I’m a theist! I think God exists, created the universe, fine-tuned the constants, made harmonious psychophysical laws, and loves you (yes you!) This is the single most awesome fact about the world!

But lots of people disagree with me about this. I like to think that my theism is rational, but maybe not. So to test how well I understand the best case for atheism, I thought I’d do my best to steelman atheism! I’ll describe the best reasons, in my judgment, to be an atheist as well as give my best responses to some of the theistic arguments I’ve promoted in the past. This is a rare glimpse of what an atheist Bentham’s Bulldog might look like—hope you enjoy!

2 The prior of God
When evaluating some theory about how the world is, we should look at two things. First, the prior probability of that theory: how likely it is before considering the evidence. The theory that I am cheating in poker has a higher probability than the theory that a fairy rigged the deck, even though they both can explain my extraordinary stream of luck. This is because its prior is higher. Next, one should look at the evidence—we’ll do that later.

I think God’s existence has an extremely low prior. Absurdly low!

There are infinite ways that the world could be. Infinite possible deities, sets of laws and initial conditions, and many more things too weird to grasp. The prior probability of any of these should be infinitesimal. When there are infinite possible options, you shouldn’t start out very confident in any of them.

Belief in God came largely out of ancient polytheistic belief—wherein people believed in many feuding deities like Zeus and Poseidon. Over time, belief in a bunch of feuding limited gods was replaced by belief in a single supreme God who calls the shots. But what are the odds that the random outshoot of ancient Paganism would happen to be the most intrinsically likely way for the world to be? It would be quite a miracle for such a thing to be true!

>>40515573 (OP)
Now, theists like the scoundrel who writes the Bentham’s Bulldog blog often claim that God has a high prior probability because of his simplicity and non-arbitrariness. Such a claim is almost too confused for one to know where to begin.

First of all, there are many equally simple and non-arbitrary theories. The theses that there’s simply maximal instantiated value (this is called axiarchism), every possible world (modal realism), a maximally evil God, the set of all physical objects, and maximal beauty, are all equally simple and non-arbitrary.

Second, theism is of quite doubtful coherence. Don’t even get me started on the obviously ludicrous notion of classical theism—where God is supposed to be identical to each of his attributes, like his knowledge that the world has at least three onions. Joe Schmid’s dispatched that view quite persuasively, to my mind.

But even theism of the normal sort is of doubtful persuasion. For example, God’s supposed to know everything. Everything—all infinite truths. But for every truth that God knows, it’s true that he knows it. So he knows some truths A and B, knows he knows A and B, knows he knows that he knows A and B and so on forever. Is this regress coherent? It’s unclear!

In addition, because there’s no set of all truths, God knows a number of things too large to be a set. Can one know so many things that there’s no set of all things that they know? One’s beliefs are gathered together in a way rather like being causally bundled—certainly causal finitists should be doubtful of this idea.

In addition, God’s supposed to be the best possible thing. Is there a best possible thing? It seems that for every possible thing there is, it could be made better simply if it acquired the disposition to make more good stuff. God could be improved upon if he simply made more good stuff. For that reason, the notion that there’s some uniquely best thing—supreme over all—is quite doubtful.

>>40515583
Now, I’m not claiming this is obviously incoherent. But there’s enough that’s doubtful about God—enough philosophical hoops that must be jumped through for him to even be in the running as an explanation—that the prior in his existence must not be very large.
Third, the path towards establishing that God is simple is very dubious. Generally the scoundrel called Bentham’s Bulldog argues that he’s simple because he’s a limitless mind. On account of his total absence of limits, there’s nothing constraining what he knows or can do. But this is very doubtful.

It requires that minds are the sorts of things that can be unlimited.

It requires that being unlimited is a joint carving property. While some fundamental things may be simple on account of being infinite in the property that it possesses, limitlessness in the sense needed for the argument is quite distinct. God doesn’t just possess the property of mind to an infinite degree—he’s unlimited in some other qualitative sense.

It requires that accounts of simplicity on which simplicity is about the length of the mathematical description of some entity are false. Being unlimited and infinite does not lower a thing’s Kolmogorov complexity.

It requires that morality is objective and non-natural—that there are moral facts that an omniscient being could infallibly know.

It requires some odd thesis about motivation, according to which a limitless mind would thereby be motivated to follow the good. Seems equally plausible that a person’s motivations depend on their desires. There’s no guarantee that wisdom alone will make a creature virtuous.

Each of these seems doubtful to me. Let’s be very generous and grant them each 1/2 probability. Well, the odds they’re all correct is 1/32. So even putting aside the challenges to theism in terms of coherence, there’s only a 1/32 chance that theism is even on the table as a potentially parsimonious theory.

>>40515593
Now, there are other routes that people go to establish that God is simple. But these are equally dubious. For instance, lots of people say God is simple because he just has one property: perfection. But perfection isn’t a joint-carving property. There are no fundamental perfection facts that don’t reduce to facts about goodness.

Besides merely instantiating some property—like perfection—to a high degree doesn’t make a thing simple. The most complicated state of affairs wouldn’t be simple just because it maximally instantiates the property of being complicated. Simplicity is about the component parts of a thing, not the higher-level properties it instantiates. If the most beautiful state of affairs is highly complicated and disjointed, it wouldn’t thereby be simple.

