I recently viewed Dr. David Wood’s video, Scooby-doo and the Case of the Silly Skeptic. The target of Wood’s criticism was Dr. Michael Shermer (pictured above), who defended a principle which he referred to as “Shermer’s Last Law,” in the course of a debate with Wood on October 10, 2016. According to this law, any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God. The reason is that technologically advanced aliens could easily produce effects that would look like miracles to us. As Wood puts it (paraphrasing Shermer’s argument): “They might be able to cure diseases instantly, or regenerate limbs, or change the weather. These kinds of things would seem miraculous to human beings, and so from our perspective, aliens who could do these kinds of things would be indistinguishable from God.” So if we saw something miraculous, how would be know that it’s God and not aliens?
In the debate, Wood fired back at Shermer, asking: “If you did want to know that God exists, wouldn’t you want some method to figure out if He exists, something that would lead you to the truth about that? According to Dr. Shermer, there can be no such method, because [for] anything God could possibly do, you could say, ‘Aliens did it.’ … So it’s built into the methodology that you could never know whether God exists or not. If it’s built into your methodology [that you can] never know the truth about something, then I have to question the methodology.” In his video, Dr. Wood added: “If somebody says to me, ‘Prove to me that statement X is true,’ but an examination of his methodology shows that he won’t allow anything to count as evidence that statement X is true, how can we take that demand for proof seriously?” Finally, Wood administered his coup de grace against those who demand proof of God’s existence: “When I use an atheist’s methodology against him, he can’t even prove his own existence,” since advanced aliens could make me believe that I am arguing with an atheist when in fact I’m not, simply by messing with my brain.
Wood also attacked Shermer’s hypocrisy for asking why God doesn’t detect amputees: even if He did, Shermer still wouldn’t be convinced of God’s existence. And how reasonable is it, asks Wood, for Shermer to believe the evolutionary naturalist myth that life originated from non-living matter, while at the same time insisting that the regeneration of a limb from living matter would somehow constitute proof of God’s existence?
Is Shermer simply being willfully perverse, as Wood seems to believe? Much as I profoundly disagree with Shermer, I would argue that his position is at least intellectually consistent, even if I also consider it to be unreasonable. Here’s why.
Why I think Shermer’s skeptical position is an intellectually consistent one
1. Philosophically speaking, there is nothing inconsistent in the position of someone who refuses to believe in God’s existence unless she has proof, or at least good evidence, that God exists. (Arguably, the person who says, “I won’t believe in anything unless I have proof or good evidence that it’s real,” is being self-referentially inconsistent, since there are some things – e.g. the external world – whose reality we just have to accept as given; but the skeptic who restricts the scope of this evidentiary principle to supernatural beings is perfectly consistent. Such a restriction might strike many people as rather ad hoc, but inconsistent it ain’t.)
2. There is also nothing obviously inconsistent in a skeptic maintaining, on independent grounds, that for any extraordinary effect E (e.g. the instantaneous regeneration of an amputated limb), the hypothesis that aliens produced the effect will always be more probable than the hypothesis that God did it. [And what might those “independent grounds” be? Perhaps the skeptic might argue that the existence of an all-knowing Being Who is absolutely simple – as classical theism insists that God is – is fantastically improbable, on antecedent grounds, as it is difficult to see how an utterly simple Being could give rise to the sheer variety and complexity of things that we see in this world.]
From these two premises, it follows that no effect, however extraordinary it may be, can provide good evidence that God exists. What this means is that if a theist is going to defend the reasonableness of belief in God when arguing with a skeptic who accepts the above premises, then it would be advisable to stick with ordinary effects, and then deploy a philosophical argument (say, the cosmological argument or the teleological argument) to show that the best explanation for these effects is God. But I digress.
What if the same skeptic mocks religious believers, asking them why God never heals amputees? (Or does He? See here.) The question is a perfectly legitimate one, since the absence of such healings is, on the face of it, puzzling if God exists. But if the skeptic goes on to admit that even such a healing wouldn’t convince her that God exists, is she being inconsistent? I think not. She is simply making two independent points: (i) the best sort of evidence that could possibly be adduced for God’s existence (namely, well-documented evidence for extraordinary miracles, such as the instantaneous healing of an amputee) appears to be lacking; and (ii) even this evidence wouldn’t be enough to show that God is real, anyway, since the antecedent probability of the existence of the God of classical theism is far lower than the probability of advanced aliens existing.
