Another example concerns consciousness. Its existence really does seem to be more likely given omni-theism than given source physicalism and thus to raise the ratio of the probability of omni-theism to the probability of source physicalism. But we know a lot more about consciousness than just that it exists. We also know, thanks in part to the relatively new discipline of neuroscience, that conscious states in general and even the very integrity of our personalities, not to mention the apparent unity of the self, are dependent to a very high degree on physical events occurring in the brain.
Given the general fact that consciousness exists, we have reason on source physicalism that we do not have on theism to expect these more specific facts. Given theism, it would not be surprising at all if our minds were more independent of the brain than they in fact are. Thus, when the available evidence about consciousness is fully stated, it is far from clear that it significantly favors omni-theism.
Arguably, given that fine-tuning is required for intelligent life and that an omni-God has reason to create intelligent life, we have more reason to expect fine-tuning on omni-theism than on source physicalism. Given such fine-tuning, however, it is far more surprising on omni-theism than on source physicalism that our universe is not teeming with intelligent life and that the most impressive intelligent organisms we know to exist are merely human: self-centered and aggressive primates who far too often kill, rape, and torture each other.
In fairness to omni-theism, however, most of those humans are moral agents and many have religious experiences apparently of God.
And while religious experiences apparently of God are no doubt more to be expected if an omni-God exists than if human beings are the product of blind physical forces, it is also true that, given that such experiences do occur, various facts about their distribution that should be surprising to theists are exactly what one would expect on source physicalism, such as the fact that many people never have them and the fact that those who do have them almost always have either a prior belief in God or extensive exposure to a theistic religion.
It seems, then, that when it comes to evidence favoring omni-theism over source physicalism, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
Further, when combined with the fact that what we know about the level of well-being of sentient beings and the extent of their suffering is arguably vastly more probable on source physicalism than on theism, a very strong though admittedly controversial case for premise 1 can be made.
What about premise 2? Again, a serious case can be made for its truth. Such a case first compares source physicalism, not to omni-theism, but to its opposite, source idealism. Source idealists believe that the mental world existed before the physical world and caused the physical world to come into existence. This view is consistent with both ontological idealism and ontological dualism, and also with physical entities having both physical and mental effects.
It entails, however, that all physical entities are, ultimately, causally dependent on one or more mental entities, and so is not consistent with ontological physicalism. The symmetry of source physicalism and source idealism is a good pro tanto reason to believe they are equally probable intrinsically. They are equally specific, they have the same ontological commitments, neither can be formulated more elegantly than the other, and each appears to be equally coherent and equally intelligible.
For example, it adds the claim that a single mind created the physical universe and that this mind is not just powerful but specifically omnipotent and not just knowledgeable but specifically omniscient. In addition, it presupposes a number of controversial metaphysical and meta-ethical claims by asserting in addition that this being is both eternal and objectively morally perfect.
If any of these specific claims and presuppositions is false, then omni-theism is false. Thus, omni-theism is a very specific and thus intrinsically very risky form of source idealism, and thus is many times less probable intrinsically than source idealism.
Therefore, if, as argued above, source physicalism and source idealism are equally probable intrinsically, then it follows that premise 2 is true: source physicalism is many times more probable intrinsically than omni-theism. Notice that the general strategy of the particular version of the low priors argument discussed above is to find an alternative to omni-theism that is much less specific than omni-theism and partly for that reason much more probable intrinsically , while at the same time having enough content of the right sort to fit the totality of the relevant data at least as well as theism does.
In other words, the goal is to find a runner like source physicalism that begins the race with a large head start and thus wins by a large margin because it runs the race for supporting evidence and thus for probability at roughly the same speed as omni-theism does. An alternative strategy is to find a runner that begins the race tied with omni-theism, but runs the race for evidential support much faster than omni-theism does, thus once again winning the race by a margin that is sufficiently large for the rest of the argument to go through.
The choice of alternative hypothesis is crucial here just as it was in the low priors argument. Another would be a more detailed version of source physicalism that, unlike source physicalism in general, makes the relevant data antecedently much more probable than theism does.
Thus, it may be stipulated that, like omni-theism, aesthetic deism implies that an eternal, non-physical, omnipotent, and omniscient being created the physical world. The only difference, then, between the God of omni-theism and the deity of aesthetic deism is what motivates them.
