Within Reason - #137 Debunking Arguments for God - Graham Oppy

Episode Date: January 4, 2026

Graham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean of Research at Monash University. An Australian philosopher of religion, he is often considered one of the most thoughtful and important academic atheists in the world.Buy his book, Arguing About Gods, here.Timestamps: 00:00 - Tour00:31 - The First Cause Argument14:14 - Can There be an Infinite Regress?30:46 - The Modal Fatalism Objection36:08 - The Kalam Cosmological Argument51:12 - The Fine Tuning Argument1:06:15 - The Multiverse1:10:01 - Are the Constants of the Universe Just Necessary?1:15:37 - Was the Hole Designed for the Puddle?1:20:20 - Anselm’s Ontological Argument1:33:59 - The Modal Ontological Argument1:38:23 - Closing

Hey, I'm going on a tour of the United Kingdom. If you've ever been interested in that big question of God's existence, or try to make sense of religion in the 21st century, or consciousness, or anything philosophical, then join me on stage as I try to work out some of these topics with you. I'll be in conversation with a good friend, but also bring questions because there will be an extensive Q&A, and maybe even an opportunity to hear and rate some of your philosophical hot takes. The tour dates are on screen.

The link to buy tickets is in the description, and I hope to see you there. Graham Oppie, welcome to the show. Thanks for inviting me. Welcome back to the show. We have had you on before a few years ago, where we talked about atheism and whether it's a view that needs justification, which was interesting. However, of course, atheism is a view that positions itself contra another position. You've got Theism, and the atheist is the person that says, I don't believe that that's true.

And so a lot of the discussion around atheism is not so much positive. cases for why God doesn't exist, but rather the reasons that people give for believing in God don't really suffice or don't really sort of do it for us. And to that effect, I thought that I'd bring you back today as one of the most respected academic philosophers who is an atheist and writes about atheism to talk about some of the most popular and respected arguments for the existence of God and see why we think that they might fail, if that sounds good with you. Yep, that sounds fun. So I think a good place to start. And you wrote a book about this a few years ago, a number of years ago called arguing about gods. And you started with ontological arguments. But I think maybe a sort of softer way in and a more familiar way in for most people listening might be to start with the so-called cosmological family of arguments, which involves causation. It involves the idea that there must be some kind of first cause or explanation or necessary foundation for things

which exist. Cosmology sort of looks backwards to the beginning of the universe or the or downwards to the foundation of the universe. How would you best characterize this family of arguments and what are some of its different forms? Okay, so I think you did a pretty good job there. Lots of these arguments appeal to some kind of principle of causation or exploitation or sufficient reason. And the idea is that you expect to find causes or sufficient reasons or explanations for the existence of certain kinds of things and then the way that the arguments developed by theists

for the cause or the explanation of the sufficient reason turns out to be gone. I think that won't capture all of them, but it captures enough of them. Now, I think, you know, one of the interesting things you said there was that things have some kind of reason or I can't remember the exact word you use, maybe explanation or something like that. And we're getting at something that I think is quite important that you've written a lot about, which is this so-called principle of sufficient reason, which underlies probably, I would say, the most popular version of the contingency cosmological argument that I hear today, which is, if I can try to sort of lay out a brief sketch of this, the idea. the idea that basically anything which occurs, for anything that happens or anything that exists, there must be some sufficient explanation or sufficient reason for why that thing occurs or why that thing exists. In other words, we're not just satisfied to say that something is true. We want to say there must be a reason that it's true. That doesn't mean

we need to know what that reason is. Maybe it's beyond our comprehension, but there must be some kind of reason. And then through a series of stages, you know, the theist might say, we're in a world full of objects and events and things and, well, there must be a sufficient reason why, you know, this microphone exists. But then whatever the reason for the microphone existing, there must be a sufficient reason for that thing. And whatever the reason for that thing is, there must be a sufficient reason for that thing. And that can't go on infinitely. And so there must be a sort of self-justifying thing at the beginning of all of this that does have a reason for its existence, but contains its own reason within itself. And that is what you might

call a necessary being, something whose existence is like self-explanatory. And that thing typically gets the label of God. So let's go back to the start here, and let's look at this really important principle called the principle of sufficient reason, that for anything that is true, there is a sufficient reason why it's true. Do you think it's a good principle? It depends what you mean by sufficient reason. What we're going to suppose is needed. If you think that the sufficient reason has to necessitate what it explains, then you're going to get into trouble. I think that if we think about a plausible principle of this kind, it's going to be one that says if something happens, there's an explanation for

the happening, but it needn't be determining explanation. It needn't be that this was the only thing that could happen. So if we're thinking about a causal principle of sufficient reason, I think that it's got to be consistent with indeterministic causation. So the world was a certain way that meant there are a limited range of options that could happen at the next point. one of them did. There's no explaining where you got that one rather than one of the others.

That kind of principle of sufficient reason looks like it's plausible to me, and it's one that pretty much everybody can accept, I think. So how does a theist typically go from whatever their version of the principle of sufficient reason is? Like, what is that reason? And how do they go from that to constructing an argument? for what they call God. Okay, so there are different ways of doing this. You could think of the principle in the, in Kalama arguments,

there's a version of a principle of sufficient reason. The principle that says whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning to exist. And it's our cause. And sort of straightforwardly, the idea is we trace back things that began to exist it can't go back infinitely so there can't be a regress

so we're going to come back we're going to come to something that exists but wasn't caused to exist by anything else and as you said the kind of a natural thing to say at this point is that that thing exists of necessity, necessary things don't need causes

so that would be that would be one version there are other versions which say think about the collection of all of the things that have causes or explanations and think about that sum and ask what explains it and by construction that sum was all of the things that have the things that have explanation that have explanations in terms of other things. So whatever is going to do the explaining is something that's not explained in terms of something else.

So again, a kind of necessity. It may not be the same kind of necessity that we end up with in every case. But the idea is that there's this necessary thing that all of the things that have explanation are explained ultimately in terms of. So that would be a couple. Wade. And then the thing is supposed to be, I mean, this bit of the argument is much harder to make out, the thing that's doing the explaining here is supposed to be God. Yeah, it's always difficult to sort of jump that final hurdle, isn't it? But a lot of these arguments, they don't seek necessarily to establish, you know, the God of the Christian Bible or something. You might sort of start with an argument that establishes that there is some kind of primary cause to the universe and you come up with a bunch of other reasons to come up with the attributes that that being might have. In this instance, I'm intrigued by what I see is quite an intuitive.

principle, like this idea that for anything which occurs, there must be a sufficient reason. And for me, what a sufficient reason means is that, like, it's some kind of explanation which leaves no mystery as to why a particular thing happened. So if something happens, and we'll call it event E, then if I have sufficiently explained E, then there's no mystery about why E happened anymore. So when somebody says, there could be like non-deterministic causation or probabilistic determination, maybe there's just like an 80% chance that E was going to happen, and that suffices as an explanation. To me, I think, oh, maybe that plays a part of the story of explaining why E occurred.

But as for why it occurred in this case, when it could have not, and yeah, there was only a 20% chance that it wouldn't have, but there's a, like it did in this instance, and if I ran it 100 times and 20 of those times it wouldn't, if I was, as I would be in this circumstance, not entirely clear on why in this instance it happened versus the other, I think there's still some mystery there, and therefore I don't think that a probabilistic explanation is a sufficient explanation. I think it can only ever be about as sufficient as the sort of percentage probability with which it predicts the event, if you see what I'm saying. Right. So some people do respond that way. I think that If you genuinely have indeterminism, then mystery is no longer an issue, right?

There are a range of things that could happen. You know that, for sure. There's just this range of things, and you get one of them, right? And there's nothing further to say about why you get this one rather than one of the others, and that just means that's all the explaining that it's possible to give, right? It's not like there's some further explaining that could be given so that there was a mystery here that could be solved. Now, you might not like the idea of indeterminism. That's a different matter.

But if you go the alternate route and you say no causal indeterminism, so in order to explain something, we have to have something that necessitates it, right? We couldn't have got anything else. we're going to end up with, it looks, as though, everything's necessary. That's where it looks like that's heading. And there have been theists, or there have been philosophers,

including in particular some theorists who've gone that way. So Leibniz famously seemed to come around to the view that there's just one possible world, right? The actual, everything that happens, happens with necessity. And lots of, of people think that's not really a comfortable position to land up in. I admit that it's one of the views that you can take. But the alternative is to say, even if you're committed to principle of sufficient reason, right, is just to say once you've got your complete indeterministic explanation,

that's all the explaining there is and we should be happy with it. I think, you know, I'm dissatisfying, with probability as an explanation. But for those listening, it doesn't do it for me, but it might help to think in terms of like, you know how atoms are randomly vibrating? And it just so happens that there are so many of them sort of randomly vibrating that they all sort of cancel each other out and objects remain relatively stationary.