Let’s go back to Dr. Wood’s remark: “If somebody says to me, ‘Prove to me that statement X is true,’ but an examination of his methodology shows that he won’t allow anything to count as evidence that statement X is true, how can we take that demand for proof seriously?” Dr. Wood’s point is a rhetorically powerful one, but it seems to me that Dr. Wood is guilty of an equivocation here. For the skeptic is not saying that nothing could ever count as evidence for God; rather, what she is saying is that according to her own epistemic principles, any effect that would qualify as evidence for God would simultaneously as even better evidence for the existence of advanced aliens, since their existence is antecedently more probable than God’s. In other words, the classical theist’s definition of God is epistemically self-defeating, since it makes the task of establishing God’s existence with even a high degree of probability an impossible one. “Don’t blame me,” the skeptic might argue in her defense. “Blame your definition of the Deity. That’s where the real problem lies.”
Refuting the skeptic
So, what’s wrong with the skeptic’s two-step argument? I’m not going to attack the skeptic’s first premise. I think that for someone to argue that we ought to believe in a supernatural being, he needs to produce good evidence that such a being exists. In the absence of such evidence, I see nothing wrong with someone believing in such a being, simply because this belief makes his life meaningful. Fair enough. Far be it from me to scoff at beliefs that people hold onto, because their very sanity depends on their continuing to believe them. That’s not wishful thinking; it’s psychic self-preservation. If giving up your belief in the supernatural would make you sad, that shouldn’t deter you from pursuing the truth, even if hurts your feelings. But if you think that giving up such a belief would make you go crazy, then you’d be best advised to let sleeping dogs lie. So I don’t think fideism is necessarily irrational. However, if someone wants to tell me that I ought to accept his supernatural belief, then I think it is perfectly reasonable for me to demand good evidence – particularly in an age when different people’s beliefs about supernatural beings mutually conflict.
Where I would find fault with the skeptic is in the second premise of her argument: that for any extraordinary effect E, the hypothesis that aliens produced it is always more probable than the hypothesis that God did it. Even if we judge the existence of aliens to be antecedently more probable (given our background knowledge of the world) than the existence of the God of classical theism, we need to bear in mind the following:
(i) it doesn’t follow from this that for any effect E, the hypothesis that aliens produced E is more probable than the hypothesis that God did. There might be some highly specific effects (which I’ll discuss below), whose production by God (assuming He exists) would be vastly more probable than the production of these same effects by aliens. In that case, the degree to which these effects tend to confirm God’s existence might outweigh the antecedent improbability of the existence of God, when compared to aliens. That would tip the balance in God’s favor;
(ii) unless one is claiming that God’s existence is logically inconsistent with some known fact F, it follows that the antecedent probability of God’s existence, while low, is not zero or even infinitesimal. Given that the number N of events that have occurred in the observable universe is finite, and given that none of these events is logically inconsistent with God’s existence, it follows that the antecedent probability of God’s existence (from what we know about the world) will also be a finite number which is measurably greater than zero. Indeed, I would argue that for any simple hypothesis H, we should always rate its antecedent probability as greater than or equal to 1 in 10120, which has been calculated by Seth Lloyd as the number of base-level events (or elementary bit-operations) that have taken place in the history of the observable universe. In a post I wrote several years ago, I argued that the antecedent probability of the existence of some supernatural agent(s) should be assigned a value of at least 1 in 10120: “…[I]f we imagine embodied particle-sized intelligent beings scouring the cosmos from the moment of creation onwards, the maximum number of observations they could possibly make of naturalistic occurrences is 10120, hence by Laplace’s sunrise argument, the prior probability they would rationally assign to a supernatural event would have to be 1 in 10120.” That being the case, belief in a supernatural agent could be rendered reasonable by evidence which favors theism over naturalistic hypotheses by a factor of more than 10120 to 1. How might this happen? The mathematician Charles Babbage (1791-1871), in Chapter 10 and Chapter 13 of his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, makes the perspicuous observation that whereas the evidence against miracles increases an an arithmetic rate as non-miraculous occurrences accumulate over the course of time, the evidence for a miracle increases at a geometric rate, as the number of independent eyewitnesses increases. It therefore follows that even a vanishingly low antecedent probability of a miracle can be overcome by the testimony of a sufficient number of independent eyewitnesses;
(iii) theism is not the same as classical theism. Most people who believe in God hold Him to be omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent (although they might quibble amongst themselves about exactly what these terms mean). But when we look at the other attributes of the God of classical theism – changelessness, impassibility and simplicity, for instance – I think it is fair to say that: (a) most people care little for these attributes; (b) Scripture is at best an ambiguous witness in their favor, and the reasons why Jews, Christians and Muslims came to insist on God having these attributes are largely philosophical; and (c) today, however, many philosophers and theologians would dispute the claim that these attributes are an “all-or-nothing” package. Hence even if someone had what looked like a solid argument against one of the attributes traditionally ascribed to God, it wouldn’t necessarily constitute a good argument against God Himself.