An omni-theistic God would be morally perfect and so strongly motivated by considerations of the well-being of sentient creatures. An aesthetic deistic God, on the other hand, would prioritize aesthetic goods over moral ones.
While such a being would want a beautiful universe, perhaps the best metaphor here is not that of a cosmic artist, but instead that of a cosmic playwright: an author of nature who wants above all to write an interesting story. Further, containing such a line is hardly necessary for a story to be good.
After all, what makes a good story good is often some intense struggle between good and evil, and all good stories contain some mixture of benefit and harm. This suggests that the observed mixture of good and evil in our world decisively favors aesthetic deism over omni-theism. This makes no difference as far as the inference from step 4 to step 5 is concerned.
That inference, like the inferences from steps 1 — 3 to step 4 and from step 5 to step 6 , is clearly correct. The key question, then, is whether premises 1 , 2 , and 3 are all true.
In spite of the nearly complete overlap between omni-theism and aesthetic deism, Richard Swinburne 96— would challenge premise 1 on the grounds that aesthetic deism, unlike omni-theism, must posit a bad desire to account for why the deity does not do what is morally best.
Omni-theism need not do this, according to Swinburne, because what is morally best just is what is overall best, and thus an omniscient being will of necessity do what is morally best so long as it has no desires other than the desires it has simply by virtue of knowing what the best thing to do is in any given situation. This challenge depends, however, on a highly questionable motivational intellectualism: it succeeds only if merely believing that an action is good entails a desire to do it.
On most theories of motivation, there is a logical gap between the intellect and desire. If such a gap exists, then it would seem that omni-theism is no more probable intrinsically than aesthetic deism.
For example, a deity interested in good narrative would want a world that is complex and yet ordered, that contains beauty, consciousness, intelligence, and moral agency. Perhaps there is more reason to expect the existence of libertarian free will on omni-theism than on aesthetic deism; but unless one starts from the truth of omni-theism, there seems to be little reason to believe that we have such freedom.
For example, if open theists are right that not even an omniscient being can know with certainty what libertarian free choices will be made in the future, then aesthetic deism could account for libertarian free will and other sorts of indeterminacy by claiming that a story with genuine surprises is better than one that is completely predictable.
Alternatively, what might be important for the story is only that the characters think they have free will, not that they really have it. Finally, there is premise 3 , which asserts that the data of good and evil decisively favors aesthetic deism over theism. A full discussion of this premise is not possible here, but recognition of its plausibility appears to be as old as the problem of evil itself. Consider, for example, the Book of Job, whose protagonist, a righteous man who suffers horrifically, accuses God of lacking sufficient commitment to the moral value of justice.
Instead, speaking out of the whirlwind, He describes His design of the cosmos and of the animal kingdom in a way clearly intended to emphasize His power and the grandeur of His creation.
On this interpretation, the creator that confronts Job is not the God he expected and definitely not the God of omni-theism, but rather a being much more like the deity of aesthetic deism. Those who claim that a God might allow evil because it is the inevitable result of the universe being governed by laws of nature also lend support, though unintentionally, to the idea that, if there is an author of nature, then that being is more likely motivated by aesthetic concerns than moral ones.
For example, it may be that producing a universe governed by a few laws expressible as elegant mathematical equations is an impressive accomplishment, not just because of the wisdom and power required for such a task, but also because of the aesthetic value of such a universe.
Much of the aesthetic value of the animal kingdom may also depend on its being the result of a long evolutionary process driven by mechanisms like natural selection. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Unfortunately, such a process, if it is to produce sentient life, may also entail much suffering and countless early deaths. It is arguably far more plausible that in such a scenario the value of preventing horrendous suffering would, from a moral point of view, far outweigh the value of regularity, sublimity, and narrative.
If so, then a morally perfect God would not trade the former for the latter though a deity motivated primarily by aesthetic reasons no doubt would. To summarize, nearly everyone agrees that the world contains both goods and evils. Pleasure and pain, love and hate, achievement and failure, flourishing and languishing, and virtue and vice all exist in great abundance.
In spite of that, some see signs of cosmic teleology. For example, we can say we're "agnostic" about climate change, neither believing it or disbelieving it. Alternately, it's used to express our ambivalence about something, using the term to equate to such sentiments as, "I don't care," "I don't really want to know," or "I don't even want to think about it.