In principle, there's nothing stopping from all of the atoms in like this microphone or the computer in front of me from just spontaneously all just shifting a meter to the left. An object could, if all of the atoms happen to sort of vibrate with force in that direction, it could just sort of shuffle along to the left-hand side. But that doesn't happen. We've never seen that happen. And you might say, well, why not?

You know, why is it sitting still? I say, well, because the probability of those atoms doing that is so, so low, that we've just got an extremely high probability that the computer will remain still. Same thing with thermodynamics. If I spray an aerosol can and the smell spreads out across the room, that's all probabilistic. You know, in theory, again, in principle, those molecules that came out of the can could spontaneously, you know, find their way into a cup on the table or something. And when we say, well, why didn't it do that? Why is it spread out? We say because the probability is just so extremely high. And for most people, that does it. That's like, yeah, fair enough. That sort of counts as an explanation. Even though it's not a deterministic one, it's only a probabilistic one. So I think it's a little bit easier to see when the probabilities are just that high, why that functions for some people as a sort of sufficient. sufficient reason, but I think it is worth highlighting what you said as well, which is that

if you take my view, which is that for things to have a sufficient reason, they essentially must, like if P is a sufficient reason for Q, that's the same thing as saying that P entails Q, you know, that you can't have P and not have Q follow it. And I think that is roughly the view that I take. But then, you know, I said I describe this view as, as, as, you know, intuitive and plausible, but I think it has holes in it as well. But I thought that was worth sort of spelling out for, spelling out for people. But take this probabilistic thing, you know, that you're championing here. How does that change anything? Like, does the argument no longer run in the same way if we say that, okay, well, a sufficient reason will include things like

non-deterministic explanation, but you still have this chain of explanation that even if it's just probabilistic, sort of stretches back into time or stretches down into the foundation of reality. And That still has to terminate somewhere, right? That's right. So one question will be, let's wind back to the first bit of causing the first arrow and ask about, okay, so on the before side of the arrow, we've got something that we're supposing is necessary. On the after side of the arrow, we've got some content.

contingency because the arrow itself is indeterministic, right? So there could have been different things that came out that necessary thing. If you put the deterministic view, there'd just be one thing that could come out. So I don't think that it does make a difference. If you're dead set against infinite

regress, it's not going to make any difference. Your argument for a starting point is going to look just the same. Sure. Okay. So then let's talk about that idea of an infinite regress, right? Because I think most people intuitively, whether they want to accept the principle of sufficient reason in its entirety or not, will say, okay, I think, yeah, most things require causes. There are some causal chains that exist somewhere in the universe, right? And they do. have to terminate somewhere. And they're either going to terminate in something like randomness. Things just occur for no reason. That seems a bit sort of dissatisfying. So instead this kind of seems like it has to terminate in again, this sort of self-justifying

principle called necessity. Or one option is that it goes back on forever, right? So a lot of atheists have just said, you know, maybe the Big Bang wasn't the beginning of the universe. You know, maybe there is an infinite past or maybe there's an infinite sort of downward scientific explanation, if you prefer, and that just goes on forever. And you have the so-called Hume Edwards principle that, you know, as long as each individual sort of moment in the chain is explained by the bit previous, you know, P is explained by Q and Q is explained by R and R is explained by P1 and so on, then each individual like component is explained, therefore the whole thing is explained. But a lot of philosophers say that this kind of thing just

can't go back on infinitely. And I wondered if you could give us the most robust case that you can as to why people think that can't be the case. So this is actually quite difficult to do. There's lots and lots of different attempts that have been made to show that somehow other there's something just incoherent in the idea of an infinite regress. It's going to be difficult to establish this because there's nothing incoherent in models that we can make, like just use the negative numbers, right, minus one, minus two, minus three going backwards. It's not somehow or other that the arithmetic of the negative integers that's incoherent. So it looks like we can make models of some kind.

And the kinds of arguments that you get, for example, the kinds of arguments that have been going around recently based on Benadetti's Grim Reaper paradox that are supposed to show that you can't have causal infinitism so you can't have an infantism. Those arguments are very tricky and not, I think, particularly intuitive either. Yeah, well, a lot of people just sort of point to what they see as a general implausibility of infinity. So people might be familiar with like the Hilbert's Hotel. stuff, right, where it just seems like infinity kind of leads to a paradox. And that's enough for some people to say, this infinity thing, it just can't exist. It leads to all kinds of

problems. You know, if infinity minus one is infinity, then I can make one equal zero. And that's just a huge problem. So let's just not allow infinities. It's like dividing by zero or something. It's just not something that we sort of allow to occur. But, you know, one of my favorite lines of thought here that I've been talking a lot about recently is this difference between what the philosophers call the per se and the per accident's causal chain. And I want to try to avoid using Latin if possible. So instead, I'll call it horizontal and hierarchical causation, even though that's not quite perfect as a term. You'll know what I'm talking about here, but in brief, you know, if you imagine the dominoes knocking each other over, each of

dominoes seems to have its own causal power. Like if I knock over that first domino and then the next one knocks over the next one, the next one knocks over the next one, I can take that first domino and I can throw it away. You know, I don't need it anymore. And that chain will keep on going. Another favorite example is how my father caused me to exist. My father could now die and I would now have my own causal power to bring about a son, right, even though he's not there anymore. And you can call this horizontal causation just for ease's sake. But there's this other kind of causation, in which the individual components don't have their own causal power. So the microphone in front of me, which gets a lot of attention in these kinds of conversations,

because it's always right there, is being held up, helpfully, by this microphone stand. And so the microphone is kind of caused by the microphone stand, at least its position is. But the microphone stand doesn't have the causal power on its own to hold up the microphone. It borrows it from the ground, because the ground wasn't there. it's not like the microphone stand would just be floating there so it borrows it from the ground but the ground that this is on is well the floor that it's on is borrowing it from the foundations of the building that I'm in but those foundations of the building are borrowing that causal power from the earth and so on and so forth and the difference with this kind of causation is that unlike

being able to remove that first domino if you remove any more foundational sort of moment in that causal chain if I remove the floor for example then the whole rest of the causal chain disappears instantly. The microphone wouldn't be here anymore if that were the case. Now, I know you know all of that, but the reason why I think that's useful to think about is because if in this kind of causation, the microphone stand doesn't have any causal power at all of its own. It only borrows it from something else. But the thing it borrows it from doesn't have any causal power. Borrowes it from something else. That borrows it from something else. That borrows it from something else. I could see those dominoes stretching back infinitely. You know, maybe domino zero was knocked over by domino minus one. That was knocked over by domino minus two, minus three, minus four, yeah, and that just goes on infinitely, fine, because each one has its own causal power. But if you have to borrow it from something more foundational, but the things that are being borrowed from don't have any causal power, that's not something that can go back on infinitely. Because if you had this infinite chain of course, causal actors that had zero causal power, then there'd be no causal power in the chain

and there'd be no effect. And yet there is a microphone in front of me, Professor Oppi. So how could that possibly go on infinitely? There must be something at the ground from which that causal power is all being borrowed. Ergo, in this kind of causation, you can't have an infinite series of causation. What do you make of that? So I think that it's true that if you've got hierarchical chains, they're going to be finite. They're going to terminate. But different chains will terminate in different things, and the things that they terminate in will not be candidates to be got. So take your example of a thing being held up by the earth. So this was a kind of causal chain of things being held up by other things. What holds up the earth? Well, sorry,

at this point we've just departed from any sensible understanding of physics if you think that there's an answer to that question. The earth isn't held up by anything. And so we get to our sort of unheld up hold-upperer at that point. It's the earth. Is that God? Answer, straightforwardly, no. So that's that particular example. Take a different example, one that was also quite common in the literature. there's a ball roll no i'll make it a hoop rolling along beside me because i've got a stick and i'm using the stick to make the the hoop roll and um so the stick is making the hoop roll my arm is moving the stick i'm moving my arm now what's moving me at this point we've reached again the kind of end of the movement chain but i'm not got right so

the plausible examples of the kind that you're giving, I agree, there are these hierarchical chains, but they always, all of the kind of examples that you can come up with, and there are different ones. Like, I mean, here's another one. You watch a, you're at a level crossing, trains going past, there's a bunch of carriages, each carriage is pulling the one next to it. But somewhere up the front, there's an engine. And there's nothing that's pulling it all on. So it turns out to be the thing that's not merely being pulled along by other things. It's pulling everything.