Theism seems to commit the core error that’s ubiquitous throughout history—assuming that agency is natural and simple when it’s quite the opposite. The ancients peered up at the stars and assumed some designer must be behind them. Turns out the simplest—and now universally agreed upon—explanation was in terms of natural processes. At some point, when you’ve witnessed agential explanations for unknown phenomena be wrong over and over again, you should begin to question them! The best explanation of these repeated error is that humans have an innate tendency to overattribute things to agents—something we independently know from psychology! You shouldn’t ignore this bias in assigning your priors.

For these reasons, I think theism has a vanishingly low prior. It’s the kind of explanation that’s been wrong repeatedly, is of doubtful coherence, and has no plausible claim to simplicity.

3 Evil
The world is filled with horrifying, gut-wrenching evil. Billions of sentient beings die every second. Thousands of children die of preventable disease every day. For billions of years, animals have been suffering and dying—in numbers we cannot fathom, across time scales we cannot fathom.

>>40515602
Such a thing is obviously incompatible with the existence of a perfect God.

Are the aforementioned things bad? Is the world a worse place because it has cancer in it? Is it worse because it has malaria and genocide and starvation and predation? Anyone of remotely sane ethical persuasion would have to obviously answer yes. The theist, however, is tasked with explaining why a perfectly just, merciful, loving, and powerful God fails to intervene to stop these horrors. He could stop them with a thought, make it so that no child has to starve to death in her mother’s arms merely by saying the word. Why doesn’t he?

The theist doesn’t merely need to think that each of the world’s apparent evils are secretly so good that they shouldn’t be abolished (after all, if they should be abolished and God can abolish them, why doesn’t he?) They don’t merely have to think that it would be wrong of God to have intervened to stop COVID or 9/11 or the Nazi Holocaust. They must think that God couldn’t have set up the world in any better way. Not only does some great good come from the holocaust that makes it so that God should not prevent it, God apparently—in his infinite wisdom and majesty—could not have achieved that good in any other way.

Could any proposition be more absurd? Could anything be more ludicrous on its face than the notion that there is a good reason for babies to get cancer, for animals to starve, and for natural disasters to ravage the world claiming countless lives? Could anything be more ridiculous than the idea that these are uniquely required for some greater goods?

>>40515615
What are the odds that the ideal mix of evils for our growth and character building would happen to be those randomly churned out by indifferent natural laws? If there was a God who was designing the laws, aiming at the good, he wouldn’t make the laws uniform across the entire cosmos! He wouldn’t make the ordinary goings-on of the world utterly indifferent to value, so that whether gravity pulls some object down is wholly independent of the moral consequences of it doing so. If an ethical person was creating the law of gravity, he would not direct it to bring objects down if doing so results in them fatally falling on the head of a baby.
This is the core problem with every theodicy. While perhaps some theodicies can explain why some evils might be conducive to greater goods, it would be utterly and wildly inexplicable if the optimal laws for bringing about those goods are indifferent to value. In addition, such a view simply strains credibility. Is it really plausible that the world wouldn’t be improved if God had stopped any of the particularly gratuitous instances of suffering? Is it really plausible that if God had done a secret miracle—never discovered by anyone—to make COVID never infect humans, the world would have been a worse place?

The standard theodicies, for this reason, are inadequate.

The free will theodicy, for instance, may explain why we are typically allowed to do things that harm others. But it cannot explain natural evils and it cannot explain why we are given strong desires to do evil things. Things would be far better if the rapist never had the desire to rape—if no one ever had a desire to torture small children in sheds. It similarly cannot explain why we are given the power to do even very terrible things to each other.

>>40515631
The soul-building theodicy claims that evils exist to strengthen our characters. How, pray tell, does the small child who starves to death in her mother’s arms have her character strengthened? How does the old lady with dementia who slowly wastes away have a stronger character as a result of her suffering? The notion—that must be believed by proponents of this theodicy—simply strains credibility that there are no instances of evil that are better prevented by God and that the best laws for soul-building would be ones that function with total indifference to the extent to which their behavior affects soul-building.

Or take the archon abandonment theodicy—a favorite of this blog. This theodicy suggests that the reason that the world is filled with grotesque horrors is that there are powerful angels who could have prevented the world’s evils but didn’t. God allows such a state of affairs because setting up a world where archons can make a great difference to our well-being allows us to closely connect with the archons. In the worlds where the archons don’t screw up, it creates connections that last forever and thus are worth all of the world’s evil.

This theodicy very clearly fails.

Put aside the fact that the theodicy posits powerful wizard demons with no evidence. Normally the fact that your theory has to posit magical beings to explain the data is seen as a cost of your theory. Few would have been impressed by Newtonians suggesting that demons explain the perihelion of mercury.

But putting that aside, why in the world would God make the demons be the only thing sparing us from great suffering? The theodicy can perhaps explain why there are archons who can make a great positive difference to our well-being. But why make it so that if the archons abandon us, most creatures on Earth will live short lives of intense suffering. God could make such creatures vast difference makers without making us miserable wretches in their absence.

>>40515637
It’s particularly surprising that the world where the archons don’t intervene appears blind and indifferent. This is a rather striking coincidence. While it makes sense God might allow the archons to intervene, why the hell would the world where they don’t look, in its ordinary functioning, exactly like an atheistic universe? Why would there not be any agents that appear to be working?

It would be especially surprising that none of the archons would help us out. But if some of the archons are helping, why don’t we observe them?

Why doesn’t God simply give the archons a strong desire to help us? He wouldn’t force them—he’d just make them psychologically disposed to help us. He can do that. He is God. He could make the archons more motivated to help us than humans are motivated to have sex and eat food.

