Within Reason - #73 Arguments for Atheism Tier List w/ Joe Schmid!

Episode Date: June 23, 2024

Joe Schmid is a PhD student in philosophy at Princeton University. He graduated with a B.A. in philosophy from Purdue University in 2022. He has published articles in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of time, and the author of books including "Existential Inertia and Classical Theistic Proofs". He runs the YouTube channel, "Majesty of Reason". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joe Schmidt, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. I say welcome back. The last time you were on, it was still the Cosmic Skeptic Podcast. It's been a while since that little meeting in Austin, Texas that we had all those years ago, where we sat down and did in classic YouTuber style a tier list for arguments for God's existence. And, you know, I have been wanting to bring you back on for a while. And the other day you suggested the idea of sort of doing a part two, let's do arguments for atheism.

It's a good way to sort of keep the bandwagon going, even though I think tier list. maybe sort of stopped being cool about a year ago. We're going to resurrect it. We're going to make them great again. Yes. Yeah, exactly. We're going to have some fun. So welcome back to the show.

People who aren't familiar with you should go and check out your channel. Majesty of Reason. You're now a PhD student, aren't you? Tell people about that. What's going on in your life? Yeah, so I'm a PhD student at Princeton University, writing lots of stuff in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of time, making lots of super epic cool videos that everyone should immediately watch,

including 12-hour-long videos, like over the weekend that we did our last tier list. So, yeah, that's what's going on in my life? Yes, sir. What was that tour? What was that really long video? It was like every argument for God's existence or something. Yes, the Capturing Christianity did a video outlining, like, over 150 arguments for God's existence, and basically I just went through each of them and gave my thoughts.

And I also drew on, like, published literature in giving those thoughts. So that's part of why it's so long. Just a couple, right. Just 11 or 12 hours or so. I think it was well worth it. I do know some people who have watched the whole thing in full, and they were like very grateful, and they've sent me messages. And I'm like, oh, that warms my heart. Well, to be I mean, most audiobooks are like about that long.

So, you know, it's not sort of an obscene amount of time spend listening to somebody. But I would take that as quite the compliment, my friend. I mean, looking at my watchtime analytics, I think we'd be lucky if people are still watching this episode right now. It's not quite that bad, but YouTube is notorious for people dropping off. So having said that, let's jump right in. We've got a tier list. And for people who don't know what that is, it's a big sort of box. Now, those who are only listening will not be able to see this, but it'll be fine.

You just need to bear in mind that we have a series of rankings. And the top ranking is S tier, followed by A, B, C, D, E, F. A to F are you sort of like, you know, school rating type things. And what's the S you told me about this last time? What does S mean? I don't know. Superve, superlative. Who knows?

Someone told me it was like an anime thing or something? I can't remember. Whatever it is, S is like the top of it gets, the God tier, if you like. And what we're going to do today, since the last time we did a tier list of arguments for God, we're going to do a tier list of arguments against God's existence. Now, Joe, being the academic one amongst us. us. You've kindly prepared what you think are some of the sort of go-to arguments for God's existence. I didn't realize there were quite that many. And so I'm happy to be going through

them with you today. Let's hit the ground running. What's our first one? Right. I know you said there were so many, and there are many more arguments that we can consider. And I just briefly want to note that philosopher Felipe Leon has this blog post on his blog ex-apologist. It's super helpful, and it collects together and links to about 200 or so arguments for atheism. And so we're going to be restricting ourselves quite significantly here, and we're also not going to be looking at arguments against particular world religions, like Christianity, whatever. So, yeah, I just wanted to note that for the audience, and you could probably link that in the description as well. But our first... Yeah, 10 hours rather than 12. We're going to keep things short today.

Just, mom, just one more video before bed. So, yes, we're going to the problem of evil. That is the first argument, the first one that we're considering. And yeah, I'll just go right into it. So there are two kind of broad... Yeah, the problem of evil. So there are two... For those of us who haven't heard of it, it sort of rings a bell, so maybe you can just refresh my memory as to what it is. Right. So it's basically, if God exists and God is all good, all knowing, and all powerful, why is there so much evil in the world? It's kind of like spurred by that question. And there are really two broad families of arguments from evil. There is no single problem of evil. The first kind of family of arguments from evil is what philosophers call logical arguments from evil. And these try to show that God, existence is inconsistent with certain facts about evil and suffering. So it's like there couldn't

possibly be a God given certain facts about evil and suffering. The second broad family of arguments from evil is what philosophers call evidential arguments from evil. And these basically just try to show that certain facts about evil or suffering are really good evidence against God's existence. They give us good reason to think that God exists. It's not so much that evil is inconsistent with God's existence, but they do give us good reason to think that God doesn't exist. So it's those two broad families of arguments, and maybe we could just start with logical arguments from evil. Sure. So logical argument from evil, trying to actually exclude the possibility of God's existence given the nature of evil, and this will have something to do with a sort of logical incompatibility

between the existence of evil and God. Why would the existence of God logically preclude the existence of evil? I think this would involve God necessarily being good, right? It would need a picture of God that means that you can't have a God that isn't a good God, and you'd need to have an idea that there can't be a good God who would allow evil, right? Those are probably the two points of contention here. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, it goes back at least to Epicurus, and then sort of revived by J.L. Mackey, and there are various different kind of more sophisticated logical arguments from evil nowadays, defended by philosophers like J.L. Schellenberg and James Sturba. But yeah, the basic idea from Epicurus is that, well, if God exists, then he's going to be

all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfectly good. and he's going to be essentially all of these. Since he's all knowing, he's going to know about all the evil in the world, and he's going to know how bad it is and how to prevent it. Since he's all powerful, he's able to prevent it. And since he's perfectly good, he's going to want to prevent it. And if a being knows about something, knows how to prevent it, is able to prevent it, and wants to prevent it,

then it just follows that the being will prevent it. So then, if God exists, there's going to be no evil. It just follows from God's existence. But since there is evil, it just strictly follows that God doesn't exist. So God's existence is incompatible with the existence of evil. QED sounds great. Now, we'll discuss some of the objections. And hopefully we can keep things relatively brief because I want to get through as many of these as possible.

Also, this is rather familiar territory for most people listening to this show. I want to say from the outset, though, this immediately strikes me as S-tier, not necessarily because it's like the best argument in the world, but just because it's the problem of evil, man. This is like the atheist argument. It's like the first thing that people go to. It's the last thing that people sort of complain to about God. Probably if they made it to the pearly gates themselves and we're still criticizing him, it would be either that or maybe the sort of not enough evidence would come in at a very, very close first or second. So, I mean, what we didn't talk about was how we're going to actually rate this.

So like S tier, A, tier, B tier, we can talk about the strength of the argument. We can talk about historical relevance. We can talk about its persuasive power, even if it's not actually very good. In principle, it might happen to convince a lot of people. Based on those kinds of considerations, it kind of ticks all of the boxes for me so far to be absolutely top tier. But I don't know, I don't know if you sort of agree with that initial intuition. Yeah, it's difficult because, like, how are we to rate these? Are we writing them in terms of plausibility, in terms of, yeah, strength, power to convince, ease with which it's communicated?

I guess the way we did it for the theistic arguments was at least, you know, generally speaking, how strong are they as arguments? Like, do they give us good reason in general to think that God exists or doesn't exist? And I think that's probably how we should rate these. And so, I mean, we could probably, before we get into the rating, we should probably at least mention the evidential argument or arguments from evil as well as certain criticisms. Yeah, because some people will say that, like, I mean, the initial response to the logical problem of evil is to essentially say that, well, God can have good reasons to allow evil. There are lots of reasons why God might allow evil. God might need to allow evil because human free will is a valuable thing.

And therefore, in order to have free will, people need to be able to freely choose to murder each other. You know, C.S. Lewis talks about how if God were to steal the triggers of every gun in World War I, preventing, you know, preventing war from happening, it would seem to disallow the, freedom of the soldiers to fire guns at each other. And as evil as that is, if you take that away, you sort of rid the world of something even worse than evil, which would be the mechanistic kind of no free will animals that they would become. So that's one famous reason. Another might be that evil is necessary to attain higher order goods. You know, you can't have bravery if you don't have fear, so you need the bad thing to get the good thing. So there are lots of sort of reasons

why God might allow some amount of evil. But also, as well as saying, okay, evil itself isn't logically incompatible with God. There are also people who say, this is a big complicated topic, and I'm not convinced that it's logically incompatible with the existence of God, but I think it at least provides some kind of reason to sort of count against God's existence.

So there's sort of a less strong version of the argument that just says that, and this is where we're in the evidential territory, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, for broadly the reasons that you've mentioned, philosophers have mostly turned away from logical arguments from evil, just because it seems like, sure, God might want to prevent

all evil, provided that that evil isn't necessary for bringing about certain outweighing goods, and you identified some of those goods. But if certain instances of evil are indeed necessary for bringing about greater goods, then you can sort of see how God may very well want to allow that sorts of evil to exist. So for that reason, philosophers have turned to evidential arguments. There are lots of different evidential arguments. Probably my favorite and probably your favorite is a sort of argument from evolutionary animal suffering. And we can probably put it in Bayesian terms.

I'm not going to go into the mathematics, right? So don't get scared. But basically we're comparing different hypotheses about reality and seeing which one better predicts or better explains the data. And whichever one does better predict or better explain the data is supported by that data. So what is the data here? Well, it's basically that natural history has. been pretty grotesque. For hundreds of millions of years, animals have been ripping each other

to shreds. They've been preying on one another. They've been parasitizing one another. Natural disasters have ripped through entire species, something like over 99% of all species that have ever existed are extinct. And just in general, starvation and misery and languishing seems to be kind of like the norm throughout evolutionary history. And given this, given the bloodbath of evolutionary history, we can kind of ask, what best explains this? Well, one hypothesis is that there's this perfectly good being that orchestrated this from the get-go, that shows this as the very means by which this being is creating biological diversity in general, and humans in particular. Another hypothesis is that, no, like the foundation of reality, whatever it is,

doesn't really care about the flourishing and languishing of creatures. And so if there's going to be a certain kind of evolutionary process, then it's not terribly surprising that it's going to be so fraught with profound and egregious suffering and things like that. And just to like make this a bit more, make this a bit more palpable for people, think about all the different ways that God could have created biological diversity and humans. You know, he could have created it in 6,000 years as young Earth creationists think he actually did. But no, he chose hundreds of millions of years of animals ripping each other to shreds. He could have made photosynthesizing animals, animals that get their energy from the sun,

instead of having to devour each other savagely in order to survive. But instead, no, he chose animals devouring each other savagely. He could have made animals chemosynthesized, so get their energy from chemicals. He could have made animals or biological organisms or whatever out of material that doesn't constantly get lost to the environment, so there is no need to kind of continually imbib new materials. He could have given like aesthetic, anesthetic in the claws and teeth of predators so that the animals who are in their dying hours of misery,

aren't actually in misery. Instead, they get some sort of anesthetic effect from that. It could have altered this fawn's mental state so that the fawn doesn't experience that kind of exquisiting agony and so on. So I've just given so many different ways that God could have created biological diversity and humans. And it seems like we'd expect God to create through one of these ways. Given that God is perfectly good, he knows exactly the extent of the suffering that would be caused by a grotesque and protracted evolutionary process. And so it seems like Theism makes it incredibly surprising that we'd see this bloodbath of evolutionary history, whereas under like a competing naturalistic hypothesis, as I've explained, it's not terribly

surprising. And so this is some pretty powerful evidence for the naturalistic hypothesis over theism. So that's the general kind of line of argument here. Yeah, I mean, I would say that if you assume that you've just sort of got organisms competing with each other for survival and it's sort of unsupervised, it's not only a better explanation, you would come to expect. You don't just explain the abundance of suffering. You come to expect the abundance of suffering. And it's worth emphasizing that natural selection is the process by which we come about. And natural selection does not just involve, but relies upon the death

and destruction of the weak. Survival of the fittest is the same thing as the death and destruction of the unfit. And this is the chosen mechanism. And like you say, on the surface at least, seem to be many, many different ways that this could have been avoided. I mean, it is worth mentioning that what we expect to find kind of depends how far back you go in your assumptions. So, you know, if we assume the existence of a bunch of organisms tearing each other apart, you know, what best explains this God or no God, some will object. Well, sure, okay, it's unlikely that animals would be savagely killing each other if God existed.

However, if God didn't exist, it would be unlikely that anything including animals existed. at all. So if you're going to play the game of sort of, well, what would you expect if there was no God? Oh, you'd expect an entire universe with planets and animals that sort of come to life and have, you know, first person centers of consciousness and eat. And like, none of that's in any way likely if there's no God. So some people will just want to push that assumption back and say that the very fact that you're talking about animals that can suffer is itself reason to believe in God. That does sort of move it to a different argument because now we're talking about like an argument for God's existence from the existence of animals. But it is sort of interlinked.

And it's also worth pointing out that people do say one of the arguments for God's existence is the moral argument, that objective moral standards can only exist if God exists. And so if you're looking at the world and saying, oh, this is wrong. I don't like this. This is bad. You know, all of this suffering, you know, boo. People like to say, well, by what standard are you judging the world to be bad? And if there's some kind of moral standard by which things are bad, you're assuming the existence of God. Therefore, you are, in the words of Frank Turek, stealing from God in order to make your case against his existence.

What do you think of that? Yeah, so basically everything is wrong with that. So, firstly, in terms of the data, we don't have to construe the data in terms of, like, evil or something like that. All we have to construe the data is a protracted process of profound suffering. And then we can, like, that does not commit the person who's running this argument to their, being objective evil. It doesn't commit them to an objective moral standard. Instead, we're just using the descriptive state of affairs of there being a very protracted process of grotesque, overwhelming,

seemingly gratuitous suffering, seemingly pointless suffering. So once you do that, then we can just compare how likely this data is under the respective hypotheses, and we don't need to commit ourselves to there being objective evil or something like that. So no, you don't need to run the problem of evil, or you don't need to be committed to there being objective morality by running the problem of evil. That's one thing to say. The second thing to say is you can always sort of run this kind of point, even if you were to put it in terms of evil and objective evil, you could always put it in terms of an internal critique. So the theist themselves, theist is committed to their being objective evil. The theist is committed to thinking that these instances of suffering

are evil. And it's an internal problem for them then, if they're positing this omnibenevolent God who orchestrated this process, that he would create it in ways that are rife with this kind of evil. Evil, in fact, seems to be the very engine, the very mechanism of creation. So the argument then doesn't need to be run in terms of saying something like, oh, hey, this really is objectively evil, and that shows that God doesn't exist. You can say, no, no, you theist, you believe that this is objectively evil, and so you have a problem on your hands. I don't need to say that it's objectively evil. That's the second thing. That's a second response. And then a third response, there are actually many more, but I'll just give this for the sake

of time. The third response is that not only does Turk and proponent, not only do Turk and proponents of these arguments, typically merely assert that objective morality requires God's existence. Typically, they don't give adequate justification for this, at least by my lights, but also there are countless models that are perfectly consistent, defended by professional ethicists, countless consistent models of how you can have objective morality under a non-theistic worldview. So people can check out my channel for various videos that I've done on that, but we don't need to get into that here. But suffice it. Yeah, I think basically everything we say should be footnoted with at least 10 different videos that you've made and probably an article in a journal

somewhere as well. I'll make sure the relevant stuff is linked down in the description. But you're right. I'm not sure if I, I think I interrupted you there. I'm not sure if you had anything else that you wanted to put on to this. I mean, we can cover objections all day long and talk about these sorts of things, but we should probably get into ranking this one. Yeah, we're here for the ranking man. I know you suggested S-tier. Yeah, talking about it now, it's, I mean, it's definitely got to be at least A, right? Like, I think it's probably S-tier, like I say, just because it's just, it's an absolute, it's an absolute classic. I mean, it would be rediscovered by any person who ever thought about the existence of a good God. There is the problem that it assumes

God has to be good. It doesn't really do anything. I mean, you said earlier that we're not arguing against any particular religious tradition. There are religious traditions that believe in a, in a sort of deistic, non-personal god that this doesn't really do anything for, which makes me maybe want to bump it down to A, but it's got to be one of those surely, right? I'm not sure. Maybe it, maybe it's just too good. I would vote S-tier because, like, again, it's the problem of evil. Like, if that doesn't get S-tier, then what else is going to get S-tier? And, you know, like, lots of professional philosophers defend this, and it does really have, I think, sway with people. And it's got some high degree of plausibility. Cool, right. Problem of evil is going in the S-tier. I'm writing this down,

so I can keep track of where we are, and we'll put it on screen. But for those listening, hopefully you can just keep track. So Problem of Evil is S-tier, probably not a huge surprise to anybody, and probably not super interesting to anyone who's watched even like two minutes of any video I've ever made in the history of my YouTube channel. So let's briskly move on. What's next? Next up is the argument from divine hiddenness.