And that's where one terminates. And so the kind of question to ask is, what's the example of something where it's plausible that this terminates in something beyond the universe? And I don't believe that there's any example of that kind. well is that is the problem there just i guess like the words that we're using right because i said you know the microphone is being held up and you're quite right like once you say what's holding up the earth you've kind of lost track of of of what we're talking about because to be held up is really to sort of have an object between you and the earth that's kind of what we mean by being held up in some respect right but then maybe instead i should just say oh okay well what i really

meant then is like, why is the microphone where it is? Let's phrase it like that. And the same answer. You know, well, it's where it is because the microphone stand is where it is, you know, and the microphone stand is where it is because the floor is where it is. And then you'd get to say, well, you know, why is the earth where it is? You might say, well, because. So that just shifts the problem, though, because now let's consider what this, where it is, this relative to, once we get to the universe, we can't ask, why is the universe where it is? That was exactly the same kind of reference problem that I was thinking comes up in the case of the holding up.

Yeah. But then what I'm going to say is, okay, you're quite right, but I'm, but what you've just said there is that, you know, I've pushed the problem back, and that's true, but what if I can keep pushing the problem back until we get to the universe? So what have I said? Okay, fair enough. I shouldn't have said, why is the microphone where it is? I should have said something like, why does the microphone have the properties that it has, right? Which includes its spatial location. And now it might get a bit more complicated because I might say, well, it's got the properties it has because of the shore SM7B. It's spatial location is because of the microphone stand, all of that kind of stuff. But if we followed one of those threats, might say, well, you know, this property at least, it has the property of its spatial location because of the stand, and that's because of the Earth, and that's because of so on and so forth. Well, why does the Earth have the properties that it does?

Oh, because of, you know, some kind of universal laws of gravity and stuff like that. Well, yeah, why? And then we get to the universe, you know, some kind of big sort of collection of everything, and we say, well, why does the universe have the properties that it does? That does seem like a sensible question to me, and it seems like if there were an answer for why the universe had the properties that it has, we are now straying into the realm of a cause that sort of exists outside of at least logically separable from the universe. So once you're asking about things,

why do they have the properties that they do? There's two kinds of considerations here. One will be some of the reasons why it is the way it is at the moment is because of what other things are doing to it right now, and the other thing will be to do with its history, right? it has the properties that it now because of the way that it was earlier, the way that other things were earlier. If we're asking this question at the level of the universe,

why does the universe have the properties that it does? Once we've got to the universe right now, why is it the way it is? If you're me, you're going to say, well, to answer that question, we look to the past. So we've given up on horizontal exponents. Is that right? No, we've given up on vertical explanation at this point. You're now going to do it horizontally.

And we're going to go back if there's a first thing that its properties it has of necessity. So it doesn't look like finding these kinds of, I mean, asking these kinds of questions about things in the universe isn't, at least by my life, it's going to take you beyond the universe. I see. I guess what I'm trying to get at is, is to what extent the impotence of this line of thought is a result of the way that we're wording it and the fact that we're unhelpfully choosing words like holding up and how much for this in principle. Because like poetically speaking, almost, I could say, well, what holds up the earth? Well, that's a silly question. But in a way, I could say, well, you know, the earth is kind of held up by the sun, like in a sense. And as long as you

kind of get what I'm saying there, you know that really I've maybe made a bit of a mistake with my language, but the point is still there, but the earth is there because of the sun. And I'm wondering, like, is there, do you think there is any sort of perfectly designed version of, like, the language we're using that could get us to what the theist wants, which is a sort of direct line from the microphone to the, to the god of the universe? So, I suspect not. I mean, there is a kind of quite good version of this argument that Ed Fezer gives in his five proofs book. But the thing that he focuses on from memory is something like unification of essence and existence. It's a very abstract thing, something that you might

not think is happening in the world, and that kind of requires some external doing. So what unifies your essence? in existence has to be something else, and thoughtably that thing's going to be God. So it's a very short vertical chain, a sort of one-step chain. But that's where he ends up with, because he kind of concedes a point about all of the standard examples, that they just, I'll say it this way, they just peter out. They don't get you outside the universe. Yeah, and I'd recommend. recommend that text, as I have done in the past to people, and Ed Faser has been on this show as well to discuss the argument from change. I think one thing that's probably worth mentioning here before kind of moving on is that I mentioned this to you over email, is that one of my favorite objections to contingency arguments, any kind of argument that relies on contingency and necessity, is this wonderful observation that was made by Peter Van Inwagon, which is known as the modal fatal fatalism objection.

And I think maybe it's worth trying to touch on. It can get a bit complicated, but I wonder if there's a kind of simple-ish version that we can get at. And it first relies on this controversial assumption. Again, we take the principle of sufficient reason. Let me say everything which happens, there is a sufficient reason for why it happens. And you have to sort of be on my team for this to work. You have to say, well, a sufficient reason is the same thing as entailment. You know, if P is a sufficient reason for Q, that means that if P happens,

Q must happen. P entails Q. And I suppose the most interesting part of Van Nuwagon's line of thought here is that if P is necessarily true, if it just cannot be false, then if P entails Q seems to imply that the Q is also necessary. It would be weird to say that, yeah, P has to be true. And if P is true, then Q is true. But, but, but, Q could be false. That doesn't make any sense. So if a necessary thing entails another thing, that other thing is necessary. Yet the first premise of contingency arguments for the existence of God are there exist contingent objects, which could have not existed and they require an explanation for their existence. And ultimately, the theist wants to say that this is all explained by a necessary being. But if your first premise is that there are contingent objects, your conclusion is that everything is caused by a necessary being, or sufficiently explained by a necessary being, that's where this becomes relevant, because if a necessary being, or a necessary

truth sufficiently explains everything in the universe, then because it's necessary and it entails everything in the universe, everything in the universe cannot be contingent. Therefore, the first premise doesn't even get off the ground. Now, I know that's far from the entirety of what Van NWagon says, but it's an interesting thought, you think? So I think that that is what Van Nguyenwagon says. That is the objection that he's making to this style of argument. And I think that if you really want to hang on to the idea that there's a necessary cause,

you better give up the idea that the causal relation is a relation of necessitation. Or you better, as well, so as we before, you better judge. I just go with Leibniz and say, surprisingly, absolutely everything is necessary. Yeah. I mean, the reason why I say that it's, the reason why I say it's not, the totality of Van Mwagon's argument is because he gets quite specific about how this all works with his big conjunctive contingent fact and stuff like this, which I think is probably too complicated to get into verbally here. But I would recommend people go and read the paper. I think

it's one of the most ingenious arguments I came across when I was first getting into contingency arguments years ago at university. But the basic point that I think is worth reflecting on that I think not enough people spend time reflecting on is that if a necessary being is like causally adequate to fully explain a contingent thing, there is a potential paradox lurking in there unless you're extremely careful. Because necessary. things cannot entail contingent things, or can they? I mean, I suppose that's the question to round this off. Do you think that at least that part is true? Are we sort of misusing, because some people have sort of told me that that's not quite how necessity and contingency works on

some theories of logic. Is it just sort of, it seems to me almost, you know, like clear and distinct, as Descartes would say, that it seems obviously true that if something is necessary and it something, the thing it entails is also necessary. But is that always, is that necessarily true? So, I think that that's true. If you've got, so I'm just trying to think of the modal, a little bit about modal logic now. So we've got necessarily P then Q and we've got necessarily P.

Right. So in a normal modal logic, we're going to have necessarily Q. That's, we can make weak modal logics in which you don't have that, but there have been very few people who've thought that those weak modal logics are going to work for the explanation relation or something like that. Maybe it'll work for, you know, a deontic logic or something like that. Yeah, and I think we're on the same page there as it were.

And I'll try to remember to link all the various things I'm talking about in the description below. But, you know, some people will be listening to this and thinking, okay, cool, this contingency stuff is really interesting. But when I've heard of the cosmological argument, it's because I've seen these debates with William Lane Craig, and he's talking about Calam and things beginning to exist. So I think if, even if only briefly, we are going to have to give some attention here to this famous calam cosmological argument, popularized by that, Dr. William Lane Craig, who has also been on this show, which is quite simple. Premise 1, everything which begins to exist has a cause.

Premise 2, the universe began to exist. Conclusion, therefore, the universe has a cause. What do you think? Okay, so that's, I'll add one thing. Sometimes the argument goes like this, whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning to exist. So they're actually two versions. of the argument.

