The trouble with theists considering a “world without God” is they generally think God created the world, so without him there wouldn’t be a world at all. Obviously, this is not what we observe.
On the other hand, attempting to point at things which clearly couldn’t exist without a Creator generally falls into the category of “god of the gaps”, both in terms of the criticisms it levies and, alarmingly often, in terms of already-understood science.
Perhaps a world of Boltzmann Brains? But then, I’ve never really seen the logic behind “if there was no God, everything would just be random”—where would this randomness come from, anyway?
On the other hand, a world without any life at all, or at least intelligent life, could be argued—after all, most of the universe is lifeless as it is, and probably always will be. But then we run into all sorts of awkward anthropic issues where nobody’s quite sure how to reason about probabilities anymore. Still, if God leads to intelligent agents with high probability, then our very existence seems to count as evidence for Him—even if we’re reasoning a priori from “I think therefore I am.”
But let’s assume life exists, which it does, so that’s a fairly solid assumption. God is good, right? Clearly a torture-world would be proof of his nonexistance, as what sort of omnibenevolent superbeing would tolerate it? But then there is disagreement on how much pain would prove the nonexistence of God. Some say a sufficiently superintelligent God should be able to arrange for no pain at all without sacrificing what we value. Others claim that morality actually requires unfathomably vast numbers of people’s horrific suffering because of Justice or somesuch.
And, of course, you get the people who claim that the world they observe fits exactly with what they deduce a priori about a world without God. On the other hand, these people never seem to make original predictions, which leads me to believe that their deductions are actually incorporating things science has already told them about this world instead of the logical consequences of their priors. (The same goes for believers who claim this is exactly what they would expect a world with God to look like if they found one.)
So … yeah, I have no idea why I wrote this long, rambling comment.
Well, the natural theology seems to suffer from the problem of arbitrary, easy-to-vary hypotheses. One could, as an alternative, engage in reflection on which hypotheses are non-arbitrary and hard to vary (otherwise know as, whisper it: metaphysics).
The trouble with theists considering a “world without God” is they generally think God created the world, so without him there wouldn’t be a world at all. Obviously, this is not what we observe.
On the other hand, attempting to point at things which clearly couldn’t exist without a Creator generally falls into the category of “god of the gaps”, both in terms of the criticisms it levies and, alarmingly often, in terms of already-understood science.
Perhaps a world of Boltzmann Brains? But then, I’ve never really seen the logic behind “if there was no God, everything would just be random”—where would this randomness come from, anyway?
On the other hand, a world without any life at all, or at least intelligent life, could be argued—after all, most of the universe is lifeless as it is, and probably always will be. But then we run into all sorts of awkward anthropic issues where nobody’s quite sure how to reason about probabilities anymore. Still, if God leads to intelligent agents with high probability, then our very existence seems to count as evidence for Him—even if we’re reasoning a priori from “I think therefore I am.”
But let’s assume life exists, which it does, so that’s a fairly solid assumption. God is good, right? Clearly a torture-world would be proof of his nonexistance, as what sort of omnibenevolent superbeing would tolerate it? But then there is disagreement on how much pain would prove the nonexistence of God. Some say a sufficiently superintelligent God should be able to arrange for no pain at all without sacrificing what we value. Others claim that morality actually requires unfathomably vast numbers of people’s horrific suffering because of Justice or somesuch.
And, of course, you get the people who claim that the world they observe fits exactly with what they deduce a priori about a world without God. On the other hand, these people never seem to make original predictions, which leads me to believe that their deductions are actually incorporating things science has already told them about this world instead of the logical consequences of their priors. (The same goes for believers who claim this is exactly what they would expect a world with God to look like if they found one.)
So … yeah, I have no idea why I wrote this long, rambling comment.
I agreed with that, although it seems
Well, the natural theology seems to suffer from the problem of arbitrary, easy-to-vary hypotheses. One could, as an alternative, engage in reflection on which hypotheses are non-arbitrary and hard to vary (otherwise know as, whisper it: metaphysics).