universe as opposed to that one in which case the probability that you get this kind of very narrow life permitting range with respect to complex structures it's actually not clear why that isn't super Duper low on theism as well because again god has all these boatloads of different universes to choose from with different psychophysical laws that also realize the relevant values another article that i want to go through is this

one by neil manson how not to be generous to fine-tuning skeptics so the fine-tuning argument for the existence of god requires that the probability that the universe is life-permitting if god exists is not Nearly as low as the probability that the universe's life permitting if god does not exist recently some proponents of the fine-tuning argument have reasoned as follows stipulate that the probability that there exists a life-permitting universe if god exists is one in a billion only the most hardened skeptic would refuse odds like that right so one in a billion is more than just

fair those skeptical of the fine-tuning Argument it is generous even on that generous assumption the fine-tuning argument is very strong this article explains why the assumption is not in fact generous so yadda yadda yadda he's talking about plug which is the probability of a life-permitting universe under god's existence so probability life-winning universe given god's existence so that's what plug is so then he goes on to consider what Fine-tuning skeptics think so in order to answer the question of whether or not people are right that it's generous to the fine-tuning skeptics to say okay let it

be one in a billion even still the fine-tuning argument would succeed in order to evaluate that we need to understand better the thinking of those skeptical of the claim that plug is not extremely low let's call such people fine-tuning skeptics all fine-tuning skeptics who Have written about the issue agree that there is no reason to think that plug is quite high several of them suggest a much stronger point the value of plug is inscrutable they claim to see no basis for assigning any probability at all to the proposition that god would create a life permitting

a physical universe graham opie jan narvissen elliott sober and stephen j gould all express well the fine-tuning skeptic's position let's start with appi api says that given only The hypothesis that there is an intelligent designer of a universe and given no further assumptions about the preferences of that designer it is not clear to me that there is very much that one can conclude about the kind of universe that the designer is likely to produce abby continues in private communication with neil what do we know about the range of natural realities that are open to god

to create it may be true that natural realities sufficiently Similar to ours are all fine-tuned but even so fine-tuned natural realities could be just the tiniest blip in the full range of natural realities that are open for god to create that is that are creatable consistent with all of god's attributes i can't see any good grounds for assigning a probability high or low to the claim that god will create a fine-tuned natural reality as manson points out one common theme amongst Fine-tuning skeptics is that god is a being so unlike us that we simply cannot

say what we ought to expect god to do with regard to creation we should also note that fine-tuning skepticism is not limited to atheists or agnostics fideists adherents or reformed epistemology and skeptical theists might all agree that reason alone gives us no answers to the sort of questions about god raised by oppie and so on regarding skeptical theism in particular hud Hudson in various publications argues that the theist cannot make a plea for epistemic humility in the face of the problem of evil and then turn around and insist that it is obvious that our universe

is one of the sort that god would probably create skeptical theists he says are in no position to assert the high probability premise hudson's name for the claim that plug is quite high hudson writes that it is an inconstant and uneasy skeptical theism which Professes ignorance about how much we know about just which things are possible goods about just how good they in fact are and about the necessary conditions of their realization in a wide variety of scenarios but gratuitously grants an exception when it comes to pronouncing on what god is likely to aim at

in creating a cosmos once again we are in the dark about whether the possible goods in question are representative of the possible goods That there are and about what far greater goods may of necessity be forfeited or far greater evils may of necessity be guaranteed if the particular goods of embodied free intelligent sentient beings are realized end quote and has a conclusion from this that we don't have good reason to accept the high probability premise in the fine-tuning argument in fact we're not even in a position to assign any Probability here at all so this

section in particular is the important one that i want to focus on why fine-tuning skeptics say that plug is inscrutable so one reason is we begin by making a simplifying assumption and although it's not the only way to think of probabilities a quite natural way to think of a probability is just as a proportion n divided by m the probability of getting an outcome with feature f is just the number and of Outcomes with feature f divided by the number m of all possible outcomes assuming all possible outcomes are equally likely to occur so for

sum n and for some m plug equals n divided by m in the case at hand let the numerator n sub t t for theseum stand for the number of ways god might create a life permitting universe and let the denominator m sub t stand for the total number of ways god might make some possible world actual those ways Include god's not creating anything at all as well as all the ways god might create some reality distinct from himself and then of course you can do this with atheism as well so you let n a

a for atheism stand for the total number of ways that there might have been a life permitting physical universe conditional on atheism and m sub a stand for the total number of ways that reality might have been conditional on atheism So numbered amongst m sub a so the total range of possible worlds under atheism are not only all the possible distributions of matter and energy given the actual law structures and the actual values of the free parameters of physics but also all the possible distributions of matter and energy given the actual law structures and every

possible combination of values of the free parameters of physics m a might be inflated further if the atheist includes Possible physical universes with different law structures with non-physical epiphenomenal properties with possible physical universes with brutally emergent phenomena and so on and it might even be inflated further still if there could be realities consisting of combinations or fusions of any of the above but precisely because of this fine-tuning skeptics see m sub t as beyond comprehension why well because They agree with theists that god is supposed to be omnipotent so god can create any reality that

could possibly exist if there were no god if we suppose as i think we should says api that god could make any universe that is possible on the naturalist hypothesis then we are surely entitled to the conclusion that the range of possibilities is no narrower on the theistic hypothesis than it is on the naturalistic hypothesis thus for fine-tuning skeptics m sub t is Going to be at least as big as m sub a and arguably much bigger to see why m sub t might be much bigger than m sub a consider first the physical universes

that are impossible under atheism these are physical universes in which god miraculously rearranges the matter and energy of the universe in any number of ways of course some of these new possibilities will inflate n sub t so the ones that are life permitting the possible realities that are like Permitting for example there will be ways for a life unfriendly physical universe to yield embodied life through god's miraculously rearranging the matter and energy in that universe by creating boltzmann brains for example but some of these new possibilities will also inflate m sub t for every way

god could intervene to make a life unfriendly physical universe have life in it it seems that there are just as many ways that god could Intervene in a life-friendly physical universe to guarantee that life never arises in it in addition to these new possibilities for physical realities god has the power to create realities with non-physical entities and processes that are not possible on atheism thus god could create worlds in which occasionalism or barkley and idealism turns out to be true for the members of this enlarged set of possible worlds if there are intelligent beings in

them at All those intelligent beings are either not actually or not necessarily embodied in living matter the bearers of intelligence would not be living things but rather souls spirits or immaterial minds and then there are possible realities that fuse these possibilities say by having a physical realm but also heaven with angels spending most of their time in heaven but also able to interact in the physical realm so these new Possibilities introduced by theism inflate m sub t even further note that these are just the metaphysical possibilities we limited humans have imagined fine-tuning skeptics will think

that theism generates other metaphysical possibilities of which no philosopher has yet dreamt proponents of the fine-tuning argument are surely chafing at this point all of this is true if we assume that all of these possibilities are equally likely conditional on theism They will say but why should we do that and if we should not then simply coming up with the ratio n sub t divided by m sub t would not tell us the value of plug it certainly is epistemically possible that not all the metaphysical possibilities are regarded equally by god there might be a

preference function for god that assigns different probabilities to different possible worlds or sets of worlds depending on the overall features of those worlds Given that god is supposed to be morally perfect perhaps god would prefer worlds capable of producing intelligent life over worlds capable of producing only die protons that would be because other things being equal worlds containing intelligent life are better that is richer or more valuable than worlds containing only die protons but in response to this even if fine-tuning skeptics are moral realists of some sort and so they agree that god Has a

preference structure that'll track these objective values there are still serious questions about exactly what feature or features bear the weight of objective value in the fine-tuning argument is it materiality or physicality that makes some possible creations better than others it's hard to see how mere physicality could set one possible creation apart from the rest a universe that re-collapsed a microsecond after the big bang would be Physical but that alone doesn't make it worth creating is it physical life that is intrinsically viable well bacteria are physical life forms but being a reality such that bacteria might

arise in it does not seem to be a particularly good making feature of a possible creation is it intelligent or conscious physical life that is particularly worthy of creation in that case though it seems that it is the intelligence or consciousness not Physicality or animation that is doing the heavy lifting with respect to the value of this creation why think intelligence is only morally valuable if it is embodied the problem here for proponents of the fine-tuning argument is that if god does exist then clearly it is possible for there to be a non-physical intelligence after

all god is supposed to be just such an intelligence why think god would prefer to create other intelligent conscious Beings by creating a life-permitting physical universe god had other seemingly much more efficient and sensible options for example god could make barkley right so even if they grant that god has a preference function over possible creations fine-tuning skeptics are going to need to hear a lot more before they agree that the function favors the creation of a life-permitting physical universe and favors it enough to make the fine-tuning argument Persuasive given all this it would seem to

fine-tuning skeptics that even conditionalizing on theism the possible realities forbidding embodied life might very well vastly outnumber the possible realities permitting life given that god's preference function for possible realities is inscrutable to them they say plug is also inscrutable to them and then the next video that i want to recommend you guys check out is this Video from friction does fine tuning prove a designer you can look that up and i'm sure you'll be able to find it let me i forgot to hit the like button but yeah definitely check this out this is an

excellent video and it offers some criticisms of the fine-tuning argument based on some similar considerations that i have been leveling here and then the final final thing that i want to look at is from felipe leon so fleeby leon says that there are further Independent reasons that might lead one to doubt that cosmic fine-tuning should be chalked up to one or more intelligent fine-tuners here i will mention one other features of the universe aren't what one would expect on the hypothesis for one thing it appears that the vast majority of the observable universe is quite

hostile to life for another most of the relatively meager number of living things that we know to exist in the universe appear to languish for a Significant portion of their lives for yet another the members of very many species are hostile to the existence of those of the others in short even if the more general phenomena of cosmic fine-tuning might seem surprising on naturalism but not on theism the more specific aspects of the life that seems fine-tuned are surprising on theism but not on naturalism accordingly while the former sort of phenomena might raise the probability

of an intelligent foundation The latter sorts of phenomena appear to deflate it and he cites draper here talking about the fallacy of understated evidence i'm actually going to go through a video later on within this video explaining the fallacy of understated evidence and how it relates to these sorts of arguments let's finish collins he likes to simplify it to the following the probability that um we have the evidence for fine tuning and Given the naturalistic uh i have a title here k should be e uh no i'm sorry k k is the interval right so

the same objections that i just raised are going to be applying to this as well argument from collins is really cool it's the fine-tuning for discoverability the idea is that of all the possible values fundamental physical constants could assume there's a tiny range that permit Uh the existence of embodied conscious agents uh and we call that the anthropic range now within the anthropic range there's an even tinier range of values that the physical constants could assume that would make the universe optimal for scientific discovery and investigation and he calls this the discoverability optimality range and

so an example would be uh the universe has relatively low entropy all throughout but uh Embodied conscious agents need only a relatively small regional pocket of low energy in order to exist so the universe doesn't have to have low entropy all throughout for us to exist yet the general low entropy of the universe all throughout makes the universe optimal for observational discoveries in astrophysics and cosmology so examples like that uh give collins a new argument a new kind of fine tuning argument would go like This the values of certain physical constants fall within the discoverability

optimality range within the anthropic range if naturalism is true it is enormously improbable that the values of certain physical constants would fall within the discoverability optimality range within the entropic range but if theism is true it's not at all improbable that the values of certain physical constants would fall within this discoverability Optimality range so the values of certain physical constants would that they would fall within this discoverability optimality range within the entropic range strongly concerns theism over naturalism the main idea is just being that look god didn't just create a universe that was minimally sufficient

for our existence there seemed to be features of the universe that make that seem uh that are perks i guess that they're not Just necessary they're they're things on top of what's necessary that make it uh very convenient to do science and and to observe the world and so forth yeah so i haven't researched this particular argument in significant detail so i'm actually inclined to think that discoverability is evidence for theism but i guess i'm just not sure how strong that evidence is again we have the aaron lucas problem that we can only Look at

the epistemically illuminated region right that share our law structures and where you vary the constants but that of course leaves us entirely in the dark about the character of the epistemically unilluminated regions where you vary the very law structures themselves moreover we have these potential problems with respect to god would seem to be able to secure the goods of discoverability in Conjunction with the goods of conscious embodied moral agents in infinitely other many other ways again in a kind of barclaying universe and maybe a simulation universe within a theistic idealist universe maybe just in a

kind of non-physical heavenly realm maybe in a completely different kind of universe where it's just fundamental particles but we have different psychophysical laws and so on i guess i'm inclined to think that Discoverability is evidence for theism but i just because of these various considerations i don't know how strong the evidence is the considerations are very very complex to my mind here so you start to get really into the weeds and of course i don't specialize on fine-tuning arguments so anyway on the next argument okay uh and then i've already got this pulled up actually

here fine-tuning for discoverability it's in the two dozen or So arguments for god that we're just completely one opening in this stream so so the next argument may be uh we don't need to infer design at all biologists themselves say organisms appear or look designed not that we're inferring that they're designed that's just how they appear so some philosophers have argued that if x appears designed like then x is justifiably taken to b the product of intentional design some things in nature do appear designed So firstly i think premise one should be defeasible eyes that

is it should be made to feasible so effects appears designed like then x is justified to feasibly which means it could be overturned or overridden by countervailing considerations moreover arguably we do have one such defeater in the form of evolution by natural selection in particular it's arguably a defeater if you know that there are plausible Alternative explanations that don't involve intentional design that nevertheless explain the appearance of design so then even if there is an appearance of design why should you favor the intentional design hypothesis over these alternatives so this would seem to serve as

a kind of undercutting to feeder for this defeasible justification for taking it to be a product of intentional design because now you have a workable Alternative hypothesis that accounts for it without intentional design and so i would take evolution to actually serve as a defeater for this argument arguably moreover i think that we have again parodies on our hands so if x appears to be incompetently or evilly designed like then x is justifiably taken to be the product of an incompetent or evil intentional design Some things in nature moreover appear to be incompetently or evenly

designed genetic information that is specifically directed to causing let's say cancer or brain tumors or genetic deformities or diseases or we could talk about things that seem like incompetently designed like the recurrent laryngeal nerve and so on or teleological evil where basically things are designed to rip each other to shreds and cause immense suffering in other animals So we can conclude from this that some things in nature are justifiably taken to be the product of incompetent or evil intentional design but if god exists right god is the designer of those things and so they are

not the product of incompetent or evil intentional design right since god is not at all incompetent or evil and so we can conclude that it's justifiably taken to be the case that god doesn't exist so given this parody we have a new Argument for atheism on our hands so they're justifiably taken to be the products of design and so you have richard dawkins famously opening his book the blind watchmaker by defining biology as the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed uh and you have qrik saying that biologists must constantly

keep in mind that what they see is not designed but rather evolved if you take the principle that look if How something appears as evidence of how it is uh these things in nature appear designed so that's evidence that they are designed and you can run an argument uh from design in biology or uh from you know the cosmos in general with uh this sort of reasoning right and there you go some resources on that one oh wow we're only two moral arguments wow wow so before getting into specific moral arguments i do just want

to make two General remarks here first check out my moral argument playlist therein i have videos on topics intimately related to the moral argument as well as videos significant portions of which are directly aimed at the moral argument for instance in my video response to trent horn i go through various ways that non-theists can respond to moral arguments all right so that's the first general remark a second general remark is Check out this series index it's called william lane craig on morality and meaning it's on the blog philosophical discussions and so basically what this person

has done he's a professional academic philosopher and what he's done is he's taken articles published in peer-reviewed philosophy journals on the topic of morality and in particular william lane craig's moral argument As well as craig's meta ethical theory of morality and theistic meta-ethics more generally what he's done is he's gone through various papers published and he's basically summarized them and broken them down for a wider audience so for instance he covers musculus be independent of god this is a series about wes morrison's article of the same name which looks at craig's and alston's solutions to

the youth road dilemma Also some thoughts on theological voluntarism he wrote this in response to craig harris debate where he offers a neglected critique of theological voluntarism this person has also published an article in sofia called something like the epistemological objection to divine command theory or something like that also craig on objective morality so in here he suggested general methodology for determining the merits of any meta Ethical theory and he also gives a close textual and philosophical analysis of what craig means by objective he also has a series of articles on god and the ontological

foundation of morality so craig insists that only god can provide a sound ontological foundation for objective moral values and duties is this right with the help of wes morriston once again he tries to answer the question in the negative so no he's not correct and he's drawing on the Published period work of philosopher wes morrison here and he also draws on his own insides and then we have to find command theory and the moral meter stick this is yet another series that he's done on it so in his efforts to avoid the revised youth of

a dilemma craig sometimes relies on william alston's analogy of the meter stick according to this analogy god stands in the same relation to the good as the model meter stick Stands in relation to the length one meter doesn't make any sense well jeremy coons argues that it doesn't and in the series of posts i walk through the various steps of kunz's argument and so again it's going through articles that jeremy coons has written on this regard he also goes through stuff that eric wielenberg has published his craig's defense of divine command theory inconsistent he's gone

through craig's Allegation that on an atheistic view humans are quote unquote nothing but mere animals or collections of molecules he's also gone through what wilhelm craig says on ultimate accountability and whether or not there's a defensible account of moral value there he looks at what craig has written with his co-author jpmorland and again he's drawing on the work of eric willenberg who counters that there is a defensible atheistic account of value i would argue That there are many such defensible accounts and that this account is no worse off than craig and merlin's preferred account of

moral value and then of course he goes through stuff about meaning in life but we don't really need to concern ourselves with that here anyway with that shout out out of the way and you guys definitely need to check this out let us get on to the video itself moral arguments uh which take particular general facts about Morality to support the existence of god a generic argument from the objectivity of morality generally if morality is objective or morality can be objective only if god exists reality is objective so god exists i would say premise one

is false so first uh a note to give you guys some context very few meta-ethicists take this line of reasoning seriously popular apologetics is seriously out of sync with meta ethics here if you buy Mainstream anthologies on metaethics for instance most won't even mention god and will still contain boatloads of theories accounting for morality in non-theistic terms so there's a striking gap between popular apologetics on meta ethics and the actual meta-ethical literature but that again that's just a note so here now we're getting into some of the criticisms that i raise so first i would

raise an intrinsicality objection i think it's obvious that some things are Intrinsically right or intrinsically wrong or intrinsically good or intrinsically bad there's something in the very nature of suffering which makes it bad or which accounts for grounds is badness it's facts about the action of torture what it is to torture someone and it's facts about the victim and the various experiences that they undergo when they are being tortured it's those facts which account for the badness of torture It's those facts which account for the badness and wrongness of torturing right what it is to

torture someone and what it is to be the victim and to undergo their various experiences there's something intrinsic to this situation itself which accounts for why it is bad and wrong i think that's just obvious again it's not as though i have some independent argument for that just as i don't have an independent argument for thinking that suffering itself is bad No of course i don't have an argument for that i can just see that it's obviously true and similarly i could just see that it's obviously true that some things are just intrinsically bad they're

bad in and of themselves without reference to whether or not there's some being in the sky that has some attitude towards it or whether there's some being in the sky whose nature says something about it no that doesn't matter by my lights that's Utterly irrelevant what matters what makes the relevant action wrong is facts about the action the victim and so on and facts about the suffering it's facts intrinsic to the situation itself so i think again this is the intrinsicality objection this has nothing to do with their extrinsic relations to whether or not we

ourselves think that it's bad or whether or not god thinks that it's bad or whether or not god commands something about the situation or whether or not God's nature somehow specifies something about the situation by my lights that all seems quite patently irrelevant so that's the first objection i would say no certain things are intrinsically good and intrinsically bad there's something about josh rasmussen himself which accounts for why he has dignity and value and so on there's something about pursuing and cultivating the intellectual and moral virtues honesty integrity curiosity and so on these Things are

by their very natures intrinsically good intrinsically valuable and so it's just patently false that they could only be valuable or good or have these various moral properties if god exists no what it is to be these sorts of things it's intrinsically valuable so that's one of my objections to these sorts of arguments another objection is a kind of second order euthyphro objection so the first order Problem basically poses the following question do god's commands make right actions right or wrong actions wrong if yes well then it would seem as though rightness and wrongness are arbitrary

right and because then explanatorially prior to god's giving his commands nothing is right or wrong it's constituted by the command it's dependent upon the command of whether or not it's right or wrong so if god would have commanded us to torture innocence That would have been right but if not if god's commands don't make right actions right or wrong actions wrong well then it would seem as though divine command theory is false because then they're made right or wrong in virtue of other things an alternative way to put this which i think is more plausible

you could say god either has a reason for commanding what he does or he doesn't if he does have a reason for commanding what he does well well then It's surely that reason which is doing the explanatory heavy lifting with respect to accounting for the rightness or wrongness or goodness or badness of the thing in question that reason is surely enough on its own to ground rightness or wrongness but by contrast if he doesn't have a reason well then it's completely arbitrary he literally has no reason for commanding what he does and it's literally arbitrary

in that case You might say oh no god is essentially good it's part of god's nature to be perfectly good and so on so he couldn't of course command those other things and his commands flow from his nature you could say those sorts of things but then of course the second-order euthyphro problem arises because then we can just ask is there an explanation as to why god's essential nature for example lovingness forbids rape if so if there is such an Explanation as to why god's essential nature forbids rape well then it seems that it's that

explanation which is accounting for the rightness or wrongness or goodness or badness or permissibility or impermissibility of the thing in question that explanation is surely enough on its own to ground morality for example if his nature forbids rape because rape is wrong in itself or violates the rights of the victim or causes unnecessary suffering To the victim then it's those reasons that ground or explain the wrongness or the badness or whatever of the relevant action so basically there's either some more fundamental reason why god's essential nature specifies what it does or there isn't if there

is some more fundamental reason say because it violates rights or say because of the badness of the suffering that the victim undergoes or whatever then we have a more fundamental Explanation and it's certainly that which is doing the explanatory heavy lifting with respect to the badness or the rightness of the wrongness or whatever moral properties we're talking about but by contrast if there is no such more fundamental explanation if there is no further more fundamental reason as to why god's nature forbids what it does or necessarily leads to commands which forbid what they do well

then again we have this Arbitrariness word then there's no explanation as to why rape for instance is prohibited as opposed to morally obligatory and so on so we get the arbitrariness problem that way and so on the latter horn we get the absurdity that for instance the prohibition on rape is arbitrary but on the former horn bringing in god seems to be entirely explanatory odios all you need is that more fundamental reason in order to account for or explain why the Relevant action or state of affairs is good or bad or right or wrong or

whatever has the various moral or axiological or deontic properties that it does have i actually do find that second order problem reasonably plausible still further objection that i would raise so i think this is like the third objection i think that there are perfectly adequate alternative explanations for why certain things are right or wrong or Good or bad or whatever i've already hinted at various such potential explanations for instance maybe there's something in the very nature of rape or there's something in the nature of the victim's experience of it or whatever that accounts for why

it's bad or wrong or whatever or maybe we can give an explanation in terms of rights or maybe we can give an explanation in terms of utility or maybe there are so many Different things that could provide groundings or explanations as to why certain actions or states of affairs have their axiological or deontic or moral properties and so i think given that there are these alternative explanations and given that none of these require that god exists i think we have uh excellent reason to think that this first premise is at the very least unmotivated so

that's a third response fourth response that i would give is That it's what i call the both end in primitives objection so the atheist let's say thinks that torturing someone is objectively wrong well that you can ask why and you know maybe they're gonna cite certain facts about torture and facts about the victim and facts about suffering and then you can say oh yeah but why is suffering bad you've kind of hit a primitive bedrock there because it is right maybe that's either self-explanatory maybe it's not Self-explanatory if we think that self-explanation is incoherent but

maybe this is just a primitive but it's justifiably taken to be a primitive or maybe you think eudaimonia or flourishing or happiness or the flourishing of sentient beings or whatever is something that is just the primitive bedrock with respect to explaining why certain things are good so yeah you can play the y game with the atheist but of course the atheists can Turn around and similarly play the y game with the theist what metaphysically explains why torturing someone for fun is wrong they might say certain rights or suffering is bad but then you can ask

why then they might say oh well because god commands it to be that way or because god's nature is such that and then they give some story about god's nature but again you can still ask why why does god's nature give rise to why does god's nature forbid rape why is God's nature such that it specifies that suffering is bad why is god's nature such that it specifies that human flourishing is good you can ask these questions just as much of the theist and they're eventually just going to have to say unless they admit an

infinitely descending regress of groundings they're they're also going to have to end in some kind of primitive bedrock so both of us are ending in primitive bedrocks we just fundamentally say x grounds the Badness or rightness or wrongness or goodness or badness of something and that's that end of story you can try to ask why does it ground the the wrongness or badness or whatever and again we've just hit explanatory bedrock and so it's not at all clear that the theist is in any better position than the non-theists with respect to grounding morality in this

case both have a ground it's just that their grounds are different both end in Something that just primitively grounds let's say the badness of suffering or that primitively grounds the goodness of the flourishing of sentient beings or whatever it's not all clear why we should prefer a primitive ground which is something like god's nature is such as to specify that this is bad or god's nature is such as to specify that this is good it's not at all clear why that is a better primitive than the various primitives That i've been suggesting for the non-theist

and there's actually a really good article that makes a point that's quite similar to this and it is called could morality have a source by chris heathwood it's published in the journal of ethics and social philosophy so what he and he argues quite convincingly that ultimately every single meta ethical Theory is gonna have some kind of primitive bedrock that there's gonna be some sort of moral truth or some sort of link between a grounding fact and the moral truth that it grounds there's gonna be some sort of fact like that has to be primitive on

any theory whatsoever so he says it is a common idea that morality or moral truths if there are any must have some sort of source if it is wrong to pick a promise or if our fundamental moral obligation is to Maximize happiness these facts must come from somewhere perhaps from human nature or from our agreements or god such facts cannot be ungrounded floating free i not only deny this i believe it's opposite if we look more closely at the moral theories that are supposed to be paradigm examples of theories under which morality has a source

we will see that these theories too posit ungrounded moral truths we are anyway here inquiring into the sort of explanation Constituted by a kind of metaphysical grounding and this metaphysical grounding whatever else it is is an asymmetric relation if q is true in virtue of p p cannot also be true in virtue of q so the basic problem that he's pinpointing here is that we have this claim right which is dct divine command theory and it's saying that an act is morally obligatory if and only if and because god commands it now we then ask

Is god in some way or another the source of dct itself right because this is itself a kind of moral claim it's making a claim about the conditions under which something is morally obligatory so this is itself a moral claim and so then we can ask well in virtue of what is this moral claim true well if it's true in virtue of something about god well then again we have just created another moral claim namely the moral claim of dct itself would then be True just in case and because of that more fundamental feature of

god which is explaining the moral truth of dct but again that link between this more fundamental feature of god and dct is itself a moral claim right because dct as we've shown is a moral claim and so we are talking about the conditions under which a particular moral claim is true in particular we're asking what makes it true that is itself a moral claim and so then we can still further Ask what is the grounding of that moral claim if you're gonna deposit a still more fundamental feature of god well then you could see where

we're going we're off on a vicious infinite regress so it seems as though we have to bottom out in some sort of primitive moral claim here the only way to avoid a primitive moral truth then that is a moral truth that isn't itself grounded in something more fundamental the only way to avoid that Is then to adopt something like self-grounding where one the same thing grounds itself but that is of course absurd grounding is a priority relation one thing is due to or owed to another and it obtains in virtue of that other and it's

well now universally granted in philosophy that grounding relations are asymmetric if one thing grounds another then that further thing doesn't ground the first thing so everyone it seems is going to have to Admit groundless moral facts it is moral facts that don't themselves have any further explanation or ground and so it's no mark against a non-theistic theory that oh well it can't ground all of morality no because neither can a theistic theory so anyway before i level my final objection just a summary so the first objection that i raised was an intrinsicality objection i think

it's obvious that some things intrinsically Have the moral properties and values and so on that they do and that has nothing to do with our extrinsic relations to god or god's commands or god's nature or whatever the second problem was the higher order or the second order use of for objection the third problem was the alternative explanation objection so for various moral facts and moral truths i think there are perfectly adequate alternative explanations for why those things are true that is why various Actions are right or wrong or good or bad and these alternative explanations

don't deduce anything having to do with god now of course as i pointed out these explanations are ultimately going to have to hit some explanatory bedrock arguably and the link between this bedrock the fact that this bedrock grounds or explains certain moral truths that fact is going to itself be some moral truth that doesn't have a further explanation so i recognize that but i Pointed out firstly that there are going to be perfectly kosher non-theistically acceptable principled stopping points which are our primitive bedrocks so either the fact that suffering is bad or the fact that

something about suffering grounds its badness in the case of goodness maybe it's just the fact that the flourishing of sentient creatures is good or something about the flourishing of sentient creatures is good and then i Then pointed out that in both cases in both the theistic and non-theistic cases you're going to end in some kind of primitive like this some kind of primitive which is reporting the link between your explanatory bedrock and the various moral properties that it is alleged to be explaining and so theism isn't uniquely positioned to offer a grounding for morality both

theism and non-theistic views have to have primitive moral truths at the very least Primitive truths that link certain groundings and so that was my fourth response there is no unique advantage accruing to theism because we're in the same boat essentially both theistic and non-theistic meta ethical views end in some kind of moral primitive and then my fifth and final response to this specific line of reasoning is that this is i think going to be a specific problem for christianity because i would say that if you grant that morality is Objective only if god exists well

then that god is gonna have to be a particular way and i would argue that the particular way in which that god has to exist is definitely not the way that the christian god is and just to see that you can look at the various old testament atrocities like commanding genocide telling abraham to kill a son and of course basically deceiving him in the process leading abraham to genuinely think that abraham was going to kill his Son and so on and of course you have the various other sorts of atrocities like killing innocent children and

so on drowning innocent children mind you but anyway let's watch some of this which is a violent god question mark from the non-alchemist let's watch some of this to bring out this point further the bible is a violent book but you already knew that there's one story however that i don't think gets enough attention and it's found in second Samuel chapter 21. the short version is that there's a famine in the land and god tells david it's because saul wronged the gibeonites to make things right david has saul's sons killed and the fame and stops

as everyone knows killing people's kids to stop a famine makes total sense sarcasm aside this really says what it appears to say even the conservative esv study bible pushes back against the idea that these seven were accomplices in saul's acts the text In no way suggests this furthermore even barrow's oldest son could scarcely have been more than 10 when saul died because david must have been at least in his late teens when married married and was no more than 30 when saul died it goes on to note that a more plausible suggestion is that god

still exactly punishment from saul's house for some of the evil that soul had done yes that's definitely the more plausible suggestion and trying to wiggle out is pointless For two reasons first god accepted the totality of david's actions by relieving the famine all without any kind of rebuke and second yahweh killing the descendants of guilty parties is a well-established pattern in the biblical texts whether it's through massive flooding destroying entire cities with fire killing the egyptian firstborn punishing korra's rebellion by swallowing up the household and goods of those involved including their sons and Little ones

into the earth stoning and burning aiken and his son's daughters and livestock since he took things for himself that were supposed to be destroyed commanding the complete destruction of entire people groups specifically to include the infants or killing david's kid as a punishment for his own actions yahweh isn't afraid of indiscriminate killing at least as he's depicted and if you're a christian watching this and want to defend Yahweh's honor then by all means give it your best shot in the comment section below but i recommend that you just make peace with the fact that your

god can get pretty bloodthirsty so that gives you a glimpse into why i think that even if morality required let's say god's existence in some manner or another arguably that wouldn't be the christian god and the christian god is not a good candidate for that now of course you can say yeah well god is the author of life He could take away life if he wants he can you know kill innocent people if he wants he can command the genocide of people if he wants he can kill innocent children he can drown innocent babies and

livestock if he wants he's god no yes yes you could do that but then don't expect me to take seriously your suggestion that this is the ultimate grounding of morality this is the moral meter stick because then morality is Very very very very different to how intuitively morality seems to be in which case we actually start to have an undercutting defeater for our second premise here because this second premise is resting on various obvious moral truths like let's say it's never okay to drown an innocent child so you could try to say oh yes god

himself doesn't have any moral duties so he's not violating anything oh god is the author of life so he can take life if he wants it and so On you can say that but then again you're just losing the plausibility that god is the ultimate standard of goodness and badness you're losing the plausibility behind the claim if it had any plausibility in the first place but you're losing the plausibility behind the claim that it's the very character of this being it's the very nature of this being which is the ultimate grounding of morality no not

if the being acts in that sort of Way so uh we can go to the an abducted version of this argument which is just which more people should be aware of yeah yeah uh morality is objective if morality's objective then god's the best explanation for being objective uh so god's the best explanation for being objective so probably god exists there are a number of things to say here i think premise two is false for many of The reasons i just articulated i think it's just not at all clear that god has the best explanation for

its being objective again whatever feature you're pinpointing about god that grounds the objective moral values and truths and so on whether it be god's commands or maybe his character or something about his nature we can still ask does god have some reason for commanding as he does or is there some more fundamental reason which explains why God's essential nature is as to forbid rape or is as to essentially lead to a command that forbids rape if there is such a more fundamental reason well then there is actually arguably a better explanation for morality's being objective

namely in terms of that more fundamental reason and cutting out the middleman ontological commitment to this radically different kind of thing god we have a simpler and it seems more explanatory illuminating explanation There by contrast if there is no such more fundamental reason well then we have arbitrary objective moral values and truths which of course is not at all a good explanation for objective moral values and truths if they're ultimately rendered entirely arbitrary so no i would reject that if morality is objective then god is the best explanation the best explanation is arguably in terms

of certain intrinsic features of the various things in Question like suffering or the flourishing conditions or the flourishing conditions for sentient creatures which we might say are set by their intrinsic natures or characters the best explanation for being objective so probably god exists and you can support that by saying look morality always seems to be tied to persons if morality is objective that means it must be tied to a person whose nature is objective some way so there's different Ways you can defend the main premise of that argument look morality always seems to be tied

to persons morality always seems to be tied to persons that seems to me to be obviously false and like pretty much self-evidently false so consider a world in which there are no persons and yet something like an elephant or a chimpanzee is let's say the quote-unquote highest form of life and sentience that there is suppose further that these beings can Undergo various tragedies elephants can lose loved ones and they exhibit signs of mourning over that elephants can undergo starvation and it's quite obvious that they suffer through that now here there are various moral values instantiated

in this world in particular there's the badness of the suffering there's the badness of the death of the loved one and so on so there are various moral truths in such a world moral values we might say in such a world and Yet there are no persons in such a world this i think is just an obvious counter-example to the claim that morality always seems to be tied to persons so that's the best explanation for being objective so probably god exists and you can support that by saying look morality always seems to be tied to

persons if morality is objective that means it must be tied to a person whose nature is objective some way so you what No so so again firstly no morality is not always tied to persons but secondly even if it were always tied to persons what that could lead us to say is like no it's actually in the very nature of the various persons to which it's tied to you could say it's various facts about the very natures of those various persons to which morality is tied right it's in the very nature of personhood that the

person has dignity and so on that is a perfectly objective Explanation for it that doesn't require there to be some person in addition to the finite persons that there are some sort of infinite person which somehow grounds various moral truths and facts about persons there's different ways you could defend the main premise of that argument david is a good person to look at that yes we have uh arguments from evil for the existence of god we have the first one the normative implications of evil evil Contrastively implies that there is a way the world ought

to be uh some actually come close to defining evil this way as a deviation or distortion or corruption of the way things are supposed to be but if that's true then there's a way the world uh ought to be uh but there can be a way the world ought to be only if there's an intention or goal or purpose behind it uh so there is an intention or goal or purpose behind the world uh the if that's true Then that can be true and if god exists so god exists so i think premise 2 is

false or at least unmotivated i can say god either has some reason behind his intention or he doesn't so god is intending the world to be such that humans don't languish for the entirety of their lives why right is there some underlying reason behind god's intention there either is or there isn't if there is an underlying reason well then it's surely that reason Which is doing the explanatory heavy lifting with respect to accounting for the wrongness or badness or impermissibility of the thing in question of the badness let's say of a world in which humans

are languishing for the entirety of their lives but if god doesn't have a reason behind his intention well then again we are thrust into arbitrariness moreover there's the point about alternative explanations there are perfectly fine Alternative explanations as to why the world ought to be certain ways rather than others that don't make any reference to intentions or goals or designs i've already been articulating various ones and of course there's the both end in primitives problem that i was mentioning earlier and premise four i think here is also probably false so for instance maybe the motivation

or goal or design or purpose comes from a morally Indifferent creator the creator could still be the creator could still have various intentions it could easily be the case that there is an intention or goal or design or purpose behind the world and yet the thing with that intention or goal or designer purpose isn't god it could be some zeus-like character it could be some morally indifferent creator it could be an aesthetic deism hypothesis a la paul draper it could be boatloads of Things it doesn't have to be god evil is privation evil is a

privation of goodness it's like well i think the common analogy is it's like light and darkness evil is not primary it doesn't have like some positive ontological status rather it's a deviation or corruption or something that effect of what is good so evil is privation if evil is a probation of goodness one thing that we should say here is that premise one Is deeply questionable and it's rejected by most ethicists meta-ethicists and metaphysicians it has difficulties involving pain false belief and so on so for instance there seems to be a kind of positive phenomenological character

associated with pain and that itself seems to be bad there doesn't seem to be like a privation of goodness there like oh it's the absence of what a pleasurable state of mind no it's not merely the absence Of a pleasurable state of mind it doesn't seem to be an absence of of anything there seems to be kind of positive qualitative feel there there are certain qualia associated with pain and those themselves seem to be bad and it seems to have a kind of positively bad character there now of course people who defend evil as probation

are aware of these sorts of objections you can go back and forth and Back and forth on objections reposts subjections or posts and so on now i just want to make you guys aware of a very good lecture that alexander prus has made on the privation theory of evil he gives various quite serious objections to it and then he goes on to develop his own theory of evil as a misarrangement but he does criticize this traditional privation theory of evil and he goes through pain false beliefs sin and various other problems That are quite serious

problems for the theory and this is by cle for science 2021 new perspectives in fill of religion 13 july number two so check that out if you are interested in looking at the privation theory of evil further this goodness is ontologically technological status rather it's a deviation or corruption or something to that effect of what is good so evil is privation if evil is a probation of goodness goodness is ontologically and Explanatory prior to evil it's good this isn't logically explanatory prior to evil and there's more goodness in the world than evil that being the

main premise if there's more goodness in the world than evil probably god exists so probably god exists now the clever thing here is that for is just a converse of the problem of evil the skeptics would argue that uh if there's more evil in the world than good Then probably god does not exist well this just flips us around and says there's probably more goodness in the world than evil if evil is understood as privation let's look at premise 3 because that seems like a blatant non-sequitur to me if goodness is ontologically and exponentially prior

to evil there is more goodness in the world than evil what from the fact that things of type 1 depend on things of type 2 such that Type 2 is ontologically and explanatory prior to type 1. it obviously doesn't follow that there are more things of type 2 than type 1. if the type god is explanatory and ontologically prior to the type created things then there are more gods than there are created things no that's just absurd god is ontologically and explanatory prior to created things does it follow that there are more gods or that

there's somehow more of god Than there are created things no there are boatloads of created things and there's only one god fundamentality does not imply a greater prevalence of the fundamental thing if anything when you get more and more fundamental you get more and more unified you get more and more sparse you get fewer and fewer things we could actually say if goodness is ontologically and explanatory prior to evil then there's more evil in the world than good because again as you go Through the more fundamental layers of reality you tend to get fewer and

fewer entities you tend to get fewer and fewer kinds of entities you tend to get more and more unified and so on you see that in science the more fundamental you go the more and more unified you get you get this very simple and elegant standard model of particle physics which explains the vast array and diversity of things so as you go more fundamental as you go to ontologically and explanatory Prior things there are fewer of those so if goodness is ontologically explanatory prior to evil there is more evil in the world than there is

good and of course given what chad had just said if there's more evil than good then probably god doesn't exist so probably god doesn't exist we seem to have an even more powerful argument from evil as the privation of the good against god's existence here horrendous evils some evils are so bad that they seem to have A non-naturalistic dimension to them i mean some evils are just so objectively appalling and horrendous that they seem to have cosmic or spiritual significance they seem satanic almost or to require hell they provoke existential outrage shaking one's fist at

heaven that sort of thing reading up on this particular argument some of the examples of horrendous evils i encountered were just so oh i mean i i won't be able to get them out of my mind for a long time so If one then we're justified in thinking that maybe jet has the seeming that somehow they require some sort of supernaturalistic dimension to them or something like that i don't have that seeming at all we know from psychology how horrendous humans can get on their own we know that humans are susceptible to propaganda we can

dehumanize others you can come to see other humans as literal vermin and once You do that you can kind of turn off your empathy for them in some sense and you can do really atrocious things and we know the various natural mechanisms by which this happens that's what a lot of social psychology is literally dedicated to so anyway i don't find this first premise at all plausible no that's just people doing these sorts of things people can be really really really depraved and bad they do have a non-natural significant Dimension to them the best explanation

of there being evil so horrendous that they have a non-naturalistic dimension is that good and evil have a deep spiritual significance so two here it's not clear that that is true if number one then we are justified in thinking that they do have a non-naturalistic dimension to them first we have to take into account that that's a very non-simple explanation given the success of science in finding Naturalistic explanations for the various actions that humans have done throughout the past we should expect arguably that the very very very horrendous things that humans that humans do that

might seem to have an unnaturalistic dimension to them are likewise susceptible to naturalistic explanation that's a kind of argument from the success of historical naturalistic social psychology so that would seem to be a Defeater for the inference from the seeming to the truth of the seeming moreover there are alternative explanations that don't involve a non-naturalistic dimension to them as i've just been specifying so so probably good and evil do have a deep spiritual significance but if that's true then something like this is probably true so something like this is probably true i should also say

with respect to two Appealing to some sort of supernaturalistic dimension to these sorts of evils it seems to increase complexity it seems to be predictively fruitless like why do you expect it in some cases and not in others why do you see it in 1940s germany rather than let's say 2022 west lafayette indiana and so on well actually we do have certain explanations we can look at the socio and historical and psychological factors that went into the weimar Republic and so on and the the cultural history of germany and so on so we have these

various naturalistic explanations that is what is predictably fruitful what's particularly fruitless is that there are like what demons running around somehow and they really like to correspond to the the cultural and sociological changes and psychological changes and they just happen to do it so that it really nicely tracks onto these naturalistic explanations it's just a Predictably fruitless cosmic coincidence so that kind of happens and also doesn't seem to fit nicely with our background knowledge of various causes of these sorts of phenomena i would also say that premise 5 is deeply questionable there are lots of

non-theistic supernaturalistic views for example maybe there are just demons and angels lurking around there's no need for god here absent some further considerations or arguments if they have deep spiritual Significance all that would follow is that there's some like spiritual realm and that certain things in the spiritual realm are somehow influencing the horrendousness of various evils or influencing stuff that happens in the world why would that require god to exist why would that even probabilify theism there are boatloads of other supernaturalistic explanations available for that oh i didn't know that that was so is this

