Metaphysical Whack-A-Mole

Here’s an argument for the existence of God:

• There’s no contradiction in an omnipotent being spontaneously coming into existence.
• Nothing that was not omnipotent would be able to prevent an omnipotent being coming into existence. (Think of it like a game of metaphysical whack-a-mole.)
• In a given time period, if there is no contradiction in something happening and there is nothing to prevent it from happening then there is a non-zero probability that it will happen.
• So in any given time period at the beginning of which there is no omnipotent being, there is a non-zero probability that an omnipotent being spontaneously comes into existence.
• So over an arbitrarily large time period the probability that an omnipotent being spontaneously comes into existence will be arbitarily close to certainty.
• There has been enough time that we can be practically certain that an omnipotent being has spontaneously come into existence.
• Once an omnipotent being exists, it will see to it that it continues to exist, since it is omnipotent and wants to continue to exist.
• There cannot be more than one omnipotent being, since it follows from their omnipotence that they would be both able and unable to frustrate each other’s intentions, and this is a contradiction.
• If there is exactly one omnipotent being, then that being is God.
• So we can be practically certain that God exists.
• So God exists.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

A good day to create the universe

Ancient and medieval cosmologists used to wonder whether the universe had always existed, or whether it had come into existence at some particular time in the past. (I don’t think it had occurred to them that it might have existed throughout an open temporal interval bounded at the start but with no first point.) One of the arguments in favour of the universe always having existed was based on what philosophers call the Principle of Sufficient Reason. The idea was that if the universe had come into being at some particular time then there should be some reason why it came into being at that time rather than at another. This worry can be beefed up a bit if you think that God created the universe: even if random events can happen for no reason, it seems odd to think God would make a decision for no reason. Of course it’s odd to imagine God paralysed between two bales of hay like Buridan’s ass, but it’s actually kind of hard to explain exactly how arbitrary divine decisions are meant to work.

One option in the face of this problem is to say that the universe has always existed, and if you want to put a theological spin on that then you can say that God constantly acts to keeps the universe going, or that it depends on him in some other way besides being created at a particular time. An alternative is to say that there was no such thing as time independent of the universe being created: God’s act of creating the universe also created time itself. That option goes back a long way, but it’s probably harder to square with a pre-modern understanding of time than with the picture offered by contemporary physics, so people still fretted about it. It’d be nice to have an explanation for why one time to create the universe might have been better than the others, so that’s what I’m going to offer today.

When philosophers of religion aren’t fretting about cosmology, they’re usually fretting about free will and divine foreknowledge. If God knows this morning what I’ll do this afternoon, how can my actions this afternoon be free? Well, one option put forward by Boethius is to say that, just as seeing something happening now isn’t making it happen, seeing/knowing about something happening in the future doesn’t make that happen either. We control what we’ll do, and that determines what God (correctly) believes we’ll do. If that’d be a case of backwards causation, then there’s backwards causation. (Backwards causation? Wouldn't that mean time travel is possible? Well, yes: with God all things are possible.) Now, if you take this line on free will and divine causation, then I can help explain why God created the universe when he did.

The idea is that, at each time while he was waiting to create the universe, God knew which free choices the people would make if he created the universe then. The same initial conditions could lead to different outcomes – that’s what indeterminism is – and at each time God knew which outcomes he’d get if he put his initial conditions in place then. He waited until the time that would lead to the best choices, created the universe then, and here we are.

                                                                                                        

For someone with the prior commitments I have about time, free will, the existence of God and the principle of sufficient reason, this puzzle is basically moot. But a puzzle being moot never stops philosophers trying to solve it. And if you have different commitments, maybe my idea can help you more substantively. What do you think?

The problem of evil people

What are you supposed to think when you really admire someone, and you think they’re perfect, and then you become convinced that if they were perfect things would not be as they are? You change your mind, of course, but what do you change it to? I suppose you could decide that the person in question must have never existed in the first place. Or if you think philosophical zombies are possible, you could decide that their body existed, but was an automaton. But in practice, you tend to decide that the person exists, and has a conscious mind as you’d always thought, but isn’t perfect. I think we’re sensible to update our beliefs in this way. If a child's first clue that their parents aren't perfect is when they find the Santa Claus story isn't true, they should stop believing in Santa but keep believing in their parents.

Now, some people go through a phase of thinking there’s an omnipotent god, perfect in every way, but then they decide that if that was how things were, then the world around us would be different. There’d be less suffering, or no suffering, or organisms would seem better designed, or people would experience an amount of suffering proportional to the amount they caused, or something like that. This is understandable: the original opinion is a common one to which many people are brought up, and the so-called Problem of Evil is a tough problem for it. What I find hard to fathom is the reasoning behind a common response to the problem. Rather than decide that the god they’d thought was perfect isn’t perfect after all, they decide it doesn’t exist. But isn’t that crazy? If there’s evidence for divine agency, then there’s evidence for a divine agent as good as the actions and omissions attributable to it. If I’m right, then the proper response to the Problem of Evil is not atheism, or at least not the kind of atheism which says there are no gods.

One reason people might respond this way is because they held the former opinion on the basis of authority, rather than more direct evidence for divine agency. The former believer becomes convinced that the authority had something wrong, and this casts doubt on the rest. The beliefs in the god’s existence and its perfection aren’t independent because they have the same source. It'd be like the kid realising reindeer can't fly and inferring that the whole Santa story is probably nonsense. This makes some sense, but not much. The more the authority was trusted in the first place, the stranger it is to throw out the whole story on the basis of one incorrect detail, and the less the authority was trusted, the less likely it is that they were the sole or even primary basis of the person's belief. (Unless they're a four year-old.)

Another reason the perfection-belief and existence-belief might be dependent on one another is that someone might think an omnipotent, omniscient god would have to be perfect. There have been people who thought that all cases of wrongdoing resulted from either our ignorance or  embodiment, but I don’t think it’s very usual to think this now, except insofar as all agency requires embodiment, and the believer in divine agency wouldn’t have thought it did. So responding to the problem with atheism would suggest some rather old-fashioned views about the sources of wrongdoing.

The third explanation I can think of is that people decide that they have no interest in what gods there may be unless they’re perfect, or at least very good indeed. So they don’t stop believing as such; they just ignore the issue. I expect this sometimes happens, but it seems reckless, especially if the imperfect god still goes in for divine retribution. Indeed, it’d be understandable if a raised credence in an imperfect god went with a raised credence in Hell. It’s also worth pointing out that this attitude has no place in serious rational inquiry into how things are.

I’m an atheist. It’s not because of the Problem of Evil; it’s because I don’t see any evidence for divine agency, whether of the sort I’d like to happen or the sort I wouldn’t. And I think the Problem of Evil does pose a serious problem to the widely held belief that there’s a perfect god. I don’t, however, think the problem by itself offers much support to the view, also widely held, that there aren’t any gods at all. Perhaps I’ve got the wrong end of the stick and nobody thinks it does. If I have, you can get back to what you were doing. But if you’re an atheist because there’s so much suffering in the world, then I’d be interested to know exactly how that works.