It won't really matter. I don't think we're going to get so precise as to worry about the difference between them. So there are two key things to think about in assessing the syllogism. One is what you mean by the universe, and the other one is what you mean by begins to exist. So if you think that there's an initial state of the universe

that's necessary, Do we think that that kind of initial surface begins to exist? That's a hard question to address. If you compare with the situation facing the Theist, the The Theist says, so, as God makes the initial state of the universe. But what about God? Does God, in a relevant sense, begin to insist? and is there a kind of difference between these questions

sort of what theists and naturalists could say in answering that question is there a relevant difference between the options that they've got so that would be that that's the main thing to think about I think yeah sometimes it feels like the kind of of paradoxes and like incomprehensibility that a theist describes to the atheist, you know, like, well, you know, a universe can't be eternal and infinities don't seem to make much sense and stuff like that. When you start talking about God, some of these concepts seem to kind of crop up again in various ways where they're treated as though they're a bit different. It's like, no,

no, God isn't infinite. He's just timeless. You know, he hasn't existed for all time. He's kind of existed for no time. And it kind of feels like a similar-ish trick as being pulled, especially when you consider that modern physics tells us that time is a sort of dimension of the fabric of space time, right? It's just one dimension of the same kind of stuff that the universe is made out of. And so if you sort of go back to the Big Bang, let's say, everything gets sort of condensed and everything sort of begins, it sort of feels like that point itself might be kind of described as timeless, you know, because it's this sort of infinite, almost near-infinite sort of density. And we know that, like, mass changing in that way can have huge effects on time,

and time can slow down and speed up and stuff. And, yeah, maybe we just sort of get this timeless thing at the beginning of the universe. And it seems a little unclear, I think, to a lot of people. And one of the points you make in this book I mentioned earlier that crocks up quite consistently is, like, even if this argument gets you somewhere, it doesn't seem to get you to something that you should call God. It gets you to, yeah, there's something weird going on at the beginning. There's some necessary existence.

There's some first cause or a bunch of causes. But to call it God seems a little bit misplaced, perhaps. Right, yeah. So that's the way that I'm inclined to respond. There is this other thing about what exactly you mean by the universe, whether you think that the universe is just all of natural reality. or whether you think of it as our bit, this side of inflation, of our inflation, and there might be a whole lot more stuff, including a kind of background space that maybe

goes back infinitely into the past with lots of inflating going on in different regions at different rates of time. And then our universe maybe turns out to have a cause in that background space because there's a cause for the inflation to happen. that will give you a very different kind of response and you kind of have to make a decision about what you're going to mean by the universe before we can really settle things yeah yeah in my experience most atheists I speak to especially just sort of casually hearing the calum they reject the second premise most readily that the universe began to exist they sort of say oh maybe

the universe is infinite or maybe, you know, the universe that is the multiverse or stuff that, you know, before the Big Bang, you know, maybe there's just more to it. And it seems like a pretty easy sort of thing to say. I'm also interested in the first premise, because you said it also, you know, it depends what you mean by begins to exist. Because I've made this point quite a lot that things don't really begin to exist ex neelho. In the way that the theist wants the universe to begin to exist ex neelho, you know, when God creates it out of nothing. When we talk about things beginning to exist in a colloquial sense, it seems intuitive at first, right? Like everything which begins to exist has a cause, sure. But like, you know,

does a car begin to exist? There's no new material. Nothing's like popped into the universe. Instead, you've taken a bunch of pre-existing matter, a bunch of metal and some rubber and, you know, electrical wires and stuff. And you've just kind of arranged it. You just kind of put it in an arrangement and given it a label. And so it never really begins to exist. And a literal sense. In fact, given that all of the matter of the universe, which we just rearrange to create objects like cars and microphones and lights and stuff, if that all originated at the Big Bang, then let's say the Big Bang is the beginning of the universe. Let's say the universe did have a beginning and it was called the Big Bang. Well, the first premise of the

Calam is everything which begins to exist, and I kind of want to put in brackets here, to make the argument truly valid, we'd have to say everything which begins to exist ex-Neilo, Because that's what we're trying to get to. Everything which begins to exist out of nothing has a cause. Premise 2. The universe began to exist out of nothing. Therefore, the universe must have a cause. But if the only thing that's ever begun to exist out of nothing is the universe, because everything within the universe is just a rearrangement of matter, right? Like, there's no new stuff. The only time anything has ever begun to exist in the literal sense is when the universe began to exist. Then the argument now reads,

this. Premise 1. The universe began to exist, because the premise is everything which begins to exist has a cause. And so, oh, sorry, rather, the first premise then becomes, if the first premise is everything which begins to exist has a cause, the only thing that really began to exist was the universe. So the first premise is now just, the universe has a cause. Premise 2, the universe began to exist. Conclusion, therefore, the universe has a cause. The first premise becomes identical to the conclusion, I think that the Kalam cosmological argument might actually be circular. Right. So it's quite tricky to give a good account of what circularity in arguments makes for, but I do think that there's a serious question about the first premise of

the kind that you're pointing to, that everything that begins to exist has a cause of its beginning to exist, it really, it really does matter what we decide we're going to mean by begins to exist. Because if we decided that God begins to exist, in the relevant sense, it begins to exist, that, you know, there's no problem. a time at which God doesn't exist maybe that's enough to make it the case that

God begins to exist where no theorists and it's going to say, oh, okay, so God's got a cause. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? And, you know, when I had William and Greg on my show the first time, I presented this to him quite excitedly at the time. I was very young. And I was like, you know, I kind of think this is circular because I don't think that things really do begin to exist in the way you want them to. I think you just sort of rearrange

matter. And he says to me, you know, Alex, I don't think you realize how radical the view is that you're proposing. It's this view called myriological nihilism, which has since become a huge part of so many of the topics I talk about and my listeners will be hopefully quite familiar with the concept. But it's funny that that's how I was introduced to the concept because he said, well, you know, Alex, if a car, if there's no point in which the car began to exist, then that that means that right now the car doesn't really exist. And I was like, huh, but I was happy to kind of bite the bullet on that and say, yeah, you know what? I've, I've, I still don't think that the calum works, but I now also don't believe in distinct material objects. Thank you, William

Lane Craig, for giving me that existential crisis, although I, I find it, I don't find it troubling at all to be a mereological nihilist, but I do think as long as you're willing, so you, in other you should be aware of that potential implication, but I think as long as you're willing to accept that, like think about what the argument is saying. Everything which begins to exist, again, in what sense? Well, because our conclusion, we want to be talking about the universe being created, like, new stuff.

Then to be consistent, we have to be talking about stuff beginning to exist in the same way. So when the premise says everything which begins to exist, we have to mean new stuff, everything which begins to exist as new stuff has a cause. And you kind of want to say, well, how on earth do you know that? Because when have you ever seen anything pop into existence and verify that it has a course, you know? Right. So that's interesting. And this thing about cars when they begin to exist is really tricky too because cars are assembled from components that are made in all kinds of different ways.

I mean, in all kinds of different locations typically and then brought together and, put together in a certain way, there's a certain amount of vagueness about exactly when a car begins to exist. I don't know whether that matters, but, I mean, presumably this is part of what feeds into your meriological nihilism, right? You can't actually, so, I mean, here's another part of the same thing. Suppose I like to take my car apart and sort of sits in the backyard spread out all over the lawn. Does my car still exist while it's spread out all over the lawn? Or does it only exist intermittently when I put it all back together again? And if it does, is there a kind of precise point, which I've put in just enough of the components that it now exists before it didn't?

Yeah, it's tricky. I mean, the common example that I come across all the time, or did when I read about this, I suppose, is somebody taking their watch or their clock in for repair, and maybe the watch gets taken apart and the hands get sent off to one factory and the glass gets sent off to another and the leather strap gets sent off to a different factory. And it's like, does the watch still exist? It seems at some point, like if I were to set it on fire and disintegrate it into individual bits of ash, we probably want to say it's not there anymore. But, like, Like, you know, in theory, all the material's still there, the ashes there, the stuff that's sort of burned up and evaporated into the air is somewhere in the atmosphere or something,

it's still all there. The people say, no, no, no, no, the watch doesn't exist. And yet, if I just remove the strap from my watch, we want to say it still exists. And there is, again, this sort of problem of specificity, of resolution. of like where but if we can't even say meaningfully when a thing begins to exist or that it begins to exist or in what sense it begins to exist it starts to look more and more dubious that we can have a strong premise like everything which begins to exist has a cause it's like i don't even know if we can sort of agree on what we're talking about here so some people will hope that we we can just a loose talk will do i mean in a loose sense most of the time when we talk about things beginning to exist, we're going to agree sort of roughly about when it began to exist and when it stopped existing. I mean, yeah, there's some vagueness.