In addition, God could simply give the archons the belief that our lives will go badly if they don’t help us but not actually make their lives go badly if they don’t help us. It seems that what matters in helping others is how much sacrifice you give for how much expected benefit. Pulling a child out of a burning building produces no less objective-list benefit if, unbeknownst to the person who pulls the child out, the child would have been saved later by someone else. Thus, God doesn’t actually have to make the world horrendous if the archons don’t intervene—he could just make them think it’s that way.

>>40515660
Lastly, the argument assumes that objective list theory is right. If hedonism is right or desire satisfaction theory then God could simply make creatures with maximal pleasure or fulfilled desires. This is especially problematic because objective list theory is very implausible.

Thus the argument assumes:

There are archons.

Libertarian free will is right (otherwise the archons would just help us out).

Objective list theory is true.

The archons for some reason don’t make their existence obvious.

The world absent archons is filled with enormous gratuitous suffering—rather than merely being absent in certain goods.

The world absent archons doesn’t appear to be presided over by any agents.

God for some reason needs us to be in actual danger—rather than just having the archons believe we’re in danger.

Each of these assumptions, however, is quite doubtful. They range from somewhat dubious to ridiculously unlikely. Even if we give each of them a generous 1/3 chance of being correct, the odds they’re all right is 1/2187. Very unlikely!


Suppose one simply knew that God existed. Would they really expect a world as bad as this? This world? The one where thousands of children die every day, where nearly every organism who has ever lived has died after just a few days or weeks? If an angel proposed that God would make such a world, they’d be laughed at—and not invited to all the cool angel parties. The only reason anyone seriously entertains that this world is made by a perfect God is because they have status quo bias. They can’t imagine just how much better a world that God would actually make would be.

>>40515665
Another common reply to the problem of evil is skeptical theism. People claim that God might have all sorts of unknown reasons for allowing evils. But this is woefully inadequate. While God could, of course, have reasons we don’t know about, the odds that the optimal mix of goods would be brought about by blind and morally indifferent laws is very near zero. In addition, provided you think that, say, we can be confident that the holocaust was a bad thing, you should think that we can be confident in some ethical judgments—despite the suite of unknown reasons. The odds God wouldn’t have moral reasons to prevent a single one of the world’s suite of horrors are very low.

I don’t just think the problem of evil is a consideration against God’s existence. I think it’s single-handedly, overwhelmingly decisive. Theism does not withstand the problem of evil. Not even close. Theism requires one to believe a great absurdity—that all the world’s evils are for the best. That one who could prevent rape, slavery, genocide, starvation, hunger, torture, and each of the million other distinct and horrendous evils shouldn’t do so. That is almost too absurd to contemplate.

This absurdity was pointed out quite convincingly by Stephen Law. Imagine an evil God—limitless in power, knowledge, and wickedness. Such a being’s only motivation was to bring about evil. Do you think there’s any chance such a being exists?

Of course not! The world has too much good for such a hypothesis to be even remotely tenable. Such a hypothesis is laughably ridiculous. But all the things theists say about the problem of evil could be equally said about the problem of good. One could similarly posit that the being allows good because this is a side-effect of giving us free will. That our flourishing allows greater spiritual decay, so that we can exercise the evils of betrayal and wickedness.

>>40515675
Such hypotheses, while coherent, are obviously absurd. But so is a good God.

Now there are two different versions of this challenge. The first one notes that obviously an evil God is disqualified by the world’s good. It claims that by parity, a good God is disqualified by the world’s evils. Generally theists just bite the bullet and say that an evil God isn’t ruled out by the world’s goods. If you believe this—that this world might be the creation of a maximally wicked being—I have a bridge to sell you!

The only half-decent reply I’ve heard to this challenge comes from Max Baker-Hytch and Ben Page. The core idea: it’s way more obvious that a torture would is worse than our world than that a bliss world is better than our world. A world where everyone was simply intensely pleasured all the time would not seem much better than the present world. In contrast a world where everyone was tortured all the time would seem obviously worse. Thus, it is claimed, this world is more obviously incompatible with maximal evil than maximal good.

First of all, I think this is quite doubtful. The reason we have this intuition is just because we can more easily grok how bad extreme suffering is than how good extreme pleasure is. If we had a better sense of how good experiences could get, we wouldn’t have this intuition.

Second, even if a mere bliss world wouldn’t be obviously better than ours, there are some conceivable worlds that are obviously much better. It’s as obvious that the best conceivable world is much better than this one as it is that the worst conceivable world is a lot worse than this world. It is obvious that a perfect being wouldn’t create this world, just as it’s obvious that a maximally terrible being wouldn’t create it.

>>40515683
The second version of the challenge is, in my judgment, also quite decisive. Even those who think an evil God isn’t ruled out by goodness tend to think that the hypothesis is implausible. But why should such a hypothesis be much less plausible than the good God hypothesis?

There are a great many replies, each wildly unpersuasive. Let’s explore them:

“A good God has a higher prior. Perfection is a real property while imperfection is not.” Reply: if perfection is a real, joint-carving property (rather than e.g. just the property of being maximal in badness) why not think that its opposite is equally a real property?

“A good God possesses all great-making features. An evil-God possesses mostly great-making features but then one random bad-making feature. This means that it’s very unlikely it exists—it’s a weird, arbitrary, and disjointed entity.” Reply: infinite power is not a great or terrible property. Whether it’s good or bad depends on who has the power. There’s no more reason to suppose that power is inherently tied with goodness than badness.

