“So God can’t make the atoms be arranged one way and the humans be arranged another contradictory way.”
But couldn’t he have made a different sort of thing than humans, which were less prone to evil? Like, it seems to me that he didn’t need to make us evolve through the process of natural selection, such that species were always in competition, status was a big deal, fighting over mates commonplace, etc. I do expect that there’s quite a bit of convergence in the space of possible minds—even if one is selecting them from the set of “all possible atomic configurations of minds”—but I would still guess that not all of those are as prone to “evil” as us. I.e., if the laws of physics were held constant, I would think you could get less evil things than us out of it, and probably worlds which were overall more favorable to life (fewer natural disasters, etc.). But perhaps this is even more evidence that God only cares about the laws of physics? Since we seem much more like an afterthought than a priority?
Or maybe the Ultimate Good in the eyes of God is the epic sequence of: dead matter → RNA world → protocells → … → hairless apes throwing rocks at each other and chasing gazelles → weirdoes trying to accomplish the impossible task of raising the sanity waterline and carrying the world through the Big Filter of AI Doom → deep utopia/galaxy lit with consciousness/The Goddess of Everything Else finale.
“So God can’t make the atoms be arranged one way and the humans be arranged another contradictory way.”
But couldn’t he have made a different sort of thing than humans, which were less prone to evil? Like, it seems to me that he didn’t need to make us evolve through the process of natural selection, such that species were always in competition, status was a big deal, fighting over mates commonplace, etc. I do expect that there’s quite a bit of convergence in the space of possible minds—even if one is selecting them from the set of “all possible atomic configurations of minds”—but I would still guess that not all of those are as prone to “evil” as us. I.e., if the laws of physics were held constant, I would think you could get less evil things than us out of it, and probably worlds which were overall more favorable to life (fewer natural disasters, etc.). But perhaps this is even more evidence that God only cares about the laws of physics? Since we seem much more like an afterthought than a priority?
Or maybe the Ultimate Good in the eyes of God is the epic sequence of: dead matter → RNA world → protocells → … → hairless apes throwing rocks at each other and chasing gazelles → weirdoes trying to accomplish the impossible task of raising the sanity waterline and carrying the world through the Big Filter of AI Doom → deep utopia/galaxy lit with consciousness/The Goddess of Everything Else finale.