They planning it for that well it's in his two dozen or so paper and every every argument in that paper is just defended ever so briefly but yeah that's that's argument very interesting all right let's move on so from universal beliefs certain moral beliefs are shared by all humanity if that's true then god's the best explanation for that so god's the best explanation for their being beliefs share about moral beliefs here by all Humanity so probably god exists so it's not entirely clear that premise one is true i'd like to see the empirical research for

it that is an empirical claim i know there has been some research done on certain values that you can find across humanity but it's unclear how you demarcate values and beliefs and the interplay between them anyway and they get manifested differently of course in different cultural contexts i'm not saying that This premise is false clearly but i'd like to see the empirical research behind it um and there also moreover with respect to premise two there seem to be simpler explanations in terms of say are having reliable moral beliefs tracking moral reality or perhaps in terms

of our evolutionary history you might of course claim that god best explains these further facts but then that would be a separate argument and the onus is on you To prove that claim and plus i don't know why would theism predict this data disagreement we often hear from theists themselves provides opportunity for growth and flourishing and inter-community dialogue and intercultural dialogue and growing and learning and so on so why wouldn't we actually expect god to actualize a world in which there is profound moral disagreement is such that no moral beliefs are universally shared by all

of Humanity that would facilitate various goods we can dialogue with each other we can try to convince one another of accepting certain moral beliefs that we think are true and are better than the moral beliefs that other people have we can have dialogue across ideological barriers moreover god could easily have some morally sufficient reason for allowing this kind of moral doxastic discord you know skeptical theism and all So i guess my point is just that why would theism lead us to expect that there are certain moral beliefs shared by all of humanity or at least

why would it lead us to expect it more than a relevant naturalistic alternative hypothesis or at least even a relevant non-theistic alternative hypothesis again you can say something like oh it's good that we all agree on certain moral beliefs and so on but yeah it's also good that we have disagreements again as I've pointed out this agreement provides opportunities for growth and flourishing and inter-community intercultural dialogue and dialogue across ideological barriers and coming to know certain truths and building relationships and bridges between different people groups with differing fundamental beliefs and so on so again where's

the predictive payoff of theism here The main move here is just that look there can be moral disagreements uh between cultures and so forth but uh actually these disagreements turn out to be fairly superficial the classic example is uh love your neighbors yourself seems to be a pretty universally agreed upon moral principle it just turns out that one tribe in africa that sees okay to murder members of another tribe they just don't see members of the other tribe as persons so They agree with underlying principle there's just unclarity on how it applies so there's your

argument from universal more beliefs okay sid wick and kant sidwick uh moral philosopher early 20th century he thought that the central problem of ethics was showing how one could be true acting morally is always rational only if it's always uh what's best ultimately what's best for me uh and he said it must be rational for me to act morally otherwise noble deeds Like self-sacrifice and altruism might be irrational but it seems true that that's never irrational uh to be altruistic uh so two acting morally is always what's ultimately what's best for me only if god

exists two is equivalent to if god does not exist then acting morally is not always what's ultimately best for me uh that seems true i mean morality and self-interest come apart if god does not exist uh so three happy morally is always rational only if god Exists morally is always rational so god exists so i think there are several problems with this so premise one seems false to me consider an analog so again press one says acting morally is always rational only if it's always what's ultimately best for me consider being epistemically responsible is always

rational only if it's always what's best for me no sometimes we have to believe the Truth even if the truth bloody sucks for me similarly it's not at all implausible to suppose that sometimes we have to behave in a certain way even if behaving that way bloody sucks for me even if i have to make certain sacrifices and i don't want to it'll make me sad and so on morality still has that demand of me similarly rationality has certain demands of me even if i don't want to believe that i have some let's say Interminable

illness and my life would be better if i didn't have that belief and i could just ignore it and i could live in a kind of delusion where i think everything is all fine and dandy still it's epistemically responsible for me it is rational for me and i ought to still believe what is true in that case even though it's not what's best for me and so in the case of at least epistemology it's false that it's always rational for you to Believe what's true only if it's always ultimately what's best for you to believe

what's true and similarly i would say acting morally can be rational even if it's not ultimately what's best for you it also seems to me that premise two here is false there could be lots of other ways that acting morally could always be what's ultimately best for me without god existing for example maybe there's some sort of karma kind of thing Going on or maybe there's some strange law of nature or whatever sure those have a low prior probability but so does a god who ensures that every morally action corresponds to what's ultimately best from

you that's also a pretty metaphysically profligate hypothesis my point here is just that this is just false there are other ways for acting morally to always be what's best for me other than involving god's existence and finally it's actually not clear to me Whether premise 4 is true and indeed it seems quite contestable consider two actions that i might perform one of them is the moral action a and then the other one is some other act a star which is based on prudential or practical considerations rather than specifically moral considerations now doing the moral action

over the action based on prudential practical considerations it might actually in some cases be irrational so there might be a case Where you have two choices choice one and choice two choice one only involves doing something like super duper slightly wrong like maybe it's just lying about the millionth digit of pi or maybe it's just like slightly flicking the ear of your cousin which you know will cause like a millisecond of ever so slight pain and annoyance to them or whatever in that case choice one we can suppose would be the morally wrong thing to

do Versus choice two which is refrained from doing that but suppose that that morally wrong thing to do is attach to various prudential and practical considerations benefits indeed that far outweigh by like quadrillions to one the badness of whatever you're doing in this case it's not actually clear that doing the moral action is the rational thing to do it might be the case that because it's only ever so Slightly immoral and because whatever you're doing is ever so slightly immoral together with the extremely beneficial practical or prudential considerations that come along with it perhaps it's

actually rational to do that one and irrational to go with the more moral option anyway it's just not clear to me whether or not that is true of course you might try to collapse the prudential and practical Considerations and say that those after all count as moral reasons that's questionable my point here is just to establish sufficient unclarity as to whether or not number four is true because again i can concoct these sorts of scenarios where it's only this super duper minorly wrong thing but it's accompanied by if you do it super duper beneficial prudential

or practical consequences or considerations and that by my lights shows that it's at Least unclear whether or not premise four here is true and that's all that i need to do in criticizing the argument i just need to show that it's not at all clear whether one of the premises is true we have another kantian argument from from robert adams a central term here uh is what it means to be for a belief to be demoralizing and he just says it's it means it's weakening or deterioration of moral motivation so if a belief is demoralizing

it's morally Undesirable uh if a belief is morally undesirable there is a moral advantage and believe in the opposite it is demoralizing to believe that there is no moral order in the universe and by moral order he just means there is a balance of good over evil in the universe where our moral acts makes significant difference to that balance uh so it's moralizing to believe that there's no moral order in the universe And nothing we do morally can make a difference so it's morally undesirable to believe that there's no moral order in the universe there's

moral advantage in believing that there is a moral order in the universe theism provides the most adequate theory of a moral order of the universe if theism provides the most adequate theory of a moral order of the universe there's moral advantage in accepting to use them so there's more Advantage instead sorry i i had this light up late here so that's all right that one had a lot of premises so let's go back so i think premise one is at least questionable this is equivalent to saying that if a belief is morally desirable then it

isn't demoralizing but i don't know there seem to be plenty of beliefs that could be both morally desirable and demoralizing for some people who are rich i don't know maybe they think yes ultimately it's morally Desirable that we have redistributive justice so that other people can not starve when they are bathing in their mansion and so on uh so they might think yeah okay that's morally desirable but it still might be demoralizing to them in some sense maybe they just really want to hold on to their riches maybe they want to have their bath swords

oh yes but anyway you can kind of see how different beliefs that might be morally Desirable could be demoralizing against the backdrop of a different preference structure which in some sense is in discord or in disharmony with the moral facts similarly lots of people who might experience attraction to people of the same sex they in christianity might find certain christian doctrines like for instance that engaging in homosexual activity is Strongly immoral they might find those deeply demoralizing and yet they might because they're christians they might find them morally desirable so yeah in some sense it's

what we should desire given what's morally true so in that sense it's morally desirable that's what's the moral thing to do but it still might be demoralizing to them they might not be able to let's say marry the person that they love that can be profoundly Demoralizing similarly with other traditional christian moral ethical doctrines with respect to things like transgenderism and other sorts of things so anyway premise one is equivalent to again saying that if a belief is morally desirable then it isn't demoralizing but as i've pointed out there seem to be morally desirable beliefs

that actually may very well be demoralizing for at least some people So that's premise one what about premise three this premise seems implausible by my lights maybe it's demoralizing for some people to think that there is no moral order in the universe but for others it could be profoundly galvanizing it could spur you to help make the world better it's precisely because there isn't some overarching pattern of moral order say a pattern in which good always wins or a pattern in which justice is always enacted that we Can be motivated to rectify things to push

for reform to change things for the better so again although this might be demoralizing for some people it could be galvanizing for lots of others so it's not just true simplicity or that it is demoralizing to believe that there is no moral order in the universe it's also not clear that premise 6 is true premise 6 says that theism is the best explanation of there being moral Order in the universe again though there are lots of alternative explanations of this maybe there's some sort of thing like karma maybe there is some sort of strange natural

law that makes it such that goodness prevails over evil or something like that my point here is just it's at least not clear which of these is the best explanation of there being moral order in the universe again you might think That karma or a law of nature has a really low prior probability but the same thing could equally be said about god trying to actualize a moral order i'm not positively claiming that these alternative explanations are more probable than theism i'm just saying it's not clear which of these explanations caught an explanation of their

being moral order it's not clear which one of these is the best Explanation premise 7 also seems to be a non-sequitur here even if there's a moral advantage accruing to theism with respect to moral order that doesn't at all entail that accepting theism is morally advantageous all things considered there could easily be lots of other respects in which theism is not morally advantageous for example in the case of christianity eternal conscious torment old testament atrocities and so On and i also reject premise eight that just seems quite clearly false to me if there's moral advantage

in accepting a position you should accept that position like what there seems to be moral advantage in accepting the position of there being some sort of karmic laws after all that gives literally everyone exactly what they are due so there definitely seems to be some sort of moral advantage in accepting Karma but does that mean you should accept that there is this thing called karma no of course it doesn't mean that so premise eight just seems to me to be clearly false but anyway let's continue and that one isn't robert adams more arguments for theistic

belief yeah odor birds argument from cosmic justice and by cosmic justice he means um all virtue is rewarded and all vice is punished okay so premise one we live in a rational moral order uh by rational more Order uh we mean it's the case that uh where it always makes rational sense to behave morally that's what it means that we live in a rational order it makes sense to always make sense to to behave more like if we live in a national moral order yeah liz jackson just turned in in the live chat she said

chad isn't doing push-ups lame oh man there were a time there was a Time in high school by the way liz jackson is a queen when i was i was the king of push-up contests believe it or not i was a wrestler in high school i pride myself on that my wife would appreciate it if i did more push-ups so we live in a rational moral order uh if we live in a rational moral order there's cosmic justice again that's understood as being all virtue is rewarded all vices is punished so There's cosmic justice if

there's cosmic justice there must be a cosmic judge who administers it so there's cosmic judge who administers it okay so let's listen to how we define a rational moral order again and cosmic justice again because depending on those definitions it's going to affect which premise i think is plausible or most plausibly rejected odor birds argument from cosmic justice and by cosmic justice he means um all virtue is Rewarded and all vice is punished one thing that we should note here is that even under christian theaters and there doesn't seem to be cosmic justice in that

sense if someone lives an atrocious life but on their deathbed they repent they accept jesus they do whatever is required to get into heaven or whatever well then there was lots of vices during their life that they're that's not going to go punished unless you think they're going To go to hell first and then go to heaven or unless you think that they're going to go to purgatory first and then go to heaven but if we're assuming that they really are genuinely sorry and if you're catholic maybe they went to confession and they confessed it

all and moreover then received the eucharist and so on in that case they would be free of both mortal and venial sin and in that case they would go straight to heaven assuming that they really were contrite And assuming of course that they did their penance in that case the vice isn't after all punished the vice that this person lived for the first let's say 80 years of their life isn't punished after all various prominent versions of christianity are going to be incompatible with this argument arguably but let's set that aside let's listen to how

we define these things so cosmic justices every virtue was rewarded and every vice is punished so premise one we Live in a rational moral order uh and by rational more order we mean it's the case that uh where it always makes rational sense to behave morally that's what it means that we live okay so if it always makes sense to behave rationally then virtue is always rewarded and vice is always punished to me that just seems like a straightforward non-sequitur it could easily be the case that it makes sense to live morally To do what

you're obliged to do given the demands of morality to cultivate virtue and so on even if you're not ultimately rewarded for your virtue or punished for your vice seriously does it only make sense to live a moral life if there's a carrot and a stick this way of thinking is just so deeply implausible no do good for goodness sake because it's intrinsically valuable and that makes perfect sense even if absolutely Every one of your virtuous deeds isn't ultimately rewarded and even if some of others's vicious deeds aren't ultimately punished so this just strikes me as

deeply deeply implausible but even setting that aside at premise 4 it's just not at all clear whether that's true again there are alternative ways that you could have cosmic justice without there being a cosmic judge who administers it again you could have something like karma you could have some Strange law of nature or whatever premise five further still is very far from theism the cosmic judge could be something like a zeus-like character it could be an aesthetic deist hypothesis it could be any among an infinite array of non-theistic but quasi-supernaturalistic cosmic judges but again to

have a fully informed view on the matter i'd have to read oderberg's paper or book chapter but uh i said that i was going to basically Make this video without doing additional research in the sense of research beyond what i've already done throughout my years of studying philosophy of religion so anyway let's continue inspired a lot of similar arguments uh one in every actual case one has most reason to do what is morally required so one just says that there is overriding reason to perform one's moral duty if there is no god and no afterlife

well i guess i do want to say on premise One again given what i said earlier it's at least not 100 clear to me that premise one is true it seems that i can at least conceive of a case where again you have two different choices under one of the choices you're doing something that is ever so slightly morally bad and so you ought not do it in the moral sense of ought and yet there are tremendous practical and prudential benefits from doing it and then on the other one you don't secure Those practical and

prudential benefits but you still avoid doing this ever so slightly immoral thing and things get complicated here because someone might say that those practical and prudential considerations themselves might turn into moral reasons and so actually on the whole it's false that you ought not do that first option but then we get into the weeds about what's the nature of moral reasons how they relate to practical and prudential reasons and so On so that just further supports my claim that it's just not clear whether premise one is true because you get into all these different weeds

about these debates about the nature of reasons about the nature of practical prudential reasons as well as how they relate to moral reasons and so on if there is no god and no afterlife uh then there are cases where morality requires that one make great sacrifice for only modest benefits and he gives example of like a Poor widow who has the opportunity to steal like 10 million dollars and she knows that she would never get caught and no one else would be harmed by this this is 10 million that no one ever even realized existed

but she would be stealing it if she took it so if there's no god and no afterlife then there are cases where morality requires that one make a great sacrifice for only modest benefits so if there's no god uh there's no reason why she shouldn't take that 10 Million um so uh if a given case if a given case morality requires that one make a great sacrifice only for only modest benefits then one does not have the most reason to do what is morally required i've already given some reasons for thinking that it's not clear

whether premise one is true but suppose that i grant a premise one then i think premise three Is very probably false again this almost sounds like carrot and stick reasoning it doesn't matter whether morality is requiring you to make great personal sacrifice for only modest benefits you're still always going to have most reason to do what is morally required again if one always has most reason to do what's morally required this seems to be something about the very nature of morality or the very nature of moral obligation that it's By nature it's overriding and in

that case it doesn't matter if there are going to be great personal sacrifices for only modest benefits to you because the very nature of morality is to be overriding in which case this premise three is going to be false no it is false that if there are cases where morality requires one to make great personal sacrifice for only modest benefits then you don't always have most reason to do what's morally required no Regardless of whether or not there are cases of morality you still have most reason to do what is morally required again that's probably

because there's something in the very nature of moral obligation which makes it overriding of every other consideration granting premise one i think premise three is extremely implausible well if there is no god or afterlife then in some cases one does not have the Most reason to do what is morally required but she does have a reason to do what's morally required namely not stealing a million dollars so it's false that there is no god or afterlife there you go layman's moral argument another thing i want to say here is that premise 2 strikes me as

deeply implausible this is equivalent to saying that if there are no cases where morality requires one to make great personal sacrifice for only modest Benefits then either god exists or an afterlife exists or both for starters that doesn't get you even god's existence if you're saying it's false that there is no god or afterlife one way for this to be false is for it there actually to be no god but for there to be an afterlife so interestingly we don't even have an argument for god's existence now a necessary condition for there being no Cases

where morality requires one to make great personal sacrifice for only modest benefits probably is there being an afterlife but it's certainly not there being a god you can have a whole concoction of non-theistic views that nevertheless accommodate an afterlife and that prevent there being cases where morality requires one to make these super huge personal sacrifices for only modest benefits karma for instance is one such hypothesis in that case if You're doing something that's like super morally valuable you're not making a great personal sacrifice for only modest benefits because the the benefits aren't actually after all

that modest you are going to be rewarded given the karmic cycle or whatever or there could be some strange law of nature or whatever so anyway i don't find this argument plausible so let's move on there you go layman's moral argument okay we have an interesting set of Arguments that push more toward a christian conception of god and not just a theistic conception so we have linda zakzebski's argument from the need for divine aid and being moral now she asks you know classic question that you encounter in ethics classes why be moral well she says

uh why try to be moral and so by thinking about this question uh she has a following argument it is rational to try to be moral only if it's rational to Believe the attempt would likely be successful well let's stop at that first premise because i find it deeply questionable so to find a counter example to this we only need to cook up a case in which it's rational to try to be moral and yet it is not rational to believe that the attempt would likely be successful well by my lights here's one such case

suppose you know there's only a 50 chance that your attempt to be moral Will be successful perhaps we discover something about human nature that delivers this result or perhaps you have some sort of condition whether genetic or psychological or spiritual that disposes you toward immorality and that there's only a 50 chance that you can overcome this disposition and be moral okay so again suppose you know that there's only a 50 chance that your attempt to be moral will be successful but suppose you also know that if god Exists trying your utmost to be moral despite

this disposition makes it likely that you will inherit eternal life in heaven with god whereas not trying to be moral makes it unlikely that you will inherit eternal life and if god doesn't exist you will only have the finite costs and benefits associated with trying or not trying in that case we can construct a decision matrix and show that it's rational to try to be moral in this case so long as You don't assign god's existence a probability of zero so supposing you don't have such a credence we've thereby constructed a scenario in which one

it's rational to try to be moral and yet two it is not rational to believe that the attempt would likely be successful so anyway that kind of decision matrix response seems to give a counter example to premise one so let's continue though to try to be moral only if it's rational to believe the attempt would likely be Successful but it's not rational to believe the attempt would likely be successful if all we have is our own human faculties to go on and this is because if all we have is our own faculties uh we can't

be confident that we have genuine moral knowledge given the death and diversity of moral disagreements given the depth and diversity of moral disagreements we can't be confident that we have Moral knowledge if all we have is our human faculties to go on that seems deeply implausible firstly even if we had divine faculties to go on there is still this depth and degree and extent of moral disagreement so how does adding something beyond our own human faculties how does that even help how does that help you have genuine moral knowledge in light of the depth and

degree and extent of moral disagreement That we find if we have something that calls into question you're having moral knowledge at all in this case which is questionable but if we even have something that calls into question whether or not you have moral knowledge in this case it's surely the very fact of widespread deep fundamental moral disagreement even if you think you have some sort of divine revelation that helps you the fact of disagreement just Rearizes because lots of these other people who disagree with you morally think they have divine revelation on their side moreover

even the people who share your own divine revelation will probably have differing moral views than you perhaps because they interpret the divine revelation differently or whatever for instance within christian circles very deep and profound and significant moral disagreement about for instance Homosexuality about transgenderism about infant baptism about the way christianity should relate to the state and so on so that seems really implausible if you're appealing to the depth and extent and widespread aspects of moral disagreement to say that you don't have moral knowledge in the case that you only have your own human faculties to

go on well then you're also not going to have moral knowledge in the case where you have More than your own human faculties to go on because the same disagreement is going to be present there so anyway let's go back uh we can't be confident that we can overcome our moral weaknesses and bring about good in the world uh and we can't be confident that our moral efforts wouldn't just be vain in the end why though we have moral exemplar humans we do know that humans are capable of being moral and Overcoming lots of their

weaknesses and so on because we've actually seen it so premise two just seems to be false by my lights humans are perfectly capable of being moral and indeed likely to become moral on their own so long as they commit themselves to it or so the non-theist will say again and so it's perfectly rational to think one's attempt would be successful even if we have our own human faculties to rely on after all by the naturalist lights there Have been some profoundly virtuous human beings and they became virtuous without requiring anything other than their own human

faculties to go on and if one wants to convince the naturalists to think that they have more than their own human faculties to go on they need to be given some non-question begging reason in support of that but three it is rational to try to be moral so it's rational to believe the attempt would like to be successful so we have more Than just our own human faculties to go on follow us logically from two and four now if a theory postulates exactly what more we need to be rational and believing the attempt at the

moral would be likely to be successful then that then it's rational to believe that theory christian theism postulates exactly what more we need to be rational in believing the attempt that being moral would likely be successful namely uh we have Uh by divine revelation the divine assurance of and guidance grace providence uh exactly we need the assurance of genuine moral knowledge the assurance that we can overcome more weakness uh and that are more electrons wouldn't be in vain and so it's rational to believe christianism there's a lot to say here premise six by my light

seems clearly false um if a theory postulates exactly what more we need to be rational believing the attempt at being more will Likely be successful then it's rational to believe that theory no even if this antecedent being true even if that counts in favor of a theory there could easily be defeaters and countervailing considerations such that those make it no not rational after all to believe that theory so even if this counts in favor of a theory which is questionable but even if it does count in favor of theory it doesn't automatically follow that it's

rational to believe the theory Again you have to look at your total evidence and moreover there could be defeaters and countervailing considerations moreover think about judaism and islam and bear non-religious theism and so on these sorts of views also postulate what more we need to be rational in believing the attempt at being moral would likely be successful treating islam as a theory here it's not as though under the theory of islam allah is somehow impotent to Make people who attempt at being moral likely be successful no allah can easily do that and allah does do

that same with judaism and yahweh and same with bare non-religious theism as well you have an omnipotent god in the picture who can provide you with the requisite divine assistance and so on so there are boatloads of other theories apart from christianity that also postulate what more we need to be rational believing the attempt to being moral would likely Be successful would it does it follow that it's rational to believe absolutely every single one of these well then it would follow that it's rational to believe incompatible things so anyway i think that this just provides

us with a counter example to six no it doesn't follow that it's rational to believe a given theory just because it postulates exactly what more we need to be rational and believing the attempt of being moral would likely be successful islam does This judaism does this bare non-religious theism does this and lots of other hypotheses do this as well let's move on because i've already argued that there are so many different places where this argument is exceedingly weak and arguably clearly false but let's continue john here we're on the world gap yeah uh he's defended

this argument over the course of like three decades now what it means by the moral gap is it's a gap Between the demand that morality places on us and our natural capacity to live up to it so uh morality essentially demands that we be perfect uh but it seems like we can't be perfect so if again if you ought to do x you can do x then it's false that we ought to be perfect because as he just said no we can't be perfect so then it's just false that we ought to be perfect given

this principle that if one ought to do x then one can do x that ought presupposes or Implies can of course you might say oh well you can secure that if you have god in the picture but no naturalist no atheist would ever grant that we ought to be perfect because they don't have god in the picture and so to simply assert that we ought to be perfect is simply to beg the question against the naturalist or the atheist they would never grant that assuming of course they accept that odd Implies can as this argument

requires so assuming that they grant that ought implies can then no naturals or atheists would ever grant they would never grant that one ought to be perfect because no of course we can't be perfect only if you antecedently are justified in accepting theism would you be justified in accepting that we ought to be perfect in which case the argument would be utterly dialectically toothless but anyway the principle that odd implies Can sure i think lots of otts imply cans but does ought as such for every single x does that imply that one can do x

it's not clear by my lights compatibilism might be true it's an epidemic possibility in which case free will would be compatible with being causally determined but if we are causally determined well then it's plausible that we don't have the ability to do otherwise but nevertheless we're still Free and responsible for what we do and so if we're free and responsible for what we do we can be blamed for it and it can truthfully be said that we ought not to have done it so even if compatibilism is true it's still true that hitler for instance

ought not to have persecuted the jews but yet if compatibilism is true hitler could not have done otherwise so we have hitler ought to have Refrained from killing the jews and yet hitler couldn't have refrained from killing the jews again assuming compatibilism and assuming moral realism or whatever so given the compatible isn't more for those privy to debates in philosophy of action and more strictly speaking semi-capitalism given that compatibilism might be true and given that compatibilism would plausibly deliver us a counterexample to this first premise Well then i think we should be very hesitant to

accept this first premise at least by my lights of course you might think that compatibilism doesn't even have a chance of being true but for me i definitely think it has a chance of being true and in that case my credence in one is correspondingly lowered that's the moral gap that john here talks about and it gives him this following argument if one ought to do x then one can do x that's Pretty much an indisputable principle of ethics that's not true that principle has come under tremendous fire in meta ethics and ethics there are

lots of papers published that challenge whether ot implies can one ought to live up to the demands of morality uh so if all that one can live up to the demands morality but one can live up to the man's morality only if one has the requisite extra human assistance so one Does have yeah so i think premise four is just implausible the naturalist thinks yeah we should live up to the demands of morality and so we can but of course there is no extra human assistance so the demands of morality only require us to do

things that are possible for humans to do on their own whether or not someone accepts four seems to be a function entirely of one's prior commitments no one who doesn't already accept something like theism or At least no one who doesn't already reject atheism would be in a position to accept four it seems of the extra human assistance and similarly we say that if a theory postulates exactly the extra human assistance needed to live up to the demands of morality it's rational to accept that theory again we saw earlier why that is very implausible indeed

it arguably seems clearly false even if satisfying this Antecedent here counts in favor of a theory again which is questionable there could be defeaters in countervailing considerations which renders it not rational to believe the relevant theory i've already criticized six earlier and i talked about again judaism islam baron on religiousism and so on so anyway let's just continue christianism does postulate exactly the extra human assistance needed to live up to demands morality uh and and there he Has in mind um the christian doctrines of atonement justification and sanctification so it's rational belief christianism kant on

the duty to promote the highest good count factors and allowed moral arguments now by highest good means perfect proportion of happiness to virtue so uh you're happy in like you diamonistic sense like flourishing you flourish uh to the extent that you're virtuous okay that's what he means by the highest good So we ought morally to promote the realization of the highest good what we ought to do must be possible for us to do it's possible for us to promote the realization of the highest good only if there's a god who makes that possible for us

um and so because only god could ensure the perfect proportion of happiness to virtue so god exists okay so what's interesting promise four Is saying if it's possible for us to promote the realization of the highest good then there exists a god who makes the realization possible but notice that there's a discrepancy here we're talking about we ought to promote the realization of the highest good it's not saying that we ought to realize the highest good it's saying we ought to promote the realization of the highest good and that Only entails that we can again

give an odd implies can which is contestable but that only implies that we can promote the realization of the highest good then why would that require god who makes the realization possible right all we need to be possible here is the promotion of realizing the highest good so even if god is required to make the realization of the highest good possible it's not at all clear that god is required to make the promotion of the Realization of the highest good possible and indeed it seems as though it could be possible to promote the realization of

the highest good even if the very realization of the highest good is not possible you can still try to promote it we can still for instance try to promote world peace even if maybe given the limitations of human nature world peace ultimately cannot be realized still we can promote it and we ought to promote it and so on So premise 4 here is implausible it's not clear whether premise 1 is true either it depends probably on what the highest good is suppose that the highest good is like so good that it's beyond our natural capacities

even to promote well in that case the naturalist who accepts that autumn implies can would never grant that we ought to promote the highest good and of course in that case the argument is utterly powerless to move naturalists only those antecedently Accepting the supernatural would be convinced of the argument by contrast suppose the highest good is not beyond our natural capacities to promote well then in that case premise 4 once again is false so either way the argument simply fails moreover it's not clear whether premise 2 is true there are several challenges to the principle

that odd implies can like the compatibilist challenge that i've rendered earlier And again i've given a reason to be very skeptical of premise four here but here are some others we can ask what is the highest good perhaps it's something like just a flourishing life a life full of intellectual and moral virtue a life in which the person knows important truths about reality has a good character acts morally and all around achieves various excellences that humans can achieve well that doesn't require god to facilitate its realization kant might try to define The highest good or

the realization of the highest good as perfect proportion of happiness to virtue but then we can just ask why why is that the highest good give me some reason to think that that's the highest good as opposed to the thing that i just laid out and finally what i want to say is yet another challenge to premise for why would it require god specifically to facilitate its realization why not just some sort of supernatural help like Maybe an angel would do maybe an angel is able to realize the proportion of happiness and virtue the correct

accurate proportion to them or maybe it's just some superhuman power something like zeus or something like a kind of karma or something like a law of nature that ensures that again these other sorts of hypotheses might be intrinsically improbable but so is the hypothesis that there is a god who makes this realization possible Yeah this should be a familiar argument uh we have objective moral applications if we do then they're best understood as divine commands that was the subject of robert adams uh unsurpassed book uh on theistic ethics finite infinite goods uh so objective moral

obligations are best understood commands but if they are then uh god exists so god exists god exists Okay so i find premise two implausible of course and i find it inadequately motivated moreover the first problem with it is again um when god is making his various commands like we ought not to rape either has some reason to make that command or he has no reason to make the command if he has some reason to make the command like say because raping someone is bad or because of the suffering that the person undergoes well then surely

it's that reason which is Doing the explanatory heavy lifting with respect to generating the moral obligation in which case god's commanding it god is kind of like just an intermediary here he's not doing any explanatory heavy lifting with respect to one's obligation not to do it all you need to ground or explain the objective moral obligation not to rape would just be that further reason let's say facts about the victim and the suffering that the victim Experiences and facts about what it is to rape someone but by contrast on the other horn of dilemma suppose

that god is no reason to forbid this or to command us not to do this well then it's completely arbitrary right and of course that's absurd plausibly if obligations are just entirely arbitrary then they don't have any normative authority over us and moreover it's just patently false in its Own it's just false to say that it's arbitrary that rape for instance is wrong so that's the first problem the second problem is that again there are alternative explanations that enjoy it seems greater parsimony and explanatory power again to ground objective moral obligations and duties you need

only sight various facts intrinsic to the act or the situation or the victims of the act and so on you can Talk about the suffering of the victim you can talk about the rights of the victim maybe you can talk about the utility involved you can cite boatloads of facts intrinsic to the situation that stance independently ground its impermissibility and you can also talk about the nature of the action itself like the very nature of promise making or the very nature of non-consensual sex and so on so again there are alternative Explanations that don't involve

divine commands that seem to be firstly importantly simpler and at least by my lights also seem to enjoy greater explanatory power but all i want to point out here is that there are alternative explanations the third problem is of course eric wielenberg's example of lifting a pinky finger if you could lift a pinky finger to prevent a million holocaust it seems as though that very fact makes it Morally obligatory for you to lift your pinky finger or whatever it doesn't matter if god commanded you or not it seems as though the very fact of the

situation that you can just by doing this thing at very little to no inconvenience to yourself prevent millions of holocausts and that profound suffering and badness that would ensue there from it seems as though that alone would be sufficient to generate a stance-independent moral obligation for You to lift your pinky finger it doesn't matter whether or not god has commanded you since premise 2 would imply the opposite of that it would imply that nope you literally are not morally obliged to lift your pinky finger unless unless god just so happens to have commanded you to

do so no that just seems utterly implausible and then the fourth problem which i'm not going to develop in any detail here but whelenburg develops a kind of psychopath Argument which is kind of interesting basically objective moral obligations and duties that are generated by commands only oblige the people to which the command is made if the command is made sufficiently known to them if i just whisper under my breath to my child let's say you have you ought to clean your room or something like that so that the child doesn't hear it it would be

absurd to then blame my child and say oh no you Didn't live up to your obligation like what i didn't even properly communicate to this child but of course psychopaths given their constitution it seems as though they're either not able to grasp or they're somehow out of touch with the moral obligations and duties and so this divine command through moral obligations and duties would seem to entail that psychopaths don't after all have any moral obligations which seems absurd right surely they are still morally Obliged let's say not to dismember people and torture them now anyway

much much much more can be said both back and forth on these various arguments and so on but i'm just giving you some of the reasons that i've found at least reasonably plausible that make me reject premise two here and i guess the argumentative approach here more generally uh you'll see in arguments from obligations and duty they often talk about how objective obligations and Duty the reason for thinking that there are such is that let me just give you a quick example um we just had a bunch of snow uh the past few weeks here

in ohio so at one point that was up to you know 18 inches and my wife has to get up very early for work to leave sometimes at like 5 30 in the morning and i could sleep in until the baby wakes up at like nine o'clock but uh she can't get out of the driveway if i don't get out and clear it um you know Sometimes there's maybe not you know there could be just a little bit just enough snow where she could drive over i could get away with like staying in bed uh

but there's just something pulling me i really feel like a genuine almost physical tension that pushes me out of bed to go shuffle that driveway that's just the right thing to do so moral obligations and duties often have This feeling of pushing and pulling people to behave in certain ways which well it's not clear that it's the moral obligation or duty which is like pulling you or pushing you in some manner it seems to be your psychological dispositions and so on and the character that you've built up over the years that's not to say that

there aren't objective moral obligations and so on i actually think there probably are and i'm just taking issue with the way that He's described the situation here yeah the explanation of course is in terms of your character that you've built up over the years and your psychological dispositions and desires and so on and of course potentially fear of the wife's retribution human argument from humans conscience uh guilt shame responsibility and so on are only appropriately felt in relation to other moral agents but sometimes so i think that premise is Implausible the very fact of transgressing

a moral maxim legitimates or renders appropriate responsibility and guilt and shame and so on it seems it doesn't matter if there are other moral agents it's the very fact that you've transgressed to moral maximum the very fact that you've done something you ought not to have done that is what legitimates or renders appropriate responsibility and guilt and shame and so on it doesn't matter there are other Moral agents around so it seems indeed we can even agree with the spirit behind one but simply reject the quote-unquote other constraint it's not the case that it's only

appropriately felt in relation to other moral agents sure it's probably felt only in relation to moral agents but perhaps that moral agent is yourself it seems as though you you could easily appropriately and legitimately feel guilt and shame responsibility etc in relation just to Yourself so again those are the two reasons why we can reject premise one responsibility and so on are only appropriately felt in relation to other moral agents but sometimes we appropriately feel guilt shame responsibility for deeds done in secret that harm i see where your mind is going deeds done in secret

uh so guilty responsibility for deeds done in secret are appropriately felt only if there's another moral agent That's privy to deeds done in secret uh so there is a moral agent that's privy to deeds done in secret the best explanation of that is if there's a god-like being so there is a god-like being so premise 5 it's not clear to me why that's true and it seems somewhat implausible it could be all other sorts of moral agents maybe there are again maybe there are aliens monitoring us from afar and so are privy to our deeds

Done in secret whatever those might be maybe there are angels that are privy to our deeds done in secret maybe there's some zeus like supernatural character that's privy to our deeds done in secret and so on down the line of like the infinitely many possible agents that it could be why think that god is more plausible than any of those of course you're gonna say something like well aliens that's really intrinsically improbable but at least we know that There are physical beings in the universe that are intelligent and so on and we know that the

universe is sufficiently huge and so on like we at least know those things those that are in our background knowledge that might even be more intrinsically probable than theism i'm not saying it is but i'm just saying it's not clear that it isn't and so again even if you say that these various other hypotheses like there Being a zeus-like supernatural character that's privy to our deeds or maybe they're being some sort of angel that's privy to our deeds done in private you might say those have a low prior probability but i'm just going to turn

around and say yes but that's the exact same thing as a god that's privy to our deeds done in secret again it might just be something which even has a comparable probability of god's existence like an aestheticism hypothesis that paul draper Has talked about or just even something that's exactly like god except it's more properties it's morally indifferent there are boatloads of other alternative hypotheses at least many of which even seem to be as intrinsically likely as theism super interesting i've never heard of this argument uh but i definitely want to think more about it

that's why i'm kind of pulling this up right now i want to see what kind of additional resources there are Yeah so if i remember correctly i think graham opie objects to this argument by saying well no it doesn't guilt shame and responsibility don't imply relation to someone else because relation to yourself is sufficient you can just you can feel guilty yourself and so well maybe maybe so maybe not i mean on the other hand it's like there are some scumbags that probably don't Feel uh you know who would just get away with anything and

yet realize maybe your psychopath and realize that you did do something wrong so so you know that is true but remember what the premise was the premise was appropriately felt in relation arguably when you're talking about psychopaths and scumbags like that even if they don't feel guilt and shame responsibility and etc even in relation to themselves the question is would it be appropriate for them to and yes it Would you know the defense of this argument might require distinction between objective deals subjective guilt things like that on the intrinsic harmfulness of wrongdoing wrongdoing is intensely

harmful to the wrongdoer even if they don't feel like it so harm here means not pain or suffering or guilty conscience but just having or even having bad character it just means Objective well-being you are not objectively as good off as as you would be if you hadn't harmed someone or or done something wrong to someone um metaphorically wrongdoing is like it's soul withering in a way even if it doesn't seem to you to be so wrongdoing is intrinsically harmful to the wrongdoer that could be true only if harm is the harm here is his

punishment from a god-like being so here's god like So premise one is true in so far as wrongdoing intrinsically harms the moral character of the wrongdoer yeah but then premise two seems clearly false all you need to harm your moral character is to do something wrong for which you are morally responsible that has nothing to do with punishment from a god-like being indeed the very fact that it's intrinsically harmful seems to militate against the truth of premise too if it's intrinsically harmful then it's simply Part of the very inner nature of the wrong doing to

harm the one who performs the wrong doing but in that case the source of the harm is the wrong doing itself it seems and its intrinsic character or nature not some extrinsic relation to a punisher outside the wrong doer but perhaps the proponent of this argument has something else in mind i mean maybe but in any case the notion of intrinsic harm is either going to be naturalistically acceptable or not if it Is then the naturalist would never grant premise two and so the argument is dialectically toothless and so fails and if it isn't naturalistically

acceptable then again the naturalist would never grant premise one and so then the argument is dialectically toothless and so would fail either way the argument fails these are all really interesting arguments so this is this is just really cool it's really cool all right uh moving moving on moral knowledge now This yeah this is one that i am uh very yeah this shows up in the blackwell companion uh the author there oh what's his name uh lindell mark lindell uh we have more knowledge if naturalism is true then we probably don't have moral knowledge but

atheism is true we probably do so if we have more knowledge that strong evidence feeds them against naturalism so more knowledge is strong evidence for this Against naturalism and the main reason for thinking uh that uh the faculties we use to form more beliefs aren't wouldn't be aimed at truth but fitness if naturalism is true so it's possible that we could always have uh it's possible that we could have true moral beliefs if if naturals is true but it's more likely that those true beliefs would be true by accidents it'll be like believing it's noon

when you look at the clock that says Noon and it is noon but yesterday the batteries ran out of the clock and stop the hands at noon you know you have a true belief that it's new but only by accident uh so if naturalism is true far more beliefs are true only only by accident that's the main idea here i think this would probably require a video on its own right just because of how complicated the argument for moral knowledge So there are lots of challenges to premise two in the literature so eric willenberg for

instance has a third factor approach wherein he targets premise two and says that nope that's not true or at least we don't have sufficient reason to think that it's true wrestling for lando for instance check out his published works he's written on this and he has responses to this sort of line of reasoning also seen my video with him and cain b both of Whom actually rejected the principle argument that was just laid out by chad for thinking that premise two is true and they also gave reasons for their projections so definitely check out that

video that i did with russ schaefer landau and kane b and also i want to put some resources on your radar for investigating this moral knowledge argument further because there are some forceful criticisms or at least potentially forceful criticisms of the Argument that i want you guys to be aware of one of the best places to go here is challenges to moral and religious belief disagreement and evolution edited by michael bergman and patrick kane now of course a big shout out to purdue university boiler up bro because michael bergman is one of my professors at

purdue university and pat kane is one of my professors at purdue university so yeah These guys are both amazing definitely check out this now the the relevant chapters that i want to at least put on your radar is this one i'm basically just going to briefly talk through this one by sharon street if everything happens for a reason then we don't know what reasons are why the price of theism is normative skepticism so she is actually challenging this third premise here no if this is true then it's false that we very probably Would have more

knowledge we actually very probably wouldn't have moral knowledge so we're going to go a little bit through her article but also the article from william fitzpatrick why there is no darwinian dilemma for ethical realism he essentially provides a response to premise two here that if naturalism is truly probably don't have moral knowledge so definitely check out this book and check out the two chapters in particular that i just mentioned the One that's just chapter 12 by william fitzpatrick and the one which is chapter nine from sharon street and we're just going to go briefly through

some of the stuff that sharon street writes in her article so sharon street she is actually one of the defenders of a kind of evolutionary debunking argument of morality so she's argued elsewhere in a secular meta ethical context that norman of realism the position that there are robustly mind independent truths about How to live faces the following epistemological problem on this opposition that normative realism is true we must conclude that in all likelihood we are hopeless at discovering how to live this skeptical conclusion is so implausible that we are forced to reject the realistic supposition

that leads to it in this essay i explore a structurally analogous argument according to which theism the position that there is a god in the Sense of an omniscient omnipotent and morally perfect being also leads to normative skepticism and therefore should likewise be rejected general strategy of her argument is to suppose with the theist that god exists and then to argue that this supposition when coupled with factual observations about the kinds of things that happen in this world has implausible substantive normative implications concerning the kinds of moral reasons for action that There are indeed to

such an extent that on the supposition that theism is true we must come to distrust our faculty of moral judgment across the board this skeptical conclusion is unacceptable for a variety of reasons first it's extremely implausible blah blah blah right it's unacceptable basically it's intolerably unacceptable the argument bears closest resemblance to a line of objection that has been developed against the theistic position Known as skeptical theism according to this line of objection the skeptical theist cannot successfully contain his or her putatively restricted area of skepticism instead the skepticism inevitably spills out beyond its intended domain

and becomes crippling though she basically begins with what she calls moral common sense the example she's about to give is disturbing but if the subject of discussion is evil and what morally to make of it then it is Essential that we have in mind real life cases philosophical positions concerning evil that might sound plausible in the abstract need to be tested against reality whose horrors outstrip on a routine basis anything that one might otherwise have imagined was possible one among endless possible examples of a horrific real-life evil is a drunk driving accident that occurred in

the early morning hours of july 2nd 2005 in long island new york in this accident a Drunk driver traveling 70 miles an hour the wrong way on a highway struck a limousine that was carrying six family members home from a wedding that had taken place earlier that day in a crash a seven-year-old girl who had been a flower girl at the wedding was decapitated the limousine driver was also killed on impact and the flower girl's five-year-old sister father and maternal grandparents were critically injured in the minutes that followed the Flower girl's mother who had also

been in the limousine pulled herself from the wreckage and began searching for her family she knew that her five-year-old daughter was alive because she could hear her moans but as she searched the wreckage she found her seven-year-old daughter's decapitated head the mother picked it up and clung to it screaming to her husband that katie is dead in spite of repeated requests by emergency personnel the mother refused To give up her daughter's head holding onto it for nearly an hour as she watched the rest of her family being cut from the wreckage the idea that there

was a good moral reason to permit this scene of unimaginable horror to take place defies every last shred of moral common sense this is so in the sense that if there was such a reason then the moral reality of the world is very different from what our everyday moral and factual capacities are capable of Discerning i assume that no one among the likely readership of this essay would seriously entertain the thought that any of the parties involved deserve this what then when we examine the world as we might have thought we knew it we can

find no circumstance moral empirical or otherwise that would seem to supply any good reason to permit such an event to occur importantly for our purposes this Is not to say that there couldn't be a morally good reason to permit such an event to occur of course there could be there could be a morally good reason to permit anything but it is to suggest that cleaving to the view that there was a morally good reason to permit this crash to happen which as i will argue belief in god entails might come at a very high price

it might come in particular at the price of our ability to trust our own faculty of moral Judgment going forward if there was a morally good reason to permit this to happen in other words then we are hopeless judges of moral reasons the rest of this essay consists in a more formal exploration and development of that idea so basically we're not going to go through her essay but i just wanted to make you aware of it my point here is not to necessarily agree with her argument and not even necessarily disagree with her argument i'm

just Showing how these issues are immensely complex and unclear which inspires in me a deep sense of humility and tentativeness in these sorts of regards i mean her case isn't absurd and it needs to be reckoned with right it's not implausible what she's arguing she has a case to be made anyone who wants to defend a premise 3 of this argument here needs to address her case that she makes in that chapter and similarly anyone who wants to defend Premise 2 here needs to contend with william fitzpatrick's chapter in this book as well the chapter