I suggested above that even if the existence of advanced aliens is vastly more probable on antecedent epistemic grounds than the existence of God, the production of this or that miracle might turn out to be readily explicable only on the hypothesis that God exists, and astronomically improbable on all other hypotheses. But what sort of miracle are we talking about here? I’ll let a New Atheist answer that question.
Miracles that would overwhelmingly point to God rather than aliens as their cause
(The following section is excerpted from a previous post of mine on Uncommon Descent, written in 2014.)
[New Atheist Professor Jerry] Coyne has conceded that if he found the phrase “Made by Yahweh” in every human cell, he would tentatively conclude that God was responsible. In a post titled, What evidence would convince you that a god exists? (July 7, 2010), Coyne explicitly declared that if scientists found messages in our DNA, it would be reasonable to infer that God or other supernatural agents were responsible:
Over at AlterNet, Greta Christina describes six things that, if they happened or were observed, would convince her that God exists. These including magic writing in the sky, correct prophecies in sacred texts, accurate information gained during near-death experiences, followers of one religion being much more successful (in ways that couldn’t be explained by economic and social factors) than followers of other faiths. Go read it: she qualifies and explains all of these things in detail…
Making the same point, I provided my own list in a critique of the claim that science and faith are compatible:
There are so many phenomena that would raise the specter of God or other supernatural forces: faith healers could restore lost vision, the cancers of only good people could go into remission, the dead could return to life, we could find meaningful DNA sequences that could have been placed in our genome only by an intelligent agent, angels could appear in the sky. The fact that no such things have ever been scientifically documented gives us added confidence that we are right to stick with natural explanations for nature. And it explains why so many scientists, who have learned to disregard God as an explanation, have also discarded him as a possibility.
In a subsequent post titled, “Shermer and I disagree on the supernatural” (November 8, 2012), Professor Coyne was even more explicit, writing that he would “provisionally accept” the existence of “a divine being” if scientists discovered confirming messages written in our DNA:
I’ve previously described the kind of evidence that I’d provisionally accept for a divine being, including messages written in our DNA or in a pattern of stars, the reappearance of Jesus on earth in a way that is well documented and convincing to scientists, along with the ability of this returned Jesus to do things like heal amputees. Alternatively, maybe only the prayers of Catholics get answered, and the prayers of Muslims, Jews, and other Christians, don’t.
Yes, maybe aliens could do that, and maybe it would be an alien trick to imitate Jesus (combined with an advanced technology that could regrow limbs), but so what? I see no problem with provisionally calling such a being “God”; — particularly if it comports with traditional religious belief — until proven otherwise. What I can say is “this looks like God, but we should try to find out more. In the meantime, I’ll provisionally accept it.” That, of course, depends on there being a plethora of evidence. As we all know, there isn’t.