So there are many different arguments from divine hiddenness. It's a bit misleading to say the argument. but here's one way to construe the argument. The first premise would be something like, if a perfectly loving God exists, then there's a God who is always open to a personal relationship with any finite person. So the idea behind this premise is that love seems to be relational,

it seems to be self-giving, and it goes beyond mere benevolence and toward a desire for union with the beloved and a personal relationship with the beloved and involvement with them for its own sake. And so, given that God is perfectly loving, it seems like God would always be open to this kind of relationship with creatures. We might ask, along with J.L. Schellenberg, who is one of the main proponents of this argument, how could God count as loving someone if at that time God is

sort of closing off the possibility of a relationship with them? If God is preventing them from being able to participate in any meaningful way in a kind of conscious reciprocal relationship with them, it just doesn't seem to fit very nicely with God being perfectly loving. So that's the first premise. If God's perfectly loving, then there's a God who is always open to a personal relationship with any finite person. The second premise would be that if there's a God who is always open to a personal relationship with any finite person, then there's going to be no non-resistant, non-belief in God. Okay, so what is non-resistant non-belief? Well, it's just basically people who fail to believe in God, but that's not, their failure to believe in God is not

due to, like, willful, culpable resistance to God on their part. So that's what what a non-resistant non-believer is, and that's what non-resistant non-belief is. It's someone whose non-belief is not due to willful, culpable resistance to God or to relationship with God. And so the reason for thinking of this premise is true, that if there's a God who is always open to a personal relationship with any finite person, then there's going to be no non-resistant non-belief. The idea is that the relationship in question, a kind of conscious, meaningful, reciprocal relationship requires that the other person believes that you exist, right? You need to have them actually believing that you exist in order to be in a kind

of conscious, meaningful reciprocal relationship with them. And so given that, given that God is open to that, and the other person is also open to that, they're not sort of willfully resisting it. God would take the steps to ensure that they minimally meet the bare necessary conditions for being in a relationship with them, namely believing that God exists. So we get that second premise. But, alas, the third premise is that there is non-resistant, non-belief in God. And so given that if there's a God who's always open to a personal relationship with any finite person, then there is no non-resistant non-belief. But there is non-resistant non-belief. It follows that there is no such God who is always open to a personal relationship with any finite person. And again,

if there is a perfectly loving God at all, then God is always perfectly, God is always open to a personal relationship with any finite person. And so it's going to follow that no perfectly loving God exists. So that's the broad, broad brushstrokes of the argument. There are many ways that, could go in response, but I'll just turn it over to you. Yeah, very, very well put as ever, as ever, Joe. I think it's another, it's another powerful one for me, in particular because of the persuasive force it has. I mean, I've said before that the problem of evil might be the most popular argument that people use, but really, this is possibly slightly more popular. I've advocated that it might actually be a more popular reason, because if you ask people, especially

people who haven't like spent a lot of time doing philosophy of religion or whatever just like why don't you believe in god it's like i don't know man i just sort of he's just not there you know i've never felt him i've never seen him i've never seen any evidence like any of that kind of stuff they might talk about evil as well but a lot of the time especially for the more sort of passive atheists it's just not something that they're confronted with it's just not something they think about sure they'd be they'd be perfectly willing to encounter god if he sort of showed up but it's just not there so i think it's powerful for that reason and again possibly i mean for me i've relied on it so heavily that it's another possible S-tier, but I'd understand if it might be a bit lower

for various reasons. But for me, this is like the fundamental question. I mean, the problem of evil, there are like responses that evil seems like this big topic, this huge sort of confusing mystery that's like embedded into at least certain religious traditions like Christianity, God's suffering on the cross. But the sort of just, God just not being there, that's less present, that's less addressed. It's sort of always assumed. I mean, even the, even the, even the, even the psalmist who will write about their sort of quarrels with God or their confusion about God, they never use this as an argument to think he doesn't exist. They're only ever confused. They're only ever thinking, oh, he's evil or they don't understand him properly. It's quite a more

modern phenomenon, I think, to use this as reason to think there is just no God. And so I think it's quite powerful. There are, as you say, a number of responses. I mean, what you essentially have to do is deny one of the premises. So some people will say that God has good reason to hide himself from people. And some people say, well, actually, there are no non-resistant non-believers because everyone has enough reason to believe in God and there's some reason why they're not. The first thing to know is that those two contradict each other. You can't believe both of those responses at once. You can't say that, well, actually, no, there's more than enough evidence for everyone to believe and at the same time say, oh, but God also has good reason to

not allow people to believe. That can't be true at once. God might have reason to restrict evidence from people. But then for me, an interesting subset of this argument is the problem of religious geographic distribution. So the fact that statistically speaking, you are far more likely to be a theist if you're born in Rwanda, say, one of the most Catholic countries in the world, than if you're born in Thailand, which is like 90-something percent Buddhist and Buddhism is atheistic, therefore you don't believe in God. So if Christianity is true, for example, then your place of birth is a statistically reliable indicator of how likely you are to be saved. That doesn't seem so great.

And people will say that this commits the genetic fallacy of you sort of believing something for the wrong reason doesn't make it true. It doesn't make it false. That's of course, that is of course accurate. However, if you believe that it's being supervised by a God who loves everybody equally and wants to come to know everybody, like you say, then why would he hide his face more from the Thai than from the Rwandans? Or is it just that the Thai are just naturally like orders of magnitude more resistant than the Rwandans are? And if that's the case, then why are they built in that way? You know what I mean?

So there are so many problems as to God's seeming arbitrary desire and ability to reveal himself to some and not to others. There are those who even don't want to believe in God. like C.S. Lewis's conversion. He talks about dragging his eyes darting like a desperate animal for any means of escape, dragged into belief in God. And there are those of us who go, please just give me something, and they get nothing. So the arbitrariness of God's revelation, the geographical distribution of God's revelation, and also the fact that it doesn't seem to accord to people's desires, seems to me to undermine belief in God quite powerfully. Yeah, I think the point about geographical distribution is a very good one. And it also highlights that, you know, we can run this argument in different ways. We don't have to put it as a deductive argument saying that, listen, God's existence is like strictly incompatible with the existence of non-resistant non-believers. We can just say like the fact that there are non-resistant non-believers, many of them, and the geographical distribution of them, at least just seems incredibly surprising on the hypothesis that there is indeed a perfectly loving God who is a

open and desires a personal relationship with everyone who is indeed willing. So it's just pointing to different variants of this argument. And I also like how the geographical distribution point serves a bunch of different purposes. So another purpose that it serves is to render it very implausible that everyone who fails to believe in God, that's always due to some kind of like willful, culpable resistance to God on their part. So it's like there's something like unique, unique about like Thailand? Is there something in the water there or something? Like what is going on? It's just so overwhelmingly implausible. And, you know, they're historical and isolated people's. Many people are non-believers because they like literally have no concept of the theistic god. You go back many thousands of years ago, like isolated tribal peoples alive today even. And again, many of our ancestors from many thousands of years ago. I mean, deconverting is often accompanied by like extremely negative social and familial repercussions, anxiety, depression, lots of other things like that. Again, it doesn't seem to be like culpable, willful resistance, God, or like a desire to sin or anything like that. And I mean, like, just in general, um, uh, theists would rightly and frequently do laugh off suggestions that, like, all theists believe in God for emotional or psychological reasons ultimately, like, that's really what's driving them.

It's just like wishful thinking. And they typically say, no, that's silly. And just as that's silly, it's equally silly to say that literally all nonbelievers fail to believe in God for reasons of, like, willful, culpable resistance or, you know, immorality or something like that. Like you can't have your cake and eat it to trusting your own introspection and testimony of fellow theists while distrusting the introspection and testimony of others. So I don't think it's particularly promising to go the root of denying non-resistant non-belief. And in fact, there are many more reasons to think that there at least are some non-resistant non-believers. And I would personally want to construe this argument as a kind of, yeah,

like evidential type argument. And again, I mean, we could go through lots, lots of more objections. I mean, I don't know if you want to cover others, but we could rank it. I mean, it's worth mentioning that, I mean, we've spoken there about denying the existence of non-resistant non-believers. Oh, everyone just resists. But there's also the other premise of saying, well, maybe there are non-resistant non-believers, but God has good reason to allow them. One reason that's often given is that if God made his existence obvious to everyone, it would be like epistemically overpowering and would like remove our free will in choosing to believe in him. Like to have a relationship with someone. You have to have sort of a free choice. But if, if God's existence was

plainly obvious all the time, then we'd essentially be sort of, you know, we'd have no choice but to just believe in him and come to love him. And that doesn't seem very nice. It doesn't give us a level of freedom. This comes up a lot. I think it fails for like so many reasons. I mean, for a start, like, for a start, you don't need to make yourself sort of overbearingly present just to prove your existence. I just need like one, you know, foolproof indication once in my life, that this God exists. And then the rest of the time, he could still be sort of distant or away or whatever, but as long as I've got that one experience, it tells me that he definitely exists, that would be enough just to convince me of his existence. I mean, that would be, that would

be fine. The second thing to say is that there are people, even within religious traditions, who are certain of God's existence, and yet still do not choose to enter into a relationship with him. So Satan famously is an example of someone who knows God's existence, but chooses not to not to believe in him. So it seems like possible to still have that freedom even if God's existence is obvious. Secondly, it does seem to sort of undercut where people like to argue that God's existence is evident everywhere and there's all this evidence abounding that people are just blind to. It sort of undercuts that too. So there are a lot of reasons I think why that's probably not worth taking super seriously. I'm not sure if you've got anything to add there.

No, I think that's spot on. And the argument does not require that God's like always hovering over your shoulders or like God would just be like blindingly obvious. He'd be in the sky just like watching over us all the time. Like the argument is about like God's securing the necessary preconditions for us being in a conscious reciprocal relationship with him. All that requires is that, you know, we have a belief in God or something like that. It doesn't require God to be like constantly experientially present. He can still be experientially distant, which can allow us to have free will and so on, even though we nevertheless continually maintain belief in him. It's like, you know, it's just like your mother. Your mother is not always hovering over your

shoulder that can still allow you to go to the party and like you know take a sip of the beer when you're like 17 or something but uh you know that doesn't it doesn't detract from but you still believe in your mother's existence when you do that right um and like uh you know your mother's existence is obvious to you but that doesn't like threaten your ability to like engage in a free meaningful relationship with your mother and so on so like i don't know it's just not a plausible response if there is a response that if i were a theist i would take it would be something along the lines of, yes, God does indeed have, sometimes have reason to permit there being non-resistant non-believers, because sometimes that can make for much greater relationship goods down the

line and even great relationship goods in the present. I think if God exists, it seems plausible to me, actually, that non-theists could have an implicit relationship with God by loving and deeply pursuing truth and beauty and goodness and justice, since if God exists, like these are all intimately bound up with God and his nature in certain ways. And so arguably non-theists are getting closer to God, even though they don't know it. They're getting closer to God and getting acquainted with God and actually building a relationship with God when they're being committed to doing morally good things and they're being committed to loving truth and pursuing truth and cultivating virtue and doing all these sorts of things. It's similar to, you know, when Jesus said

in, I forget which gospel it is, maybe it's multiple gospels, but Jesus basically, you know, There are various people who fed the hungry and clothed the naked. And they said to Jesus, like, Lord, when did we do these things for you? And Jesus replied to them, well, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me. So it's like, by helping other people, we are, even if we don't know it, we are indeed kind of serving God. And so non-theists, if God exists, non-theists actually can be in a kind of implicit relationship with God. And oftentimes that may actually sometimes be more valuable, at least for them in the current moment than an explicit relationship with them. You know, like, despite the fact that they don't

think there's any reward in the afterlife or something like that, they are committing to truth and they are committing to goodness and these sorts of things. And so it can- And there's good practical reason for, like, everyone loves a good conversion story. C.S. Lewis, I already mentioned recently, I Ann Hersia Ali, you know, she sells out a crowd, I don't know if it's sold out, but this, you know, crowd in New York come to listen to her, talk to Richard Dawkins about why she's now a Christian. And it's quite a beautiful, moving story that lots of people are clapping and applauding, and maybe there's some utility in a conversion, which you can't get if somebody spends some amount of time not believing in God. The problem I have

with that, though, I mean, what you said was sort of like implicit relationship anyway, but some people have suggested, well, by being an unbeliever, you sort of move towards a relationship with God, and there's something better about becoming, you know, one of God's children where you went up before. It's sort of like a prodigal son-esque. This is better because you know what it is not to believe and now you do. One interesting problem I have with that is the existence of libertarian free will. So like suppose we say, well, God is allowing me to be an atheist now because one day I'm going to discover his existence, converts to Christianity, but there's some value in that process. Maybe, look, I'm a YouTuber and if I convert to Christianity over in the next few years,

that will, you know, bring the message to a lot of people, cool. But if you believe in libertarian free will, if you believe that people have free will, then somebody could break into my house right now and slip my throat. And if they do that, if they happen to choose to do that before the time that God had allotted for me to convert to Christianity, then it seems like I would not inherit eternal life because I didn't accept Christianity by the time that I died, whereas if I'd been alive for another few years than I would have done, which means that my salvation, my going to heaven or hell, is determined not by God, not by me, but the choice of any random person who could come and slip me in the throat. There are, of course, responses to that. Maybe God would just

treat me how he knows I would have behaved if I stayed alive. Maybe God knowing when I'm going to die would change the sort of course of effects or a course of events or whatever. But it's worth considering. So lots of lines to go down, lots of interesting things to think about. Another probably quite familiar one to the audience, though. Where do you think it ranks? Well, it has, I mean, it's, it does have, at least as we were saying and arguing, it does have some modicum of plausibility to it. And like you can kind of, you know, this is what, like you said, this is what so many atheists think to themselves. You know, it's like, he just doesn't seem present. And, you know, so many even religious believers struggle with this. You know, it's like, if God really does

want a personal relationship with me and I'm open to it, then why does he seem so absent? So I do think that there's there's some plausibility to the argument of course you know there back and forth objections and so on but I mean I'm inclined to put it pretty high up it doesn't it seems plausible for me to I mean you're right it does just feel like you know God's not there but then there is the sort of story of the fish looking for the water or Emmanuel Kant's image of the dove flying through the air and feeling the wind resistance and thinking gosh if only I could just get rid of this air that's that's holding me back. If I could just get rid of it, I'd be able to fly so much easier. There is a, there is a sort of possibility that we, we can't

see it like the air that we're breathing. Glenn Scrivener has a book called The Air We Breathe about the sort of culture of Christianity that surrounds us without us realizing it. But that analogy can also be used for God's existence as a whole. Like, maybe it's just like so foundational that it's sort of, you stop noticing it. Like how you stop notice, you don't notice. You don't notice that you're speaking a language when you say sentences because it's just it's just sort of the mechanism that you've you've embodied so there's some plausibility in a response like that I mean it doesn't take away the feeling of people sort of trying to pay attention and noticing but it's it's it's certainly like and those kinds of responses I think unlike the

problem of evil when somebody says something like that it's kind of I think it's more difficult to like double down on the point and be like come on my like look at this deer on fire in a forest and tell me that this is, you know, because God needed to invent bravery or something, it is just ludicrous. Whereas when somebody says, look, man, I know you don't feel this presence, but you've got to understand that you're interacting with it wrong or that he's there in ways that you wouldn't otherwise understand. It's like, it's more difficult to just be like, come on, man, like look at this thing. So maybe it's more sort of like, I would say A tier, at least, but I'm thinking maybe A rather than S. Yeah, I mean, I'd be cool with A tier.