12 that i was talking about all right so anyway back to this more resources on that one okay okay uh richie uh defends the argument where we have a capacity to apprehend objective moral norms but if that's true the best explanation for that is that our cognitive faculties were intended to apprehend objective Moral norms so uh our cognitive faculties are intended to apprehend objective moral norms but if he is true uh three is truly isn't his best explanation for that so this is the best explanation for our having capacity to apprehend objective moral norms seen

pretty similarly it's quite clear how this argument is not at all going to be independent of the previous argument i don't want to say that they're identical Arguments but they're basically the same thing and again i'm just going to say here that premise 2 is implausible by my lights so long as there's a naturalistic account of how our moral faculties reliably track moral reality and indeed there are several such accounts one or more of them will be a better explanation than divine intention they're gonna be simpler and they're gonna be at least as explanatory potent

and of course accounts in terms of Divine intention also face the problems that i previously mentioned in particular are going to face sharon street's argument that she developed in that chapter that we've been going through so anyway let's continue so we have two arguments from altruism where genuine altruism is sacrificial behaviorally for another it incurs no benefit to yourself uh your relations or to your social group okay uh it's exclusively a sacrifice for Someone else all right so if it incurs no benefits to yourself then genuine altruism is incompatible with christian theism of course because

if you are genuinely altruistic then it doesn't grow any benefits to yourself but of course what we might think of as sacrificing yourself for others that is going to accrue benefits to yourself under christian theism because you're going to be rewarded in heaven and so on indeed Lots of the other arguments in this list said precisely that and so if gender and altruism exists and is rational according to this first premise well then christian theism is false hence christian theism is false what's sauce for the goose is sauce of the gander okay or to your

social group okay uh it's exclusively a sacrifice genuine altruism is sacrificial behaviorally for another it incurs no benefit to yourself uh your Relations or to your social group okay uh it's exclusively a sacrifice for someone else uh with no benefit all right if genuine altruism exists and is rational that's a key premise uh if naturalism is true genuine ultra altruism does not exist and it's irrational so well that seems like the key premise to me arguably that seems really impossible naturalism seems to be a precondition for genuine alters and Under theism plausibly god's gonna reward

you in some sort of afterlife i mean again atheism doesn't strictly entail it but it might probabilify it so yeah there is no genuine altruism it seems under that sort of thing yes you can genuinely sacrifice yourself for others and maybe you can even sacrifice yourself without expecting some reward but you're gonna get it if god is perfectly good and he apportions benefits to you based on the good things That you did in your life and so given the definition of altruism that was given earlier that can't exist under christian theism and it's very unlikely

to exist under theism it seems naturalism or something like it is actually a precondition for genuine altruism because only then can you really truly sacrifice yourself without any benefits incurred from that so anyway this is just a very odd argument anyway if we define altruism in the Normal sense where it's just like at least sacrificing something of your own for the sake of others for helping others that is perfectly compatible with naturalism altruism in that sense can perfectly well exist under naturalism and it can be rational under naturalism that can be still perfectly rational because

it's intrinsically valuable let's say given that it does exist and is rational naturalism is false if he isn't true genuine altruism probably Does exist and is rational so the existence and rationality of genuine altruism strongly confusion i've argued yeah that it's precisely the opposite there's a second argument yeah we have a second argument from altruism uh from bruce which is that moral altruism is irreducibly normative um this one will take a bit of explaining well let's just say yeah i agree uh there can be no naturalistic explanation for moral altruism if Moralism is irreducibly normative

so there is a naturalistic explanation for moral altruism uh there are good theistic explanations of moral altruism however uh which is evidence for theism well it's interesting because that premise that he added verbally there that there are good theistic explanations of moral altruism is not showing up on the screen i just take it that maybe they accidentally omitted a premise so anyway just note that that Should be there on the screen for those of you who are looking at the screen there should be an extra premise that says there are indeed good theistic explanations for

moral altruism what i want to say here is that uh premise two seems to be just clearly false i've been going through various ways that are nontheistic and perfectly compatible with naturalism that can explain or ground or account for objective normative truths and assuming That those normative truths aren't reducible to non-normative truths and facts well then we're going to be able to account for that as well in non-theistic terms so anyway i don't find too plausible at all but also for their implicit premise here that there are good theistic explanations for moral altruism listen whatever

it is that the theist wants to point to about god to ground the normativity of altruism they're going to Face the same dilemma we've seen crop up time and again for moral arguments either there's some underlying reason why god's being that way delivers the normativity of altruism or there isn't such an underlying reason if there is then the naturalist can simply cite that reason it's that reason which is doing they have exponentially heavy lifting it seems if there isn't then altruism's normativity is just entirely arbitrary Which seems absurd and moreover here's a parody argument to

this sort of argument premise one moral altruism is intrinsically normative that seems plausible there's something about sacrificing for others in and of itself which is good that seems to be in and of itself deeply valuable and it seems to be intrinsically normative as well second premise if moral altruism is intrinsically normative then something about the altruism itself accounts for Its normativity not some extrinsic relation to god or god's nature so conclusion something about the altruism itself accounts for its normativity not some extrinsic relation to god or god's nature and in that case god isn't needed

as an explanation the naturalist can simply appeal to the intrinsic nature or character of altruism itself to account for its normativity and indeed its irreducible normativity back into it let's get the arguments Back on the screen here so experiential arguments is the next section we've got a quote from william james i'll let you take it away yeah so you can't really talk about arguments from religious experience without at least some examples and here's one this is from william james's book the varieties of religious experience so i want to at least make some very general points

about arguments from religious experience and then i'll Be able to refer back to these general points as i proceed through these specific arguments so the first point that i want to make is that plausibly the support that religious experience is going to provide certain religious claims is only going to be prima facie or is it going to be defeasible which is separate from ultima fascia and like whether or not all things considered you have reason to accept the Religious tradition as such so i do think that yes if you let's say have an experience as

of god then you're gonna have some sort of feasible justification for that because at least i lean towards something like phenomenal conservatism but that justification is highly defeasible that is in principle it can be overturned overwritten by countervailing considerations or reasons it can be undercut or rebut as the case May be and arguably there actually are going to be defeaters for these seemings for these experiences in the context of religious experience three considerations at this juncture come to mind in particular so again this is all still within my first general point but these are three

different considerations that might very well serve as defeaters for the relevant justifications that the Experiences and the seemings provide so first we have of course the massive disagreement religious diversity seems to pose a defeater for the verticality of religious experiences in the same way that right wildly conflicting eyewitness reports undermine each other suppose that there was some sort of concert and there was a stage in the middle and a bunch of people attended it a bunch of people come up to you afterwards one person says oh there's dude there was a Donkey on the stage

and that's all that there was and then the next one says there was a band there and it was like 10 guys and they were all playing and then another one says no there was just like one dude and he was a mime and he was doing a mime performance another person said that they saw four elephants there and they were pink and they were dancing and a still further person said no the stage was just blank it was a terrible event because it was just blank Now what are you going to think happened well

it seems as though you should suspend judgment as to what happened because of these various conflicting eyewitness reports they seem to undermine each other given the very fact of their radically divergent character similarly if two eyewitness reports disagree on the most basic facts about what happened with respect to let's say a religious tradition or with respect to Cross-religious tradition comparisons well then it seems that neither gives you good grounds for any beliefs about what happened and it certainly seems again that the contents of religious experience reports are radically divergent from one another some subjects of

religious experience report experience of nothingness as the ultimate reality some a vast impersonal consciousness in which we all participate Some an infinitely perfect personal creator some experience it as having a trinitarian structure others as having a unitarian structure some experience a unity or identity or aspect hood with the ultimate whereas others experience a kind of radical distinction and radical dependence upon it as something wholly other these are substantive and core elements of many such religious experiences and They seem to directly contradict one another to maintain then that one's own religious experiences are vertical one would

have to either a find some common core to all these experiences such that in spite of substantive differences between them they could reasonably be construed as experiences of the same reality or b insist that one's own experiences are heretical and that therefore those of other traditions with divergent or incompatible experiences Are not vertical and yet neither of these moves seems particularly plausible i mean b especially involves an intolerable level of arbitrariness it seems and a really isn't much better for in that case god is literally intentionally and knowingly inducing experiences in people that further cement

them in false religions this is profoundly surprising and indeed arguably morally objectionable on especially exclusivist style religious Theism on which explicit adherence to a particular religion is required to inherit eternal life and or avoid eternal conscious torment and moreover it even seems surprising on bear theism isn't god supposed to love truth like why is he a sower of such fundamental boxestic discord now you could of course blame something like demons for these other divergent religious experiences or whatever but then that will of course cast doubt on The reliability and evidential efficacy of your own traditions

experiences maybe your own ones are caused by demons or whatever and plus you take a massive hit in prior probability that is not a predictably fruitful hypothesis and it goes against our background knowledge and various other things like you're just taking a massive hit in prior probability finally you could chalk these differences in religious experiences up to differences in Interpretation more specifically the thought goes there's a difference between uh experiencing a thing and then your interpretation of that experience consider that mystics from different religions come to their experiences of the divine with different interpretive frameworks

that they inherit from their differing religious traditions the differences in their reports you might say are due to their having different interpretations of the same sort of Experience i think we can say the following in response to that so perhaps that is the case but also perhaps that isn't the case why think it is the case over it's not being the case after all the burden of justification here is on the proponent of the argument from religious experience they need to positively show why religious experience strongly favors theism it's not enough then merely to suggest

that the differences are due wholly to Interpretive differences this needs to be justified not merely suggested or atom braided and it's not clear how one would go about showing it furthermore once we have such a vague or indeterminate experience that allows for such radically divergent and incompatible interpretations in what sense can we confidently say it's really god that they're experiencing the very fact that their experiences are so indeterminate and interpretable in Substantively irreconcilable ways it seems should lead us to suspend judgment on what exactly they are experiencing lastly the point about the surprising nature of

the data on theism remains specifically it seems quite surprising that god would knowingly and intentionally induce such experiences of himself while making the content of those experiences so vague and indeterminate that people came to thoroughly contradictory accounts of What they experienced this in turn will amount to further cementing the experiencers in a false tradition by my lights this seems quite surprising on theism i mean think especially of how things could be god could if he wanted to make experiences determinate and unambiguous across a variety of different religious traditions different times and cultures ones that don't

even have any causal contact with one another they all could Have converged on let's say a kind of trinitarian christianity or whatever god could have done that that would have provided amazing evidence for christianity but of course we don't have that and indeed it's nowhere close to what we have so anyway that's my first subpoint within this first general point remember my first general point was that we should keep in mind that the justification that religious experiences and seemings and so on provide is prima Facie not ultima fascia and that there may very well be

defeaters for these sorts of justifications now i'm just going through various potential defeaters the first one was massive religious disagreement which i just covered the next one is listen the evidential case for naturalism and or against theism can itself serve as defeaters i guess the third potential defeater is irreligious experience lots of people Either seem to experience the absence of god or they seem to experience something which if it were to obtain would entail the absence of god so some people for instance seem to report that they have experiences of evils so poignant so bad

so horrendous so horrific so soul destroying that it just seems to them it appears to them that the evils in question are just intrinsically impermissible they're so Bad that no one could be justified in just even allowing such evils to transpire or obtain and of course if one has that kind of poignant experience of the intrinsic impermissibility of something well then that of course will given the general principle that experiences provide you with some prime of facial justification for what they are experiences of you would have private facial justification for thinking that some of these

horrific Evils actually are intrinsically impermissible but of course if such horrific and horrendous evils are intrinsically impermissible then it's impermissible for god to allow them god can't do something impermissible but he would if these things were impermissible and so since you have prime facial justification for thinking that they are impermissible you have private facial justification for thinking that god doesn't exist so you have to come to Grips with irreligious experience people's experiences of maybe the ultimate purposelessness of the universe or the ultimate indifference of fundamental reality to their well-being or their flourishing and so on

so again that's at least a potential defeater for these sorts of claims to religious experience and then the fourth potential defeater is the fallacy of understated evidence something that we should always keep in Mind when we are investigating arguments from religious experience and arguments more generally especially bayesian arguments but anyway to get a sense of what this fallacy is and how it relates to the argument from religious experience let's watch a particular video produced by real aetheology it is an excellent video so act it's called understating the evidence let's say a couple with two small

children moves in across the Street from you they also drive a brand new car now you just happened to be reading earlier that day that this particular model in gear scored the highest in its class in every single safety measure across the board you also learned that this car costs significantly more than other cars in its class specifically because of this high safety rating given the total evidence available to You at this time you reasonably infer that your new neighbors probably care a great deal for safety for their family you wait a few days allowing

them to settle in before crossing the street to introduce yourself however as you walk up their driveway you notice that the airbags have been tampered with and disabled and that the child safety seats are both attached properly with duct tape naturally you're a bit puzzled observing the general fact that your Neighbors purchased a car specifically pricey for its safety features clearly seems to be more likely on the hypothesis that the family cares about safety than on the hypothesis that the family does not care about safety and yet given the general fact the additional observations the

specific facts of the duct-taped child safety seats and disabled airbags are more likely on the hypothesis that the family doesn't care about safety than the Hypothesis that they do now if say somebody was in a position to know all of these facts the general and specific facts but yet they presented an evidential argument for the hypothesis that the family cares a great deal for safety but appealing only to the general fact about the car's high safety rating and related high cost they would be guilty of understating the evidence philosopher paul draper argues that many evidential

arguments for theism are Similarly guilty of appearing convincing only because they understand the evidence as they quote successfully identify some general fact about some topic that is more surprising on naturalism than on theism but all too conveniently ignore more specific facts about the topic facts that given the general fact are significantly more surprising in theism than unnaturalism there are many examples of arguments for theism which fit this pattern one such Argument sets it cites on religious experience if we agree that the general fact of religious experience had apparently of god is more likely on theism

than on naturalism we can say it counts as some evidence for theism over naturalism but paul draper reminds us that the general fact of the existence of religious experience is not the only relevant fact we know about that topic draper reminds us of three specific facts which given the general fact of Religious experience are much more likely on naturalism than on theism first quote not everyone has theistic experiences and those who do typically have a prior belief in god or extensive exposure to a theistic religion secondly the subjects of theistic experience pursue a variety of

radically different religious paths none of which bears abundantly more moral fruit than all the others And third victims of tragedy are rarely comforted by religious experience again given the general fact of the existence of theistic religious experience each one of these facts are more likely on naturalism than atheism and so after considering all the relevant facts about religious experience it's not all obvious that relevant observations regarding the topic of religious experience actually favor theism over naturalism just as When considering all the facts about your neighbor's car it's far from obvious that they give a damn

about their children according to draper many evidential arguments for theism suffer similarly if you liked this video please subscribe to relay theology all right all right so that's my first general point about defeaters and then now on to my second general point And of course within my first point there were four sub points the first one was about religious disagreement and specifically religious disagreement in the context of religious experience the second one was about how a defeater could simply come by the evidential case for naturalism and or against theism the third one was irreligious experience

and then the fourth one was the fallacy of understating the evidence so my second general point is uh just That i want to defend arguments from religious experience against two common objections that i don't think succeed so the first objection is that well hey there are naturalistic neurobiological explanations and that these show that the relevant experiences aren't actually reliable after all but of course in response to this every experience whatever its source is accompanied by a corresponding neurological state to argue that the Experience is illusory or unreliable because there's a corresponding brain state is you

know clearly fallacious the same reasoning would lead us to conclude that sensory experiences are illusory or unreliable since in each sensory experience there's a corresponding neurological state that is just like the state that occurs in the corresponding hallucination the proponent of the naturalistic explanation as a defeater owes us some reason to believe that his Or her argument is not just another skeptical argument from the veil of perception so anyway that's one objection that i wanted to allay or at least to respond to but a second objection is that well hey unlike sensory experience religious experiences

aren't inter-subjectively verifiable and this casts doubt on their reliability and or their evidential force now there are lots of responses to make To this one response is listen not just any dissimilarities will do to defeat the argument from religious experience the dissimilarities need to be epistemologically relevant it's not enough to show that religious experiences don't typically allow for independent public verification unless one wants to give up on other perfectly respectable practices that also lack that feature for instance memory oftentimes rational intuition and so on Oftentimes you intuit something even though there's no intersubjectively verifiable way

to confirm the truth of what you're intuiting like various mathematical and logical truths and so on of course other people might share your intuition and you might be able to talk with one another about your intuition but still the intuition itself justifies you the very fact that it seems quite obvious that it cannot be the case that both p and not p that Alone surely gives you reason to think that the law of non-contradiction is true and yet of course that intellectual seeming of that's true that is not something that's like intersubjectively verifiable and so

we have here a source of justification that isn't inter-subjective anyway i just want to go through this there's a principle called the privacy principle which i will articulate in a second but this is a paper that i wrote for one of my Classes with paul draper i want to go through the paper and basically respond to this objection from interest objective verifiability because i think it comes up a lot in internet discussions and i think we should be wary about using it as an objection i've already given some reasons that like intersubjective verifiability doesn't seem

to be a relevant difference a difference that casts doubt on the reliability of something's deliverances And or the evidential force of their deliverances so i gave that response but i'm going to give lots of other responses or at least two other responses in this paper here so some of you religious experiences as private in the sense that only one subject perceives their apparent object or objects and not only that but no one else would perceive the apparent object or objects were they in the same perceptual circumstances and my aim in The paper right here is

to assess whether the experiences that are private in that sense are or can be evidently efficacious and i argue in particular that the privacy principle or pp according to which private experiences are evidently a feat that is they don't have any evidential force whatsoever so it comes to at least two serious problems so i'll first characterize pp and the notion of privacy at play then i'll articulate the First problem which is a counter example from counter factual intervention and then i'm going to articulate a second problem for pp which is that it's either false or

it fails to rule out at least in principle the evidential force of some religious experiences so on to pp so let's get clear on the notion of privacy at play so perceptual experience e is private to subject s what that means is that no one else apart from us would seem to perceive Ease percept while in the same perceptual circumstances as s roughly pp states that ease being private to s entails that e provides no evidence to s for claims about e's percept that is the thing that e is of putting this rough approximation together

with the above mentioned definition we get the privacy principle or pp if no one else apart from s would have seemed to perceive e's percept While in the same perceptual circumstances as s then e provides no evidence or justification to s for claims about e's percept spelling out what precisely constitutes the same or relevantly similar perceptual circumstances is difficult it'll at least evolve s's immediate environment like for example the lighting or the spatial arrangement of objects or the temporal ordering of Events or whether or not something is obstructing s's eyes or ears or whatever and

so on but further explication i know will arise as you proceed through my arguments later now two final notes about the pp first the goal of proponents of pp is to rule out the evidential force of private religious experiences while ruling in the evidential force of ordinary Experiences like you watching this video or you remembering that you aidable cereal this morning second because pp is a conditional or implication all we need to do to show that it's false is to pinpoint a possible actual situation in which the antecedent is satisfied while the consequent is not

given these two notes undermining pp could involve showing either one that pp fails to rule out the Evidential force of some private religious experiences two pp mistakenly rules some ordinary experiences to be evidentially effete or inefficacious or three there is or could be a situation in which the antecedent but not the consequent is satisfied so my first problem for pp is zapping the pp nice okay so suppose there's some mad scientist with a zapper device a zapper device is a machine that directly modifies the Phenomenology of a subject's perceptual experience in any manner the scientist

wishes it could be a slight modification from the way things would have quote unquote normally appeared or a major modification or whatever the modification is direct insofar as the zapper causes the desired effect a modification the subject's phenomenology without any intermediary mechanism so for example without an implant or even the stimulation of a portion of the Brain that wouldn't otherwise be stimulated suppose that s is alone in a room in normal lighting conditions in which there is a cat named professor on the table so as it turns out draper has a cat and his cat

is named professor so anyway because s's cognitive and perceptual apparatuses are not malfunctioning aspertically perceives professor on the table suppose further that the mad scientist with zapper in hand is monitoring this room and the Subject or subjects they're in very closely the scientist has decided to zap any subject s star distinct from s within the room in such a way that it would appear to s star that professor is not on the table holding all other perceptual phenomenology fixed if no such s stars within the room the scientist does nothing because s ends up alone

in the room the scientist doesn't do anything but had others been in the room the scientist would have directly Prevented them from perceptually experiencing professor here's the rub we seem to have here on our hands a counter example to pee pee insofar as pp's antecedent but not consequent is satisfied so uh yeah an unsatisfied pp so consider pp's consequent surely as his experience of professor justifies us in thinking that say professor exists after all ss faculties are functioning perfectly within entirely normal surroundings s Has no overriding reason to doubt the deliverances of s's faculties essa's

perception is in fact veritical the scientist literally does nothing and so on thus it seems that the consequent of pp is not satisfied for us since s does have evidence or justification for thinking that professor exists nevertheless the antecedent of pb does seem to be satisfied thanks to the counterfactual intervention no one else Apart from s would seem to perceive professor even when in the same room same spatiotemporal location same lighting conditions and so on the scientists zapper changes nothing about the immediate perceptual environment and surroundings there are no physical obstructions no rearrangements of the

room's contents no alteration of lighting conditions and so on the only thing that the scientists zapper manipulates is wholly within the subject The extrinsic surroundings and environment remain unchanged across worlds moreover it seems that no perceptual circumstances within subjects are changed across worlds either for the zapper doesn't change any perceptual circumstances inside the subject but instead directly alters the subject's perceptual mental state itself in the scenario i described neither the eyes nor optic nerves nor occipital lobe nor any other neurophysiological or Sensory apparatuses are altered by the scientists counterfactual manipulation instead the perceptual experience itself

is what is directly altered and surely a perceptual experience itself is not among the perceptual circumstances of that very experience indeed if the perceptual experience itself were among its perceptual circumstances then it would be impossible for someone else to be in the same circumstances but yet have a Different experience but in that case the antecedent of pp would literally be impossible to satisfy for any perceptual experience including religious ones and so there's a counter example to this general idea that for some experience to be reliable or have evidential force it needs to be intersubjectively verifiable

we just have a straightforward counter example to it but let's shift gears to then my second problem for pp so this is from training So plausibly the content of one's perceptual experiences can be dependent upon or conditioned by prior training and expertise when a seasoned neurologist looks at an mri scan of a brain there's a real sense in which the neurologist sees something different than what non-neurologists see or would see for instance in a scanned brain image the neurologist as a result of decades of training and expertise can see abnormalities tissue damage etc to Which

non-neurologists are entirely oblivious this observation poses a dilemma for the pp either training expertise is part of the perceptual circumstances of e or it is not if it's not part of the perceptual circumstances of e then pp seems obviously false four if the neurologist's specialized training or expertise doesn't count as part of those circumstances then the neurologist could presumably be in the Same perceptual circumstances as others when seeing the mri scan of a brain but and here's the rub the neurologist would nevertheless see things for example brain pathologies that others would not so the antecedent

of pp would be satisfied right no one else apart from this specialized trained expert neurologist or group of neurologists would seem to perceive say the brain pathology in the mri scan while in the same perceptual circumstances but it Would be absurd to suggest that the expert neurologist has no evidence for justification for claims about the brain pathology so the consequent is not satisfied or pp's consequence is not satisfied therefore if training or expertise is not part of the perceptual circumstances of e then pp is false now take the other horn of the dilemma which is

the horn on which training experience is part of the perceptual Circumstances of e if training or expertise is part of the perceptual circumstances of e well then it seems that pp fails to rule out at least in principle the evidential force of at least some religious experiences mystical experiences for instance are often considered to be the result of substantial training and expertise in various spiritual disciplines the same holds for a host of other religious experiences in speaking about the Christian contemplative tradition for example bill austin describes the experience of god as a quote discipline that

involves opening oneself up to the presence and activity of god within and letting god work within one as he will end quote all singing continues writing that it also involves quote doing what one can to remove blocks and obstacles to the conscious realization of what god is doing into the more intimate communion with god it involves a Practice that has developed over the centuries and has been continually tested and refined with the aim of attaining such communion and affecting appropriate transformations in the life of the individual end quote thus attaining at least some religious experiences

may plausibly involve at least in principle a kind of training or discipline or expertise analogous to the neurologist case but in that case for all the pp shows it could very well be The case that those who would attain such training or experiences in the spiritual discipline would have the relevant experience or experiences in question and since the horn of the dilemma we're pursuing states that such training or expertise in the spiritual discipline is part of the perceptual circumstances of the experience it very well could be the case that were others in the same perceptual

circumstances including the same level of training or Expertise in the spiritual discipline than they would after all seem to perceive the percept namely god of such experiences if that's right then at least some religious experiences in principle are not private in the manner required for pp hence the antecedent is not satisfied at least in principle for at least some religious experiences meaning that the inference by means of the pp to the evidential inefficacy of such Experiences is blocked pp therefore fails to rule out the evidential efficacy at least in principle of some religious experiences assuming

of course that training expertise is among the perceptual circumstances which is this horn of the dilemma in summary training or experience is either part of the perceptual circumstances of a given experience or it's not if it's not well then pp is false as i argued but if it is then Possibly pp actually fails to rule out the evidential force of some religious experiences either way pp or the use of pp is in trouble so anyway here my two criticisms were basically firstly from counter factual intervention we have a straightforward counter example to this kind of

privacy principle and second we have a dilemma concerning whether or not training or expertise is part of the perceptual circumstances of a given experience and those two responses are Of course in addition to the first response that i gave which is just that listen the differences need to be epistemologically relevant sure there's a difference between perceptual experience and religious experience in that at least many religious experiences aren't inter-subjectively verifiable where at least many perceptual experiences are intersubjectively verifiable but the question is whether or not this is epistemologically Relevant and indeed it doesn't seem epistemologically relevant

given that memory is oftentimes firstly reliable but not intersubjectively verifiable and secondly rational intuition is oftentimes reliable at least in certain domains like mathematical and logical domains and yet still not itself intersubjectively verifiable so i've made two general points before going on the first general point was That arguments from religious experience are only going to be delivering arguably prima facie justification not ultimate facial justification in which case they are susceptible of defeaters and i listed at least four defeaters a massive disagreement the evidential case for naturalism and or against theism irreligious experience and finally understating

the evidence and then my second general point was just defending Arguments from religious experience against two common objections the first common objection was that we have neurobiological explanations of religious experience which in turn shows that those experiences aren't after all reliable because we can explain them just in terms of neurological function and then the second objection was that unlike sensory experience or unlike perceptual experience more generally religious experiences aren't Intersubjectively verifiable and that this somehow casts doubt on their reliability and or evidential force so anyway those are the general points that i wanted to make

with respect to religious experience and i will refer back to these as we examine these specific arguments in this section of the video if you want to read this william james quote you can it's just someone talking about one of their religious experiences I won't read but uh people like saint teresa and brother lawrence uh speak of being intensely aware of the continued presence of god uh not not in a dramatic way but sort of in a continual way such that the most remarkable and awful experience imaginable to them would be if god removed his

presence that's what they say and hence you have some discussion of the dark knight of the soul when when people when saints feel like god has removed his presence from Them okay so we have some examples there uh to get a sense of what sort of experiences we're talking about uh okay we have our first argument religious experience as analogous to aesthetic experience now for this let's define an athlete as an ass thief an asphete i like it now just to aesthetic experience now for this let's define an athlete As an aesthetic expert so think

of like a wine taster or a musician or a painter or a food critic okay uh not movie critics because all movie critics suck apparently uh so just love the high brow end if the aesthetic experiences of athletes justifies their aesthetic beliefs aspects sorry i love it um i can't get enough of it the religious experiences of religious people justifies their religious beliefs uh so the aesthetic experiences of Athletes justifies their religious beliefs or uh the aesthetic experiences of athletes justifies their aesthetic beliefs so their religious experiences religiously justifies their religious beliefs so religious experience

of god justifies belief of god so again i would point out that this is only a prime facial justification not an ultima facial justification and those four defeaters that i listed earlier or at least four potential defeaters are Going to be present here namely firstly disagreement secondly the evidential case for naturalism against theism thirdly irreligious experience and fourthly understating the evidence well it's john hick's work kind of launched discussion of the argument for religious experience for contemporary philosophy religion and the main idea is that look if widespread Consistent and persistent religious experience of god is

unreliable then so is our sense experience generally because we have just we seem to experience god or people claim to experience have religious experiences just as just as frequently as since experience generally so if one is not trustworthy the other one is that is surely false come on dude like all of us basically at all times are have sensory experience except when we're like asleep And even then oftentimes we do have sensory experience but like no it's not the case that all of us basically at all times similarly have religious experience maybe a very very

few people at all times somehow are yeah like these giga chads that are like constantly experiencing god just as much as we are constantly having our sensory experiences but again that's only going to be relatively few people not Absolutely everyone and even for those relatively few it's unclear whether or not they are constantly experiencing god maybe they're just in a constant state of e4 or whatever i just wanted to say that that claim there was extremely implausible that he made what about premise one premise one seems to me to be implausible so look at this

image many of you are quite familiar with this a right here and b right here Believe it or not are exactly the same shade of color the the it's literally identical a and b you can show this if you erase all this other stuff uh i actually know someone who after being like repeatedly shown this and being shown like scientific experts showing that they still refuse to believe it even after all this stuff was erased away and you put these together the person was saying that no you actually probably were just pulling A trick on

the person because they were so obviously distinct so some people are so ingrained in this but yeah it's called the checker shadow illusion these are indeed the same color here and here it's really hard to believe but it's true but now let's go back to the argument if widespread consistent and persistent experience of a darker shade of gray is unreliable so is our sense experience more generally what what no that doesn't follow our Sense experience can be still reliable generally even if in certain domains in certain contexts even our sense experience is unreliable similarly our

sense experience can be generally reliable even if in certain domains in certain contexts our experiences that could broadly be categorized as religious experiences are unreliable that doesn't cast out on your sense experience more generally think about the various cases of Illusions that we do indeed know of that illusion that i showed right here that is widespread everyone basically sees it it's consistent it's consistent across time and space and culture and so on and it's persistent even after knowing that it's illusion at least for me i still see them as different colors right this one seems

obviously darker than this one if we accepted this premise it seems that we should also accept that parody premise that if widespread consistent And persistent experience of these various illusions that we know of if that's unreliable then so is our sense experience more generally it seems as though we should accept that but of course we shouldn't accept that and hence we shouldn't accept this first premise more generally we could just talk about widespread consistent and persistent experience of blank and so instead of doing it of god we just put in like Bigfoot or flying saucers

or the success of homeopathy or whatever i'm not saying that the epistemic status of believing in god is equivalent to the epidemic status of believing in bigfoot flying saucers or homeopathy i'm not at all saying that i'm literally in agnostic so my credence in god is relatively high compared to a lot of other people and i'm a very skeptical person with respect to bigfoot and flying saucers and homeopathy and so on so my point is not To establish an epistemic parity or epistemic equivalence between them my point is simply to show that this general line

of reasoning is not a good general line of reasoning so it seems to me you can have widespread consistent and persistent experience of blank being unreliable for certain specific domains and contexts without your sense experience and experiences more generally being unreliable so that's that's the first premise being At least by my lights not very plausible premise four here if widespread consistent and persistent religious experience of god is not unreliable it is rational to believe in god that seems to me to be false why well because it could be that widespread consistent and persistent religious experience

is a reliable method firstly and yet no one actually uses that method because there is no widespread consistent and persistent religious Experience and in that case we cannot infer that it's rational to believe in god no particular religious experience of some particular percept is widespread instead they're highly culturally conditioned across the various continents and so on are they consistent no they're very inconsistent across these sorts of traditions and so on are they persistent well there are different religious traditions over time with Different experiences over time and so on so it's not even clear that they're

persistent and then finally there's that general point about the primophasia versus ultima facial justification this argument even if successful is arguably only going to be giving you a prima facie justification for thinking that god exists not an ultimate facial justification and so it's going to be susceptible of Those four potential defeaters that i listed earlier so anyway let's continue trustworthy so it's kind of a parity argument and you'll see this come up again uh as we go through a few more swinburne's famous argument relies on the principle of credulity which has already sort of showed

up a few times if it seems to you that p then you're primousing justified and believing p it seems to me god exists so i'm just Fighting believing god exists so i'm actually somewhat skeptical that one could have such a hyper specific highly theory laden seeming imagine someone said it seems to me that the general theory of relativity is true it's like what how do you have that seeming i mean come on seemings are just not that fine grain they just don't go to that highly theory-laden level here are some seemingly it seems to me

that there's a Computer in front of me or at least there's some sort of gray and black object in front of me seems to me that there are these hands attached to my arms it seems to me that torture is bad okay these things are fine but like are we gonna say well it seems to me that rule utilitarianism is true what like how do you have a seaming that is so fine-grained so hyper-specific so highly theory-laden and similarly that seems to be the case with god because this is a Highly theory-laden hyper-specific concept i'm

also skeptical that we're able in this case to differentiate a genuine seeming of god that is a phenomenal state in which something strikes one as manifest it's unclear to me how you're differentiating that from just simply like a report of your belief or belief-like state towards the proposition that god exists like Given all your other evidence in your background experience you find it possible that god exists maybe partly because you you grew up that way or maybe partly because you already know a various arguments that you think are quite convincing how do you distinguish an

appearance of god's existence to you how do you differentiate that from the experience of god's existence just being plausible to you in light of your various background and so on so like It's just a report of your like belief-like state toward the proposition i don't know it's unclear how you could differentiate those two so anyway i'm actually somewhat skeptical of this first premise but even setting these worries aside let me just grant that it seems to someone that god exists to a lot of other people firstly it's going to seem to them that god doesn't

exist in which case they'd be prima facie justified and believing that god doesn't Exist so we're kind of at a stalemate here but also again this is prima facie only and they're going to be arguably defeaters for this prime facial justification and so a number of those four potential defeaters are going to be applying here i just don't think this argument is going to really do much in the dispute between atheists and theists i mean aren't theists gonna be the only ones who are Saying that it's seeming to them that god exists plausibly isn't that

just a function of their background beliefs and so on presumably atheists will just say no it seems to me that god doesn't exist and then theists will be the ones saying that it seems to me that god does exist and moreover i should say again it's unclear whether they're actually having seemings in these cases as opposed to mistaking that with some report of their belief or belief-like states toward the Relevant propositions in light of their background and the arguments they're aware of and they're just general epistemic structure but anyway let's move on we have planning

on a proper basically of belief in god which is probably familiar to a lot of your audience if you want to yeah so i'm going to skip this one just because i'm not really all that interested in proper basicality and secondly investigating plantainian Proper function and reform epismology would probably require a whole lecture of its own i can at least direct you guys to felipe leon's well firstly just this blog post as such so he's done lots of amazing blog posts over the years where he does a kind of systematic in-depth analysis of arguments for

god's existence and he's drawing on peer-reviewed published articles and so on and he links you to those so anyway it's his indus it's assessing theism in General in christianity in particular he has different preliminaries about caring about pursuing truth and faith and reason and theistic conception of god and then he goes through different evaluations of arguments for theism so he's got like the liberty and cosmological argument the kalam domestic cosmological arguments o'connor he's got design style arguments including demski and so on but he's also got lots of stuff on planning it from Like proper function

his reformed epistemology look at all these oh my goodness and like a lot of these again are just links to certain papers or summaries of papers that people have published in peer-reviewed journals criticizing planning has reformed epistemology we've got plenty argument evolutionary going against naturalism blah blah blah you got all this sort of stuff so anyway for those of you who are Interested check out this and check out in particular the stuff that he's written here on planinga's stuff on proper function and reformed epistemology but anyway back to the video and we're going to skip

this one austin on perceiving god okay so let's listen to this one perceptual experience is reliable uh release experience has the same basic epistemic structure as perceptual Experience so the structure is that there's a receiver there's an object received and the perceiver's phenomenal experience of the object or qualities of the object so release experience seems to have the exact same perceptual structure but if that's true then we should think that it's just as reliable as perceptual experience with respect to previous two it's going to depend on what we mean by basic epistemic structure now Caveat

it's been over two years since i studied allston on religious experience in fact the last time i studied it was actually in a class with paul draper uh in one of our upper level philosophy religion classes so honestly i don't quite remember the very the specific details and i'm too lazy to look it up in any case if we take a basic epistemic structure to include under normal conditions appropriate causal contact with the apparent object well then no Naturalist would ever grant that religious experience has the same basic epistemic structure as perceptual experience and so

no naturalists would then grant premise two by contrast if we mean something more intrinsic to the experience for example something appearing to be the case in conscious experience or maybe some apparent object presenting itself to one in conscious experience well then the naturalist will Likely reject premise three on the basis of the aforementioned defeaters uniquely afflicting religious experience and not perceptual experience those four defeaters that i mentioned earlier on premise five also seems subject to those defeaters right if religious experiences of god are reliable then they justify belief in god anyway let's get on to

argument number 69 nice perceptual structure but if that's true then uh we should think that it's just as reliable As perceptual experience generally now you can't really talk about alston and religious experience without his answer to why perception is reliable and his groundbreaking book perceiving god he argues that there's no non-circular way to demonstrate perception just general perception how it's reliable uh so he proposes the most practical way the reason we do trust it is with this principle if he is formed on the basis of a socially established Doxastic practice than p is justified uh

i think there are alternative ways to undergird our sensory knowledge and one of them is precisely lots of the principles that we've been looking at so far principles like phenomenal conservatism don't require talking about this stuff about socially established doxastic practices and so on so it's not clear that you need this in order to be able to let's say justify perceptual experiences So we do typically treat perception as justified it's just a social practice that we have but in the same way it's a social practice that we have uh we form religious beliefs based on

uh socially established dogmastic practice so we shouldn't think that our religious beliefs are any less reliable than our perceptual beliefs there are lots of socially established practices that seem to be Not at all reliable or truth-tracking in any sense we all engage in collective myth-making and these other sorts of things there are lots of social practices where the things that drive those practices or the beliefs that are formed on the basis of those practices are not justified but anyway setting that aside again we just have to keep in mind that the conclusion here is prima

facie justification not ultima fascia and this argument too is Going to be facing those four potential defeaters that i mentioned earlier so i also just want to at least put on your guys's radar a and a particularly good article that criticizes this line of reasoning that's by john tury it's published in the uh journal faith and philosophy it is entitled practical and epistemic justification in austin's perceiving god and he argues that the main argument in austin's book perceiving god fails i Believe it's this particular argument that we are looking at here with chad check out

that article if you guys are interested we're not going to go through it here because it's somewhat complicated but anyway let us move on to it i was talking practice so we shouldn't think that our religious beliefs are any less reliable uh this type of stuff it's it's required reading i think okay so if religious experience can Justify if i have a religious experience if that can justify my belief in god what what the evidential value does it have for someone else well yandell argues in the following way if some people have experiences which seem

to them to be some people do have experiences which seem to them to be of god uh now those experiences don't seem to be at least some of them don't seem to be subject to defeaters nothing that would undermine The reliability of those experiences so uh the occurrences of those experiences is evidence that god exists uh just generally and especially the evidential value of those experiences increases if they occur in various cultures and at various times to people of various backgrounds social economic status and so forth so because they do uh occur in such divergent

ways and in such variety the eventual force of those experiences is increased So premise three that some of those people's experiences are not subject to defeaters that's deeply questionable i gave those four potential defeaters earlier and i do think that the the people's experiences here are indeed arguably subject to those the massive amounts of divergence and disagreement and incompatibility among the various traditions and what they Purport to be established by their experiences and indeed the contents of their experiences themselves seem to be incompatible the fallacy of understated evidence et cetera et cetera et cetera so

anyway i think that this third premise is going to be false as for premise six here i think this is questionable those experiences occur in various cultures and at various times to people of various backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses the experiences Are almost universally culturally conditioned and highly dependent on previous exposure to the relevant religious tradition again what would be surprising is if completely different cultures from completely different time periods converged independently and despite no previous exposure to the relevant traditions if they all converged on a single religious tradition and yet that is of course decidedly

not what we see Instead we see extreme divergence extreme toxastic discord lots of incompatibilities and failure to converge on a single tradition especially failure to converge when there's no causal contact between the relevant traditions even though god could of course reveal to one or both of the groups which particular religious tradition is correct okay we have cruces onto a mystical argument so actually before we listen to this i want To put on your guys's radar that i had an extremely in-depth assessment critical assessment of pieces i had an extremely in-depth critical assessment of bruce's onto

mystical symmetry breaker here this is my the modal ontological argument a user's guide you can't fault me for liking my own video what am i gonna click dislike come on bro bruce is onto mystical symmetry breaker so i go into a lot of depth looking specifically at this Argument and i i level a variety of criticisms of it let's listen to it and then i'll offer just some very very brief remarks but again i'm going to point you guys to that video that i made it seems to s that p it's a little more modest

than the principle of duty that we should presume that p is possible not that he's the case but just said it's possible now mystics have experiences which it seems to then that god exists If if so then we should presume god possibly exists if we should presume god possibly exists by us five we should presume he does exist yeah so one thing to note is that samkhara's principle it's not at all clear that that's true it seems kind of implausible and it's subject to arguably lots of counter examples so consider dreams right in our dreams

