In my last post, I rewrote Bentham Bulldog’s recent post to be more understandable. I didn’t do this out of being patronizing or condescending, but because many people don’t understand what he has to say, and I wanted to make it easier for myself to understand, while also providing practical examples of how he can improve his communication.1
In this post, I’m going to respond to the arguments of that piece. I won’t go in maximal depth, nor do I want to invite a point-counterpoint posting discourse. That kind of content can become unwieldy.2 I imagine BB has better things to read and write about anyway, and that’s totally fine too.3
On Improbability and Evolution
Naturalist atheists believe evolution does amazing things and science often leads to counter-intuitive outcomes.
Take the eye, for example. No one component of the eye sees, yet together it does, and so no supernatural explanation is necessary.4 And yet, it’s difficult to explain the pressures that selected for the eye in a step-by-step evolution because we weren’t there to observe it happening. In fact, it’s tempting to say this evolution is so improbable to be impossible.
But evolution teaches us that long time scales makes some outcomes more likely cumulatively over time. You don’t need to look at nature to know this, just imagine a 100,000 team single-elimination basketball tournament. It’s incredibly unlikely that any one team will win it. But with each round, it becomes more probable for one team to win it all. From the outset, one team had a .001% chance of winning the championship, but when the tournament is over, the final outcome looks inevitable in retrospect.5
Similarly, it seems incredibly improbable that naturalism would shape brains that could adequately understand reality, but the longer evolution takes, it becomes almost inevitable, pending on selection pressures. We don’t intuit how long a billion years is, how that time length sharpens the evolution of certain high quality sensory organs, and how well evolution can attune those organs to inform our senses to be in line with reality.
On Improbability and Physics
I’m agnostic on probabilities and physics when it comes to proving God, because I don’t think most people outside of those fields understand what the hell is being talked about. Given this ambiguity, advocates appear to sneak in assumptions without justification. What’s more, they can always reframe a model with different data points.
For instance, per the theist, the fact that life can arise in our universe at all is a good argument for the increased probability of a God. The problem with this argument is that it presupposes that God cares about life arising in the first place. You need evidence for that claim!
What’s more, this argument seems less probable in another framing. Victor Stenger made this argument in his book God: The Failed Hypothesis. The percentage of the universe that we could classify as “life” relative to empty space, dark matter, or just stars is smaller than microscopic. It would be like looking at the composition of the atmosphere and saying the carbon dioxide I just released into it by revving a car engine once6 is the point of the atmosphere. It seems more like a mistake than an intentional outcome.
This is in contrast to a universe where life was, say, 30% of it. If you presented me with two universes, one like that or one like our own, and asked me which one I thought was designed with life in mind, I’d say it’s the former.
We can argue or invent unfalsifiable theories about why God created or didn’t create the universe in such a way, but it’s important to keep in mind that probabilistic reasoning is about making decisions given limited information that we know for certain. We can form reliable weather, election, and sports models by using agreed upon data with verifiable definitions. We don’t have that data when it comes to universal origins. We don’t know that the fundamental constants of a universe could be different, we just know what our universe’s happen to be like.
There are even spooky new atheists who contradict the design apologist and say actually life can arise with different constants, and also the predictions about the universe being unlikely are wrong.
Who am I supposed to believe? I couldn’t tell you, as I withdrew from physics 101 in college. But I’m skeptical of the claim that the fundamental constants of the universe could be different and it was determined by a being as opposed to random chance, and there cannot be a multiverse with natural selection of universes. It seems like the proponents of design are sneaking in multiverse logic without allowing others the ability to also use it.
Sure, if you believe even one of the other arguments for God, it increases the probability of the design argument in a cumulative way, over the baseline multiverse explanations, but it feels like cheating. It’s like me playing one on one in basketball, and we’re tied, and you say “I can win because I can pass it to my friend and he can shoot and score.” It doesn’t seem to matter if I reject that you can do that, and it seems equally unfair that you won’t let me do the same with my friend.
What’s the difference between a cumulative case diminishing the probability of a viewpoint and gish galloping?
For the most part, I agree that cumulative cases are more persuasive than non-cumulative arguments, but once again, there is a problem of framing.
About a decade ago, I took a debate class and it diminished my view of debate. One time, we played a game where we had to defend a position and attack the other. If you ran out of defenses or arguments, you had to sit down. I lost this game when I went against someone who literally just started making assertions. They weren’t particularly relevant arguments, they were just odd statements, border-lining on non-sequitur. I wish I could remember specifically what the arguments were, but I do remember being floored that I lost because I had standards of what counted as an argument, while my opponent was allowed to gish gallop.