In an earlier post, titled, Can there be evidence for God? (11 October 2010), Coyne challenges New Atheist P.Z. Myers (who said that no amount of evidence for the supernatural would budge him) on this very point, appealing to the virtue of explanatory simplicity when pressed as to why he would take certain public signs (such as the healing of amputees by a man descending from the clouds who identified himself as Jesus) as evidence for God. In this post, Coyne specifically mentions healed amputees, but his point about there being an abundance of documentation would apply equally well to the discovery of a “Made by Yahweh” message in every human cell, which he mentioned in the passages cited above:
Now you can say that this is just a big magic stunt, but there’s a lot of documentation – all those healed amputees, for instance. Even using Hume’s criterion, isn’t it more parsimonious to say that there’s a God (and a Christian one, given the presence of Jesus!) rather than to assert that it was all an elaborate, hard-to-fathom magic trick or the concatenation of many enigmatic natural forces?
And your evidence-based conversion to God need not be permanent, either. Since scientific truth is provisional, why not this “scientific” truth about God as well? Why not say that, until we find evidence that what just happened was a natural phenomenon, or a gigantic ruse, we provisionally accept the presence of a God?
Coyne’s attitude here strikes me as eminently rational, and what I would expect from a man of science.
Are there any special miracles that can unambiguously be ascribed to God?
As we noted above, Professor Coyne would tentatively accept the existence of God, given the (well-documented) occurrence of certain specific miracles. But can we go further, and point to miracles (such as the resurrection of a man from the dead) which could only be caused by God, and which could therefore be unambiguously ascribed to God?
(The following section is an excerpt from an earlier post of mine on Uncommon Descent, written in 2014.)
[Thomistic philosopher Edward] Feser thinks that the resurrection of a dead body would be a clear-cut example of a supernatural event or miracle that in principle, only God could have caused:
Christ’s resurrection from the dead would be a paradigm case of such a miracle. But establishing such a miracle in turn requires a lot of philosophical stage-setting. It requires establishing God’s existence and nature, divine providence, the possibility in principle of miracles, the possibility in principle of a resurrection, and so forth. All this groundwork has to be established before the occurrence of a miracle like the resurrection can be defended. (Again, see the post just linked to for discussion of this subject.)
While I would agree with Feser that only a supernatural Being could raise a dead person back to life, as such an event would constitute a massive violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I have to disagree with his implicit claim that a well-documented case of a corpse coming back to life could only be ascribed to God. For the problem is that what looks like a resurrection might not actually be a resurrection. Consider the following scenario. Suppose there is an advanced race of aliens who are capable of very quickly moving bodies wherever they choose, using technologies beyond our ken. The aliens are also capable of transforming one person’s appearance (including the DNA of their cells) into that of another person, in the twinkling of an eye, although such feats of course require an enormous amount of energy. To simulate a resurrection, then, all the aliens would have to is quickly remove the corpse from the scene, transform another individual into a replica of what the deceased person looked like while he/she was still alive, and rapidly transport that person to the place where the corpse was before – all in the space of a fraction of a second. Ridiculously far-fetched? Yes, of course. But is it demonstrably impossible? No.
Nor is there any reason in principle why an alien could not tamper with our visual systems and/or our memories, making us think that we had seen a dead person come to life even though nothing extraordinary had taken place.
To make matters worse for Feser, there is another possibility that he has to consider: that demons may be able to bring about or at least mimic the resurrection of a dead body. Consider the following passage from Exodus 7:
10 So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did just as the Lord commanded. Aaron threw his staff down in front of Pharaoh and his officials, and it became a snake. 11 Pharaoh then summoned wise men and sorcerers, and the Egyptian magicians also did the same things by their secret arts: 12 Each one threw down his staff and it became a snake. But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs. 13 Yet Pharaoh’s heart became hard and he would not listen to them, just as the Lord had said. (NIV)
Commenting on this passage in Exodus, St. Thomas Aquinas, writing in his Summa Theologica, vol. I, question 114, article 4, reply to objection 2, was willing to allow that demons can transform inanimate objects into frogs, using “certain seeds that exist in the elements of the world.” And although he went on to argue that demons could not raise a dead man back to life, he added that demons were perfectly capable of creating a “semblance of reality” so that “something of this sort seems to be effected by the operation of demons.” Demons are capable of producing collective hallucinations too: “the demon, who forms an image in a man’s imagination, can offer the same picture to another man’s senses.”
