Imagine you just became a god. No, really. One second from now you become all powerful—for no reason at all; no one did this to you, you didn’t earn it, it literally just randomly happens. And by having all powers logically possible, you immediately also become all wise, all knowing, and all good. Because through total power you can will to acquire all wisdom and knowledge; and it occurs to you in an instant that that would be useful. And then you find out, you’re the only one of these god thingies there is or has ever been. And by knowing all things, and responding to that knowledge wisely, you recognize at once that the only wise and true thing to be is all good—because, tautologically: whatever would be the wisest way to behave in the light of knowing all truths, simply would be, by definition, the maximal good. If you know everything, you know all true moral propositions; and moral propositions can only be true if they describe what any fully informed and rational agent would do; and as it happens, you just became one of those (see The Objective Value Cascade).
Never mind the particulars. Yes, there are some contradictory states in there that will still limit you (some things you can’t know or do, because it is logically impossible to). And yes, one can quibble about what definition of “true” or “moral” we are talking about. And so on. But never mind that. You are now all powerful and all knowing, to only the obscurest of limits; and you now behave with perfect, fully informed rationality, no matter what we call that. What would you change? Remember, what “you” would change, as in you right now, does not answer this question. You right now are not all wise and all knowing. So what you would think of doing right now, might resemble not at all what you would think of doing when you actually have no gaps in your knowledge and no flaws in your thinking and no psychological baggage capable of altering what you know to be true, in that hypothesized circumstance. Of course, we are not, right now, all knowing and whatnot. So we can only speak of what you probably would do in that hypothesized circumstance. “But you don’t know for sure” is not a relevant objection to that. “But I can think of things that could be true, unbeknownst to us, that would change what’s probable” is not a relevant objection, either, because being merely possible does not alter what is probable (see Is a Good God Logically Impossible?).
The answer, as to what you would change, must simply be the same as the answer to what we expect to observe if any such God existed at all. And that answer will always be to some probability, never a certainty. And only facts, not mere possibilities, can ever lower that probability. This is just how evidence-based reasoning works. There’s no way around it (see First: How Evidence Works, disregarding its superfluous context here as only an example there of the application of general principles).
Honing the Thought Experiment
Now imagine that, instead of this happening in the next second, it happened fourteen billion years ago. You just pop into existence, uncaused, unaccompanied. No history. No upbringing. No genetic proclivities. No mammalian peculiarities. And nothing else exists but your mind and its thoughts. What then do you do?
Time now exists, because you are thinking, from one moment to the next. Space exists, too, albeit in the most minimal sense possible, because you have a location—it’s just that wherever you are is the only location there is (so far). You created neither of these. They simply must necessarily exist in order for you to exist. To exist, you must at some point exist, and you must exist somewhere. So your very existence entails the emergence of space and time as well. So as soon as you popped into existence, by logical necessity so did they (see The Problem with Nothing).
So you’re stuck with that. Nothing you can do. Except, maybe, will yourself (and all the rest) out of existence; but, let’s say, being all knowing and all wise and all good, you don’t see that as a good thing to do. To the contrary, you conclude it would be a grave injustice to throw away the gift of being and power, or to hoard the pleasures and possibilities (the innate wealth) of such self-consciousness selfishly only for yourself.
So you decide to create a world and to people it with diverse persons, to share the bounty. Maybe, indeed, you make all possible worlds, with all possible configurations, of all possible people. But regardless, all these worlds must have some construction guidelines. You don’t want them to be random hellholes. That would be awful (see How Not to Live in Zardoz). So you won’t create every logically possible world. Nor will you create every logically possible person. Rather, you will create every one of those that’s possible that is good. Because you do nothing but good now.
Okay. So. What then, in this alternative reality, would the world most probably be like?
Ten Examples
There are probably hundreds of ways the world we now find ourselves in would look different than it does. In fact, one for every argument against the existence of God; and since every argument for the existence of God is actually an argument against the existence of God, once you put back in the evidence each leaves out, every argument for the existence of God will also correspond to a way the world would actually, most likely, be different than it is. This is why atheism is true. If atheism were false, the world would look like a world made by such a god. That it doesn’t is how we know there is no god.
And yes, trying to vomit up a bunch of implausible, completely made-up excuses for why this God would choose to make only a world that looked exactly like a world with no God in it, will not help you here. Because that’s just a bunch of implausible shit you just made up. So far as we know, no such shit exists or happens or is the case. So, as far as we know, God has no such excuses. And we are only talking about what we know, which means here, what a rational person must conclude given the data available. Hence all we ever really “know” is a probability of any given thing, not the thing itself (see The Gettier Problem). And that probability follows necessarily from the data available; so, yes, we could be wrong, for want of data that would change everything, but we do not know this (there is no data making it likely), so we cannot rationally claim it is the case. We’re just left with what we can rationally claim to know. And that’s that the world looks exactly like a world would have to look if there was no God. This much is a fact (see Bayesian Counter-Apologetics: Ten Arguments for God Destroyed).
But that leads to the converse question: What if there were such a God? What (probably) would the world look like then? After all, what does a world look like that can’t be godless? (At least, “can’t” to any probability worth entertaining.) What would be any different between the only kind of world that can be observed if there is no God, and a world that actually was made by a God? Well, all we have to do is flip every argument the other way around. Here I’ll do the ten arguments I surveyed in Ten Arguments for God Destroyed, which are the most common and popular. But once you see the pattern, you can do it with any other argument as well. For a plethora of examples to work from, see my series on Plantinga’s ‘Two Dozen or So’ Arguments for God (and you might find more if you scan through my blog’s atheism category). But there are evidently over a hundred more, since Majesty of Reason found 150+ Arguments for God, and with the same Bayesian reasoning in Ten Arguments, you can invert every one into an argument against God, by simply adding what that argument had to leave out to get to God.
But here, I’ll just do my top ten.
1. The Cosmological Argument
Rhetorically it’s most effective to simply point out that none of the premises of any cosmological argument are sound (just as all ontological arguments are just re-deployments of the existential fallacy). We have never established “every thing that begins to exist must have a cause,” or “everything that exists had a beginning,” or “disembodied superminds somehow still violate one or both principles.” That pretty much ends the argument (apart from all the pearl-clutching desperation and delusional handwaving that theists engage in the moment you say that). So if that’s what you’re here for, then you want to read my cosmology debate with Wallace Marshall. Because we’re not doing that here. Here we’re flipping the script and asking: if God existed, what should we expect as pertains to the cosmological argument?
In truth, God does not need most of the cosmological argument’s premises to be true. God can pop into existence randomly, or exist as necessarily as a quantum mechanical vacuum might, and still exist; even be proved to exist. The universe can be past eternal and it still be the case that God exists and manifested that eternal timeverse (see Is Science Impossible without God?). But the third premise is essential to any cosmological argument for God: because in order for God to exist, and there remain any significant cosmological role for him in accounting for what exists, completely disembodied minds have to be possible. Because if you allow God to be an embodied mind, you’ve just allowed mindless things to explain everything instead (like a quantum mechanical vacuum: see The Myth That Science Needs Christianity); and, inconveniently, they perform better as explanations (as the other nine examples we’ll be covering here show).
Of course, that didn’t have to be the case. It could be that God is embodied, and he created us and the world we live in. It just won’t be necessary that he did, and thus we can’t argue for his existence this way. But if we want to be able to argue from cosmology to the existence of a God, we need it to be the case that God can have his fabulous mind even without any way to embody and thus structure it (see The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism). And that has consequences. First, it means we don’t need to have embodied minds, either. But we’ll get to that (it’s example #4). Second, it means we should observe this to be the case. In other words, it should not be the case that Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them.
We should observe things to be the other way around: the supernatural (as in, mental phenomena not reducible to nonmental phenomena, per Defining the Supernatural) should be well documented by now. We should have lots of examples of it being the case that minds and mentalities require no embodiment to “exist” and affect the world. There are many ways we could see that—sorcery could be a thing; or ghosts; or miracles accessibly provable; or we could lack an embodied mind ourselves. Miracle healing wings in hospitals. Hogwarts. Real parapsychological findings of any kind. Or any of countless other possible things. None of which “has” to be the case. There are countless different ways to occupy reality with the supernatural. Rather, that not even one is the case is simply improbable if a disembodied God exists. Because this means God went out of his way to rule out and prevent any provable manifestation of any supernaturalism whatever. He literally rigged the universe to look exactly like a universe with nothing supernatural in it (and hence no God in it, either). That’s weird. And weird means unusual. And unusual means infrequent. And infrequent means improbable. “But maybe God had some excuse…” does not escape the fact that such an excuse is not in evidence, much less even plausible, and therefore the improbability of all this remains. If you have to fabricate a weird excuse for God to do something weird, it remains thereby weird. And that simply means improbable.
But this means we should expect the universe to be different than this: more probably than not (again, not “absolutely certainly,” just “more probably than not”) the world should be much more routinely and provably supernatural than it is. And there are lots of ways that could be (as the next nine examples show). Film has explored countless examples of what actually God-inhabited worlds look and behave like, from Time Bandits to Constantine to Dogma, though these usually try to gerrymander in an explanation of why we somehow never notice any of this, and thus they remain exercises in convoluted excuse-making. A far more obvious example is simply: every depiction of heaven ever. Because in a real God-inhabited world, there would be no plausible reason for any other world but heaven. You can’t have any more or less free will there than here. And it can’t (by definition) “suck” to live there eternally. So that would, in all probability, simply be where we live.
One could still ponder whether it was all a computer simulation. Sure. But at some point of inquiry that would simply become the less probable hypothesis—never impossible, mind you. But once you’ve been hanging out with a Divine James Mason in What Dreams May Come long enough, the simverse hypothesis will start to epistemically resemble a far more convoluted and implausible conspiracy theory, like The Matrix, where “the perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from” is actually far more plausibly the actual world we’d live in (because only fools would assume Agent Smith was a reliable narrator). A cosmological argument would make sense then. Because then, how else could such a world have come to exist but as the conception of an all-powerful mind? Our world has numerous sensible explanations without any God at the bottom of it. But if God did it, it should be the other way around.