I mean, another thing that, just one final thing that I want to mention. So I think I agree with A tier, so we can put it in there. But one final thing that I do want to mention is that we might think that the hiddenness argument or certain versions of the hiddenist argument are successful against certain versions of God or God's existence or religion. Like if you have a particular brand of Christianity, which predicates one's salvation or one's consignment to hell on one's beliefs, in my view, this actually is an incredibly powerful argument against that version of Christianity. It just seems so implausible to me that, let's say

someone in Thailand, who just through no fault of their own, has never even heard of Jesus Christ or something like that. Or, you know, like the hunter gatherers who are living in isolated parts of the world, like literally causally isolated from everyone else, have never even heard of Jesus Christ or God or things like that. And so through no fault of their own, they fail to believe. And yet they're being consigned to hell on the basis of that. Yeah. That just seems so overwhelming implausible. It just seems patently unjust to me. And it's a version of the divine hiddenness argument as targeting these particular brands of Christianity. Not all versions of Christianity are committed to that. I want to highlight that. But at least many, many people

are. And it's just, or like, you know, the 12-year-old Jewish girl who, through no fault of her own, doesn't believe in Christ. She hasn't been presented with the relevant evidence. You know, her family just has always told her that Judaism is true. Judaism is true. You know, all of her evidence speaks to Judaism being true through no fault of her own. And so through no fault of her own, she fails to believe in Christ. It's just so, it's just not plausible to me as a, as an I think it's worth, it's worth pointing out as well. Again, I don't, I don't want to dwell here because we'll take forever. But I think it is worth mentioning on this geographical distribution point that, like you say, some people think that to be saved, you need to know about Jesus.

I think that's wildly implausible. I think so to a lot of Christians. You know, Jesus is the way that people come to be saved, but not knowledge of Jesus. It's Jesus' sacrifice. The thing that matters, and in fact, I think Jesus emphasizes this in the Christian tradition, the thing that matters to him is that you do the will of the father. Like, doing the will of the father is the important thing. Being a good person, doing the right stuff. And so interestingly, and St. Paul writes in the first epistle to the Romans in the first chapter, verse 20 reads, for since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made

so that people are without excuse. So quite like fierce language, people are without excuse, you know, it's like written into the world and onto their hearts. But he also does describe them as invisible qualities, as if to say they're not things that you can see and quantify, and yet they're so obvious that people are without excuse for not paying attention to them. It's worth bearing in mind that some people say, that's what matters. So the 12-year-old Jewish girl who's never heard of Jesus, well, she's still going to have a moral conscience. And if she follows that moral conscience, then she's doing the will of the father. And so for a Christian, for example, you might say that, well, America is way more Christian than Iran. And somebody might

say, well, nominally, yeah, more people call themselves Christians in America than call themselves Christians in Iran. But a lot of American Christians aren't really living a particularly Christian life. And a lot of people in Iran who, despite being Muslims, you know, are still living a life which broadly is sort of in keeping with the will of the father. They've got a moral conscience. They're, you know, they look after the family, et cetera. And so although there might be less people who call themselves Christian in Iran, there might be more people doing the will of the father in Iran, which means that across the geographic distribution, if what you're counting is who calls themselves a theist, who calls themselves a Christian, sure, there's a, there's a big variant.

but if you're actually looking for who's doing the right thing and living a good life, you might find that it's much more evenly distributed. Just thought that was worth mentioning, which is, you know, another reason why I think maybe not quite worthy of the S-tier. Yeah, no, I think we're in agreement with that, so A-tier it is. A-tier, all right, let me put that in. Divine hiddenness, A-tier. Okay, what's next?

Hit me. Up next is the argument from religious confusion or religious diversity. So, the idea behind this argument is that if God exists and creates finite persons, it seems like we'd expect God to ensure that finite persons would at least know how to properly relate to him. Like, relationship with God, after all, is profoundly valuable, and failing to appropriately relate to God is believed by most theists to have, like, dire, eternal consequences. And so we should therefore strongly expect God to clearly reveal the finite creatures the proper way to relate to him, more generally what God is like and how we can flourish in communion with him.

But here comes the data, right? Crucially, though, God has not clearly revealed this. Like, the world is like massively religiously diverse and confusing, containing thousands of religions with competing claims about God's existence and his nature and his character. And they have various competing claims as well about how we are to live our lives and how God wants us to live our lives and, you know, the appropriate ways of relating to God and achieving salvation or things like that. And so, like, the idea here is that, like, evidently, if God exists, God seems, like, shockingly inept at conveying these matters of such dire and eternal significance to humanity, leaving us with, like, conflicting and non-obvious religions with, like,

pretty, like, mundane and seemingly silly religious texts depicting God as, like, drowning babies, or, like, commanding the utter destruction of entire people groups, including, like, the children, or, like, sanctioning monstrosities, like, collective punishment, things like that. So like just the sheer mess of religious diversity, the extent of confusion and strife that this causes, and the kind of like lameness of purported divine revelations, they all seem to be a testament, intimately bound up with one another, they seem to be a testament to God's like failure to kind of adequately communicate and clearly communicate to us what God is like, how we are to live, and how we are to kind of appropriately relate to God. and so given that we'd like very strongly expect God to do that if God exists and God hasn't done that whereas under you know under naturalism you know this is all just like these are all just religions are various the results of various complex social and cultural and various other factors that vary region by region so it's not terribly surprising if God doesn't exist that we'd see this

vast diversity the confusion the strife that it causes and the lameness of divine revelations that's not very it's not very surprising on atheism whereas on theism it does seem in incredibly surprising. And so it seems to be pretty good evidence for atheism over theism. That's the general line of argument. Yeah, I mean, I'm not so sure about this one. It's like, would we expect everyone to get it right? It seems like there's, there's a sense in which this is kind of a subset of the divine hidden this thing. It's like, well, if you've got a totally wrong idea about who God is and how to worship him, that might just be because of your upbringing. That might be because you haven't

sort of been given the relevant evidence or information, but it does seem as though you could point to the fact that, though like human societies, the world over, think of God totally differently, almost everywhere we look, there is some kind of religious sensibility, some sense of the sacred and profane, of the numinous, of the supernatural, and so throughout this religious diversity, the fact that despite this diversity, they all sort of converge on this one thing, there's some evidence that there is something going on because even everyone who disagrees can agree that you know like the supernatural exists for example

so you could sort of flip it on its head and say that there's a as long as there's that common thread you know this gives us this the sort of the diversity of everything else only serves to underline and reemphasize the agreement you know suppose a single

parent raises children right and uh you know we come across the children one day you know they're alone in their house and you know like um there's just like engaging in massive strife like sometimes they're punching each other they're like you know there's pretty big strife between them pretty big conflict um and we sit down with them is guys why are you like yelling each other so much why are you so being so mean to each other and so on and it comes out that like at least part of the reason is that um you know like uh according to one of them the single

parent said that uh they get to have the uh the we today you know they get to play with the we today. They alternate days or whatever, so they get the we today. But according to the other one, the parent told them that they have the we today. And so, like, it's the conflicting claims about what the parent says to them that's engendering this strife. Now, we can ask like, supposing that

they're equally genuine, you know, they totally believe what that they, that the parent has revealed to them that they're the one who's supposed to have the we today, supposing that they're being honest and reflective and whatnot, and that this is engendering the strife between them. And supposing

Furthermore, that the parent has the opportunity to clarify this matter very easily. They could just walk down the stairs or something and just tell them. I mean, we can start forming hypotheses about how good of a parent this is. Is this a perfectly good parent? And it doesn't seem to be the case that the parent is perfectly good. Given this, the parent easily could have prevented lots of this strife by making it clear which child gets the wee today. And, you know, you might come around and say, well, you know, they at least agree that there's

a parent, you know. It's like, you know, we agree that there's something supernatural. They agree that there's a parent. Like, oh, it's not a very plausible response. It's not, that wouldn't do in the court to try to exonerate the parents. If the question was whether this parent existed, let's say it's in a courtroom, you know, does this parent exist? And they brought in these kids and they said, can you tell us about your parent? And one of them went, oh, yeah, you know, she said I could have the Wii and the other one goes, no, that was me.

And they start sort of bickering in the courtroom about like who got to play with a Nintendo Wii. I think the judge would like bang his hammer and say, okay, you know, sort out that argument elsewhere. We don't really care. Like we've got what we need, which is like obviously the parent exists, right? And also, you say, you know, the parent could just sort of come down the stairs and reveal himself. People often say, you know, why doesn't God just come down and reveal himself? And the Christian answer to that is, of course, he did and we killed him. And it's sort of like, okay, at that time, that's kind of what's believed to have happened.

It's sort of like it's the grandchildren of the people who are fighting over it trying to figure out if the parent existed and the grandchildren sort of can only remember that their grandparents said that they saw the parents because the parent is now like dead or whatever. And so it's sort of a long time ago and they're not really sure about the accounts and stuff. I mean, sure, God could like come down every single day and correct us, but then people would say like how detailed is that going to get? you know if somebody has a dispute about whether god is a trinity or not okay maybe god should come down and like let us know you know with like a big sort of angel with a horn and a big scroll that says verily i say unto thee but then what about like minor disputes you know what if there's like a debate about you know whether it's appropriate to to use the female pronoun when referring to god and it's sort of like well is that really worth a whole divine decree what if they're

sort of like debating whether, you know, churches should be tax exempt or something. It's sort of like, well, you know, I don't know if that's quite worth it. So I'm not sure God would come down to settle every dispute. It does seem plausible that the biggest ones are quite important. But then some would say, he did. He gave us a book, and the book is what we need. Right. So, no, I think that's, I think this is a good point.

So the argument really, so to your earliest point about how, you know, the judge would say, well, you know, clearly you have a parent, right? So, like, we should similarly say, well, you know, like, this is not a challenge to God's existence or something like that. But, like, listen, the challenge is not so much to the mere existence of a supernatural being, but to God conceived a certain way, a perfectly loving, perfectly good, just and fair God. So it may very well not be a challenge to the bare existence of something supernatural, but it does seem to be a challenge to God so construed. And indeed, the judge would probably say, you know, this parent is not perfectly clear to their children or something like that. Like, the parent is not perfectly efficient and fair or something like that, even though the parent does, in fact, exist.

So that's one thing that I wanted to say in response to that point. I guess the next point that you mentioned was about, like, major disputes versus minor disputes. And I think this is a pretty important distinction in mounting this argument. I think the proponent of this argument, in order to have any, like, modicum of plausibility, would have to restrict this to, like, major points. Like, whether there is a god, like, how to appropriately. relate to this God and like what this God wants of us or something like that just but not so much the minor details about like well you know should we like go to church on like Saturday evenings

or like Sunday mornings or something that that's not as important as um you know like whether or not there is such a thing as God but um and I know you mentioned like a lot of religious things will say you know God has indeed revealed this but the point is not whether or not God has revealed it but whether or not he has sort of clearly revealed it in such a way that like it reaches it reaches people and there's no kind of confusion or like diversity as a result of it. I mean, maybe the parent really did clearly reveal to one of the children that they do indeed, that they do indeed get the wheat for the day. But like given that, one of them has incurred some sort of deep misunderstanding

and that affects the relationship between the two children with one another and between the children and the parent. The parent has excellent reason to step in and nevertheless clarify this particular point. So it's more, it's not so much that God hasn't revealed anything. but that he hasn't sort of clearly revealed things and hasn't cleared up confusion and the vast amounts of diversity and the strife that this causes.

So, I don't know, I think that there are some responses on behalf of this argument to these objections. And of course, there are other objections. Let me just mention one. Sometimes people argue that it's actually not terribly surprising under theism that we'd see like massive religious confusion and disagreement since there are various goods that can be secured by religious confusion,

like helping one another learn about God, a kind of collective pursuit of truth, right? dialogue across deep ideological barriers, working together in community, opportunities to love those who deeply and vehemently disagree about matters of such deep importance, and so on. A lot of these, there are various opportunities for growth in virtue, growth and knowledge of God, helping one another learn about God, and these seem profoundly valuable. So that's another response that someone might make. Briefly, I do just want to say a few things in response to this response.

We're kind of a few layers into the dialectic, but oh well. so um one response to this response and again i'm not here to like defend this argument i'm just trying to like give it the best shot that it can in the audience's eyes um while there are indeed a number of goods that result from you know massive religious confusion and disagreement there are also lots of bads that seem to be much worse than those goods like you know religious wars religious persecution widespread religious intolerance dehumanization of those on the opposing side tribalism significant epistemic vice so given this I don't know, it doesn't seem like the goods mentioned kind of sufficiently justify

massive religious confusion, and they don't seem to make it much less surprising on theism. And this is all, like, all the, this becomes all the worse if there are like dire eternal consequences for getting the wrong religion. Oh, yeah. That's a common theme throughout these, throughout a lot of atheological arguments. The arguments actually get more powerful if you think that there are like dire consequences for getting, getting a lot of these things wrong about God. Yeah, but anyway.

I agree. And I guess one final thing that I want to mention is that. But arguably these goods could be secured without massive religious confusion since a lot of these goods, you know, dialoguing with one another across ideological barriers, a lot of these can actually be accommodated within the confines of a single religion with clear and widely accepted dictates about how to properly relate to God and what God is like. So, yeah. Sure thing. Okay. So then the big question. Where does it go? What do you think? Well, I mean, in my estimation, it's not as. powerful as the problem of evil or divine hiddenness. I agree. But, you know, as I've, as I've

been trying to steal man the argument, it does have some plausibility to it. I don't know. Like, you know, the more I talk, the more I'm sort of convincing myself. I'm putting it so eloquently that I'm beginning to, it's sort of bumping up every single time. No, I agree with you. As we talk through it, you're quite right. It is, it is powerful. And like I say, it's kind of a subset of this hidden this kind of thing like I must say that there is like an intuitive non-propositional force to just thinking like really like there's like a whole world of Muslims and a whole world of Christians and both of them just think that they they the other has just got it like deathly wrong and they're just these fully functional countries societies religious traditions and histories

and histories and like like really like one of like at least one of them is just like completely doomed? I don't know about it, man. And I mean, also, just think if things were different. This is another way that we can see the force of the argument. Think if things are different. Think if across causally isolated societies, across thousands of years, people independently converged on like one religion.

And they got like, although they may disagree about like whether or not to use he or she or them pronouns or whatever for the being, although they disagree on minor things, they get generally speaking the major things of major significance, right. like that there is a god generally speaking what god is like generally speaking how we are to appropriately relate to this god and in general what god wants of us imagine that independently people sort of conversion on that that would be significant evidence i think in favor of god's existence in favor of their being who's directing the things like that directing its creatures like this but the fact that we don't see that then is evidence against the existence of such a god and so i don't

know. I think there is some plausibility to it, and it makes me think maybe it should go somewhere around B tier. Do you know what? I was thinking exactly the same thing. This is going swimmingly so far. We haven't had any major disagreements. B is where I was going to put it. Okay. And I am also beginning to worry that maybe subconsciously when thinking of these arguments, they sort of occurred to you in order of plausibility, and we're just going to sort of make our way down the list. But you know what? I'll stick it in. Okay. No. Religious confusion is going to be it. Peter. Okay. Yeah, yeah. We'll, well, we'll see in a second. So we've got the problem of evil in

S-tier, divine hiddenness in A-tier, religious confusion coming in just below it at a B-tier. What's next? What's next is the dreaded stone paradox. Oh, yes, go on, S-tier. Yeah, oh my goodness. Okay, so Homer Simpson, famously, you know, this is, it all goes back to no, it doesn't go back to Homer Simpson, but he famously asked, could God a microwave a burrito so hot that he himself couldn't eat it. And that's basically what we're getting at. I'll put it in terms of the stone because, okay, fine. It's a stone paradox. I like the burrito paradox better. It's a better

flavor to it. That was good. That was good. Zing. Okay. Yes, that was a good one. Okay. Anyway, the question is, could God create a stone so heavy that he himself could not lift it? If yes, then there's something that God can't do, namely lift the stone, and so God can't be omnipotent. If no, then there's also something God can't do, namely, create the stone. And so God can't be omnipotent. Either way, God can't be omnipotent, so an omnipotent being as impossible. Yes, God is crushed under the weight of this metaphorical rock. Exactly. Okay, so let's unpack this a little bit. You talked about omnipotence.