>>40515689

“An evil God would want to deceive us. Thus, the evil God hypothesis is self-defeating, while the good God hypothesis is not.” Reply: First of all, if there are two hypotheses and one is self-defeating, they might still have equal probabilities provided they’re both low. For example, if at the start of the universe a leprechaun flipped a fair coin and then deceived everyone if it came up heads, you should have equal credence in it having come up heads and tails. Second, why would a good Got not deceive us? Potentially infinite goods are in the balance. Surely infinite goods would be worth a bit of deception. Third, there are parallel arguments for why an evil God wouldn’t deceive us as to why a good God wouldn’t. Perhaps by preserving our rational faculties we can more deeply betray others. Even if you think it’s slightly more likely a good God wouldn’t deceive us than that an evil God wouldn’t, this won’t explain why the evil God hypothesis is absurd and the good God hypothesis is reasonable. It might mean a good God is slightly more likely, but it won’t explain the massive gap in reasonable probabilities that theists claim there are.

Thus, I think the problem of evil—especially in its evil God variant—is single-handedly decisive.

4 More considerations
There are a great many facts about the world that fit poorly with theism. While theists can contrive an ad hoc explanation of any of them, none of their explanations are very impressive.

First of all, there’s the fact that God is hidden. If God existed, we’d all positively expect him to at some point show his face. It’s particularly striking that people go through psychologically devastating crises of faith that shatter their worldview and launch them into deep depression—but through all this, God never reveals himself.

>>40515694
Now, theists often reply by saying that if God revealed himself, those who rejected him would be more culpable. But why, pray tell, is God not capable of motivating the majority of people to follow him? Most people love their mothers, for instance. Most people try to help out their mothers. Why then could God not set up a world where people love him as much as their family?

It also strikes me as quite odd that knowing about God would make a person’s wrongdoing more culpable. Should this make Christians fearful of evangelization? Is God not capable of getting most people to follow him? Being exposed to the truth would seem to make a person’s punishment more fitting—because they know more clearly when they do wrong that they are doing wrong. One should not flee from the light of truth.

In addition, this reply is obviously ad hoc. If you knew God existed but didn’t know if he revealed himself, you’d obviously guess that he would. So this will clearly cut the probability of theism.

Second, why does God make creatures as unimpressive and wretched as us (credit to Sebastian Montesinos for this argument. I’m pretty sure that Montesinos hates me and thinks I’m a hack, but he’s a smart guy and worth reading). God can create an infinite array of creatures. On naturalism, you’d expect the creatures that exist not to be that impressive—to be whichever creatures happen to be thrown together by biology. On theism you’d expect wonderful, brilliant, godlike beings. Once again, the naturalistic prediction is confirmed.

Third, on naturalism you’d obviously expect death to exist. Nothing natural survives forever. On theism, there’s no reason for us to die. So once again, the fact that the world contains death is a confirmed theistic prediction.

>>40515705
Fourth, theism requires an odd view of metaphysics. Theists tend to think that God is infinitely good. He’s not just a little better than the things below him—he’s infinitely far above everything else. A world of God alone would contain much more value than a world with all the other good things.

But such a view strikes me as metaphysically quite odd. Why would there be a single best thing that’s far better than everything else below it? Goodness seems like a degreed property without a clear pinnacle.

And why couldn’t there be multiple Gods? If there could, then it’s hard to see why God is uniquely worthy of reverence. If he makes multiple gods, then what makes him so special?

Fifth, God is supposed to have been outside time. Then he either entered into time or remained outside of time. But how can a creature outside of time act? If a creature is out of time—non-temporal—it would seem frozen and unable to act. While theists have a great many answers to this question, none make much sense. God and time remain a challenge.

Sixth, God’s existence is incompatible with causal finitism. God knows everything—his mental state is collectively caused by infinite facts. But if one thing can only have finitely many causes, God cannot exist. His existence is also, for this reason, incompatible with the existence of an actual infinite. Thus, for one to be a theist, it seems they’ll need a fairly permissive account of infinites.

Seventh, theists generally hold that God is a soul of some sort. Soul theory is the only view of consciousness on which theism makes sense. Surely God is not a physical object—and nor is his mind a property of something else. But generally non-theistic soul theorists hold that a soul is simply a bearer of consciousness. For it to be impossible for me to be God, he’ll need some kind of special—and deeply mysterious—soul. But such a thing is an odd bit of one’s ontology.

>>40515711
Eighth, theists will have to be moral realists and non-physicalists. Now, I lean towards both of these views. But once again, this is another cost of theism. It means that theists are committed to a great number of contentious views, many of which are affirmed by a minority of philosophers. It also probably requires moral non-naturalism! If morality is natural then it’s hard to see why God would follow morality rather than its twin Earth analogue.


Ninth, as Paul Draper has noted, atheism seems like the best explanation of the biological role of pleasure and pain. Organisms produced through evolution would be almost guaranteed to experience pleasure in response to activities that increase their survival and pain in response to activities that decrease their survival. This is, of course, what we observe.

But this is quite surprising for theists. What are the odds that the ideal conditions for soul-building and connection-building would happen to involve activities conducive to biological survival being associated with pleasure? Such an assumption is wildly unexpected and ad hoc.

Tenth—Draper once again—theism best explains the presence of pain in moral patients. Moral patients are those who cannot understand morality—babies, some of the mentally disabled, animals, and so on. Such creatures cannot generally benefit from pain. When a deer dies in a forest fire, she does not learn valuable lessons or experience soul-building.