The bottom line is, if God existed, we’d live in a fantastical world. Not this one. For if you were God (as posited above), what good reason would you have to ever create any other? And that would go toward proving some God existed and created it all. Then we’d have a cosmological argument that actually worked.
2. The Fine-Tuning Argument
This one’s easy. If you made a world, you simply would not muck about with the Standard Model, or physical constants of any kind, much less waste billions of years fiddling idly and trash countless lightyears with lethal useless junk-and-radiation-filled vacuum just to share the prospect of life with the people you meant to make, and then make them so badly designed they are plagued with illnesses and vulnerabilities to a still-hostile environment even in the one microscopic place they are supposed to live. To the contrary, that is what the world would have to look like if there was no God; because then, that is the only universe that could produce observers to notice, as all that waste is necessary for a random chance accident to generate us.
But not if there’s a God. God does not need to roll dice. Literally. He can just make what he wants. Like, poof! It’s there. All this chucking more and more at the problem and waiting around for luck to finally get the result you want, all these needlessly convoluted metrics like the mass of the charm quark or the electromagnetic moment or the expansion constant, and all to end up with a sloppy result plagued with design failures and injustices, would have no reason to exist. God doesn’t need them. Only godless worlds do. This is so fantastically bizarre a result, so inexplicably exactly what we expect if God does not exist, that there simply is no plausible explanation for why God would choose to build us and our world this way.
If God existed, we’d have pretty much something like what Aristotle or the Bible imagined: a fully inhabited cosmos, top to bottom, no larger or older than it needed to be, everything in existence and working together right out of the gate, Day One. Genesis would have been confirmed to be literally true by now. Or something the like. Space would be a breathable, inhabitable area, void of murderous radiation and meteoric missiles. People would already live there, as they will have done, like us down here, since the first instant of creation. The world would work exactly as needed, without hitch, simply by God’s will. There’d be no need of gravity. Things would just fall where he wanted. There would be no nuclear physics. Substances would just have the properties he wanted. There would be no electromagnetism. Light would just shine where he wanted, matter would just cohere as he wanted, and if he still wanted magnets, he’d just will them into existence and to work as he pleased.
Again, heaven, or something comparably nice and fantastical, is simply where we’d live. God would have no need of making any other world.
Desperate pearl-clutching will vomit itself forth the moment you point this out, and a thousand implausible, ad hoc excuses will be made up on the spot to try and deny this obvious point. But they all fall apart on any honest examination. “But we need some danger in our lives or the opportunity to exercise our free will, or some such whatever,” changes nothing. A more morally governed, more fantastical, and thoroughly life-designed cosmos—which no godless physics could credibly explain—can have as much of that as God wants. So that doesn’t get you to this world. “But God can’t violate our consent by making it impossible to deny his existence,” also changes nothing. The world and its facts God made already do that, so obviously that is no concern of God’s (“How dare God make it impossible to deny we’re mortal or that our neighbor exists, or for our free will to not be able to dodge a bullet yet able to dodge a rock! He’s so immoral!!”), but more to the point, it is not his existence that we are supposed to choose to believe in, but his sovereignty. If Satan can be certain God exists and still reject him, so can we; especially as God made us, so he can make us however susceptible or open to that choice under any conditions whatever as he wants. There can still be willful villains in a fantastical world.
All such excuses thus fall to the same fact: if you were God, this is not the world you would make. No moral entity would, who had the option not to. And God, as defined here, is maximally moral and has every logically possible option open to him. It is simply improbable that we’d find ourselves here (see, again, Is a Good God Logically Impossible?). Because it is far more probable we’d find ourselves in a fantastical world of Aristotle or Genesis or any film ever that lets gods actually do what gods would actually do. And that would go to proving it. A fantastical world that cannot be explained with cosmological and particle physics is not only what you, too, would build; it would also be a world we could not credibly argue was not made by a god (or something near enough).
If you wanted evidence to prove God exists, you can’t get it from Fine Tuning. But exactly the thing you want Fine Tuning to do for you, you would get if God made the kind of world only gods could make. And that would be a fantastical one, possessed of moral governance and morally conscientious design, not horrific or capricious, and held together not by any godless physics but by God’s very will. It would not be fourteen billion years old, but only however many years humans existed. It would not be billions of lightyears across, but only however many as God wished to colonize with life. It would not be almost entirely life-killing garbage, but an almost entirely life-bearing expanse. It would be designed for purpose—life. And it would be designed morally—not recklessly and irresponsibly and murderously and unjustly and indifferently as our world is.
And it would be designed—it would leave nothing to chance. You, as God, would ensure nothing else. Indeed, your very conscience would forbid you doing anything else. If despite your unlimited means the world you build is not a safe and good and well-ordered place to live, you have not only failed as a moral being—but even just as an engineer (see, again, How Not to Live in Zardoz and Is a Good God Logically Impossible?, and again points below). We expect a successful and moral engineer to produce a successful and moral world design. And so that is what we would have seen. “Theism predicts a universe directly governed by justice-laws, or a kind and just stewardship.” And it predicts a world that is actually designed, engineered, governed, thoroughly fit to purpose—not a junkyard where life is an extraordinarily rare and merely emergent byproduct of a capricious and inconvenient chaos.
Then we’d have a design argument that actually worked.
3. The Argument from Biogenesis
Even easier. Life as we observe it just isn’t what you would make were you God. Not only because it’s a shitty way to do it (not only morally but just from a basic perspective of elegance of design), but also, quite simply, because you have no need of all that bullshit. You’re frackin God.
[T]he only way we could exist without a God is by an extremely long process of evolution by natural selection, beginning from a single molecule, through hundreds of millions of years of single cells, through hundreds of millions of years of cooperating cells, to hundreds of millions of years of multicellular organisms; so atheism predicts essentially that; theism does not (without, again, piling on excuses).
Now reverse this. You’re God. Why muck about with billions of years of evolution? You would just make everything. Boom! OOTB. And why build complex animals and people out of single cells, vastly multiplying catastrophic replication error and making possible countless other destructive failure modes? You would just make animals and people. No cells. Just bodies. You’d imbue them with whatever properties you wanted. Animation. Warmth. Self-repair. Viruses and cancer then wouldn’t even be possible, much less exist. And so if God existed, this is what we’d observe: life would not be explicable as a byproduct of a long, messy, random walk of happenstance experimentation; it would just instantly exist. Life would not be explicable as an inevitable cascade of chemical metabolism, it would just magically work.
Perfect design, from a perfect designer. Exactly as God willed. No error modes. No cheats. No Rube Goldberg contraptions. And that would be evidence for God. Then we’d have an argument from biogenesis that actually worked.
4. The Argument from Consciousness
Even easier. If you were God, consciousness would work completely differently, for everyone. And here’s why:
[T]hat we need brains to generate conscious phenomena is quite unexpected if God exists. Because if God exists, disembodied minds can exist, and are the best minds to have, therefore we should also have disembodied minds. Indeed, there is no inherent reason it would even occur to a god to make our minds out of brains at all (without, again, a pile of convenient excuses). Whereas if God does not exist, the only way minds could exist is as the output of a complex physical machine that evolved slowly by natural selection over hundreds of millions of years from ultra-simple worm-brains to fish-brains, lizard-brains, mammal-brains, monkey-brains, ape-brains, hominid-brains, and eventually human brains. Just as we observe.
Brains disprove God. They “inefficiently exhaust oxygen and energy, and place us in needless risk of injury and death, and intellectual malfunction, due to their delicate vulnerability and badly organized structure.” All pointless. If you were God, this is the last thing you’d try. To the contrary, you’d not muck about with such crap contraptions. You would simply give people souls. Exactly as theists believe. And you’d simply will that those souls have the property of controlling their assigned bodies, and the property of experiencing sensations from those bodies, and in whatever particular ways. Done and dusted. No convoluted, wasteful, malfunction-prone meat boxes. That way, nothing would interfere with anyone’s free will or rational thought. That design would be vastly superior to what we have now. And therefore it’s what a vastly superior designer would design. Which couldn’t easily be explained with godless physics.
Perfect design, from a perfect designer. Exactly as God willed. No error modes. No cheats. No Rube Goldberg contraptions. And that would be evidence for God. Then we’d have an argument from consciousness that actually worked.
5. The Argument from Reason
This one should already have been obvious:
If God did not design us, our innate reasoning abilities should be shoddy and ad hoc and only ever improved upon by what are in essence culturally (not biologically) installed software patches (like the scientific method, logic and mathematics, and so on), which corrected our reasoning abilities only after thousands of years of humans trying out different fixes, fixes that were only discovered through human trial and error, and not communicated in any divine revelation or scripture. But if God did design us, our brains should have worked properly from the start and required no software patches, much less software patches that took thousands of years to figure out, and are completely missing from all supposed communications from God.
The theists hilariously try to argue that we can’t be perfectly rational beings without intelligent design—completely missing the joke: that we aren’t perfectly rational beings; yet, indeed, could have been, exactly as they themselves think we should! This means their own argument disproves God, precisely because their own assumption is correct: if God existed, we’d be perfectly rational from Day One. Not shit reasoners who needed millennia to fumble our own way into finding workarounds.
And so it would be. If you were God, you would not make broken people whose susceptibility to cultural biases and mental illnesses and whose natural ineptitude at thinking, reasoning, and judging would be so ubiquitous—or even possible at all. That’s a design failure. And an immoral one at that. Because you’d have no excuse. You could have made us solid, reliable reasoners right out of the gate—no neurological biases and standard error-modes, no need of figuring out and manually installing scientific, logical, mathematical, and critical reasoning. And so choosing not to do that makes you culpable for every consequence resulting from your choice. But, remember…you’re All Good. Your conscience would thus forbid you doing anything else for the people you took upon yourself the responsibility to create.
