Nice post! My favorite part was “Quantum Mechanics.” 😂 funniest thing I’ve read all week. Very apropos.
I think a good meta-argument, relevant to your post, for atheism (or specifically against a benevolent god) is the widespread disagreement you cite:
1. There’s widespread disagreement about God’s existence.
2. There must be powerful evidence or extra-evidential motivators working for one or both sides of the debate. So, for the sake of this argument, let’s investigate a possible motivator that could making one side’s thinking cloudy or covertly dishonest.
3. Those who believe in God’s existence almost universally think God is good and has goods plans for their future. God is a source of hope for them, typically.
4. Humans are prone to wishful thinking and optimistic bias. For instance, people think they are less likely to lose their job, less likely to get divorced, less likely to become alcoholics, less likely to get cancer, etc. than they actually are. And they think they are more likely to achieve career success, succeed in new business ventures, experience improvements in their personal relationships even without exerting extra effort, etc. than they actually are. Basically, people appear to be hardwired for hope. This isn’t surprising from an evolutionary perspective (disclaimer: I’m not an evolutionary psychologist). As I see it, a self-aware, emotion-driven species wouldn’t get very far if it couldn’t feel hope for the future, as hope is very important for motivation. No hope —> no motivation —> no productive action —> poor survival/reproductive outcomes.
5. Atheism does not offer hope to its adherents the way belief in God does.
6. Per 1-5, people are more likely to falsely believe God exists than they are to falsely believe God doesn’t exist.
Not sure if this meta-argument is strong enough to dissuade us from relying more on “object-level” arguments. And theists levy all sorts of meta-arguments as well, but I think they’re generally pretty bad.
Anyway, thanks for a great read. It really hit hard. I also think people are insane for not being in a constant state of disorientation, or even panic, over the epistemological ambiguity of our existence.
Oooo, fun meta argument, I’m definitely an atheist and I agree that the “maximally benevolent” part of god is one with specifically weak supporting evidence, so I disagree with Bentham the most from that angle because he’s quite sure of it, and your “atheism doesn’t say the world is good” is a good take.
I think maybe a Christian would say to your argument that hope was programmed into the universe as a necessity for evolving species by God, because hope is good and he wanted it to be necessary. I think there is something to be said about how the world makes more sense from an atheist perspective, but it’s the strongest when specifically paired with the problem of evil.
The world has a lot of bad stuff happening to good people, so, uh, why would God do that, assuming the Christian agrees all humans have souls, and this argument is stronger if they also agree animals have souls. You can rephrase your argument to have the same bones but be about PAIN, and say atheism predicts pain and unnecessary suffering, but a benevolent god does not, and then the theist can’t counter with this idea of “well they programmed the starting conditions of the universe”
Good point. I do think the problem of suffering is the strongest argument of the lot. It’s shocking to me that so few theists will relax or drop one of the three O’s (omnipotent, omniscient, omni-benevolent) to deal with the problem in a convincing manner (as opposed to making up patches ad hoc like “it only LOOKS like there is unnecessary suffering—trust me, God is using this as part of his Divine plan to bring about the best of all possible worlds, you’ll see!” which is about as good of an example of special pleading as you’ll ever see. Imagine if life were paradise and an omnipotent-Satan believer was like, “just wait, when we die, we’ll suffer eternally in hell—trust me!”). I suspect it’s because a large part of the appeal of theistic belief is the therapeutic benefit of believing there is someone you KNOW will make all things come out right in the end. If you admit that, if there is a god, he isn’t a 3O god, you have to live with the doubt that maybe he won’t be able to or won’t want to make all things turn out well.
just thought about this from an anthropic perspective: the fact that i am not born in the future is possibly (though not definitively) foreboding. I hope we make it through lol
I run around yelling much of the same things to people. Very first-principles, this post. Important to think this way; we're all collectively crazy for mostly not thinking this way.
Perhaps sometimes when we don’t know the answer to these questions it’s because the universe is fundamentally personal (made of persons) and thus prone to conspiracies. Evil beings might want to confuse us, and good beings might want to restrain us (from having too much bad wisdom) or instill in us a sense of wonder.
The bit about perspectives was interesting: how is it possible for there to be disagreement about such fundamental questions? I’m not really sure what to think about this question. The fact that we disagree is really more a fact about us than the universe… and yet this response seems lacking.
I also liked the final section. I’ve got an upcoming piece about a similar topic, about how the mundanity we see in the world is an illusion brought on, as you say, by routine and familiarity; we convince ourselves that this universe is normal, banal.
Thanks for your comment! I wanted to get across how insane all this is and tried to do that by rapidly switching between topics that are very important and make no sense at the fundamental level. I have another post coming up soon that the fact that Theists and Atheists can cohabitate at all morally and in law given the foundation of their beliefs are so different means that people's habits are not influenced by their beliefs as much as they think.
I also like the child and the parent metaphor, that's my favorite part!