But the vagueness doesn't extend over centuries. Like when I began to exist, it's slightly indeterminate, but it was sometime around the beginning of the 60s, right? It wasn't in the 1860s. Yeah, and it's, you know, it's easy enough when you zoom out in that way. Although, of course, if you speak to a Buddhist or a Hindu or something, they might have a slightly more complicated answer, or perhaps a more simple answer in that, you know,

well, you didn't begin to exist in the 60s or the 80s. I guess we sort of all began to exist at the same time. And once again, you've sort of got this only one thing ever begins to exist, if anything does. But, you know, people sort of, I think one of the reasons, one of the motivations for views like that are to sort of try and, get away from these seeming paradoxes of things beginning to exist or not existing because I've taken my strap off my watch and so it doesn't exist anymore. That seems a bit weird to say

and so people kind of want to accept a metaphysical principle that just releases all of that paradoxical stuff into the air. And one way to do that is to say the watch doesn't exist in the first place. You know, that's what the Muriological Nialist does. They just say, there is no watch. So it's not a problem for me. You can take as many repairs, you take it for as many repairs as you like and it's not going to cause me any metaphysical concern. But you know, okay, we might not be able to talk about exactly when things begin to exist. And we're not sure if the universe began to exist in the right metaphysical sense. But let's use that as a segue to move on here. And we spent a lot of time on cosmological arguments, but I wanted, as promised, to cover a

couple more and maybe we can do them with a little bit more haste. Because I think cosmological arguments are probably the most, like, tricky and technical, especially in this format to get into. But there's this other feature of the universe, whether it began to exist or not, which is that it seems to abide by some perfectly balanced and really finely attuned laws and principles and constants. So famously, this is called the fine-tuning problem or the fine-tuning argument, or whatever you want to sort of label it. Now, we're talking here about things like the strength of gravity. We're talking about the expansion rate of the universe, the curvature of space time, the strength of the strong and weak nuclear forces that

like, you know, hold atoms together. In principle, logically, it seems possible that gravity could be two times as strong. It could be that when you have an object of one kilogram mass, It just exerts twice the bending of space time than it does in the actual world. That could have been the case. And the scientists have been telling us for years now that if that were the case, if gravity had been a little bit stronger, then the entire universe would have collapsed shortly after the Big Bang, right? Because the gravitational pull would have been too strong and things would have collapsed

in on themselves. If it had been any weaker, then everything would have flown apart so fast. that planets couldn't form. And so this fine-tuning argument, I think, is often misrepresented. I think people think we're talking about, like, oh, the Earth is the perfect distance from the sun, which is pretty nice. But when you realize there are billions and billions of suns and billions of planets, yeah, one of them's going to hit.

But we're talking here about the fabric of the universe itself, that if these constants had been ever so slightly different, like, basically nothing could exist short of maybe like some hydrogen atoms or something like that. So the Theist wants to look at this and say, this fine-tuning can only be explained in one of three ways. Chance, which seems exceedingly unlikely, given just how perfectly balanced these constants have to be. Necessity, they just had to be this way, but they certainly don't seem logically necessary, and we don't really have any good reason to suspect that they would be necessary. We don't have any sort of scientific law that says they have to be that way or something like that. And third is design.

You know, somebody chose to make them that way so that the universe could come about and no surprises which one they favor. So, having laid that out, what do you think? So there's, you've given, you're suggesting there are three options. Let's part design and talk about the other two. Whether it's chance or not depends upon, I think, when exactly these values are fixed. So one story that you could tell, one way that maybe the physics could play out,

is that at some point there's something like a phase transition in the universe and the values, get fixed by the phase transition and it's just in the other other things that happen in physics this is going to be an indeterministic process right suppose it goes that way well now it doesn't matter what the numbers are it doesn't matter what the probabilities are once you know that it's indeterministic that it really was just a matter of chance. There's nothing left to worry about. It's like suppose we conquer the galaxies, right?

Humans inhabit. And we build sort of every star has either a planet that we've colonized or a set of planets that we've artificially constructed. And there are billions and billions and billions of galaxies, right? I'm underplayed how many there are. And we have a universal lottery in which every person on every one of the planets had a ticket. And it turns out that you have the winning ticket. And the odds are astronomically against you getting the winning ticket.

for reasons that I won't go into, we're quite confident that the lottery was one fair and square, but you shouldn't be worrying about the fact that it was so incredibly unlikely that you would get the winning ticket to think, oh, they must have, it must have been rigged in my favour. It must have been that what reasons are known to me that the organisers of the lottery decided that I was going to be the person that wins the big prize or whatever. So long as you're confident in the fairness of the process, the size of the number doesn't matter. And I think that analogy is going to carry over to the case of the fine-tuning of the constants. So long as we know that it was just the result of some phase transition in the universe.

So that's the first point. You can't rule out chance as a satisfying explanation. until you've ruled out the possibility that there was a phase transition of that kind, perhaps back before inflation, so it's physics that we don't know anything about. Can you just clarify what you mean by a phase transition? So I'm just thinking about something that happens that applies to the state of the whole of the universe in which these various parameters get set to particular values. they would not set to these values earlier maybe it's because the universe wasn't at that

earlier point wasn't characterized by those parameters that's the kind of thing that I've got in mind the parameters now have they always characterized the universe yeah who knows I think sort of thoughts like that are quite plausible or intuitive Yeah, you know, I would think there's no way it's me that I've won the lottery. It's so unlikely, but someone had to win it, right? But it's that someone had to win it that I think is key here, because we've only got one universe that we know of. And people like to talk about a multiverse. That's kind of a version of the chance argument, but shelving that for the time being, there's just the one universe that we know about. And so it seems to me less like doing a big lottery. with everyone in the universe and the person who wins is really, really surprised, it'd be more like sort of, I don't know, if, in the same way that if, I don't know how many like hands of poker are played every day, probably millions online poker and, you know, casinos around the world. And probably a royal flush occurs every now and again, right?

but I've got to say that if there were only like one game of poker that occurred or one hand of poker that occurred and it was a royal flush and it was like the one time that it had happened I would feel like less inclined to say like oh well you know like had just as much chance of that hand as any other it would feel a lot less less easy and so in other words the intuitive force that someone had to win the lottery it doesn't feel like some universe had to get the constants that they did, unless there is a multiverse. If the idea is just that, well, something can be unlikely, but as long as we know that it was due to chance, like it shouldn't be a problem, I still think that that would be like a big, a big problem for me. You know, like I find it very difficult to, to swallow that intuition for the universe unless we're just talking about a multiverse, in which case it becomes trivially easy to say, yeah, you know, some universe had to have these constants. So in the case of the poker hand,

that someone gets a royal flush is actually some evidence that there's some cheating going on, right? In general, if I was really, really confident that there couldn't possibly be any cheating going on, then the one deal and it comes up, well, fine. But the, so that's one thing. But the point about that, The analogy is just that it so easily could have happened that the cards came out

differently and you didn't get a royal flush, and in the case of the universe, it could easily have happened on this telling of the story where there is a just, a kind of, I'll say random even if it's not quite the right way, a random assignment of the values to the constants. It could easily have turned out that if it is the case, there's just one unit. universe, the one universe that there is only lasted for a tiny fraction of a second blew apart so rapidly that it never contained anything interesting. And the thing to say would be, that's just the way it turned out. But that's it on the assumption that there's this kind of uniform, random assignment of

the values. Well, maybe not very likely, right, the story about the the random assignment of the variables that depends on physics stuff why not well do you think it is plausible I just want to be clear on what

you're saying here do you think it is just like plausibly true that there's only one universe and that it has the constants it has and it could have had different constants and they are like extremely like finally balanced with a with a

unbelievable degree of unlikely do you think it's plausible, like a sort of live option to just go, yeah, but it just so happened to be that way? Sure, just on analogy with the so I happen to win the intergalactic lottery. Yeah. I just, I mean, it's just, I mean, you can make the numbers in the intergalactic lottery as big as you like. You can make them rival the numbers in fine-tuning argument. It doesn't, it doesn't change anything. as far as I can see the lottery thing is more like the multiverse because the way the lottery works is that there is a ticket that's going to win right but I think it would be more like you run this strange you run this really strange lottery where like you have to you have to pick a series of of 10 numbers and it's not that like everybody gets a ticket and somebody's going to win it's like there's only one player right because there's only one year

universe. There's only one player and they have to pick, you know, 500 million numbers in a random order. And I've written down 500 million numbers. And if you pick the right numbers, you know, you're going to win the lottery. You're going to get a million dollars. And the person just randomly guesses 500 million numbers in a row. And I go, oh gosh, you know, like after however long it takes me to check them, I go, yeah, congratulations, you've won. That seems to be more like the situation where there's one universe and those constants have to be exactly as tuned as they are in order for basically anything to exist and it no longer becomes plausible to me for the person who won the lottery to go like oh well you know i guess you know it's so it's so what's the

explanation for the numbers that they write down right it's what what matters is the um ruling out any other possible explanation. So, I mean, I agree that it seems massively implausible, but that's because you'll be, you're standing to think, well, they must have cheated. They must be using cameras. There must be somebody with a microphone. They must have an earpiece,

and someone's just dictating the numbers to them or something like that. And that will be a more plausible hypothesis than the, than the um they just guessed them all but the thought was we rule all of that out and then what's the option you just accept it hmm I suppose and in fairness in that case like if I just if I just knew that the person genuinely had just randomly had just randomly chosen and just got unlucky then yeah I would just have to accept that as a matter of fact but I suppose if somebody said that a live option. And for me, like, when I look at fine-tuning, like, yeah, like, God designing the universe is a, is a live option for me. I don't think it's the, like, true one.