we have broadly perceptual experiences not perceptual in the sense of yes causal Contact with something in the external world but perceptual in the sense of phenomenologically it seems as though we are experiencing something which is in some sense outside of us so yeah just think about how crazy absurd some dreams are like in some dreams you might time travel in some dreams like time itself is like warped you might just randomly find yourself at one moment in walmart but then the next moment somehow you're on a plane or Something like that i think i've only

lucid dreams like once in my life once or twice and the moment i realized i was lucid dreaming i literally just willed myself to start flying and so i just started flying i zoomed everywhere so like through my own powers i was able to fly lots of these things are arguably metaphysically impossible right time simply can't be structured as it is in dreams even though it seems to us that it is structured that way in such dreams Similarly i think i'm the kind of thing i think my essence just precludes me from being able to

just will that i fly various different ways i think we have excellent reason to think that that's true and so i'm essentially incapable of that and yet i was capable of that in my dream or at least it seemed to me that i was capable of that and so it seemed to me that i was able to fly but of course i'm not able to fly i know this is saying we should only presume that p is Possible but there are so many counter examples to this sort of principle that's one thing that i wanted

to say the second thing that i want to say is that there's actually lots of disagreement among mystics about their experiences some of them have experiences of this like impersonal absolute still others have experiences of a personal absolute still others have experiences of a trinitarian absolute still others have Experiences as of a unitarian absolute and so on some of them might claim to experience like the inner trinitarian structure of god or you know something like that still others claim to experience just like a pure unity lots of mystics actually claim to have experienced a kind

of unity or even identity with god or that we are all aspects of god lots of these are actually incompatible with traditional theism It genuinely seems to them that either we are like somehow deeply unified with god or somehow aspects of god are identical to god and indeed lots of mystics actually claimed identity with god and they went to suffer persecution for their beliefs and they didn't give them up even despite that persecution because they were so convinced of what they had experienced in their mystical experience and so given that we should presume that these

various situations Are possible but if those are possible then of course traditional theism is possibly false and of course if traditional theism is possible false then it's necessarily false and so we have on our hands an argument against traditional theism indeed an argument for the impossibility of traditional theism that one is super interesting to me we gotta move on uh personal transformation and this is defended by austin again there are many people who Believe god has promised to them to help them develop spiritually who then do develop spiritually this phenomenon is widespread enough uh that

it's evidence that god basically keeps his promise he does help people develop spiritually it is widespread enough so it's evidence for god's existence and he cites examples of dramatic conversions subsequent life changes uh the the lives of saints in particular and so forth so yeah i think Premise two here is deeply implausible being widespread firstly doesn't matter what matters is whether the proportion of people who go on to develop spiritually after them coming to believe god's promise is significantly greater than the proportion we would expect by chance alone we would obviously expect this to happen

a ton right after all tons of people believe in god and take themselves to talk to god and be in a relationship with god and also take god To have promised them something and of course they often take it to be super duper vague like oh you're gonna get better like okay or oh you're gonna spiritually develop which of course could be interpreted in like boatloads of different ways and you can fit basically anything into that but anyway boatloads of people think that god has promised them something or promised them like spiritual growth or whatever

just by Chance alone boatloads of them will spiritually grow for example they might grow morally they might grow socially they might grow emotionally they might grow relationally they might intellectually mature or whatever all of these can be interpreted as axes along which one can develop spiritually after all right there are only three options for someone they deteriorate spiritually they remain stagnant or they improve On average over some span of time so it's not improbable just by chance that tons of people who form such beliefs go on later to improve and especially given how open to

interpretation and vague this spiritual development is we also have to think about the time span like how long is this did god give them a specific time span by which they are going to improve if it just says you're going to improve or something like that that could take years that Could take days it could be within the next 10 minutes like maybe just within the next 10 minutes you feel some sort of spiritual improvement or whatever moreover we humans have a proclivity to craft positives out of overall negatives we focus on the various positive

aspects either of our lives or our experiences and so on this kind of positivity bias and that could lead even people who don't develop spiritually to think that they've Developed spiritually in various ways or to hyper focus on the small moments in which they did develop spiritually they did something good or something good happened to them and to ignore their spiritual failures further still i think that there are defeaters for this sort of reasoning firstly we have of course disagreement in terms of what spiritual development consists in what like is god causing some people to

like spiritually develop in ways that are like False and like not good for them because they're developing further in their own religious tradition some people are becoming more and more let's say hindu some people are becoming more and more let's say christian like following closer and closer to the tenets of their religion becoming more and more devoted and dedicated and so on is god leading people further and further away from the truth or are you just arbitrarily going to privilege those christian ones or Those judaic ones or whatever and of course we have to keep

in mind the fallacy of understated evidence many people spiritually deteriorate even after coming to believe such promises like this further still we have to keep in mind the base rate fallacy how many people again had such promises and yet then failed to develop spiritually or to improve and finally i think there is actually an alternative and arguably better Explanation for why people go under develop spiritually after they come to believe that god is going to help them develop spiritually and this explanation doesn't involve god's existence or god's actually helping them develop spiritually can you think

of an alternative explanation why would lots of people go on to develop spiritually after they come to believe that god has promised them that they will go on to develop Spiritually hmm i wonder why i mean listen the very fact of coming to believe such a promise would influence the likelihood that one spiritually improves and that's just a matter of them even just having the belief if they believe that that's going to happen they're going to take steps to try to actualize that they're going to try to be better in their lives they're going to

try to say sorry to that person that They've been in a debate with for the last few weeks they're going to try to say sorry to their spouse for not taking out the trash as often as they do and so on so you can appeal to their own belief states and motivational structures and so on in order to explain why they then go on to develop spiritually after they've come to believe that god has promised to help them develop spiritually this explanation simply in terms of the belief states and Motivational character of the people seems

firstly importantly simpler than the hypothesis that god is actually helping them develop spiritually and secondly it seems at least as equally explanatory powerful it is widespread enough so it's evidence for god's existence and he cites examples of dramatic conversions subsequent life changes uh the the lives of of saints in particular and so forth all right ndes and religious experience You've probably had people on your channel before talk about near-death experiences am i right yup so let's not talk about the nature of them let's just say let's just look at how they could be used in

arguments for god's existence or life after death uh let's just go ahead and scroll through through these i just formulated how they could be used as arguments for theism and for anyone who doesn't look at how They could be used i'm skeptical of two here at the very least i'd need to see some reason for thinking that this is true again we have to keep in mind lots of experiences like ndes and so on contain things that christians themselves would want to say like oh crap like that's definitely not something that's supposed to happen in

the afterlife or that definitely contains stuff that's incompatible with My view of what god is like or what the afterlife is like and so on so i mean firstly even christians themselves have to say that lots of ndes are such that their experiential content are not vertical but the second thing that we have to consider is base rates there might be some striking cases where someone is like this person put my dentures in this particular bag or whatever provided you enough chances Some of these stories are going to be hits right there are going to

be lots of misses but some of them are going to be hits and so even if you have some hits which look like super astounding like oh that couldn't have happened at all by chance you know like there has to be something going on here you can't forget all the countless misses that either weren't reported or they were reported but they contain certain inaccuracies anyway i just think That there are lots of issues predicting the base rates and other sorts of things here and on a different note i think several defeaters will probably afflict premise

one here for example disagreement lots of people from different religious traditions have different experiences even in their ndes and so the potential defeater based on disagreement among the relevant experiences is also arguably going to be afflicting premise One here i guess i can just give a shout out this juncture because ndes is not really my area of either interest or expertise right so i perfectly well recognized that if there were some nde expert they could probably wipe the floor with me if i were trying to debate with them but anyway i do know that there's

this really good book by michael sudduth and it's called a philosophical critique of empirical arguments for post-mortem Survival by palgrave frontiers in philosophy of religion i actually have this hardback it's a really good book and suddenth basically provides a critical exploration of classical empirical arguments for post-mortem survival arguments that purport to show that data collected from ostensibly paranormal phenomena constitute good evidence for the survival of the self or individual consciousness after death focusing on arguments based on the data Of near-death experiences mediumship and cases of reincarnation type he aims to revive the tradition of empirical

inquiry into life after death associated with philosophers william james cd broad etc suttas proposes to advance the debate with a novel approach for the first time the traditional arguments are formalized using the tools of formal epistemology sadness shows that this procedure exposes the achilles heel of the Classical arguments a self-defeating dependence on auxiliary assumptions he further argues that when formulated in the light of the problem of auxiliaries long-standing skeptical objections to the classical arguments are immune to the traditional survivalist counter arguments so anyway i highly recommend checking this out it's an in-depth philosophical examination of

whether or not things like ndes are evidently salient like whether or not they have Probative evidential value with respect to their being and after life or with respect to their being a god and so on arguments for god's existence are life after death uh let's just like go ahead and scroll through these i just formulated how they could be used as arguments for theism and for anyone who doesn't who isn't familiar with near-death experiences this isn't really going to be helpful to you but i guess i'd just encourage you To look up cameron's videos on

your death experiences yeah i've had gary hypermas i want to talk about him okay good yeah look at look at his videos with hate okay miracles i also think that there are videos from people in the skeptical community who are quite critical of these sorts of appeals to near-death experiences and they have also made in-depth videos and even brought on scholars and so on so I'd recommend checking those out as well if you want to have a balanced assessment check out both sides again i recommend checking on both sides don't just check out one side

either only the skeptical side or only the pro side all right so let's continue on with miracles a few preliminary remarks about miracles you can't talk about miracles without talking about hume uh so hume has this principle the Probability that the testimony of a miraculous event is unreliable is vastly greater than the probability that the event itself was actually miraculous so that's his main principle which makes three mistakes it assumes miracles are intrinsically improbable but they're not if god exists so firstly even if we grant that it could still be the case that miracles are

intrinsically improbable because god's Existence could be intrinsically improbable so even if god's existence renders miracles like nowhere near intrinsically improbable when you condition on that it would still be the case then that miracles are intrinsically improbable because because god's existence would then be intrinsically improbable so what he said there just doesn't even address that first quote-unquote mistake but secondly i think he's wrong to say that even Conditioning on god's existence miracles are not intrinsically improbable our normal experience of the world gives us extremely good reason to think that even if god exists god has a

very very very strong proclivity not to produce miracles so even if god exists we still have extremely strong reason to think that miracles are very very intrinsically improbable just think if you didn't think that they're intrinsically improbable then you'd have To really take seriously that maybe tomorrow some sort of miracle will prevent the sun from rising maybe some sort of miracle will occur and my water that's in my cup and that i'm about to drink is going to turn into wine or something like that like no we have a general expectation that the natural order

will operate as it does as it normally does with a kind of regularity and non-miraculous pattern that is the overwhelming norm so it seems as though Like even making inductive inferences and just going about in the world you automatically have to think that it's far more likely that the natural course of events is going to take place then a miracle will occur and this is true even if god exists so again even under god's existence the probability is extremely small because quite evidently god has a very strong preference not to perform miracles look around at

all the things that god is doing he's sustaining a Natural order in which miracles are extremely extremely rare so whatever else god is like god has a really strong proclivity in general not to produce miracles they are intrinsically improbable even if god exists doesn't factor in all the relevant probabilities uh and it underestimates the key so it doesn't factor in all the relevant probabilities it's not clear that that's true when hume says reject the greater Miracle like if it would be more miraculous or more improbable that the testimony is unreliable than that the event actually

occurred as a miracle he's basically expressing bayes theorem he's saying if the relevant likelihood ratio sufficiently outweighs the ratio of the priors yeah then actually do go with the miraculous occurrence so he seems to at least be acknowledging or at least hinting at that even if the ratio of the priors strongly Favors their not being the miracle in question if it would be a greater miracle that the testimony is unreliable well then you should actually go with the miracle hypothesis what he's saying there is even if the prior strongly disfavors the miracle hypothesis a likelihood

ratio could sufficiently favor it to overcome that that's just one way to try to charitably interpret hume i'm not trying to get into the business of interpreting human miracles There are actually lots of different interpretations and i don't really care how we try to interpret him what matters here is just that with bayes theorem in hand i do think it's extremely plausible that miracles are highly intrinsically improbable such that the denial of any given miracle claim has a very very strong advantage from the outset with respect to the ratio of the priors and what that

means is that if we are to believe that some miracle has occurred We need a very very big likelihood ratio to overcome that ratio of the priors that's the core i think of a broadly human idea and that is true that's bayes theorem cumulative evidential power of multiple independent uh doesn't factor in all relevant probabilities uh and it underestimates the cumulative evidential power of multiple independent testimonies and so just to illustrate this last one real quick okay the odds that two independent witnesses who are Both 99 reliable testifying uh to other things the odds of

them testifying falsely is one in ten thousand okay three such witnesses is one in a million and six such witnesses is one of the trillion okay so let's not assume that they're 99 reliable let's just assume that they're just as reliable as not uh you'd need more witnesses in that case but you can still get a very powerful uh confirmation of an event uh with with witnesses that are not 100 reliable So arif ahmed has done some night's work on miracles and responding to this third point one thing that we should note is that oftentimes

in these sorts of miracle reports you don't actually have independent testimonies that's actually somewhat hard to come by but anyway set that aside i just recommend with respect to this alleged third mistake to check out erifam it's work you can check in particular if you want like a youtube Introduction to his uh thoughts on the matter you could check out his discussion with alex malpass on malpass's channel thoughtology t-h-o-u-g o-l-o-g-y and of course he has academic papers on the matter and so on and i think he's done a few other videos on youtube okay so

so we're going through a generic argument from miracles here so i guess i'll just make some generic remarks on Arguments from miracles arguably there are still going to be facing for lots of these arguments for miracles like defeaters arising from disagreement lots of other traditions claim to have miracles that prove their tradition or whatever lots of other incompatible traditions claim to have their own miracles they claim to have eyewitness testimonies and so on lots of them claim to have their Own miracles that confirm their competing and incompatible traditions just as and just as this served

at least as a potential defeater in the case of religious experiences it seems as though that's arguably gonna serve as a potential defeater in the case of these sorts of arguments from miracles much more can be said about that but i want to streamline this process Secondly as i pointed out miracles are arguably gonna have a very extremely low prior probability so even a pretty favorable likelihood ratio will arguably be swamped by the low priors now in principle yes you can have a sufficiently favorable likelihood ratio that counteracts that disfavorable prior probability ratio but it's

arguably going to be quite difficult now i'm actually not going to examine these arguments for miracles in any detail Partly because this video is already very long and partly because i guess i'm not super duper interested in arguments for miracles that's not to say that i don't have any interest in them whatsoever it's just to say i guess that my proclivities lie more in the kinds of i don't know metaphysical arguments now there is going to be some stuff in here that i'm not even going to comment on with respect to Arguments for jesus's resurrection

i have co-opted a document made by someone else i just made a copy of it it's just a list that basically is on resurrection resources so it gives you some books that are quite helpful and it's a kind of critical case so you're going to see sources in the video here that are going to be favorable towards it but of course i want to equip you guys with tools to be able to think critically about this from both sides so Basically i co-opted this list from someone else this is i'm not saying that i endorse

everything on here most of it i haven't even looked into just because again i research other stuff this again this is not an endorsement for me i'm just putting these resources on your guys's radar for you guys to check out so you got books we got articles some of which are on field papers and so on and even published in peer-reviewed journals the philosophical biblical internet Posts and blogs and so on here's an era vomited one from philosophical dispositions there are lots of others from philosophical discussions there are other ones for oh youtube videos and

so on apparently there are responses to capturing christianity ken miller max baker hitchen here there's a response in here to interlocks recent book on the resurrection to the magrus entry and so on so yeah check out these resources I'll put this link in the description i have a generic argument from miracles that would the structure would look like this and miracles are hard because there aren't really a bunch of individual individually structured arguments it's just that we plug in different purported miracles for e to get the miracle to get the argument from miracles so you

have to look at the individual miracles themselves to see whether or not there's good evidence that they Occurred uh we have uh try on goldsmith's argument that the exodus event we have the reason to think that the exodus event occurred i believe he was on your channel is that right yeah he was talking about that yeah it was great it was really cool so so look at his look at him look at his interview if you want to get the fuller sense of his of his Argument here they're displayed is is his khazari and the

argument would go look because our principle is true if the exodus is a tradition that meets the criteria of the principle then it's likely true it does meet the criteria so the exercise tradition is probably true which obviously includes all the reckless events that happen obviously no what so one thing we should say here with respect to this argument In particular which i do want to say something about so firstly i think it's the broad consensus of most scholars at least as far as i'm aware i could be wrong on that that uh no the

exodus tradition is is probably not true given the evidence that we have and in general at least i use this as a general epistemic rule of thumb that when i haven't sufficiently studied an area i defeasibly defer to the relevant expert Consensus in that area and so i'm going to defeasibly defer to what i take to be at least what most scholars think with respect to the exodus which is that no that exist tradition is not probably true so anyway that would be a kind of counterargument but i do specifically want to say of course

it includes all the miracles that happen no even if we grant that yeah something like the exodus tradition happened and that it's broadly historical we needn't further Grant that the miraculous events of those reports are well evidenced or that they are probably true consider an analogy we know of lots of different battles that happened in ancient greece and ancient rome and so on but actually lots of those historians believed in like supernatural things that were occurring in those different battles so we know that the battles occurred and we know that the sources are generally reliable

but we don't thereby extend our Commitments to what they said with respect to the supernatural events some of them might involve some of the gods coming down and fighting the battle with them or other sorts of things like you just read into the ancient history and you'll find that actually lots of historians included these sorts of supernatural details this is not how historians think they don't say things like oh well the stories involving these sorts of battles are Probably true and of course if they're probably true that would include all the supernatural things in there

so we have good reason to think that zeus exists no what precisely because such things are intrinsically so improbable we take the general reliability of these sources to consist in their reliability of describing the various mundane historical social and political goings-on we don't or at least shouldn't extend our high confidence to the Various supernatural events also described therein even if we grant that the sources are generally reliable and what they describe is broadly speaking probably happened full then it's likely true it does meet the criteria so the exercise tradition is probably true which obviously includes

all the miraculous events that happen uh okay uh other candidates for e would be the miraculous events that purported in Records events that happened throughout the new testament in the ministry of jesus we will not camp out on those but uh yeah there's some resources on the reliability of the old testament in particular the access narrative yeah kitchens is also really good on the reliability yeah so you can plug you can plug any of the things that jesus did into the generic argument for miracles we gave uh and Provided that the rel the new testament

is generally generally reliable you have a good argument for miracles and of course you can't talk about the argument for miracles without mentioning the resurrection where we have historical yeah so see the resurrection document that i was showing earlier that is in the description uh and also see my general remarks at the beginning of this section with respect to arguments for miracles and the certain potential Defeaters that afflict them concerning prior probability and defeaters arising from earliest potential difficulties rising from disagreement and so on vertical evidence these are all individual pieces of historical evidence uh

the e one through e in however many pieces of evidence you wanna factor into the argument and so we can run an argument from miracles in three ways we can have a c inductive argument uh given the evidence uh Whether or not they make the resurrection hypothesis greater than point right so i think that i've said basically everything that i would say with respect to a lot of these sorts of miracles arguments a lot of these quote unquote miracles and i think they're going to appeal to like craig keener equally well attested to these sorts

of things or like things that christians would like vehemently reject in eastern religion so for instance There are boatloads of reports about what like tibetan monks have done and like different really strange things that people reported about them that could only be if if those reports are accurate interpreted as supernatural other sorts of things within hindu traditions about reincarnation and various anecdotal reports about people being able to specify the past lives of other people through means that they had no way there are so many other Conflicting traditions which seem equally if not better evidenced than

the ones that christians are oftentimes willing to accept so anyway as someone who's just looking at all this from the outside it a lot of it just looks like an epistemic mess but again i grant that i haven't looked into all this stuff in tremendous detail and so i have to have the requisite episodic humility and recognize that this is just one of the domains or one Of the areas that i haven't researched all that much in so i have to have quite a mitigated confidence in my pronouncements on these sorts of matters absent further

investigation into them for that reason we are going to skip to the metaphysical arguments which is number 79 so we are only skipping a few we're skipping through what like 77 through 79 or something like that or maybe 76 as well so it looks like we're actually at Non-traditional arguments so do you wanna talk about pragmatic arguments what i was thinking was what if we just like breeze through instead of discussing each one individually so all right objects uh lowe's argument some abstract objects exist necessarily but all abstract objects depend on concrete objects so there

must be a necessarily just a concrete object we have phasers august yeah so Firstly definitely see my god and abstract objects playlist because i go over these sorts of arguments in tremendous depth therein now what's actually kind of interesting is that this argument here is just quite obviously invalid first if some abstract objects exist necessarily and abstract objects depend for their existence on concrete objects it doesn't follow that at least one concrete object exists necessarily it could be the case that Necessarily there are some concrete objects or other and in that case abstract objects could

depend for their existence on concrete objects while they're necessarily existent because there are some concrete objects or other in every single possible world right so there's no empty world which is devoid of concrete objects and so you could have necessarily existing abstract objects depend for their existence on concrete Objects even if absolutely every single concrete object is such that it contingently exists again all you need is that necessarily there is some concrete object or other so this conclusion here doesn't follow perfectly compatible with premises one and two is the claim that every single concrete object

exists contingently so this argument is just facially invalid of course you can always add a premise to the effect of oh well if some abstract Objects exist necessarily and if abstract objects depend on their existence on conquered objects then there's at least one concrete object that exists necessarily but then of course you're just relocating the problem then we're asking why should we accept that premise why shouldn't we think that that premise is just a non-sequitur after all i've just given a situation wherein at least in principle the antecedent of that conditional could Be true while

the consequence is false so we would need some reason to think that conditional even if you add it to this to make it valid we would need some reason to think that that conditional is true the second thing that i want to say is of course you know nominalists will reject this first premise i'm not myself anonymous with respect to abstract objects i at least tentatively lean towards realism with respect to at least some abstract objects But i just want to point that out that there are boatloads of anomalies it's a perfectly respectable position william

lane craig for instance is a die-hard nominalist i've had kenny boyce on my channel to defend nominalism against boatloads of objections to nominalism as well as arguments for realism including the very standard arguments that lots of the thinkers are that are cited in this video cite in favor of abstract objects So anyway check out that video if you are curious on checking out nominalism the next thing that i want to say is you have to be careful when you're mounting these sorts of arguments and how they impact other aspects of your worldview if you think

some abstract objects exist necessarily then i think it's almost unavoidable that you're going to have to admit that there are actual infinites for instance if some abstract objects exist necessarily let's say propositions Well then there are infinitely many propositions here's the proposition one plus one equals two here's another proposition one plus two equals three here's another proposition one plus three equals four and so on and so on a sort of capitalist ideology that that short of secures the or if you're talking about mathematical objects right there are infinitely many shapes a three-sided shape a four-sided

Shape a five-sided shape a six-sided shape and so on there are infinitely many numbers and so on so if you think that some abstract objects exist necessarily you can't run any arguments that allege to show that actual infinite collections are metaphysically impossible they're not only metaphysically possible they are metaphysically necessarily existent the next thing that i want to say with respect to these arguments is why why do Abstract objects depend for their existence on concrete objects when i think about this this just seems really implausible even if there were no concrete objects i say it

would still be the case that one plus one equals two and let's say girdles and completeness theorem would be true and in that case plausibly mathematical objects and truths are not dependent on concrete objects moreover if there were no concrete objects it would still be true That there are no concrete objects and so there would plausibly be truths that is propositions in such a world and so plausibly propositions don't depend on concreta and so on down the list of abstract objects i think these represent direct and plausible challenges to premise 2 here the next thing

that i want to say here is that abstract actually pose many quite serious problems for theism as william lane craig for instance has pointed out i've Gone through many such problems that abstract objects pose for theism in my playlist god and abstract objects let's just set aside the is more generally but let's just focus on classical theism these abstract objects that exist necessarily are either intrinsic to god or they are extrinsic to god if they're intrinsic to god then divine simplicity is obviously false in which case classical theism is false again because if there are

abstract objects and They're intrinsic to god well god himself isn't an abstract object so he's distinct from these things that are intrinsic to him and so there are these things that are intrinsic to god but distinct from god which is flatly denied by divine publicity so you can't run this argument i would say if you think that classical theism is true but by contrast if the abstract necessarily exists on objects are externs of god well then god isn't free To refrain from creating in which case again classical theism is false traditionally a commitment of classical

theism is god's freedom and indeed his freedom to refrain from creating and of course under classical theism anything apart from god is dependent on god's creative causality so whether abstract objects are in or not in god classical theism is false but you also get challenges to theism more generally from abstract objects you get challenges to The isaiah sovereignty doctrine god isn't in control of the abstract landscape you just have this infinite array of necessarily existing things that god has literally no control over moreover it seems though god isn't the creator of all things visible and

invisible as many christians say every sunday i guess you could say that god creates these sorts of things but then god isn't free to refrain from creating which again is something that Traditional theism wants to repudiate and of course if you don't want to accept classical theism and you instead want to accept some sort of non-classical model of god it's difficult to see how you're going to avoid god's dependence in some manner on the abstract landscape god will have various properties like omniscience and omnipotence and so on moreover god wouldn't exist were god not omniscient

and so there seems to be this thing Distinct from god and only the property of being omniscient such that god couldn't exist without it god is in some sense dependent on something distinct from him so whether you go the classical theistic root abstract objects are going to pose a serious challenge for you or if you go to the non-classical theistic group it seems abstract objects are also going to pose a serious challenge for you if you are a theist on the non-classical theater and you can try to Respond to that by distinguishing different senses of

dependence maybe you'll try to say that god himself grounds god's various properties and so god isn't dependent on the properties rather the properties are dependent on god then you might get into issues about god somehow being prior to his own essence which it's difficult to see how god could be prior to his essence because some things essential properties are those properties that it simply Cannot exist without and so if god is somehow grounding the properties of his essence god would somehow be prior to those very properties but how could god be prior to those very

properties if for to be god you have to have those properties like in the first place it seems so you get a potential vicious circularity in that sense but anyway you get into the weeds very very very quickly with respect to this kind of non-classical degree because again you Have to distinguish the different kinds or senses of dependence you can distinguish logical or mere counter factual dependence you can distinguish a kind of grounding dependence constitute of dependence causal dependence and so on so we get into the weeds there so there's probably going to be some

wiggle room for non-classical theists to get out of the argument that i was just mentioning but anyway let's just move on because my point here my point is just That there are so many problems with these sorts of arguments from abstract objects i pointed out that this one here is clearly invalid secondly the nominalists are just going to reject premise one thirdly premise one would arguably prove actual infinites and so it would be incompatible with at least some major arguments for theism fourth i don't think this second premise is plausible i gave some reasons for

Thinking that abstract uh plausibly don't depend on concreta fifth abstract actually pose many quite serious problems for theism i find that they're incompatible with classical theism and that they will pose some quite serious challenges to non-classical theistic models of god as well this necessarily but all abstract objects depend on concrete objects so there must be a necessarily distant concrete object we have phasers Augustinian proof which is similar to greg welty's conceptualist argument which just arrives at the yeah so i have a whole video based on a chapter in my forthcoming book existential inertia and classical

theistic proofs on the augustinian proof so definitely check out my video expressly dedicated to the augustinian proof i argue that the proof shall we say miserably fails again we have the problem that anomalous will reject one and kenny boyce for instance Has pretty much already responded to the arguments that phaser levels on behalf of the reality of abstract objects that's not to say that i agree with kenny boyce but i'm just pointing out that if you want to level this argument or if you want to accept phases augustine improve you have to reckon with the

arguments and the defenses that nominalists give of their position in response to the various arguments that phaser and others level on behalf of Abstract objects secondly i don't think at all that phaser's established premise 2 both platonic realism and aristotelian realism seem like live options to my mind and the objections that phaser gives to them are very very poor and thirdly again we still have that fact that abstract objects pose serious problems both to classical atheism and non-classical theatric models of god but even especially to classical season in light of what i said earlier and

what i Say in my august any proof video so theism by eliminating from aspect objects by eliminating other theories about abstract objects uh we have low on objects from reason abstract objects seem to be things that we reason about they seem to be objects of reason uh but if that's true then uh the only way they could be objects of reason if they're the object of reason though non-physical necessarily just an infinite intellect Okay so one thing to say here this premise one if objects of reason exist they are non-physical necessarily existent and infinite number

of course then you've got an actual infinite collection so you're not going to be able to run certain other arguments for god's existence moreover i simply reject premise two why should we accept that they're best explained by non-physical necessarily existing infinite intellect that's an extremely non-simple Hypothesis you're positing this radically different fundamental kind of thing within our ontology and it's not at all clear that it has explanatory advantages over rival hypotheses like platonic realism and aristotelian realism nominalists will reject premise three of course so the same points apply there and of course the same points

about abstract objects posing serious challenges to theism rearrise as you can See boatloads of these arguments that are presented here as distinct arguments face literally the exact same challenges the arguments aren't independent of one another in that whole concoctions of them whole swaths of these arguments rest on the same sorts of premises or the same sorts of assumptions but anyway that's the point about independence that we're going to talk about later boatloads of these arguments are not at all independent of one another as is Evinced by the fact that some of the exact same objections

re-arise over and over and over again to allegedly different arguments within the various categories the arguments from propositions uh let me just read this one propositions are distinctively thought-like if propositions are distinctly thought like then they must be the thoughts of a necessary infinite mind and there are a Lot of papers here defending that main proposition propositions are distinctly thought with respect to this argument this is also something that i address in my forthcoming book and i even have a whole video dedicated to this kind of argument the argument for god from logic that focuses

on various suspiciously thought-like features of propositions and tries to identify them with divine thoughts so anyway check out my video the argument from god for logic So here is that video on the argument for god from logic it was published on march 18th 2022 so check that out for those who are interested i talk about propositions at length in here and i talk about how it's actually not at all clear that premise 2 here is true and indeed it's deeply implausible by my lights at least we're trying to get some sort of explanatory payoff by

saying that oh well we can explain why propositions have their distinctively Thought-like character for instance they're about things by saying that they're thoughts of an infinite mind but then of course you're just you're raising the question in virtue of what are the thoughts of an infinite mind intentional that is about things is it just primitive well then you can say the exact same thing about propositions and shave off the complexity of adding an unnecessarily existent non-spatio-temporal infinite Mind in your ontology are they intentional in virtue of consisting of maybe some sort of organization of properties

or something like that well then again you can say the exact same thing about propositions and so on down the list of various things you might say so it seems so anyway i think premise 2 is deeply deeply questionable and by my lights implausible and of course you also have nominalism as a response to this sort of argument Nominalists like kenny boyce who again i've had on my channel are going to project that there even are such things as propositions and furthermore you have all the problems that propositions will be posing for traditional theism both

classical theism and non-classical theism propositions exist and they're going to be positive ontological items intrinsic too but distinct from god in which case the traditional doctrine and divine Supposedly is false wherever you're going to have challenges to a sadie and sovereignty and so on and so on and so on richard bryan davis uh he argues that the constituents of propositions are best understood as ideas so the idea of uh so if we have the proposition quine is wise in order to be true uh it has it has constituents uh it has the conditions quine the

idea of equine and the idea of wisdom Or you could have the constituents the property of being coined the property of being wise and they're tied together by some sort of relation you can say that doesn't require these to be ideas it doesn't require there to be mind that ties them together you can have a perfectly respectable platonic view of these sorts of things or of course you could go nominalist i point these sorts of things out in my video on the augustinian proof Now in order for those to be arranged in such a way

for that proposition to be true uh you need a mind to arrange them so propositions but there are problems why though and moreover they could be tied together by something like a relation uh in order for those to be arranged in such a way for that proposition to be true uh so uh they need but there are Propositions that have constituents that can only be arranged propositions that no human mind has ever thought of so uh they need another mind to arrange the constitution so there's propositions uh then we have a color no you're not

gonna be able to get omniscience out of that all you're gonna be able to get is that there's at least one mind which in some manner organizes together ideas or concepts such that they form or Constitute propositions it doesn't follow that this being knows those propositions you also need to establish that it has various toxastic attitudes towards those propositions it has to have belief-like states towards them moreover those belief-like states have to be appropriately truth-tracking moreover the being has to have some sort of justification for its belief like stances toward the relevant propositions Or if

not some justification maybe some externalist condition like being appropriately related to the facts known none of this is established merely by establishing that there's some mind that ties together or organizes constituent ideas into propositions in mind to arrange the constitution so there's propositions uh then we have keller um that argument is actually to me is becoming more and more interesting as i'm getting older so i definitely Want to look more don't read the formulation there i'll just read the inductive version the probabilistic formulation this is christopher menzel's argument from sets uh the probability that set

theoretical realism is true so sets exist so of course anomalists like kenny boyce will reject that the next thing to note is that premise three here i think is questionable activism explains the existence and nature of sets better than set theoretic realism And three in particular so the idea is that sets collectively form a kind of iterated structure where you have sets being built from other sets and so on now menzel has shown that there are certain contingent elements of this set theoretic hierarchy there are certain contingent cutoffs as to when the hierarchy comes to

an end as it were assuming that his argument for that succeeds he then goes on to say the best explanation for that is that there's an Infinite intellect that can freely choose to collect things together into certain sets that's how you can explain the contingency there but for me though it's not clear why freedom helps here both the relevant views namely set theoretic realism and activism are going to have some sort of indeterministic link from the necessary to the contingent there are certain contingent aspects of the set theoretic hierarchy and those we can suppose are

Indeterminately explained by more fundamental necessary facts of the set theoretic hierarchy there's no precise reason as to why the hierarchy cuts off here rather than there or whatever but we can still offer some explanation in terms of necessary facts about the hierarchy and the necessary fact that is to cut off somewhere or other we can still cite those to give an indeterministic or non-complete explanation for why the set Theoretic hierarchy cuts off where it does and adding in freedom doesn't really help here this view also has an indeterministic link from the necessary to the contingent

god makes certain contingent choices but of course those aren't brute those are just indeterministically explained by more fundamental necessary features of god it's not at all clear why one of these explanations is better than the other Both of them can explain the contingency and both of them explain the contingency in terms of necessity neither of them are able to explain why the set theoretic hierarchy cuts off where it does rather than somewhere else neither of them can explain that and so ultimately to me it's just not clear why adding in libertarian freedom would help here

all you're doing is just relocating the indeterminism you're just relocating the place where we don't have an Explanation as to why one thing obtains rather than some other thing and also in doing so you're bloating our ontology quite significantly you're adding in this generous fundamental kind of thing this infinite non-spatiotemporal mind or whatever and so even if i granted that this sort of theistic activism offer to gain an explanatoriness with respect to the contingent aspects of the set theoretic hierarchy it's an entirely separate Question whether that is sufficient to overcome the cost in theoretical parsimony

and it's not at all clear that it is and of course this is arguably going to be incompatible with classical theism because some sets are going to be necessarily existent so they're going to be necessarily existing things that are numerically distinct from god of course if those are intrinsic to god then you have divine simplicity being false and Those are extremes of god the name of god not being free to refrain from creating which is also rejected by traditional versions of classical theism and you're going to have certain worries about a sadie and sovereignty and

so on so anyway once more we don't have an argument that's truly independent of the other arguments in this category i won't read the formulation there i'll just read the inductive so basically what i say there Is also going to be applying to this uh particular bayesian formulation of the argument so anyway let's get on to the next metaphysical argument activism so uh sets conference well here's just a handful of arguments from unities so we have facts facts uh exist and our unities of constituents so one thing that i want to say here is that

relevant to this argument is my video on the neoplatonic proof so i highly recommend Checking this out for those of you who haven't it's on fazer's new platonic proof uh i did this in 2021 it's based on an article that i published in the european journal for philosophy religion i didn't link it in here but you can find that on my fill paper profile and you can also find it on my website josefschmid.com but anyway i argue that these sorts of arguments for some sort of unifying cause of composite things Ultimately don't succeed and much

of what i say in response to phaser's neoplatonic proof will be applying to these sorts of arguments mutations mutants or with appropriate modifications so we have facts facts exist and are unities of constituents problem is uh the constituents of facts need to be unified and they can only be unified by something external to the fact itself but there are facts in every possible World so there must be an external fact unifier in every possible world that's from our good old uh philosopher king living out in the wilderness william balochella okay so premise one facts exists

and are unities of constituents so it's not 100 clear that premise one is true maybe objects exist and maybe objects have various properties but are there such things as facts that's like over and above objects And the properties that they have and perhaps the events in which they participate it's not at all clear and even if there were facts this might come with some implausible commitments at least for let's say classical theism facts exist well then does the fact that god exists does that fact exist if so i mean is that a unity of constituents

if so then that's that fact is going to be distinct from god right because god isn't a unity of Constituents according to classical theism and so the fact that god exists is going to exist in any world in which god exists of course and it's going to be distinct from god so we have something that necessarily exists and is distinct from god which of course is not going to be compatible with traditional versions of classical theism because god is supposed to be the creator of whatever exists apart from himself and god moreover is free to

create or Refrain from creating and hence whatever is apart from god is gonna have to be contingent rather than necessary so anyway it's not clear that a classical thesis will be able to run this argument premise two moreover facts can be unities of constituents only if there is an external fact unifier that seems to me to be false or at least very questionable why can't something within a unified plurality explain the unity of said Plurality so consider the fact that a particular grain of salt exists at a particular moment what explains that well maybe something

within that very fact itself can explain why that grain of salt exists at that particular moment so the sodium and the chloride ions themselves have various features like being a cation and being an anion together with their various electrostatic properties they themselves have properties which can explain their Unity together within a salt molecule and so in principle it seems as though you could cite things within a fact which is a unity of constituents that explains why the relevant constituents are unified in the way that they are so there need not in that case be an

external fact unifier something within the fact can explain why there is the unity of the relevant plurality of constituents and moreover if you deny what i just said well then it seems as Though we're going to have an argument against trinitarianism on our hands because we have at least some sort of plurality there in the godhead at least a plurality of divine persons so must there be something external to divine persons that somehow unifies them all together well good luck saying that if you're a traditional theist so anyway i say premise two is probably false

and indeed i think at least christians who are Trinitarians should probably project premise two as well premise four by my lights if some fact or other exists in every possible world there must be an external fact unified in every possible world this itself seems incompatible with classical theism i was saying earlier how if there's some fact distinct from god that's necessarily existent well then that's going to be incompatible with traditional versions of classical theism Well this premise three is saying precisely that some fact or other exist in every possible world and of course facts are

unities of constituents so unities of constituents exist in every possible world when since god is into a unity of constituents it follows that some non-god thing or other exists in every possible world and that of course entails that there's at least one thing apart from god that god is not free to refrain from creating and that of course Conflicts with traditional versions of classical theism interestingly we actually have an argument against classical theism on our hands here also what i say here is that premise 4 by my lights seems to succumb to something like a

quantifier shift fallacy if some fact or other exists in every possible world there must be an external fact unifier in every possible world even if i granted that why must That external fact unifier be the exact same being the exact same entity in every possible world just because each fact requires some external fact unifier or other that unifies it it doesn't follow that there is some single fact unifier that unifies all the facts so even if some fact or other exists in every possible world there might just be different external fact unifiers in the different

possible worlds that there are so it doesn't follow that there's an External fact unifier in every possible world that there is some one thing which is such that it exists in every possible world and unifies facts in every possible world so i think premise 4 arguably succumbs to a quantifier shift fallacy a still further problem here is that let's focus on this quote unquote fact unifying mind well we can now focus on facts about that mind itself and its various intrinsic states it has various different beliefs and might have various Different desires it has different

reasons to act on different things you know it has more reason to actualize some worlds and less reason to actualize other worlds and so on so they're going to be facts about this very mind and its own intrinsic states must we then posit some external fact unifier outside of this mind that unifies the various intrinsic states of this mind together into one well if so well then that thing is Either a mind or it's not if it's a mind well then we have the same problem and if it's not a mind then ultimately non-mentality is

more fundamental than mentality which is of course incompatible with thesem so if we suppose that it's a mind well then we get the infinite regress problem and of course we have the problem of trinitarianism that i mentioned earlier we could say either the three persons together require some external fact Unifier the fact that there are those three persons either they require some external fact unifier or they don't if they don't require an external fact unifier well then why is it the case that facts can be unities of a constituent only if there is an external

fact unifier why that doesn't seem plausible but if they do require an external fact unifier then trinitarianism is false there is like something outside of the trinitarian Godhead that's somehow unifying those things together like nope that is not compatible with traditional christian trinitarian theism so anyway there are lots and lots of problems at least by my lights for this sort of argument so let's move on to the 85th argument contingent objects are unities of sorts they are composite and temporal there's nothing intrinsic to contingent objects okay premise one why Why why can't there be a

simple contingent thing why why so consider tropes i'm not saying that i believe in troubles but tropes are often taken to be simple primitively individuated positive ontological items so what are tropes well trope theory right the theory of tropes is the view that reality is holy or partly made up from tropes tropes are things like the particular shape weight and texture of An individual object tropes are also particular so they are like particular positive ontological items but they're much more like properties than they are like how philosophers traditionally conceive of substances or objects so there

might very well be simple tropes that are contingent plausibly there might not have been green things in which case the greenness trope would be contingent It may very well be as most trope theorists suppose that tropes are themselves simple they aren't further composed of more fundamental things and so here we would have a contingent positive ontological item some sort of contingent thing which is not composite it would be a simple contingent thing you could also talk about myrological symbols if we think that at least some neurological symbols are contingent as theists are going to be

wanting to think Well then no not all contingent beings are composite moreover why think that all contingent beings are temporal what why can't there be a timeless contingent thing maybe god just timelessly wills that some timeless angel exists and is just like contemplating god for all of timeless eternity or whatever that angel would then be contingent but it would not be temporal i'm not saying that this is a genuine possibility my point is why would you rule that out why should we Think that that is metaphysically impossible this is asserting that all contingent beings are

composite and temporal i've already challenged composites but why should we think that all contingent beings are temporal it seems just deeply implausible by my lights so we're off to a good start um objects that explains what holds them together through they are composite and temporal there's nothing intrinsic to Contingent objects that explains what holds them together think about this as well a theist might agree with the kind of non-spatial temple universal wave function view that i was articulating earlier on theists themselves might agree in some sense with the broad picture of a listener's view of

the non-spatial temporal universal wave function but they might simply take that to be a contingent thing that is created and sustained by god so then we would Have a non-spatiotemporal and hence a non-temporal contingent thing or you might take some contingent thing to be something like a timeless quantum field or some sort of timeless quantum state or whatever so premise one just seems deeply implausible are composite and temporal there's nothing intrinsic to contingent objects that explains what holds them together through time so that just seems false by my light there are various Metaphysical accounts of

let's say existential inertia which don't deduce anything extrinsic to certain contingent things that explains why they persist through time there are perfectly respectable accounts of why contingent things persist through time that don't deduce anything extrinsic to the contingent things in question i go through many such accounts in my forthcoming book existential understanding classical theistic proofs But also if you want a snapshot into what i argue they're in you can check out this blog post so you think you understand existential inertia in particular check out the various metaphysical accounts of existential inertia that are developed in