Like, okay, we, I think most people, when they're defining God, do say God is omnipotent. That is sort of all powerful. So one easy way out of this is just to say, oh, I believe in a God who's not omnipotent. Problem solved instantly. He just can't do like all things. Cool. Easy. That's fine. But a lot of people want to say, no, God is all powerful. So if God is all powerful, then is this not a paradox, Joe? I don't think so, no. I mean, we really just have to get clear on what exactly it is to be omnipotent, right? So the argument here is trying to infer that God is not omnipotent from the fact that God can't do something. But that doesn't follow. Since if something is an impossible task, then God's inability to do it, that's no threat to

his omnipotence. I mean, omnipotence, as theists typically understand it, is to at least a very rough approximation, something like the ability to do whatever is possible. And so if something is impossible, well, I mean, of course God can't do it, but it's also no threat to his omnipotence. that he can't do it. Because again, omnipotence is just the ability to do whatever's possible. It's so obvious that, like, if you say, well, omnipotence is the ability to do anything, and you could just think, okay, well, then can God do an impossible thing? Well, hold on. Yes? No, no, we can't do something that's impossible.

Like, that doesn't make any sense, right? And so instantly it's just this paradox. And it's so sort of obvious and self-defeating that this can't be what we mean by omnipotence. Like you say, a good definition of omnipotence is the ability to do anything that's possible. So God can't make a square with three sides. But as you say, that's not a threat to his omnipotence because it's just something that's not possible. This does at least, you know, somewhat uncomfortably maybe put, like, restrictions on God. It seems like there are these things called logical laws which sort of constrain God and what he can do. Like if God really wanted a triangle that had two sides,

he just sort of couldn't do it even if he really really wanted to I mean in a sense Joe that might seem like a strange thing to want but like I would love genuinely to see like a triangle with four sides like wouldn't you love to see

like that would be awesome like if I said dude I've got this triangle with four sides I've drawn it on a piece of favor do you want to see it you'd be like yes I want to see that that sounds like the most interesting thing in the world so for God who can do anything

he must be like what how fascinating it would be to see a triangle with with like four sides but he can't do it. And so it seems like God is, like, constrained in a way that might make some theorists uncomfortable. I'm kind of at a loss for words in how to respond. I mean, I don't know.

Okay, sure. I think it'd be interesting if, I mean, obviously, I'd want to see it because I'd want to point out where exactly you're going wrong and where exactly you're kind of confusing yourself. I mean, I wouldn't want to see it because I think it'd be, like, awesome to have that power. I don't think it's awesome to have that power because I think it's impossible to have that power so something has that power then it's just an impossible being

an impossible being that's not a good that's not a great being I mean it's impossible so I think what they'd say is like no God isn't more awesome or better if he like has the power to do these impossible things

because that would require that God is impossible and you know that that wouldn't make God better so I don't know I don't see much plausibility here the reason why it would be so cool to see a four-sided triangle is because you know it's impossible. If I just showed you it and you were like, oh, right, it would suddenly become a lot less interesting, I think, is the thing that's that's fun about it is that it's like, what the hell are you talking about,

man? I don't even understand. So, yeah, like, I don't know. I mean, one helpful way of thinking about this. I've got a friend who talks about things existing both in the intellect and in reality. Like a unicorn exists. It just sort of exists in the mind, right? And there's a sense in which, like, the word unicorn has a referent. And the same way that, like, Sherlock Holmes seems to have a referent. Like, when I say Sherlock Holmes, there's a sort of thought that that attaches to in a way that all of the characters that Arthur Conan Doyle never wrote about and no one ever wrote about don't seem to have a reference.

They seem to, even if, even if, like, Sherlock Holmes doesn't exist, the characters that were never dreamt of by any author seem to exist even less, if you know what I mean. And so there's sort of, like, levels of existence. There's existence in the mind and existence in reality. And the way he thinks about this is to say that, yeah, God can do all things. It's just that logical contradictions just aren't things. They're literally like not things. Like a square triangle is just not a thing.

It doesn't have a reference. Even in the mind, it literally just doesn't attach itself to any real thing, any real thought, any real concept, any real object, like nothing. And so God can do literally all things. it's just that like when you say can he create a rock so heavy he can't lift it or like a triangle that's got four sides that's just not a thing man it's literally not it there's nothing that that thought can attach to as a reference hmm maybe man maybe maybe there's something to that i don't know it seems to be resting on assumptions that i don't like that they're like i don't know different kinds of existence or different like ways of existing or like

different degrees of existence or something, which I'm very much opposed to that. I even have a hard time understanding what that could possibly amount to. I just think something either exists or it doesn't, and there's just one univocal sense of existence that applies to everything. Either there's zero of something, so like there are zero unicorns, or there's more than zero. And that's all that I mean when I say that like, you know, unicorns exist. Like there's more than zero and there's more than zero of them, right? So, well, no, I don't know about that. Because like, Because, like, you know, would you say that spatial extension exists? Well, I think spatial extension would be a property of things.

Which exists. Well, whether or not I think properties exist, you know, I mean, I tend to lean towards thinking properties exist, like redness exists. I tend to lean to that way. So, like, how many rednesses are there? I mean, there's either zero redness or there's like two redness or three redness, right? No, there's only one property of redness, and it's what all red things share in common. That's probably...

Anyway, we don't need to get bogged down into metaphysics. We've got the argument on our hand and... Sure, sure, sure, sure. In my view... What I'm saying is, I think I like this argument more than you do. I don't think it works, but I think it's got a bit more like room for fun than I think maybe you're giving it credit for. I think that the idea of their being constraints on God is fun to think about, the idea

of what exactly that means, the sort of the slightly condensed. definition of omnipotence that at least requires some kind of debate. You might sort of stop a theist in their tracks for five minutes to be like, well, can he do everything or just all possible things? Do impossible things exist? And if so, are they things that God can't do? Like, it's sort of a, it's, you know, it's a thinker to some degree. Yeah. And it definitely, like, it spurs interesting philosophical reflection on what exactly it is to be omnipotent and our analysis of omnipotence. In short, we want to have an analysis or an account of what it is to be omnipotent that doesn't succumb to the paradox. And I guess it has philosophical utility

in that regard. And so, for that reason, I wouldn't put it in the F tier, because it has philosophical utility, as you're saying, and like spurring thoughts and helping people refine their notion of omnipotence. But in terms of like an argument for atheism, which I'll tell you what I'm thinking. I'm thinking E tier, okay? So right above F. Yeah, right above F. I think that. I think I think that's fair, especially because, like, you know, got, like, the concept of omnipotence is, it's quite a strange one. I mean, like, obviously religious traditions have always described God as, like, all powerful, this kind of stuff. But it's like really philosophical, analytic sort of concept. I mean, everything we're doing here is quite inappropriate, really. We're talking about this, this God, this being that we're supposed to relate to, who reveals himself through narratives and peoples and nations and all kinds of stuff. And we're sort of like, yes, but does he fulfill the necessary and sufficient criterion of being able to, if P is the set of all possible things, does it, you know, that kind of, that kind of crap just feels like a bit inappropriate. So, so like against this like religious tradition and also against the fact that someone can just say omnipotence just means the ability to all possible things and against the position that somebody could say, yeah, well, maybe omnipotence is like a slightly lesser quality than we had it than we thought, or maybe God isn't omnipotence. And there's just like so many reasons to be like, this, this should remain both on the sort of Twitter feeds of cringe, atheist, meme pages and also in the E tier.

Yes, yes. I mean, in terms of like whether or not it succeeds, like I would actually put it at the F tier, but because it has philosophical utility of going in the E tier, maybe. Yeah, I mean, it might sort of be like if evolution is real, then why they're still monkeys kind of level of like, like, you know what? It's actually an interesting question. Like, it's sort of like, you know, if you're, if you, if you don't get, you might think for a second, well, no, hold on. I mean, if we came from apes, why are there still apes? Oh, that's kind of interesting. And you get to learn about like diverging branches and what it means to be a cousin rather than a descendant.

It's kind of interesting. But like, once you've done that, once you've, once you've learned that, if you still keep sort of peddling it as like some kind of argument, something's probably gone wrong. So yeah, let's sick it in the E tier. That's my, that's my compromise with you. I can't bring myself to put it in F. Okay, yes, that was an S-tier analogy, I will say. Oh, well, thank you, sir. Plenty more where that came from.

Speaking of which, what's next? Next up is the argument from the scale of the universe. So, in short, the argument is universe big, therefore no God. So that's basically what they... I mean, no, I mean, I can probably try to steal man it. I mean, I see this on atheist meme pages all the time, and it's basically like, you know, like, they're talking about the size of the universe and how it's like so implausible that, you know, God would create this, just to have a relationship with you or something like that.

So if I were to steal man this argument, if we look at the universe, it is so overwhelmingly vast, and it's mostly lifeless and barren and just devoid of things of value. It's just mostly uninteresting stuff, you know? And similarly with, like, time. I mean, it's only, in terms of, like, cosmological history, we've only gotten, like, things of value, like valence conscious states, states of pleasure and pain and whatnot.

We've only gotten that for the past, like, maybe hundreds, of millions of years, and the universe has been here for at least 13.8 billion years ago, and maybe that was preceded by, like, a big crunch or something like that. I mean, in terms of, like, the temporal span of the universe and the spatial span of the universe, like, it seems to be mostly full of, like, barren, valueless, lifeless stuff. And so the thought behind the argument, and this is my just steel man of it, is that, well, if God creates a universe, as theists think he has done, like, we'd expect it, it seems, to be brimming with things of value.

since that's just like that's much more valuable than a universe that isn't brimming with things of value. But a mostly lifeless and barren universe is the opposite of that, right? So the universe that we have is the complete opposite of what we'd expect under theism. And by contrast, it's much more expected if God doesn't exist, and fundamental reality just doesn't care about producing things of value. If there are going to be things of value under such a view, then they're going to be very tiny portions, or at least it seems more likely that they're just going to be very tiny specks

in all of the barren lifeless wasteland of reality. And so then, the thought is that the size of the universe, the scale of the universe, and the insignificance, the seeming insignificance of things of value within the universe, is evidence against God's existence because it's much more surprising on the hypothesis that God exists than it is on the hypothesis, then a competing, like, naturalistic hypothesis.

So that's my steel man of this argument. I'll turn it over to you. I mean, you're sort of smiling and laughing as to suggest that you can't even take it very seriously. I must say, I was talking about this the other day with somebody or other, about the sort of, I mean, I've been arguing with people a lot recently or talking a lot about the decline of the significance of propositional arguments, like what I was just saying in the existence of, in the question of God's existence. Like people are much more interested at the moment, it seems, in the cultural space in like narrative and politics and this kind of stuff. The sort of analytic philosophy arguments of God's existence has fallen out a favor a bit. And part of the reason for that is, because there is something that you can't quite capture in a syllogism about like thinking about the size of the universe, watching one of those videos where it like zooms out into the earth and the solar system. And you talked about time like 13.8 billion years of past. God knows how much future, including after, you know, human beings could like destroy themselves with a bunch of new. It's probably not on like a religious picture of divine intervention. But like such a such a big expanse of time. Famously the analogy people give. if just in case people aren't aware of this. I mean, you talked about how we've been here

for a few hundred million years in terms of like conscious agents and the universe has been here for billion years. People often can't get a grip on the difference between millions and billions. The famous example is that a million seconds is 12 days.

A billion seconds. Do you know how long in this show? A billion seconds? It's like 37 years or something? It's 31 years. It's 31 years. versus 12 days for the difference between a million and a billion. Like, it's unfathomable.

And even then, it's quite difficult to really wrap your head around just how long the universe has been here. And just kind of like what? So that, like, I mean, the joke is like, oh, and all of that so that God can tell you not to masturbate. You know, like, it's like, it's funny. It's a good stand-up bit. But it does also capture something which, like, when I see that video or I see that sort of scale comparison of how tiny we are in these huge galactic expanses, Like, it does lead me thinking, like, man, there's something just wrong with the idea that we're what it's all about. And could I put it into a syllogism?

Like, maybe, like, you just kind of did. You sort of steal me. You can come up with a way of putting it. But it doesn't quite capture. It's like trying to take a poem and, like, explain what it means in non-poetic terms. You can do it, and it can help people to understand, like, what the poem's getting at. But there's something captured by just hearing the poem. And there's something captured by just thinking about the universe that's just like, I don't know.

No, man. So it's got this like emotive power that I think is, is quite strong. But you're right that like as a syllogistic argument, it's, you could just meme upon it. Like, oh, well, like the universe is big. Premise to if God existed, the universe wouldn't be so big. Therefore, God doesn't exist. Like, yeah, man, like great argument. Yeah, it's sort of, yeah, fair enough. But it's got something to it is what I'm saying. Yeah, I mean, so I think that's an interesting point, and it goes, it's similar to what, at least a number of theists say about God's existence, you know, it's like, just like, look at the trees, man, like, it's fall, just like, seriously, look at the trees, and you're just struck with like, ah, the awe and the beauty of creation. Okay, like, you know, put this in argument, premise one, look at the trees, premise two, if look at the trees, that God exists, conclusion, God exists. I mean, fair enough, yeah, fair enough, but, but, but having said that, I think there's like, you know the sort of, you know the sort of, of like the bell curve IQ thing and there's sort of it's like a bit of a meme format yeah it's sort of like the the bell curve of intelligence and it's like messy desk at one end clean desk in the middle and then messy desk again at the high end right so i think there's something like that going on with like you know no idea of like philosophy or theology like but god must exist because of the trees and then it's sort of like curves up into you know the column cosmological argument and contingency arguments, and then it just circles right back around to it at the heights of

intelligence. No, no, no. Like, yeah, look at the trees, man. Just look at the bloody trees. God exists. You know, there's like a version of it that when properly thought out and considered and appreciated for what it is, like it kind of does work, man. Like, you look at the universe, you look at the trees, you look at the world and you think, man, this is awesome. This is beautiful. And it sort of gives you this feeling that you can't put in a syllogism. Interestingly, that often happens for people looking at the universe. Like, the same person who looks at the same person who looks at. at this huge galaxy and says, we mean nothing, looks at this galaxy and thinks, wow, this is amazing. The heavens declare the glory of God. So there's, I guess that sort of symmetrical

pull that might sort of undermine the atheistic quality of this consideration. Yeah, and those kind of like, I guess we could call it sort of like direct insight or like alleged direct insight or some maybe it's just like an intuition. Like you just, you look at the trees and it just strikes you that God exists upon, you know, the occasions that intuition to you or something like that. And similarly with the size of the universe, it can occasion that intuition inside of you. I mean, I sometimes think I have this sort of intuition when I read about some like the most particularly horrific instances of evil. So if like I'm reading about some of the things that happened in, for instance, Auschwitz, I get this distinctive sense that like, oh man,

like no perfectly loving being could allow this sort of thing to happen. Or like, what is it, like, Junco Feruta or whatever it is. I forget her name. But like, it's like one of the worst crimes in like the history of humanity like this this Japanese girl I think was basically like tortured for like many dozens of days

and it's atrocious and when I read that I'm like when I listen to the descriptions of what occurred I just get this distinctive like poignant sense that like man like clearly there's no God

you know like that sort of thing and you know sometimes I get a different sense when I'm looking at like the profound machinery inside the cell I actually minored in biology in biology when I went to Purdue, and, you know, like some of this microbiology stuff is just so

overwhelmingly insanely complex and ordered and beautiful and it's incredible. So, like, I don't know, I get these competing senses, and it's hard to, it's hard to, like, put stock in one of them as opposed to some of the others. But anyway, just in terms of this argument, what are some of my thoughts? I guess if I were a theist, I mean, like, maybe, this may very well be, like, evidence that, like, we aren't the only thing that God is interested in when God is creating. But that doesn't mean that God doesn't exist. It just means that we're not the only thing that God is interested in. God has, maybe has aesthetic reasons for a very large and mostly lifeless universe. I mean, you know, like you look at the pictures from the Hubble telescope and that they're pretty

stunning. And maybe like a vast diversity of things, some of which are lifeless, some of which are like gigantic planets, some of which are just like tiny particles in interstellar space, some of which are life forms. Maybe like this vast diversity of things better reflects God's goodness. You know, like Aquinas famously said that, like God created a vast diversity of things because no particular thing could adequately reflect his goodness that he kind of eminently contains. So of vast diversity of things, bed reflects different aspects of the divine character and God's goodness and so on. And finally, I guess maybe there's, maybe like a large and mostly lifeless universe is required in order for the universe itself to be able to produce life. You know,

like life is a very seemingly rare and precarious kind of thing. And maybe there is some value in the universe itself kind of cooperating with God to bring about these sorts of valuable results, like the existence of conscious life. And so it would make sense that God would then create a gigantic universe, because it's like making it more likely that their life would come about in some small portions of it through the universe's own kind of means. So, I don't know. There are a lot of different responses to this kind of argument. It's also worth considering that, well, for a start, I mean, like you say, the universe seems to be necessary to, for some areas of life. Like, I mean, famously the heavier elements are forged in supernovae supernovae how do you how do you say the plural

supernova supernovae supernova whatever that's how I pronounce it supernovas you know fine um the big the big stars collapsing or whatever like that's where we come from and not only is there sort of beauty in that like awesome great um it's it's also like okay maybe you just need these huge like clusters of of exploding stars in order to create the carbon that makes up most of our bodies. And it just so happens that, yeah, why not make them really beautiful as well? Cool. Like, awesome. Um, sure, maybe, but it does seem to me like there's nothing in principle stopping God from just like poofing carbon into existence. He seemed to manage to do that with like hydrogen. So why not? Or at least with subatomic particles. But also, it is worth

considering, I think, this universe big thing. There will have been a time when, you know, all human beings were consigned to wherever they were living in Africa like Ethiopia or something and if somebody had brought them a picture of the planet Earth and said look at the size of the earth you're on they might have said gosh there can't be a god because like look at all this wasted space look at all of this landmass that's just completely empty except for a few like wild animals that don't even like have a moral conscience like this is totally ridiculous why would God create this huge, massive earth and, like, can sign us all to Ethiopia. And someone goes, yeah, well, we could go over there.