I don't have enough reason to think that's the case. But, yeah, it's possible. Yeah, maybe God designed the universe. If my only other option, let's say, were chance, because that's the one we're considering right now, I think I would have to choose the God explanation, because it would be like, if there were two explanations for how that person got that number, either they randomly chose, or somebody had secretly, like, psychologically, you know, designed it so they'd pick those numbers. And I would, in a heartbeat, I would pick that second explanation. And would you do the same? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I agree about that. I'm just thinking about that can you rule out chance? Right. Absolutely. And at this stage, we haven't compared the other hypotheses. And so I just like to be. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's worth pointing out. And do you know what, I think you're right at the very least that the chance thing just gets like brushed over, doesn't it? When people are talking about this, they go like, so it could be chance, but we know it's not that. So let's talk about it. But yeah, let's slow down. Let's take a moment. Let's think about it. Okay.

So what about our other options here? We've sort of got necessity in design. At least that's the way that it's often painted. So are those are only remaining options? So how are we going to classify multiverse, right? So there's just a lot of trials here, and the constants are just assigned randomly to an incredibly vast array of initial states of universes and a few of them take off and the rest of the most spectacular failures. Is that necessity? I typically say that that's a version of the chance because you're saying that like, yeah, the, we find ourselves in a finally tuned universe just by chance because this is like the lottery thing where there are like trillions and trillions or maybe an infinite number of universes and yeah, like, of course by chance, some of them are going to be finally tuned.

But now I'm thinking about it, in a way, it's also maybe a version of the necessity argument, because if there's a multiverse of every possibility, you want to say that, like, necessarily one of those is going to have finely tuned constants. So maybe it kind of sits outside and should be its own option. But yeah, I mean, it's probably the most popularly discussed response to this is the multiverse. So how have we classify it? Some people posit the existence of a multiverse in response to the fine tuning problem. others think they have other reasons to believe in a multiverse anyway, and then conveniently that sort of solves this problem for us. Do you think it is as neat a solution, as atheists often claim that if a multiverse exists, then fine-tuning problem just disappears? So I think that it's an important question whether we have independent reason to believe that there's a multiverse or not. It seems like it's very expensive if you're postulating a multiverse just to explain the fine-tuning of the constants, theoretically expensive. So, but there are certainly physicists working on interesting multiverse models.

So this is something that's consistent with physics as we have it now. I don't know because the cosmology of the early universe seems to be always in a state of incredible flux. so I don't know. Much like the early state of the universe itself. I just did an episode with Phil Halper, a friend of mine, and Nie Ayesh Af Shordi. They wrote a book called Battle of the Big Bang, and it's about all of the competing models. And yeah, there's a lot going on there, and I think it would be fruitless, even for a physicist to try to speak too confidently on what's going on back then, let alone us too. but I understand what you're saying

it gets a bit complicated but the philosophical point it seemed to me like what you were saying is it shouldn't be quite enough to say we've got this fine tuning problem and the multiverse would solve it so let's believe in the multiverse instead it's only really going to be satisfying

if you have other reasons to believe in the multiverse which you then apply to fine tuning and see that it offers a solution yep so I'm fine with that So now we've got chance and multiverse as two things that might be satisfactory, but on their own, neither of them seems particularly appealing, I think, is the right way to just remember the situation. Okay, and so we've got this multiverse thing going on. We've got this potential for chance.

what about necessity by which I want to say there's only one universe and there's just some reason why the constants had to be the way that they are by necessity? Do you think that's a plausible option? So I think that that's a viable option and if forced to choose between the three options that we're now discussing is probably the one that I look. like the most out of the three. But not that I'm enormously confident that it's the best one of the three to pick, or maybe that's not the right way to say it, not that I'm not enormously confident that it's the correct answer.

Well, a lot here turns on what you think about the metaphysics of modality. What's the story that you want to tell about? about necessity and contingency. And broadly speaking, there are two competing schools of thought. There's one school of thought that seems to think that basically our powers of conceivability tell us about the range of metaphysical possibility. So if we can kind of consistently conceive of something, then it's metaphysically possible. And if you're thinking about it that way,

it seems very implausible to take the necessity route. There's a quite different approach to the metaphysics of modality, which I take it goes back to Aristotle, but there have been lots of people in the history of philosophy. You've gone this way who think that modality is grounded in the actual world. So somehow the actual world determines what's possible. Now, the particular version of this that I want to go with is that possible worlds share some history with the actual world and diverge from it only as indeterminism, causal indeterminism plays out differently. Now, if you've got, and you think that the constants were fixed, always, so the values have always been the same, then it's a,

consequence of that view that the values of the constants are necessary, right? There's no point, history, where they could have taken on a different value. They've always taken on the value that they do, and there's no mechanism for changing them as the universe evolves. So there's no possible world where the values are different from how they are. So it turns out that they're necessary. That's the third position. Yeah. Now, okay, so, and some other people will say that they have sort of a trust in this necessity argument in the sense that they're searching for this so-called theory of everything. You know, like if you could sort of solve science. Now, my regular listeners will know that I'm suspicious of the extent to which science can actually explain anything at all. I think it's a purely descriptive enterprise. But for those who, you know,

take an explanatory view of this. They say, okay, well, you know, we haven't got there yet, but one day I'm sure we will unlock the key, which tells us there's one simple equation or something which predicts or entails all of the constants as we currently have them. I think you still probably have a problem of like why that equation is the way that it is, but maybe when we get there, we'll see that it's self-justifying or something. And so even though we don't have it, there's this idea that,

that there is some necessary reason that we just haven't discovered yet. So we've got some broad strategies here. And you said, of the three that we've been discussing, your favourite is the necessity thing, not in that scientific way, but in the modality sense. But the way you caveated that by saying, you know, of the options that we've got here, like made me think,

is there a response that you have to the fine-tuning problem that doesn't abide by these categories? Like typically speaking, if somebody presents this argument to you, What is your actual view? Like yourself, you don't believe that the universe was finely tuned by a creator deity. So how do you sort of suspect we can account for the finely tuned constants? So what I'm going to say is there's this range of options and it's kind of we aren't in a position to decide between. Sure.

If you insist that I just answer the question and I'm only allowed to pick one, then I'm going to pick necessity, and I've written a couple of books where I try to elaborate the kind of worldview that I see as being based on this necessity answer. And in those books, I don't say what I'm now saying, which is, okay, so this is where at every choice point I pick the view I like the most, but I'm not necessarily confident in the choices. So that all worldview isn't one that I'm enormously confident. it's just that at least it gives you a kind of complete well view to discuss you know i was i was

about to move on and try to wrap up with a with something on the ontological arguments um but just before doing so i i nearly forgot that every time i ever talk about fine tuning or see it discussed on on the internet somebody comments about the puddle who i can't remember which which writer it is that talked about the talk about the puddle it's like the person who goes, wow, I like how wonderfully designed the shape of the hole is for the water that fills it. Now, which is obviously a parody. The idea is you've mistaken the way around that this goes. It's not that the hole was designed for the puddle. It's that the puddle just fit the hole that happened to be there and gave the illusion of a perfectly sort of designed hole.