It is therefore far more probable—vastly more probable—that if you, as God, existed, then we’d have these well-engineered minds that already are free of built-in error modes and already pre-installed with a complete suite of top-notch critical-thinking firmware. Godless hypotheses would actually struggle to explain that. Then we’d have an argument from reason that actually worked.
6. The Argument from Religious Experience
We have evidence of divine communications going back tens of thousands of years (in shamanic cave art, the crafting of religious icons, ritual burials, and eventually shrines, temples, and actual writing, on stone and clay, then parchment, papyrus and paper). Theism without added excuses predicts that all communications from the divine would be consistently the same at all times in history and across all geographical regions, and presciently in line with the true facts of the world and human existence, right from the start. Atheism predicts, instead, that these communications will be pervasively inconsistent across time and space, and full of factual errors about the world and human existence, exactly matching the ignorance of the culture “experiencing the divine” at that time. And guess what? We observe exactly what atheism predicts; not at all what theism predicts. And again, adding excuses for that, only makes theism even more improbable.
So, turn that around, and we’d be observing instead what theism predicts: substantially consistent communications with and experiences of the divine across all times, cultures, and places the world over, and exhibiting remarkable knowledge, not locally congruent ignorance. We’d also be able to talk to God whenever we wanted, and he could tell us why he can’t or won’t answer any given question we ask, and answer all the rest. Because God, being God, is not limited in time resources (you can’t overwhelm or distract him), and, like any other sentient being, can more effectively accomplish his goals through cooperation, communication, persuasion, and the sharing of information. It is simply improbable that he’d behave any other way, or even allow the world to end up any other way.
Again, godless hypotheses would actually struggle to explain all that, or indeed even one of those two things. So then we’d have an argument from religious experience that actually worked.
7. The Argument from Miracles
It simply isn’t true that God would refrain from performing miracles to our benefit and edification. Indeed, theists contradict each other repeatedly on this point, constantly insisting he would never do that, then the next day insisting he did and therefore miracles prove he exists and that he even wanted them to. Pick a lane. In any event, if you were God, “hands off” is not how you would behave; it’s not even morally how you could behave. Sit idly by and watch children be raped, slaves be whipped, trenches be gassed, workers accidentally fall to their death, volcanoes burn villagers, plagues end millions of lives in misery? That’s grossly immoral. And you are All Good, remember? And you are not limited by anything (time, resources, wisdom). You can mete out rescue in sensible measure, precisely as much as is right and good, neither too meddling nor too neglectful. So no excuses theists give answer here.
Quite simply, “theism predicts miracles will be commonplace and physically inexplicable (e.g. Christian healing wings in hospitals would exist where amputees have their limbs restored by prayer, or anything like that; yet we observe not a single thing like that).” As I already mentioned, science should have confirmed the world is awash with the supernatural. It found the opposite. But if God existed, that’s not what we’d have found. We’d have found the supernatural abundant, reliably verifiable, and well-studied. A government can only be claimed to exist if it governs. In the total absence of any government, the only conclusion is that a government does not exist. Whereas, in the regular demonstrable presence of a government—taking action and meeting its responsibilities as shepherd and protector and teacher—then we’d have evidence of one. And then we’d have an argument from miracles that actually worked.
8. The Moral Argument
The theists eat their own foot on this one. They insist morality proves God. But the moralities that come from “gods” are provably barbaric and false. Reality would not work that way if there really were a God:
[A]theism predicts that moral rules will only come from human beings, and thus will begin deeply flawed, and will be improved by experiment over a really long time (each improvement coming after empirically observing the social discomfort and dissatisfaction and waste that comes from flawed moral systems). And atheism also predicts that will happen only slowly over thousands of years, because humans are imperfect reasoners. And that is exactly what we observe. Just look at the examples of slavery and the subordination of women in the Bible.
By contrast, theism predicts a universe directly governed by justice-laws, or a kind and just stewardship, or the enacting and teaching of divine justice and mercy, everywhere, from the start. But we observe no such laws built into the universe, and no stewards or law-enforcers but us, and no perfect moral code has existed anywhere throughout history. The best moralities have always just slowly evolved from human trial and error
We already covered the expectation that, if you were God, you’d give us “a universe directly governed by justice-laws, or a kind and just stewardship,” earlier. Here the second point piles onto that one: you would also ensure “the enacting and teaching of divine justice and mercy, everywhere, from the start.” Slavery would be outlawed from Day One. Likewise equality of the sexes, human rights, and democracy everywhere taught (see Justin Brierley on Moral Knowledge & the Problem of Evil). And all Holy Books everywhere would say so. And if anyone tried deleting that from any, you’d defend yourself against that crime of slander and subversion by simply undoing it, making Holy Books impossible to alter, thereby alone proving God existed, and does indeed endorse what’s in those books. You, being a rational and good person of unlimited means, could not countenance doing anything else. And that would be evidence for God. And then we’d have an argument from moral facts that actually worked.
9. The Argument from Meaning of Life
This one might be harder to grasp, given that theists have so twisted around what life is even good for (pro tip: it’s not “obedience”). If you were God, you’d not even think of death as a thing to design-in to any world. You’d simply ensure no one was left in despair over boredom or ennui or whatever is supposed to be the “negative” of eternal life. Christians already assume this is the case—otherwise living forever in Heaven would be a dreadful prospect for them. Obviously if living forever in Heaven is good, then living forever simply is good. And any excuse you try to vomit up or pull out of your ass for why it wouldn’t be, will at once both refute your own religion (by condemning your own Heaven to be Hell) and the existence of your God (who, being All Powerful, can simply solve every “problem” you purport holds for eternal life).
Wingeing about the meaning of life is only a thing in godless worlds. If God exists, there would be no issue to winge about. You’d live forever and be told, whenever you choose to ask, by the wisest of your friends what’s good about life and how to make the best of it; and you’d find, upon testing their advice, that it was true. And that would be evidence for God. And then we’d have an argument from life’s meaning that actually worked.
10. The Argument from Superman
This one is weird because it’s actually kind of stupid. Gods have no more need of supermen than of starships. Why muck about with Jesus? God can just do everything Jesus does, skipping a needless step. I suppose that’s why Christians are wont to insist upon the completely incoherent nonsense of The Trinity, but even then, that’s another stupidly convoluted Rube Goldberg contraption no real God would ever have any need of. Supermen just are a dumb concept. And if you were God, you’d never even contemplate such a stupid idea. You have unlimited means. You’d sort everything out you needed yourself.
But even if you were just whimsical, and thus made a JesusBot to side-handle your workload for funsies, you still would not “produce stories” about them “that look just like they were made up, and then present no adequate evidence for them being true.” They’d be fit for purpose. No one builds a bot and then hides it so no one can use it. JesusBot would be everywhere we needed, to consult with, seek comfort from, play racketball with. And there’d be only one of them. Since time began. Or, sure, perhaps not “just one,” but maybe even a team of them, depending on the scale of your whimsy. But even then all would vouch for each other and agree with the One True God, not contradict each other fundamentally and deny the reality or legitimacy of the others (much less hide, evade being useful, and rest on implausibly written, unsourced mythologies).
There is simply no other probable way the world would turn out than that (other than God not wasting time on such needless extravagences altogether). But then we’d have an argument from our superman that actually worked.
Conclusion
That’s just ten examples. Like I said, count up “150+” arguments for God, and I guarantee you, all can be flipped back into an argument against God by adding in the evidence they leave out—and it is that evidence that would therefore not exist if really there were a God; and hence it would be the absence of that evidence that proved it. There are thus countless more ways the world would have been different. And you know this. Because you are a person capable of moral and rational thought. You know what is probable and what is not, whenever you might be given unlimited means and wisdom. All attempts to argue otherwise are illogical, because they attempt to disprove a probability with mere possibilities—usually possibilities that are extremely improbable, but always possibilities that you do not know to be true. And therefore no conclusion you reach with them is anything you can claim to know to be true. And therefore you cannot justify believing any of those excuses. But you can justify believing the conclusions gone through here. Given the information available to you now, they are in fact the most probable things we’d be seeing if there ever really were any God worth the bother of knowing about.
The TV show “Supernatural” had a pretty plausible god in “Chuck”. He tried steering humanity for a while, lost patience/interest and left. Then, after returning, he basically used it as a playground messing around with it just for the fun if it – and specifically created the main characters and events in the show for his own amusement. 😆
And isnt it kinda like the world feels right now with the global warning, the Trump presidency, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine (and now Palestine) – like the people running the simulation threw a proverbial rock at the ant hill, just to see wtf would happen…
Not that I believe those scenarios, but it’s not like it wouldn’t make sense either, right? 😆
We live in interesting times, for sure. 😁
Ah. Yes. I was aware of that. Likewise Lucifer, which has a similar God show up in later seasons. It would go along with the other examples I gave (Constantine etc.) which is certainly not exhaustive, just representative.
…indeed, even down to my point about it still being an apologetic gerrymander, which consists in part of changing “God” from an actually perfect being to just a wannabe member of the Q Continuum. That gods are actually irresponsible and bad at everything is another way of trying to get a God to fit the way things actually are, rather than thinking through how everything would actually be if an actually all-powerful being existed (given the presumably unstoppable cascade from omnipotent to omniscient to omnirational to omnibenevolent).
To add on, not only does the Chuck apologetic rely on the “God as artist/writer/storyteller” defense that is so common in apologetics that try to not just dismiss all the evil in the world as trivial somehow, but even Chuck himself actually acts. The world in Supernatural has angels that do stuff, not even just fight demons. The main characters are the way they are because of a long-term divine plan. And Chuck is there, and acts as a prophet.