It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, we're just going to walk across the ocean, like, to, like, wherever the hell this, like, Antarctica-looking thing is, like, yeah, sure, man, like, good luck with that. And then, you know, you fast forward a couple of hundred thousand years, and look at us go, man. We've even made it to the moon. Of course, you know, light years of distance is a bit of a bigger challenge, but, like, a lot of people are hopeful about wormholes and galactic expansion and all that kind of stuff. And maybe we're just at the beginning of some like exponential growth of humanity across the stars. And if that's the case, the universe will begin to feel a lot smaller.

And depending on just how exponential and just how long we're talking, I mean, a billion years from now, we might have made it quite far if we're still alive. 20 billion years? 50 billion years? I mean, like, man, we're talking about a long, long time. We're talking like orders of magnitude more time, possibly, than like the difference between like an amoeba in the ocean and a fully developed human being. So the universe could be full of surprises. I just think that's worth also bearing in mind.

Yeah, now time for ranking it. So, I mean, preliminary thoughts. Preliminary thoughts for me is that it's not a terribly good argument in my view. It's not, I feel like it's not as bad as the. stone paradox. So if we put the stone paradox in E, even though I think maybe it should go an F, if we put that in E, I think I'm inclined to put this in D. I was thinking the same, especially because it has that opposite pull of people do look at the universe and think how beautiful God must exist. You know, universe big, therefore God, universe big, therefore no God. They both

sort of do something for people. And so maybe you're right that the Rock one should have been an F and this should be an E, but like E and D, it definitely should be above the rock one. Like, it should obviously be above the rock one, right? So, yes, yes. Probably D tier? I mean, we can revise this at the end if we need, but I think at least for now, like, D tier seems like a good place to put it. Yeah, sounds good.

Okay, universe big is going into the D tier. Awesome. Another one, another one down. What's next? Up next is the evil God challenge. So, we've got two different hypotheses on the table. One hypothesis is that there's an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God. And on the other hand, we've got a different hypothesis,

which is that there's an omnipotent, omniscient, maximally evil God. And the evil God challenge is basically saying something along, there are different ways to put it. But one way to run the evil God challenge is to say that, well, hey, the good God hypothesis and the evil God hypothesis are roughly equally plausible or roughly equally likely or roughly equally reasonable. After all, so the thought goes, arguments for a good god can often be parallel to create roughly equally compelling arguments for an evil god.

And famously, lots of arguments for God's existence don't tell us about the moral character of the creator or the designer or whatever. And moreover, objections to the existence of an evil god, for instance, that there's so much good in the world, can often be paralleled to create roughly equally compelling objections to the existence of a good god, that there's all this evil in the world. So the thought, then, is that the good-god hypothesis and the evil-god hypothesis are roughly equally likely. The motivations for the good-God hypothesis seem to carry over roughly, equally plausibly

to the evil-God hypothesis, and the objections to the evil-god hypothesis seem to carry over, roughly, equally plausibly, to be objections to the good-god hypothesis. And so, since they're both roughly equally plausible, or equally reasonable, if the evil-god hypothesis is incredibly unlikely, then it's going to follow that the good-god hypothesis is also incredibly unlikely. And so then the next premise is that, well, hey, the evil god hypothesis is indeed pretty unlikely. It just seems kind of silly in itself. Some people call it even preposterous. And moreover, the profound goods that we see in the world just seem to count strongly against its existence. And so then, it follows that a good god is

also incredibly unlikely to exist. That is the argument. Now, I see this kind of as, I mean, it's obviously connected to the problem of evil. It might kind of be a support of the problem of evil it might like be a version of it because what we're essentially saying is like consider mr theist that there is this evil god and the theist goes well i don't believe in that evil god that you're speaking of any like yeah but like think of all think of the kalam cosmological argument think of like all this kind of stuff like surely god exists yeah yeah but you're saying he's evil and that kind of being can't exist why not well look at all of the good in the world if there was a perfectly evil god you know why would why would like surely the universe could be so much more evil

Like, obviously there's too much good in the world for there to be a perfectly evil God. And then the atheist says, ah ha, well, what about your good God? You know, there's too much evil in the world for there to be a good God. Now, the interesting thing for me about this is that when you raise the problem of evil and say there's too much evil in the world for a good God, it doesn't end there because the theist says, oh, but there are lots of reasons why God would allow so much evil. There are so-called theodyses. You can also construct these for the reverse case, right?

So now I'm saying, what about this evil God? And a theist says, I don't believe in an evil God. There's too much good in the world. And I say, ah, but my evil God has really good reasons to allow so much good. For example, what's something worse than a homeless person starving on the street? A homeless person starving on the street outside a banquet where people are like, you know, just overly enjoying themselves, an abundance of food, so much food that half of it gets wasted and thrown in the bin, getting drunk, spending so much money.

it's so much joy and outside there's this as homeless man who can see this through the window who's starving on the street and freezing that makes it so much worse and you couldn't have that great evil that comparative evil if we didn't have this great good of luxury and then pleasure and also you know in order for human beings to freely commit evil like the holocaust god has this evil god has to allow them to you know freely choose to love each other as well because otherwise it wouldn't be so truly evil when they choose to commit evil against each other. So in other words, there are these theodices which reconcile the existence of good with the existence of the evil god.

So I can say, yeah, there are loads of reasons why an evil god would allow so much good. And yet the theist usually says, but come on, man, are you really telling me that if there was a maximally evil god, this is what the universe would look like. Like he couldn't make it any more evil. It just seems, as you say, preposterous. and the point is that similarly the atheist is going to say okay you've got all these theodyses to try to reconcile evil with the existence of a good god but come on man do you really think that if there existed a good god this is what the universe would look like so i think it's powerful

but i do think it kind of is just like a support for the problem of evil you need to assume that the the atheist is going to reject uh it is going to reject the existence of an evil god based on the amount of good in the universe and you're going to have to have to to probably fool back on the analogy that that brings up with disproving the good God through evil. So I think it's kind of a version of the problem of evil. I don't know if you agree with that. Yeah, I'm not so sure because, I mean, like, suppose that, uh, suppose that like basically pretty much any plausible argument that one might raise for God's existence would equally support the evil God hypothesis. Um, I mean, if that's the case, then it's starting to look like

one may not have good reason to think that God exists as opposed to the evil God. And so, like, the evil God challenge may still indeed have some foothold, even if we think that the problem of good, let's say, is, like, not a successful argument, or even if we think that it's, like, a version of the problem of evil. I still think, I don't know, I still, I still find that there's some sort of remnant of a challenge here, because, like, it's still a challenge to explain why a good God is more likely than an evil god in light of the seeming parody in support for them, as well as the seeming parody in objections to them. So, like, again, even if it's, I don't know, I just, I don't, I'm not sure I agree with that.

Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to think of what exact challenge it poses to say, well, there could be an evil god. I mean, for a start, if there is an evil god, that's not atheism, right? Right, I mean, the challenge, you need to reject the evil god. Yeah, I mean, the challenge is roughly, it could be most clearly stated as follows. The evil god hypothesis and the good god hypothesis are roughly equally plausible. The evil god hypothesis is incredibly implausible. And so the good god hypothesis is incredibly implausible.

And we can put this in terms of probability. Like, they have a roughly the same probability because roughly the same supports can be given for them. roughly the same objections apply to them, but the probability of an evil god is incredibly low. And so, since they have roughly equal probability, it follows that the probability of a good god is also incredibly low. And so then it follows that the probability of atheism, as construed as denying the existence of a good god, is incredibly high. So that would be a challenge? Okay, that makes a lot of sense. But then why would somebody say that the probability of the evil god is really low? Why would they say that? Ah, right. Well, one

one thing they might say is just like, listen, it just seems ludicrous. I mean, in the same way that we think, you know, like, you told me, you tell me that you can make a four-sided triangle or whatever. And I, that seems ludicrous. Like, no, and I assign a very low probability to that because it just seems obviously false. No, you can't. And similarly, if it just seems obviously false that there's no evil God, well, then it seems like we can justifiably assign a low probability to it. So that's one thing we might say. Of course, it's not like a contradiction in terms or something like that. It's not like an analytical matter. Actually, some people would say it is and maybe that's a worthwhile objection to to raise here is that some people think

that like god and good are like the same thing you know the tomists will say that goodness and godness and being they're all just like one big sort of spherical thing that just like exists i don't know why i always picture it as a sphere it's like this divine simplicity this the super simple object uh or maybe there is something about maybe like if moral realism is true then if god is omniscient, then he must be omnibenevolent as well because he would know all moral truths and maybe moral truths are intrinsically motivating. Maybe they're not, whatever. But like there are people who will make arguments of that kind who will say, well, if there is any kind of God that is all powerful and all knowing, it like will follow that God is maximally good, just like by definition,

in which case the evil God challenge is undermined because the evil God is not as plausible as the good God. In fact, the evil God is impossible. Right. So, a few things to say here. As ever. Yeah. One thing is that, I mean, listen, if someone just thinks that it's like an analytic matter, that, like, what it is to be God or to be a God is to be, you know, like, goodness itself or something like that. I mean, like, okay, let's not call it the evil God challenge. Let's just call it like the foundational being, which is maximally evil and also knows, you know, is omniscient and omniscient, omniscient, unipotent. Let's just call it like a super demon.

Okay, I'm not going to call it a God, okay, because maybe what you mean by God is just something which is goodness itself or something. Okay, I'll call it a super demon. And we'll just call it the super demon challenge. And the argument would then be like, the considerations that are mounted on behalf of the existence of a good God, or just God simplicity, are equally going to be carrying over, at least roughly, to the existence of this super demon. And the objections to the super demon hypothesis seem to carry over roughly equally plausibly to the existence of, to the hypothesis that there's a god. So like, I don't know, like, I don't think it can be so easily swept away just by appealing to like these alleged analytic truths about God being

connected to goodness or something like that, or just what one means by God. Now, you did bring up this point, it's very similar to something that Swinburne argues, the kind of like, well, this being, according to the evil god, or the super, I'm going to go forward and say evil god instead of super demon or whatever. The evil god is, you know, according to the hypothesis, omniscient. And so it's going to know all moral truths. And if we think that, um, moral truths are kind of intrinsically motivating such that merely by knowing them, you are thereby motivated to act in accordance with them. then it's just going to follow that this being is going to have to be motivated to act

in accordance with goodness. Any omniscient being is going to have to be omnibenevolent. So I think there are two things to say in response to this. Motivational internalism, this view is called motivational internalism, that just like morality is kind of inherently motivating, our knowledge of moral truths that's kind of inherently motivating. That's just false. I mean, like, the vast majority of philosophers reject it, and it doesn't seem particularly plausible. very often we know that something is what we really should be doing and it's the good thing to do but alas we're not motivated to do it yeah i don't know i think there are some i think there are some defense i'm sort of quite attracted to the idea of of moral truths being intrinsically motivated

i i wasn't sure if we were going to sort of get into this maybe we shouldn't spend too long on it but like i mean it's worth considering that people want to trivially say like well yeah but you can believe something's moral and not be motivated to do it i don't know if you can believe something to be moral and literally not be motivated at all. I mean, you could, you could be motivated in another direction by other things, but it's like, it's not like there's no motivation whatsoever there. It might be like you think it's good to give to charity, yeah, but you really want that new computer. And so, you know, you're not motivated enough to give charity, but you're still like semi-motivated. It's just overcome by something else. And like, maybe if you knew the true

about the ethics of, like, you know, how much money you'd be spending on personal computers and stuff. Whatever the right answer is, is what you'd end up being motivated to do, right? It's just that there are, like, competing motivations, and that's why you're not always motivated to do the right thing, exactly. Yeah, so, I mean, so a couple things to say here. One, one is that, um, I mean, we should distinguish the mere, like, I think it is a descriptive fact that, like, typically speaking, when someone judges something to be morally good or judges it to be the case that they morally ought to do it, very often they are also motivated to do it. I agree with that. But what we're considering here is whether like the mere fact that someone judges something to be good or judges it to be morally obligatory, the mere fact entails that they're all going to be motivated to it. Because this argument is requiring the knowledge to entail that they're going to be motivated. And I don't see why, I don't know, it seems like I can conceive of someone who just, like, they judge that, yeah, like, this is what I morally should do. But I truly do not care about morality. Like,

you know, like a, like a psychopath or something. Like, I don't know. Jeffrey Dahmer, you know, he said, like, at some level he knew what he was doing was evil. But maybe, it seems to me easily conceivable that he nevertheless could have just been totally felt cold to that. Like, there's no motivation whatsoever to act in accordance with what he knew deep down was kind of evil. I don't know. When you say, when he says something like, I knew somewhere in me that something I was doing is wrong, that says to me that there was something sort of nagging at him, right? Like, I think in other words, to know a moral truth. I mean, look, you're speaking to an emotivist. So of course, I'm going to think that when you say something is wrong, you're obviously

going to have like necessarily an emotional reaction to it of some degree. Like, obviously I'm going to think that. But like, I don't know what a moral, what it can mean to know a moral truth, become, let's say, convinced of a moral truth, if it doesn't mean to suddenly feel its persuasive power. I think that's what it means to think that, like, in the same way that if you become convinced of an argument, you just suddenly become convinced of the persuasive power of the conclusion. And what does it mean to become convinced of the persuasive power of a moral truth? I think it must mean something like to be, like, motivated to like, to like, to like, to like it to act in accordance with it, motivated to want it, you know, something like that that has to be

in there somewhere. I can't imagine somebody, like you could say, some people say, well, I know it's wrong, but what they mean is they've been told it's wrong, they've been taught it's wrong, but they don't really feel it. They're like, well, I know it's supposed to be wrong for me to, you know, have sex with a man, but I just, I don't know, like whatever, you know, I'm gay, like cool. Like, they might sort of think something like that, but that's not the same thing as like actually thinking, it's wrong, and being like, well, I know this is wrong. I know, like, I'm convinced that this is wrong. Like, I, I literally believe that it's wrong. And yet, that has absolutely no bearing, like, none whatsoever on, like, my motivation to do it. You know what I mean? It just seems,

it seems implausible to me. Right. I mean, again, as a descriptive thesis, I think, like, the ordinary person, it is going to be implausible if you told me that, like, you know, just pick a person at random and tell me that they really do believe that something is wrong or obligatory, then I'm going to infer that, yeah, it's very, very likely that they're going to have some sort of motivation to either avoid it or to do it. But I don't know. I think we're just maybe not going to see eye to eye on whether or not there's like an extreme case here. Imagine like an extreme case. Imagine somebody is like, I honestly think that stealing is like morally the worst thing you can do. Like, worse than murder, worse than anything. The very worst thing you can do to a person

is stealing. And they, you know, maybe they tell you why maybe they give you an argument, whatever. Even if they're irrational, they just claim to be convinced of the truth that that is the worst thing you can do to a person. And yet, you watch them go and steal from someone. And you say, well, hold on a second, mate. You just, you said it's like, and they're like, yeah, oh, it doesn't mean I'm, I'm in any way, shape, or form motivated to it. And then further, imagine that they then, like, refused, they then like refused to throw their cigarette butt on the floor because they thought it was immoral. And he said, hold on a set. Oh, wait, what do you mean? They're like, yeah, I think it's probably kind of wrong to like, to throw a cigarette butt on the floor. And okay, so you think that it's