The point I’m making here is that even when evaluating miracles, we have to adopt a balance-of-probabilities approach. Yes, one might imagine an advanced race of aliens pulling off a stunt like that. But it’s not rational to suppose that aliens would do such a thing: first, we haven’t discovered any aliens; and second, even if they existed, it’s extremely unlikely that they would bother to pull religious pranks on us. And for all we know, demons may be capable of causing us all to suffer hallucinations. But we have no special reason to believe that they would – and if we believe that the world is governed by Divine Providence, such a scenario would seem especially unlikely. The most obvious interpretation of an event such as a dead person coming to life is that it’s a supernatural sign from Heaven. And that should be enough.
[Case study: the Resurrection]
The best defense of the Resurrection of Jesus on Bayesian probabilistic grounds that I have seen is The Argument from Miracles: A Cumulative Case for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth by Professor Tim McGrew and his wife, Dr. Lydia McGrew. What the authors attempt to demonstrate is that there is “a small set of salient public facts” that strongly supports belief in the resurrection of Jesus. Taking into account only the eyewitness testimony of the women at the tomb of Jesus, his twelve apostles and St. Paul, they calculate that the facts in question are 1044 times more likely to have occurred, on the assumption that the Resurrection of Jesus actually happened, than that on the assumption that it did not. However, their argument makes no attempt to calculate the prior probability of a man rising from the dead.
(In my post, I go on to argue that using Laplace’s Sunrise argument, the prior probability of a man rising from the dead in the first century A.D. can be calculated as about 1 in a billion, rather than 1 in 10120. Since 1044 is much greater than one billion, the evidence supporting the Resurrection vastly outweighs the antecedent improbability of a Resurrection occurring. In any case, given that there were actually 500 witnesses to the Resurrection, we could still establish the reasonableness of belief in this miracle, using the lower figure of 1 in 10120. In another post, titled, Good and bad skepticism: Carl Sagan on extraordinary claims, I also deal with the common skeptical objection that the witnesses to the Resurrection may have been the victims of mass hallucination.)
Conclusion
Dr. Shermer’s skeptical point that any extraordinary effect could have been either produced or simulated by advanced aliens is a valid one. But the inference he draws, that belief in God is never warranted by the evidence, is a faulty one. God may not be the only possible explanation of any particular event, however extraordinary. Nevertheless, He may be the only reasonable one.
Anyway, here’s what another section of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says about God as a “necessary being”:
From the “Atheism and Agnosticism” entry
Doesn’t really say much except that it’s hard to know what a “necessary being” is and how one could say that God would be such a thing, but then that really is the problem. It seems to be nothing but word-play that reinforces one’s unwarranted belief in a deity.
Glen Davidson
Yes. Agreed.
sean s.
I never said your claim was illogical. I asked you how you KNOW (you claimed to have actual knowledge) that it is in fact possible that God does not exist. I don’t think that’s something anyone can claim to have knowledge of.
Then i pointed out that your argument is nothing more than an argument from ignorance. You don’t have any proof that the non-existence of God is impossible, therefore you “know” that it is possible that God does not exist.
Argumentum ad Ignorantiam: (appeal to ignorance) the fallacy that a proposition is true simply on the basis that it has not been proved false…
Entertaining possibilities is not a claim of knowledge.
sean samis claimed to have actual knowledge.
No you don’t’
No you don’t.
You do too.
Sean’s original statement also struck me as an argument from ignorance, but since nobody knows whether necessity is a necessary trait of God even if it exists, what’s the point in arguing over this?
How do you know he doesn’t?
How do you know that nobody knows that?
peace
All this is by way of a distraction, so Mung will not have to address his own words.
My full question to Mung yesterday was “You object to me claiming to “know that it’s possible that X does not exist” as being illogical, but then say that “X must exist because X cannot not exist”? Pray tell, how do you KNOW that?
Please notice that he conveniently omits that last part in his recent complaints about me.
We do know it is possible that no deity exists because we know that anything which has not been proved impossible is possible.
That’s what possible means.
Since we don’t know that the absence of gods is impossible, the absence of gods is something that “may be conceived, be done, or occur according to nature ”; it’s something that may or may not occur”; it’s “something that may or may not be true or actual”.
We do know it is possible that no deity exists because we know that anything which has not been proved impossible is possible.
