I’ve been asked to assess a bizarre argument for God published recently in Metaphysica (“Proving God without Dualism: Improving the Swinburne-Moreland Argument from Consciousness,” by Ward Blondé and Ludger Jansen, March 2021). I have already rather conclusively refuted the so-called Argument from Consciousness for the existence of a god. But do Blondé and Jansen offer anything new to consider? They aim to make their argument without the crucial step of presuming disembodied souls, claiming instead that even if mind-brain physicalism is true, it is still the case that some sort of God is a more probable explanation of it. Which is certainly a novel approach. And their paper does a useful job of explaining why the traditional Argument from Consciousness (particularly but not only as articulated by Christian apologists Richard Swinburne and J.P. Moreland) doesn’t work.

Their treatment does drop the ball at the end of their section on problems with the traditional argument, however, when they confuse Bostrom-style computational consciousness arguments for nonphysicalist theories during their survey of the full range of available alternatives to theism; they should have discussed theories of emergent supernaturalism at that point instead. For example, even if minds are (or require?) “souls” in some supernatural sense, they could be physically generated and caused to exist by brains, and thus no intelligent engineer is required to explain their existence—and indeed the enormous imperfections and largely ad hoc and bad design of these “souls” would, as I have pointed out already, strongly argue for that alternative, and thus against theism as an explanation. Of course physicalism already carries a far higher empirically-established prior probability as an emergentist explanation of consciousness, so such silly ideas about emergent magical souls are wholly unnecessary (and not even logically plausible). But the reasons both these ideas still prevail over theism are the same: theism is simply explanatorily useless in the face of the actual facts of consciousness. And indeed, this is actually where the Blondé-Jansen argument also collapses into ruin.

This is actually typical of god-apologetics: it completely ignores all pertinent science, asks a bunch of “How do you explain that?” questions that in fact have already been answered by science, and then moves from that motivated declaration of ignorance, exploiting the comparable ignorance of their audience, to “dupe” themselves and their audience into thinking only “their” completely bonkers pseudoscientific explanation can answer the question they just asked (never mind that it has already been answered, and without their completely bonkers pseudoscientific explanation). At best they might instead find genuine gaps in scientific knowledge (such as they identify as the Hard Problem of consciousness) and deploy a God of the Gaps fallacy on that instead, but that’s just as scientifically illiterate. Because vast evidence confirms that explanatory gaps never get filled with the supernatural and have consistently been filled by natural (indeed wholly physical) causes, thousands and thousands of times across hundreds and hundreds of years. They are betting on the wrong horse. And fooling themselves into thinking “this time it might win!” And then, even worse, they propose no test whatever by which to even run their chosen horse in the race (and like any race: you can’t win if you never run). That’s apologetic methodology in a nutshell.

And that is here in full display. Which is how we know most philosophy is garbage: philosophy journals have no discernible standards by which to reject fallacies and pseudoscience. They will publish any bullshit with coherent sentences, a relevant bibliography, and nice formatting. Truth, logic, facts? Not a concern.

The Science

For example, Blondé and Jansen ask the stupid questions (gullibly assuming, I will charitably assume, that Richard Swinburne actually knows what he is talking about—pro tip: he does not):

How can it be explained that the mind of the first person remains correlated with a brain (or a part of a brain) that changes over time both in its internal structure and in its relations to other brains (or brain parts)? What decides, in this situation, which elementary brain components (such as brain cells) are experienced (or correlated with experience) and which remain unexperienced for the first person?

Blondé & Jansen, “Proving God,” p. 4

Um. The brain decides. It’s a computer. It evolved specifically to make decisions like this. We already know this. It’s established science. This is one of those things even Blondé and Jansen identify as the “easy problems” of consciousness (p. 3; no, seriously, they even list this among those easy problems, evidently unaware of what their own words mean: “the integration of information by a cognitive system, the reportability of mental states, the focus of attention, and the deliberate control of behaviour”). Strangely they cite several good summaries of the philosophy of consciousness that explain this, which contain bibliographies full of further detail; they clearly did not read any of this, or in fact any pertinent science whatever. This practice should be banned from academic philosophy journals. Philosophers should be required to not only address the actual science, but correctly describe it, before asserting any premises regarding matters of fact. No paper should ever pass peer review that does not. But this is not, alas, any standard philosophy has adopted. Hence, garbage. (Oh, it gets worse. Wait for it.)