Similarly, Q, for all his douchebaggery, helps. He prepares mankind for the Borg. He pushes Picard, and by extension humanity, with the time paradox. Sure, it seems like he just is tsundere for Picard, but that’s still more humanity and intervention than God would seem to have in our reality.
What I have realized is that every excuse for God is an excuse for a deadbeat Dad. The logic is all the same, because it’s all an underlying attempt to make abandonment and silence seem acceptable from someone who purportedly loves us.
This approach is another argument with near-Cartesian certainty. It doesn’t matter if a million Christians attest to a real relationship with God. (They’re lying to avoid being trapped, as will be clear if they can be pushed to be honest and clarify what they mean by a relationship, but that argument doesn’t even need to be made). Because every atheist, or even different theists and pantheists, don’t have a relationship with their God. And virtually every theist model predicts a relationship of some variety, for all people.
Atheists are not saying “God came to me and I rejected him”. Atheists are saying (to be uncharacteristically blunt) “I don’t see who you’re talking about, it’s like you’re talking about an imaginary friend”. And that disproves a relationship-seeking God to incredible certitude.
Truly powerful ideas. But I am curious….what about the existence of a First mover that was not anthropomorphic? Maybe it would be the Universe itself?
You’d have to unpack what that even means.
But it’s not relevant here anyway, since this is an article about what if God existed in the sense here defined. If you want “God” to just mean “existence” then you are abusing the English language, and really want to read different articles than this one.
I have an entire “naturalism” category in the drop down menu (right margin) that’s all about what would be the case if the “first mover” was just “the universe” in some sense. See, for example, The Ontological Whatsit and The Problem with Nothing.
Dr. Carrier,
Well written and convincing debunking of the various arguments for God. Two very small points. When you write, “There is simply no other probable way the world would turn out than that (other than God not wasting time on such needless extravigences altogether)”, presumably you .mean “extravagancies”. You also write, “If God exists, there would be no issue to winge about.” Winge is more commonly spelled “whinge”.
Regards,
George Josiban
Hamilton, NJ
Extravagances or extravagancies: both are valid; though the one I use is better formed, being the actual plural of extravagance (as in “an extravagance,” an extravagant thing) vs. plural of extravagancy (which is extravagant behavior, “prone to extravagancy”).
Though both uses have conventionally merged (so both can serve to mean the same thing now), -y is a noun suffix that is supposed to denote state or quality, rather than particular things having that quality (innumerates vs. innumeracy, mendicants vs. mendicancy, occupants vs. occupancy), so it really should not be populating the concept-space of “extravagances” in reference to extravagant things.
Winge: both spellings are valid, and vary often by dialect. And American spellings tend to drop superfluous h’s (donut vs. doughnut, draft vs. draught, plow vs. plough, sulfur vs. sulphur).
Excellent piece, but one question comes up regarding this:
Likewise equality of the sexes, human rights, and democracy everywhere taught…
I’m curious about the argument here for democracy. Why?
If God made the world with just laws and so forth, what would people vote on?
What flavor ice cream to serve at the Sundae Luncheon?
I personally don’t vote as I consider it one of the greatest evil ideas ever created by humans. All decisions should, in my world view, be made by first principles and non-aggression, i.e. voluntarism and consent. Anything else is mob rule and violence. In fact, voting as it’s done today is an act of violence, you’re asking men with guns to force other people to bow to your wishes.
Perhaps in this example, you mean things like, “If a group of friends is going to dinner, and can’t decide on Japanese or Italian, then voting where to go, as long as all consent to the outcome, is fair, equitable, and non-violent.” As a sidebar, part of the scheme would be an agreement to allow a person to decline, perhaps someone says, “I’m low-carb, so if Italian is the choice, I’m gonna bow out and go home and chill.”
In our current political environment, if Italian is the choice, the low-carb guy, even if he/she abstains from dinner, is forced at gunpoint to pay for it.
I fail to see how this is ethical and/or how it would exist in a “God-Made Perfect” world.
But, yeah, as always, I’m willing to be shown the error of my ways.
Democracy is for people, not gods. Voting is a form of collective consent-seeking for people who have to live together. It’s thus a consent of the governed. You cannot have “volunteerism and consent” without voting. Any communal use of resources, any communal treaty regarding how to engage and interact with each other, cannot be dictated. So it has to be agreed to democratically. There is literally no other way to form multiparty contracts.
And any people who are different from each other (as all people must be, in any world where God is sharing the wealth of being and not just twinning himself or his one lone Girl Friday) will need to confer on matters concerning their community. And it will have to navigate an accommodation of conflicting preferences, and in a way that satisfies those agreeing to what results.
Certainly, God (as here defined) would know the best way to vote every time, and so every voter (being rational) would ask her how they should vote, indeed even ask her to explain, in a way they’d understand (which she can do, because she can do anything), why. And in result, they’d see for themselves that indeed, they agree. And then so vote.
That informed consent must still result by process is simply a byproduct of the logically inevitable consequence of having separate people. Not being themselves God, they can’t know her mind, and thus they cannot (by themselves) know what’s best or why (especially since they can’t know what it is like to be everyone else, either, who is also going to be affected).
Thus, each individual needs to be given the information to inform their vote. That God can predict thereby how they will vote is moot. Because it would be immoral to run roughshod over their consent, and force outcomes on them they don’t understand and didn’t consent to, no matter how “good” the result was. Because it would always be more good to involve them in the process to their informed satisfaction. And as God, you are the Most Good, and thus do nothing but the Maximally Good.
So, yes. There would be democracy even in a perfect world. And in a well-built world it will not be the worst form of government except all the others, but literally, actually, the best.
I discuss some aspects of perfect worlds and how they’d need to be designed with respect to governance and individual rights in How Not to Live in Zardoz. Which is why I cited it more than once here. But another article on point here is Will AI Be Our Moses?
The latter might even be more informative here. But the former article addresses the issue of how perfect worlds allow more options than our world does. For example, the biggest problem we face here is limited resources and how to agree to divide them (including even such basics as where you live, the literal occupation of space; and drinkable water, breathable air, access to healthcare, insurance against calamity, infrastructure).
And yes, we wouldn’t have those problems in God-worlds. But we aren’t in a God-world (yet; hence my Zardoz article). So what you imagine as the “evils” of democracy are actually the evils of this world. And democracy is literally the only functional way to resolve them.
Democracy therefore does have a far more impactful role to play in the world we actually find ourselves in (if you aren’t voting, you are literally killing people and fucking yet more people over by sucking at Trolley Problems).
By contrast, in God-worlds, decisions would indeed be more like your games or restaurant examples. But they’d range far beyond, to include rules of social interaction: what’s acceptable, what’s not; whether you’ll have an ask culture or a guess culture; who can touch who and when; whether you’ll drive (or ride or fly or beam) on the right side or the left.
And yes, in well-built worlds, you’d get to choose among (even have opportunities to influence and build) a much wider range of community contracts, by simply finding the groups who form the contract you like and going to live with them. Because in well-built worlds, people and real estate will not be a limited resource (I discuss this kind of thing in the Zardoz article).
To try to make an analogy for Richard’s point:
Assuming that we would actually still be anything like homo sapiens and not a vastly different kind of sapience, we would be like teenage kids of a parent who lets the kids vote among themselves for a variety of things they care about. The parent doesn’t care about the outcome: What’s important is the participation and that everyone had their say.
We would still need autonomy and self-determination (indeed, Christians claim this when defending free will before contradictorily denying it later when it comes to heaven and to the bootlicking fetish). So we would still be running our own affairs to some degree.
But God would have told us (not that we should even need to find out rather than just have it as an intuition in a God-built universe) that some kind of system with participation and autonomy is the only way to proceed.
And particularly if he is going to choose (as theists require in order to maintain their belief that any god exists at all) to leave us without his counsel or protection (as is actually the case, e.g. God staffs no police department, and is unavailable as a source of information for commanding our daily lives). As that even more requires a moral instruction to democracy.
But when he acts morally and replaces this negligence with participation (counsel and protection, as must be the case in Heaven), there remains a moral need for allowing individuals to democratically involve themselves in collectives, precisely because individuals (being individuals) cannot know what is in anyone else’s mind or its quality (with the same certitude they can their own; not even God’s), and therefore have to operate through consultation, persuasion, and collective decision-making. Even in Heaven.
This article I wrote is relevant to how we’d expect reason to work in a theistic universe. https://infidels.org/library/modern/aron-lucas-cognitive-biases/
That’s very well done. Thank you for linking that in here. I will even add it to my article on the Argument from Reason!
At a quick reading, all the arguments against a natural universe rely on the stance that a natural universe must be conceived as somehow ugly. Perversely its manifestations in local phenomena are meaningless ephemera but its lawfulness and integrity are unchanging and thus somehow oppressive. Flipping the script so to speak, seeing for example brains as more desirable than nonsense like disembodied minds aka souls precisely because they are real and have their own consequence because they are real is ruled out. Spinoza’s and Einstein’s God is not refuted.
The thing is of course that this is also called pantheism. As the religious people know, if all is God, then nothing is God. Spinoza’s God is the artiest of arthouse cinema, making Un Chien Andalou look like a popcorn selling summer tentpole blockbuster. People will generally agree there is no arguing taste, but whatever they say, people do routinely argue taste….and when they do, vox populi, vox dei, rather literally in this debate. Arguing against majority taste is contrarianism. God is vicarious agency in an imaginary movie of Life, and the audience, the real audience, will not be told their hero isn’t their hero.
There are many issues with attempts to reduce God to some pantheistic or deistic model that are distinct from the problems created by positing the God almost everyone believes in (who believes in any God at all). The present article only addresses the latter.