this particular section or i guess quote unquote chapter of this blog post the metaphysics of eit i go through different tendency disposition accounts that cite tendencies or dispositions i Go through transtemporal accounts inside transtemporal relations connecting the different phases or stages of an object's life that can account for its persistence i go through law based accounts necessity accounts no change accounts and so on many of these accounts are perfectly respectable explanations of why some contingent things can persist through time without requiring something extrinsic to them that explains why they Persist through time so i would

say premise one is deeply impossible i would say premise two is false what about premise three well interestingly enough premise three here rests on premise one premise three depends on premise one such that if premise one is false or implausible premise three is likewise false or implausible and i've already argued that premise one is implausible why does premise three rest on premise one well Because look premise three is basically saying that which explains what holds contingent beings together through time cannot be other contingent beings this is relying on firstly thinking that all contingent beings are

temporal right if not all contingent beings are temporal then in principle you could have a timeless contingent thing which explains what holds the various temporal contingent beings together through time and so it actually could be a timeless Contingent thing that explains why the temporal contingent things are held together through time so premise three quite obviously rests on premise one and i've already argued that premise one is deeply impossible and ends premise three is deeply impossible this argument just seems to be a mess honestly also in addition to having three probably false premises the argument is

invalid look at this one through three don't entail four four Says so that which explains what holds contingent beings together through time must be a necessary incomposite a temporal sustaining case of course they mean cause but this is obviously invalid all you're able to conclude is that what explains why things persist through time is a necessary thing because it says well it can't be again we're assuming the truth of all the premises one two and three given that all you're able to conclude is that the thing is necessary You can't conclude that it's incomposite from

the fact that all contingent beings are composite and temporal it doesn't fall that all necessary beings are non-composite and non-temporal it could be the case that all contingent beings are composite and temporal and all necessary beings are composite and temporal or maybe all necessary beings are simple but yet temporal or maybe all necessary beings are timeless but yet composite that's perfectly compatible With one so literally this is an invalid argument the conclusion doesn't even follow from the premises all you're able to get from the premises is that this thing is necessary you can't conclude that

it's incomposite nothing in the premises justifies that you can't conclude that it's a temporal nothing in the premises justifies that so anyway this argument is one of the most painful out of all of them so uh let's just continue because it's invalid And literally like all three of its premises are false can you get worse than that i mean honestly the dixie argument that was presented at the beginning might be better than this argument well here's kind of an odd argument you can look at that there are some holes that are made this is definitely

an odd argument if x is a whole then x is made by an intelligent agent yes i could definitely tell that all atheists And all naturalists are going to accept this first premise yep nothing suspicious there on a more serious note yeah a premise one i think is false it doesn't follow from the fact that if something is a whole then it's made by an intelligent agent like what if you accept that if x is a hole then x is made by an intelligent agent arguably god is in some sense a whole he has various

properties or aspects he has various mental states like beliefs and Desires and choices and qualitative conscious states like bliss or blessedness or happiness or whatever and so on so god is in some sense a whole of various aspects and so must there be some intelligent agent that made god no of course not now of course you might try to get around this by saying oh no god isn't even a whole of those very things god is numerically identical to each of his beliefs to each of his desires to each of his choices to his Happiness

god is numerically identical to each of his properties it's like okay that if that's what you're going to take to get around this argument um okay you can take that model of god if you want but that's a deeply implausible model of god at least by my lights and it comes to various independent problems that i outline in my forthcoming book existential nursing classical theater proofs as well as problems that i've Outlined in my published work and of course it just seems facially implausible it seems facially impossible that god's omniscience would be numerically identical to

god's omnipotence which is numerically identical to god's timelessness which is numerically identical to god's assail which is numerically identical to god's desire that all shall be saved which is numerically identical to and so on so yeah premise one is false and i think Even theists should probably reject it but also some holes made by an intelligent unembodied agent require that agent to be godlike that just seems to me to be false no it doesn't require the agent to be god-like maybe it's a really bad being maybe it's a morally atrocious being maybe it's a morally

indifferent being that wouldn't really be godlike it's only god like in so far as it would be an intelligent unembodied agent But as for the other things whether it's omnipotent whether it's omniscient whether it's holy good where this argument is entirely silent about that and of course it's unclear whether something is god like if it doesn't even come close to being omniscient omnipotent holy good and so on like it could just be like an angel or something it could be something very Much like a human mind just a disembodied human mind you might say oh

well that's intrinsically improbable but then of course the same thing could arguably be said about there being this intelligent unembodied agent which is godlike made by an intelligent aide everything composite is made by an intelligent agent it's the main premise there uh justified by induction things like that justified by induction things like that Okay induction like so induction in order to justify this premise by induction it would have to be something like all observed holes are made by an intelligent agent therefore all holes are made by an intelligent agent but like no it's not the

case that all observed holes are made by an intelligent agent no there are lots of observed holes that we at least either have no clue whether Or not they're made by an intelligent agent or we have good reason to think that they're not made by an intelligent agent so i don't even think that this first premise is supported by induction if anything an argument against god's existence would be supported here more by induction if x is a whole then x is made by a finite intelligent agent the only intelligent agents within our inductive evidence base

are finite and so if we are extending our inductive Evidence base to all holes having to be made by intelligent agent i can equally run an inductive argument which is just as powerful saying that all holes are such that they're made by finite intelligent agents okay which would entail that of course the whole universe was made by an inf a finite intelligent agent which of course wouldn't then be god so perhaps we have a new argument against god's existence on our hands here positive It wouldn't be it wouldn't be a good argument against god's existence

but some holes cannot possibly be made by an embodied agent so there must be unembodied an underbody major that made it and some holes are such that they could only be made by a godlike unembodied agent so there must be an unembodied godlike agent we have uh arguments from unity using the cosmos as an example you see how that argument goes there we'll Just go ahead okay so i do want to offer some comments on this so it's not clear why premise three here is true the unity of the cosmos cannot be explained by its

parts or natural laws i gave the example of salt earlier and it's not clear why that couldn't be the case with respect to the cosmos there might be some something within the cosmos perhaps like a universal wave function at its foundation or maybe something like a quantum field at its foundation that Explains the unity of the various non-fundamental things such that you have an internal explanation of the unity of the cosmos it's not clear why that couldn't be the case premise 6 here also seems quite clearly false at least by my lights and part of

it depends upon what you mean by cosmos but whatever external to the cosmos that explains this unity must be timeless why couldn't it exist in a metrically amorphous or non-metric or undifferentiated time Prior to the beginning of metric time why not immaterial no why couldn't it be a material thing that exists in a non-metric time or a metrically undifferentiated time or why couldn't it be a material or a physical thing which exists timelessly as alyssa a's universal wavefunction does powerful okay that's a little bit ambiguous all it needs is the power to explain the unity

of the cosmos that only require that doesn't require it to have Literally any other powers or whatever plausibly a mind why i could equally say no implausibly a mind okay we have uh rasmussen's argument from limits which is interesting whatever's limited has an explanation if whatever somebody has an explanation possibly something's unlimited so something is unlimited possibly um if something's unlimited then it's perfect something's perfect it's Necessary so it follows that uh if something's unlimited it's necessary and then we have the crucial step from s5 uh that gives us our conclusion there is something that's

perfectly necessary so i have various responses so here's response number one it's not clear to me why we should accept premise one as opposed to accepting say a psr as restricted to simply contingent things not necessarily limited things but just a psr restricted to contingent things Which would allow for a foundational necessary thing that's limited in various ways so that's one way that i would respond it's just not clear to me that whatever is limited has an explanation i would probably only go so far as to say that whatever is contingent requires an explanation which

would allow for there to be a necessary limited thing now you could of course say in response to me there that explanation joe is the Norm and so positing a break in that uniformity would require some principled reason now that's a potentially plausible response but then i'm just thinking about the whole of my evidence base in that case i could in principle grant the rest of the argument and then mount as a principled reason any argument for naturalism or against theism because if you're just saying that hey explanation is a norm and so we should

have some Defeasible presumption against positing a break in that uniformity well then that feasible presumption is gonna have to carry through here so you're not gonna be able to get that there is something that is perfectly necessary that's not the conclusion that you can get to the conclusion that you can get to is that there's a defeasible presumption in favor of thinking that there is something that's perfectly necessary but of course that's highly Defeasible and any principled reason that you could offer in favor of naturalism or against theism would potentially serve as something that counteracts

that support or justification so that's one thing that i would say it's just limiting if you will pardon the pun it's limiting the degree of confidence that we should have in this kind of argument as an argument for god's existence response number two i would say premise Two here is questionable if whatever is limited has an explanation then possibly something is unlimited what i say is in principle it could be the case that every limited thing has an explanation while something unlimited is impossible perhaps every contingent limited thing is ultimately explained in terms of a

necessary limited thing and the necessary limited thing is explained in terms of the metaphysical necessity of its existence or equivalently the Metaphysical impossibility of its non-existence of course i know josh has various things to say on this and i have various things to say in response and he and i have gone back and forth and back and forth and back and forth in lots and lots and lots of email exchanges over the years so of course i'm not saying that josh is unaware of this kind of response josh and i have gone anyway we both

have gone back and forth a lot on this argument i'm just articulating some Of the worries that i have for it i'm not saying of course that they are final or that they are knocked down or anything like that inquiry continues but my point here is just that premise two i think is questionable again it could be the case that everything limited has an explanation because every contingent limited thing has an explanation in terms of something necessary that's limited and then that necessary limited thing would be Explained in terms of the metaphysical impossibility of its

non-existence and in that case everything would be limited despite the fact that whatever is limited has an explanation so you wouldn't be able to conclude that possibly something is unlimited okay response number three i would say that premise four is implausible by my lights i think something could be unlimited and yet nowhere near perfect perhaps it has Simply no axiological properties whatsoever so no properties like goodness or badness or things like that and in that case and in that case it could be quote unquote unlimited with respect to its value or with respect to its

goodness but it would be unlimited in that respect simply because it is not the case that it has some limited degree of value or goodness or whatever it's just the kind of thing to which value and Goodness don't even apply similar to how god doesn't have any spatial limits simply because he's not a spatial being of course some people think that god is a special being but set that aside god isn't limited spatially and the reason for that is because spatial properties don't even apply to god it's not as though god has some like degree

or extent of spatiality and that degree or extent is limited no rather such properties don't even Apply to god and similarly something could be unlimited in principle it seems to me and yet nowhere near perfect because perhaps it simply has no axiological properties and it's just not the kind of thing to which axiological properties would attach perhaps like something like the foundational universal wave function or quantum field moreover we can suppose then that it still lacks spatial and temporal boundaries if it's a quantum field maybe It's like an everywhere present quantum field maybe it's the

universal wave function which functionally realizes the whole of space-time itself so it's not restricted to a particular spatial location or particular temporal location alternatively if it's something within space-time it could be in some sense quote-unquote omnispatial and omni-temporal so it could just be again something like a quantum field which doesn't have any like particular Boundaries on it but it just extends to all of space and throughout all of time and so we could even have a spatio-temporal object which is not limited even in those senses so my point is just that i'm actually quite skeptical

that you can infer perfect from unlimited because maybe lots of the properties that like apply to god it's not as though we're saying that it has like oh yeah it has some knowledge but it's like a super duper limited degree Of knowledge or those sorts of things or what has some value or it has some goodness but just a super duper limited degree no those sorts of properties aren't even applicable to it and yet it's still unlimited in the various properties that are applicable to it like spatial extent or temporal extent or whatever so that's

the third response that i level the fourth response that i want to level is a problem arguably god or at least the christian god cannot be Unlimited this seems to infer that something is unlimited and the idea is that this unlimited thing is god but of course the christian god i argue cannot be unlimited so first a problem of trinitarianism so to be trinitarian is to be limited in a certain respect one is limited in one's number of persons it's not two it's not four it's not 250 it's not infinitely many it's exactly three and

so god isn't after all unlimited if god is trinitarian now of Course one response that you're probably going to give and one response that josh himself gives is that oh well the foundational being simply can't have fundamental limits it can have non-fundamental aspects or properties or features or respects in which it is limited in various ways so it can have various non-fundamental limited aspects or properties or features and so on it's just that those limits must be explained by or dependent upon or grounded in more Fundamental features or aspects of the foundational being and those

fundamental features will be unlimited but by my lights that response is seriously problematic for several reasons the first reason why that response is seriously problematic is that how are the persons then fully divine is a saying not a divine attribute is it not an essential divine attribute plausibly a saiyadi is a perfection and so the Persons would then be lacking a perfection and so not after all god so the trinitarian problem still remains now why would i say that they'd be lacking perfection well because this argument is saying that any of these limits are non-fundamental

they're grounded in some positive ontological items some more fundamental layer of the foundation as a whole but in that case these various non-fundamental aspects the the trinitarian hood of this being The the fact that it exists in three persons that's gonna be grounded in something more fundamental than the three persons and so the fact that there are three persons it seems this limit would then be grounded it would be non-fundamental it wouldn't be assay it would be dependent on something else within god but then it's exceedingly difficult to see how the three persons are fully

divine because then they seem to be Dependent realities here's another way to see this for any acts if x is god then x is fundamental that seems plausible god is that then which nothing is more fundamental god is the fundamental ground of reality or whatever god is by nature fundamental and so anything that is god is also fundamental now the father is god the son is god and the spirit is god so each of the father and the son and the spirit are Fundamental but if each of the father son and spirit are fundamental well

then god's being trinitarian is likewise fundamental since god's being trinitarian just is a matter of existing in these three persons the father son and the spirit and so if these three persons are fundamental so is god's trinitarian hood so it would follow that god's being trinitarian is fundamental which is of course incompatible with the response Above the response above that was just given says that no actually that limit the fact that god is trinitarian god's trinitarian hood that's actually not fundamental contrary to what we just derived so that's my first response to this rejoinder to

the trinitarian point i would say no then that that just seems to be incompatible with the persons being fully divine which is what you need to affirm if you want to affirm Trinitarianism okay what about the second response to this rejoinder that it's fundamentally unlimited but it can have non-fundamental limited properties or aspects or features or whatever my second response to that is well then you're gonna probably gonna have to say goodbye to the doctrine of dying supposedly as well well then you're gonna have to say goodbye to the Doctrine of divine simplicity as well

at least of course for those who accept trinitarianism so christians wouldn't be able to be accepting both the argument from limits and then the doctrine of divine simplicity because again the response in question requires there to be some more fundamental layer of god upon which the other limited aspects of god like for instance god's being trinitarian depend but then it is false contra-divine simplicity that everything In god is god dependent's relations within god among numerically distinct positive ontological items is simply debarred by divine publicity now of course i'm okay with this since i think there

are lots of independent reasons to reject divine simplicity and i know josh rasmussen likewise doesn't accept the traditional doctrine of divine siblings as espoused by classical theism but i just want to flag this as a problem for trinitarian proponents of divine Publicity who are looking to employ the argument from limits so that's my second response that points to its incompatibility with the doctrine of fine specialty when i say it i mean the response to the trinitarian point that makes a distinction between being fundamentally unlimited and being non-fundamentally limited so that's my second response my third

response is that once you say that the foundation can be Fundamentally unlimited but non-fundamentally limited what i want to say then is then the naturalists can then say that the naturalistic foundation is limited in boatloads of respects so long as they say that there are more fundamental aspects of the foundation which are unlimited and which in some way or another explain its non-fundamental limits and so then the argument here the argument from limits would then lose all Of its force as an argument for theism if to qualify is unlimited you simply need to be fundamentally

unlimited but you can have various non-fundamental limited features and properties and so on well then the naturalist can perfectly well accept that there is something unlimited and it's not going to get you anywhere near something being perfect because then it could be limited in boatloads of different respects so long as those limited respects are Explained in terms of a more fundamental layer of it which is let's say just like thoroughly qualitative and unlimited now you might say of course that no we're not saying that it can count as unlimited despite having limited non-fundamental aspects in

unlimited foundational aspects all we are concluding here is that there is something that's unlimited and then we would just be referring to the fundamental layer of the foundational Being as a whole and that fundamental layer of the foundational being as a whole even if it has a non-fundamental layer which is limited that foundational layer is unlimited and that's what we're referring to here but again that doesn't really help the argument because then i'm still going to be rejecting premise 4 here no it wouldn't follow that if something is unlimited then it's perfect because again you

can have this naturalistically friendly unlimited Thing which is this unlimited fundamental layer of this naturalistic foundational being this naturalistic foundational being is unlimited in whole concoctions of ways whole boatloads of ways it's just that it has some more fundamental layer which itself doesn't have limits and again that fundamental layer that could be just let's say a qualitatively simple trope that doesn't have quantitative features or something like that it could be something Thoroughly unimpressive and nothing anywhere near perfect i actually talk about seeds of these particular responses in my video contingency arguments and the psr with

elephant philosophy so um this was in 2021 wow this is almost like a year and a half ago or something but anyway let's listen a little bit to this because i think it'll be illuminating this is on 1.5 times speed of if we're saying that every fundament every not every limit is Such that it can't be fundamental uh then they're gonna have to say firstly that being transparent is not gonna go to god that's already uh unintuitive secondly it seems though they have to i mean this is fine by me but they're gonna have to

deny divine suppose because you have more fun like a layer of god that's somehow explanatory undergirding this lesson mental layer of god um so you have these kinds of i mean that's obviously not compatible with Splicing the third thing is that it seems as though the naturals can then say oh well the foundational reality is limited in a whole host of respects but oh fundamentally speaking um it's just unlimited it's unlimited and that explains why it's limited in all these other regards like um perhaps it's spatially limited and super limited in its power but oh

fundamentally speaking it doesn't have limits and it explains those and so i don't know it Seems as though it gives kind of fodder for the naturalist as it were um and then the fourth at the fourth and the fourth response i want to make to that is that um i don't know it just seems to me that if if the kind of being trinitarian is not fundamental i don't know it's hard for me to see that how each of the persons are or at least how okay how each of the persons are defined it's really

god surely anyway i go on to articulate the Problem that i have been articulating here but like look at this my glasses were broken so i had to put white tape on them oh my goodness this is why i need your patreon buddy because i need to be able to afford glasses i'm a lowly college student so like oh man yes if you want to give me a one-time donation um these are the sorts of things that you're helping me do like just to fix these stupid little broken Things that i'm not able to fix

on my own i have since fixed the glasses thankfully i had some sort of warranty on them or whatever oh man i probably look like such a walking around campus just with this uh oh i love it um the thing is i really didn't care and i still don't um which is just i love it okay anyway so yeah i'm leveling a bunch of different responses to the argument from limits right My first response is that it's not clear why we should accept premise one as opposed to say psr restricted to the contingent things my

second response is that premise two is questionable because every limited thing could have an explanation despite the fact that it's not possible for there to be an unlimited thing the third response was that premise 4 is implausible by my life something could be unlimited and yet nor near perfect and then the fourth Response that i'm giving is that god cannot be unlimited because of trinitarianism and then we're looking at uh josh's response to that which is okay the being simply can't have fundamental limits it can have non-fundamental aspects that are limited or it can have

non-fundamental limits but it just can't have fundamental limits and then i'm leveling various responses to that so the first one is that it doesn't seem to the persons wouldn't be fully divine the Second one is that you're getting rid then of divine simplicity the third one is that this guts the argument of its force and it seems to cut against premise four here because then the naturalist could just say that the naturalistic foundation is limited in boat loads of respects so long as they say that there are more fundamental aspects of the foundation which are

unlimited and which explain those non-fundamental limits Okay so that's the problem that the argument seems to pose for christian theism but here's the second problem that applies to theism more generally okay so we're still within my fourth response in general that arguably like this argument is just problematic for theism because god can't under theism be unlimited so that one was specific to christianity but here's the subpoint which is just to theism more generally so possibly god Can't be unlimited because his desires and his reasons they vary in strength they are in some sense degreed or

on a spectrum and not all of them are maxed out and not all of them are maxed out and of unlimited intensity if you deny this well then you gut theism of its explanatory power like right which world among the infinite array of worlds is god to create each of them is sufficiently good for god to be able to create them it's not as though any of Them are incompatible with god's existence so each of them has some degree of goodness and so god has some degree of desire for actualizing them but if you're saying

that all of god's desires are just like unlimited like of infinite intensity or whatever maxed out well then well then we become entirely unable to predict which one of these is such that god would actualize and so we literally wouldn't be able to predict any particular world among the infinite Array of possible worlds that we would expect god to actualize so you're gutting theism of its predictive and explanatory power if you say that all of god's desires and all of his reasons have an unlimited intensity or unlimited strength moreover you're gutting god of his perfect

rationality because surely god has more reason to actualize some things over others because surely some things Are objectively more valuable than others and so because god's desires have to track objective values surely god's going desire to actualize some things more than others if he's perfectly rational of course and i mean if you say that well then god would not be perfectly rational because then god would have an inappropriate and imperfect uh preference function which of course is a kind of limitation itself so either god Has limited strengths of reasons and desires or whatever in which

case god is limited or if he has unlimited strengths of reasons and desires and so on well then he has limits in that case he's still limited because then he has inappropriate and imperfect preference functions now again you might respond to this by saying that those desires are non-fundamental or the strength of those desires is non-fundamental or those reasons or the strength of those reasons That's non-fundamental but again this response is seriously problematic you're gonna have to say goodbye to the doctrine to find solicity and again the naturals can say the exact same thing so

i guess the purpose of my bringing out this point about desires and reasons or at least the strengths of desires and the strength of reasons or at least the relative weights of reasons how much they impress god as it were my point in bringing that up is just that the Problem of divine limitation is not going to be afflicting just christian theists it's also going to be afflicting theists more generally so it seems as though all theists are going to be in this camp here so anyway that is my fourth response is that this argument

seems to conflict with god's having to be limited in various ways what about my fifth response to the argument from limits well i'm going to call this the problem of a limitation a Limitation not a limitation in the sense of like atheism you know that kind of prefix but a limitation in the sense of like capital a dash limitation so it's a specific kind of limitation that i'm going to be explaining in a second so in light of what we've just said it seems as though we would have to modify the principle of explanation to

saying that every fundamentally limited being is non-circularly explained that is has an explanation outside of itself the Relevant explanatory principle can't be that every limited being is non-circularly explained or explained by reference to something outside of itself because of course we've just seen that god is going to have to have some limits and of course god doesn't have an outside explanation something outside of him that explains why he exists so you're gonna have to basically modify the principle to say okay god is Fundamentally unlimited and our argument really is every fundamentally limited being is non-circularly

explained or externally explained but here's the problem for that what i say is that all the same motivations for the principle that fundamentally limited beings are non-circularly explained hereafter explained equally apply to the principle that beings with any limits whatsoever are explained okay so call of being with Any limit whatsoever an a limited being an a dash limited being and call a being with fundamental limits an f limited being okay so being with any limit whatsoever that's an a limited being and a being with fundamental limits is an f limited being note of course then

that f limitation being f limited entails a limitation or being a limited but not vice versa because in principle again you could have something that's that has some limitation or other But it's not a fundamental limit to it so my claim then which again i offer for the purpose of you know serving you guys not to knock down or build up some sort of tribe is that the same motivations for the principle adduced in josh's argument namely that f limited things have an explanation or at least can have an explanation the same motivations for that

principle equally justifies the principle that a Limited things have explanations or that they can have explanations so if we accept the f limitation principle on the basis of such motivations it seems we should also accept the a limitation principle on the basis of such motivations as well consider that a combination of both reason and experience attest to the truth of the a limitation principle right from experience we uniformly and Universally witness a limited things having some explanation i witness explanations of a limited things in my own mind when for example i form mental images or

intentions and our empirical evidence also attests to it science is in the business of discovering all sorts of truths about and explanations of a limited things and it has been profoundly successful in this endeavor and science of course is founded on a kind of rational explainable order we Can also run a modal uniformity argument based on the inductive experience above that i just mentioned absent special and sufficiently countervailing reasons we should think that a limited things are categorically uniform when it comes to the modal property of explicability josh rasmussen himself has published on this kind

of modal uniformity support what kinds of things we can ask moreover could exist without an explanation well we might say that mere differences in a Limits don't seem relevant to unexplained existence a limited things don't seem relevantly different from one another in terms of calling out for some deeper explanation and finally our default stance should be that a limited things are explicable explicability or being able to be explained is the norm rather than the exception and so we would need some special reason for making an exception to this rule these it seems are lots of

the central Motivations that people cite on behalf of the f limited principle that every fundamentally limited thing requires some explanation or at least can have an explanation and i'm just pointing out here that all of them equally apply to a limited things such that they would equally motivate thinking that every a limited thing has an explanation or at least can have an explanation so from this and from the fact that there are a limited things and finally from the fact That explanation here again we're taking to be non-circular or an outside explanation we can conclude

that there is an a unlimited being what explains why the fact that there are any a limited beings at all well it can't be in terms of an a limited being because then of course we'd have a circular explanation for that and of course per our principle a limited beings whether individually or As a plurality they require some sort of explanation and so we can conclude that there is an a unlimited being that explains why there are a limited beings we can conclude that there is or at least can be an a unlimited being that

explains why there are the a limited beings that there are this a unlimited being has no limits whatsoever whether fundamental or non-fundamental now we can ask why does this matter Well uh for starters it equips us with a new argument against theism and christianity as well because we showed earlier that god after all is not a unlimited under both christianity and theism god has various limits albeit non-fundamental limits but still he has some limits he's limited in the number of persons in which he exists the degree or strength of various of his desires and reasons

are limited and so on so god isn't a unlimited so we've basically Concluded to an a unlimited being that explains why there are a limited things and god is going to be among those a limited things in which case now we've just gotten to an a unlimited being which is the foundation of reality and that's not god but of course if we suppose that god exists god is supposed to be the foundation of reality but we've just concluded that the foundation of reality is a unlimited and hence not god and so god isn't the foundation

of Reality and because if god exists again god is the foundation of reality it would follow that god doesn't exist so we have a new argument against god's existence on our hands arguably so anyway that is my fifth response to the argument from limits it's the problem of a limitation and the idea again is in short that given that god is limited in various respects basically they have to modify their principle of explanation Instead of saying that every limited being has an outside explanation because that would entail that god has an outside explanation which is

absurd they have to say every fundamentally limited being has an outside explanation and that wouldn't entail that god has an outside explanation because they want to say god is fundamentally unlimited despite having certain non-fundamental limits now of course though once they say that I say that the exact same motivations for their principle that every fundamentally limited being has an outside explanation would equally justify thinking that every limited being whatsoever with any limits whatsoever has an outside explanation such that if they affirm the former it seems as though they should also affirm the latter but of

course affirming the latter requires denying theism and christianity itself So that ensures the problem of a limitation that is my fifth response my sixth response to the argument is basically right we have to compare the theories right so if we say psi if we compare the theories so one of the central motivations behind the argument is to explain things as far as we can but we have to balance this against other theoretical virtues like how well it explains the data its qualitative and Quantitative and ideological and theoretical simplicity and so on and so on suppose

one view h explains things further compared to a rival hypothesis h star but h's further explanation isn't all that illuminating which is explanatory depth and h also accounts poorly for a lot of the other data which is explanatory breadth suppose also that h is qualitatively quantitatively and ideologically and theoretically more Complex than h star in this case we should surely accept h star rather than h even though h explains things further than h star and we might suppose h star prematurely stops the explanatory buck so even though even though h explains things further than h

star and even though h star we might think prematurely stops the explanatory buck we should still accept h star in this situation over h because it best manages the trade-off Among the various theoretical virtues but given that what i say is just that even if positing an unlimited being affords us some explanatory payoff in explaining why there are limited beings we shouldn't be too quick to adopt the principle that whatever is limited has an explanation because we have to compare the theories according to one of which whatever's limited has an explanation and so Explains things

basically as far as you can we have to compare that to another theory which says maybe most limited things have an explanation and maybe there's a fundamental limited thing that doesn't have an explanation but perhaps that theory manages the trade-off between explanatory power and theoretical complexity and all these other considerations much better than the former theory and in that case we should Actually accept the latter theory over the former theory so it seems and furthermore what i say is just that it's not clear whether or not this is the situation that obtains with respect to

this argument to me it's not clear whether or not naturalism manages those trade-offs better than theism and that in turn i think can serve to undermine this particular argument and in particular i've been using it to target premise one as i just mentioned Now someone might respond to me here by saying that okay well maybe we can just best interpret the argument from limits as saying that all other things being equal the fact that h explains things further than h star gives an edge to h over h star now i think that seems reasonable but

it just seems to significantly weaken the case for h as other things are almost certainly never equal what comes to mind especially is how following Draper from his stanford encyclopedia of philosophy article on atheism and agnosticism as well as his discussion with alex malpass on malpass's channel thotology arguably the view of a thoroughly fundamentally unlimited foundation is far less intrinsically probable than the competing hypothesis that the foundation has some limit or other along some axis or other although specifying some particular limit along some particular axis would Arguably make the unlimited foundation hypothesis more intrinsically probable

than such an alternative it seems reasonable that the hypothesis on which the foundation has some limit or other along some axis or other far out competes the unlimited foundation hypothesis in terms of intrinsic probability after all for any property p that something has there's only one or two ways for that thing to be unlimited with respect to p either have p to an Infinite extent or maybe infinite magnitude or else have p in a kind of qualitatively complete and pure way by contrast there it seems infinitely many ways to be limited with respect to p

you could have p to this degree and then a little bit higher and then a little bit higher and then a little bit higher and a little bit higher and so on all those ways constitute various ways to be limited with respect to p so it seems as though the intrinsic Probability of having some limit or other along some axis or other is far greater than being thoroughly unlimited along every axis whatsoever or at least along every fundamental axis whatsoever and in that case it's not at all clear to my mind why or how merely

explaining in the present dialectical context at least one fact further namely the fact that there are limited things it's not clear why explaining that one Fact further would raise the posterior probability of the unlimited foundation hypothesis enough to counteract that intrinsic probability advantage of the sum limit or other foundation hypothesis and it's also not clear to me how illuminating the explanation proffered by the unlimited foundation is presumably the explanation is in terms of a freely willed act of creation this is its explanation for why there are limited things or at least fundamentally Limited things but

then of course we get into the weeds of the luck objection rollback arguments and all sorts of things that render the explanation far less illuminating to my mind than we might have initially thought at the very least all these potential issues for the argument concerning intrinsic probability and explanatory power and whatnot are very murky to my mind which should inspire us or at least inspire me to be extremely cautious and Hesitant in accepting the argument so anyway that's my sixth response it's about theory comparison but on to my seventh response to the argument from limits

now i'm just going to be very brief with this particular response the basic idea behind the response is just to appeal to platonism and basically it's just saying that plausibly some properties and some propositions exist independently of god and other concreta and in that case then plausibly there Would be limits fundamental to reality control the argument from limits again because propositions are limited in various respects right the proposition that 1 equals two is limited to being just about the number one the plus function the equals function and the number two it's limited in that way

and if we think that at least some propositions aren't going to have some kind of outside explanation or grounding or whatever well then arguably we have Reason to think that that first premise is false whatever's limited has an explanation no there are going to be some limited things that don't have an outside explanation now of course that's going to get us into debate between theistic conceptualism and platonism and so on but i've already argued both in this video and elsewhere that arguably theistic conceptualism is going to face some potentially serious problems with Respect to abstracta

i suppose you could then respond by saying oh well i'm just going to restrict my first premise to saying whatever concrete that's limited has an explanation okay i guess you could do that but then my question would be given that we have good reason to think that some limits are indeed fundamental and don't have a further explanation albeit abstract limits why think that there couldn't be Concrete limits that similarly are fundamental that don't have a further outside explanation so even if you restricted the scope of that first premise we would still seem to have an

undercutting defeater on our hands because again there would be nothing inherently problematic about limits as such being fundamental we would need some further reason as to why concrete limits are relevantly different From abstract limits with respect to the ability to be fundamental yes yes i know much much much much much more can be said both back and forth on these matters and for every single objection i leveled much much much more can be and has been said back and forth on these various considerations especially between me and josh in private conversation over the years so

anyway if josh is listening to this i want to express my utmost gratitude to Him for all of his thoughts and serving me throughout all these years all these various email correspondences and so on i've learned and grown so much by interacting with josh and i don't at all mean to imply or suggest or even intimate that the considerations that i've leveled here are insuperable or knocked down or that josh doesn't have responses to them or that josh can't respond to them or whatever i know josh has various considerations The same response i in turn

have various considerations to say in response to what he has to say and so on and so on and so on and so on and back and forth and back and forth perhaps throughout endless eternity so anyway let us continue on to the 89th argument which is metaphysical number 89. applicability of mathematics well let's just run through this when you play mathematics and physical world requires explanation the best explanation is god so Applicability of mathematics is evidence for god yeah so i think this one is is definitely interesting the first thing to say is that

arguably the best form of mathematical platonism is going to be a kind of plenitudinous mathematical platonism on which basically the consistent mathematical systems and formalisms and so on are going to correspond to ones that do in fact actually exist and populate plato's heaven so that's a kind of plenitudinous Platonism but in that case pretty much any physical world whatsoever that might come to exist is going to correspond to some sort of consistent mathematical description given the plenitudinous nature of the mathematical realm it's not at all going to be surprising that a subset of that mathematics

is going to be applicable to whatever physical world happens to obtain this response broadly speaking is given by mark ballagher he's a philosopher of mathematics I'm not talking about one i'm just saying premise one could be explained in terms of different alternative explanations that don't involve god so this is a target of premise two and as for premise two the best explanation for the applicability of mathematics to the physical world so what explains that well lots of these cases of the applicability of mathematics of the physical world are going to be explained in terms of

us Literally designing the mathematics so that we can apply them to the physical world oftentimes we try to construct or concoct mathematical systems and different ways of describing the physical world precisely because and so that they can be applicable to the physical world now this is not always going to be the case don't get me wrong there are certainly cases where a certain bit of mathematics was developed just purely for instance for its Intrinsic interest or because the person thought it was fascinating or because the person maybe thought it was elegant and beautiful and then

later on independently that happened to be very applicable to a specific portion of let's say quantum mechanics or you know whatever you won't have a full explanation of the applicability of mathematics just by citing that hey lots of cases of the applicability of mathematics are explained in terms of Us simply trying to invent or concoct or discover whatever it may be the mathematics precisely so as to be applicable to the physical world so then we're still left with the question what explains that remainder what explains the remainder of the cases of the applicability mathematics to

the physical world that aren't explained by us devising the relevant systems or at least trying our hardest to try to discover the relevant Bits of mathematics so as to apply to the physical world what explains that remainder what explains the cases where the mathematician is just developing a mathematical system just because it's elegant or beautiful or whatever because it's interesting and then later on it goes to like really nicely correspond to the physical world or is used in some sort of portion of mathematics well it's not clear to me how this couldn't be explained by

a simple appeal To base rates with respect to the point about base rates we have to think about the proportion of mathematical theories or systems or formulas or whatever sort of bits of mathematics we think about the proportion of those which were developed independently of considerations of applicability to the physical world and were instead developed say because of intrinsic interest or because they were elegant or because they were thought Beautiful or whatever we would have to think about the proportion of those that are applicable to the physical and compare it to the proportion of those

that aren't applicable to the mathematical world and it's just not clear how we could determine that proportion we have to think about all of the failures think about how many mathematical theories and systems and formulas and formalisms and so on were developed just From the intrinsic interest of the mathematician think about how many of those didn't end up being applicable to the physical world why should we think that the proportion of those that did end up being applicable to the physical world is any more than we would expect just by chance we don't have anything

remotely resembling a sampling of the bits of mathematics that were developed independently of considerations of Applicability in the world we don't really have any idea of what proportion of those ended up not being applicable to the physical world and what proportion of those did given that there could very well have been far far far more misses rather than hits why should we think that this is any more surprising than it would be just by coincidence lots of these bits of mathematics precisely because they didn't end up being applicable have just Been you know crumpled up

and thrown into the trash bin so we'd have to we'd have to go through the trash bins of the various mathematicians throughout history it's just not at all clear that the cases where bits of mathematics which were developed independently ended up also being applicable to the physical world it's just not at all clear that that is any more surprising than would be expected just by coincidence Moreover we can still ask the question like why is this expected under theism or at least more expected undertheism than say naturalism or some other relevant alternative hypothesis we seem

to have to build in certain facts about god's preference structure god could actualize lots of the goods of conscious moral rational creatures without having them embedded in a physical world to which their mathematics is applicable so even ignoring the stuff about the base Rates and so on i think that there's still this lingering question about why we should expect the applicability of mathematics of the physical world under theism or at least why it's more expected under theism than naturalism there are various intellectual goods associated with mathematics and so on and being able to apply that

to the physical world but there are lots of other intellectual goods as well and god could actualize lots of those other Intellectual goods without actualizing the applicability of mathematics to the physical world and of course are also moral goods and so on and the actualization of those it seems doesn't require the applicability of mathematics to the physical world so what is it about theism that leads us to expect the applicability of mathematics to the physical world or at least renders it more expected under theism than on naturalism it's not entirely clear how We are to

answer that question of course if your hypothesis is that god modeled the physical world in accordance with mathematical structures well yeah then your hypothesis just strictly entails the data but of course you're only securing that by making the prior of your hypothesis exceedingly small under theism why would we expect god to model the physical world in accordance with mathematical structures god could actualize lots of The goods that he seemed to have been aiming at in his creative act he could have actualized those without even having a physical world as we saw in the case of

the fine-tuning argument more if this is the theistic hypothesis this whole thing here then the naturals can equally well say that there's some fundamental natural item which modeled the physical world in accordance with mathematical structures that also entails the data finally even If the relevant data is more expected on theism than on say naturalism positing an infinite intellect underneath the mathematically modeled physical world at least seems to incur a massive complexity cost and it's at least not immediately clear whether this cost would be outweighed by the gain in explanatoriness assuming of course that theism does

offer a gain in explanatoryness with respect to the data in question the applicability of Mathematics to the physical world and i've given of course some reasons for being suspicious of that but anyway let's move on to the next argument left out reductions and this comes from his book god and necessity and if you are masochistic and interested in philosophy i recommend reading that book uh he painstakingly goes through all sorts of different abstract objects i Mean numbers properties sets universals uh functions and he reduces them down to god and his activities as the best explanation

for the existence of these things but the virtue is he gets them all to be reduced to god and his activities but he does so while avoiding the main criticisms of anti-realism about abstract objects and the main criticism the main weakness there is just that look if we don't have abstract objects we can't have objectivity about Mathematics uh and we can have realism uh he says well i can get you both if they're just reducible to to a necessarily existing concrete being god so i think premise three is implausible that only atheism can secure the

virtues of both anti-realism and realism i go through this further in my playlist god and abstract objects but long story short anti-realism is indeed more economic than realism but If you are saying that all this whole plenitude of abstract objects exist but they're just reducible too they're nothing but the activities of god let's say well then you have just as many oncological commitments as the realist plus god super added on so it's like yeah you have the number one you have the number two you have the number three you have the number four and you're

maybe identifying them with god's activities or maybe identifying i Know left house has a different theory than various other thinkers but of course theistic conceptualists will have for any positive ontological item within the non-theistic realist let's say platonic realist camp there's going to be a corresponding divine positive ontological item for the theistic conceptual view or the theistic activist view or whatever now you might say that the theistic activists have some kind of unifying explanation such that they all Kind of terminate and go back to god i actually discussed that in my video thesis conceptualism divine

simplicity and platonism i think that's the title it was a discussion with parker setacase from parker's pence's podcast but anyway i'm not going to go into the details here about that rejoinder from explanatory unification i just advise you to check out my responses to that in this particular video here but finally even if they have A kind of unifying explanation there it's not at all clear that we have an economic advantage of course because you're literally positing a fundamental suey generous different kind of thing within our ontology namely an infinite intellect a non-spatiotemporal intellect that

is certainly not economic i would also question premise one that we should accept the best theory of abstract i would say that we should accept the bestiary abstractor only with the Following caveat all else being equal so all else being equal the best theory of abstract is should be acceptable but of course if that theory has lots and lots and lots of other difficulties well then we shouldn't accept it simply because it's the best year of abstract we have to look at our total evidence there could easily be defeaters that overcome the gain a theory

accrues by being the best account of abstracta on To the next argument i have a review of that book which which makes understanding it i think of mercy to the reader uh okay all right let's so yeah let's continue moving on argument from possibility modalities are grounded in powers well if so they could only be the powers of an omnipotent being so there's not enough to be so yeah i think premise two is implausible at least right now i don't See sufficient reason to think that it's true but of course i'd probably have to look

into the resources just from my epistemic vantage point i'm just gonna reject premise two no uh you can have modality grounded in powers it's just the various mundane powers of the things around us it's possible for me to become a chef because i have various causal powers i can go to chef school i can study up on the culinary art none of this requires there To be an instant being we just need the various mundane powers of things in the natural order okay it's interesting that when i was looking at the literature on nomological arguments

it seems to be widely agreed on both theist and atheist sides that if realism about laws is true that laws of nature actually exist that's evidence for theism um so you have nancy cartwright's famous paper no gods no Laws uh where she argues that realism about laws supports theism and the best naturalistic option when it comes to laws is to reduce them to dispositional powers of things well then you had a whole bunch of articles in response saying in effect no god no powers powers themselves are best explained if god exists so that's kind of

interesting dynamic that goes ours okay so with respect to this argument here i would say premise one is deeply controversial And by my light it's probably false it's not at all clear that laws of nature are prior to that which they describe as subjunctive in structures perhaps they're subjunctive in structure but they don't seem prior to that which they describe i would probably say that laws of nature are just descriptions of causal powers and so they're not prior to that which they they describe actually that which they describe is prior to them the laws are

only true and They only have explanatory power in so far as the things that they describe exist and have the various powers that they do so i would probably reject premise one i would also probably reject premise two that is a monumentally complex theory the best theory of the laws of nature being this way is that they're counterfactuals of freedom well then of course they'd only be counterfactuals of freedom of some like sort of Some sort of being that transcends the natural order but that accrues some major complexity costs and it's not at all clear

why that would best explain the laws of nature being like this as opposed to let's say a dretzki armstrong thule kind of account of laws of nature on which they're basically necessitation relations between universals in that case they could be prior to that which they describe and subjunctive and Structure as well and that seems to be a simpler explanation than invoking some transcendent being with freedom beyond the natural order uh the first argument here i just want to mention that dynamic um comes from oh you skipped the kind of factuals argument oh sorry no that's

the one that i had pulled up so okay okay so this is this argument comes from my old calvin proff del ratch where he basically says the laws of nature are best understood as Counterfactuals in particular counterfactuals of freedom but they could only be counterfactuals of freedom of a god-like being so a godly being exists very cool argument scholastic argument it's kind of similar to the scholastic argument from abstract objects which is just that it eliminates alternative views about uh realism about laws uh to get you the only possible uh solution To realism outlaws which

is theistic so it's not at all clear what they're being quote unquote transcendent and yet quote-unquote imminent means i don't really even know what to make of this argument because like what do you mean by transcendent yet imminent think of something transcendent i think it like is in some sense beyond the natural world but of course the natural laws aren't beyond the natural world that doesn't even seem to make any sense Maybe the idea is that they're in some sense explanatory prior to the various goings on in the natural world but then of course that