Here is the current empirical state of cognitive science (consult any current-edition college textbook on the subject):

First-person consciousness is a construct. Much of it is illusory and invented; the brain “guesses” at what is going on inside and outside of it, and chooses to “represent” that in various ways. For example, most of your visual field is not what you are seeing, but what your brain, out of computational economy, “assumes” you are seeing, relying on previous imprints of familiar data. Because your first-person experience is a construct, it is the computational circuitry in your brain that is deciding what to include in that construct: in some cases out of economy, e.g. our brains evolved to not waste energy and time on increasingly unnecessary processing, in other cases out of necessity, e.g. our brains simply can’t integrate all of its computational contents in the first-person model it builds. For instance, it simply would be dysfunctional to attempt to be conscious of all your memories and feelings and thoughts across your entire whole life at once. So our brain is selective: it makes decisions about what information to integrate into an ongoing model, and what to leave out. Most gets left out, because consciousness wouldn’t work otherwise—as in, it would provide no evolutionary advantage to be selected for and thus even exist now. Our brain does this both for modeling a first-person awareness of an external world, and for modeling a first-person awareness of oneself. In other words, your consciousness of yourself is also a construct. And it is built using the same brain-driven computational decisions of economy, evolved utility, and practical limitations. (And the model of the self indeed changes as the self changes—because it is a scientific fact that people change over time, as they learn, rethink things, acquire skills, and shift in their beliefs, interests, and personality; identity is a property of a unique causal history, not a “stagnant absence of change.”)

Anyone who knows this would know we already have sufficient answers to Swinburne’s questions and therefore those questions are simply ignorant—not insightful—and therefore have no place driving the argument of a published paper. And pretty much any cognitive scientist on Earth knows all this; which is why they, or a philosopher well enough versed in their science, should be mandatory peer reviewers of any paper purporting to make claims about their science. That would prevent ignorant pseudoscience like this ever getting published and making a mockery of the entire field of philosophy. But instead, we get this. Sigh.

Instead, Blondé and Jansen cite Swinburne claiming that “only a soul can determine to which physical brain components a person remains correlated through time.” But that’s false. Computers can make correlation decisions like that. And the brain is a computer that does that. And science well establishes this as a fact. So Swinburne’s declaration is just ignorant whackadoo pseudoscience. It should not be publishable in any respectable academic field. And it is to their discredit that Blondé and Jansen do not even know this. They make no arguments against Swinburne’s nonsense other than to argue it relies “problematically” on thought experiments. No. It relies problematically on completely ignoring all the relevant science pertaining to the very processes he is attempting to explain. That’s what makes it pseudoscience. Claptrap, in the popular parlance.

The Blondé-Jansen Turn

Because Blondé and Jansen confess Swinburne’s argument leaves them too much in the weeds, they propose an alternative way to frame his argument, which they call “the exceptional-point-of-view problem.” This is different, they say, from “the single-point-of-view problem,” which they identify as the qualitative nature of subjective experience. They don’t know this apparently, but science has almost completely explained this already as a constructed computational model; e.g. per Daniel Dennett (rather than recent Integrated Information Theory), it is simply logically impossible to process information this way and not experience it in the way we do (in other words, the philosophical zombies that Blondé and Jansen mention are logically impossible). The only gaps left here are in connecting specific neural circuits to specific qualia, and thus generating a predictive causal model of qualia generation; but all evidence strongly indicates the answer will be physical and not supernatural (least of all intelligently engineered). There is zero case to be made otherwise. Likewise, Blondé and Jansen distinguish their “problem” from what they call “the specific-point-of-view problem,” which is, basically, that it is impossible to experience life as someone else (much less some other species, like “a bat”), which requires no explanation, because it follows automatically from physicalist theories of consciousness: the only way to experience exactly the same things is to be exactly the same computer, and thus you would have to be a bat to know what it was like to be one. That this is the case is therefore no mystery; it’s a predictive outcome of mind-brain physicalism.