We don’t know that no deity exists, we just know that is possible.
sean s.
Since God’s nature is not impossible, it exists in all possible worlds; but, on the doctrine of simplicity, God is his own nature, and so God exists in all possible worlds.
See how easy that is?
People who claim to know that it is possible that God does not exist have no objective empirical evidence to support their claim. They may as well be uttering magical incantations.
What does that mean, exactly?
The existence of any of the thousands of gods people have worshiped has in every case been problematic. Ultimately, the best argument for their existence is never empirical, but rather the unhelpful claim that “you can’t prove me wrong.” One would think that the default would be that something does not exist, absent any evidence to the contrary, but I guess not. When it comes to the gods, apparently the default is that belief, if sincere, MEANS existence, and the burden is always shifted to others to prove a negative.
I admit I struggle with the notion of “empirical evidence” of the nonexistence of something so vaguely defined that no two people agree on exactly what it is. I personally place gods in the same group as space aliens – I can conceive of neither one actually existing, but I can’t conceive of empirical proof of this. How does one go about observing, weighing, measuring, or otherwise testing what does not exist?
Maybe it means that Mung is a “naturalist”?
Good try, but no.
1. Your second phrase (“it exists in all possible worlds”) does not follow. If God’s nature is not impossible, it is possible that it exists in all possible worlds but that existence is not certain.
2. The doctrine of simplicity is not logically established, so the claim about it is unfounded. That third phrase should say “if the doctrine of simplicity is correct, then God is his own nature”
(And could you explain what value the doctrine of simplicity provides in this situation anyway? It seems to add no value to your argument.)
In sum, your claim boils down to this: If God’s nature is not impossible, it is possible God exists in all possible worlds, and so it is possible that God exists in all possible worlds.
See how easy that is? God is possible. I have never disputed that. But God’s existence is not known to be necessary, so we also know that God’s nonexistence is also possible.
I have never claimed objective, empirical evidence on this, it’s a matter of logic. BTW, you have no objective, empirical evidence that your deity is more than a mere possibility either. The rest you utter is just magical incantation.
sean s. [edited]
Presumed non-existence is treated as the default by some (when evidence of existence is absent) but the logic behind that default is weak. As you notice, it’s really hard to logically prove the non-existence of something.
The default mentioned is unnecessary. Absent proof of existence and absent proof of non-existence, the existence of anything is simply unknown. Unless there’s a reason to take a stand on the matter, that should be enough.
The existence of deities is unknown and there’s no obvious reason to care if they do or don’t exist, so I regard them as unknown. Full. Stop. There’s no need to go any further.
sean s.
I don’t think that’s right, Sean. He’s arguing only that any “nature” (i.e., PROPERTY), say, e.g., squareness or goodness, that is not impossible exists in every possible world–although it may only be exemplified in one. I think many property realists hold that possible properties exist (in that that ethereal sense) in every possible world. That is, it’s possible that something have them. (Some have called that “subsistence” rather than “existence.”)
But if one grants that premise, it’s true only because these “natures” are universals. God, presumably is a particular, that’s why I asked what “God is identical to his nature” is supposed to mean. In my own view (following, e.g., Russell and Carnap) that’s a logically impossibility. So the Platonic realism he’s pushing there doesn’t help even if one accepts it for the sake of argument.
Well, unless you care about, say, dying.
Not being a property realist I don’t grant that premise. If he or you wish to establish the reasonableness of that premise, I’ll pay close attention, but the logical basis and necessity seems lacking.
But even so, Mung’s initial premise as that God’s nature is not impossible, which makes his nature only possible, not a given. Mung’s second phrase treated God’s nature as established by its mere possibility: “Since God’s nature is not impossible, it exists in all possible worlds”. This is incorrect.
So if God’s nature is not impossible, it is only possible that God’s nature exists in all possible worlds.
This leaves open the possibility that God’s nature is not possible, in which case it would not be possible in all possible worlds.
So, no. I think I got it right.
sean s.
Chuckle.
Believing in some deity will not change my mortality.
sean s.
You’re missing the point of my posts. I’m not trying to demonstrate the possibility of God’s existence, I am challenging the claim that one can KNOW that it is possible that God does not exist.