depends on highly controversial views about the nature of natural laws and i would say no they're not they're just descriptions of the causal powers of the various entities around us so premise one just seems implausible at least under a natural interpretation of What transcendent means also it's not clear why premise two is true natural laws can be transcendent yet imminent only if they are grounded in a transcendent yet imminent being that assumes that the natural laws need to be grounded in the first place but why except that premise four by my lights also seems implausible

why would the transcendent yet imminent being have to be god maybe it's just the case that there's some transcendent yet imminent Naturalistic foundation like for instance some sort of foundational universal wave function or foundational quantum field it could be transcendent in the sense of perhaps being non-spatial temporal but it could be imminent in the sense of let's say functionally realizing the contents of space-time okay from induction this is uh john foster's famous argument abduction is justified but it can only be justified If there's genuine regularity in nature but that can be true only if uh

there are laws of nature that govern nature but that can be true only if theism is true right so this third premise that there can be genuine irregularity of nature only if there are natural laws governing nature that seems implausible to me uh there don't need to be natural laws governing nature maybe there need to be natural laws but The natural laws don't need to govern nature it exerts some sort of spooky ghostly influence on it where the laws of nature are somehow reach in their tentacles into the natural world and push and pull things

around no my lights natural laws aren't the things that are doing the governing if natural laws are just descriptions of the causal powers of things it's the causal powers of things that are doing the relevant influencing so i'd probably reject Premise three here premise five it's also not at all clear that this is true why is that the best explanation of there being natural laws governing nature if natural laws do in fact govern things perhaps the best explanation for why perhaps the best explanation of there being natural laws governing nature is that they are necessitation

relations among universals and these universals Are instantiated in nature why is that a worse explanation than god did it and again that theory has been really well developed by lots of pretty important philosophers like dretzki armstrong thule and so on so anyway let's move on so uh theism is true oh this is i like this sorry this is from bradley montan who is not a theist but he argues this way he says we believe or believe in the reliability of induction that can only Be true if we're justified in believing that the universe started in

a low entropy state uh but if naturalism is true the problem see like what i'm sorry that premise 2 just seems so obviously false maybe i'm missing something think about it was aristotle unjustified in believing induction is reliable aristotle wasn't justified in believing the universe started in a low entropy state he had no clue what Entropy was and yet he was obviously justified in believing induction is reliable is my grandma is she not justified in believing induction is reliable my grandma has no clue what low entropy is and yet she's justified in believing that induction

is reliable despite the fact that she's not justified in believing that the universe started in a low entropy state so anyway i think premise two is clearly false what about premise three we're Justified i'm believing the universe started in a low entropy state only if theism is true i'd say it's not at all clear why that's true i'd want to see some reason or justification for thinking that that's true entropy state is ridiculously low i mean ridiculously low um in fact he points out that the probability that we're all boltzmann brains is higher than the

probability that the universe started in a low entropy state of Naturalism is true so uh well what about theism is true gives us any expectation to think that firstly there would be a physical universe and secondly that the universe exhibits various entropic features and thirdly that the universe would start in such a way that it has a low entropy it's hard to see how this also wouldn't be exceedingly improbable even under theism itself god's omnipotent god could have easily created things such that things started in a Super-duper high entropy state god could have created it

in any starting entropy state why on earth would god choose a low entropy state in particular so it seems to be just as improbable under theism as it is under naturalism given that uh we're justified in believing induction is reliable uh that's evidence that atheism is true uh we've got swinburne's arguments From induction as well that uh well it's gonna take a little bit explaining explaining okay the premise when the best naturalistic theory of the laws of nature that they are determination relations between properties that's similar to the dressing armstrong thule account that i was

suggesting earlier and it's not at all clear why this Premise is true i think the naturalist could easily accept and arguably it's a better theory than the dretzki armstrong thule theory i think the naturals could easily accept that laws of nature are just descriptions that cause the powers of things maybe that's the best naturalistic theory of the laws of nature and so this first premise i don't know it just seems really impossible to me what about premise four if laws of Nature are regularities imposed on nature by god then there is just one kind of

causation agent causation what that seems to be so implausible laws of nature could be regularities imposed on nature by god but there could also still be event event causation it's not as though the fact that god imposes various regularities on nature that doesn't like destroy the fact that one billiard ball hitting another Billiard ball causes the latter billiard ball to fly off unless of course you want to adopt something like occasionalism so this fourth premise just seems obviously false by my lights it doesn't follow that there is just one kind of causation agent causation from

the fact that laws and nature are regulated imposed on nature by god it could easily be the case that god imposes various regularities on nature and yet that Preserves event event causation maybe one of the regularities that god imposes on nature is that when one event happens another event causally follows from that from quantum mechanics bruce gordon's argument in the two dozen or so volume uh basically it argues that if quantum indeterminacy is true physical objects are radically ontologically incomplete they're like puzzles where you have all the pieces laid out and they should snap Into

each other but there's gaps in between all the puzzle pieces uh that's what reality would be like physical reality would be like if quantum indeterminacy is true and you don't have god so the only way to fill in those gaps is if they're filled in by something non-physical which a mind-like thing which has to be god yeah so this rests on certain highly contentious interpretations of quantum mechanics and I really i don't think those have been established at all it's also not clear why we should accept premise one here and moreover given one and moreover

given one it's not clear why we should then embrace number two if there's genuine optic indeterminacy then why should we think that material objects are not radically ontologically incomplete after all if there is genuine optic indeterminacy then it seems as though material objects Would be radically ontologically incomplete in some manner premise 6 moreover it seems to me to be false and it seems to suffer from a blatant lack of imagination if you're saying the only thing that could be more fundamental than matter that could complete material objects is a god-like mind like what what why

we could have tau we could have brahmin we could have the neoplatonic one we could have some ethereal we know not what it could be a ghost it could be An angel could be a demon it could be whole concoctions of different things it doesn't have to be a god-like mind so anyway yeah that's why i say it seems to suffer from a blatant lack of imagination so tell me what's the difference what is the difference between a moral argument and an axiological argument well axiological arguments are argument isn't based on non-moral kinds of value

there are There's some overlap uh but there are other kinds of values than moral value there's aesthetic value uh there are norms that are not moral norms they're just sort of norms of of nature you might think yeah social norms but norms are actually logical in a way um so it's uh just from non-moral kinds of value so we have questions fourth way i threw this in the last minute the other day uh cause i don't i don't know A single well i was gonna say i don't know a single person who defends this argument

today but i believe david alexander defends it uh so he won't look at his book i think we already referenced his work uh we have deontic arguments which okay so i guess i'll just be brief here premise one is at least implausible with respect to truth are there things that are more true than others that's not at all clear now of course you might be saying oh We're not using true in the sense of correspondent with reality we mean true in the sense of like genuine that is like living up to the various potentialities that

are built into one's nature so a squirrel that lays around all day and like eats toothpaste or something that's not as true of a squirrel as one that really does well finds a mate you know has a family works the nine to five job eats nuts instead of Toxic toothpaste or something you might say that that's a truer squirrel because it's like living up to the form or essence of squirreliness better okay that comes with some pretty heavy metaphysical baggage now i would say that premise two seems by my lights false there are more or

less good or two or noble etc only if they are so by resemblance to something that's maximally good true or noble or whatever Why should we accept that we can talk about things that are more or less flat things that are more or less spherical things that are more or less triangular a really hastily drawn triangle on like the side of a bus seat that's definitely going to be in some sense less triangular than one that's done super precisely by a professional geometer going very carefully and they've got their compass or whatever does all of

this require that there's some like Maximally flat surface that there's some like maximally spherical object or that there's some maximally triangular thing i think that that's implausible moreover we can talk about things having more or less sides or i guess we should say more or fewer sides like shapes some of which have more sides some of which have fewer sides must there be a maximally sided object no of course not and that doesn't even seem to make any sense yes yes i know There are two mystic rejoinders to this but of course there are also

further rejoinders to that and of course we're joiners to those rejoinders but also rejoin us to those who are joining us those are joiners and so on which are based on the actual arctic principle that if it ought to be the case that p then p is the case that might seem kind of counterintuitive but a surprising number of philosophers actually defend that Principle uh so ought to be the case that god exists so god exists i'm so sorry i i cannot take this seriously hitler's commitment to preserve and protect innocent jewish lives ought to

exist so it exists oh my goodness this is so absurd okay let's continue now you can modest you can make it even more modest by by saying uh And he says a surprising number of philosophers axiarchism which is what this is really based on axiarchism is an extreme extreme minority position off the top of my head i actually don't know anyone in addition to john leslie who has defended it but there are probably various others who have defended it but i'm guessing it's only like a handful of philosophers you can make it even more modest

by by saying uh You can mobilize the principle by saying if it ought to exist then possibly it exists uh and then you can run the argument that way if if it all exists it possibly exists to exist so god possibly exists and dude this is yeah this is a really cool argument for argument it is i love how simple maybe it's cool but it's not at all plausible suppose we agree that hotness implies possibility then obviously no atheist would ever grant That god ought to exist the argument is just dialectically toothless here's another way

to look at it we already know by considerations the modal ontological argument that the atheist thinks that god is impossible we thus know that the atheist thinks god's existence would imply everything since impossibilities imply everything and so god's existence would imply the worst world imaginable and given this it seems like it's not the case that god ought to Exist after all so that's one way that you could think about it but also the point is if we agree that oughtness implies possibility no atheist would ever grant that god ought to exist one would only be

justified accepting that if one is antecedently committed to theism so the argument is just utterly dialectically toothless moreover we can give various parodies we could say firstly naturalism ought to be true if naturalism ought to be true it's Possibly true but of course if it's possibly true then it's necessarily true hence naturalism is true we could talk the same about mental privacy mental privacy ought to exist if mental privacy ought to exist and it possibly exists if it possibly exists well then there is possibly the case that there is no omniscient being right because god

would have to be privy to every last bit of your mental life and so you wouldn't After all have mental privacy and hence possibly god doesn't exist and of course if god possibly doesn't exist it falls at god actually doesn't exist hence god actually doesn't exist or you could consider a piece of knowledge consider the following piece of knowledge someone knows that god doesn't exist this piece of knowledge ought to exist after all knowledge is extremely valuable and so on so this piece of knowledge ought to exist therefore this Piece of knowledge possibly exists but

of course knowledge is factive and so in the possible world in which someone knows that god doesn't exist it entails that god doesn't exist in that world hence it's possibly the case that god doesn't exist hence god doesn't exist indeed god is impossible now of course the theist is just going to say no no theist would ever grant that knowledge that god doesn't exist ought to exist They're going to say no theist would ever grant that you're only in a position to accept that if you antecedently reject theism yeah that's my point that's my whole

point with respect to this first one no one who isn't antecedently atheist would ever grant this in other words no non-theist no atheist would ever grant this first premise and you would only be in a position to grant this first premise if you antecedently accepted god's Existence so the natural response to the parody arguments that i've just been giving which is the response i think theists should give and that they probably would give can be turned precisely around to argue against this argument this argument is and it's got some really clever defenses in the literature

uh one being from our say our philosophy uh sage uh william balagella beauty objective beauty a lot of Philosophers here rely on eddie's and mac's book real beauty as a sort of a tour de force uh defense of the objectivity of beauty so let's just say their beauty is objective well that's uh more likely on theism than naturalism so uh it confirms theism over naturalism so premise one is of course questionable i don't have views on whether beauty is objective or not i haven't studied that at all so we're just gonna set that Aside but

i just wanna note that lots of people are going to project that of course but what about premise two objective beauty is more likely if theism is true than if naturalism is true now that's somewhat plausible i guess i would maybe say there are things that are objectively beautiful and that that would be more likely on theism than on naturalism one of the causes of My concern is that i think if objective beauty exists well then it would exist in virtue of various intrinsic features of the beautiful things themselves so it would be precisely because

of the various colors inherent to a painting of the various colors inherent to a sunset the contrast within the sunset and all these various features of the sunset itself which grounds or accounts for its objective beauty i Would say it doesn't have anything to do in that sense with god but of course that's with respect to the grounding of the beauty of the thing we still still can ask why are there the beautiful things why are there lots of beautiful things indeed the fact that there are lots of beautiful things i guess i tend to

think that that'd be more likely on theism than on naturalism so it provides some evidence for theism Over naturalism because god would also be attuned to beauty and he'd have some weight of a reason to bring about whereas on the hypothesis of a difference where fundamental realities in some sense indifferent to the flourishing and languishing of sentient beings it would seem as though it's also indifferent to the production of beauty and of course the natural thing to note at the juncture is if beauty is evidence for god's existence then it just it Follows this is

just mathematically follows that the absence of beauty right there being no beauty or perhaps ugliness would be evidence against theism and of course there is lots of ugliness and repulsive things in the natural order felipe leon actually has an interesting argument from revulsion that he's developed along these lines that we're rightly repulsed by various things within the natural order like various Parasites there's this like blood sucking parasite that replaces the tongue of fishes i think it's called like the semethowa exigua or something but yeah we seem rightly repulsed by various things that seems surprising on

theism that you also have lots of creative things that are just like fraught with like repulsive features so anyway let's just continue this objective well that's uh more likely on theism to naturalism So uh it confirms theism over naturalism i love this quote from peter forrest uh kind of gives you gets you into the intuition that beauty's objective he says how ugly the stars are tonight how trivial the pounding of the waves on the beach and is it not crass to be thrilled by mountains the rainforests and the wildflowers are quite repulsive and as for

sunsets well look if a full-blown relativism in aesthetics was correct then those responses might be unusual But not in any way improper but my reaction is that anyone who fails to appreciate the beauty of this universe is defective i worry that there might be some normative entanglement going on here and that's a term that lance bush has pointed out that lots of people mistake one's meta-ethical commitments with one's normative ethical commitment so like even those who are meta-ethical Anti-realists can still say things like yeah torturing someone for fun is bad that's wrong you can say

yeah it's really wrong it's just that's undergraded by different meta-ethical frameworks like are there these stance independent moral facts that ground that or is it explained in terms of perhaps something else and so i wonder if there's going to be some sort of normative entanglement here whether or not you think there are stance Independent facts about ugliness and beauty you are still perfectly able to say that you think someone who fails to appreciate the beauty of this universe is in some way defective you can still say that yeah various features of this universe are really

beautiful and are really ugly that doesn't commit you to these stance independent facts about beauty and you can really say that they are defective because per the analogy of whatever your normative theory in ethics Is the analogy transferred over to your theory of beauty you could still say according to that theory they are indeed defective now of course your theory isn't stance independently true but that doesn't of course prevent your theory from being true so that's something that i want to think about further and to return to but i do worry that there's gonna be

some normative entanglement here Yeah i cannot agree with that any more that is awesome i love that quote he's been on the he's been on the channel before so one of the things he points out in his paper is that a surprising number of naturalists just straight up agree that beauty is evidence for these and under naturalism they just go on to say well there are other considerations that push natural that make natural is more plausible okay um you might be able to run an aesthetic argument for theism Not by assuming beauty is objective but

just by having aesthetic sensibilities so the fact that we just have natural and sophisticated aesthetic sensibilities uh has been argued to be evidence for these naturalism premise two is natural and sophisticated aesthetic sensibilities that's probably true i'm not sure if they're sophisticated some people might have sophisticated aesthetic sensibilities but in terms of We like i guess in general i would think that our aesthetic sensibilities are not so sophisticated they seem to be somewhat crude they vary quite heavily interpersonally and it seems as though it's difficult to say like one is more sophisticated than the other

and so on but anyway i i'm not sure about the sophisticated aspect there but we certainly do naturally have certain aesthetic sensibilities like things appear to us in various ways that could Be described aesthetic that seems to be undeniable now that we have natural and sophisticated aesthetic sensibilities is more likely if theism is true than if naturalism is true i guess i'd have to look at the justification for this further to comment on this i mean again i'm inclined to think that certain considerations about beauty provide some Evidence for theism over naturalism but i tend

to think that it's not extremely strong evidence but anyway um again i just have to look at further further reasons supporting premise two in order to make a confident pronouncement about whether or not it's true have natural and sophisticated aesthetic sensibilities uh has been argued to be evidence for the ideas of naturalism uh natural beauty as the product of aesthetic intent this goes back to Tenant um if x is beautiful x is likely the product of aesthetic intent the natural world is so that seems implausible why should we think just from the fact that x

is beautiful that x is likely a product of aesthetic intent and of course the naturalist is just going to flatly reject that the naturalist is probably going to say like even if they think that this is a stance dependent fact they're probably going to say something like yeah sunsets are Beautiful but obviously they're not the product of aesthetic intent it's not as though there's some like intentional being that that wants there to be sunsets or that like designed sunsets or anything so anyway i think that premise one is just impossible on its own firstly because

even under atheism there are lots of things that are like either accidentally produced or just produced by the workings of nature that are beautiful but they don't really seem to Be the product of aesthetic intent but the second problem is i don't think naturalists in particular would ever grant number one so you'd probably already have to antecedently be a theist in order to be in a position even to accept premise one so it seems in general beautiful see the natural world is in general beautiful that's interesting i'm actually not sure that that's true i don't

know at least my own aesthetic experience the natural world Seems in general just kind of neutral some things about the natural world are beautiful sometimes i am odd at certain sunsets and bodies of water but i guess in my normal experience of the world just you know walking around and so on it tends to be a more neutral sort of thing i don't know it tends to be more gray than vibrant as it were not speaking of colors but i guess my aesthetic experiences they're almost just neutral they're kind of just gray And occasionally there

are some vibrancies here and there with respect to the natural world maybe that's different for other people that's fine and i mean the vibrancies right sometimes they're good vibrancies but other times they're repulsive vibrancies i don't know sometimes i find spiders around me and they're just oh so repulsive for like centipedes i think centipedes are just so disgusting i'm Sorry but i find them so utterly repulsive um and like beetles and lots of other insects like and there are so many insects like man there are lots of things that i find to be uh just

so utterly repulsive and like yeah there are lots of space pictures that are beautiful but of course you have to think about the sample space right i mean if you when you turn your telescopes to the sky the vast majority of it right is Definitely not beautiful it's just either empty space or it's just super bright white light or things like that and of course a lot of those images that you see are tampered with and altered and so on and enhanced and but anyway my point is just that this claim it's not at all

clear yes there are lots of beautiful things in the natural world but there are also lots of ugly things lots of repulsive things and lots of just gray dull things and which is more Prevalent i don't know i tend to think that the dullness and the greyness have a vast preponderance and then i'm not sure which is more the beauty or the evil ugliness repulsiveness and so on yeah so it's like the product of that content your allies is a little bit different than what i'm looking at pause okay uh so so there must be

a god like well okay so i've given some reason to Question premise one but what about premise four well i don't know that seems to me to be questionable why would it have to be the product of the aesthetic intent of a god-like being maybe it's maybe it's something like an angel or maybe it's something like draper's aesthetic deism hypothesis in fact that would probably be the best hypothesis in this regard it could be a whole lot of things that really aren't at all close To god but nevertheless they have some sort of aesthetic intent

behind the natural world and again we have to keep in mind considerations of ugliness and repulsiveness and so on oh so for instance like premise one the reasoning behind this would seem equally well to say something like if x is repulsive then it's likely the product of poor aesthetic intent the natural world is in general repulsive or at least you could say various features the natural world Are repulsive so the natural world is likely the product of poor aesthetic intent but if that's the case well then well if god exists then it's his aesthetic intent

which is the progenitor of the universe and hence god's aesthetic intent would be poor but of course that's absurd if god exists then his aesthetic intent is not poor and hence god doesn't exist so that's an interesting a theological argument you might be able to derive out of this Natural beauty as a gift uh natural this comes from peter forest's book uh natural beauty gives the resilient impression of being a gift you know it's like you see a beautiful sunrise or or a mountain range uh it inspires in us deep feelings of gratitude uh but

gratitude is a mental state in which we are impressed with the goodness with the goodness of our having received a gift from someone a gift from a giver so natural beauty Yeah so premise one attribute gives the resilient impression of being a gift it's not clear how you could even have an impression of something being a gift i do think yeah you can certainly have the impression of being such that one some good thing is happening or if some aesthetically beautiful thing is out there and secondly there's no sense in which you deserve to be

having this experience or in which you deserve for this good thing to be transpiring But that of course is completely different from something being a gift from someone lots of things can be both good and undeserved without those being gifts from someone else so i would only grant that natural beauty gives the resilient impression of being something that's good or naturally enough beautiful which is such that we didn't do anything to deserve the good aesthetic experiences that we have when we look at the natural Beauty but that of course doesn't give one any reason whatsoever

to think that it's a gift given by someone moreover this premise four seems implausible uh firstly why would the being have to be benevolent if anything this evidence seems to suggest like indifference or something like that most of the beautiful stuff that we find is actually like super duper hostile to us imagine that a painter made a painting or painted the ceiling but like if you Go up there and try to touch it or like even get close to it you explode or something you'd probably think that the person who made that the person behind

these sorts of beautiful things is definitely not benevolent at the very least they're not wholly benevolent but of course that's precisely the sort of beauty that we see in the universe that we have the beauty that is seen in cosmic structures it's just a bunch of gas if you went out There towards the gas you would basically explode you'd die pretty much immediately obviously that analogy is going to break down in lots of different ways my point is just that it's not at all clear why the giver would have to be benevolent why couldn't it

be morally indifferent if this thing is responsible for all the natural work we've taken to account all the evidence and of course part of that evidence is natural beauty but also part of it is A whole boatload of naturally repulsive things and again if we're talking about gift simply in the sense of it's something that's good that we just don't deserve we didn't do anything to deserve it the naturals could equally grant that natural beauty is a gift in that sense the naturalist doesn't think that we did anything to deserve these relevant aesthetic experiences that

doesn't entail that it can only be the gift of some sort of transcendent Benevolent giver gives us the resilient impression of being a gift well then we're justifying believing it is a gift but it can only be a gift of you go see so media is a gift to beauty as a natural sign and natural science a technical term uh it's so rather than explain the technical term and all that stuff i guess you could just look at it look it up you can Just look it up um here's a gift it's a natural sign

and that's what yeah i'll just be brief here why does natural beauty signify concepts of and beliefs about god why that just seems impossible like i'd probably reject premise three here so anyway let's move on so science a technical term uh yeah okay uh mathematics keep going okay Beauty and mathematics i'd like to see the reasons for premise 2 here that mathematical theories inspired by aesthetic impulses often successfully apply to the physical world that's more likely if theism is true than if naturalism is true again go back to the stuff that i said about the

base rates about aesthetic impulses and so on we don't have access to the whole boatloads of mathematical theories inspired by static impulses that didn't end up Successfully applying to the physical world lots of those are just going to be tucked into the crevices of mathematicians notebooks or in the trash bins of the various mathematics halls and so on so i'd like to see the base rates the mathematical theories that were inspired by static impulses that ended up being not successfully applicable to the physical world compared to those that were applicable to the physical world and

i'd like to See if there's anything that's more surprising than just chants going on because again if you have lots of mathematicians working by their aesthetic impulses just by chance a number of them are going to hit upon mathematical theories that are later successfully applicable to the physical world and of course those are mixed with various other mathematical theories which weren't inspired by aesthetic content but were explicitly developed or At least undergirded by trying to discover them precisely to apply to the physical world so anyway let's move on uh we may have to even uh

get a little bit quicker here so we've got we've got another one 45 to go so we may just need to kind of breathe okay okay beauty and mathematics is similar to the argument from the applicability of mathematics natural rights okay uh human worth arguments from human worth equality and natural rights now You asked earlier how are axiologicals actually a lot of arguments distinct from more arguments well look um we think that human persons are moral subjects because they have intrinsic value because they have intrinsic worth it just seems to me so clear that this

is just utterly incompatible with lots of the moral arguments that they went through if human beings have this intrinsic value What it is to be an intrinsic value is to have value in and of yourself because of the kind of thing that you are because of what you are you have that value in virtue of what you are not in virtue standing in some extrinsic that's extrinsic not virtue standing in some extrinsic relation to like some divine being or maybe the divine being's commands or beliefs or attitudes or nature or whatever if you have intrinsic

value of worth then you Evaluate in and of yourself because of the kind of thing that you are because of what you are and that of course is patently incompatible it seems to me with lots of the moral arguments that we were considering earlier lots of the more arguments that we were considering earlier it's like oh you can only have values if god exists no something about the kind of thing that we are is what grounds our value has nothing to do with god that is what Intrinsic value is so anyway i just think it's

interesting to note that there's a at least by my lights a serious discrepancy there it's not really moral exactly but they have their moral subjects they're really more concerned because they have intrinsic value in word so we can run a bunch of arguments based on the terms of value and worth of human beings just from they're having intrinsic value and worth uh they're Having equal worth yeah so the fact that human persons have inherent value or worth is much more likely if theism is true than if naturalism is true i guess it's not clear to

me why that's true precisely because the worth here is inherent or intrinsic and so if it's inherent or intrinsical then they have the relevant value because of what they are in and of themselves so it's like how is theism helping here now of course i guess you Could say theism is helping here in the sense that theism gives us greater reason to expect there to be beings of profound value and worth than naturalism does and i actually think that you're right if you said that so i do think that would give some evidence for theism

over naturalism from they're having intrinsic value and worth uh they're having equal worth if we have equal work there must be something that we all have in common in virtue of with Which we have equal worth uh well if naturalism is true there is nothing in common nothing that is substantive in common that big round equal worth why that just seems false we could all have various causal powers by our natures that ground our equal worth there that's something that could ground our equal worth that something in common had among us we can distinguish between

the power and the manifestation Conditions of the power you can still say that a newborn has the various rational powers the various rational faculties it's just that given its age or for other people given their genetic conditions or whatever uh the manifestation conditions for the relevant causal powers are in some manner or another not being met so anyway i i think you could easily pinpoint things that all humans have in Common in virtue of which they have equal worth under naturalism that confirms and over naturalism and you combine those two things together interesting too premise

six it's not all clear why this is true why would god be the best explanation of that why isn't it a better explanation that all humans simply share something like human nature or all humans have various causal powers that grant them Equal worth why does that not suffice as an explanation or why is that a worse explanation then the god explanation is not at all clear uh yeah equal worth argument is interesting and uh they they argue that the best candidate there well these industries obviously have equal worth and virtue of bearing the divine image

or just being children of god or being equally loved by god or something that just seems Implausible to me all those people either there's some reason that god has for affording them all equal worth or he doesn't if he does have some reason like maybe because we all have like rational capacities or whatever if god's basing it off of something that we all have in common well then it's that thing that we have in common or it's that more fundamental reason upon which god is acting That grounds our equal worth but by conscience if god

has literally no reason whatsoever then his affording us all equal worth is just utterly arbitrary he could equally as well just have given let's say only black people the worth and everyone else has no worth whatsoever or he could have given all females worth and no males worth so again either god has some reason for affording us all equal worth or treating us as made in the image of god or Whatever perhaps because of our various intrinsic features like rationality will intellect and so on or he doesn't if he does well then it's those features

which are the things that are shared in common among us which can by themselves suffice to explain why we have equal worth and if he doesn't have a reason then it's just arbitrary we have natural rights um we have natural rights only if we have those two Previous properties where we have inherent worth and we have equal worth and of course if we have inherent worth and we have it in virtue of the kind of thing that we are we have a virtue of what we are it doesn't have anything to do with some sort

of extrinsic relation to what god thinks about us or says about us or commands about us or what his nature specifies about us mrs first argument best explanation of our having inherent and equal moral Worth is that that status is bestowed on us as an honor as from an authority that seems impossible to me again this authority either has some reason for why they're bestowing the status on us or they don't if they do have a reason again then it's that reason which seems to be doing the explanatory heavy lifting with respect to us having

the relevant inherent or equal worth or whatever and if the authority doesn't have a reason Then it's just arbitrary premise form over seems to me to be implausible that the only proper authority that could bestow inherent in equal worth as an honor on all humans is god why couldn't it be something like the aesthetic deism hypothesis why couldn't it be something like zeus why couldn't it be something like an angel like come on that could bestow on such an honor uh would be god but we have arguments from theism from Mind related phenomena such as

consciousness reason and knowledge we have an argument from locke john locke there's always been something in existence um it's either everything is either a thinking thing or a non-thinking thing they're not thinking things uh but uh thinking things can't be produced by unthinking things why why anyway why should we think that's true that thinking things cannot be produced By non-thinking things what does it just seem to you to be true okay i don't share the seeming how is this not as impossible as saying oh well living things can't be produced by non-living things so there

has always been some living thing you know something that metabolizes let's say what no at some point you can go from elements that are themselves not metabolizing And when they have a sufficient amount of complexity and so on from that either can emerge metabolism and various life processes or perhaps those things can ground the life process or perhaps they can cause them or perhaps they can functionally realize them maybe they can constitute them maybe they can be identical to them how you conceive of the relationship between the various non-metabolic components and processes of life and

metabolic crosses and so on Is a tricky issue and the same of course is going to go with neural states and thinking things but my point is just that it's not at all clear to me why we should accept premise four and it just seems just as plausible to my mind to say that thinking things cannot be produced by singing things i'm a thinking thing but like how could i produce some other thinking thing just by the means of the operation of my thought Like i can think up different characters but those characters aren't themselves

thinking things they're just like mental images in my mind i can try my hardest no matter what i do i don't seem to be able to produce a thinking thing now of course if i found a lovely lady we might be able to produce a thinking thing but that seems to be in virtue of there being various non-thinking things available like like neurons and blood vessels and so on So i don't think premise four here is plausible uh so there's always been at least one thinking thing and that's gonna be god so why can't thinking

things produce one another ad infinitum maybe you're gonna appeal to something like the harm or causal fenechism but we've already gone over that why why i think that premise six is true moreover this argument is just simply Invalid seven doesn't follow from the premises we have a kind of quantifier shift fallacy here doesn't follow from the fact that thinking things can only be produced by other thinking things and that there cannot be infinite chains of thinking things it doesn't follow that all thinking things must be produced by a thinking thing that has always existed no

merely from the fact that for each thinking thing it's located within a Chain of thinking things dependent on other thinking things such that that chain traces back to a first member it doesn't follow that there is some one first member which is a thinking thing to which all thinking things must trace back maybe there are like 30 different chains of thinking things being produced by other thinking things and each of those different chains terminates in a different thinking thing which itself wasn't produced by a Further thinking thing in that case it's just false that all

thinking things are produced by one thinking thing that has always existed and yet in the situation that i just described there are no infinite chains of thinking things and every thinking thing is itself produced by another thinking thing so in that case the premises here would be true and yet the conclusion here is false and that shows that the argument is just patently invalid in short we have the Quantifier shift fallacy merely from the fact that for each thinking thing there is some first thinking thing that produced it it doesn't follow that there is some

one first thinking thing that produced all the other thinking things just as from the fact that for each person that person has a mother it doesn't follow that there is some one mother that everyone has produced by unthinking things uh so there's always been at least one thing and of course This conclusion doesn't even get you to god maybe it was just some sort of angel maybe it was just some sort of demiurge thing maybe it was just some sort of zeus-like thing maybe it was draper's aesthetic ideas in my hypothesis and so on from

psychophysical laws this is richard swinburn's argument from consciousness mental states are connected to brain states by psychophysical laws that would be incredibly improbable if naturalism was True so that's evidence for this naturalism yeah so this is actually a really really interesting argument and i haven't actually studied this in all that much detail so i'm gonna have to be really brief here long story short i'm actually inclined to think that this is evidence for theism uh especially psychophysical harmony that dustin crummett has done stuff and actually there was a recent interview on emerson green's channel Published

on may 4th 2022 where dustin crummett goes through this argument from psychophysical harmony and it's a super interesting argument and i'm inclined to think that it provides evidence for theism conscious states per se or non-physical conscious states this is jpmorgan's argument from consciousness and he the main idea here is just the improbability of getting non-physical mental states if naturalism is true and if non-physical mental states have an Explanation they can't be it can't be in terms of scientific explanation it must be in terms of personal explanation so premise one here is of course deeply contestable

while i am at least sympathetic to it i'm inclined to agree at least tentatively lots of naturals of course wouldn't grant this now premise two here is i think obviously false we saw this sort of thing come up in the context of the gale proofs cosmological argument and this Dichotomy between scientific and personal explanations is so patently wrong there could for instance be a metaphysical explanation which doesn't fit a scientific pattern of explanation but nor does it fit a personal pattern of explanation and in the case at hand a metaphysical explanation seems to be the

best candidate plausibly the explanation if there are non-physical mental states the explanation for why they exist is Going to be in terms of possibly something like a grounding style explanation they're grounded in more fundamental brain states or perhaps they're functionally realized by the corresponding neural states instead of citing laws governing the evolution of physical systems over time and instead of citing some agent with the intentions to produce the thing in question it seems to me that the best explanation will probably just be in Terms of a metaphysical explanation rather than a scientific or personal explanation

here assuming of course that mental states are indeed non-physical so anyway i think premise two is very probably false and i think it's not clear why premise five is true either if the explanation for the existence of non-physical mental states is personal then it is theistic again maybe there's some sort of like personal angel behind all this maybe There's like zeus behind all this maybe it's the aesthetic deism hypothesis behind all this it could be a whole concoction of hypotheses that aren't theistic so anyway let's move on to the next argument we have a recent

argument from consciousness which is very good very tightly argued uh consciousness exists given a lot of nature that's extremely unexpected uh uh if naturalism's true but not atheism is True so consciousness has confirmed cesium over naturalism and so i don't have too much to say on this because i am inclined to think that consciousness confirms theoretical theism over naturalism it's not clear to me that given the laws of nature the existence of consciousness is very unlikely if naturalism is true but very likely if theism is true so i'd like to see further justification for premise

two and more over the various considerations That i raised in response to the fine-tuning arguments may be applicable here now these arguments from consciousness they are sometimes referred to in the literature as arguments from flavors and colors uh just just because they focus on phenomenal states of consciousness like redness or sweetness uh but uh william paley actually has a real argument from from flavors and colors gathered from this quote uh i don't know anyone who's Defending this today but there should be so i outlined the argument you can read the quote on your own but

i outline this argument as follows if there are pleasures which is the next lie if there are pleasures that are gratuitous given naturalism but expected given theism well then that's evidence for theism over nationalism there are such pleasures so that happens with these nationalism so if there are pleasures that are Gratuitous given naturalism but expected on season they are evidence for theism over naturalism so this is worded a little bit weirdly they're gratuitous given naturalism so that's not even saying that they are unlikely on naturalism it's just saying that they're gratuitous that is they don't

really serve what some purpose so yeah it's not clear what gratuitous Is doing here maybe the idea is that if there are pleasures that are unlikely given naturalism but expected on theism or they're unexpected on naturalism so anyway this premise is worded weirdly in any case it's not clear why we should accept this promise too i guess i would say what is it about theism that makes us expect gratuitous pleasures or at least that makes us expect it more Than on naturalism huntism just as you wouldn't really expect gratuitous evils that is evils that don't

serve some greater purpose why would there be gratuitous pleasures god isn't really a hedonist maybe he thinks that we don't really deserve these gratuitous pleasures if they're gratuitous pleasures then we don't deserve them so if we don't deserve them why would god bring them about in any case it's just not 100 clear what about theism makes it More likely that there would be gratuitous pleasures on theism than on naturalism maybe god is puritan and god doesn't want you to have gratuitous pleasures i don't know maybe god wants you to have only pleasures that you earned

that you deserve and that aren't gratuitous i don't know so intelligibility of the world uh well we have this intuition that the world is intelligible there are states of affairs That we understand then we can explain but naturalism can't really give us a plausible story about how we've come to have that intuition if naturalism is true there's no reason to think that that intuition is is true so we should either withhold our belief in naturalism or the intuition well we shouldn't withhold our belief in the intuition so we should withhold our belief in naturalism further

thesis gives us good reason to think the into a good story For why we should have that intuition and so it's evidence for these naturalism this paper was just published like uh what yeah like this year so one thing that i want to say is it's not clear to me why premise one is true that there's no plausible naturalistic ideology or causal origin story of the intelligibility intuition that is the intuition that the world is intelligible such that we have the intuition because It's true presumably when our ancestors were evolving and when their various intuitive

structures were being shaped that was being influenced by the state of the world and of course because the state of the world is generally it's quite intelligible generally it makes sense there are explanations of various phenomena generally it's kind of orderly and regular and so on that would impact Our plausibility structures so as to be able to latch onto that so as to be able to expect that those who didn't predict that those who didn't expect that it seems would die off so it seems as though there actually are at least somewhat plausible naturalistic origin

stories of how we can have the intelligibility intuition such that we have the intuition because it's true after all the world is in fact intelligible and The intelligibility of the world that our ancestors were interacting with possibly explains why they developed the general expectations and intuitive plausibility structures and so on concerning the world's intelligibility now of course you might say that oh well this only applies to their immediate environment this doesn't apply to domains that are far removed from anything that our evolutionary ancestors could have even dreamt of and so we have No plausible ideology

of why they would be governed by order and regularity and intelligible explanations and so on but perhaps the naturals can say okay then sure with respect to those domains that are very far removed from our humdrum ordinary experience you know the sorts of environments that our evolutionary ancestors would find themselves in okay sure uh in that case we can't presume that our intuition that such domains are orderly and Intelligible and so on we can't presume that that intuition is reliable but intuition isn't the only thing that could justify the naturalist in taking these various domains

which are indeed far removed from ordinary humdrum experience to be intelligible right actually experiencing those domains and witnessing for yourself that there's a kind of order in regularity and so on that can justify it as well so anyway it Seems as though there are lots of other different justifications that naturalists can cite that don't rely on intuition when it comes to the things that are far removed from one's ordinary experience and so on lots more can be said and i probably need to research this further to have developed thoughts and i'm sure um the author

of whatever paper or book that this is from i think it's a religious studies article i'm sure the author is well aware of the Criticisms that i have just made so we should withhold our belief in naturalism further these gives us good reason to think the intuit a good story for why we should have that intuition and so it's evidence for atheism over naturalism and mental causation uh well intentionally is just the property of being of or about something physical object objects can't have that property thoughts do uh mental causation you know we're talking about

how the propositional content of a Thought causes another in a chain of logical inferences um well that's really impossible both of those things are really implausible given naturalism uh but they're not given theism so uh their evidence for this naturalism victor repper he's most well known for the argument from reason but his work on this is just all over the place he he's not sure whether it's an argument for theism or just against naturalism he draws from like the argument from what i Call argument from abstract objects he calls it this it's just to me

it's a very messy way of presenting argument they're better formulations than i reference he's not sure whether it's an argument um okay reason involves intentionality mental causation but those can only have a personal explanation does he mean that whenever those are instantiated in finite persons that very instantiation must have a personal Explanation that goes beyond those persons what is this personal explanation here i guess i'd want to see a fleshing out of what this personal explanation like what is premise 2 here really expressing intentionality mental causation can only have a personal explanation the naturalist might

just say that yeah persons are the things with intentionality and mental causation but the fact that the person has those Causal powers can itself be explained in terms of let's say a metaphysical explanation maybe they can be grounded in neurophysiological elements maybe they can be functionally realized by them anyway there are so many different theories of mental causation and intentionality there's so much work there and very few of the theories have anything to do with god lots of the theories of Intentionality for instance cite various causal aspects of the world and how we causely link

up to them various theories of mental causation while those oftentimes depend on whether or not you think physicalism or non-physicalism is true but even those that are non-physicalistic they oftentimes have the mental being in some sense grounded or explained by or functionally realized by the physical or perhaps maybe we just have a case of Emergence again none of this requires you to have some sort of theistic explanation anyway we're just moving on cognitive science of religion has basically confirmed that we humans have a natural disposition to form beliefs in supernatural agency uh not just any

supernatural agents but a supernatural agency that seems to be very theistic in nature the argument here is that well if that's true uh that's highly expected on theism but not on naturalism uh so that Confirms this naturalism well so it's actually not clear that we have the disposition to form beliefs in like specifically like a highly theistic being that's not clear to me i'd have to do more research here to evaluate the precise nature of these dispositions i suspect that they're just kind of vague dispositions to think that there are like agents beyond the natural

world In cognitive science of religion and so on you have the hyperagent hyperactive agency detection device and so on and actually this has led to a prevalence of actually animalist views so think thinking things of like nature spirits and so on so like tree spirits and mountain spirits and other sorts of things philosopher titty smith has actually done some empirical work and shown that this actually seems to be the predominant result across cultures and Times with respect to dispositions to form beliefs in supernatural agency which that would actually be kind of surprising if theism is

true like we have dispositions that lead people to believe in like false things so anyway i'd want to see the specific character of these dispositions to form beliefs in supernatural agency i'd like to see the naturalistic explanations on them for instance if they cite the hyperactive agency detection device or whatever Now of course you could ask does theism itself predict h-a-d-d maybe it does maybe it predicts it better naturalism but maybe not because that leads a lot of people to have just radically false beliefs both about god and about the natural world so anyway firstly

it's not clear what the nature of this disposition to form beliefs in supernatural agency is and secondly it's not clear whether or not theism predicts This better than naturalism argument from certainty uh the fact that we have strongly certain beliefs about things in particular mathematical objects uh winds up being evidence for theism because only theism can explain how there can be a causal explanation connecting our certain beliefs with the objects that we have beliefs about namely mathematical objects or so so premise one is going to be Rejected by fictionalist anomalists like kenny boyce i've had

kenny voice on my channel premise too by my lights seems deeply implausible and actually lots of epistemologists have jettisoned this requirement on there being a causal explanation connecting the knower to the object known one reason is because think about knowing the future right oftentimes we do know the future like that the sun will rise tomorrow the Object known there is the sun's rising tomorrow is that somehow like backwardly causing me to know the fact no philosophers have in general because of reasons like knowledge of the future and indeed knowledge of abstract objects philosophers have actually

pushed back against this causal criterion of knowledge and actually lots of epistemologists think that it's just simply thoroughly wrong-headed at this point so anyway i would say premise two Is probably false and moreover think about premise two did the truth of premise two somehow like causally bonk someone on the head so that they know the truth of premise two the truth of premise two isn't something that could cause them in any manner to have certain beliefs so premise two might very well be self-defeating you could only know this premise if there's some sort of causal

explanation between the truth of this Premise and the people who claim to know it but there doesn't seem to be any plausible way for there to be such a causal explanation and hence no one can know this premise so perhaps this premise is actually self-undermining i would say moreover that premise 4 is implausible it's false that only a god-like being can provide a causal explanation for our strongly certain beliefs about mathematical objects it could be something like a demiurge Could be something like draper's aesthetic d as a hypothesis it could be something like zeus it

could be something like an angel could be whole concoctions of things certain beliefs with the objects that we have beliefs about mainly mathematical objects okay knowledge has proper function we have knowledge uh but we can have knowledge only if our cognitive faculties are functioning properly so many naturalists will reject two There are lots of other plausible accounts of knowledge for example there are internalist ones and there are also external ones that don't cite proper function so for instance reliabilism moreover premise three here that our cognitive faculties have a proper function only if they're designed that's