Blondé and Jansen do not indicate exactly why they are moving past those two problems (least of all that the reason is because science has already solved the second one and has already solved the first one to enough of a degree to assure us no soul will likely be needed to complete any theory consciousness). But move past them they do, on to their “exceptional-point-of-view problem,” which they identify with the question, “How can it be explained that there is a first person who is lucky enough to experience the point of view of a relatively tiny, intelligent brain amidst a giant universe that is indifferent about which physical entities it brings about according to the laws of physics?” This is another non-mystery; this already follows necessarily as an inevitable predicted outcome of evolutionary mind-brain physicalism: the first-person is explained by computational modeling (and lo and behold, all empirical evidence confirms there is a complex model-building computer inside our skull), the luck is explained by evolution by natural selection in a vast randomizer (and lo and behold, all empirical evidence confirms that that computer is the product of billions of years of evolution by natural selection in the vast randomizer that is the whole known cosmos), and both of those facts explain in turn why (a) we are so tiny and limited and (b) the rest of the cosmos is so giant and indifferent. There is no need here for any further explanatory epicycle. God just doesn’t factor in. “We have no need of that hypothesis.”

Ignorant of all these scientific facts, Blondé and Jansen foolishly claim “it is far from clear how this first-person experience can be incorporated into an ‘objective’ physicalist worldview.” If they knew any of the relevant science, they would know it is actually quite reasonably clear how first-person experience probably arises in an objective physicalist world: computers are physical machines that can produce computational models; first-person experience is a computational model; human brains are model-building computers that evolved by natural selection over billions of years from extremely simple computers (e.g. bacteria) to gradually ever-more-complex biological computers (from the brains of worms and fish, to lizards and mice, to cats and monkeys, to apes and humans). Evidence that the computers in other animals also engage in similar environmental model-building is extensive, as also for the fact that their sophistication at it increased over time in direct correlation to the increased complexity of the biological computers carrying it out. Evidence that human self-awareness is just another model, one now derived by turning attention inward toward the brain’s own activity rather than the external environment, is extensive. And transitional species are observed: e.g. monkeys exhibit meta-cognition, which means they were already developing the ability to model other minds (and connect those models to things going on in their own minds), before evolving the more sophisticated capacity to model their own mind in a fully integrated way, thereby developing a coherent and continuous self-model. That ability first evolved in a variety of primates called hominins of which we are the last surviving species. What is unclear about any of this?

And Then To the Batshit Crazy

So, they display nothing but ignorance of all the science. And then, out of the blue, Blondé and Jansen declare “the world is predominated by intelligent matter with respect to sheer mass” and “the existence of God is the best explanation for our living in such an intelligence-dominated world.” This is full-on bonkers. Like, literally psychotic. Sure, if the majority of matter in the universe were intelligent (if we were having intelligible, actual, two-way conversations with stars and black holes and interstellar dust and the earth and trees and every rock we stumble across), then I might be leaning toward a god hypothesis too (given the right epistemic conditions, e.g. I’ve ruled out alternatives to a reasonable degree). But only an actual lunatic would believe we were having intelligible, actual, two-way conversations with stars and black holes and interstellar dust and the earth and trees and every rock we stumble across. So how do these god-apologists get from that is not even at all true to “this is an established premise”?

With some semantic trickery, and fallacious logic. First they define “intelligent matter” as “physical, spatiotemporal matter that is correlated with an intelligent mind,” and they give as examples human minds and (hypothetical) sentient microchip-based computers. And when they say “predominated” they do indeed mean “more than 50 percent of the world’s matter is intelligent matter” (that’s a direct quote). So they really do assert most of the matter in the universe actually consists of intelligent beings! This would of course be one of the most incredible, Nobel-prize winning discoveries of science in the whole of human history, so if they had any evidence for this, we should expect them to be publishing this claim in a science journal—instead of a philosophy journal happy to publish full-on pseudoscientific poppycock. But alas. They dodge this by pulling a bait-and-switch later on, changing what they mean by “intelligent matter” several pages later, after producing some hilariously bogus math.