And the reason I want to point that out is because I think that's a very clever sort of response to some versions of these design arguments, like the distance of the earth from the sun and stuff like that. But I want to point it out because it kind of frustrates me when I see that, because when faced with the possibility that the universe as a whole could not have formed like molecules, it's not enough to say something like, oh, well, you know, it's a bit like seeing a puddle and thinking that the hole was designed for the, no, there's no water, there's no hole, concrete, there's no helium, there's no anything. This strong version of the fine-tuning argument is not applying to, you know, like, oh, well, you know, like, it's not like the sort of, oh,

this thing looks designed, a bit like a watch or something like that, or, you know, we're in the habitable zone. It's like the fabric of reality would not exist as you know it if these concerts were not finely tuned. And so I just want to say that that puddle analogy, only applies to a very limited scope, I think, of so-called fine-tuning arguments. And it does not respond adequately, even closely adequately, to something which is about the existence of anything at all made a physical matter. There would be no water and no hole in the ground for it to fill if the constants weren't finely tuned.

Anyway, I just want to say my piece. Unless you, maybe you have something to say on that, yeah. Yeah. So I think that that's absolutely right. The kind of cosmic fine-tuning argument, the power of analogy isn't any help at all. I have a suspicion that maybe Dawkins was the person who originated that analogy. No, it was a fiction, it was a writer of fiction. I'll figure it out while you're speaking. I'm not sure what else to add, really, at this point.

Okay, it was Douglas Adams, by the way. It was too, actually. It was Douglas Adams who came up with it. I'm not sure where exactly. But yeah, the puddle analogy, imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, this is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in. Fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact, it fits me staggeringly well.

It must have been made to have me in it. And yeah, it's funny. It's clever. It's a good bit. But it's very limited. in its scope? The puddle analogy is very good for evolutionary, I mean for responding to evolutionary arguments for design

because the evolutionary story tells you about how your features fit the world as it now is. Yes. Yeah, and that's where it's so genius, right? Is that like somebody who thinks, you know, wow, look how brilliantly designed the human eye is to perceive, you know, color and the environment and stuff. And the point here is like, no, no, no, like your eye evolved for the environment. It's not that the environment was designed for your eye or whatever. It just evolved to fit the space that it was in.

And Douglas Adams here is giving a wonderful illustration of that by saying the hole wasn't designed for the puddle. The puddle just fit the environment in which it was in. That's right. But for some reason, I see this, like Douglas Adams quote, quoted more in response to fine-tuning than to any evolutionary arguments, which is extremely strange because I think it just doesn't apply at all. It's just like a bit of a PSA to people listening. Think about it for a moment. That doesn't quite apply. Although I'm sure some of you

have already commented it down below. And some of you may even think that despite what we've just said, it does still apply. And if you think that's the case, please do let us know why. Having said that, we are kind of running out of time. And it's also very late for me. because you are on the other side of the globe. But I think we would be remiss not to mention what I think is one of my favorite arguments of the existence of God. And that's the ontological family of arguments

because you can do them from an armchair. It's great. You can sort of sit down, close your eyes, just think about stuff and guarantee the existence of God. There are lots of versions of this, I think too many, of course, to cover here. But I think there are two that are the most famous

and widely discussed. The first is Anselms are really, original argument, in which Anselm essentially asks you to do something quite simple. He says, just conceive in your mind of the greatest conceivable being. And I want to be clear, Anselm does not say God, at least not yet, because he's just asking you to do something which, by definition, is possible. Conceive of the greatest conceivable being. So that means take all the qualities it could have power, knowledge, goodness, whatever, and turn them all. up to their maximal conceivable quality. Again, not say infinite, just whatever you can conceive.

Okay, you've got it in your head. And here's the question, does that thing exist in reality? Most people say, no, it only exists in my head. I say, well, then you're not doing what Anselm asked you to. Because if that being existed in reality, it would be greater. It would be a greater conceivable being, because it would have more existence. It would have more reality, you know. There seem to be like levels of existence. It seems that, you know, Hamlet doesn't exist in the way that I do. So it exists, Hamlet exists less than I do. But also there are all these characters that Shakespeare never wrote that never existed. They seem to exist even less. And maybe logical contradictions like a four-sided triangle seem to exist maybe even less than that. And Anselm kind of wants to say that these levels of existence, or maybe you only think there are two, existence and non-existence. He says there's like existence in the interstance. He says there's like existence in the interstance. that is just your imagination, and there's existence in reality, and a being which exists in reality as well as the intellect is greater, it has more stuff than the one that only exists in the intellect. So, like I said, Anselm was asking you to do something which by definition

you can do, you can imagine the greatest conceivable being, but a being that exists in reality rather than just in the mind is greater, and therefore, as long as you're doing what you're told to do, which you can do, you're imagining a being which exists in reality. Therefore, the greatest conceivable being must exist in reality. And this, Anselm says, all men call God. What do you think? So what I want to say in response to that is kind of what Cornelho said in response to Antelm, sort of within a year of Anselm's producing this argument.

But the way that you just described it, I can, certainly conceive in my mind of, I don't know, let's be very specific. There's a multiple choice test that I've just done with a hundred questions on it. And the sort of my greatest conceivable performance on that test. I can certainly conceive of that. And clearly, the greatest conceivable performance for me on that test is going to be real rather than just in my mind. And now it responds with the reasoning. And so that greatest performance on that test exists in reality, which is great because I didn't study and I just guessed a hundred times, but I'm guaranteed to get 100 on the test. that cannot be right.

There's something wrong with the reasoning going on here. That's not specific to stuff about the attributes with the sort of greatness of the being. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I mean, Gronillo's own example was the greatest conceivable island. Mm-hmm. Yeah, the greatest conceivable island, the greatest conceivable pizza, the greatest conceivable, you know, horse, unicorn, whatever you like, it's a sort of

a scheme of response. It's a, it's a parody. It's a way of saying, well, if that logic holds, then the greatest possible island exists, as Anselm had it too. And I think it'll be easier to, I've got a response to this that, you know, actually a good friend of mine, Ryan, if you're watching, we used to spend ages talking about this. And I think I ended up coming around thinking he might have been right about this, which is that it would be easier to see this with something like a pizza or an island, I think, than the test score, although I think it does apply. So let's say, okay, I can imagine the greatest conceivable pizza, just like the maximal desirability of cheesiness and whatever toppings you like and all that kind of stuff. But clearly, a pizza that

exists in reality is greater than the pizza that only exists in my imagination. Therefore, as long as I can conceive of it, it must exist, right? But that doesn't work. Why not? Well, here's one response. Anselm has asked us to imagine the greatest conceivable thing, like across all categories. He's not asked us to imagine the greatest conceivable, like, car, or the greatest conceivable God, even, or the greatest conceivable, you know, conscious agent. Just the greatest conceivable thing, as all the qualities get turned up. Now, if I think about, if I think about, that greatest conceivable pizza, a pizza that only exists in my mind versus a pizza that exists in reality. The pizza that exists in reality is greater in the sense that it has more

stuff. It's got more existence. But is it a better pizza? Because we've restricted our scope now. We've said, you know, we're talking about the greatest conceivable pizza, right? And is a pizza that exists in reality actually a better pizza? It's unclear to me whether that's the case because like all of the great making properties of pizza, cheesiness, you know, fluffiness, temperature, all of that kind of stuff, those exist of the pizza in my mind. And so it doesn't seem to me that making that thing exist in reality makes it a better pizza. And I know I said I wouldn't do this, but I'm going to have to use a Latin word here, which is the word quar, which means sort of, you know, in regards to or something like that.

So, is the pizza a better pizza qua pizza when it exists in reality? Some people want to say, not really. But people listening are like, what are you talking about? Of course the pizza is better if it exists in reality. Well, yeah, it's better qua thing. If you then expand your scope and say, a pizza that exists in reality is a better thing, or sorry, a greater thing than a pizza that only exists in the mind because it's got more stuff. it's got more existence. Yeah, that's fine. But if you've expanded your scope now to be talking about things again, you know, you're talking about the pizza that exists in reality, being a

greater conceivable, like, thing, well, I can take that pizza and I can make it an even greater thing by giving it, I don't know, omnipotence. Yeah, it's an omnipotent pizza. It's an even greater thing now, and now it's an omniscient pizza and it's existed for eternity. And suddenly I would just be describing God again. So the only way that I can parody the argument, is to not talk about things, like as a general sort of broad category, which is, I think, crucial to Anselm's argument, I've restricted my scope. And now I'm talking about things where their existence in reality doesn't make them better qua that category of thing. And it's a hard intuition to get across because when you first hear that, you're like, of course a pizza that

exists in reality is a better pizza. But I'm not convinced that it is. Because when we say the pizza that exists in the head it will have all of the qualities like temperature and cheesiness and tastiness just in the imagination. Okay, so what I don't want to ask you is do you kind of see where I'm coming from here and then like

maybe you might think it's nonsense but if you don't, can you at least like back me up for the audience that are not completely talking nonsense and then tell me why you think that that line of argumentation fails or maybe you do think it's nonsense. Yeah, so I can say where you're coming from But there is an intuition here that you might simply not share, right? The pizza that only exists in your head is not much of a pizza, in my opinion.