questionable as well there are naturalistic realists about function and they typically accord evolution a key Role in determining faculty function and premise five is also questionable that if our cognitive faculties are designed then probably god exists why should we think that this probabilifies god as opposed to let's say draper's aesthetic deism or an indifferent dnd hypothesis or zeus or angels or whatever but they can function properly the whole notion of proper function requires design so we can have knowledge only if Our uh faculties are designed uh episode probability also relies on the notion of proper

function it uh richard ott argues that the best account of epidemic probability makes reference to uh properly functioning cognitive faculties if that's true that entails design then right so it's not at all clear why this would be the best account of epistemic probability why couldn't you have let's Say an internalist account where probability that concerns what is rational for you to believe in light of the evidence and considerations of what you're aware epistemic probability almost seems to be like a thoroughly internalist notion it's crucially reliant on the evidence and considerations that you are yourself aware

of it's hard to see how proper function comes into play here but again i'd probably have to read the article or Whatever to see how it does of course for the same reasons as the previous argument this second premise is going to be quite questionable lots of naturalists think that we can have a proper functionalist account but you could cite evolution as determinative of function and moreover premise 4 here is going to be implausible because the designer could be whole concoctions of things other than god We have another argument from epistemic probability given that our

cognitive faculties are extremely poor in lots of different domains especially things like politics religion and philosophy given that they systematically seem to lead to so much divergence and failure and so on it's not at all clear why god would even be the best explanation for this we're then saddled with the task of trying to explain like systematic failures of our cognitive Faculties then we have another thesis argument from epidemic probability uh we all have to talk about knowledge uh we can just talk about general reliability of our cognitive faculties as evidence for theism or nationalism

as that would be expected on these but naturalism yeah so of course there's a huge literature on the evolutionary argument against naturalism and i can't go in depth all that much here what i'd say is it's not at all clear to me that the Probability that our cognitive faculties are generally reliable under naturalism is very low it seems to me that reliable cognitive faculties systematically promote survival and reproduction those organisms with at least broadly reliable faculties are in general going to be far greater at surviving and reproducing than those that don't have such reliably functioning

cognitive faculties and for those of you who want to look at Planning as evolutionary argument in much greater detail i can highly recommend this systematic examination this is on fill papers it is on planning on belief in naturalism it's published by troy cross anyway i thought i can probably bring this up so that you can see it this is the link i'll probably just put this in the description but it's like 116 pages yeah i highly recommend checking this out for those who are interested From anti-realism i think this is a brilliant argument uh if

realism is true but god does not exist radical skepticism is true and this has been the argument from anti-realists like richard rorty uh and hillary putnam uh they say that if and they're just wrong so premise one is false realism about the external world doesn't require god to exist i i guess that's enough for me to say on this honestly If there's an objective reality distinct from our minds there's no way to avoid radical skepticism since it's always possible that we're radically mistaken about objective reality uh and we can avoid this radical skepticism with anti-realism

just deny that there is an objective mind independent reality oh well alvin planet comes along and says uh well if it's true but god does not exist radical skepticism is true i'll grant you that but radical scepticism is False so yeah realism is false or god exists realism is true so god exists a brilliant turning of the table is there by playing again i don't think it's brilliant it's just extremely implausible god's existence doesn't help at all we still are faced with maybe there is an evil demon that's deceiving me about the external world you

might think oh no god wouldn't allow that well god allows child cancer god apparently has a Morally sufficient reason for that of course god could have a morally sufficient reason for allowing you to be deceived maybe it's only being deceived for five minutes maybe this is the five minutes in which you're being deceived this is just five minutes where you have been implanted with all your memories by this evil demon and so on like god could easily have a morally sufficient reason for allowing that to obtain after all he literally allowed the holocaust after All

he literally allows people to be psychopaths after all he literally allows people to actually hallucinate and to be deceived in various ways he allows people to dream when they actually think that they're not dreaming and so on so god doesn't help with avoiding radical skepticism at all you could still be a brain in a vat people get kidnapped people get tortured so of course people get kidnapped and then their brain hooked up to wires and so on So you could still be a brain in a vet you could still be deceived by an evil demon

or an evil genius etc etc etc you could still be in the matrix god doesn't help with any of this i wonder if if chad is being tongue-in-cheek when he says that this is a brilliant argument this goes down from the worst arguments in this list from idealism everything has an intrinsic non-relational quality that's required if there's if anything exists it's gotta there's gotta be Something to that thing that makes it that thing that can't just be relation to other things uh nothing would exist in itself if nothing has non-relational qualities but the only thing

that we know of that can have non-relational qualities is consciousness why premise two just seems impossible about my lights and very few naturalists would ever grant it it seems as though there could easily be non-conscious states That have intrinsic non-relational qualities what is extension a relational quality you might say it's a relation between an object and a spatial region but it's not clear that that's true extension it just doesn't seem to be a relation between the object and something else i guess i'd have to study extension further but that seems to be a non-conscious property

or maybe an unconscious state it's not an Extrinsically relational fact about something that characterizes it as it in itself in itself it is an extended thing it could be extended even if you destroyed other things in reality if everything has a non-relational quality everything has a conscious quality which is grist in the middle for idealists like george berkeley to say that oof it's george barkley my dude it's definitely not george berkeley oh Just quality um which is grist in the middle for idealists like george to say that the only way everything can have a conscious

quality is if god exists before right so i think premise four is also deeply impossible i think pan psychism would probably even be a better explanation at this juncture premise four here we should note is incompatible with classical theism it's not as though god's mind under classical theism is Like partly going to constitute the various created things in the world so if you want to adopt this argument you can't accept classical thesis uh that's something to keep in mind here's an argument i think you'll like cameron i hated all the others this one's from no

ability a fish style proof for any proposition p if p then it's possible that someone knows p now if one is true then two is true for any proposition p There's someone who knows p now if two is true then there's someone who knows every truth and if three uh and so follows then that there's someone who knows every truth uh now this argument you might think that one and two are somewhat dubious but they're fit style proofs they're agreed that those premises if not true that they follow from one another that's the main thing

um so it's it's a logically airtight argument it's just a question where the Premises are true yeah and the question is whether or not one is true of course i mean this is similar to like the modal ontological argument you have one premise it's possible that god doesn't exist and then of course you could do the various formal manipulations of the symbols and so on and get that god exists well yeah of course but that just shows us that no atheist would ever grant that first premise easier way to think about this argument Is saying

that premise one every truth is knowable premise two if every truth is knowable then someone knows every truth so someone knows every truth now there is a kind of it sounds weird but there is a kind of style truth for the claim that if every truth is knowable then someone knows every truth that might sound surprising but it's true but then of course the question is is every truth knowable and importantly No naturalist would ever grant that every truth is knowable which we can call the principle of nobility only those who antecedently accept theism should

be convinced by the argument in which case it's utterly dialectically toothless as an argument for theism and so it utterly fails moreover there seem to be clear counter examples to premise too that one can only divert if one antecedently assumes and is justified in assuming theism for Example consider that by the naturalist lights at some point it was true that currently there are no minds okay that sentence currently there are no minds that was once true by the naturalist lights sending a saipan psychism now this truth that currently there are no minds that couldn't possibly

be known since if it were possibly known if it were possibly known that currently there are no minds well then it would be possible for a mind to exist while that Proposition is true since something's having knowledge presupposes that it has a mind so if this truth were possibly known well then it would be impossible for a mind to exist while it is true that there are no minds which is of course absurd and so by the naturalist lights this truth couldn't possibly be known and yet it was at some point true now you could

of course try to dispel with this Counterexample to the principle of nobility by saying aha well naturalism is false and some mind is eternal but then of course accepting that principle of no ability that every truth is noble accepting that would require antecedently accepting theism which is of course the very thing that was supposed to be established by the argument not assumed by it or consider infinite conjunctive truths naturalists will say that these sorts of Things are true but of course because there's no infinite intellect they can't be known now of course you might say

oh but there is an infinite intellect so but of course that's the very question at issue as to whether or not there is an infinite intellect so by considering infinite conjunctive truths the naturalist can't hope to convince the theist to to reject their theism the same is true for the theist the theist can't hope to convince the Naturalist that every truth is noble precisely because we already know that naturalists are committed to the falsehood of that and so no headway is made in the dispute between naturalists and theists by saying that every truth is knowable

you would have to antecedently accept theism in essence to accept that premise in which case the argument again is dialectically toothless the modal epistemic argument and this is a Written's argument uh so we can count for him again he says for any proposition p if p is possibly true then p is noble proposition god does not exist is not knowable so the proposition god does not exist it's not possibly true so the proposition god is necessarily true so premise one suffers from the same problems that i just raised naturalists would not at all grant number

one in fact it follows that number one is false From naturalism so of course to assert premise one is to beg the question against the naturalist consider that currently there are no minds that was true at some point by the naturalist's lights but of course and so that was true at some point so hence it's possibly true but of course no one could know that because if someone did know that there are currently no minds well then it there would be a mind because knowledge Requires there to be a mind and so there would be

a mind while it is true that there are no minds which is absurd so by the naturalist lights supposing that one is true leads you to absurdity so no naturalist would ever grant premise one similarly with the infinite conjunctive truth example also premise two what why should we accept premise two if knowledge is something like justified true belief Well a lot of people believe that god doesn't exist and a lot of people arguably are quite justified in thinking that grandma be for instance has spent his whole life studying philosophy of religion and he's the world's

leading expert on philosophy of religion so even if he's mistaken surely he has justification for thinking that god doesn't exist and if it turns out that god doesn't exist if it turns out that that's true well then it seems as though Grandma be does know it why would we say that this is not knowable like it's metaphysically impossible for someone to know this at the very least the atheist would never grant this the atheist is going to say no that god does not exist that's true and so long as you have let's say a good

argument against god's existence or whatever then it's clearly knowable so i think one is utterly dialectically toothless And begs the question against the naturalist and i think premise two probably suffers from the same fate uh very cool argument uh i believe that alexander prus also is on record as liking this argument which is evidence in its favor um and actually actually this this argument was apparently a cause caused quite a stir when it was published uh it was even mentioned in the new york times of all places wow So we're about to go to a

new category but i didn't tell people to like like and subscribe if you're enjoying subscribe that is in the description uh after i think maybe one or two more arguments and i'll do another round of push-ups to keep you guys let's let's finish i guess i'll tell people if you like my content please turn that little bell for notifications like subscribe and consider supporting me on patreon i'm a Lowly college student so any of your help will be lovely and of course i'm using it to firstly pay back my college debt but also to help

produce videos that can try to serve people and to help them think critically about the fundamental nature of reality so if that sounds interesting to you if you see value in the work that i do please consider becoming a patron we have an argument from concept acquisition uh and this is Based on the idea that uh we have to ask ourselves how have we come to have concepts we have concepts but how well one view is that they're just innate that review that view is virtually universally rejected no one believes that view anymore uh then

another view is that uh they're abstractions from concrete objects so if we see we get the idea or concept of squareness from obstructing it from a bunch of square things the problem with That view is that it seems to presuppose that we already have the concept of squareness that we're latching onto in all these square things so it's kind of circular so there's a sort of middle position view here which is premise one we can have concepts only if we have the innate ability to acquire concepts and we do so with the help of a

linguistic community so it's kind of circular so if we see we get the idea or concept of squareness From abstracting it from a bunch of square things problem with that view is that it seems to presuppose that we already have the concept of squareness that we're latching on to in all these square things so it's kind of circular it's not clear to me that that's true why is it presupposing that we have the concept no it just presupposes that we're able to witness resemblances among things let's just say you you hand me some tiles and

the tiles are in fact Shaped like a square but let's say that the person in question doesn't know this some of the tiles are red some of them are blue and so on this person will obviously be able to see even without having the concept of a square like they can see that there's some sort of resemblance between these two things and they can abstract away from the color red and the color blue and the color green and so on the various colors Of the tiles and they're also going to be able to abstract away

from the smells of the tiles the weights of the tiles even perhaps their size and they're going to be able to see something that is held in common among them they can just see that that doesn't require them to antecedently have the concept of a square and once they see that they can label that commonality among them they can call it something like Black so black that's what all these things have in common they can draw out the little shape and it's that shape that they have in common so here they've sort of developed the

concept of square they didn't antecedently have it but all they need is the ability to recognize objective resemblances among things that doesn't seem to require them to antecedently have the relevant concepts they only need to be able to recognize objective resemblances and to be able to Correlate those objective resemblances with various linguistic tokens that they might utter like black or square so anyway that would be one way to reject premise two by having a different view of concept acquisition another reason why i myself would think that two is implausible that it seems to me that

concepts can gradually emerge through let's say some sort of evolutionary process you can't have a linguistic community Going back and back and back and back and back at infinitum but where that comes to a halt it seems is the evolutionary process so at some point in the evolutionary process you get perhaps some rudimentary conceptual forms and then eventually get language and then so you get some sort of communication of these rudimentary conceptual forms and then over time it gets gradually refined and it gets more complex and so on i i don't see why There's anything

wrong with there being this kind of gradual evolution or emergence of concepts and that doesn't require absolutely every single having of a concept to be derived from some pre-given linguistic community perhaps there was just some mutation in some relatively primitive creature that gave them some sort of relatively primitive mental categories by which they can kind of divvy things up and then eventually those categories were able to be Expressed through language once language evolved anyway i'm just doing like armchair theorizing here about language acquisition i'm not saying that this is actually true i'm just saying why

would you rule that out in order to assert premise 2 you'd have to rule these various alternatives out i don't see any reason why we should rule those things out now of course the people who defend this argument might give such a Reason i'm not doing additional research as i said for this video so anyway my point is just that i don't find premise too plausible because i think there are boatloads of other ways that you can acquire concepts that don't involve necessarily having a pre-given linguistic community that's basically helping you along so there's a

sort of middle position view here which is premise one we can have concepts only if we have the innate Ability to acquire concepts and we do so with the help of a linguistic community um uh mine yeah i got a typo there in that premise uh that's okay so look uh if if we can if we have concepts but they're only uh but we can only get them with the help from someone else who has concepts well that just pushes the question back like how do they get concepts uh and how do they get concepts

and so we eventually need to make Reference to a being with intrinsic conceptual power that sort of starts the chain of other beings having concepts and that of course might be something like an angel it might be something like zeus it might be something like a demiurge it might be something like draper's aesthetic d as a hypothesis and so on so of course this conclusion we still need some reason to think that this thing would be god but even setting that aside i've given some reasons for Thinking that two is implausible so we wouldn't even

be able to get here uh from language ability in general humans innately have very sophisticated linguistic abilities the best explanation for that is that god exists why i just say premise two is impossible i'd say evolution is the best explanation and that those evolutionary factors that we would be citing don't themselves necessarily require reference to god in order to have their relevant Explanatory power language ability in general humans and semantic content radical skepticism is false in other words we have knowledge uh but that can be so only of semantic content can serve as an anchor

for successful reference and his knowledge but cemented content can only be an anchor for successful reference only if it has these certain features and uh bonuback argues that those features can only be there if they're grounded in the Transcended ground uh which can only be got so i'd have to research this further to have an opinion on it at face value i'd find three to be implausible but i just have to look at the justification offered for premise three in order to make uh a fully reasoned assessment about this argument so let's just continue and

finally we have an argument from the falsity of semantic and determinism and so we have a bunch of examples where propositions Seem the meaning or the truth status of these propositions seems indeterminate um so like a question of like classic examples like vagueness like there's true proposition like that man is bald there's true proposition that means it's not bald but where where between those two things the does the one proposition become true and the other one come false so it's indeterminate uh the argument here is just that no we don't have to say that our

semantics is vague and Indeterminate we just have to say that god knows the answer of the correct answer of the semantics the the semantics are just all worked out in god's mind even if they can't be worked out in our mind so there is a correct answer of whether or not a person's bald it's just we don't know what god does okay yes you could say that you could also just shave off god and say yeah there is a fact of the matter but we just don't know it Why would that fact of the matter

need god behind it it's not at all clear however i would really like to know what this objective means here because as philosophers often use objective it just means mind independent so of course this is very weird that it's saying that they're objective and mind-dependent like what at least in the usual terminology as philosophers use it this first premise is very very poorly worded maybe there's A very technical stipulative sense of objective being used here maybe i'm not sure so whether or not premise one is plausible might depend on what we mean by objective but

even setting that aside again i'm probably just gonna project premise three that seems implausible seems as though the relevant reference with a t and the relevant semantic facts and so on seems as though those could be fixed By let's say maybe environment perhaps causal history maybe together with linguistic community at large or maybe some other naturalistically acceptable proposal anyway i'd still probably have to do more research on this particular argument to have a fully worked out assessment um but let's move on so there's a correct answer of whether or not the person is bald it's

just we'll know what god does all right anthropological arguments oh Anthropological arguments are arguments based on existential and social aspects characteristic of human beings so we have a famous c.s lewis argument from desire natural desires generally if not always imply there is something that can satisfy them well we have a natural desire for things only god can satisfy so that implies there is a god now this argument so premise one is i think implausible when It comes to what we might call maximalized natural desires so for instance natural desires for things that are in some

sense ramped up to the max so not just a mate but the perfect mate not just a family but the perfect family not just food not just sex not any of those things but perfect food perfect sex and so on so i might grant that non-maximalized natural desires at least generally implied that there's something which can satisfy them but it's not at All clear to me that maximalized natural desires like desires for the perfect mate and the perfect family that there are absolutely no flaws whatsoever with my maid there are no flaws whatsoever with my

family no flaws whatsoever with the food and so on i would say no clearly don't always and moreover clearly don't even generally imply that there's something that can satisfy them and then of course we can ask whether the natural desires for Things that only god can satisfy are maximalized and plausibly in those cases those desires seem to be maximalized we like we might desire perfect bliss or perfect happiness or whatever or immortality is the perfection of unending life these seem to be plausibly the kind of maximalized desires so in the case of natural desires allegedly

natural desires i'm going to challenge that in a second but in the case of natural Desires that only god can satisfy it seems as though those are going to fall into the category of maximalized natural desires and i would say that there's a relevant difference between the kind of humdrum ordinary natural desires versus their maximalized counterparts and i would say firstly that maximalized natural desires do not imply and do not generally imply that there is something that can satisfy them but all i would actually need to say is that it's Actually just not at all

clear whether or not maximalized natural desires generally if not always implied that there's something which can satisfy them alternatively i could say it's just simply not at all clear whether or not the desires that only god can satisfy are maximalized so i could run this as a kind of rebutting or undercutting defeater as the case may be either way though i think that we have a defeater on our hands I would also say that premise two here is at least deeply questionable why should we think that the relevant desires in question are natural desires as

opposed to artificial desires what are some markers of natural desires well arguably firstly their occurrence is spontaneous secondly they're prevalent to the extent of being the norm or being almost universal so their prevalence is basically normal or universal and furthermore There's a kind of common linguistic identification of types of desire and or their satisfaction and or their deprivation across different cultures and societies and so on the desire for food and sex these occur without cultivation you don't need to cultivate these in someone these seem to occur without cultivation they are in other words spontaneous in

their occurrence moreover they're prevalent to the extent that their absence generally invites Explanation and furthermore natural languages have words across a variety of different cultures and societies and so on for these desires and or for their fulfillment and or their frustration now in contrast to these markers of natural desires artificial desires at least plausibly would tend to be firstly something like acquired or inculcated or enculturated second they'd be liable to be non-universal and quite culturally variant and thirdly they would be not Ubiquitously linguistically represented across different societies and cultures and times and in geographic regions

and so on and what i would say is that desires for things that only god can satisfy actually seem much more like artificial desires desires for things like heaven or desires for things like union with god or things like that those seem to be much more acquired or inculcated or enculturated depending upon the beliefs Of the culture and so on they seem to be non-universal their content seems to vary quite heavily across cultures and time periods and so on and it's not clear that they're ubiquitously linguistically represented the sorts of desires that theists typically associate

as desires for like heaven and or god or whatever they just seem artificial given what i've just articulated they don't really seem to come without acquired abilities And dispositions and sensibilities which in turn depend on again something like an upbringing or a formation in a particular culture or way of life indeed various facts about these allegedly divine or transcendent desires that his desires only god can satisfy they seem to evidently count against theism possibly if god exists god implanted these desires in us to help facilitate a loving relationship with him but then why are these

desires so often Thoroughly confused there's deep significant widespread persistent disagreement between theists and atheists christians and jews muslims and hindus and so on as to what these desires might be pointing to not to mention the confusion within and hostility between differing theistic traditions based upon their differing conceptions of and desires for god in reality these sorts of desires seem to motivate drive and push people to Radically divergent and contradictory conclusions about the objects of their desires this seems deeply surprising if god implanted the relevant desires in us to facilitate a loving relationship with him and

of course this criticism i think is especially poignant under a kind of religious exclusivism under which you like have to be an adherent of one particular religious tradition in your earthly life you have to have some sort of explicit docsastic commitment perhaps Even to that religion in order to avoid hell or go to heaven or whatever furthermore i think there are potential parodies in the vicinity here so we can for instance find some natural desire that only god's non-existence or else some x that implies god's non-existence could satisfy so we might say that natural desires

generally have not always imply that there is something that can satisfy them We can in turn say that we have a natural desire for mental privacy but of course if god exists then there is no mental privacy as we've seen god has privy to your thoughts every single thing that's going on in your mind so we can conclude that probably mental privacy exists and since mental privacy strictly entails god's non-existence we can conclude that probably god doesn't exist or maybe maybe you don't think that we Have a natural desire for mental privacy to me that

seems just as plausible as saying that we have natural desires for things that god can only satisfy another desire that we might find more plausibly a natural desire is maybe the desire to fully comprehend reality you find this kind of deep insatiable curiosity across all different cultures across different times and geographic locations and so on arguably this curiosity this desire to comprehend reality perhaps even just Fully comprehend reality that seems to be again just as plausibly a candidate for natural desire as the allegedly natural desires for things that only god can satisfy but arguably that

desire could only be satisfied if god doesn't exist because if god exists god is this infinite being and surely there's at least some aspects to god that can't be fully comprehended by finite persons you'd have to be god himself to fully comprehend the infinitude of his being If that's the case then if natural desires imply that there's something that can satisfy them then since we plausibly have a natural desire to fully comprehend reality it would follow that we possibly fully comprehend reality but if god exists we can't fully comprehend reality because that would require fully

comprehending the infinitude of god which is not fully comprehensible to finite persons hence probably god doesn't exist again i'm not really Positively claiming here that the desire to fully comprehend reality or the desire for mental privacy and so on i'm not claiming you that these are natural desires my point is just that there are no less plausibly natural desires than are the allegedly natural desires for things that only god can satisfy that are referenced in this argument here here's another thing that's possibly a natural desire i naturally desire that my fellow creatures don't experience Torment

torture and so on if anything's natural desire something like empathy for other conscious suffering creatures could plausibly be a natural desire natural desires for people at the very least but any sentient organism not to be consciously tortured or tormented and especially eternally consciously tortured or tormented so we plausibly have natural desires for no one to be eternally consciously tormented which would imply that that state of affairs Actually does obtain or at least probably does obtain in which case traditional christianity is probably false because traditional christianity implies eternal conscious torment so anyway there are lots of

potential parody arguments here in the vicinity but in any case let's move on to the next argument by them well we have natural desire for things only god can satisfy so that implies there is a god now this argument has actually been Pretty definitely defended in the literature don't dismiss it too too quickly uh and you have a modalized version of this argument natural desires imply there can be something that satisfies them not that there is something but just candy but if we have natural desire for things only god can satisfy well then there can

be a god and then we're off and running if there can be god there is a god so there's a god lots of the criticisms that i already Just mentioned are going to be applicable here so lots of the arguable counter examples with respect to premise one concerning maximalized natural desires are also going to be applying here even in those cases of maximized natural desires a perfect mage a perfect family perfect food perfect sex and so on it's not at all clear that there even can be something which satisfies those and of course the naturalist

wouldn't accept that there could be a perfect Mate a perfect family a perfect food and so on that's just not how the natural biological world works so it seems to me that with respect to maximalized natural desires that seems to pose exactly the same problems for this premise one as it did with the previous premise one now of course you might say oh well if god exists maybe there is the perfect family the perfect food and so on and all that's in heaven but yes you might say that but then of course you'd Antecedently need

to be a theist in order to think that these aren't counterexamples and hence you'd antecedently need to be a theist in order to accept premise one so of course then the argument would be dialectically toothless premise two here is also again going to inherit the exact same difficulties as i mentioned earlier it's not at all clear that these are natural desires as opposed to artificial desires furthermore we have all the same parody Problems we could talk about natural desires that only god's non-existence or else some acts that implies god's non-existence could satisfy even if those

are possible they would still since i argued that they entailed god's non-existence it would follow that possibly god doesn't exist if those things are possibly satisfied so again in terms of mental privacy you can turn to fully comprehending reality and with respect to the point about eternal Conscious torment it seems at least as plausible as the claim that we have a natural desire for things only god can satisfy it seems at least as plausible as that to say that we have natural desires so that no one even could end up in eternal conscious torment because

that's just such a bad way to end up that we desire naturally that people and at least sentient creatures don't end up that way and that no one could end up that way and if That's case if it's possibly the case that necessarily no one ends up like that if no one could in principle even end up like that well then it would follow via s5 that no one can end up that way and no one in fact ends up that way and so again we'd have an argument against a traditional version of christianity so

that's very interesting let us go on bruce's argument from the motivational center of lives similar effects can be The motivational center of many people's lives that is evidence that x can exist it's obvious that god is the motivational center of people's lives so that's evidence god can't exist god can't exist exist yeah so there's definitely a lot to say here and i could probably have an independent video on this particular argument but i'm not sure about one we can think about all the different religions and all the different ultimate Concerns that people have those are

gonna afford us boatloads of cases where something is the motivational center of someone's life like islam or following the prophet muhammad peace be upon him or following hinduism or following christianity or whatever lots of these things will be the motivational center of people's lives and yet we know that lots of them are actually going to be metaphysical impossibilities So there are going to be boatloads of examples of cases where something is the motivational center of people's lives and yet the motivational center of their lives is metaphysically impossible and given these boatloads of counter examples it's

just not clear why we should think that the motivational centrality of something is evidence that it can exist at the very least if it is evidence it seems to be very weak evidence indeed and moreover in these Sorts of domains with respect to questions like god precisely because there are so many different incompatible motivational centers of people's lives with respect to things like god the characterization of god the particular religion and so on it would seem as though the very fact that there are so many of them and we know that almost all of them

have to be metaphysically impossible then that would seem to at least provide A defeater because again you have various other different conceptions of the absolute or the ultimate reality that form the motivational center or basis of people's lives so even if we granted that god's being the motivational center of many people's lives is the feasible evidence that god can exist we seem to in fact have defeaters on our hands it's also not 100 clear to me that premise 2 here is true that god is the Motivational center of many people's lives specifically i guess i'd

want greater evidence for it i'd like to see whether other things are really or ultimately their motivational centers for example community or serving people or helping people or perhaps there being life after death or maybe just goodness or maybe avoidance of hell or maybe various other sorts of things like is it really god that's the motivational center of their Lives or is it instead something like love or goodness or beauty or community service or helping others or life after death or avoidance of hell or something like that i'm not saying that this premise is false

i'm just saying i'd like to see greater evidence for two and of course we have a potential for a parody argument and again i haven't looked into bruce's paper here in a long while so bruce might consider this parody but i'll just level it Nonetheless so firstly we could say that atheism or naturalism or something that entails atheism or naturalism is at the motivational center of many people's lives there are lots of different atheist activists people who try to promote naturalism as much as they can natural naturalism and atheism as world views seem indeed to

be at the motivational center of lots of people's lives and if x being at the motivational center of many people's lives implies That we have evidence for the possibility of ex it would follow that we have evidence for the possibility of atheism or naturalism and so we have a symmetrical justification for the reverse possibility premise in the modal ontological argument we could also return to the examples that i gave earlier i do know some people who give like every fiber of their being to opposing eternal conscious torment views of hell i know lots of people

who what We might describe as militant universalists for instance that kind of worldview the militant universalist worldview seems to be the motivational center of their lives must be concluded then that it's evidence that that kind of militant universalist view and the intrinsic impermissibility of hell or things like that is that possible if so then well then because their views are that it's just not even possible for eternal conscious torment To be justified because they've certain objections to it in principle well then we'd have evidence that possibly it is necessarily the case that there is no

eternal conscious torment and hence there is no eternal conscious dormant or at least we have evidence for thinking that that's true similarly for the various other things that i said earlier like mental privacy maybe it's at the motivational center in many people's lives that they have a great deal of Mental privacy maybe the search for complete or comprehensive understanding of things is at the motivational center of lots of people's lives and as we've already seen if god exists arguably those aren't even possibly attainable and yet given that they're at the motivational center people's lives we

would have evidence per this principle that they are possibly attainable and hence evidence that god doesn't exist so let's go through what yujin nagasawa Writes with respect to this argument so bruce's argument is based on a principle according to which a propositional belief that is at the motivational center but flourishing and intellectually sophisticated life is probably possibly true suppose many individuals and communities have led a flourishing and intellectually sophisticated life for a long time while holding a motivationally central belief that p According to proofs this entails that p is probably possibly true one can hold

a central but false belief to quote bruce's example a doctor can lead a flourishing and intellectually sophisticated life bringing a cancer treatment to patients even if his belief in the effectiveness of the treatment is false yet it seems difficult to think that such a belief can be the motivational center of a flourishing and Intellectually sophisticated life for a long time unless it is at least possibly true and again this is metaphysical possibility bruce argues that given these observations and given the fact that there have been many flourishing lives in history at whose motivational centers lies

the proposition that god exists we can conclude that god's existence is probably possible hence according to proofs the possibility premise of the modal ontological Argument is probably true now one thing i want to say at this juncture is that percy's example actually probably does more harm to his case than good because arguably if the cancer treatment is ineffective well then it's something about the very nature of the cancer treatment and it's something about the kind of biological thing that the treatment is trying to treat which just renders it actually impossible for the treatment to work

for instance If you take tylenol in response to a malignant tumor that's in fact going to not succeed in getting rid of the tumor but it's also not even possibly going to succeed given the very nature of that chemical given its makeup and given the nature of the biological processes going on with respect to the tumor that's a treatment that just can't even possibly work and so actually arguably bruce has afforded us a pretty plausible counter example and even a mundane counter Example which is going to extend to lots of other cases he's offered us

a counter example to the the relevant principle now of course we have to be careful about counterexamples here because prusa admits that yes okay it's possible that someone could have a motivationally central belief which is nevertheless metaphysically impossible but he thinks that that would just be improbable so we do have to be careful with saying the word counterexample here but my point is Just that even in this very mundane case arguably here is a case where something is at the motivational center of someone's life and yet it's metaphysically impossible the the effectiveness of the treatment

is at the motivational center of his life and yet the treatment is not even metaphysically possibly successful so anyway that makes me very very suspicious of his principle and it makes me think that there are boatloads of ordinary humdrum cases Where this principle just completely fails which makes me very very suspicious of the principle itself so anyway that's one thing that i wanted to note before going on to nagasawa's critical assessment so the most obvious response to peru's argument seems to be to point out that there have been many flourishing lives in history whose motivational

centers are propositions based on atheism or other alternatives to monotheism such as Pantheism or polytheism if we apply prusa's reasoning to beliefs relevant to these propositions we seem to be able to show that the non-existence of god and the existence of pantheistic or polytheistic gods are probably possibly true too this is not good news for perfect being theists because the thesis that the non-existence of god or the existence of pantheistic or polytheistic gods are probably possibly true seems to Undermine the possibility of god's necessary existence bruce offers a careful examination of this objection so yes

prus does of course examine this objection in his article it's a further question as to whether or not what he says on behalf of his case succeeds the thrust of his response is that such beliefs concerning atheism pantheism and polytheism are either one harmless because they're composible or co-conceivable with the existence of god According to perfect being theism too irrelevant because on close examination the beliefs in question do not centrally or rationally contribute to life as much as theistic belief does or three false because we can undercut such beliefs by providing decisive arguments against them

so i don't think that this third thing is plausible because okay yeah you can always say oh yeah we can provide different arguments against These sorts of views okay cool you can say the exact same thing about theism you could say the exact same thing in response to proofs okay cool you have this argument but but you can also provide arguments against theism itself for instance various arguments from evil so i don't think this third thing right here is a good response all we're examining here is whether or not prusa's symmetry breaker would equally support

these other views which in turn would Equally support the reverse possibility premise it's irrelevant whether you have other considerations which might render those views false again we're in the context of the modal ontological argument so you don't really have a symmetry breaker if the support that you provide for the forward possibility premise equally supports the reverse possibility premise i think we can set three aside here what about two irrelevant because On close examination the beliefs in question do not centrally or rationally contribute to life as much as theistic belief does that's going to be difficult

because that seems to be relying on some sort of empirical claim like how much theistic belief specifically like belief in god specifically and moreover the god of perfect being theism contributes to people's lives as opposed to again like the community service contributing to it As opposed to helping the poor that contributes to it as opposed to the love of neighbor and so on it's it's just not clear how much theistic belief specifically like the belief in the god of perfect being theism which is centrally motivating such people to live flourishing and rationally healthy lives so

i'm quite skeptical of two here and then number one harmless because they're compostable or co-conceivable with the existence of god according to perfect Being theism it's not clear to me whether or not that's true if someone is promoting the cause of atheism itself atheism as worldview or naturalism as a worldview that's of course not that's not compostable with god right it's it's atheism it's naturalism so that wouldn't apply to the naturalism case and it seems as though it's also not applicable to these various other cases the great spirit with respect to various native american religions

that's the ultimate Reality for them it's this pantheistic great spirit that is not compatible that's not compostable that's not co-conceivable with god the perfect being theistic god being the ultimate reality because that's not a pantheistic god and similarly down the list like others have various impersonal absolutes or they kind of just have this like universal consciousness as an absolute or something like that so anyway this first point is also questionable to me But again i'd have to go through peruse's article in particular to have a fully worked out assessment here my point is just that

i don't find these three responses here particularly plausible at least prima facie so anyway let's just continue with nagasa's critical appraisal it seems to me that a more promising objection to bruce's approach is concerned with the role of necessary existence in a belief at the Motivational center of a life the possibility premise of the modal ontological argument says that it is possible that there is god or using planning as terminology it's possible that there is a maximally great being again for a possibility claim to be usable in the modal ontological argument it has to state

that the existence of god understood as a necessarily existent being is possible on the other hand if the claim is that the existence of god Understood merely as say an omniscient omnipotent omni-benevolent being without any mention of necessary existence is possible then it does not support the modal ontological argument yet it seems that the motivationally central belief held by the majority of theists that god exists does not seem to assume even implicitly the idea that god exists necessarily ordinary religious believers who have never studied the philosophy of religion do not normally entertain the Idea that

god is a being that exists in all possible worlds especially especially possible worlds as governed by s5 modal logic let alone holding it at their motivational center prus is aware of this objection and tries to respond to it he says that whether the belief that god is maximally excellent in all possible worlds is motivationally central to anyone is irrelevant all we need according to proofs is the Centrality of the belief that god exists where god is understood as a being with maximal greatness which unbeknownst to many entails necessary existence he writes one can believe that

there is a maximally great being without believing that there is a being that has maximal excellence in every world just as one can believe that frank has inherited all of susan's property without believing that frank has inherited susan's horse However this response doesn't seem to succeed as prue says the success of his argument for the possibility of the existence of god depends on many factors such as how motivationally central the belief is how flourishing the individual or community x is how much of x's humanly excellent activity flows from that belief how rational is the motivational

connection between the belief and the humanly excellent activity how intellectually Sophisticated x is how long the involved time span is how large community x is and so on and so on it seems implausible to think that the probability of the possibility of the necessary existence of god itself increases as positive values are assigned to these factors because most believers are not even aware that necessary existence is entailed by god's maximal greatness that is it seems implausible to think that the probability of the possibility of God's necessary existence specifically increases as the probability of the existence

of god conceived more generally increases we can make the following analogous claim the belief that frank has inherited all of susan's property might play an important role in frank's flourishing yet the more specific fact that frank has inherited susan's horse as part of her property does not seem to be able to play any role in his flourishing unless he is Aware of it the success or otherwise of my above objection to proofs is not ultimately very crucial because even if bruce's argument is indeed sound it does not establish precisely the possibility premise anyway the conclusion

of person's argument is that the existence of god is probably possibly true if we plug this into the modal ontological argument the conclusion that the mobile ontological argument has to be weakened Accordingly probably an omniscient omnipotent omni-benevolent being exists in the actual world this is much weaker than the original conclusion that an omniscient omnipotent omni benevolent being does exist in the actual world while the weaker conclusion is still significant it compromises the virtue of the modal ontological argument as an a-power derivation of the existence of god blah blah blah it's likely to generate further disputes

about how to Assign the value to the probability claim nagasawa gives various considerations earlier in his book which he takes to justify thinking that the probability in question depends on boatloads of factors and it's really not easy to determine the probability of the possibility of god's existence by appealing to bruce's criteria in light of that and we should also note of course that nagasawa basically goes through lots of These different arguments like what ought to exist can exist and various things like that like the deontic argument he goes through the samkara principle and various other

things it's in chapter seven of nagasau's book maximal god a new defense of perfect being theism published with oxford university press in 2017. it's a wonderful book i actually recommend you guys check it out if you get the chance oh he also talks about like girdle's Ontological argument and arguments from positive properties and so on so i highly recommend checking out uh the book here by yujin nagasawa he gives some really great critical appraisals of various arguments that have been leveled in this 150 argument presentation it's obvious that god is the motivational center of people's

lives so that's evidence god can't exist if i can't exist god does exist from the nature of love this is jerry walls argument in the 2000 or so volume our riches and most profound displays of love strongly suggest that they are not just evolutionary byproducts of kin selection and reciprocal altruism well that's true then that strongly suggests that uh there's a deeper non-naturalistic source of love central to reality uh so we're justifying justifying believing there is and god's best explanation yeah so of course premise one it's not clear that this is true of course you

could say It's just an evolutionary byproduct of kin selection that almost seems to sap the meaning out of it it still has various properties that it does even if those various properties are some sort of evolutionary product so naturalist i think will definitely question premise one here the second thing to note is that this is arguably only going to be prima facie justification it's going to be highly defeasible and whether or not it's Ultima facial justification is a separate question premise 3 is also impossible at least by my lights it says if we are justified

in thinking that then we're justified in thinking there is a deeper non-naturalistic source of love central to reality why does it have to be central to reality firstly secondly why does it have to be non-naturalistic Is the only naturalistic proposal something like an evolutionary hypothesis it's not clear that that's true the fourth one here that if there's a deeper non-naturalistic source of love central to reality it's probably god again there could be lots of other hypotheses and it's not clear why or how we're ruling those out and it's not clear how the probability of those

hypotheses relate to the probability of god's existence it might be an aesthetic Diesel hypothesis it might be a dummy or a hypothesis it might be something like an angel it might be et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera so premise store is also at least questionable so let us move on reality uh so we're justifying justifying believing there is and god's best explanation uh objective meaning our lives are objectively meaningful uh but that can be so only if god exists so god exists so one thing to know is that At least many

naturals will reject one many naturals of course will accept one so i'm not sure what meaningfulness amounts to in this context so i'm not really going to take a stand on one just because i want to see a precise cashing out of what this meaningfulness is and what it is for it to be objectively meaningful presumably that means independently of our particular stances so it stands independently Meaningful but again what is this meaningful amount to and in particular how is it different from our lives having just objective value like us being beings of dignity and

worth and us being bound by various moral rules and maxims or whatever it's not clear how this could be anything over and above that but setting that aside and i guess i'll just go with some sort of intuitive grasp that i have of this with that in mind what i'm going to want To say here is that i think two is probably false again we can run a sort of youth for objection if god has anything to do with the meaning of our lives god either has some reason to bestow our lives with meaning or

there's some reason why god somehow grounds or accounts for our lives meaning or there isn't if god does have some reason say because we are conscious beings and there are various good things And the meaning of our life is to actualize the flourishing of our lives and try to facilitate the flourishing of those we love and so on like if he has some reason to either assign us value or if there's some deeper reason as to why his nature is such as to specify that our lives are objectively meaningful well then it's plausibly that very

reason which on its own is sufficient to account for our lives having objective Meaning god is only standing as a kind of intermediary here by conscious if god has no reason for that well then it seems as though the meaningfulness of our lives is just patently arbitrary moreover i think there's another plausible response here which is that if we grant our lives are objectively meaningful surely there's something about our lives which is such that it makes it meaningful surely they are intrinsically Meaningful they're meaningful in and of themselves there's something about virtue itself cultivating intellectual

virtues and moral virtues it's meaningful it has nothing to do with some sort of extrinsic relation to god no the moral life itself is intrinsically meaningful the virtuous life itself is intrinsically meaningful the flourishing life itself is intrinsically meaningful there's something about that kind of life There's something about what it is to pursue truth and beauty and goodness and virtue and all these other sorts of things to cultivate the intellectual moral virtues which accounts for why they are meaningful so if our lives are objectively meaningful i would say that they're intrinsically meaningful and the various

aspects of our lives like flourishing and love and virtue and these sorts of things i would say that they are intrinsically Meaningful and of course if they're intrinsically meaningful then this second premise i would say is false it's not the case that they're meaningful only if some extrinsic fact happens to obtain and of course finally i would say with respect to the second premise why why does it have to be god why can't it be something like an aesthetic diesel hypothesis or an angel or a zeus-like character or plato's demi or any of the Whole

panoply of various beings that it might be it's not at all clear why it would have to be god and here's a way to actually make that argument more clear uh something can uh has meaning only if it's endowed meaning by one or more personal agents why various things can have intrinsic they can be intrinsically meaningful again assuming that i understand what this Meaning locution is but they can be intrinsically meaningful in and of itself love is meaningful in and of itself virtue intellectual virtue moral virtue and so on these are intrinsically meaningful you don't

need some sort of agent to endow or assign it with meaning indeed if you did right that agent either has some reason to do it or the agent doesn't right if the agent does have some reason say because the agent recognizes something deeply profound and Beautiful and valuable within the thing itself well then that alone is sufficient to account for why the thing itself has meaning the agent's recognizing it is just an intermediary in this process by contrast if the agent doesn't have any reason for endowing the relevant thing with meaning well then again it's

just patently arbitrary anything then could have been meaningful if the agent just had endowed it with it Was it authority in control so if our lives have objective meaning then that means they are endowed objective meaning by uh an agent with the represent authority control but the only sort of agent that has that sort of authority control is god and it's not clear also why that would be true why can't it be again played with dummy urge aesthetic d is a hypothesis and angel zeus like being et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera et

cetera it's narrative our Lives can be objectively meaningful only if they're they form a narrative but they can only form a narrative if they if there's an author or narrator uh this is an argument that's being defended pretty well by uh joshua's secrets so why is premise too true especially if you're conceiving of narrative as something that like a narrator provides in in that case no one who isn't already something like A theist or some except something like these angelic or zeus-like or aesthetic deism-like hypotheses no one who doesn't already accept those sorts of hypotheses