On naturalism, one would expect moral patients to suffer. The conditions under which suffering is experienced would not be tuned for the benefit of the sufferers. It’d be indiscriminate. In contrast, moral patients suffering is quite inexplicable on theism. Why would God make it so that animals, babies, and non-humans can feel intense pain?

>>40515732
Eleventh, naturalism would seem to predict the world would involve a Darwinian struggle for survival. Few organisms would survive for very long. The creatures that do exist would be constantly struggling to survive. Naturalism predicts the blind Darwinian mechanism as being the only way to produce life. Theism makes the odds of such a mechanism low. Once again, naturalism’s prediction has been confirmed.

Evolution itself is quite surprising on theism. Designers do not build bridges by throwing together random slop until a few of them happen to get bridges. Evolution is filled with pointless suffering. Why would a God allow it?

Twelfth, if God made the world, why would it be mostly barren and desolate? God could make life on every planet. Life is a good thing. So why—prey tell—would he make a world with almost no life? Why would he wait billions of years before any life began? Surely doing so is just passing up on lots of potential extra value!

Thirteenth, naturalism predicts a random world where conditions would vary locally. It’s no surprise that people have very different experiences in different cultures. But if God is real and sets up the world in ways ideal for our flourishing, what are the odds that, say, the ideal flourishing conditions for those in ancient China would differ dramatically from those of people in the modern day?

Fourteenth, what are the odds God would have a simple set of laws that hold throughout the entire universe? God has various aims he wants to achieve. It’s quite surprising that achieving those aims would be best brought about by totally uniform laws. Probably the best laws for achieving his aims in different locations would vary.

>>40515734
People respond by suggesting that this is inexplicable on naturalism. This isn’t so. If the laws are fundamental—built in at the ground level—it’s no surprise they’re simple. Fundamental things are very likely to be simple.

They also reply that such conditions are needed for us to be able to do science and understand the world. But this only requires mostly operational laws that kick in at higher levels. It does not require totally uniform laws.

Fifteenth, naturalism predicts most creatures living very short lives. Because there is routine danger is the evolutionary process, death would be routine. Theism predicts a world made for our flourishing. If theism is right, it would be a great surprise if the ideal conditions for flourishing involve most creatures dying after about a week. But most creatures do die after a week or so. Once again, a prediction of naturalism is confirmed over one of theism.

Sixteenth, naturalism would predict that almost everything in the world could be improved. If the world is produced by blind, indifferent natural processes, it would be a great surprise if everything was optimal. Theism, in contrast, predicts the world being mostly optimized—so that it couldn’t be easily improved.

But it’s easy to think of loads of things that could be improved. We could all be smarter, more physically able, and so on. Every bit of the world could be more beautiful. We could be more disposed towards happiness. So could others. Once again, this is a confirmed prediction of theism.

Seventeenth, theism incorrectly predicts that we’d have very intense positive experiences. If there is a God, he can bring about good experiences of any intensity. It would be quite a surprise if he only, therefore, produced mildly positive experiences for most people most of the time. It would be doubly shocking if the most intense painful experiences were generally more intense than the most intense pleasant experiences.

>>40515742
One could go on through many more lines of data but the point is clear. Theism predicts a world utterly unlike our own. Naturalism does not. Theism is utterly, massively disconfirmed by almost everything about our world. It’s metaphysically extravagant, extremely immodest, and wildly out of accordance with the evidence. As Mackie remarked, the great miracle of theism is the fact that anyone believes it.

5 Fine-tuning
There are a great many obviously terrible theistic arguments—the moral argument, for instance, and the Kalam. But there are some other theistic arguments that are taken seriously by many smart and intellectually serious theists like Amos Wollen (blog here), Dustin Crummett, Philip Swenson, Robin Collins, and me when I’m not pretending to be an atheist! The three that I’ve previously written about finding most persuasive are fine-tuning, psychophysical harmony, and the anthropic argument. So now let’s see why those arguments don’t work.

The fine-tuning argument originated when a bunch of physicists discovered that many of the constants in physicists fall in a very narrow range needed for the formation of complex structures. The cosmological constant falls in a value that’s about one part in 10^120 of its available range and is needed for any complex structures to form. If atheism is right, it is claimed, this is quite a coincidence. If theism is right, then it’s positively expected. God would set the values to whatever they need to be in order to give rise to the formation of complex structures.

In addition, proponents of fine-tuning often claim that having a structure of laws that produces anything interesting—rather than random chaos—is very unlikely on atheism.

>>40515750
Regarding the second class of claims, I don’t know how we’d know that. There are infinite laws—both life-permitting and hostile to life. How do we say which one is more common? Such a claim is often boldly asserted and supported by the fact that we humans have struggled to find such laws. But this tells us little about their genuine likelihood.

Regarding the first class, I think that this is not very impressive evidence for theism. First of all, atheists have an easy time explaining this. They can go in for a multiverse explanation. And while there are some technical kinds to work out, multiverse hypotheses like eternal inflation are already supported by the evidence of physics. It’s therefore not much of an additional cost.

Second, they can go for a simulation to explain this. The simulator’s original universe wouldn’t actually have to be finely-tuned. While people may often sneer at the simulation hypothesis, there’s no reason to think it’s very unlikely. And there are powerful arguments for it.

Third, there might be some explanation in terms of deeper physics. While there are some technical challenges for such a proposal, it might be that deeper physics is inherently likelier to produce order than chaos. We shouldn’t confidently rule out such an idea.

