In a recent article titled Why I’m Staying Out Of The Substack Religion Debate, Kabbalistic fiction author1 Scott Alexander wades into the Substack religion debate. In it, Scott explains at a high level why he thinks it unlikely that God exists, setting aside all the little details of all the arguments. And he replied to your favorite Substacker, who I’ll leave unnamed out of modesty. In my view, carefully considering Scott’s case makes clear precisely why God’s existence is so plausible.
Scott opens his argument with the following parable: imagine a group of people who thought aliens assisted Napoleon in his rise. Now, there is actually a lot of evidence for this hypothesis. A bunch of stuff about Napoleon is weird and can be explained by alien assistance. So you can imagine an alt-world where Substackers make complicated Bayesian arguments for the hypothesis that aliens assisted Napoleon and Lydia McGrew claims that the evidence for alien interference is good for a Bayes factor of 10^44 or whatever.
But this is a terrible hypothesis, obviously! Why is it terrible? Scott’s answer: same reason theism is a terrible hypothesis. Specifically, his diagnosis is that the hypothesis is:
Very complex and ad hoc. Why would the aliens intervene secretly to rescue Napoleon?
Doesn’t even explain the data that well. Why do the aliens remain hidden? Why did Napoleon lose sometimes? Anytime you posit some super ad hoc hypothesis involving powerful hidden entities that don’t even do exactly what you’d expect, your theory pays a big cost.
As Scott puts it:
The very strongest version of the overfitting penalty should go to theories of the form:
Why did this anomalous thing happen? Because there was a powerful entity trying to make that specific thing happen. No, you can’t see it, it hid all evidence of its own existence. Yeah, the outcome doesn’t match any sane entity’s plausible goals, but I can sort of tell a story for why they kind of sort of vaguely resemble those goals. No, you can’t apply human limitations to it, the entity is an exotic form of intelligence for which we have no other evidence.
I agree that these theories are generally bad. But I don’t think this applies to theism for two basic reasons. First, it isn’t true that we have “no other evidence” for theism. Second, I don’t think theism is ad hoc.
It would be one thing if God were just being trotted out to explain one or two random anomalies. Instead, God provides a good explanation of about 30 features of the world. Now, when you pad your list with 30 arguments, they won’t all be winners. But there are a bunch of good arguments on the list—at least the first nine strike me as very forceful, even considered on their own.
These arguments don’t require positing weird eccentric motivations of God—they posit more general facts like “a perfect being would prefer life to random floating clouds of hydrogen gas,” “if God’s going to create at all, it’s not terribly unlikely he’d do a lot of creating,” and “God prefers agents with minds to random mental static.” None of these require that we guess God’s favorite toothpaste flavor!
And sometimes we do posit that there’s an invisible entity with weird properties to explain observable evidence. Case in point: dark matter. It is literally invisible mostly undetectable matter that you can’t see or measure directly. And you need very finely-tuned invisible matter to explain the data—not just any invisible matter will do. Nonetheless, we’re pretty sure it exists because it explains a lot of otherwise mysterious features of the world. So sometimes inferences of the form “positing this invisible thing and adding some auxiliary assumptions explains the world way better than alternatives, so we should believe in it,” are correct.
Note that any time you use an agent to explain anything, you’ll posit an agent who doesn’t do exactly what you expect. The prior probability of any agent doing any particular thing is very low. If I see a crude drawing on your desk, though my prior in you making a crude drawing is low, I’d be pretty sure you drew it.
Suppose I come back to my home and see that many of my valuables have been stolen. However, surprisingly, a good number of valuables weren’t taken. Positing that a burglar broke in involves thinking:
Why did this anomalous thing happen? Because there was a powerful entity trying to make that specific thing happen. No, you can’t see it, it hid all evidence of its own existence. Yeah, the outcome doesn’t match any sane entity’s plausible goals, but I can sort of tell a story for why they kind of sort of vaguely resemble those goals.