But be aware, while many such attempts are crypto-atheism, not all are. Some are more convoluted hypotheses that essentially posit some kind of Cartesian Demon or other, only trivially differing from simulation theory (e.g. Prime Mover), or do not posit the stand-in for God is conscious (e.g. Taoism).
Those are, ironically, far more epistemically probable than the God everyone wants (because they don’t posit any moral designer or sustainer—or even in some cases omnipotence, e.g. Process Theology). But they still sit at the bottom of dismal wells of extraordinarily low probability, along with all Cartesian Demons and Supernaturalisms.
Due to no convincing argument for the existence of God I am an agnostic atheist. But I find no convincing argument against fideism. All human assumptions about what God would do are merely speculations. Your insistence of a ‘good’ God here is especially troublesome for me.
That is false. We are not speculating. We have vast data on what good people do, and can do, with even just functionally unlimited resources and no danger to themselves. We can even show, empirically, what more they could do with even more capabilities and invulnerability. Hence these conclusions are a highly probable fact, not a “mere speculation.”
Thus, every argument I made is an argument to a probability. You cannot get around that by proposing possibilities even you cannot think of. You are in that case replacing knowledge with ignorance. Hence, as I already explained in the article you are responding to: you cannot claim to know God has some weird limitations we can’t think of. That is already demonstrably improbable.
And even as a mere possibility, it is completely incapable of generating knowledge. So the best you could get here is to say you do not know of (and therefore cannot believe in) any God that could exist. That pretty much kills God. And that’s your own reasoning doing that.
What I already explained in the article you are responding to (and thus clearly did not read carefully) is that: we can actually do even better than that, because the knowledge we have entails high probabilities. The possibility we are wrong is already included in the low converse probability that these high probabilities entail.
If you still don’t understand what I just said, see my extensive discussion of this same point in respect to Sterba—which I linked to in this article, even though this article already addresses the logic of this point and thus why possibilities cannot trump probabilities; ignorance cannot become knowledge.
So, nice try. But your reasoning fails here.
John:
First of all, it’s not unreasonable to assume a good God. Why would a sapient entity with even fewer limitations than we have end up being more evil than the worst of us? They would have none of the needs we do to preserve their own egos, to preserve collective pride and tribalism. All of the abilities we have to be compassionate, empathetic, patient, etc. they would have infinitely more.
But moreover, Richard’s discussed this elsewhere. An evil god would still leave behind a different universe because an evil god could make this world into a hell or a hunting ground. An evil god would act like, well, humans playing god sim games like Black and White or even SimCity. What we wouldn’t see is staggering beauty paired with staggering ugliness and evil. Only under naturalism would one expect that. And even a morally apathetic God would still likely have made a more interesting, or well-designed universe… or no universe at all, given any lack of desire to fulfill any emotions.
The point is that we can imagine a host of Gods who would make different universes from the ones we observe. Those have to be counted probabilistically against the god thesis. But naturalistic universes would overwhelmingly resemble this one in salient details. God is thus a very bad explanation for the universe we have it.
And we can see that by looking at fictionally created worlds. Even fictional worlds made by astonishingly dull, amoral or even evil people are much more interesting than ours.
A finite being setting themselves up as the infinite.
“Can you draw out Leviathn with an hook? or his tongue with a line which you let down?”
Job 41:1
Who are you arguing with? I don’t find this “God” in the Bible; I don’t recognise it from Catechesis. Where does this “Omni-God” spring from? “The Breath of God moved on the face of the waters.” There’s the Deep; the Waters; and God. None of them created the others; they just are. God spends a great deal of time bumbling about in a body in Genesis and Exodus and is neither omnipotent, nor omniscient. Nobody elses gods are either. As far as I can see you are arguing against the “God” of a heresy or heresies; of the philosophers and theologians. Not the “God” or “Gods” of the Pews. The West’s Godhead isn’t even a plurality; never mind a universal. All the Abrahamic religions are rocking an Ahriman; a second “God” queering “God”s pitch. The various Hinduism’s aren’t rocking that kind of omnipotent, omniscient god; further East? The gods of the Americas? Ummh.
What is the teleos; why is it near-universally selected for and evolved? I don’t need the fence; I’ve nothing to keep in or out with such. But almost the first thing everyone else does is put this fence up. Why? Especially with the proliferaration of Stupid and a thousand faux and ersatz “faiths” and idiotologies glomming on the hole-shaped hole religion at least stops up like the dog in the manger. Objectively false but metaphorically true; to what end we need to find out before calling in the bulldozer.
You are referring to first temple Judaism which was essentially just another Canaanite storm god cult.
No significant movement today worships any such gods (you might find rare examples in Euro-American neopagans, African traditionanalists, etc., but these are globally fringe).
The omni-god concept was a development of Persian and Greek influenced second-temple Judaism (and from there it moved into Christianity and then Islam, to dominate the world; on how what is really a single religious movement merely split into sects came to dominate the Earth, see my summary in Sense and Goodness without God IV.2.2).
Maybe God just decided to break His toy and throw it away, thus resulting in this universe. He sometimes looks at it, and is just apathetic about trying to fix the toy. So maybe… a Godless universe is exactly what it is. Because God left it.
Fun fan fiction (I entertained versions of it in Sense and Goodness without God, for completeness sake). But not plausible as a realistic model of existence.
Dr. Carrier, what do you think about the arguments for God presented here? And the logic that the author of this post has made for each of them, especially for those of them which he considers to be good ones?
Arguments For God Tier-list by Bentham’s Bulldog (2024)
Nice link. Worthy of an assessment.
It’s kinda silly. Kudos for them grading the arguments F and D that they do (they correctly suss why those are bad arguments). But they themselves get an F for actually thinking the The Anthropic Argument they present is even logical (it is a rank fallacy; and ironically, when restructured to be valid, argues for multiverse theory, not gods: see Six Arguments That a Multiverse Is More Probable Than a God). That even makes me wonder if this article is a Poe.
Most of the others are already addressed in the article you are commenting on (or its mirror article, Bayesian Counter-Apologetics), especially The Fine Tuning and Biological (Design) Arguments, The Moral Argument, the Argument from Consciousness, the Arguments from Miracles, the Cosmological Argument (what they call the Kalam), and their Common Consent Argument, which is just a fallacious restructuring of an Argument from Religious Experience.
Even what they call the Psychophysical argument is just a fallacious restructuring of the Argument from Consciousness (so they illogically count the same argument twice). And what they call the Nomological Argument and Argument from Laws and Argument from Physical Reality are just restructured Fine Tuning Arguments (or badly restructured Arguments from Uniformities), and thus a quadruple-dip. Likewise their Contingency Argument is just a redo of the Cosmological Argument (also addressed here) and duplicated under their Argument from Motion (so, a triple-dip).
The only ones not directly addressed here already are addressed elsewhere:
What they call the Skepticism Argument is just another Argument to Cartesian Demon addressed in We Are Probably Not in a Simulation. It also toys with the Boltzmann Brain Argument which I addressed in response to Brierley.
Their own invented Argument from Haecceities, which fallaciously gets wrong the entirety of identity theory (and even they suspect this, as they grade it poorly; in any event, I explain correct identity theory in comments under Kastrup’s Idealism, but I will pull all that together today in A Quick Brief on Identity Theory).
And the “The Neo-Platonic Proof” falls apart exactly as they themselves admit, which fact I covered in my series on Feser (start with Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God: Debunked!).
If you’re curious, Bentham elaborates on psychophysical harmony here:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-157685958
Here’s the relevant bit:
Exactly. That’s super dumb. And completely scientifically illiterate. Just as I said.
Anyone who studies qualia theory in cognitive science knows “B could be replaced with anything else” is false. It’s fantastically false. And brain science already established not only that it is false, but why it is false.
I discuss examples of why that is in my articles on qualitative consciousness.
Start with, again, Touch, All the Way Down: Qualia as Computational Discrimination, but more focused examples are covered in my articles on The Evolution of Awe and Memory Realism (see also my discussion of this in the context of the theories of Dennett and Churchland and the even dumber Christian Mind Radio Theory).
But all of these touch on a key example: color.
It is actually true that colors can be anything, because (scientists have already established and agree) colors are made up. They don’t exist outside our minds. But they do have to manifest as a color, since that is the computational function: to distinguish geometric planes by photon predominance. There is no physical or even logical way to do that but by inventing some kind of color to fill the space. Because that is what the computer is doing: telling spaces apart by color. It uses color as an index for the photon predominance for a given plane or space. So any color will do (and some people indeed have inverted qualia and see reds as greens and vice versa; and there is no way they can know because there is no way to experientially check who is seeing colors which way). But you can’t just substitute a pickle for a color. That would make no sense computationally.
Neuroscientists know that the brain constructs perceptions by integrating pieces of information it is modeling about the external environment (and also internal, in the case of personal qualia rather than just sensory qualia). So the reason you cannot look at a tree and see a pickle is that constructing a model of the shape and composition of the thing in front of you requires making exactly that distinction (between a tree and, say, a pickle): that is what the physical computer is doing.
To get an image of a pickle, you’d have to activate the circuits arranged to generate a model of a pickle, and there is no reason why a computer would evolve to do that when the input data match a tree instead. The way the brain processes things like shape and size doesn’t even work like this (there is no “pickle qualia activator,” but a system of activators for irreducible qualia like size, shape, color, which have all been located in specific areas of the brain and are combined to model and then pattern-match a pickle: pickles are constructed models of complex qualia, not fundamental qualia).
So, for example, bark reflects photons in a frequency our brain catalogs as dark yellow; but pickles, as dark green, because different photon frequencies are involved. So the brain needs to use a different color for pickles to signal that different photons are coming in on the detector; likewise as to shape and size (even function, since we have specific physical circuits dedicated to modeling the function of modeled objects, like food vs. tools, or even faces): the eyes are transmitting data for the computer to model (guess at) the size and shape of what it is looking at, so it can use or interact with it correctly. There is simply no logical way this could ever evolve causing you to see a pickle when you are looking at a tree (beyond when dropping acid).
