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.

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):

“Suppose that a coin gets flipped which creates one person if heads and ten people if tails. You should, after being created by the coinflip, think tails is ten times likelier than heads.”

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.

“If 10 people existing makes your existence ten times likelier and 100 people existing makes your existence 100 times likelier, infinity people existing makes your existence infinitely likelier.”

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.

“That’s a really huge number. Theism can nicely explain why that number of people exists, but atheism has no comparable explanation. In fact, because it’s good to create, theism actively predicts that number of people existing, while atheism does not.”

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.

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!).

Arguments For God Tier-list by Bentham’s Bulldog (2024)

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.

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.

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.

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.