kind of wrong to throw a cigarette butt on the floor and you think it's like the worst thing in the world to steal. And yet you're not motivated not to steal, but you are motivated to pick up the cigarette. It would seem like something's just like, it would seem like that kind of person, kind of can't exist, you know what I mean? Well, I mean, I think the way that you're describing the scenario is kind of like biasing our intuitions because, you know, the way that you're describing is like, this person is like telling you, and you're like, this is the worst thing in the world, you know, they're passionate about it, you're like, you're envisioning them saying this, like, yeah, I mean,

clearly then they do indeed care about this. They have motivation to act in accordance with it. But like, once you describe the situation in a different sort of way, you know, like this person just does not care at all about morality. they have moral beliefs, like they think certain things are morally better and morally worse, but all they care about is their prudential self-interest. And that's all that they're motivated by. They just don't give a crap about morality, even though they have various moral beliefs. And I don't know, to me, that seems at least conceivable. I don't know. But, okay, we may not see I tie on this point. But this is bringing me to my next point. And it's that

even if, even if, like, these moral facts, knowledge of these moral facts is kind of intrinsically motivating. I don't know. The evil God might have stronger desires to do what's in contrary to the, the, what they know to be morally wrong or whatever. They may nevertheless have even stronger desires that oppose that. And so it's not going to follow that something is omnibenevolent from the fact that it knows and even is motivated by its knowledge of all the moral truths. Because again, it may have countervailing psychological weights, as it were, countervailing desires that push it even more strongly against their other motivations to do what's morally right. wrong. And those may always win out, such that this being behaves maximally terribly. So, I don't know, I don't think there's an entailment relation there. I mean, one thing that's, I kind of forgot that we were talking about the evil God challenge, to be honest. Yes, yes, right. That's why I'm trying to bring it back around. So, I don't know, I don't find, like, even if we granted motivational internalism, it wouldn't actually follow that omniscience and omnipotence, or omniscience

alone entails omnibenevolence, because there may very well be countervailing desires that make the being behave in terrible ways. Now, one thing that one could note at this juncture is that, well, at least so long as you have motivational internalism and we don't posit the existence of additional desires, then, then we get omnibenevolence, right? So then the theistic hypothesis doesn't have to, like, posit additional desires. It just takes on motivational internalism, right? And you get omnibenevolence from omniscience alone, whereas the evil gut hypothesis has omniscience.

and if we really do think motivational internalism is true, well then in order to avoid the omnibenevolence consequence and in order to make the evil God hypothesis even consistent, they have to posit very strong desires that counteract the relevant motivations. And so at least in one respect, the evil God hypothesis is less simple than the theistic hypothesis,

provided again that we accept motivational internalism because they're positing the evil God hypothesis has to posit these additional desires that the theist does not have to posit. And so there's a discrepancy in the simplicity hypotheses, and if we think a simpler theory is other things being equal and more probable than one that is less simple, then there's actually some sort of asymmetry between the hypotheses.

So, having said all of that, where does it go? Okay, well, let me make one more point, which is one of the reasons why I, this is, this will justify my lower placement than one might otherwise think. Okay. Yeah. So I actually do think that there are a number of asymmetries between these hypotheses. I mean, one is that it seems like the good God hypothesis is more internally coherent. It meshes well, its various parts mesh better together than the evil God hypothesis.

So what do I mean by that? Well, suppose I have an urn, right? It's this big container and it's got a bunch of balls in there, okay? And I go in there, I pick out a ball and it's black. Okay, put it down. Go in there. And I'm just randomly doing this. I'm not looking.

Take another one. It's black. Go down and take another one. It's black. Take another one. It's black. You know, at some point, like, I've gotten eight black balls. I'm going to form a hypothesis about what I'm going to get next.

And indeed, my observations so far give me good reason to think that the next one that I pick. The next ball that I pick is going to be black. This is just kind of standard inductive reasoning. The fact that all the eight balls that I've chosen so far are black gives me good reason to think that the other ball is going to be black. And if you have a hypothesis and your hypothesis is that, you know, despite the fact that all these other ones were black,

the next one's going to be white, your hypothesis is you know at least other things being equal worse than mine mine is more probable mine is better supported by the other internal aspects of my hypothesis that all the ones that were already taken were black whereas you think all the other ones that were already taken were black but the next one's going to be white so my hypothesis is better it's more kind of it it's various parts mesh better together with one another okay um how does that relate to the evil god challenge well when we compare the hypotheses of the good god hypothesis and the evil god hypothesis And we look at the good God hypothesis, you know, like each of God's properties that the good

God is characterized as having seem to be perfections. They seem to be great-making features, like omniscience. Wow, what an awesome thing to have, how valuable it is to have all this kind of knowledge. Omnipotence, oh my goodness, the ability to do anything. That's a great-making feature. It's a perfection. Oh, my goodness, necessary existence. It has a kind of robust grip on reality.

It's not like it just happens to exist. Oh, my goodness, it's independent. So it's not like deriving its existence from another. It's not dependent. so it seems to be great in all these various ways. And the good God hypothesis says, yeah, it's got all great-making features. So there's a kind of uniformity there. Just like all the balls and like me saying that all of these eight balls together with the next one, they're all black, the good-god hypothesis says, yeah, all of God's features are great-making features.

But this is where we come to the evil-god hypothesis. And that's actually like your hypothesis that, oh, despite the fact that all the eight ones that I drew were black, the next one's going to be white. So you look at the evil-god hypothesis and, you know, you start looking at its features. Oh my goodness. It's got like necessary existence. Oh my goodness. What a great feature. It's got a great grip on reality. It seems to be like a perfection. It seems to make a green being better. Oh my goodness. It's got omniscience. What a great making feature, you know. It seems to be a perfection because it's got all this knowledge and knowledge is valuable. Oh my goodness. It's omnipotent. It's got another great making feature. But then suddenly

we come across another feature and it's suddenly a terrible feature, namely the feature of being like maximally evil or whatever. And so you can see how there's a kind of the elements of this hypothesis don't mesh well together because the very fact this being has all these other perfections, gives us good reason to think that it has all perfections. It gives us inductive reason to think that it has all perfections.

But so then, if you have hypothesis that, no, it's got all the perfections but one, and that one's a terrible making feature, then your hypothesis, it just doesn't mesh well with its various parts together, and it's going to be less probable

than the good God hypothesis because of that. So anyway, that's one of the reasons. I think that's interesting. It does sort of, maybe we're like importing moral or at least value judgment to things like omniscience and omnipotence to say they're great making sort of we want to say something like oh they're they're kind of like good things to have which I don't know if we can

like assume that um like maybe there's just sort of like more of it uh like being more powerful like more knowledgeable and when it comes to morality unless you think evil is just a privation of good it's not obvious to me that like you can't just have more evil more good like it's kind of it's kind of hard to say, but at the same time, on an intuitive level, I understand what you're saying. Like, these things seem, like, good. And they seem like the kind of being we're describing omnipotent, omniscient, has these qualities that we sort of think, yeah, they're like uppers, you know, not downers. Having said that, like, I don't know if it could be any other way, because I, like, the mirror image of this would be like a, a maximally unpowerful, maximally ignorant and yet perfectly good being. which kind of wouldn't make any sense.

Like, that definitely doesn't make any sense. But then so would, like, a sort of maximally unknowledgeable, maximally impotent and also maximally evil God, it sort of doesn't really make sense either. Like, I don't know, it's kind of weird to think about, like, the sort of great-making properties of omnipotence and omniscience seem to only move in one direction in terms of them having, like, more of it, whereas morality seems to stretch off in two directions. So I'm not sure. I think that requires a bit more investigation, but I understand what you're saying and at least understand why that would give it a bit more sort of like force in terms of its ability to actually convince people. So, yeah, and also, I mean, just one final thing before we rank it, like one might think, one might say in response to this kind of coherence-based reasoning that I gave, one might think that maybe like whether those other features that I mentioned, like omnipotence and omniscience and so on and necessary existence, whether those features are actually great-making or whether they're good actually depends kind of holistically on what the being is like overall. And if the being has, for instance, unlimited or infinite or maximal evil, well, then those other features actually don't contribute to its greatness. Instead, they make.

it worse, right? If there's a necessary being which is maximal evil, well, you know, it'd be better if it exists in just one, if it exists in just one world. But if exists in literally all possible worlds, that seems to be worse. Because again, given that it's unlimited or infinite or maximal and evil, its necessary existence makes it worse. Similarly, its knowledge, now it knows exactly how to implement all of its terrible plans. And similarly, with omnipotence, now it's able to, you know, implement all of its terrible plans. So you might think that these actually aren't sort of like, these features aren't in and of themselves great making. whether or not their great making actually may depend on the moral character of the being in question.

So actually, maybe this hypothesis has a great deal of internal coherence, because these are actually terrible, they're all terrible making features. Given that, it has unlimited infinite maximal evil or whatever. So, yeah, interesting. Okay, so once again, we've got to actually place this on the board. So, what do you think, man? I mean, let's let's think what we've got so far. Is it, is it better than the universe is big? I think so, yeah. Probably, is it better than religious confusion? No, no.

I would say probably not, which means that unless you think it's sort of on a par with either of those, we've got it in C tier right now. I think that's fair. I mean, you know, there are other asymmetries between the good god hypothesis

and the evil god hypothesis that we can't get into. Again, like the literature on this is very vast, so I just want to alert the audience that we haven't covered all the potential asymmetries. But yeah, I think C tier is fair. I mean, it's not like it's a knockdown argument, but it's also not like it's silly, you know, like professional philosophers take this very seriously, so.

So we've got this now, we've got every tier covered except for, except for F, which is, which is, you know, kind of nice. Maybe some people think there's an atheistic bias going on. I would wholeheartedly reject the charge, but then I would, wouldn't I? Well, we also didn't put an F tier when we did the theistic arguments. I will point that out to people. We had no F tier, if I recall correctly. Is that right?

Did we not do that? I think so. There you have it, folks. We are fair and balanced on within reason. What do you think about looking at some of these slightly less popular, less well-known, less well-trodden arguments for atheism that you've provided for me? Let's do it. Let's do it. So I guess the next one is going to be the improveability argument.

I don't know what to call it, but, yeah, like I said to the audience, like, philosopher Felipe Leon on his blog has, like, 200 or so arguments on there, and they're linked. It's not like they're all in this gigantic post. They're linked to various other papers and books and so on in which they've been defended. And a lot of these are, like, ones that haven't been popularized, because, you know, there aren't, like, there isn't like a billion dollar industry, which is like apologetics for atheism or something like that. So, but if there were, we get a lot of people picking up a lot of these arguments and shoving them down people's throats. So let's get to the improveability argument.

So there are different ways to sort of construe this kind of argument. Here's just one way. So I guess the first premise would be something like, if God exists, then it's possible for God to create a better world than the actual world. That seems pretty plausible. Like the world could be improved in certain ways. Like he could have created more happy people. Or like our pleasure could have been like adjusted 10% up.

So it was like every instance of pleasure was like, like a 10% increase without affecting anything else. Or, you know, like maybe certain instances of evil could have been prevented and the world would have been slightly better. Or maybe God could have just made a different causally isolated universe. If you think our universe is on the whole good, which theists are apt to think, then maybe God could have just created a separate causally isolated universe, which is exactly like ours, which, you know, is on the whole good.

You know, the common thought here is that God could have created, like, more happy people, and that would have been a good thing, and the world would have been at least slightly better if God had done that. So if God exists, then it seems possible for God to create a better world than the actual world. If you disagree with this, you're going to think that the actual world, if you think if God exists, then it's not possible for God to create a better world than the actual world. So the actual world is either the best possible world or like tied for the best possible world. So like the world couldn't be improved in any way whatsoever, like to make a better world.

And that doesn't seem particularly plausible. And most of theists haven't want to go that route. Okay, so that premise seems kind of plausible. The next premise is that, well, if it's possible for God to create a better world than the actual world, well, then it's possible for God to be better in some respect than he actually is. And you might think that this is just intuitively plausible. Think of a kind of artist analogy, right?

Like, pick Van Gogh or something. Van Gogh made various artworks. It seems like Van Gogh would have been a greater artist if he had made even better art. Right? We'd rate him more highly. He'd be a better artist, it seems. He'd be a greater artist. Similarly, you're a greater inventor if you make a better invention.

And so, by analogy, it seems that also like you'd be a greater creator if you make a better creation. So then it would follow that if God, if it's possible for God to create a better world than the actual world, then it's possible to be better in some respect than he actually is, just like if it's possible for Van Gogh to create better artwork than he did in the actual world, it's possible for him to be a better artist than he actually is. Moreover, if God were to create a better world, it seems like in that world he'd be responding to and acting on better reasons, right? Because reasons more strongly favor creating a better world

than creating a lesser world. And so then, it seems like in the world where he creates a better world compared to the actual world, yeah, like I said, he seems to be responding to and acting on better reasons, and that seems to reflect better on him as an agent. Maybe he'd also be more praiseworthy or something like that, but regardless, there does seem to be at least some intuitive motivation here for thinking that if it's possible for God to create a better world than the actual world, then it's possible for God to be better in some respect than he actually is. So from those two premises, it's going to follow that if God exists, it's possible for God to be better in some respect than he actually is. But alas, if God is perfect, then God is a perfect,

sorry, if God exists, then God is a perfect being, right? And it's not possible, arguably, it's not possible for a perfect being to be better in any respect than it actually is. This is just what perfection is. Like, if you can be improved upon, you're not perfect. You're not maximally perfect. And so then, since if God exists, then God would be perfect, and it's not possible for a perfect being to be better in any respect. It follows that if God exists, then it's actually not possible for God to be better in any respect than he actually is. And notice what we've just delivered. Earlier, I argued that if God exists, then it's possible for God to be better in some respect than he actually is. But we also just concluded that

if God exists, then that's not possible. And so then, it follows that God doesn't exist. To see how that follows, suppose we have the following. two things, like if P, then Q, and also if P then not Q, how can we infer the negation of P from that? Well, suppose that P were true. By our two premises, we could derive both Q and not Q, right? So we'd be able to derive a contradiction. And if you make an assumption and you derive a contradiction from that assumption, it follows that your assumption is false. Right. So P would have to be false. And so similarly, God doesn't exist from this sort of argument. I'm not, again, for the audience, I'm not here to say that this argument is a

definitive proof that it succeeds. I just think it's interesting. And it spawns. really cool thoughts and that's why I wanted to bring it up. Right. Yeah. It's interesting. There's lots to think about there, of course. The idea, I guess the first idea to unpack is this idea that God could always improve upon the world. I think this is kind of plausible. Like there's difficulty in trying to imagine a sort of maximally great world because like even just by like creating another planet Earth, like somewhere outside, maybe like a multiverse, you just add like another universe, although maybe a multiverse that's genuinely infinite would sort of be filled up. I don't know. It gets a bit weird. But, you know, it seems like you can always just create

another Earth. You can always just like double the amount of people and make sure that they're all happy. And that seems like a good thing. So it does seem plausible to me that there can always be improvements made. The next thing to say is that God would always choose to do that. I mean you could say given that it's impossible to have a maximally great world God sort of has morally good reason to just arbitrarily pick a sort of state of goodness and just be like this is what I'm running with but that does seem a bit arbitrary it does seem a bit weird but if it's a choice between doing that and not creating a world at all seems like maybe he would prefer that but like okay that I guess that's the

like I'm not going to I'm not going to contest the first assumption that the world could be made better. What I'm going to contest is that God could have done that and also that by doing so he would be a, quote, better God. You gave the example of Van Gogh, or rather Van Gogh, and how if he created better paintings, he'd be a better painter. This probably has something to do with the standards by which we're judging, let's just call him Vincent, by which we're judging him, right? God doesn't seem to be, in most religious traditions, judged by like, some kind of like epistemic survey, some, like, empirical survey of the things that he creates. You know, God is not as good as the earth he makes. God is this maximally great, perfect being that sort of exists out in the ether

or whatever, and, like, creates the world. And could create it worse, could create it better, can sort of do what he wants. But, like, his goodness would exist, even if he never created anything, if he just sort of existed in all of his glory, he would still be perfectly good in a way that Van Gogh, if he created no paintings, arguably he could have still. He could have been like a really good painter if it just so happened that he magically had this ability to paint without practice. But like, we want to say if Vangov didn't paint any paintings, he wouldn't be a great painter. If God didn't create any universes, people would probably say he's still a maximally great being, which means that this assumption that to create a better world would make you a better

God probably breaks down. So I think that's where the debate is going to lie. I I think that's, uh, or like, yeah, not in, not as in like knowingly tell a falsehood, but like that's where the debate's going to be. Um, I think this is probably where, yeah, theists should reject the premise. Um, I mean, it is hard to deny that there's some kind of intuitive plausibility behind, behind the premise. And, you know, ultimately that's, you know, what we're relying on when we mount arguments for and against God's existence. We're just, ultimately, you know, we can't mount arguments and premises at infinite item, right? So we'd have to stop at some kind of premise eventually, and, you know, what do you say on behalf of it other

than, no, it just seems really plausible. So, I think that maybe they don't find it plausible. But, like, it's hard to deny that there's some sort of plausibility behind it. I don't know. I mean, maybe they'll construe goodness as kind of, like, dispositional. So, like, Van Gogh, or whatever it is, Van Gogh, how good he is as a painter. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. that's a more so kind of like intrinsic dispositional thing, and it can manifest in various ways. But like, had it manifested in a better painting than it did in the actual world, doesn't necessarily mean that he's a better painter, just because that's a matter of his sort of intrinsic capabilities and his kind of dispositions, right?