Now, neither this example or the dark matter example are exactly like theism. We have independent evidence for burglars. But if we can have reason to think that invisible entities lacking outside evidence caused anomalies, and we can have reason to think that particular unevidenced agents caused anomalies, then it’s not clear why we can’t think that invisible agents caused anomalies.
In addition, it’s not true that God is some totally bizarro hidden entity that leaves no evidence behind. A giant portion of the world has had a direct experience as of God. Most people throughout human history have believed in him. If a giant chunk of the world claimed to have directly seen the aliens who had helped Napoleon, and the theory also explained many different anomalies, I’d start taking the theory more seriously!
Scott complains that the world isn’t what you’d expect given theism. But neither is it what you’d expect given atheism. Given atheism, I would expect a world with nothing of value, because most conceivable sets of laws don’t give rise to anything interesting. The theist has no monopoly on surprise.
Scott then gives the standard god of the gaps argument: in ancient times, primitive people used gods to explain everything. You’d see thunder and blame the gods. You’d have a headache every time you drank hot chocolate, so they’d say the gods cursed you. As we’ve learned more, we’ve seen otherwise powerful theistic arguments blown to smithereens by the steady march of science. Through science, we’ve learned that lightning is caused by electric discharge and the pain you get whenever you drank hot chocolate is caused by you not taking the spoon out. The argument for Zeus from lightning, while once a powerful argument beloved by the natural theologians, has fallen seriously out of favor.
Now, it isn’t actually true that throughout history people cited random unexplained bits of the natural world as evidence of a creator. Pagans thought that lowercase g gods were behind these phenomena, but monotheists didn’t cite random natural phenomena as evidence for God. As Aron Wall put it:
This type of reasoning (which is quite common, although I phrase it in my own words) tends to glide imperceptibly from popular pagan polytheists (who thought there was a divinity for every major or minor phenomenon) to the Hebrew monotheists (who resisted this trend as superstitious and wrong).
It was perfectly obvious to any pagan philosopher or early Christian that Nature proceeds according to orderly laws, and natural processes. Modern Science can take credit for unifying the description of many phenomena into common mathematical frameworks, but to act as though the
existenceof order in Nature is a modern discovery is simply absurd. It is true that this fact is in considerable tension with certain forms of Animism or Nature Polytheism. But certainly almost any astute monotheist living in the last two thousand years, is going to admit that God causes most things to happen, not through whim but through the operation of certain natural processes, which can be understood to some extent by human reason.
But even if they had, this wouldn’t be evidentially relevant. If people frequently make ridiculous inferences, that doesn’t case doubt on any vaguely similar inferences. The argument for God from lightning is a terrible argument. In order for a fact to be evidence for God, it has to be likelier given theism than given atheism. There’s no obvious special reason why God would directly make thunder, beyond his general reasons for making an orderly world.
The argument for God from fine-tuning is not a ridiculous argument! And sensible theists aren’t just looking to random unexplained natural phenomena—nobody thought that God must be directly boring holes in Swiss cheese before we had an explanation of Swiss cheese. Instead, they cite facts as evidence for theism when they involve the deepest underpinnings of our world, are extremely implausible, and are extremely valuable.
So you shouldn’t cite God as explanations of mundane natural events absent extremely strong evidence. You should only cite God as the explanation of features of the world that are plausibly fundamental—not explained by anything deeper. By induction, we learn that God doesn’t monkey around in the random daily workings of the natural world—we learn little about what explains the deepest features of the world.
With that methodological clarification out of the way, there is only one really good theistic argument that has ever been defeated by scientific advance: the argument from life. Before we discovered evolution, God seemed like the only reasonable way to explain life. Now that we know about evolution, we have a better account. In its place, we have gotten many new good theistic arguments in just the last few decades. The psychophysical harmony argument is younger than I am—the fine-tuning argument is younger than my parents, the anthropic argument hasn’t even had its third birthday. So overall, the case for theism has gotten *better *with time.
One final point: all these methodological complaints pretty clearly give way in the face of really strong evidence. If the stars spelled out the first three chapters of the Gospel of John, that would obviously confirm theism or something like it. So if the case for theism is really strong, that’s enough to overcome Scott’s methodological worries.