Fourth, theism positively does not predict fine-tuning. Why would God make a finely-tuned universe. He doesn’t need to! He could make valuable conscious life by:

Direct miracle.

Making life slowly and gradually emerging in a non-finely tuned universe.

Creating psychophysical laws in a non-finely tuned universe.

Creating an idealist universe without any matter.
God doesn’t need to finely-tune a universe to produce life. Certainly the ridiculously slow and hackneyed process in this universe is not anything a designer would produce! So if anything this points towards a limited designer or multiverse rather than a God.

>>40515759
Thus, in my view, fine-tuning is evidence for atheism over theism. While neither positively predict it, atheists have a much better time explaining it than theists do.

6 Psychophysical harmony
The argument from psychophysical harmony notes that there is a striking connection between the mental and the physical. When you are in pain, you act to stop being in pain. When you have experiences of various sorts, you can give accurate verbal reports about them. This is quite a surprise—or so it is claimed!

There could be all sorts of conceivable connections between the mental and physical. There are infinity of them, in fact! It’s quite striking, therefore, that they connect in a way that gives rise to a valuable correspondence between the mental and the physical.

Every time there is a mental state that precedes behavior, three things happen. First, there is some brain state—call it A. Next, there is some mental state—call it B. B might be a person having a conscious desire to raise their arm. Lastly, there is some subsequent physical state—call it C. This might be a person raising their arm. The crucial insight: B could be swapped out with any of an infinite number of mental states without jeopardizing the behavioral correspondence. Evolution explains why we are wired to have brain state A and behavior C, but it can’t even in principle explain why the mental state that connects these things pairs with them harmoniously.

I agree that this is an interesting and tricky puzzle. But it is not a decisive argument for God’s existence.

First of all, as even its proponents admit, you can get out of it if you’re a type-A physicalist. Type-A physicalists think that there isn’t even a conceptual gap between the mental and the physical. If you carefully reflect, you can see that pain isn’t anything beyond neural firings. It’s not even conceptually distinct from a certain pattern of behavior and neural firings.

>>40515770
Now, I’m not a type-A physicalist. But it’s a serious position endorsed by lots of smart and competent philosophers and neuroscientists. You shouldn’t write it off. If you start with, say, 5% credence in type-A physicalism, then the maximum Bayes factor of this argument will be 20.

Second, the argument claims relies on a pretty dubious probabilistic inference. It claims that psychophysically harmonious laws are rare in the space of possible psychophysical laws. But how the heck does one go about determining that? There are infinite psychophysical laws! How do we know what portion of them are harmonious and what portion aren’t?

Now, they generally reply that all the simplest laws are harmonious. But how do we know that? The science of consciousness is in its infancy—how do we know with extreme confidence that the simplest psychophysical laws will produce disharmony? It’s true we can imagine all sorts of ones that are simple to state—e.g. everything with a brain experiences random static—but that requires picking out some particular state. How do we know that laws that build in specific states at the ground level are simple?

Third, it’s quite a new argument! We should be hesitant about drawing firm conclusions until it’s been adequately vetted.

Fourth, the argument overlooks all the psychophysical disharmony of the world! The world is filled with schizophrenia, pointless agony, and mental illness. We often can’t adequately communicate what is in our heads. Surely this defect of the psychophysical laws cuts the force of the argument considerably. On theism we’d expect a perfect correspondence, not the kind of hackneyed and imperfect correspondence that actually exists!

>>40515775
Fifth, atheists can explain psychophysical harmony by appealing to some force in the universe geared towards the good. They can be axiarchists (those who think that the universe is in some way intrinsically oriented towards value) or natural teleologists, who think that the world’s existence involves it aiming at some goal. They can also believe the psychophysical laws were created by benevolent non-conscious entities from other universes. While these are all speculative, they’re no more speculative than God himself.

For this reason, while psychophysical harmony is interesting and puzzling, we shouldn’t be much moved by it! And this isn’t even mentioning the morass of tricky issues it brings up.

7 The anthropic argument
The anthropic argument for the existence of God is my own progeny. It goes as follows:

The self-indication assumption is true.

If the self-indication assumption is true, then the number of people that exists is the most it could be.

2) is vastly likelier given theism than atheism, so the fact that the number of people that exists is the most it could be us strong evidence for theism.

The self-indication claims that a theory on which there are more people that exist make your present existence likelier. More precisely, a theory on which there are X times as many candidates for being your present self makes your present existence X times more likely. For instance, if a coin was flipped that would create one person if it came up heads and ten people if it came up tails, after being created by the coin flip, you should think at ten to one odds that the coin came up tails.

>>40515789
If you buy SIA—if you think your existence is X times likelier on the assumption that there are X times as many people—then you’ll get an infinitely strong update in favor of there being infinite people. If there were infinite people, it would be infinitely likelier that you’d be one of them. This doesn’t just stop at infinity; because there are larger and smaller infinities, if you buy the SIA, you should think the number of people that exists is the same size infinity of the number of possible people. That number is at least more than the number of numbers! God would be expected to create that number of people because it’s good to create, but it’s ridiculously unlikely that such a vast number of people would exist on atheism. Natural multiverse models don’t result in that!

This argument, while interesting like the last one, leaves a lot to be desired.

First of all, it assumes the self-indication assumption. The self-indication assumption is wildly counterintuitive. It implies that your existence gives you infinitely strong evidence that infinite people exist. It implies that even if the scientists told you that overwhelming scientific evidence confirmed the universe was finite in size, you should ignore them and go on being certain that it’s infinite in size. Nuts!