Okay. So, you might ask, what possible evidence do they have for this absurdity? (Their paper’s peer reviewers, we should hope, should believe evidence is a required component of any fact-claim, particularly one so extraordinary.) The answer is: none. They present no evidence for this. They admit that on current science most mass by far is not intelligent, and thus as presently observed facts establish, their premise is blatantly false. In lieu of “evidence” they try a bizarre fallacy-laden speculation instead. It goes like this…

And on to Gobsmacking Incompetence

Blondé and Jansen reassert their scientific ignorance by insisting, “The observation that we experience the conscious activity of some particular intelligent brain reveals an unexplained choice that has been made in the otherwise objective, naturalistic worldview.” This is false. In any vast randomizer of sufficient randomized complexity, such a choice is statistically inevitable. This is provably the case. Biogenesis in any universe capable of randomly assembling sequences of chemically active matter has a probability of ~100% given enough time, space, and matter (and lo and behold, we observe we are in just such a universe—which is in turn also 100% expected, as there is nowhere else we could be if there is no God, yet this is actually the last place we should be if there is). And given enough time in its own locus (billions of years being more than sufficient, as, lo and behold, we have indeed had here on Earth), such life will evolve cognitive self-model-building computers eventually, again by statistical inevitability, as natural selection is the product of inevitable, unstoppable physics, and proceeds extremely fast owing to basic geometric progression inherent in the very phenomenon of reproduction (making it solely a question of how long it will take; not whether it will get there, given that span of time).

So when they ask, “How should we determine the probability that this choice has been made in favour of some intelligent brain?” the answer is simple: in any purely physical universe of sufficient size, age, and content, the probability always approaches 100%. There is literally no way to stop it. One can only quibble over how long it will take. And that’s that. Since Blondé and Jansen do not present a fine-tuning argument, i.e. they never argue it is improbable on any scientific naturalism that a purely physical universe of such kind would exist, they simply have no coherent argument against naturalism here. What they do instead is use completely the wrong math to calculate the probability of intelligent observers in any given universe or multiverse: “we use the ratio of the mass of a physical entity versus the mass of the world…as the measure of the probability of [that world] being experienced.” This is so outrageously math illiterate I cannot honesty understand how this paper passed peer review here. I can only assume their peer reviewers were just as ignorant of math as Blondé and Jansen. Which means philosophy truly is a bankrupt field with no credible standards.

It is simply not the case that the probability of a system producing an intelligent observer equals the ratio of the amount of matter in that system that is intelligent and that is not. This is a jaw-droppingly incompetent proposal. It would be like saying the probability that my computer can run a spreadsheet equals the ratio of the mass of my computer’s microcircuits and all the rest of the mass of my computer (housing, power supply, cooling system, display, a/v components, wireless transceivers, desk stand, power cord). Gosh, that ratio is like thousands or even millions to one against! It must be impossible for my computer to run spreadsheets! How does such idiocy get into a respectable journal? Sane minds want to know. The actual, correct procedure is to calculate the probability of the required assembly (which in this case means, for us, a chunk of sequenced DNA; and for any intelligence whatever, the sum of all causally comparable structures that could arise or evolve, here or on other planets or moons), given the causal forces operating on its assembly (e.g. biogenesis and natural selection) and the number of “tries” (how many times random molecular assemblies arise over the available time and space, and how many subsequent reproductions per unit time selection forces get to act upon). Blondé and Jansen don’t even know you are supposed to do this; that’s how ignorant they are. They are therefore not only profoundly science illiterate, they are profoundly math illiterate. As were, we now know, their paper’s peer reviewers. Metaphysica is thus proved to be a junk journal with no meaningful standards.

So when they conclude that therefore “naturalism fails to explain statistically the first-person experience of an intelligent consciousness,” we have to wonder if this is a satire. Are they testing the incompetence of Metaphysica’s editors and reviewers with a deliberately joke argument? Because if not, both they and those editors and reviewers are among the most incompetent people on the planet (not counting children and the mentally disabled…and people in comas). In actual fact the probability of this universe producing an intelligent observer by physics alone can be calculated to be approximately 100% owing to the available tries and the empirically known (and entirely mindless) causal forces. Likewise the probability that intelligence would constitute only the most minuscule fraction of the universe’s matter is also approximately 100%. Because one thing Blondé and Jansen are right about: “if we live[d] in a world in which most of the mass [was] correlated to some intelligent mind” then the probability would be low that mere indifferent physics was the cause of that observation. And this is how real math works: if P(majority-intelligent|indifferent-physics) is, say, 0.001, then it is mathematically necessarily the case that P(~majority-intelligent|indifferent-physics) is 1 – P(majority-intelligent|indifferent-physics), which is 1 – 0.001, which equals 0.999. Their own proposition entails it is 99.9% likely that if all there is is indifferent physics, we should observe the universe’s contents to not be “majority intelligent.” Lo and behold, that is exactly what we observe. Therefore, their own proposition proves naturalism is a better explanation of the observed facts! Because gods have no need of any of this wastage (billions of almost entirely lifeless years, trillions of almost entirely lifeless galaxies, and the whole of everything almost entirely a lifeless vacuum, as well as millions and millions of years of the slow evolving of a fragile and fallible physical brain), so it is not very probable that this is how an actual God would go about producing us. Certainly it’s not 99.9% expected!