The intrinsic probability of a hypothesis is how likely it is before you look at any evidence. The main reason that the aliens assisted Napoleon hypothesis isn’t any good is that it has a very low intrinsic probability. Before considering specific evidence, you should think that it’s ridiculously unlikely. Scott thinks that God’s existence is the same way.
I disagree. I think God is very simple and non-arbitrary, so his existence starts with a not unreasonable prior. Here’s my preferred story about how it is that God is simple: God is simply a mind without limits. Having no limits, nothing bounds either his powers or abilities, so he can do anything and knows everything. Because he knows everything, he knows all the moral facts. If you know that something is good, and you don’t have any contrary psychological inclinations, it’s plausible that you’ll have a default motivation to follow it. So once God knows everything, he’ll always do what’s best.
Now, is this account right? Certainly there are a few moving parts to it. You have to think each of the following:
The mind is non-physical.
If you knew everything and were fully rational, you’d always be motivated to do what’s best.
The idea of a limitless mind is simple, makes sense, and entails omnipotence and omniscience.
I accepted 1-2 even when I was an atheist. 3 seems a bit shakier, but still not crazy. None of the premises are trivial, but they’re not obviously false either. If they hold, then theism has a very high prior probability. So I think theism starts with an okay prior—not extremely high, not extremely low. Certainly it starts out much more plausible than that aliens helped Napoleon.
Scott has criticisms of this hypothesis. I’ll talk about them, but first, let me give three reasons at a high level why I think you shouldn’t assign theism an outrageously low prior probability.
First, if these moves work, theism is really really simple. It’s the kind of theory that physicists dream of: one fundamental parameter set to infinity. If you have a theory of debatable internal coherence, but extreme simplicity if it works out, then a lot of the probability space will be occupied by the theory.
Analogy: suppose you’re considering between two theories of physics. One might just be totally horribly broken and incoherent. But if it works, it’s ridiculously simple. The other is definitely very complicated. Overall, you should prefer theory 1 to theory 2. Because theories that are a bit simpler have a much higher prior, even with only a low prior on theism being coherent, it will still gobble up a lot more of the probability space than naturalism. I talk about this more here, if you’re interested.
Second, much of fundamental reality ends up being pretty weird when probed. Look at quantum mechanics or the foundations of math. As Alexander Pruss puts it, discussing various puzzling Catholic doctrines:
But to reject the doctrines for this reason alone would be mistaken. For similar points can be made about Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics. To say that simultaneity is relative or that a physical object has no position but rather a probability distribution over positions borders on contradiction, and the philosophical moves needed to defend these seem
ad hocdesigned to save the theories. If we’ve learned one thing from physics in the 20th century, it is that the true physics of the world isverystrange indeed.Nor are theology and science the only places where things are strange. Similar things can be said about the mathematics of infinity, or even just common sense claims such as that there is change (think of Zeno’s paradoxes) or that material objects persist over time (think of the Ship of Theseus and the paradoxes of material composition).
We can, thus, be very confident that created reality is very strange indeed. And hence, shouldn’t we expect similar strangeness—indeed, mystery—in the Creator and his relationship to us?
Thus, it wouldn’t be that surprising if we couldn’t see how a simple ultimate reality was simple. We’re just monkeys in shoes.
You shouldn’t take this too far. You shouldn’t think that the aliens helped Napoleon hypothesis has a decent prior of being super intrinsically likely for reasons unknown. But I think it’s pretty clear when you consider God’s essentially limitless properties and mysterious nature that it isn’t outrageously improbable that he’d be a simple sort of entity. Simple things can have many properties and effects—a simple electron exerts effects all throughout the universe.
Third, there are a lot of other potential ways of God being simple. Other views of how God is simple:
The divine simplicity view according to which God doesn’t have any properties or attributes—being literally the simplest conceivable thing.
God is simply a perfect being: possessing all perfections. I’m suspicious of this account because I don’t think perfections are real and joint-carving elements of realit…