And yes, there are tricky issues in anthropics. It’s not obvious what the right theory is. But SIA is at least controversial enough that no one should be very confident in it. An argument hinging on something so controversial is unlikely to be persuasive.

Second, even if you buy SIA, infinite anthropics is notoriously difficult. There are all sorts of horrendous paradoxes that arrive. It’s not obvious that the pattern that holds in finite cases can be extrapolated to infinite cases—so that you conclude there are more than aleph null people.

>>40515795
Third, it’s not very clear how many possible people there are. But if many worlds is correct, which it might very well be, there could be Beth 2 people—and that might be equal to the number of possible people.

Fourth, there are lots of viable atheist explanations of the presence of every possible person. Mereological universalism implies that every composite of points forms its own object; it probably implies that there’s no limit to the extent of composition. There are uncountably infinite—likely unsetly many—copies of you. And this is one of the main views in mereology.

>>40515801

You could simply hold that there are arbitrarily many copies of our universe. This would be a distinctly parsimonious hypothesis—just as positing that there are infinite atoms isn’t much worse than positing that there’s one. You could adopt modal realism (thinking every possible view exists), the mathematical universe hypothesis (thinking every possible mathematical structure exists), or many other hypotheses.

Now, are all these views weird? Sure! But it’s also weird to think that there’s a morally faultless being who could have stopped the holocaust and 9/11 but didn’t!

Fifth, it’s not obvious that God would create creatures like us! Probably he’d create things that are way better. Maybe he wouldn’t create at all, because God alone has infinite perfection and he can always add good to the world by simply boosting his happiness. So why in the world would he make us? Thus, theism doesn’t even explain the data intended to be explained!

Thus, the anthropic argument does not succeed. It relies on highly doubtful and controversial assumptions about anthropics. Even if these are correct, there isn’t much reason to expect God to create loads of copies of us. In contrast, there are plausible naturalistic explanations of the creation of very large numbers of us!

8 Conclusion
Here I have argued for atheism. This was, of course, a steelman—I disagree with much of what I said. But I have done my best to defend atheism as persuasively as possible. Atheism isn’t a crazy view, so I think lots of what I’ve said has been wrong but not wholly unreasonable. Let me know what you think of my arguments—and whether you think I should do another article replying to the arguments I’ve made here!

https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-fine-tuning-argument-simply-works

https://philarchive.org/archive/CUTPHA#:~:text=Roughly%2C%20psychophysical%20harmony%20consists%20in,another%20in%20strikingly%20fortunate%20ways.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-19313-2

https://philarchive.org/archive/GRITIN-5

https://benthams.substack.com/p/everythings-an-emergency/comments

https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-archon-abandonment-theodicy

https://benthams.substack.com/p/lopsided-lives-a-deep-dive?utm_source=publication-search

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40927250.pdf?casa_token=YKA6koAu5oIAAAAA:nUR5Vy5zDOrknsvYcY-SmHgcJS-9Y_1x1yfuozhDLbFdjdJdHdCh0ojIiVDJfVMxGPxXOHqHNTPETjn_SieIAkneAlKYbeN1p535FbksAjHVMLEs9Q

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/papq.12304

https://naturalismnext.blogspot.com/2022/12/why-im-atheist_6.html

https://naturalismnext.substack.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK3jVNbG2-s

https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-moral-knowledge-argument-for?utm_source=publication-search

https://benthams.substack.com/p/against-the-kalam-cosmological-argument?utm_source=publication-search

https://naturalismnext.blogspot.com/2023/03/introduction-note-1-this-post-is.html

>>40515667
It should be a priority

I wish I was smart enough to agree or disagree with any of this

>>40515573 (OP)
Anon in your 'defence' of your hypothetical god you go for (some version) of the christian god/ second abrahamic version.
Why not argue aganist Ra anon? The sun isn't a chariot of fire being pulled across the heavens. Why not defend atheism from the polytheistic view? That takes away the problem evil and all the other issues of a single all knowing all powerful being are solved straight away.
It's because you don't beleive it to be true, you probably think the literally idea of animal headed gods to silly. Atheists view your god the same way. Hell you're an atheist too, but only for every other religion on Earth. Take the final leap anon if 99.9% of sincere faiths across history, cults, lowlest superstions and are total bullshit the 0.01% you beleive in because you were raised that way is bullshit to.

>>40517151
The man who wrote this article isn't a Christian he's just a general theist

I'm no expert but I think polytheism has some serious issues with metaphysics and stuff

>>40515573 (OP)
TLDR

All gods are mythology
All holy books are fictional

War is peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength

Politics is Treachery
Religion is Brainwashing

>>40517268
I'm free to watch porn and I'm addicted to it so I'm a slave but if I lived in an oppressive country where porn is banned then I wouldn't be addicted to porn and enslaved to it and I'd be free
Ban porn
Fuck freedom

and how about the notion of the "unmoved mover"? you've completely ignored this millenia-old question whose affirmation forms the basis of abrahamic theism. what are good arguments for an unmoved mover versus a movement that spans infinity? whichever one is decided on, the notion of priors becomes moot (in the former, god becomes the prior of priors. in the latter, the set of priors reduces to absurdity)

>>40517351
What if the universe always existed

>>40517285
Pfff you don't need to live aywhere "opressive" to have a ban on shit that's basically poison, that's not opression. Law is a thing.
>Fuck freedom
Slave. This is the only thing worth anything, and no government can give it to you.