Certainly it's not going to satisfy me if I'm hungry. And it's not that I was thinking it's fine as pizza. It just falls down on being a thing. right so I don't so I'm inclined to push back against intuition but I can see where I can see why if you wanted to defend Ansel this would be a way to go well you know what I might say to that is that I agree with with this intuition here like you want to say but if we if we drill down into it it might not be quite so simple because you say like well if a pizza only exists in my head it's no good to me because I can't eat it you know like in order to be a good pizza

I have to be able to eat it right and I could say all right so now imagine that there's a pizza that exists in reality but it's like you know it's behind a locked door it belongs to somebody else and they're not going to let you eat it right and I've got a different pizza which I'm able to eat and I might say I prefer the pizza that I'm able to eat versus the one that I'm not able to eat that's behind the locked door but is it a better pizza it seems to be like better for my circumstance or it seems to like suit me more, it seems to be that when I expand my scope to include just like the world that I'm

living in and my preferences, like, yeah, this is a better sort of situation for me. But to say that it's a better pizza, qua pizza, just because I can access it rather than it being behind a door, it seems like a very weird thing to say, right? It's not a better pizza because I can touch it. And I kind of want to say the same thing about the imaginary pizza and the one in the real world. Yeah, the one in the real world is one that I can actually physically eat and touch and see with my eyes. And that's all cool. But it's not a better pizza for that reason. It's just a kind of pizza that I would prefer to have because, you know, I'm feeling pretty hungry. Now, again, I also want to, I want to say that to the audience who are still with us

listening, saying, Alex, you've lost your damn mind. What are you talking about? Look, I'm trying my best here. Anselm's argument is a notoriously difficult one to defend. I do actually think there's a lot of truth in this line of thought, but it's a bit too complicated to fully explain why right now. But that's one little pushback, you know, that the pizza being behind the door is a bit like the pizza being in the imagination. It doesn't make it a worse pizza. So, I mean, I guess to cut to where I would really want to go in pushing back against Anselm, Anselm's assuming that there's this distinction between, I'll say, things and beings, something like that. There are different grades of existence.

And that I don't accept, right? When he talks about the pizza in his head, that's no kind of pizza at all, according to me. That kind of monongian way of thinking about there being non-existent things is something that I just want to repudiate altogether. and so probably I should have started there rather than saying things like oh the pizza in your head is no use to me I should have just said the pizza in your head is no pizza whatsoever

yeah I mean it's a really interesting sort of area of philosophy like things which don't exist and the way in which they do exist I mean to say that because for Anselm there are like I said there are these like levels of existence, which I think is an intuition that maybe isn't shared as much today, which is that, like, yeah, something can exist in the intellect, like Hamlet, you know,

Shakespeare's character, Hamlet, like, that exists in the intellect, but not in reality, versus the characters that don't exist even in the intellect. It kind of seems like there are, like, levels to it. Nantelm is treating those things that exist in the head, almost as, like, actual objects, or, like, real things. They're just real in the intellectual realm. And I think probably as a result of our like materialistic, reductionistic sort of popular views now where we think, you know, there aren't really little characters running around in the intellectual realm. It's just like neurons firing.

That we've kind of abandoned that way of looking at the world. And I think without that, this argument does kind of struggle to get off the ground. But having tried my best to defend poor Anselm, again, I don't know. I almost don't want to do this because we're so short on time, but I feel like I said that there were two. The other is the modal ontological argument, right? And just for brevity, I'd usually spend some time explaining this. I've talked about it before. If you don't know what the modal ontological argument is, then you need to listen to more of my podcasts, but also go and look it up. But more or less, like, you can talk about possibility in terms of possible worlds, right?

I could have worn a blue shirt today, but I didn't. It's black. But the fact that it's possible I could be in a blue shirt, I can just represent that by saying there is a possible world in which I'm wearing a blue shirt, right? If something is necessarily true, then it's true in all possible worlds. Like, 2 plus 2 equals 4 is true in all possible worlds. If something is contingent, it means it could be true, it could be false, it's true in some possible worlds. There are a bunch of possible worlds in which I'm in a blue shirt, bunch possible worlds in which I'm in a red shirt, bunch possible worlds where I don't exist at all, all of that kind of stuff. okay if god exists then god is a necessarily existing being that's what we were talking about

earlier with the contingency argument and stuff this necessary foundation of of everything that exists necessary beings exist in all possible worlds right and then the argument is quite simple premise one if it's possible that god exists then god exists premise two it is possible that god exists conclusion therefore god exists so why should we accept that first premise if it's possible that God exists, then he exists. Well, because if it's possible that there is a necessary being, that means that there is a possible world in which there is a necessary being. But if a necessary being exists, he exists or it exists in all possible worlds. And so as long as we just accept the premise that it's possible that God exists, then we know that a necessary being

exists in at least one possible world. But that being, being necessary, would therefore have to exist in all possible worlds, including the actual world, therefore God exists in the actual world. A relatively shambolic and lazy attempt to summarize as quickly as I can the argument. Perhaps we can have a less lazy and less shambolic attempt, but equally brief response from you. So if we hold fix the idea that if you, If God exists in, that God either exists in no worlds or in all of them, then the kind of

standard response is going to be, look, you thought it's possible that God exists, but surely it's possible that God exists. Surely there's a world where God doesn't exist. But if God doesn't exist in one world, then it follows that God doesn't exist in any of them. So actually what we should be concluding here is it's necessary that God doesn't exist. That's the immediate response to the argument. There's a parallel here between two arguments, one of which gives you God necessarily exists, or God exists. The other one gives you necessarily God doesn't exist.

God doesn't exist. And there's a symmetry. And as things stand, there's nothing that breaks the symmetry between these two arguments, so we haven't gotten anyway. Yes, because a necessary, if you want to say that something is necessary, you don't even really need to say that it's necessarily true or false. You just need to say that if it's true, it's necessarily true. And if it's false, it's necessarily false. So the language you used, it's either in all possible worlds or it's in no possible worlds. It can't be in only some. So my argument was to say, well, it's possible that God exists. So there's one possible

world in which he exists, but it's either all or none, so he must also exist in all of them, including ours. But like you say, there is this reverse modal ontological argument, which says, well, premise one, it's possible that God doesn't exist. We want to go, yeah, sure, why not? That seems to make sense. Well, that means that there's a possible world in which God doesn't exist. But he either exists in all of them or none of them. And if he doesn't exist in that one, he can't exist in any of them. Therefore, God doesn't exist in the actual world. And like you say, philosophers are working up a great sweat trying to come up with a symmetry breaker. Some people think that they've got them. I've spoken to a few people who do. But I agree

with you that that's kind of where we land with the modal ontological argument. But still a very fun exercise in thinking, right? Whatever you think of the ontological arguments in general and the modal one in particular, I think they're great fun, aren't they? You can just sort of sit around and think God into existence somehow. It's kind of interesting. So I also like Girdle's argument, but we should know even approach that topic. Yeah. But you, but you, you have an entire book dedicated to ontological arguments, don't you? Yeah, which. Although it's old.

So I wrote it, I wrote it in the early 90s. It appeared, I think it appeared at the end of 1995. It doesn't really cover Gerdel's argument because it was only just starting to see the light of day in journals in the early 90s. So where could people go for If they're interested in a I guess slightly more More math-y approach to this

Where could people go for an overview of Gurdles Ontological? Is there anything you've written Or would you just point them to like the SEP or something? So I don't think anybody's written a book About the Gerdle arguments Alex Pris has written a bunch of good papers

something kind of takey. Everything you write, pretty takey. That will be a good place to start. Yeah, sweet. Well, I already mentioned arguing about gods is another book you wrote which covers more of these arguments. It talks about

the stuff that we've been discussing today but a bunch more too and it's a I guess more of an overview and I think you know, extremely readable given the subject matter and so I'll make sure that's linked in the description and well, I say I'll make sure my editor will hopefully remind me, Alex, I'm looking at you, to put those links in the

description and we'll get them down there eventually. But having said that, Graham Oppy, thank you for this whistle-stop tour of, I think, three of the most popular reasons that people give for believing in God. We, of course, have only scratched the surface, as people always like to say at the end of podcast, but I suppose that's mostly what we're here to do. So thank you for your time, and yeah, it's been fun. Jeez.