But this casual usage of the term betrays its original purpose, an epistemological stance and methodology in which skepticism and empiricism — two hallmarks of the scientific method — takes center stage. To understand what it means to be agnostic about the existence of God, it's important to understand where the term came from. Back in , T. Huxley coined the term to counter the rampant dogmatism exhibited by many of his peers.
Unwilling to subscribe to another "ism", and inspired by a reference in the Bible to an "unknown God," he came up with the word "agnostic. Huxley was convinced that humanity cannot and will never know the ultimate origin and causes of the universe. In this sense he was a Kantian skeptic — a subscriber to the notion that we cannot know the world because the mind's structures are a distorting influence on our knowledge of what is real.
This is what Kant referred to as the Veil of Perception — an idea that's reminiscent though not as severe as Cartesian skepticism i. Ultimately, Huxley thought that arguments about the transcendental and metaphysical though possibly meaningful were empirically untestable. What's remarkable about Huxley's skepticism was his stance against certainty and those who refused to doubt — especially those who insisted that their theism or atheism must be true.
Moreover, Huxley's agnosticism was more than just stubborn skepticism — it was a methodology. As noted by the Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor:. He saw agnosticism as demanding as any moral, philosophical, or religious creed. But he refused to see it as a creed in the traditional sense of the word, and saw it far more as a method.
The method he had in mind is broadly that which underpins scientific inquiry. It means, on the one hand, taking one's reason as far as it will go and, on the other, not accepting anything as true unless it is somehow demonstrable.
All traditions of Buddhism agree that one should not believe something simply for the sake of believing it, but only if it can somehow be demonstrated as true, if it can be realised in some practical way. Yes, Agnosticism is a way to view religion, but is it a valid way to do so? Christianity is based on faith in things that are true but unseen. I believe that God lives and that Jesus Christ died for our sins, was resurrected, and through his grace we can be saved if we accept him.
I believe that all who have lived on this Earth will have the opportunity in this life, or the next, to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to either accept or reject it. Is that a valid way to view religion?
It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going. For him, philosophy, and, for that matter, religion, are dead. He has empirical proof. I respect the intellect of Mr. Hawking and his quest for a better understanding of the Universe, but for me, religion is not dead. Rather, science helps me better understand the marvelous workings of God, which discretely testify of him. That is why I read his books.
We each have the free agency to choose whether to believe, to not believe, or to sit on the fence, as it pertains to God. My choice is to believe, but I have to work on that each day. Sitting on the fence is not a viable option for me.
Likewise, Mr. Bugliosi has made his choice. I understand how he came to his conclusions and position. I would just encourage him to continue to seek the truth, which is an ongoing task for all of us, including myself.
What I will address is his idea of agnosticism as it is reflected in doubt. I believe that people misunderstand agnosticism when they see it as a static belief system that simply dismisses the reality of God, a priori.
You have to know everything there is in the universe and outside the universe to know is not there. Agnosticism is a bad idea a wicked one…well that is another discussion principally because it is an intellectually lazy idea.
Come now, intelligent people have been discussing this — with good tools in their hands — since the 17th C. The fact that people have discussed the existence of God for such a long time does not imply that they have drawn any conclusions I should accept, and I do not think that failure to be persuaded by their arguments constitutes intellectual laziness. I think that is a poor comparison. You mentioned that you must choose.
You absolutely MUST. I HAVE made a choice. I am an atheist. I do not believe personally in the existence of a higher being. He has never come for me in a time of need. Many terrible things have been justified by a belief in Him. I sincerely hope that one day, one way or another, we will find an answer.
Atheists and a large majority of agnostics strongly reject the possibility of a heaven and hell, so why would we even bother waging? What is there to even wage for? There are plenty of moral and loving non-Christians out there in the world.
So if one disbelieves in love enough to remain unmoved by it, as the agnostic does, it means his soul is lacking in love. Agnosticism and atheism, by definition, never stated anything about love or hate. That is your own definition that you made up.
Also, is there a problem with asking for proof and evidence for a claim? Is there a problem with asking questions and doubting? That is a misremembering of the passage in Inferno, canto 3. The passage is not about atheists, but about the souls of trimmers and timeservers who chose neither good nor evil.
Those who were rejected by both Heaven and Hell, are the angels who sided neither with God nor with Lucifer, but were true only to themselves. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
Previous Next. Leave a Comment. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Tumblr. About the Author: Thaddeus Kozinski. He teaches Great Books for Angelicum Academy.
0コメント