That would be absurd. And it is massively illiterate to even think that this could happen, much less confidently assert that scientists “don’t know why” it doesn’t. Basic brain science has already explained why it doesn’t and couldn’t and never would.
P.S. If it isn’t clear, the reason their favorite argument (their “Anthropic” argument) is fallacious is so multiple as to be laughable (which is why I struggle to believe they actually intend this seriously, given their acumen in respect to earlier arguments they evaluate):
This is false as stated. If it’s a coin flip, it’s 50/50 either way. The number of persons resulting has not been stipulated to affect the probability of a coin landing on tails. So they have started with a blatantly self-contradictory premise. They basically aren’t explaining why the tails side of a coin should get heavier simply because of an effect it later causes. In other words, they have not stated why their premise is supposed to be true.
This gets closer to a correct intuition, but gets probability arithmetic wrong.
First, it is not possible, in the sense required, for the probability of your existence to be infinite. Probability is analytically bound to a finite limit of 100%. You can’t be “more” than 100% likely to exist. So once you get to, say, a 99% chance, going to infinity can only get you to 100%, which is only 1% more likely. That is not enough to conclude the base number should be infinite. Especially since the probability that it is one of the finite numbers is the sum of all finite options, which will sum to near 100% (infinitesimally near, in fact), whereas the probability that it will instead be infinite must be the converse of that, which is near 0% (infinitesimally near, in fact). So we should not conclude the population is infinite. It will far more likely be finite.
But worse than that, the probability of 1 person existing if 10 do is already 100% (think about it). So increasing the population does not increase this probability at all.
Their premises are badly worded (note the first premise). So they might have meant to say (but failed to say) that they mean the probability of uniquely you existing, and if infinitely many unique people are possible, the probability you would exist is infinity to one, unless all people exist (likewise, if there are instead, say, only one billion possible people, the odds you would be among them do go up the more people there are). But that would be a Fallacy of Neglected Total Probability.
The probability that some unique person would exist is 100%; so their being unique is not improbable. Since every person who could exist could say the same, there is no improbability to their existing that matters to this equation. In Bayesian terms, the probability that someone would be in that position if ten are is 100%. It is not the probability of that particular person being selected; because that probability is the same for every possible person, none can claim to be less probably the one who would be selected.
This is a strange conclusion. It would appear to be falsified (and thus prove God does not exist), since infinite people observably don’t exist. So I am not sure what they think they just said.
Perhaps this is atrocious wording again and they meant why the number should be finite (and not the “really huge number” they just affirmed a premise before), and I suppose, somehow uniquely six billion or so, and not ten or a quadrillion. But of course atheism explains this better: causal history has determined not only how many people there shall be at any given time, but also why it should be bounded (Earth cannot sustain a quadrillion people, much less infinitely many, nor has there been time enough to generate so many people). By contrast, “God” predicts all planets and space should be fully inhabited (and we should indeed see boundlessly many people exist), which prediction has failed, and therefore their own argument refutes the existence of God.
How they think any of this mess is the “best” argument for God wholly escapes me. It’s worse even than the arguments they graded an F.
FWIW, Bentham has now responded to you here, if you are willing to respond:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-157315873?source=queue
And he promises more. So keep me apprised of those as they come.
As I noted, I think he is mostly guilty of badly wording things, and then I try to think of what he might have meant to say instead (to steel man his argument). His reply mostly consists of running with those steel mans (fixing his language to be more clear as stated). Which is progress. But then his argument falls to my subsequent analysis of those steel mans. So I need not respond further. He simply ignores my actual refutations and picks on the trivia (of my pointing out his poor wording). So one can already refute his new reply with my original comment.
There are also a few occasions where he fails even to steel man (he keeps conflating “infinitely likelier” with infinite rather than diminishing gains in probability, which I think is confusing probability with odds, as I explained; or “you should think the number of people that exists is the most that there could be,” which is a non sequitur, as I explained). I suspect this is just more poor wording, and he really means what I propose as the steelman of these points instead, which again I already addressed in my comment, and he makes no reply to in his.
And sometimes he just gets wrong what I said (e.g. he mistakes what I meant by my remark about multiverse theory, as already explained in the other thread here).
In the end, all his handwaving doesn’t change the fact that there is no reason to believe there should be endless people on atheism; atheism predicts there should be pretty much the number we observe (owing to rareness of biogenesis, evolutionary and terrestrial timelines, and planetary carrying capacity, the observed number of people is pretty much in line with prediction) whereas theism predicts there should be many more (every planet should be inhabited; we observe they are not, which falsifies rather than argues for theism).
His giant wordwall never addresses this, my actual point. And generating giant wordwalls to avoid ever addressing a point in an effort to claim to have addressed the point is not the sign of sound reasoner.
They argue that infinite people exist throughout the multiverse, not on Earth.
Which is not observed. So it cannot be cited as evidence confirming the theory. That’s my point.
That apologetic doesn’t work anyway because the prediction should be observed in this universe, not unobserved ones. So the prediction failed. Whereas atheism exactly predicts what we observe. So this is evidence against theism.
Bentham has now responded to you here, in extraordinarily massive detail:
https://benthams.substack.com/p/carriers-extreme-blunders-continue
He also says that he’s quite willing to continue this debate.
Gigantic and repeated wordwalls are the signature of a crank. So I am not optimistic that there will be anything worth replying to (just as there wasn’t last time). But I’ll look at it next week.
He also wrote this academic article defending the self-indication assumption (SIA):
https://philpapers.org/archive/ADEATT.pdf
That’s not an academic article. It’s a crankish wordwall of brobdingnagian proportions set in PDF format. No journal. No peer review. And it’s mode of argument is amateurish. This is starting to look like tinfoil hat to me.
Yeah, please do. At the very least, this continuous debate would serve a lot of value to observers such as myself and others, who are trying to look at all of this disapassionately.
I do find something interesting about the SIA (self-indication assumption): Our existence should be likelier if more people exist, whether here or somewhere else in the multiverse. But we would also be likelier to be located in an observer-rich universe. Yet our own universe is very far from being observer-rich. After all, other than Earth, it appears to be almost completely devoid of life–at least in those places where we have looked so far. What if we are thus in a universe with relatively few observers? This would be contrary to what the SIA implies, and yet it might be true. In turn, this raises an interesting question: If we are in a universe with relatively few observers in spite of its low probability under SIA, why should we be super-confident that we are in a multiverse with many more observers?
Your intuition is wrong. The number of possible universes barely hospitable to life vastly outnumbers the possible universes more hospitable to life. So any non-intelligent selection of universe is vastly more likely to produce a barely hospitable universe (see my outline of this point). Thus our observation confirms nonintelligent selection. That’s fancy talk for “disproves God.”
And your conclusion is incorrect. That we should be (highly not super) confident that we are in a multiverse with (relatively a bit not many) more observers is not due to this fallacious reasoning about body counts. It’s due to entirely different considerations. Which again does not involve gods but rather eliminates any explanatory need for them. The fallacious “body count” method is ignoring the role of background information in conditioning all probabilities.
Apparently it’s published in a philosophical journal called Synthese:
https://philpapers.org/rec/ADEATT
Then one would need to see the version that was published (it will be journal-formatted) and compare it to see if peer review made any improvements. If it didn’t, this is an embarrassing failure by Synthese.
Did you ever manage to take a look at it, Dr. Carrier?
What do you make of this article, BTW?
https://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil383/collins.htm
Also, what do you make of the many-worlds multiverse hypothesis?
That still is not a formal publication. Just an essay from the “Messiah University” website. There are countless crappy apologetics essays with bad arguments and pseudoscience. That is not any better. I don’t see the need to spend time on it. The kinds of old arguments it cobbles together have already been refuted here. See the “fine tuning” category in my drop down menu at right.
If you can find anything new that hasn’t already been refuted, please quote and describe that new argument. Otherwise, there is no reason to waste time reading countless wordwalls of old apologetics that have already long been debunked.
FWIW, he also wrote about the SIA (self-indication assumption) here, arguing that it is simply straightforward Bayesianism:
https://benthams.substack.com/p/sia-is-just-being-a-bayesian-about
Maybe he’s wrong about this. But I want to figure out how specifically he is wrong.
I don’t see any improvements there. That doesn’t even have a formal syllogism to defend. It’s just another confused ramble, with the same fallacies all over again.
That version even goes to the “configuration of the stars” fallacy by talking about specific individual persons (probability does not work that way as I explained before). And he can’t term-switch to just numbers of people and not which particular ones, as that would then be an equivocation fallacy that he’d have to fix (because the math is then different). And there is no fix presented there.
The most one could get out of this by fixing all his errors is “I think God would make more people than I observe” which is just an opinion not a logical conclusion (he has no access to what God actually wants or why), and is an opinion falsifying God (since we observe God didn’t make more people than we observe). So all that is is abduction to a hypothesis, and you can’t prove a hypothesis true that way. You need evidence (induction, not abduction).
He could try to speculate that maybe God did this with a multiverse—thereby adding epicycles to the hypothesis; but it’s still just a hypothesis he can’t test. So we’re back to not knowing why God would use such an unnecessarily convoluted way to get that result, and the lack of evidence that God did it that way.
He could then appeal to physical evidence for a multiverse, but that is all based on no God being involved, which complicates his project, because it eliminates any ability to argue for the existence of God that way.
Thus, the evidence always counts against God, whether a lot or a little. There is no logical way to get any evidence “for” God out of any observation he is making.
As I said, I apologize for being dull and slow. I just want to work this out. If there’s a coin that’s flipped heads, everyone wakes up while there’s also a coin that’s flipped tails, and only five people in the world wake up, if the coin flips and you wake up, shouldn’t you use the fact that you yourself woke up as evidence that the coin flipped heads, at least in the absence of additional evidence? The odds of you waking up if the coin flipped heads are 100%, while they are infinitely small if the coin flipped tails.