In this way, the danger of appealing to cumulative cases is that if you're too enthusiastic to prove a conclusion,7 any argument can appear acceptable and increase the probability of a conclusion regardless of its merits. Making many arguments can thus be confused with making many good arguments.
The practical problem is that every philosophical school has deeply held beliefs that appear subjective, while also having comprehensive objections to other philosophical schools.
For example, most people reading this would agree that a bad argument against atheism is that it doesn't tell you how to avoid Hell after you die. For millions of Americans, however, this is a great argument against atheism! They presume Hell is real8 and should be avoided at all costs, and the fact that atheism doesn’t acknowledge this reality is a big red flag, not unlike it’s a red flag to Bentham that his interlocuter rejects arguments about evolution.
If we were to evaluate atheism or any viewpoint and use Bentham's skeptical standard of rejecting counter-arguments, then these Americans are actual more reasonable than me or you simply because they are tallying the number of arguments, consulting their priors uncritically, and rejecting the quality of arguments to come to a silly conclusion.
In this way, what makes a viewpoint insufficiently explanatory is subjective to the individual judging a view from the outside. I reject this method of evaluating truth because it appears to be more about tallying arguments quantitatively than evaluating them qualitatively.
Missing the Point of Atheist Objections and Christian Beliefs.
I also agree that the problem of evil/suffering is not a cumulative case against general theism, but I wholeheartedly think it's a cumulative case against Christian theism.
This may seem like I'm changing the subject, but it's a distinction that Bentham overlooks: when atheists use the problem of evil as a cumulative case, it's usually in response to the Christian God, not Bentham's version of God, which doesn’t appear to be Christian.
Namely, the problem of evil is a strong argument against God’s existence if you believe that God’s essential nature is loving, and that he cares about humanity, earth, and creation, among other specific things. Indeed, Jesus is fully God and fully man, and that has tremendous theological significance for Christians.
If you have a quasi-deistic, non-Christian belief in God similar to Bentham, the problem of evil, incoherence, smallness of life and other problems appear derivative of the world being imperfect. But if you’re a Christian, you traditionally believe that God is all-powerful, all-loving, puts humanity first, and wants to personally intercede into your life to make it better, among other things. Because Christians have such a complex understanding of God, these arguments against the Christian God are cumulative.
So, you not only have the problem of evil, but also the problem of Hell, the problem of religious morality often causing harm with no obvious benefits,9 the problem of humans being resistant to persuasion yet accepting specific claims about Jesus being very important to orthodox Christianity, the problem of human smallness in a big universe, and much more.
Put simply if the Christian claim is that God loves you and doesn’t want you to suffer, puts humans/earth at the center of his creation, has a plan for human flourishing that includes witch burnings, insists that homosexuality isn’t natural, and also wants you to believe in Him despite all of the evidence contrary on these things, and so on, why did he make the world the way he did? The world does not look like it was created by the Christian God.10
This is the God atheists are criticizing, not what Bentham is defending. I and most atheists are totally fine with folks like Bentham believing what they want. Maybe there is a creator of the universe!
But I have little reason to think the creator did so with humans in mind, and much reason to think He didn’t.
He graciously looked over the article, said he’d incorporate some things, while rejecting others, as is his prerogative. Even if he disagrees with some of my suggestions, as I also say in the piece, style is subjective. The things that he disagreed with are probably (not wanting to break up the post) going to be a defining aspect of his personal voice. I disagree with that choice, but that’s fine. What’s important for anyone as a writer is that they are cognizant of the writing choices they are making and own the trade offs. That’s what good writing is about.
If you don’t believe me, I invite you to watch these videos and not suffer whiplash after like two.
I’m once again going to violate my rules upon writing this, but I’m sure no one will care.
In this way, the eye (for sight) and the brain (for consciousness) are very similar for atheists.
I guarantee you someone is saying “Go Birds!” right now.
Not the total CO2, just that CO2. And even then, I think it overstates how much life is in the world in the analogy.
As human being are wont to do
Even if they couldn’t give you a coherent theology of Hell that’s based on the traditions of their religion
Think homophobia. Who does it actually harm, and why did God waste so much time telling us it was so bad?
In My Opinion!