See reply.

https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-best-argument-for-god

Serious question, BTW. I am very interested in hearing your response to this. Just make sure that you properly understand this argument before you respond to it.

You make a lot of claims here, but never present any evidence for any of them.

By contrast, in this article you are commenting on I presented evidence for every single one of my claims, and spelled out the inviolable logic by which that evidence implies each conclusion I reach.

That is the difference between us.

Someday you might wake up and realize why that difference matters.

Meanwhile, since you end up sounding disturbingly sociopathic in your thinking here, maybe it will help if you catch up on the actual reasons people should not act like wanton murderers.

All you are doing is unveiling your biases in every argument you propose. You are operating in a world of presuppositions that fit your understanding of reality. None of your arguments against God are sound or convincing in the slightest. Rhetoric and so called probability for a statements validity does not probe anything. How do you test your truth claims? Just because you espouse something as true doesn’t make it so. Just because a moral society is better than an amoral society doesn’t make a bit of difference if there is no absolute standard to base things on. Without an absolute standard of goodness and pure morality there is and will only ever be preference. Is someone was to find it completely acceptable to come up to you and shoot you in the chest would that be wrong? If so, based on what? Your preference to not be shot in the chest? Just because its illegal to shoot someone in ill will doesnt make it morally wrong, it is simply illegal. Morality is an intrinsic aspect of our being. It is not a social construct. If it is what right does anyone have to suppress my desires and autonomy? Appealing to the “common good” and a “peaceful society” is simply announcing your preferences. Your preferences mean nothing if they have no absolute good and perfect basis for why they should apply to someone else. Preferences are not binding, just because societal norms include established systems of justice and models for sociological flourishing, doesn’t necessarily mean they are inherently superior to other forms in other cultures. Self preservation isn’t a virtue it’s simply selfishness masquerading in various forms such as “the greater good”. You aren’t concerned about “the greater good” unless you are first concerned about yourself. If society breaks down into anarchy all of your atheistic rhetoric and faith will not care about “the common good” you will care about you and you alone. You fight against the idea of God because you don’t want to be accountable to anyone other than yourself and your preferences. For a being that doesn’t exist you spend an awful amount of time trying to refute His existence. Your commitment to disproving God simply highlights the sway He holds over you. You cannot hide from Him and no matter how much you try to erase Him you will still have to give an account of your actions and words to Him. If there is no final reckoning after death for everyone then again why would it be wrong for someone to come up to you and shoot you in the chest?

Thank you. This is super helpful. Doing some of the work for me encourages me to give some work for you back. So kudos.

(1)

The DPA as you formulate it is an equivocation fallacy. No one defines “God” as “a mind.” If we did, we’d all be polytheists who believe in 7 billion gods, who actually visibly live here on earth, and we would believe we are gods ourselves. So I suspect they intended to somehow specify something other than just “a mind” did it; and I don’t see how you can get the argument then to work. We ourselves will be creating digital universes. Are we therefore gods? Not in any sense relevant to their debate. So I see no value in that argument. You can’t claim Christianity is true if Jesus is just a fabricated simulation some fallible corporate lab team somewhere else made up to fool us. It’s also not likely we are in a sim.

(2)

For the CCA, Premise 2 is false. That is a hypothesis never proved and competing with numerous other hypotheses actual physicists consider far more likely. Almost no actual physicists believe QM operates because of consciousness. They pretty much all agree the universe existed and continued operating for billions of years before any consciousness observed it, and that therefore it could continue doing so again. It is a common amateur mistake to confuse “interventions collapse quantum states” with “only conscious interventions collapse quantum states.” The evidence doesn’t support the latter; while it supports the former more than amply. Any macro-system, conscious or not, can interfere in a quantum superposition and cause it to collapse; and that’s even if you think quantum collapse is really a thing, and many physicists do not. So, since Premise 2 is not established, neither can conclusion 6 be established using premise 2.