It just, maybe sometimes they manifest in a better painting, and sometimes they manifest in a slightly worse painting. But the goodness of the painter is a function solely of, you know, the capacities to, like, you concoct in your mind a beautiful scene and then you know the capacity maybe a better example here is like being a good singer that might help sort of understand this a bit better i mean more conceivably you could just naturally be a really really good singer but you've never you never sing you you literally just never sing in your entire life you never sing a song but you're still a really good singer in a way that someone who's a worse singer than you might make better music might put

things out into the world, but they're still like a worse singer because being a good singer isn't dependent on what you put out. It's dependent on what you like could put out if you want. Yeah, it's like your intrinsic capacities. Yeah. So like then the thought would be that, well, then likewise, it's not possible for God to be better in some respect than he actually is because like his goodness is a matter of sort of like his intrinsic character and his intrinsic capacities as well. So that's one way that you could go. I mean, does this address though, so that addresses one kind of motivation for, uh, for the premise. I mean, one might still contestant.

One might find it still intuitively plausible that Van Gogh would have been a better painter. I mean, like, you know, arguably, we all have, like, the intrinsic capacity to develop ourselves in various ways to, you know, be really, really good at painting. We spend so much time at it and so on. But, like, that doesn't make me as good of a painter as Van Gogh or something. So anyway, there are ways that one could push back on that. But, like, there is another kind of line of motivation for that premise, which was that, you know, when God is creating a better world, it seems like, you know, like the reasons

to create a better world seem to, you know, they seem to be better reasons than the reasons they create a worse world. You know, like, you have more reason to create a better world compared to a worse world. It seems like, I don't know, that seems really plausible. Just like if you're making a painting, you have more reason to make a better painting than you do to make a worse painting. So then, if that's the case, well, then it seems like in the world in which God creates, you know, in the world in which that world is better and God creates it compared to this world, you know, it's better than the actual world. It seems like in that world, God is responding to and acting on

better reasons than he does in the actual world. And doesn't that seem to reflect better on him as an agent? He's acting on better reasons than he does in the actual world. So maybe that line of reasoning for the premise doesn't succumb to the same sort of objection. Again, it's maybe. I'm putting this forward for people as food for thought. Yeah, I think it's interesting at any rate. I do like these considerations of God and possible worlds and all of this kind of stuff. Like, you know, I've thought about this before in terms of the problem of evil. Like, you know, why isn't there less suffering? And there's kind of an argument that can be said, like, well, the world could always be morally improved.

There could always be more pleasure and more good and all this kind of stuff. So in order for any universe to exist at all, God has to sort of arbitrarily pick. And so to make the complaint that the world could be better actually is undermined by the fact that That's always the case. And so it doesn't matter what universe you find yourself in. You could be making some kind of problem of evil case as to why the world isn't better. And so it's sort of like this kind of consideration I think can cut both ways, depending on the context in which it comes up. But as an argument for atheism, I think it's interesting. I mean, interesting is, I suppose, one of the measurements by which we might rank this, but also it's its power. It's convincing this. It's convincing this, if that's a word. You know, what do you think, Joe? Where does this sort of sit for you in terms of its actual power? Right. Well, I mean, it's, again, it's certainly not knocked down. It's going to be very hard to find knockdown arguments for or against God's existence. Um, it's not like atrociously bad. I mean, it's not like the stone paradox. Um. Oh, that bloody stone. So I mean, I, I'm thinking somewhere in the middle, somewhere in the middle. Yeah, I mean, we've got, we've got sort of universe big and we've got evil God. Uh, universe big is in D tier. Evil God is in C tier. So, I mean, we've got sort of universe big is in D tier. So, So compared to those arguments, it's close to both of them. I'd say it's closer to the evil God challenge. So maybe C tier, maybe that's where I'm leaning.

Sort of, because let me think about this. I mean, it's a fascinating argument. It brings up lots of interesting topics about what determines the greatness of being. And each of the premises has a degree of plausibility. Like, it's not like it can't be supported. And it's not like each premise is like ludicrous. I think I'm just not, I'm doing I'm not convinced on this like, you know, a better created universe would mean a better God. It's like, you know, if the universe had an extra planet in it with more people being happy, God is like a better being by his nature, which I think kind of is necessary or is like a requirement of this argument.

It's sort of, I don't know, there could be like a myriad of different reasons why, like, the universe is as it is and not an improved version of it, which, which, I mean, we probably don't even have time to begin exploring how many there are. I mean, maybe there aren't as many as I imagine, but, but, like, it just makes me think that there's got to be a bunch of, like, theodys, so to speak, that would apply here that kind of make me want to knock it down to D tier to put it along with, like, universe being big. Because, like, the universe big thing, like, as I said myself before, I kind of think that's kind of powerful. Like, it does something emotively to me, but, like, as a syllogism, I'm not really sure. But similarly here, I'm getting a similar vibe. It's like, yeah, you know, it's kind of interesting and some kind of consideration in there, but it's not, it's not enough for me to like, like, I wouldn't use it in a debate,

right? I wouldn't bring it up as one of my arguments. However, I might bring up the evil God challenge. I might say that at a podium at a formal debate, but I'm probably not going to bring up this argument, so I just don't think it, like, does it, you know? I think that's fair, right. I mean, I would, I mean, I would say either C or D. So, I mean, if you want to put it in D, that's fine. I, I, I would, I would say probably D and also it's my show, so, you know, my, no, not, not really, but if you really are sort of somewhere in

between, I don't know, like a C, let's put it, C.5. No, no, let's put it in D. C minus. Because, because you're leaning towards D, so. That's why, that's why, that's why or the academic one, Joe, because you realize that C.5 is a ludicrous thing to even say out loud. Okay, look, we'll put it in deep, but bear in mind also, you know, there's room to maneuver here. We could knock the God Rock down and the universe big down. I mean, we could put the universe big in E and then God Rock in F if we wanted to, but whatever.

We'll sort of have it hovering around. We'll put it in detail for now because it needs to go somewhere on the screen. Improveability is what you call it, isn't it? Sounds good. And let's just do two more arguments. You know, I know there are more on the thing. But I do want to cover the modal argument from evil and the argument for material causality. And maybe we'll go a little bit quicker for them.

As you said, there were 200 of them. So if you think these two are particularly worth covering, then let's bang them out and get the hell out of this strange, weird internet meme. Okay, sounds good. So, yeah, the first one that we want to cover is the argument from material causality. And so this is actually from philosopher Felipe Leon himself and his article, The Problem of Creation X. Nihalo, a new argument against classical theism. And the argument, I mean, you could run it in different ways, but here's a standard kind of two-premise conclusion style argument. So the first premise is that every material thing with an originating

or sustaining cause has a material cause in the sense of some things or stuff from which it is made. The second premise is that if traditional theism is true, well then the universe is a material thing with an originating or sustaining cause, but no material cause. So then the conclusion follows that traditional theism is false. So on behalf of that premise one, which he calls the principle of material causality, again, the principle of material causality, or premise one, it says that every material thing with an originating or sustaining cause has a material cause in the sense of some things or stuff from which it's made. On behalf of that premise, he points out that actually, like, a lot of the motivations for this premise are strikingly similar to the motivations

that theists give for the causal principle at play in the kalam cosmological argument, that everything that begins to exist has a cause. So more specifically, I'll just mention two here, but there are more that he goes through in the paper. More specifically, it seems to be like an outstandingly well-confirmed principle. I mean, like everywhere we look, we have very strong inductive grounds for accepting it. Just like everywhere we look, you know, every beginning that we see has a cause that produced it. Likewise, everything that we see, which has an originating or sustaining cause, so for instance, like my cup, it was brought into existence and had an originating cause, we find it to have a material cause as well.

It was made out of various materials that were refashioned and shaped into it in some manner. It was made from that sort of pre-existent stuff or things were stuff. And similarly, like a flame, which you might think has a sustaining cause in terms of the oxygen and whatnot, the oxygen there is the stuff from which or out of which that's sort of being used up in order to cause the combustion, right? So it's a sort of like a material cause that undergirds it. So then the principle is outstandingly well confirmed. Our universal experience attests to it. and so we have very strong inductive grounds for accepting it.

And I guess the second reason is that, you know, a lot of people argue that just the Calam's causal principle is just really intuitively plausible, you know, like it just seems intuitive, you know, like it just seems intuitive, you know, if something began to exist, then something should have produced it. Likewise, Philippe Leon argues that it just seems really intuitive, that if a material thing begins to exist, or it's being sustained in being or whatever, it just seems plausible that it would have some things or stuff from which it's made. If just as you wouldn't take seriously, someone's saying that, you know, their log cabin in the woods just popped into existence uncaused, you also wouldn't take seriously that they kind of made it appear, but they didn't make it out of any materials or anything like that. They didn't make it from anything. They just said like, they just breathed, like let there be a cabin, boom, it just pops there or something. We wouldn't take that seriously. And so it does seem intuitively plausible that material things come from when they have a cause, they come from some prior things are stuff. But, of course, if traditional Theism is true, then the universe can't be created from some prior things or stuff. You know, God creates it ex-Neil, though, if traditional Theism is true. There's no prior stuff that God could refashion in order to bring about the universe. So, then, we get the conclusion that traditional Theism is false. And again, there are more motivations for that principal material causality, but that is the argument.

Yeah, I mean, intuitive, well, immediately, I mean to say, I feel like... to sort of argue from the fact that everything we sort of see materially have some kind of material cause that like material itself like the whole edifice would have some kind of material cause I think might just be a kind of category error like we're talking about a different kind of event we're talking about a beginning rather than like a continuation of processes that were once begun it just seems to me like really easy to say like the beginning. of the existence of everything is like a just a totally different kind of event to like the way that that stuff that exists then goes on to interact like you know if you're a mereological nihilist you might think well your cup never began to exist it just sort of like everything that began to exist begun to exist at one point like boom there it all is all this stuff all these subatomic particles and since then stuff's just being rearranged and bumping into each other and changing from energy into matter and matter to energy and covalent bonds and all this kind of stuff but it's all

just the same stuff moving around, like this event where it all comes into being is like a totally different kind of event. Like, that seems like a really easy move for me to make here. So one thing to say is that if that move succeeds here, it would also plausibly succeed in the case of the Kalam. And in fact, you yourself have brought up this point in the context of motivations for the Kalam's causal principle, right? So I think that theists need to be cautious if they're going to be using this argument.

they also want to accept the clam, or if they want to, you know, use your objection here, and if they also want to accept the clam, you know, because it's equally open to say, you know, the beginning of everything is just so radically different from the various alleged beginnings that we see in our experience. And if you're bringing in moralogical nihilism, it changes the, you know, changes the scene. So anyway, I just want to caution that at least many theses are not going to want to take that move. That's one thing to say. And then a second thing to say, and the second thing to say is probably just that whenever we have an inductive generalization, you can always bring up that, like,

like, well, hey, maybe the unobserved cases are, like, different in some way. You know, like, you can always say that. You know, like, all the, you know, all the emeralds that we've ever seen are green. But, like, you know, maybe there's an emerald that is unseen and it's existing in, I mean, maybe emeralds is bad because maybe an emerald is defined as being green. But, like, whatever. Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. In, like, a mountain, you know, somewhere in a deep cave, we know that there are emeralds,

but they've never been observed. You know, someone says, like, well, you know, like, maybe conditions are different there or something. And, like, maybe they're not going to be green. It's like, okay, listen, we grant that maybe, you know, maybe that's the case. But like, if we want to defeat the inductive generalization and we want to, you know, defeat our justification for thinking that they will probably be green, we need to be given some independent reason to think that they're actually not going to be green.

We need to be given some positive grounds. And so similarly, we would need to be given some positive grounds for thinking that the universe is a material thing that has no material cause. And again, material cause is not, it's not necessarily just like the material things that we find within the universe. As I define it, as Philippe Leon defines it, it's just some things or stuff from which the universe is made. So it could be some, it doesn't have to be like the material within the universe. I mean, clearly, the material within the universe couldn't be like the stuff from which the universe is made. But like this is where, you know, theists in principle, a theist

actually might be able to accept the argument because they could believe in, for instance, pen-entheism, which holds that God makes the universe out of the resources of his own being. He sort of refashions himself in some way or takes some of his own being, as it were, as if it's like, you know, cookie dough or whatever, and then remold it. fashions it in such a way as to make physical reality. That could also satisfy the principle material causality because the physical world is not sort of created XNilo, but it's coming from some refashioned pre-existent stuff, some causally prior stuff. So, you know, it wouldn't be able to, I just, I'm circumventing an objection that, you know, while the universe couldn't

have material cause, because, you know, material things are all within the universe. So anyway, I'll let you have the final word on this before we rank it because we probably have to go think on the inductive on the inductive point there like well you can always say with inductive things like maybe this one's just different but like you know if if if you're talking about a bunch of emeralds and I say there's this emerald maybe it's different that that does seem like something you can always do but the beginning of the universe is like famously just like completely radical as an event like the laws of physics just completely break down like time just ceases to be a concept like matter is infinitely compressed into like unimaginable proportion like There are so many other ways in which this is such a different event to anything else we know. So I could make an inductive case, right? I could say, well, look, when it comes to time, the Big Bang is radically different from everything we observe and how it works in the universe. When it comes to space, the Big Bang is radically different from everything we observe and how space works in the normal course of affairs in terms of size, in terms of all this kind of stuff. And so inductively, this other property of causation, I'm just going to say, must also be radically different from the way that it usually works in the universe as we know it right now.

And what's one way it could be radically different? Well, maybe it's like this material condition sort of doesn't exist, right? It's like, I think that would be a weird argument to make. It'd be a bad inductive argument, but it's not like I'm just taking a bunch of stuff that sort of begin to exist and saying, okay, I think my car began to exist. my shoes, my laptop, my chair, but like, but like not, you know, not my computer monitor. No, no, no, that, that sort of pops into existence. I don't know. That's very different.

You'd be like, well, why the hell do you think that? But if we're talking about something that is just so different in like every conceivable way, it doesn't seem that implausible to me that that would give us at least a room to hypothesize that it could be different here. So does it work as an argument for atheism? If you were saying it's for atheism, you would have to be making the claim that you know that the sort of causal principle applies even to the Big Bang, the material causal principle. You're taking on a quite big claim for yourself and justifying it with what's probably a relatively, in my view, weak inductive claim about sort of the material goings on in the universe, which, as I say, is like this completely different kind of operation to something like the Big Bang. So to me, in terms of ranking, I think this is actually really quite low, but I don't know.