Nice post! My favorite part was “Quantum Mechanics.” 😂 funniest thing I’ve read all week. Very apropos.
I think a good meta-argument, relevant to your post, for atheism (or specifically against a benevolent god) is the widespread disagreement you cite:
1. There’s widespread disagreement about God’s existence.
2. There must be powerful evidence or extra-evidential motivators working for one or both sides of the debate. So, for the sake of this argument, let’s investigate a possible motivator that could making one side’s thinking cloudy or covertly dishonest.
3. Those who believe in God’s existence almost universally think God is good and has goods plans for their future. God is a source of hope for them, typically.
4. Humans are prone to wishful thinking and optimistic bias. For instance, people think they are less likely to lose their job, less likely to get divorced, less likely to become alcoholics, less likely to get cancer, etc. than they actually are. And they think they are more likely to achieve career success, succeed in new business ventures, experience improvements in their personal relationships even without exerting extra effort, etc. than they actually are. Basically, people appear to be hardwired for hope. This isn’t surprising from an evolutionary perspective (disclaimer: I’m not an evolutionary psychologist). As I see it, a self-aware, emotion-driven species wouldn’t get very far if it couldn’t feel hope for the future, as hope is very important for motivation. No hope —> no motivation —> no productive action —> poor survival/reproductive outcomes.
5. Atheism does not offer hope to its adherents the way belief in God does.
6. Per 1-5, people are more likely to falsely believe God exists than they are to falsely believe God doesn’t exist.
Not sure if this meta-argument is strong enough to dissuade us from relying more on “object-level” arguments. And theists levy all sorts of meta-arguments as well, but I think they’re generally pretty bad.
Anyway, thanks for a great read. It really hit hard. I also think people are insane for not being in a constant state of disorientation, or even panic, over the epistemological ambiguity of our existence.
Oooo, fun meta argument, I’m definitely an atheist and I agree that the “maximally benevolent” part of god is one with specifically weak supporting evidence, so I disagree with Bentham the most from that angle because he’s quite sure of it, and your “atheism doesn’t say the world is good” is a good take.
I think maybe a Christian would say to your argument that hope was programmed into the universe as a necessity for evolving species by God, because hope is good and he wanted it to be necessary. I think there is something to be said about how the world makes more sense from an atheist perspective, but it’s the strongest when specifically paired with the problem of evil.
The world has a lot of bad stuff happening to good people, so, uh, why would God do that, assuming the Christian agrees all humans have souls, and this argument is stronger if they also agree animals have souls. You can rephrase your argument to have the same bones but be about PAIN, and say atheism predicts pain and unnecessary suffering, but a benevolent god does not, and then the theist can’t counter with this idea of “well they programmed the starting conditions of the universe”
Good point. I do think the problem of suffering is the strongest argument of the lot. It’s shocking to me that so few theists will relax or drop one of the three O’s (omnipotent, omniscient, omni-benevolent) to deal with the problem in a convincing manner (as opposed to making up patches ad hoc like “it only LOOKS like there is unnecessary suffering—trust me, God is using this as part of his Divine plan to bring about the best of all possible worlds, you’ll see!” which is about as good of an example of special pleading as you’ll ever see. Imagine if life were paradise and an omnipotent-Satan believer was like, “just wait, when we die, we’ll suffer eternally in hell—trust me!”). I suspect it’s because a large part of the appeal of theistic belief is the therapeutic benefit of believing there is someone you KNOW will make all things come out right in the end. If you admit that, if there is a god, he isn’t a 3O god, you have to live with the doubt that maybe he won’t be able to or won’t want to make all things turn out well.
just thought about this from an anthropic perspective: the fact that i am not born in the future is possibly (though not definitively) foreboding. I hope we make it through lol
I run around yelling much of the same things to people. Very first-principles, this post. Important to think this way; we're all collectively crazy for mostly not thinking this way.
Perhaps sometimes when we don’t know the answer to these questions it’s because the universe is fundamentally personal (made of persons) and thus prone to conspiracies. Evil beings might want to confuse us, and good beings might want to restrain us (from having too much bad wisdom) or instill in us a sense of wonder.
The bit about perspectives was interesting: how is it possible for there to be disagreement about such fundamental questions? I’m not really sure what to think about this question. The fact that we disagree is really more a fact about us than the universe… and yet this response seems lacking.
I also liked the final section. I’ve got an upcoming piece about a similar topic, about how the mundanity we see in the world is an illusion brought on, as you say, by routine and familiarity; we convince ourselves that this universe is normal, banal.
Thanks for your comment! I wanted to get across how insane all this is and tried to do that by rapidly switching between topics that are very important and make no sense at the fundamental level. I have another post coming up soon that the fact that Theists and Atheists can cohabitate at all morally and in law given the foundation of their beliefs are so different means that people's habits are not influenced by their beliefs as much as they think.
I also like the child and the parent metaphor, that's my favorite part!
Looking forward to reading it!