would grant that our lives are meaningful only if they form a narrative why would they have to form a narrative in order for them to be meaningful if you just mean that they form a narrative in the sense that the various happenings and goings on in our life in some sense have Ups and downs and they could in principle if someone wanted to collect it into a narrative of stories and so on like if that's what you mean well then no it's false that our lives form a narrative only if there actually is a narrator

or author of our lives no it just requires that there are in fact those ups and downs and that in principle someone could collect these together into a story and again why except premise five why couldn't it be Plato's demiurge or something like the aesthetic dsm hypothesis or something like an angel or blah blah blah blah anyway this argument just strikes me as quite implausible in recent writings uh from the naturalness of belief in objective meaning um look belief that god that life has objective meaning is natural to us uh we'd expect that if he

is true but not if naturalism is true so that confirms That life does have uh what i confront he is another nationalism which confirms life does have a better meaning so this argument is actually kind of interesting so one thing that i want to say is that it's actually not clear whether belief that life has objective meaning is natural to us again what is this objective meaning is it stance independent meaning how do you know that belief in stance independent meaning is natural to us why not just Belief in meaning and leaving it entirely open

why not instead say that no believe that life has meaning is natural to us but belief that life has objective meaning that's just something that's not at all entailed by thinking that our lives have meaning this kind of goes to the stuff that lance bush again has talked about with like normative entanglement and so on the the research in folk media ethics is actually really really interesting it it actually shows That it's not at all clear that for instance belief in objective moral values is natural to us it's not at all clear that that's true

certainly belief in certain moral values like you shouldn't kill someone you shouldn't do these various sorts of things it's bad and wrong to kill someone and so on but it's a separate question as to your meta ethics on that you could still very well be a meta-ethical anti-realist and yet make those various pronouncements Because perhaps what you mean by that is that you don't want people to do those various sorts of things and moreover you could say you don't want them to do those various sorts of things even if they wanted to do those various

sorts of things because you don't want to live in a world in which they do those very sorts of things so we get into really tricky waters here about normative entanglement and actually the empirical research suggests that actually belief In objective morality doesn't seem to be natural to us at all yes belief in various moral claims does seem to be natural to us but whether or not those claims are true in virtue of stance independent moral facts that is not something that is at all suggested by how people understand the relevant terms and how they

understand moral discourse and what they are meaning to commit to and if that's the case with folk meta ethics it would Plausibly also be the case with respect to folk meaning or whatever folk meaning talk so yeah people talk a lot as though things are meaningful but again that doesn't really tell us anything about what we might say is their meta ethics of meaning whether or not they think that those claims are true and virtue of stance independent meaning facts so it's actually not at all clear especially in light of the research on folk meta

ethics that lance bush has popularized It's not at all clear that this is actually a datum that we have to account for the second thing that i want to say is that even if it's natural to us so let's just set aside everything that i just said let's grant that belief that life has objective meaning is natural to us in that case it's actually not clear to me that the probability that this would obtain is much greater on theism than on naturalism Plausibly it's evolutionarily advantageous whether or not god exists to have a belief that

your life has let's say objective meaning again setting aside the fact that i think the same survival and fitness advantages would be accrued if we simply had the belief that life has meaning and not necessarily stance independently true facts about meaning but set that aside again so again it's possibly evolutionary advantageous to believe That life has meaning or to believe that life has objective meaning those who didn't believe it would arguably be demoralized they wouldn't be motivated to have sex to have children to eat food and so on they have to find some of these

things like really meaningful in order not to be demoralizing so on and in order perhaps not even to commit suicide so plausibly natural selection would actually favor this sort of belief and so it's actually not very surprising On a non-theistic view which at least includes naturalism and evolution so i would say that premise one here it's just not clear to me whether or not that's true and premise two here is like what so assuming that this is talking about the posterior probabilities of theism and natural okay so this is either talking about the priors or

the posteriors if the likelihood ratio strongly favors theism over naturalism With respect to the data of belief that life is objective meaning is natural to us that nothing follows from that about the priors so then this premise would be obviously false if this is talking about the priors but if this is talking about the posteriors it's also obviously and blatantly false it's blatantly false that if the likelihood ratio with respect to the data of belief that life is objective meaning is natural to us it's obviously false that if the Likelihood ratio between these and naturalism

with respect to that data strongly favors theism it's obviously false that it falls from that the posterior probability of theism is greater than the posterior probability of naturalism because it could be the case in principle that the prior probability of naturalism is much much greater than the prior probability of theism so either way this premise too seems to me to be obviously false So that confirms that life does have uh oh what i confirmed is which confirms life does have a different meaning okay happiness and life after death uh what makes life worth living is

happiness why why this seems implausible precisely because happiness can be subservient to things like moral and rational obligations and virtues and so on and those things also make life worth living it's not happy to me that i have to Believe that there's lots of suffering in the world and potentially there might even be gratuitous suffering that doesn't bring me happiness but it's the truth of the matter there is indeed lots of really bad suffering in the world and it would just be irrational for me to ignore the suffering in the world to pretend that the

world is all hunky-dory and that there's no suffering and avoiding that irrationality and according myself with The demands of rationality seems to make my life worth living and that seems to be much more worth living than someone who just deceives themselves into thinking that oh no everything is hunky-dory so that they can be happy all the time so anyway premise one just seems deeply deeply implausible to me that's not what makes life worth living it might be part of what makes life worth living but it's just false to say oh what makes life worth living

is Happiness no that might be part of it but lots of other things also make life worth living the premise one just seems really implausible to me things that make life worth living are also in addition to happiness things like virtue love reason truth goodness and so on but if that's true that's rational to forego happiness in this life for the sake of moral duty only if there's an afterlife where happiness is morality perfectly aligned well i can only be so if there's Something like god that makes happiness a morality perfectly aligned so god exists

okay i'm just gonna skip the rest of that argument because premise one was so implausible uh political authority uh published by uh tyler mcnabb and i think the other guy well he's gonna be referencing here shortly but political authority is justified and organism anarchism is false uh okay so i lean towards thinking one is true but i'm not super duper confident in it for those of You who haven't studied for instance political philosophy i haven't studied it in depth but i've looked a little bit into it it's actually kind of hard to justify political authority

and it's actually hard to avoid certain anarchistic arguments but anyway i'm not going full-blown anarchist here on you all i want to say is that premise one is quite controversial and again i want to emphasize that i lean towards thinking it's true i lean towards thinking yes Political authority is ultimately justified but i just want to say i'm not super confident partly because i need to study political philosophy in much greater depth and partly because the arguments that anarchists offer on behalf of their views actually aren't absurd but the leading theories of how political authority

is justified contractarian theories and consequences theories don't seem to really justify it but if it is justified that means the Best explanation would be that it has to happen so it's not clear why we should accept premise 2 there might very well be lots of other justifications for political authority now again they try to justify these premises and so on in their article so they might very well respond to various things that i said but of course the point is going to apply in reverse there are going to be counter responses to what they say

in the article and of course counter Counter responses counter counter responses and so on it's justification an extra mundane source uh which the best explanation of which is god so probably god exists one thing we might say is with respect to political authority god either has some reason for granting let's say a certain group of people political authority or he doesn't maybe it's because the there's the consent of the governed maybe it's because et cetera et cetera Et cetera if god doesn't have a reason then a political authority is just literally arbitrary god doesn't god

literally doesn't have a reason for bestowing or granting political authority to a person or a group of people but on the other hand if he does have a reason if there's something more fundamental upon which he's basing his decision there well then again surely it's that thing which could Serve as the relevant basis for political authority of course i think much more probably would need to be said on premise three there's a huge debate here and it's hotly contested in political philosophy so anyway let's just move on because yeah cool argument that's unique from free

will we have free will if naturalism is true we can't have free will naturalism is false theism is true it's not a problem we have free will so free will Confirms this is another naturalist i'd say premise one is quite controversial and lean towards thinking it's true i do think that at least plausibly we have free will although of course there are some very interesting arguments against it nevertheless i still lean towards thinking that it is true now premise two here just seems deeply implausible to me why why why wha what uh why would naturals

and Preclude are having free will you could easily have a compatibilist friendly version of free will that happens under naturals you can have reason sensitivity you can have people wholeheartedly endorsing the various decisions and so on and the various reasons upon which they act you can meet pretty much any of the compatibilist conditions that are proffered in the literature under naturalism you can meet those you can also have libertarianism under Naturalism all you need is some indeterminacy with respect to our decisions there are various accounts for instance robert cain is an account where quantum indeterminacy

in the brain can percolate up and have macroscopic effects via considerations in chaos theory and that can allow for there to be indeterminacy with respect to our decision-making processes and so on so you can even have libertarian views under naturalism so premise 2 here just Seems to me to be absurd honestly and premise 4 also isn't all that clear if theism is true it's very likely that we would have free will that's not at all clear you have worries about divine foreknowledge there are lots of quite serious challenges to our having free will in a

world in which god has infallible foreknowledge we might seem to be puppets in a kind of grand plan of gods you'll get into worries about the manipulation argument if god Is fully provident well then it would seem as though he is placing us in various situations in which he knows that we're going to do something in advance and nevertheless he still places us in there and even if you want to try to appeal to molinism to try to get around this there is a recent article by two really smart theists nevin kleimenheiger and daniel rubio

uh called molinism explaining our freedom away daniel rubio has been on the channel the Analytic christian nevin kleinheigh has been on capturing christianity i really should be getting them on my channel to talk about this article because it's so good it's actually forthcoming so this is like holland off the press by the way so definitely check this out you can find it on fill papers by the way it's freely available you can read it it's a very good article the argument that molinism is false and their argument is quite powerful at least by highlights The

basic idea is that if molinism is true well then there are factors that are both firstly ex fully explanatory at prior to our decisions and secondly that strictly entail the decisions and actions that we do and in that case you're not going to be able to have libertarian freedom there because there are factors that are both explanatory prior and sufficient for you choosing exactly how you choose what are those factors well it's going to be God's decision to place you in relevant circumstances together with the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom which are not under your control

or anything like that those are explanatory prior to you deciding as you do as is god's placing you in the relevant circumstances and of course those together are going to strictly entail what you do so we have factors that are explanatory prior to what you do and they strictly entail What you do they are sufficient for what you do dr philip swenson has also done some really good work arguing against molinism the analytic christian has actually made a video with him on some of the published work that he's done with respect to criticizing molinism and

his arguments are definitely a force to be contended with so to get around the problem that i've said earlier you might try to say that oh no the counterfactuals of creature Freedom are not themselves explanatory prior to your choices in the circumstances rather your choices in those circumstances explains why the relevant counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are true but that it leads us into a vicious explanatory circle consider some kind of factual creature in freedom l philip would freely lie in circumstances c well the fact that l is true explains why god knows that l right

that Someone knows that p partly because p is true moreover the fact that god knows that l partly explains why god puts philip in circumstances c this is how under mulanism god is providentially arranging history he puts people in various circumstances partly because he knows certain counterfactuals of crucial freedom concerning what they would do in those circumstances so we have an explanatory link from here to here Moreover the fact that god puts you in circumstances c partly explains why you choose to lie in c right it's partly because you're in the circumstances that you are

you're faced with this decision to lie you're faced with the various pros and cons of lying and so on it's partly because god put you in conditions c then that explains what you chose to lie in circumstances c and then of course the hypothesis that we are assuming for reductio is precisely that Your choosing to lie and see is itself what explains the truth of the counterfactual of creaturely freedom so this is a vicious explanatory loop we started with l and then we have a chain of explanation that eventually terminates back in l so we

just have a vicious explanatory circle again i'm just pointing out how someone might try to get around that climbing higa and rubio argument by saying oh well the fact that you'd freely choose as you do In the relevant circumstances that is actually explanatory prior to the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom concerning what you would do in those circumstances rather than the other way around but that's actually just going to land you in an explanatory vicious circle so that's not going to be an option to get around it and in that case the counterfactual creature of freedom

is going to be exponentially prior to your choosing to do what you do in the Relevant circumstances and that together with god's putting you in those circumstances are going to be things that are both exponentially prior to what you do and that are sufficient for what you do that is the guarantee that you do precisely what you are going to do in that case libertarianism is false so my point of bringing up all this is that premise 4 is not at all clear why this is true so i know that premise 1 is contestable Although

i think it's probably true premise 2 is absurd premise 4 is not at all clear why this is true well naturalism is false theism is true it's not a problem we have free will so free will confirms to us naturalism kind of my own term to get at the concept he's talking about uh which just means that uh at times we can be saints at times we're so wicked uh what explains how we're so morally one way or the other uh well pascal thought that The best explanation was found in the christian doctrines of the

fallen original sin so of course well that might be one explanation for it but i have no clue why that would be the best explanation there are boatloads of other explanations we are a mixed bag we have evolutionary origins some of that selected for things like altruism and treating people well and having empathy for others but also some of that Selected for rampant tribalism this is why we've had to continually expand our circle of moral inclusion over the centuries and indeed over the millennia so there seem to be far better evolutionary explanations for why we

are so morally bipolar in the way that we are and of course boatloads of other religions it's not like they they just ignore why we have various good aspects of us and also various evil aspects of us why would the christian doctrines be Better at explaining this than the whole boatloads of other religions that offer explanations as well so premise two here i think is just false so it's reasonable to believe in those christian doctrines so that doesn't follow that just doesn't follow from the first two premises um even if the christian doctrines of the

fallen original sin best explained this one particular fact about humans it's a separate question as to whether or not It explains other things maybe there are other explanations which aren't as good as explaining why humans are morally bipolar but that explain a whole concoction of other things much much much better than the christian doctrines of the f of the fall and original sin or maybe the christian doctrines of the fault and original sin themselves succumb to defeaters and so on my point here is just that this third premise doesn't follow from the first two Premises

i really like this argument for a lot of reasons that i can't get into promise for christian doctrines of the fault and original sin entail that christianity is true that's actually not at all clear why that's true so the fall judaism and islam also have the fall judaism has original sin so so no the christian doctrines if we were just Understanding them as simply doctrines of the fallen original sin that does not entail the christianity is true but also islam although it doesn't have something like original sin it nevertheless has the fall and it does

have various explanations for why since the fall why we continue to sin and we have various faults and so on and why the created order is in some sense broken so i would reject premise four premise Four is false premise two is probably false so anyway let's move on yeah from eight arguments consensus genitum gentium uh just a justification for belief in god just based on how widespread belief in god is uh and this is not an argument to be to be dismissed lightly it's defended by the most sophisticated epistemologists writing today including zaczebski who

we referenced earlier in thomas kelly those Leading it's also dismissed by lots of the most sophisticated epistemologists writing today so it's not clear what that okay anyway a philosopher on testimony and comments all right so here are some of the things that i want to say on the consensus gentium argument so this is from my 3k ama video let's just listen to it now okay so this person secondly do you have any thoughts on an argument into something like this Premise one diverse population across the globe in history i'll find it intuitive common sense or

plausible some kind of god or divine being exists premise two intuition common sense and possibility convert pronunciation justification premise for you know obvious error theories available and that's the only thing that could defeat this problem facial justification conclusion four so you're definitely believing in some kind of god or divine Being this is a kind of common consent argument there's a philosopher named titty smith very interesting first name if you ask me but teddy smith has an excellent paper in us relation journal philosophy it's available online for free on andrew bailey's website but you can just

search the common consent argument for the existence of nature spirit i think that's that's what the the title is called and it's in the oscillation journal philosophy again Teddy smith t-i-d-y smith you guys know what's bill smith so definitely check that out so i'm just going to read abstract because it's really good and i think he deals with the argument reasonably well so he says a traditional common consent argument the existence of god is largely abandoned and rightly so in this paper i have to salvage the strongest version of the argument surprisingly the strongest version

of the argument supports the proposition Not that god exists but that animism is probably true and that such things as mountains rivers and forest spirits probably exist i consider some plausible debunking arguments ultimately finding that it is trickier to debunk the animists claims that it might first appear i conclude that there exists one significant argument in favor of animism that has hitherto gone unstated in the philosophy of religion advice i want to check out that paper because it just Criticizes this kind of common consent argument premise two says that intuition common sense and possibility confirm

prime faction definition i think that's probably true premise three obviously is available and that's the only thing that could defeat the prime minister destination so i i don't think that's right there are any plausible things first so that's what i'm gonna say so i think you've got for instance evolutionary debunking considerations And like a hybrid hyperactivation detection device other sorts of things and the cognitive science of religion that can possibly generate beliefs in uh evolutionarily speaking generate beliefs in kinds of maybe higher powers or immaterial spirits and things like that that's probably one air theory

and that's not gonna be truth tracking and so we have a we kind of have a debunking explanation that isn't truth-tracking other relevant phenomenon Such that we can block the kind of inference to the prime faction to feasible justifications of the deliverances of such faculties also i would say that there's tons of other stuff that defeats this prime minister justification other than an error theory so i would just reject premise three uh yeah on yet another further ground across all these such cultures you might have some really really really generalized vague belief in something That's

like higher than us but like when you look at more specifics there's profound disagreement some of them are going to think that it's some kind of physical being or sometimes higher physical being or higher physical spirits others are going to think that it's some kind of pantheist model so i know that i think what a lot of native american religions have the great spirit or something and it's sort of like pantheist others have views where it's Just you know this huge pantheon of different things others have ones where it's like it's just the ancestor it's

the the material appear to their ancestors and so on that they go on and they like return to the sun you know things like that like you look yeah there are these it's funny you look yeah there are these kind of more supernatural things like that but there's a huge agreement over the specific character so like although you Might have this very very vague agreement across these different times and cultures and societies and evolutionary ethocs although you might have this vague agreement over there being some kind of higher power of some kind there's profound disagreement

over the intrinsic character nature of i think that should really clue us in to the fact that there doesn't seem to be any underlying undergirding process that is there doesn't seem to be some kind of Unifying explanation such that the cognitive factors these people are genuinely believing these things because because they're true but rather uh there's some other factor going on and i think that should close into some kind of debunking explanation also the agreement again is pretty frail and gerrymandered titty smith right so i'm just gonna put in here the claim that you're enough

all people at all times have believed in god or gods seems Misleading at best simply false at worst sure the world religions share some amount of overlap that one cannot overlook but this overlap is often vague and precise in his natural history of religion hugh notes the sketchiness of the argument of the agreement between isolated religions so he writes the belief of invisible intelligent power has been very generally diffused over the human race in all places in all ages but it has neither perhaps been so Universal as to admit of no exception nor has it

been in any degree uniform in the ideas which it has suggested end quote so although i might concede that religions typically posit the existence of as human puts it invisible intelligent power or spiritual beings or intentional agency that one does not normally physically encounter it seems a specific commitment to creator gods or high gods is not at all universal to the world religions moreover it's unclear Whether commitment to god's is even the most common commitment found across a diverse range of religious cultures and in fact jesus goes on to do like empirical work in this

paper pointing out that actually animism is something that is far more universal than uh belief in some kind of high god or high gods moreover here's another defeater of this kind of argument and the argument for atheism is so factual to feeder or more accurately and potentially fear and So i think it's also to say that um the only thing that could defeat this problem of justification is an obvious error theory anyway i think that there are a lot of issues with premise one and i think premise excuse me premise three and paris one is

also impossible given that that agreement is highly dramatic and super vague and there's far more disagreement than we would think so this one is especially interesting because we can say if there's widespread agreement On something like the closest approximation to experts that god doesn't exist that's premature evidence that god doesn't exist premise two there is widespread agreement among the closest approximation to experts namely philosophers that god doesn't exist look at the fill paper survey one of the highest convergences among the questions asked on the fill paper survey that atheism is true so conclusion we have

primophasia Evidence that god doesn't exist now of course you might say oh well we can restrict the domain and talk about just philosophies of religion and of course there are more theist philosophers religion there are atheist philosophers religion which is also indicated by that field paper survey and then of course we can get into the fact that there's a selection effect there of course right theists are the ones that are more likely to go into the philosophy Religion in the first place and study theism whereas atheists are not likely when they're going into philosophy to

try to specialize in philosophy religion because they already think that it's not really studying something that corresponds to reality and then of course you get into debates about well what about the people who are changing their minds what's the prevalence of atheist atheist and theist atheist conversions with respect to philosophers Of religion especially after they've studied the particular arguments of philosophy of religion and then of course you get into all the super duper specific details about the empirical stuff anyway my point my point is just that there are arguably going to be parodies that are

at least as bad as this argument right so i'm not even saying that that parody is a good argument i'm just pointing out that if you're going to want to make Sort of consensus arguments in favor of theism you're also going to have to be faced with consensus arguments against theism we could also talk about parody with the consensus among experts on the failure of this argument the failure of the consensus gentium argument as titty smith points out it's almost universally granted in philosophy of religion both in philosophy religion and philosophy more generally including among

theists That common consent arguments fail of course if that's the case well then we have private facial evidence for thinking that they do in fact fail and so the very argumentative scheme that this argument is suggesting to us provides us evidence against the argument itself so that's very interesting yeah let me go through this one belief in god belief just as majority of you throughout human history again that Seems false animism things like that instead of belief in high god or gods is the majority view throughout human history as indicated at least by teddy smith's

empirical analysis and moreover even if titty smith's empirical analysis is mistaken belief that god specifically exists doesn't seem to be the majority of you throughout human history all the ideas are like super duper vague and indeterminate and oftentimes it's just Some sort of intelligent creator other times it's some sort of pantheistic great spirit and so on so the quote-unquote agreement is extremely frail vague indeterminate gerrymandered and so on so premise one i would say is false false beliefs are essentially the product of cognitive malfunction it's more probable what that seems false no false beliefs can

be produced by properly functioning cognitive faculties maybe the properly Functioning cognitive faculties are just in sucky environmental conditions or perhaps false beliefs can be produced by bad initialized inputs in perfectly reliable social doxastic practices for example testimony tradition early teaching and socialization and so on those are perfectly respectable reliable social doxastic practices but if you have bad initial inputs to them with respect to the testimonial tradition and so on that's going to pollute and infect Those later people who are participating within the social doxastic practices and borrowing from the original testifiers so in that case

you have false beliefs but they're not at all the product of some sort of cognitive malfunction you actually have a reliable social doxastic practice here that's functioning perfectly properly in the case of testimony tradition and so on to reiterate again false beliefs can easily be produced by properly functioning Cognitive faculties ones that are not having any cognitive malfunction whatsoever but perhaps just the environmental conditions are pretty sucky well false beliefs are essentially the product of cognitive malfunction it's more probable that malfunction occurs in small a small number of times in few people than a great

many times in many people so that premise there seems implausible to Me think about illusions and so on those things are like built into human nature and are perceptual and cognitive faculties so i would say that it just all depends on the detail with respect to the quote unquote cognitive malfunction we might talk about illusions as being some sort of cognitive malfunction but illusions again like that illusion that i showed earlier which was the checkerboard shade illusion remember Like that is extremely widespread in basically everyone who looks at it because it's just like part of

our cognitive apparatus to misfire in that kind of way so why would it be more probable that some sort of cognitive malfunction occurs only a small number of times in a few people rather than a great many times in many different people in boatloads of cases they're just going to be certain systematic failures of our Perceptual faculties especially with respect to cases like illusions and other sorts of things like that at the very least with respect to this third premise i will say show us the empirical evidence give us an exhaustive or at least a

representative survey of cognitive malfunctions which of course will be exceedingly difficult since that's not well defined but anyway give us an exhaustive or at least representative survey of cognitive Malfunctions and examine their extent relative abundance and history to determine which of the two states is more likely the two states of course are one the relevant cognitive malfunctions only occur a small number of times in a few people versus two they occur a great many times in many different people absent that empirical evidence we don't have any reason to accept three i would say and indeed

again there are boatloads Of cases where cognitive malfunctions are seen in basically everyone a great many of times anytime you have an illusion and we know that there are boatloads of illusions do you want me to bring up the wikipedia page where it like brings up the cognitive biases and illusions and so on that afflict people there are literally hundreds of them and they're basically widespread and universal and happen all the time If anything those seem more persistent and widespread and so on than like the occasional local cognitive malfunction let's say hallucination or those sorts

of things so anyway it's not at all clear why premise three is true i'd need to see the empirical evidence for it but also just upon reflection maybe we have more reason to think that it's false than that it's true this third premise that is so three false premises or at least two False premises and one premise that's deeply questionable nice so belief in god exists in evidence uh that theistic belief is true okay a bit more modestly uh we can run a consensus gentium argument this way we don't need to appeal to widespread belief

in god to justify god's existence belief in god's existence we can just appeal to uh whom we regard as epistemic authorities on the question of god's existence in the same way you know we Cite we cite experts on things to justify our belief you know common one is oh 99 of people believe scientists believe in climate change so that's supposed to justify belief climate change well it all depends on who you regard as an epitome of authority on these questions uh that's gonna be the sort of deciding factor on this argument but if you regard

someone as an epistemic authority on the question of god's existence and they believe in god Well that's evidence of god exists so it's unclear in the context of philosophy religion especially what counts as an expert and it's unclear moreover how one determines who the experts are without taking a prior stand on the matter so it's unclear what's going to count as an expert here as well as how one determines who the experts are without taking a prior stand on whether or not god exists or at least without letting that influence who you Think is an

expert but in any case this premise too is just thoroughly subjective lots of other people can just say many of those whom i regard as episodic authorities on god's existence believe that god doesn't exist so i promise your reason to believe that god doesn't exist so this argument makes no headway in the dispute between thesim and atheism it seems to me again we should note that there's a distinction between prima facie reason and ultimate Facial reason even if you have prima facie reason there could be boatloads of defeaters for this and arguably the closest approximation

of experts is going to be philosophers but of course if you look at the full paper survey most of them are atheists then of course you know we were going to get into the dialectic earlier people are going to say oh well let's focus on the philosophers of religion in particular well it's actually not clear Why we should do that because lots of non-foster's religion have still studied extensively arguments for against god's existence they're thoughtful people they've thought of these sorts of things and they have the requisite training and tools to to think critically about

these various sorts of questions so it's not clear why we should restrict it just to foster's religion but even if we did we're going to get into debates about selection effect and so on but anyway It's at least worth keeping in mind that if anything there might be a more powerful argument for atheism here based on the fact that the most possible candidates for epistemic authorities might very well be philosophers and of course we know from the fill paper survey how that relates to god's existence the majority of philosophers are atheists but if you regard

someone's epistemic authority on the question of god's existence and they believe god Well that's evidence of god exists pragmatic we are finally right so i'm going to be honest with you i'm going to skip these because the video seems to be promising arguments for god's existence but none of these pragmatic arguments of course are arguments for the existence of god they are of course arguments something like for a pragmatic commitment to believe in god or those sorts of things as a matter of practical rationality Based on the comparative expected values of belief and disbelief and

so on so they really concern practical matters and none of that counts as an argument for god's existence i just recommend you guys to check out my video with liz jackson on pascal's wager and i just want to make some general points here i guess with respect to pragmatic arguments but we're not going to really look at these in any depth because they're not arguments for God's existence and it's interesting why these would even be included within at the end when they're like putting in 150 they're typing in 150 because these arguments they cannot they

simply cannot have an evidential bearing on the probability of god's existence if their conclusion is something like it's you know it's practical or it's practically rational to commit to god or you know those sorts of things that doesn't raise the Probability of god's existence just here are some general points on these sorts of arguments i would say we have various obligations and some of them might actually count against other obligations so we might have certain practical obligations to do certain things but that might come into conflict with our various epistemic obligations to believe in accordance

with the evidence and so on and at least weighing these sorts of obligations it's not easy So epidemic obligations again might come into conflict with pragmatic ones and it's not clear which we should side with at least in many cases that's one general point to keep in mind when evaluating these sorts of arguments secondly we should be wary of the cases that use infinite expected utility because it's not always the case that infinite expected utility trumps finite expected utility even though these arguments oftentimes Rely on a principle similar to that here's one consideration to see

why that's true suppose that you had a 0.0000001 and then how many zeros are there well it's google to the power of google to the power of google do that google times and then take that to the power of google that's how many zeros there are and then there's a one at the end you have that chance of having a marginally happy day on each day of an endless Future okay so that's that's your first option your second chance is to have one minus that number so 0.99999 with like a google to the power of

google to the power of google nines of getting a quadrillion dollars right now okay a quadrillion dollars that would probably destroy the u.s economy okay let's just say a trillion dollars so you're gonna become a trillionaire now that has a finite expected utility It's 0.99 times the trillion which is still basically a trillion dollars and moreover the other one has infinite utility right because it's an endless afterlife so you just add up all those like marginally happy days where it's like slightly more happiness than not you multiply that by 0.001 but of course that's a

finite number and it's an infinite utility but the value of the payoff is of course infinite so you have infinite expected utility under that Scenario so which of these two are you going to choose you're going to choose the first one where you have infinite expected utility but i can practically guarantee you with almost absolute deductive cartesian certainty that you're not going to get it versus the one where you're about to become an instant trillionaire and i can almost guarantee you with absolute deductive cartesian certainty that you're going to become the trillionaire which of those

Are you going to choose well i don't know about you but i'm choosing that second one i think it's obvious you should choose the second one and so you shouldn't always go with infinite expected utility i think that that's obvious but a lot of these principles rely on saying that yeah infinite expected utilities are going to trump finite expected utilities so that's one thing that we should keep in mind Moreover i would say any god worthy of the name wouldn't punish someone who earnestly seeks truth and tries their utmost to cultivate the intellectual moral virtues

and continually recognizes and perhaps even repents in some fashion for wrongdoings while making commitments to improve i would say that even if you don't have an explicit doxastic belief in god or even if you don't fall in line with some particular religious tradition any god who punches such a person who Earnestly seeks the truth tries her ammos to cultivate these sorts of virtues and continually recognizes and perhaps even repents for wrongdoings while making commitments to improve i said any god who punishes that is not a godworthy of the name god and to the extent that

a given pragmatic argument requires denying that as at least a number of them do i would say those arguments fail so anyway those are my general comments On pragmatic arguments so again i'm skipping these sorts of pragmatic arguments because they're not arguments for god's existence and we're going on to the meta arguments we have uh meta arguments there's only a few here so don't worry uh now i gotta jump back down my notes uh we have cumulative case arguments uh there are situations let me just say about transcendental arguments The problem with transcendental arguments is

twofold one well there are more there are definitely more problems than two but the their history isn't associated with very strong scholarship two those proponents of transcendental arguments they like to expand the definition of what counts as a transcendental argument And so a lot of what they'll point to as transcendental arguments are arguments we've already covered so i just wanted to throw that in there just in case you know that if there are transcendental arguments that i haven't i've looked into them very much so i just want to book note that fair enough uh okay

uh we have two ways of doing cumulative case arguments um transcendental arguments then we have arbor's Cumulative credence raiser argument the more independent arguments there are that p is true the higher ones creating should be that p is possibly true now obviously we're talking about arguments that aren't like invalid or have obviously false premises we're talking about arguments that rational people right so note that this argument isn't itself an argument for god's existence it's basically just you know noting that there are lots of other arguments that Allegedly are enough to justify belief that god possibly

exists so this isn't really an argument in its own right this doesn't itself contribute unless you're double counting your evidence this doesn't this argument doesn't itself count as an argument for god's existence that somehow raises the probability of god's existence that's one thing that we should know the second thing is that well of course we know which premise we're going to reject here Uh number two there are more than enough arguments for god's existence to justify belief that god possibly exists why why think that of course you're then you're just gonna go to those other

arguments of course so the justification for this premise is just parasitic on all these other arguments we've just considered and i've already responded to most of those some of them actually do provide evidence for god's existence i've argued but the vast Majority of them i would argue fail and can't accept so the more argument there are more than enough arguments for the conclusion god exists to justify belief that god possibly exists uh so for justifying believing god possibly exists we're just believing god exists so we're just finding god exists and of course what i would

say is uh the more independent arguments are that he is true the higher one's queen should be the is possibly true uh there are more Than enough arguments for god's non-existence to justify belief that god possibly doesn't exist and of course if we're justified in believing that god possibly doesn't exist we're justified in believing that god doesn't exist so we're just fine believing that god doesn't exist so again you just have the reverse kind of argument here and of course when we're talking about cumulative cases you also have to take Into account cumulative cases for

atheism and of course dr felipe leon philosopher who has actually written an amazing book with dr josh rasmussen is got the best explanation of things a dialogue i highly recommend checking out that book but anyway he has collected together a hundred or so arguments for atheism and a lot of these are published in you know like road rapers challenge et cetera et cetera et cetera whelenburg mites And so on lots of these are published by professional philosophers and professional books and so on other ones are so anyway uh this is felipe leon's list you could

check it out if you are interested it has a it has 110 arguments right now and it's constantly growing as new and new arguments are being published in literature and so on uh i threw that one in there at the end just uh my numbers were off and i wanted To get to a round number at one point so i just threw it in there hey look it's possible that there'd be a sound district argument uh but if it's possible to be a southeastern argument well god exists of course we could equally say it's possible

for there to be a sound atheistic argument if it's possible for there to be sound atheistic argument god doesn't exist so god doesn't exist did you make that up or what i was Inspired by some cheeky remarks in bruce's and rasmussen's book gotcha this video is already long enough what i want to say here is that many of the arguments that we've considered here are staggeringly weak some of them are demonstrably invalid yes you heard that right straight up invalid many had premises that are clearly and obviously false and still others were blatantly dialectically toothless

moreover boatloads of them weren't independent at All whole swaths whole families of arguments here suffered from the exact same problems that continually re-arose and re-arose and re-arose for instance many moral arguments are uniformly swept away for instance by non-theistic accounts of morality by higher order euthyphro problems by considerations of the intrinsicality of goodness and meaning and those sorts of things many cosmological arguments were uniformly swept away by for instance granting Stage one and adopting a naturalist friendly necessarily existent concrete foundation of reality the same is true with most of the ontological arguments again considerations of

symmetry arising there you time again considerations of dialectical toothlessness and question begging arising there the same is true with teleological arguments you had evolution arising time and again you had considerations of incompetent or evil design arising again and again and again Even if you don't think that these even if you don't think that some of these specific types of objections succeed the very fact that they can be leveled to whole boatloads of arguments to hold families of arguments shows that the arguments there are not independent of one another that all or most members of the

particular families rest on some of the exact same assumptions In which case they aren't truly independent of one another and i stress that like for even some of those plausible arguments in this list that was applying to them it applied to almost all the cosmological arguments that apply to almost all the moral arguments that apply to almost all the ontological arguments almost all the teleological arguments and so on so yeah that's one thing that i wanted to say concerning the independence of these Various arguments and concerning the fact that i think the vast majority of

them are quite implausible the second thing that i want to say is that of course you can generate a very huge list of arguments against theism and against christian theism specifically for instance we already went through felipe leon's list of over a hundred in particular 110 arguments just against generic theism now firstly that doesn't Even take into account lots of the arguments against classical theism specifically or against lots of these specific models of god there are going to be even lots more there and i advise you guys to check out my video arguments against classical

these in part one out of three again parts two out of three are going to be coming at some point in the future i don't know when and then there are going to be lots of specific arguments against christianity Focused on different theories of atonement different theories of providence different biblical old testament atrocity passages difficulties with the justice of eternal conscious torment and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on again you might be able to cook up 150 arguments for god's existence and or christianity but again you're going

to equally be able to cook up 150 and indeed arguably more against god's existence and Christianity the penultimate thing that i want to leave you with is opie's work concerning the nature and purpose of arguments of course i myself made a video with grand moppy the nature and purpose of arguments it was one of my earliest videos if only it could load wow look at the hair uh my hair was way too long here but anyway look at this stellar man okay it is called dr graham opie on the nature of arguments with existential inertia

as a bonus near the End so anyway wow over two hours of juiciness what a fun video but also i do want to briefly go over his article what derivations cannot do it's about the limitations of basically like chucking these sorts of theistic or even atheistic arguments at people so this is an article that he published in religious studies in 2015 entitled what derivations cannot do so he says there is much about contemporary philosophy of religion that Should change most importantly of course it should be philosophy of religion not merely philosophy of theism or christianity

or certain denominations of christianity here however he's going to complain about a fairly narrow aspect of contemporary philosophy religion but also this actually extends to philosophy more generally as we're going to see that really irks him it's obsession with derivations that have is their conclusion either the claim that god Exists or the claim that god does not exist so basically suppose that pro and khan are disputing about claim pro says that claim is true khan says the claim is false suppose further that pro believes all of p1 through pn and so on and claim as

well as q1 through qm and so on and that khan believes all of p1 pn not claim and not q1 through not qm and so on if pro prevents a derivation to khan with claim As its conclusion what conditions should this derivation satisfy if it is to constitute a worthwhile move in their disputation the derivations that pro might offer to khan are of two kinds first there are derivations in which the premises are all claims that khan accepts claims from among the p sub i and the not q sub j a proper derivation of claim

from premises among the p sub i and the not q sub j can create a serious problem for Khan after all on the one hand he believes not claim and on the other hand there is a derivation of claim from the other things that he believes unless the derivation is of a kind that only provides very weak support for conclusions given premises the derivation gives khan a reason to reconsider his beliefs second there are derivations in which one or more of the premises is a claim that pro accepts and khan rejects one or More of

the premises is among the q sub j in this case even if there is a proper derivation of claim from these premises the derivation creates no problem for khan after all pro and khan both already know from the fact that they disagree about claim that you can derive a contradiction if you put together claims that pro believes with claims that khan believes it is absurd to claim that the Derivation of claim from claim constitutes a worthwhile move to make in disputation about claim it is no less absurd to claim that putting forward a derivation of

claim with one or more of the q sub j among its premises is a worthwhile move for pro to make in the case of pro and con then the only kinds of derivations which have either claim or not claim as their conclusion that constitute worthwhile contributions to their dispute about claim are Reductios derivations which establish a conflict between beliefs including either claim or not claim all of which are held by one of the parties to the dispute the first step to take prior to setting out a derivation with either claim or not claim as its

conclusion is to establish that your opponent believes all of the premises that figure in the derivation that you are tempted to give if your opponent fails to believe one or More of those premises then there's no useful purpose that is served by your proceeding to give that derivation true enough if there are premises in your derivation that your opponent has not previously considered then you are giving the derivation might lead your opponent to consider and then accept those premises and then after accepting those premises your derivation will establish that your opponent has some cognitive work

to do But in the first instance all that is required is that you present the premises in question to your opponent giving the derivation is surplus to requirement if either a your opponent fails to accept the premises when they are presented or b your opponent is able to discern the implication of acceptance of the premises without being presented with the derivation from the standpoint of philosophy what we are really interested in are best Theories that include the claims of interest claim and not claim respectively if we have a derivation that establishes or even that merely

appears to establish the best theory that includes not claim is or more strongly that all best theories that include not claim are subject to reductio then we have a derivation with not claim as conclusion that is worthy of serious philosophical attention moreover it is only if we have a Derivation that establishes or even that merely appears to establish that a best theory that includes not claim is or more strongly that all best theories that include not claim are subject to reductio then we have a derivation with not claim as conclusion that is worthy of serious

philosophical attention suppose that claim is a claim about which there is widespread disagreement amongst philosophers how might a derivation with Either claim or not claim as its conclusion make a contribution to this dispute i suggest that we should think about this matter in the following terms at the outset we should try as hard as we can to frame best theories that embed both claim and not claim in particular we should produce best theories that are worked out to the same level of detail that try to cover the same range of data and so forth once

we have our best theories t subclaim and t sub not claim There's a two stage assessment process first you consider whether either theory can be defeated on internal grounds that is we consider whether it's vulnerable to reductio and second if our best theories survive internal scrutiny then we can turn to comparative assessment of the theoretical virtues of our best theories which scores best on the proper weighting of simplicity fit with data explanatory scope predictive accuracy and so forth in this part of theory Assessment there is obviously no proper role for derivation with either claim or

not claim as its conclusion right i mean think about it if you're trying to present a derivation with not claim as your conclusion and your opponent accepts a theory according to which claim is true well given that your opponent has an internally consistent theory it's going to follow that they're simply going to reject one of the premises in your Derivation assuming of course that your derivation is valid because of course your derivation takes you validly to not claim and we already know that the opposite of that is included in the other person's theory and so

if the person accepting the theory with claim accepted all of the premises in the derivation to not claim but fail to accept not claim well then their theory would actually be inconsistent after all and hence if We're supposing that the theory is consistent it simply follows that they're just going to reject outright one of the premises in your derivation in which case your derivation can't do anything to move them to accept your position you've literally just presented them an argument one of whose premises is something that they simply flatly reject and of course merely presenting

them a premise it doesn't give them any reason To accept the premise what you have to do is appeal to things that they already accept and show that they are committed to something that they don't already accept if you're not able to do that say because their theory actually is internally consistent well then the only option left really is to compare the relevant theoretical virtues of the two theories which embed claim and not claim otherwise you're just gonna be stuck on an infinite loop of trying to present Them with arguments upon arguments each of which

is such that it just has a premise that the other person flatly rejects and if if of course they flatly reject it you make no headway in the dispute by simply offering it as a premise you could of course try to offer a further sub-argument for that but again assuming that the theory is internally consistent it simply follows that they're going to reject one of those further premises in that argument So again even appealing to a sub-argument for the premise won't work because so long as their theory is internally consistent they're just going to reject

one of the premises now you might of course try to give a sub-sub-argument for that premise but you can see where we're going what this shows is that you should either be presenting them with a productio with premises all of which they accept but a conclusion that they Reject or else you should be comparing the relevant theoretical virtues of the theories any other argument is going to be powerless to move them it's going to be dialectically toothless of course it might serve some sort of purpose by at least clarifying the relations between certain premises and

conclusions and so on but it's going to be utterly dialectically powerless that is it's going to be powerless to give the other Person any reason to abandon their view and come to accept your view anyway that's what i wanted to cover with respect to this article i highly recommend that you check it out it talks about the limitations of just kind of presenting or as the case may be flinging arguments at people in rounding off this video what i really think is we should have a kind of call to epistemic humility here or perhaps even

agnosticism there are hundreds of books And articles for basically every single argument in the atheist case and for basically every single argument in the theist case instead of thinking that you've solved one of the hardest problems that has been plaguing humanity for thousands upon thousands of years perhaps you should at least dial down your confidence a little bit and recognize that some of the arguments that you find convincing whether you're a theist or an Atheist have been criticized by some of the world's leading minds and have been criticized in reputable scholarly peer-reviewed books articles and

so on so if anything my video here is a greater call to epistemic humility and of course just as exhibiting the various intellectual virtues is important it's also important that my video has served you at the very least i hope that it has served you thank you for Listening this far again if you've enjoyed this video if you enjoyed my content please consider supporting me on patreon i'm a lowly college student so any contribution really does help and of course please subscribe turn that little bell for notifications and share share this video with your friends

share this share this with anyone share it on tick tock snapchat twitter linkedin instagram facebook only fans anyway what better way to end Is there then i'm joe schmidt this is the majesty of reason and peace out [Music]