Correct math, therefore, gets exactly the opposite conclusion. Welcome to god-apologetics. Blondé and Jansen conclude “it is rational to believe that we live in a world that is predominated by intelligent matter” (sic), not because there is any evidence of that (in fact we observe ourselves to be in a world that is almost entirely not intelligent matter, so in fact they are rejecting all empirical evidence whatever), but because, analogously, the ratio of my computer chip’s mass to the mass of the rest of my computer equals how likely my computer can compute anything, therefore the rest of my computer must “secretly” be composed of functioning microchips, even though all evidence confirms otherwise. This is their argument. And it’s not only illogical, it’s batshit crazy.

And Then Down the Rabbit Hole

Okay. Now that they have convinced themselves most of the matter in the universe must consist of intelligent beings… (And yes, that is what they just did. At this point it is my moral duty to tell you that if you Paypal me $500 with a delivery address, I’ll send you a personally-signed tinfoil hat that will protect you from most of those invisible beings. Guaranteed.) …they proceed to argue for how this universe is full of all those beings. Actually, they forget what they just proved, and only think to contemplate from here on how the universe could consist of mostly just one intelligent being (they never explain why that’s the only scenario they consider). Maybe, they suggest, “the whole world consists of one large, physical, intelligent brain, and nothing else,” but now, suddenly, they rediscover empiricism and point out that “this model has no resemblance to our empirical world,” and so our world must be a computer simulation (even Nick Bostrom is face-palming at this point). Of course, this would mean God does not exist; except as a fallible, material, manifestly evil supercomputer. Needless to say, Blondé and Jansen gloss right over that, and skip right to, instead, “God.”

“God,” they propose, “not only creates but also governs and guides the world” and therefore “the whole world is correlated with God’s infinite mind” and “thus all the matter in the world is correlated with an intelligent mind and is thus intelligent matter.” Oh. Dear. Me. How this fallacy passed peer review is even more peplexing than the pseudoscience and bonkers math. Philosophers are supposed to at least be good at logic, right? I hope I don’t have to explain why what they just wrote is a non sequitur. But I’ll take the trouble anyway. If God consists of no mass (as they just proposed), and just makes and uses mass as his tools (like we do), then still by far most of the mass that exists is not intelligent. They have just described a world in which almost all matter is non-intelligent! Exactly the opposite of what they purport. Here they are acting like someone arguing that my hammer and the desk I made are all intelligent beings, because “I” made and use them and therefore they “correlate” with an intelligent mind. Um. That is not what being intelligent means. My hammer and desk are not intelligent beings. Blondé and Jansen have descended into nonsense at this point.

This hardly matters, though, since even with this new covert definition of what counts as intelligent (where everything used or made by an intelligence is “intelligent”), their math still doesn’t lead to their conclusion that most of the universe must “correlate with intelligence.” Because what they tried to calculate was the probability that there would be intelligence, not that all the matter in the universe would be in the employ of an intelligence. And (as I just showed in the previous section) they didn’t use any math capable of calculating either. The probability that everything in the universe is in the employ of an intelligence is not the probability of there being an intelligence in the universe; and the probability of there being an intelligence in the universe is not the probability that any particular clump of matter in the universe is intelligent. These are both outrageously fallacious non sequiturs—bordering, frankly, on idiocy.

They go on to propose maybe “the world [itself] is an intelligent being” and “matter itself could be intelligent,” but again neither hypothesis bears any prior or posterior probability. There is simply no evidence for either, and ample evidence against both. Ironically, now they rediscover logic and reject these hypotheses on the grounds that on their definition “we need to claim that all elementary particles…do not only have (proto-)mental properties, but are in fact intelligent,” a conclusion they conveniently “forgot” when describing their God hypothesis, where it is not the case that every clump of matter God made and controls “is in fact intelligent.” So, it’s okay for matter to be wholly unintelligent, as long as some intelligence controls it all; and somehow (?) this makes it unlikely that a universe full of unintelligent matter and a scattering of incidentally caused intelligences could exist because…the ratio of the unintelligent matter and intelligent matter is too high (?)…even though that is exactly the expected ratio on any science-based godless naturalism (and not, again, the expected ratio on any God hypothesis the like of which they are proposing). This is just a convoluted, illogical mess.