(3)

We could stop there. But it gets worse, so let’s keep going.

Time is most likely a simultaneous manifold, such that it does not require a mind to predate the manifold (in fact, that’s logically impossible; if you exist at no time, you by definition do not exist; so only a consciousness located inside the manifold can cause its wave function collapse into a real world).

In other words, on even the most parapsychological theory of QM, where conscious observation is required to collapse a wave function, any future observation can collapse the past wave function. This is in fact the entire finding of EPR experiments: that a future change of state in a detector can “cause” the emergence of a past state at the emitter. So, if the universe had to be observed to exist, any future observation of it will do, because all time is simultaneous from a POV outside it (see my article on B Theory). In other words, QM already explains why and how a universe can, in fact, observe itself. This is why you will never hear an argument like the CCA from an actual physicist. Actual physicists will know it’s confused and scientifically illiterate.

This fallacy seems pronounced at premise 3. Now, that premise seems redundant. As you’ve written it, you have not presented a valid syllogism. For instance, there is no premise that establishes “The natural universe cannot be the explanation of contingent minds.” Neither premise 1 nor 2 as written express a valid major premise to that effect. But I assume the intention was to get from them to three by some interpolated major premise, like “if QM entails the natural universe can only emerge from information processing in consciousness, then consciousness cannot emerge from a pre-existent natural universe,” but that premise would be false, as that gets at what I just pointed out: in fact, in QM, that chronological assumption no longer exists; QM fully allows future emergent minds to collapse past states of the universe, because the wave function is atemporal. It is not like the wave function for the whole universe just sits statically un-collapsed for fifteen billion years and then “suddenly” collapses. If the wave function already contained the emergence of a consciousness, that fact alone will instantaneously collapse the entire wave function for all fifteen billion years. Thus, no god is needed. Just us.

That would follow on parapsychological quantum theories; but as I noted, almost no physicists today buy into such theories, and none have ever presented any evidence in its favor at all, much less confirmed it by a sufficient body of evidence to declare it a scientific fact. Premise 2 just isn’t known, nor even likely, on any current physics consensus.

(4)

One could also question, of course, how one gets from “an eternal mind exists that observed the universe into existence” to “that mind has all the properties and traits assumed of the Christian God” (see The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism) but that’s a folly of all cosmological arguments: they never actually make even traditional theism plausible, much less any standard form of Christian theism. See John Loftus’s chapter “Christianity Is Wildly Improbable” in The End of Christianity. It’s a bootstrap fallacy to leap without premise from a highly obscure quantum mechanical deism (or indeed even pantheism), to any existing religious belief today.

(5)

To tie this all in to the thesis of Bayesian Counter-Apologetics: these arguments operate with the same trick all apologetics for gods do, by omitting evidence that, when reinserted, reverses the conclusion.

When we put back in the fact that standard QM actually explains back-causation of wave-collapse, it actually becomes evidence against God; because only a world without a god would require such a peculiar feature. If God really existed, he would not make a QM world. You have to “invent excuses” for him to have done so, over all other possible options (and if we accept the standard theist’s definition of God, those options must be darned near infinite, not constrained as if by magic to this one single way of doing it, the one way that looks like no God exists). And every excuse you invent is going to be improbable; even at best, 50/50, which cuts the probability of God in half; exactly the opposite of increasing it.

And if you reject atemporal wave collapse, you are either introducing facts not in evidence, reducing the probability of your conclusion again, or you are embracing existing quantum theories that, by lacking wave collapse as a function, no longer operate by conscious observation at all. Even most wave collapse theories don’t involve that function. So the CCA is more like young earth creationism than any sophisticated argument for god: it fails right out of the gate, by making false claims about the science.