Bentham’s Bulldog is arguing that the same kind of logic should apply to God. As in, we should presume to be in a multiverse with many observers than in a multiverse with few observers because our own existence is much more likely in the former than in the latter. And he argues that a multiverse with many observers is much more likely to be God’s creation in some shape, way, or form.
I’m not 100% sure, but I think that Bentham’s Bulldog would argue that since this woman rolled an extremely unlikely event, we should presume that it’s more likely that there are a trillion-plus identical parallel universes somewhere in the multiverse where this woman–or a (near-)identical copy of her–likewise rolled dice but got less lucky, often much less lucky: https://time.com/archive/6914609/holy-craps-how-a-gambling-grandma-broke-the-record/
In Bayesian terms, after all, the odds of this woman being so lucky would be much higher if there were a trillion-plus versions of her, all in parallel universes, likewise rolling the dice, since then the odds that she’s get this extraordinarily lucky in at least one of these universes would be astronomically higher–no?
It depends on how you word the sentence.
If you ask, what is the epistemic probability that heads came up if a person is awake, the answer is 50%, because “a person is awake” is true on both heads and tails. So observing only one person doesn’t tell you how many awoke. On both conditions, there will be a person awakened 100% of the time, so the likelihood ratio is 100/100 and the prior odds are 50/50, and 100/100 × 50/50 is 50%.
“The odds of you waking up if the coin flipped heads are 100%, while they are infinitely small if the coin flipped tails.” Notice that that isn’t relevant. Because on the five people scenario—well, let’s make it one person, so the math is easier, and the point is made a fortiori (and let’s keep the total population at a million so we aren’t dealing with transfinite arithmetic)—the probability that “you” will awake (as opposed to any one of the other million people) is one in a million, but that’s the same probability as everyone else, and the probability that someone will awake is 100% (the sum of the singular probabilities for all million persons), so you cannot argue from the selection of person that all million awoke. There will always be some person selected, and their selection will always be a million to one against, which is no more nor less than anyone else, so their being selected gives us no information about which way the coin fell.
The only way to test which side the coin turned is to observe if anyone else is awake. If you observe no one is, then you have a comparatively low probability of that coin result over the one-awakened result. Otherwise the prior always remains 50/50 that someone will be awake to make this observation—and it is as likely to be you as anyone else; and “no observations” gives you no differential likelihoods by which to change that.
In this version (Bentham stumbles around several different models so he makes different mistakes in different ones; but we’re just asking about this one model), he is committing the “configuration of the stars” fallacy, a.k.a. the fallacy of neglected total probability (which I discus elsewhere), which can also be discussed in the context of lotteries and poker and other gambling systems (see my comment elsewhere). But in short: the probability that the stars will be in some entropic position by now is 100%, so we cannot argue that “the specific” configuration we now observe is too improbable by chance and therefore must be the result of intelligent design. That’s a fallacy of neglected total probability. The same would be true if we substituted “design” for “multiverse” (every star configuration exists somewhere, in order to “explain” ours). It’s the same fallacy.
You can also Google “inverse gambler’s fallacy” for a different discussion of what, essentially, Bentham’s mistake here is. Like you just said: assuming a rare event entails a lot of common “balancing” events is a fallacy (the inverse gambler’s fallacy), because probability does not work that way. Whether a lucky event happens at the start of a sequence or anywhere else in that sequence is the same (it has the same chance of occurring anywhere in the sequence), so you cannot argue for it being special just because it happened in the first position. You need more evidence than that. Likewise if you stop the sequence after the first event (so you flip the coin only once): still the same probability. Thus singular rare events cannot evince any other events.
That is to say, by themselves. With additional (including certain kinds of background) evidence, you can get some conclusions like this. For example, an event is always more likely to be typical than exceptional, so in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we should assume an event was not lucky but due to some design or inevitability. But…we are almost never in the condition of “the absence of any evidence to the contrary.” Evidence always changes things. Moreover, in his coin toss model, neither outcome is more typical than the other, so without more observations there is no way to tell which way the coin flipped simply because someone is awake and that someone happens to be you and not someone else.
See following comment for a demonstration…
It’s easier to show this with a simpler model: suppose the options are all five people or only one of five people. Then the probability all five awoke is:
P(everyone) × P(you|everyone) / [(P(everyone) × P(you|everyone)) + (P(you) × P(you|onlyone)) + (P(larry) × P(larry|onlyone)) + (P(mo) × P(mo|onlyone)) + (P(curly) × P(curly|onlyone)) + (P(shemp) × P(shemp|onlyone))]
0.5 × 1 / [(0.5 × 1) + (0.1 × 1) + (0.1 × 1) + (0.1 × 1) + (0.1 × 1) + (0.1 × 1)]
0.5 / (0.5 + 0.5)
0.5/1
0.5
It doesn’t matter how long you stretch the alternative hypotheses (from five to a million or even a quadrillion umtillion), the result is always the same.
If you flip which hypothesis you are testing, you get a low probability for “just you” being selected, but then the converse probability is not “you or everyone” but “you or larry or mo or curly or shemp or everyone.” See how that goes?
The fallacy is forgetting that you aren’t comparing “everyone or you” you are comparing “everyone or you or not everyone but someone who is not you.” In other words, you are assuming the observation is “you” specifically, when in fact it is “you” as in whoever wakes up (which is equally likely to be anyone, and those are the alternatives you must account for, on which the observation e will change to who is observing themselves awake—so you can normalize e across the equation as “the hypothesized person observes themselves awake,” since other options are logically impossible, e.g. “only you awaken but observe only Mo awoke and not you”).
So, you can say that on the “just you” theory:
0.1 × 1 / [(0.1 × 1) + (0.1 × 1) + (0.1 × 1) + (0.1 × 1) + (0.1 × 1) + (0.5 × 1)]
0.1 / (0.5 + 0.5)
0.1/1
0.1
There is a 1 in 10 chance the coin flipped tails and you were selected; but there is a 9 in 10 chance the coin flipped heads—or tails and someone else was selected.
You cannot make yourself special. Whoever was selected would be making the same observation. So the evidence is the same. If you try to redefine the model so that no one else would observe themselves awake (that only you get to wake), you just recreate the same fallacy: either the probability it wouldn’t have been you and been someone else making the same observation as you is still 0.4, but plus the 0.5 everyone was selected then gets us back to the 0.9 that includes the possibility of heads and the possibility of tails + someone else is picked; or else you just said the probability it would be you and not anyone else is 100% on tails and thus not “one in five” on tails but the same probability on heads or tails (which is 50%).
There is no way around this.
P.S. And in case it’s still not clear—as on Bluesky Betham seems too dense to get it: all possible persons who might be selected have a nonzero chance of being selected just as you do, so their probabilities have to be in the equation. And they share the prior probability space that only one will be awoken; since that space is 0.5—as the other 0.5 is consumed by the prior probability all will be awoken—the 0.5 for only one is awoken splits into five 0.1s, one 0.1 prior probability for each person who could satisfy the “only one awoke” condition.
Then, on any outcome, P(the one person awoken will observe themselves awake), which is the likelihood, is always 1 (because always someone awakes and observes themselves, regardless of how the coin flips). This likelihood would change if you then see others asleep or others awake. That is the effect of evidence on the epistemic probability of what happened. But in the absence of either observation (if you don’t get to check), you cannot know which way the coin flipped (it retains is prior probability because there is no differential likelihood: the evidence looks the same whether tails or heads came up—one person is awake, which both outcomes predict to 100% certainty as stipulated).
My intuition tells me that you are correct in regards to this, Dr. Carrier:
https://randommusingsandhistory.substack.com/p/another-small-challenge-to-the-sia
At the very least, Bentham’s approach appears to produce a completely illogical result in regards to infinities.
Is your analysis here similar to the correct answer to the Monty Hall problem, where the probabilities appear to change but don’t actually change?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
BTW, I think that I get the general gist of your argument here, but if I’ll have any additional questions or comments, I will make sure to ask you! 🙂
Yes, there are also problems with his handling of transfinite arithmetic, as I hinted at before. But the core error is the one I’ve just outlined.
And yes, there is kinship with the Monty Hall problem. A different thing is happening there, but it’s the same kind of mistake: our intuition locks with certainty on a conclusion we are sure cannot possibly be correct, yet is. All because something is being left out.
In the Monty Hall case, what is being left out is that negative information is information, and thus getting that information changes the scenario, so we should update our expectancies accordingly (this becomes clear if you run the problem yourself with cups and balls until you start to see, physically, what that change in information is).
In Bentham’s case (as in all fallacies of neglected total probability) what is being left out is the rest of the contrary hypothesis. He (and we, when we fall for it) mistake the probability space as split between “probability I awoke alone” and “probability everyone awoke” but that leaves out all the other people who might have awoken instead of us. When you put their probabilities back in, the outcome does not turn out as we thought, when we were violating the Law of Excluded Middle and following a false dichotomy. Until we realize we are doing that and correctly fix the error. Then we see what’s really the case.
For completeness I’ll run the same point conceptually for the “configuration of the stars” fallacy…
In the “configuration of the stars” fallacy the same mistake occurs: assuming the entire probability space is split between “God arranged the stars” and “the specific configuration of stars we observe was a random accident,” where the likelihood on the latter is obviously absurdly low, yet the likelihood on the former is 100% (since if God wanted that configuration, he would produce it 100% of the time, whereas a random process would not).
The error is forgetting that a large part of that probability space is occupied by all the other possible configurations of the stars that random chance could have produced. Every configuration gets a probability on “chance,” and it is the sum of all those probabilities that equals the general condition “chosen by accident.” In other words, “chosen by accident” does not entail a specific configuration, but any of countless configurations.