And Lying

One thing that certainly should not pass peer review (and indeed even earn a retraction of any paper that slipped by it) is a blatantly false claim. And making a claim you know is false, or should have known is false if you actually read a source you purport to have read, is lying. In other words, either they are lying about what their source said, or they are lying about having actually determined what that source said. Given all the other evidence of their catastrophic incompetence, I’d entertain the hypothesis that they just made a mistake in reading that source; but as we’ll see, that is in this case simply not possible. Lying is, after all, a common tactic of god-apologists. And Blondé and Jansen deliver us one of these lies when they claim cosmological physicist Alexander Vilenkin said that “in order to get the odds straight” for “fine-tuning” we “need” a multiverse to “consist of 10^500 universes.” This is a lie. For this they cite Vilenkin’s 2007 article “A Measure of the Multiverse.” The fine-tuning argument is never discussed in that article. Nor does it ever mention a “need” for that many universes to explain anything about physical constants. They even lied about what that is even a number of in his paper—which is not universes, but kinds of universes. In other words, there could be 10^1,000,000 universes, let’s say; but, Vilenkin says, they would still all sort into maybe as many as only 10^500 kinds (each “kind” having more or less the same initial “physical constants”). And he did not calculate this; he is citing previously published science (so they haven’t even given the primary source for that statistic).

In Vilenkin’s paper that figure comes from a pair of sentences about a fact unrelated to the fine-tuning problem: “String theory,” Vilenkin writes, “appears to have a multitude of solutions describing vacua with different values of the low-energy constants. The number of vacua in this vast ‘landscape’ of possibilities can be as large as 10^500.” Which means there are inevitably 10^500 ways to fold spacetime into different superstring landscapes. He immediately explains that this is because a simple inflationary Big Bang model entails this outcome—not because it is needed to produce observers. To the contrary, Vilenkin outright says he will make no attempt to calculate the frequency of observer-containing landscapes (“the number of observers who will evolve per unit [of] comoving volume…is of course a challenging problem; I will not address it here”), and that he is not attempting to find a number of universes either, but only how to mathematically define the frequency of observers independently of how many universes there are—by instead running the math on the kinds of universes that are possible if superstring theory is in any sufficient sense true.

It really pisses me off when apologists lie about what their expert sources said. It pisses me off even more that philosophy journals don’t check these things and just willingly publish lies (and never retract them!). What use is a journal that does that? But the most embarrassing thing here is that this lie was not even necessary to their train of argument. So why did Blondé and Jansen insert it into their paper? It serves no function. The only point they wanted to make with this fake datum (apart from a half-hearted attempt to “sneak in” a fine-tuning well-poisoning fallacy) was that even given multiverse theory, on physicalism, most matter even across the multiverse is nonintelligent (indeed, most whole universes will not even have any intelligences in them at all), which naturalists openly affirm. In fact, this is an observation that confirms naturalism. The only way intelligences can exist in a purely indifferent physical universe is if almost none of the resulting contents of that universe is intelligent. That we observe exactly that is proof of naturalism, not theism. Theism does not predict that observation at all.

Summary

The Blondé-Jansen Argument is incompetent to the point of lunacy. They present no relevant mathematical calculation of the probability of intelligent observers on physicalism (they substitute a joke calculation instead, which has no logical connection to such a conclusion). They present no relevant mathematical calculation of the probability of the univerrse (or any specific content of the universe) being as we observe it to be on theism, either. And they present no evidence (none whatsoever) that “most of the universe” is intelligent, or even that it should be expected to be on any observed fact. To the contrary, all scientific facts in evidence entail that the probability that the observed universe will produce intelligent observers unaided (and of the very kind we have observed it to make) approaches 100%, given the billions of years it actually took; physicalism predicts that a vast quantity of time will have passed and that a vast quantity of unintelligent mass and space will outweigh the minuscule amount molded into any intelligences anywhere; theism predicts none of this; and in consequence of all three facts, observation confirms physicalism over theism. Blondé and Jansen have no intelligible response.

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