The DPA likewise is more an argument against the existence of God than for it; because a real God, certainly a real Christian God, would never allow fallible creatures to create a fake Jesus to fool us with in a fake universe that God himself didn’t make. That’s more like the heresy of Demiurge theory than anything else. It looks more like a convoluted paganism with a woefully handicapped and incapable God at its core. Rather, if we were in a sim, that would in itself be evidence against the Christian God, and not evidence either way for some obscure indifferent god many steps removed, who neither created our universe nor governs it. When your entire argument depends on imagining a completely alien universe (the one the “design team” exists in and runs our sim from) whose properties and contents we’ve never observed, all arguments from god go out the window. After all, how can you claim that universe was finely tuned? Or not past-eternal? Or lacks clear evidence of spontaneous random creation? You have zero evidence on which to base any such claims; which means, even less evidence than you purport to base them on for this universe.

So these are really just ridiculous, poorly informed, and illogical attempts at rationalizing a belief system. Not arguments worth anyone’s time considering.

Digital Physics Argument
1. Emergent universes exist either in a computer or in a mind
2. The universe is an emergent universe
3. An emergent universe on a computer still must ultimately emerge from a mind
4. Therefore, the universe is emergent from a mind (from 2 and 3)
5. This mind is what we call God
6. Therefore, God exists

Cosmic Conscious Argument
1. Contingent minds either have a personal explanation or a natural explanation
2. Quantum mechanics and other fields of science imply the natural universe is emergent from information processing in consciousness
3. The natural universe cannot be the explanation of contingent minds
4. The explanation of the existence of conscious minds is personal (from 1 and 2)
5. This personal source is what we call God
6. Therefore, God exists

IP tries to justify the premises with science he presents in the debate, which is why I linked it. I didn’t mean to waste your time. Hopefully this article is more relevant.

I think your observation is correct. The OA is mostly a Christian ivory tower obsession. It rarely plays a role in mission work or popular control beliefs. But many a major Christian apologist defends some version of it (Craig, Plantinga, etc.). It remains popular as such; that is, it is everywhere promoted, and frequently listed as one of the top arguments, but usually in practice ignored. I suspect it is being crowded out by (pseudo-)science-based arguments, because science holds prestige and intelligibility in a way Medieval armchair semantics no longer does.

Although I’m still wondering about the Ontological Argument. From my personal experience, it’s not really used that much in philosophical discussion. It doesn’t seem to be used AT ALL outside of such discussions.

What I mean is, there is no ‘lay’ or ‘colloquial’ version of it, like there is for the other 3 (in the form of “why is there something rather than nothing?”, “Look at the trees”, and “where do you get your morals from?”). It of course doesn’t help that the argument is terrible and somewhat convoluted, even more so than the other 3 IMO.

My question is, is the Ontological Argument really as popular as you say it is?

I don’t know how commonly used such terminology is or ever was. It’s “descriptively” true, in that, maybe the person who told you that made up that phrase on their own (or got it from some apologetics textbook somewhere) simply to indicate that what they were about to tell you are indeed the four most standard arguments for God, going back centuries at least. You’ll see in the article here you are commenting on, all four are present, if under more typical labels used today:

• Ontological Arguments
• Cosmological Arguments
• Teleological (i.e. Design) Arguments
• Moral Arguments

The other six arguments I list are decreasingly commonplace. It would be accurate to say the four just listed are the “top” arguments relied upon, although versions of all eleven can be found quite anciently so there isn’t an easy case to make that being “classical” can mean being “oldest” (much less “originating in Classical Greece” or something like that).

When I was first introduced to philosophy, particularly the philosophy of religion, I was introduced to what I heard referred to as the “Four Classical Arguments for God’s Existence”. These arguments being the Cosmological, Ontological, Teleological and Moral Arguments. But recently I tried actually Googling this term to learn more about its history. However I got barely any results talking about these four.

My question is: is this term even used that much in philosophical/theological circles? If so, why are they called “classical” arguments? I thought I’d ask you since you’re well-versed in the history of philosophy.

Thanks in advance.