You seem maybe a little bit more attracted to it than I do? Yeah, I think it's a better argument than you think it is. That's not to say that I think it succeeds in showing that God doesn't exist, but I do think it's a better argument than you might, just because, firstly, there are lots of other justifications for the principle that Philippe A Leon goes over in his article that we don't have time to cover. Secondly, I still think that it's not clear to me that we've been given like a kind of principled relevant difference between the beginning of the universe as such and other beginnings, which could account for why the former doesn't or couldn't have a material

cause, whereas the latter could. Sure, there are lots of pretty radical differences, but it's not clear why they would be relevant to the principle of material causality, why they would be relevant to explaining the, like, the difference between them, such that the principal material causality applies to one and doesn't apply to the others. And then, thirdly, like, it's not just the inductive inference that supports it, but also, like, you know, the intuition and so on. So, I would be inclined to rank it higher than you, probably, but it's not like, uh, I mean, it's, it's clearly not like the problem of evil or something. Like, I'm, I'm going to, like, I would put it like, man, I, I, I, I was tempted to say I put

like God rock territory, man. Like, I'm, I'm seriously just like, like, like, he, but listen, you also have to take, one other thing that. forgot to mention. So sorry to interrupt, but one of the thing that I mentioned that I forgot to mention is that like, remember that, like, most theists are not going to want to take the route that you've responded with. Because, again, it's arguably going to require them to give up their principle, their Kalam causal principle, and their confidence that it applies also to the beginning of the universe, which also, you know, all your points would be applying in response to that. So... That's true, but then, like, you know, what about the sort of,

the agnostic, who's just, just sort of does no skin in the game, it just says, like, all right, tell me why there's no God, and you say, well, you know how, you know how like everything you've observed seems to have like a material cause yeah sure well like the whole edifice itself the arena in which that material causation itself operates must itself therefore have a have a material cause and i'm just like what well why do you think that like literally what is your reason for thinking that i i don't think so i'm not convinced it just seems so so easy for me to and the only thing you have in response to that seems to be something like well look man you know like it seems kind of inductive, you know, like, I don't know, like, I don't see any, like,

reason to believe it, you know what I mean? It just seems like, it seems, seems kind of, seems kind of strange to me. It just seems so easy for me, like, it doesn't trouble me at right, and it's dialectical efficacy may be different for different people, and this points to a general feature of arguments, you know, like, they, they affect us differently because we come to arguments with different epistemic situations, with different plausibility structures, with different background evidence, with different background beliefs, and so on. And so this may be more convinced. or more troubling for someone who, for instance,

a theist who accepts the clom compared to, you know, you or an agnostic or something like that. So, I don't know, I think it has some... Okay. You'll probably argue we will have some dialectical efficacy. I'd be inclined to put it somewhere around maybe C-tier. I know you probably want to put it lower, but...

I would definitely not put it any higher than it because that means putting it on the level of evil god. We've probably got evil god in C-tier. We didn't go over lots of my objections to the evil god challenge. So... Okay, yeah, fair enough. What I'm thinking, man, I was going to say, man, I was going to say, like, I was going to say, like, possibly even F tier, which would make you cringe because, like, God Rock is on E. I was going to say, like, maybe if we, like, shifted God Rock down to F, we could put it in E. I mean, if you really thought it belonged, like, in C, then maybe, like, D is a good compromise, putting it along with the improve. D plus, D plus, D is fine. Improvability argument and the universe big, like, is it, is it as good as universe, okay, the universe is. Yeah, actually, yeah, okay, fair play, fair play. Because, yeah, it's sort of like, There does seem to be this like cohesiveness to materialism and like, yeah, like, you know, stuff is made of matter and matter interacts and does all this kind of stuff.

Like, that just seems to be the way of the universe, man. It seems weird that the universe itself wouldn't abide by those rules. Fair, yeah, fair enough. Okay, that's got something to it. I think D plus C minus, I mean, I think, yeah, didn't we put, didn't we put evil, evil god or improbability argument sort of halfway through, I always said like, didn't we say like D plus or something? Yeah, D plus. I would like, maybe D plus. I mean, would you really, would you want to push it up into C? Because if you really want to push it up to C, I'm sort of willing to consider it.

I'm fine with D plus. I'm fine with D plus. Are you sure? I don't, I don't want to feel like I'm sort of just like laying down the law here. But I, I, given that I sort of immediately thought this is like borderline F tier territory, I think D is quite a compromise already. I think I'm just more attracted to like the dialectical efficacy of it. Just like, that this is good for getting theists specifically to reflect a bit further on their beliefs and the parity between the calamitous. So, like, if it were mine, if it were my ranking, I'd probably put it around C. But, you know, I think it's fine to put it D here. So long as, you know, it's like a D plus. Yeah, okay, we'll call it a D plus then if you like. Okay, yes, that's fair.

I would just say, hey, man, like, you know, fair enough, you think it's C, but if you think it's C and I think it's like F, then D plus feels like a relatively healthy compromise. That's fair. D plus is fine. Okay, well, we'll stick it on the thing, but, you know, people listening, people watching, let us know what you think. Who side do you want here? This, this argument. What did you call it?

The argument for material causality. Material causality. I want people to tell me in the comments who's who side. of you who God bless you are still with us. Please tell me whose side you're on here. Where does this belong? Well, if they're curious, again, check out Felipe Leon's article, so he goes into much more detail on it. For sure. So one more. Yeah, one more. This is the final argument. Again, there are many more that we could consider. The audience goes, ah, one more argument. Right, exactly. One more argument. Yes. One more, one more.

Okay, it's the modal argument from evil. And it's okay, so this is, it's slightly cheating because it's a version of the problem of evil. But it has like, distinctive aspects that I think are cool and fun, and this is ultimately just to get people aware that there are more arguments than the problem of evil. So, the modal argument from evil, I'll present a version of it here. It's a similar argument, roughly the same argument, is developed and extensively defended in philosopher Carl Brownson's dissertation. His dissertation is freely available online. It's entitled Evil and ontological disproof. So, I mean, the rough rendition is like, hey, premise one, it's possible for there to be a word. world exclusively populated with vast amounts of gratuitous evil and no goods occurring therefrom.

Premise two, if such a world is possible, then it's possible that God doesn't exist. Premise three, if it's possible that God doesn't exist, then God doesn't exist. And conclusion, God doesn't exist. So it's very similar to the modal ontological argument for theism. The modal ontological argument for theism says that, hey, it's at least possible for God to exist. And since God's a necessary being, you know, God's either going to have to exist in all worlds or exist in none of them, right?

So if it's possible that he exists, if he exists in one possible world, then he must exist in all of them. Well, this argument is basically turning that on its head, and it's saying, well, hey, it's at least possible for there to be a world in which God doesn't exist. And again, like, God would plausibly be a necessary being

if God exists at all. So then, God's either going to have to span all possible worlds or no possible worlds. And since he doesn't span all possible worlds, right, he fails to exist in at least one possible world. It follows that God exists in no possible worlds. So in particular, God doesn't exist in the actual world. And why think? Why think that there's a possible world in which God doesn't exist? Well, this is where

we try to give some independent reason to think that. And it's from the possibility of there being a world which is so overwhelmingly bad that God just would never actualize that sort of world. Either God would be, it would be impermissible for God to actualize it, or if you don't like imputing the categories of permissibility and impermissibility onto God, then it just would be of such a terrible character, the world that is, that given God's character, he just just would never actualize it. It would be inconsistent with his goodness to kind of create a world like that. So that's how one is trying to motivate the possible non-existence of God. It's from the possibility that there's a world that is so overwhelmingly bad that God would never actualize it.

And that world, which is so overwhelmingly bad, is something like we could describe it in various ways, but it's like a world exclusively populated with like vast amounts of gratuitous evil and no goods accruing there from. Now, the question that is, why think that that's a possible world. Well, there are some independent reasons to think that's at least a possible world, and these derive from various modal principles or modal tools that philosophers use to infer what's possible. So one such principle is conceivability or imaginability. Very often, we take something to be possible because it seems totally conceivable. I mean, even earlier on in the conversation, right? I was like, well, I think I can conceive of someone who

someone who knows that something is wrong and they believe that it's wrong, but nevertheless they're not motivated to act in accordance with it because they just don't care about morality. I was trying to argue, like, and that seems at least conceivable, so it seems at least possible that someone could do that. So, like, we very often just intuitively shift from something's being conceivable to something's being possible, and arguably conceivability or imaginability provides evidence for something to being possible. And we might think that, like, this world, which is, you know, populated with vast amounts

of gratuitous evils and no goods accruing there from, like, I can describe it in such a way that it really does seem imaginable. I mean, imagine that it's basically just like the world is just a billion year long, like just animals experiencing sort of factory farming conditions or something like that, and somehow they're like kept alive or something like that through like some sort of miraculous technology or whatever. We can specify in various ways, or like new ones come into existence as the years progress. And that's basically just all that it is in the world. It's just these animals that are experiencing excruciating agony for all of all the time. That seems entirely conceivable. And again, we can specify the world in such a way that

like it's not as though the animals later on in life or, you know, later on in time are going to be getting goods accruing from the evil or whatever. So that's one sort of motivation for thinking that this is a possible world, I guess conceivability. Another one, I mean, there are various different motivations, but another one then I'll just turn it over to you is a kind of recombination principle. And these principles go back to David Lewis. And in fact, they arguably go back to David Hume, who said that there are no necessary connections between distinct existences. And what he's getting out there is that, like, if things are kind of like spatio-temporally separated, like this water bottle in the Andromeda Galaxy, well, then you can

have one without the other, you can have the other without the one, you can kind of recombine them and rearrange them in various ways. They can just, it's possible that things are rearranged in various ways, and it's possible that, let's say, there's just a world with only a donkey. or it's possible that there's a world with a donkey next to Donald Trump or something like that because these things are individually possible, and we can rearrange them in various ways to form other possible. And we can infer that those worlds are indeed possible, so long as the various things in that arrangement are themselves individually possible. This is a very well-motivated principle, surprisingly, in philosophy. There are, of course, objections to it, but there are also lots of

motivations for it. If people want to look at philosophers who defend it, they can check out, for instance, Aaron Siegel. He defends recombination principles. long story short is that like an individual spacetime region containing a creature experiencing like excruciating agony just contained within that region only the excruciating agony that's possible and we can rearrange this region and regions like it such that it's only those regions which populate a world and so the only thing populating the world is just this vast amount of suffering with no goods occurring there from that's how we are patching together or recombining the individually possible regions and so then by the patrick principle or by the recombination

principle, we can infer that this is a possible world, and then we get the premise. So anyway, there are more motivations besides for the premise, and this is a controversial, a very controversial argument, but it's interesting. And I want to at least make people aware of these different sorts of ways that people have argued for atheism. I really like it, man. I think it's, I think that's quite fascinating. I mean, it certainly seems possible to me that, like, you know, the world of maximal evil possibly exists. That seems like, yeah, sure, totally happy to draw on that. as well. Like, there's nothing, there's nothing inconsistent about that. Like, it's a logical impossibility. Like, it's logically possible that, like, there's just a bunch of suffering. And

the question is, would the God presiding over that? Um, well, like, would, would God be able to preside over that? And I mean, I know that there's got to be, it seems like there's got to be something wrong with it. Not, not least that there's a sort of, probably a sort of reverse version that could be put forward of like the possibly best world of like of all which would probably contain a god maybe if you think that the best world contains a god so if god possibly exists like i know there's probably a reverse that you could construct but like it's a really interesting way of thinking about it like could god possibly preside over just the maximal conceivable agony in a way if we're going to just very easily say that it's possible this

this world exists because, well, it's logically possible, then we could also just as easily say, well, yes, it's logically possible that God could allow a bunch of suffering. You know, it seems very unlikely. It seems very strange, but it doesn't seem like logically impossible that he would just create a bunch of evil and suffering. I don't know, like maybe it is. It's just kind of hard to say. I do definitely find this really interesting.

And, of course, it relies on this modal logic move, you know, if it's, possibly necessarily the case, then it is necessarily the case, which is, which is, you know, not everybody accepts that. So, I don't know, man, like, I think that's really interesting, how powerful it is. I'm definitely going to, like, bring it up with friends and use it, but more because it's kind of a headache to work out. I feel like if you were, like, really smart and thought about it for a long time, you could definitely come up with some pretty good reasons why it's not a knockdown argument. But, like, the way it initially sort of strike, me, I'm like, yeah, man, that's got, that's got something to it. I think that's pretty,

it's pretty cool. It's pretty powerful. I think it's a very interesting argument, and it's not like immediately obvious, like, where exactly it goes wrong. And you might find theists objecting to different premises. So it's not, it's not exactly like a, you know, a clearly mistaken argument. And like I said, I mean, there is independent motivation for each of the premises, it seems, like motivation that is independent of a prior rejection of God's existence. So I'm inclined to rate, I mean, again, because we're nearing the end, we're not going to be able to go through a bunch of different objections and, you know, the objections concerning the recombination principle and so on. But, you know, I just want to put it out there for the audience to

think about it. And just in terms of ranking, I mean, I don't know where you fall, but I'd be inclined to rank it like reasonably highly. I mean, certainly not is like the standard problems of evil and so on and maybe not, maybe not hidden this level, but maybe I'd probably put it B, honestly. That would put it at the level of religious confusion, which I think Yeah. Especially given that this is like an argument against like just God. It's not, it's not, it doesn't sort of rely on different religious traditions and it kind of, it does again rely on this like moral element of God, not being able to reside over evil. But it seems much more to like attack the root.

Like this is God's existence. It's not some like sociological analysis. I think it's got to be at least as powerful as that. So I think I think B tier is not a, it's not a bad shout. I think it's probably better than the evil God challenge. Yeah. Yeah. And you're right that it's probably not as good as divine hiddenness.

It might actually function better like as a syllogism, as an argument. It might sort of maybe, but like in terms of its persuasive power and cultural relevance and history, it's definitely nowhere near. So I think B tier sounds pretty fair. All right. Well, it looks like we probably have our tier list complete. Cool. So what did you call this one? The modal argument from evil?

Yeah, the modal argument from evil. Modal argument from evil. It's an interesting name for it. I wonder if that's a... mean is that your label for it or is that just what it's known as um so i mean carl brownson calls it the ontological disproof i think that sounds horrid that sounds horrible i think maybe like the modal argument from possible evil is is fairer because like the modal argument from seems to imply that this evil like kind of does exist like we've got the single evil that we're

arguing from it seems like it's the possibility well that's what the modal yeah i guess that's what the modal thing does or like the argument from modal evil then maybe. Oh yeah, the argument from possible evil. Whatever the case. We'll just call it the modal argument from evil for simplicity sake for the TLS. But yeah, you're right. That's complete. So, right, S tier, problem of evil. A tier, divine hiddenness. B tier, religious confusion and the modal argument from modal, or the argument from modal evil or the modal argument from modal possible evil that's possibly modal. C tier, the evil God challenge sitting alone. D tier is our most populace category with universe big, therefore no God, the improbability argument, and the argument from material causality, although controversially because Joe thinks it should be higher. In E tier, we have the god rock, which is sunk on our tier list down to the bottom and may on further reflection sink further down to the F tier, given that it does just seem to exist in a different category to these kinds of arguments. Having said that, I just think it's not like, I mean,

trivially, we could come up with something like, you know, my dog bit me today, therefore God doesn't exist, which would probably go in the F tier. And so I think we sort of need to almost ceremonially leave the F tier completely blank as a reminder that like there are literally as many arguments for and against the existence of God as you can possibly imagine if you're allowing them to be bad ones. So I'm kind of happy with leaving the F tier blank. And you know what, I think this is a relatively healthy looking tier list. But like I say, I'll be interested to see what other people think. So unless you have any particular last minute changes you want to make to it, I think I'm happy to sort of to sort of wrap it up

there. Same here. I think it's great. Awesome, dude. Well, hey, thanks for what may well be the longest episode yet of the Within Reason podcast. I've done some pretty long ones before. I might have done like two hours, two and a half hours. I don't think, I don't know where we're. I think we're a two and a half hours in terms of recording, maybe a little bit over. I'm not sure I've done that before. So thank you for the time, especially given, I think our last one was probably pretty long as well. So you've probably spent more time on this podcast than any other guest, with the exception of William Lane Craig, who I've had on about a billion times. So, man, Joe Schmidt, if people want to check you out, links are all in the description, Majesty of Reason.

You've got some published work as well. We'll put everything that you want in the description. Anywhere else that you want to direct people, any other links you want to mention? I think that's all. Thanks for having me on. I think this was really fun and I hope it was edifying for people. Me too, man. I've had a really good time and I think it's going to be a yeah, I think it's going to be a fun one to listen to you hopefully as well. So dude, awesome. Good stuff. Thanks for coming on. Thanks.