That was the claim that sean samis made. It’s an extraordinary claim and it therefore requires extraordinary evidence.
A possible correction to my comments above:
If X’s existence is possible, it is possible that X exists in SOME possible worlds. Not all possible worlds are necessarily compatible with the existence of X.
Example: if the existence of an oxygen breathing animal is possible, it is possible that oxygen-breathing animals exist in all possible worlds which are otherwise compatible with animal life and have oxygen.
It is possible that worlds exist incompatible with animal life, or which lack oxygen; in such worlds, oxygen breathing animals are not possible even though the concept is generally possible.
Therefore: if God’s nature is not impossible, it’s possible that God’s nature exists in all possible worlds which are otherwise compatible with the nature of God. If the nature of God has constraints or requirements, then God’s nature is not possible in worlds incompatible with those constraints or requirements.
It is NOT a given that God’s nature has no constraints or requirements.
sean s.
The claim is not so extraordinary. This ordinariness is, of course, why some think Mung is trying to demonstrate the possibility of God’s existence; if this were about anything other than deities it would not even be interesting.
In any event, I think I’ve satisfied the evidentiary need. I do not challenge the claim that God’s existence is possible. And we know that just as well as we know that God’s non-existence is also possible. Six of one; a half-dozen of the other.
sean s.
If X is possible, it DOES exist in some possible world. On the possible worlds model, that’s all the being possible means.
But, of course,
Nec., if possibly X, then possibly possibly X.
Back to the other biz, though–where I think you’re still a little confused. I grant that Platonism is controversial. Suppose for the sake of argument that it’s true. So now suppose that god’s nature (call it “godality”) is possibly exemplified. It follows that in every possible world there is a possible world in which godality is exemplified.
That is, the controversial premises are only that Platonism is true and that godality is a possible property. If you grant those, the rest just follows from principles of modal logic.
But, again, so what if godality exists in every possible world. It’s a freaking property!
On the Leibnizian/Plantinganian ontological argument, if God is possible, God is necessary. I don’t think the argument is sound, but it’s interesting, and various versions of it have seduced smart people since Anselm.
According to Pascal it might.
One other thing. You write
I’m not sure what you mean by “a given” but it’s important not to mix up metaphysical and epistemic modalities. So, for example, “It’s possible that Joe will be at work today” could mean either “It’s consistent with everything I know that Joe will be at work today” or “There is some possible world in which Joe comes to work today.” Those aren’t the same thing.
The point is that to say that some proposition is necessary doesn’t require that it be “a given” in the sense of certain or obvious to anybody who thinks about it or anything like that.
Ah. Pascal’s wager is nonsense.
sean s.
OK, then let me clarify: Mung’s initial premise that God’s nature is not impossible makes God’s nature only possible. It does not make it certain; it does not establish God’s actual existence in any world much less all possible worlds.
sean s.
I agree with this part, anyhow.
You’re not being asked to (by me, at least). Rather, you’re being asked to consider whether it is possible that God does not exist. We’re not trying to assess whether God in fact exists, rather it is a question of possibility. Could it be that God can not exist?
Here’s now NOT to think about such questions: Define the referent as necessarily existing.
Yeah I get that, but your challenge fails because the logical possibility of the non-existence of God is (at least it seems to me) a metaphysical claim, not an empirical one.
As such, the only tool of analysis to bring to bear on the question is logic, and in the philosophy of logic one way to assess logical possibilities is, as I understand it, that if something is conceivable it is by definition possible. For clarification, to be conceivable, it should not contain or entail logical contradictions.
The proposition “it is possible that God does not exist” is conceivable, depending on how you define God. If you define God as necessarily existing, obviously that would contradict the proposition, and then God’s non-existence would be impossible. But then the definition of God is question-begging with the respect to the very question we are trying to assess.
Someone could ask whether it is possible that evolution is not true, and I could just say that according to my definition of evolution, it is necessarily true. That would make it logically impossible for it to be not true. Surely you can see the folly of simply defining our way out of every possibility-question?
That’s a category error. An extraordinary claim is an extremely unlikely explanatory hypothesis, dependent on your/our background information.