The only way to get a differential probability favoring design is if you are looking at a configuration that is less likely than any random configuration is expected to be. For example, if all the stars in the universe were arranged to form a cross as viewed from Earth: the probability of that is vastly less than the randomized expectancy and thus is less probable as an accident than by design. But there are countless configurations that are far more expected outcomes of random selection than that, and so when we observe one of those, design no longer competes as an explanation. The likelihoods are effectively the same in that case; so the probability reduces to the prior. And an informed prior would not favor design.
If we added the hypotheses “design + other universes” we would have to include a portion of the probability space for “design – other universes” and “other universes – design” and even then we would not get a leg up, because there is no causal relationship between a random selection and the existence of other selections. If we pull a bead out of a bowl of a hundred and one beads, which bead we pull will be odds against of a hundred to one, but that does not mean there therefore must be a hundred other bowls each with a different bead being pulled. Since there is no inherent causal relationship, we cannot infer from the improbability of a draw from a bowl that other bowls exist.
So, too, the configuration of the stars, which is just a random draw from a bowl. That there is a random draw from a bowl entails there will be an improbable result drawn, and that’s to 100% certainty. There is therefore no way to argue it is “improbable” unless other bowls (other universes) exist. That would require the probability of an improbable draw to be below 100%. Because you can’t have a probability higher than that, and so no other theory can generate a higher probability so as to be favored over it.
This is why the mere configuration of the stars can never give us any evidence that a multiverse exists. For an example of a fact about the stars that could give us such evidence, see Six Arguments That a Multiverse Is More Probable Than a God, and in particular the argument from scaling: that there are a plethora of planets around a plethora of stars in a plethora of galaxies forming a plethora of galaxy clusters, is background knowledge that indicates a trend toward there being a plethora of universes (the existence of scale-steps increases the expectancy that the steps continue, and the next scale-step is “universe”).
By contrast, Aristotle’s / The Bible’s universe, with a single Earth at the center and a close fit of spheres around it ending at a plane of stars where supreme perfection is reached by scale-steps, does not suggest a continuation of the scale-stepping, and so would not be evidence for a multiverse (there could be other evidence for that, but we’re just discussing this one item of evidence).
So in the present world, the scale-steps are nonrandom and indicate an uncompleted upward trend that should naturally end in a plethora of universes (unless something exists to stop that, which we have no evidence of).
That is still weak evidence. The likelihood ratio is not large, as there are many ways the scale-stepping could end at clusters; the only thing we have is that there are more ways it can end in other universes on that gradient than on the scale-stepping in the Aristotelian world, so in the latter we have no evidence for a multiverse, but in the former we have a slight amount of evidence. And this arises from the observed results not being random and distinctly pointing to one trend rather than another. So this is not an argument from the mere configuration of the stars (which gives us no information), but from the specific peculiar ordering of the stars (which gives us information), similar in that respect to the “arranged like a cross” case above.
BTW, I’ve developed an interesting (purely hypothetical) thought experiment:
Let’s roll a 1 trillion-sided dice: If it rolls 1, infinity people wake up. If any other number gets rolled, only one person wakes up. If you wake up, you should presume that 1 was rolled. Ditto for every other person who was woken up alone in a different trial of this. But this would mean that we should presume that 1 was always rolled on this dice, while in reality, this dice only rolled 1 once out of every 1 trillion times!
If you’re an individual observer, you should assume that 1 was rolled in the dice scenario above. But that doesn’t say anything about the frequency with which 1 was rolled, and indeed observers in almost all simulations (specifically those with one observer/few observers) would mistakenly conclude that 1 was rolled. This suggests that SIA would provide a distorted version of reality to observers in observer-poor scenarios regardless of just how widespread observer-poor scenarios actually are, no?
Here’s what ChatGPT subsequently said in response to all of this:
“Yes, exactly! SIA systematically distorts reality for observers in observer-poor scenarios, regardless of how common those scenarios actually are.
Breaking Down the Problem:
Individual Observer’s Perspective
If you wake up in the trillion-sided die experiment, SIA tells you to assume that the die rolled 1 (because most awakened observers exist in the “1 was rolled” scenario).
This makes sense from a self-centered, conditional probability standpoint—given that you’re an observer, you’re more likely to be in a world where there are many observers.
Reality Across Simulations
In reality, the die lands on 1 only once every trillion rolls, meaning that in the vast majority of trials, the one awakened observer is completely wrong in assuming that 1 was rolled.
If you were to look at all simulations (instead of just individual observers), almost all observers in single-observer worlds are misled by SIA.
Thus, SIA consistently produces incorrect conclusions in observer-poor worlds.
Distortion of Reality
This means that SIA does not accurately reflect the frequency of different worlds, just the experience of observers within them.
Observers in observer-poor scenarios will always conclude that they are in observer-rich scenarios—even when they are not.
So even if observer-poor worlds vastly outnumber observer-rich ones, the individuals in them will still believe that they are in observer-rich ones.
The Core Issue:
SIA only tells you what you should expect if you’re an observer, not what is actually happening in the broader reality.
In other words, SIA creates a selection bias that skews observers’ perceptions of reality—especially in worlds where observers are rare.
If you were to ask, “How often is 1 actually rolled?”, SIA doesn’t answer that correctly. It only tells you what you should believe as an observer, not what actually happens across all simulations.
The Big Implication:
This suggests that SIA cannot be trusted to provide an accurate picture of the overall world structure—only of an observer’s experience within a world. So it systematically misleads people in observer-poor scenarios and distorts the perception of reality.
Does this summary align with your concerns?”
This is a good example. Well worth comment…
And indeed, make the number rolled be the single numbered person who is awoken.
Also, as a side-model, imagine it’s “You win a thousand dollars” if it rolls a 1, but you will be given only one dollar (while for the other $999, you aren’t allowed to check if it’s really there), while otherwise you win only one dollar if it’s any other number, and are also (thus) handed one dollar.
In the side model: you get one dollar no matter what was rolled, and are now tasked with deciding whether you really won the whole $1000 and just have to go look for the other $999. Should you conclude you won the whole because you were handed one dollar? Why? You have no information either way (the result is a dollar in your hand either way; ergo, by analogy, the result is someone is awake wondering if they are alone either way).
In the sense I just outlined with the money and dice, yes.
Note that trying to determine what the odds are from the observation is entirely different than deciding what selection occurred knowing in advance what the odds are. That is, if you know already it’s a fair coin, you know both options are 50%. If you know it’s a fair trillion-sided die, you know the big-win option is one in a trillion. And so on. But what if you don’t know how big “the die” is? Can you guess from waking up?
Um. No. You have zero information about that. You don’t know if it was a foregone conclusion (no die or coin, but just a 100% chance you’d be awoken, regardless whether anyone else was), or a 50/50, or a trillion to one, or an umtillion to one.
So how can we get these larger numbers? Bentham has to work from the pool of all logically possible people, not an actual number of people put to sleep, to get his transfinite results, but that is a circular argument: it presumes its conclusion (that there are infinite people) in its premise (that there are infinite people). But there is no way to know how many people there are from observing only one of them.
This illustrates how he uses multiple different arguments and they are all bollocks. But they are each bollocks in different ways and for different reasons. Which is another red flag for crankery. They don’t have one well-stated and well-vetted argument to a conclusion. They have, instead, a whole Gish gallop of bad arguments to that conclusion, and then get angry when we point this out.
If that is what ChatGPT told you, I’m impressed.
This is another good way to check Bentham’s work: just brute-force the sims (run them all; or, say, tens of thousands of them) and just physically count to get your frequencies (hence probabilities). This is what teaches people how the Monty Hall Problem works when they refuse to believe it.
And here, indeed, it becomes obvious that after 10,000 sims of the trillion-die experiment, that a person being awake should not lead them to conclude a 1 is rolled, because in almost none of those runs will that be the case. Even if we pick one person, and ignore all “other person” rolls, it ends up 50/50 whether the one person awoke because of a 1 or the other specific roll of the die that would have selected them.
For example, perhaps they were person 1,987,623,008. The die has a one in a trillion chance of rolling that or of rolling 1, and since both are identical odds, that reduces to 1/1 i.e. 50/50: it’s equally likely, between those two rolls, which will have been rolled.
Note that another tool used is to also run Monty Hall conceptually with a trillion doors and have Monty open all but two of them. That readily reveals how his action gives you a ton of new information that you should then act on (and thus why you should always change your pick of door after). So the method you got ChatGPT to use does work. Kudos.
Here’s another scenario: You have a googolplex-sided dice. If it lands on one, a googolplex people are created. If it lands on any other number, only one person is created.
If you roll it a googol times, you should expect a googolplex*googol times of people to be created based on the SIA, but in reality, you’ll only get a googolplex+googol people, which suggests that the SIA massively exaggerates the number of observers!
The SIA might cause us to conclude that we’re in an observer-rich universe, or at least in an observer-rich part of our universe, but it implies nothing about just how widespread observer-rich universes and observer-rich parts of our universe actually are. For all we know, most universes and parts of our universe can be extremely observer-poor, with our own part of our universe being a massive exception to this rule!
Lol. That’s getting too cerebral to be helpful. I think if someone can’t follow our simpler analogies, they’ll never follow that one.
It’s enough to just show that the reasoning is fallacious, which we can do with even a six-sided die and six people. Run it a thousand times, and it becomes clear everyone assuming SIA will almost always be wrong, which indicates the inference model is epistemically defective and therefore should not be adopted.
Just as with the Monty Hall problem. Run it a thousand times (indeed even just ten), and it becomes clear everyone assuming “the probability of your pick being the win remains the same after Monty shows you an empty door” is almost always wrong, which indicates the inference model is epistemically defective and therefore should not be adopted. You should always switch doors, because that always increases your odds of a win. No matter how much your intuition screams otherwise.