The claim “it is possible that God does not exist” is not an explanatory hypothesis. It is not a set of concepts designed to causally explain a set of observations, as such the use of the principle of ECREE to analyze it is the wrong tool for the job.
Also, I have to say I’m some times surprised about the fervor with which theists will resist even considering whether it is possible that their God does not exist. It’s like even asking that question to them has the same emotional content as a claim that God, in fact, does not exist.
I don’t understand that state of mind. I have no problem considering the possibility that atheism could be false. It seems to me that it is possible that God exists. Because it’s concievable. There are no contradictions that I know of, between anything I know and the metaphysical claim “it is possible that God exists”. What the hell is the problem?
Rumraket,
Agreed.
sean s.
Exactly right.
And that gets at a deeper problem with logical arguments. Everything depends on the premises. If you have as a premise that God necessarily exists, then demonstrating the existence of God is a trivial exercise.
What the theist seems to need is an argument that has as a premise that God possibly exists and yields as a conclusion that God necessarily exists, but without any funny business.
Personally I don’t see how the argument could go, but that’s not my problem. Even if I did believe in God, I certainly would not think that the existence of God could be proven!
On the contrary, I’ve been asked to consider whether sean samis can KNOW that it is possible that God does not exist. Put another way, that seam samis can KNOW that it’s not impossible for God to not exist.
What did he do, take a survey?
There must be “something’ that exists unless you want to subscribe to the idea that everything that exists came about from an initial state of nothingness.
It’s possible that space, matter, time, fields, energy, and anything else we conceive of as physical or material have not always existed, it is certainly not impossible that they have not always existed. Right?
Mung,
I’ve answered this more than once. Now you just need to respond to those answers. Critique them if you want, but your questions have not been ignored; answers have been provided.
sean s.
How does God solve that “problem”? I love how WLC claims that God is the efficient cause of a universe without a material cause: because it’s supposed to be impossible that the universe came out of nothing, a God that poofs universes out of nothing must exist. All hail the impossible maker!
vjtorley: Over at AlterNet, Greta Christina describes six things that, if they happened or were observed, would convince her that God exists. These including magic writing in the sky, correct prophecies in sacred texts,…
There are two common examples of successful prophesies I know in the Bible. One concerns the King Cyrus in the beginning of Isaiah 45. The other concerns Alexander the Great in Daniel 8:8,21-22. Does Greta Christina know this?
Rumraket,
Nice post!
Mung,
Not sure we can readily rule it out. To avoid the ‘nothingness problem’, you import a ‘something’ that allows things to come into existence without coming from ‘nothingness’. The buck stops there. That seems to be its main purpose, to evade a metaphysical position that seems distasteful. Well, that and taking an interest in our most intimate affairs.
According to Wikipedia, Cyrus lived some 600 years before the book of Isaiah was written. Am I missing something obvious here?
I think it’s right that there’s at least one necessary being. Put otherwise, it cannot be the case that all beings are contingent.
That said, there’s no good reason to think that the necessary being must have any (let alone all) of the characteristics classically attributed to God, unless you arbitrarily assert that God necessarily exists. But what can be arbitrarily asserted can also be arbitrarily denied.
Do you have evidence that these were written before Cyrus (died about 530 BCE) or Alexander (died in 323 BCE). Otherwise these are more likely to be post hoc faked “predictions”.
sean s.
I predicted that Trump would win the election on Nov. 9.
Glen Davidson
Is that how Greta Christina would answer? How is that not moving the goalpoasts? Looks like she has to define scripture and then look around for what is applicable to her definition.
I hear Annie has the words, “The sun’ll come up tomorrow.”
What the flying fuck are you talking about?
I do not care how Greta Christina would answer. You’re the one who said these were “successful prophesies”.
You made a claim; I’m looking for supporting evidence. Pretty normal response here.
She can do whatever she wants. You made the claim; you provide the evidence. Standard procedure here…
sean s.
Verification isn’t allowed.
Why should anyone check out anybody’s claims? Why science? Why courts?
Glen Davidson
That’s all I need to know. The rest of your assumptions are irrelevant. So long.
Hmm. So you leave in a huff as soon as someone asks you to substantiate your claims? Well, OK then.
I didn’t intend to annoy you.
I just—you know—I just got lucky.
sean s.