>>40517401
Give women rights and they'll enslave you.
It's you or them

Didn't read but I wanna offer my 2 cents.
It literally does not matter.
You can decide what you want, ultimately, for the sake of enlightenment, intellectual understanding is not so important. Feeling, sensing, practicing, meditating, are equally important, you can be wrong in one way, and correct in others, and still advance, meaning, you can live your entire life renouncing to understand and argue about whether or not god exists, and you can still reach enlightenment this way.

>>40517377
that would be a rejection of the unmoved mover, a perfectly valid stance in my view

>>40517430
>>40517430
It does matter if an afterlife exists or not because if it doesn't you NEED to get your revenge ASAP if you have nothing to lose like being homeless

>>40515573 (OP)
I'm sorry anon, but all of this is very pseud. It reads like a theistic Lesswrong article or something. I don't even know where to start on this confused mess of presuppositions and assertions.

>>40517523
If you think you know better make your case

>>40517529
I'm a theist, so it's not about "knowing better". It's that both you and the Bentham-whoever have shit premises and no idea what you're talking about. It's the kind of faggotry that can only survive on Substack.

Fundamental or presuppositional truth claims are not probabilistic claims. They can't be, because a probabilistic claim can only be based on a higher probability claim - thus probabilistic priors would create an infinite recursive chain of beliefs, each infinitesimally more probable than the last. Or else some beliefs are either firmly prior or completely circular, which throws your project in the garbage where it belongs.

This all comes from some half educated New Atheist midwit knowing 3 pages of Hume and nothing else about philosophy.

>>40517584
The author is a theist. he's steelmaning atheism
Are you sure you read or understood it?

>>40517593
I'm aware of what he's doing and that the author is a theist. Are you sure you've understood my criticism and applied it to the text?

Too long, didn't finish reading, but I'm glad to see that BB has acquired a sub-personality that is capable of seeing the light.

>>40517940
You think he should go back to being an atheist?

>>40517593
Knowledge of God is beyond the reach of the human intellect. You can't reason your way there, nor can your reason your way out of knowledge of God once you have it. The only role of reason, post gnosis, is in integrating knowledge of God with everything else you think you "know". This can take several years of deep metaphysical thinking, but no Bayesian reasoning is required.

>>40518144
How do I get knowledge of god

If you don't mind writing it out what are your reasons for being a theist OP?

>>40518151
There are many paths to gnosis. The Gospel of Thomas is one. But the secret is only revealed to those who seek earnestly and wholeheartedly.

>"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God"

>>40518186
I haven't been able to

bump

Bump

>>40515573 (OP)
This is what I think it doesn't matter while you're trapped on this plane and its largely inconsequential until you die so why worry also anybody can invent some epic creationism story even in modern day.

>>40523057
It makes a difference because it helps inform you if you should prioritize yourself or others in this life
If an afterlife doesn't exist there's no point in helping others

>>40523451
psychopath

>>40516973
I might actually create something to process it down, software for epistemic gaps is honestly the final value of AI.
>>40516194
Well, it is a low one. I wanted to read it all but this is pages. Thanks for providing the URLs.

>>40527116
I hope gpt can help prove or disprove god

>>40527634
god can still exist even if this meme is true

>>40527891
Bump

Atheists are closer to God than any believer

>>40529847
How am I close to god as an agnostic atheist

>>40530834
You aren't full of generations practiced in hubris

>>40532682
why can't anyone just choose to be humble

>>40533511
The post which made this thread was for exactly this purpose

>>40535826
okay

>>40515750
>Theism predicts a world utterly unlike our own. Naturalism does not. Theism is utterly, massively disconfirmed by almost everything about our world. It’s metaphysically extravagant, extremely immodest, and wildly out of accordance with the evidence. As Mackie remarked, the great miracle of theism is the fact that anyone believes it.

so true

This gets too few replies given how important it is

>>40537151
Yup. My perspective is that, if there is a God who intentionally created us and the universe, the universe seems to indicate that, for whatever reason, God nevertheless wants us to believe that we're in a universe that wasn't created with the love and care of an intelligent, not-totally-evil deity. So he's probably fine with atheism. And theists, on the other hand, will be given a disapproving look in the afterlife for their unwillingness to play along with the "what-if-we-lived-in-a-godless-universe" scenario God was trying to put on for us.

>>40515573 (OP)
I ain’t reading all that, but from the minimal amount I skimmed I’ll say that I hate arguments which seek to impugn the motives of a being which is incomprehensibly powerful and all knowing if he does exist.

That said, I’m an atheist and I don’t believe in a divine entity because there is no worldly evidence for it, and such a being is not logically necessary either. The typical and most often repeated theist argument I hear is that God must exist because something must have created the universe. I think it’s a retarded argument because when put it standard form it looks like this:

1. The universe (i.e. The collection of matter and energy we know and love) exists.

2. Everything that exists must have a beginning (a first mover)

3. Nothing can be the cause of itself
___________________
:. Therefore, a being with no cause (God) must have caused the universe

But rather hilariously, the God referenced in the conclusion is in violation of premise 3 himself which is the premise that kicks off this whole line of argument to begin with. If at least one thing must exist which has no cause then I see no reason not to say that the universe itself is that thing. Why invoke another entity that still has the same issue we’re trying to solve?

I think belief in God is founded in a desire to have him exist. He is philosophically convenient. He makes the things we want, like morality, easy to justify philosophically. Of course, how we could actually know what such a being would want if he did exist is a wholly separate question. And theists will happily admit their own ignorance by claiming that faith, which is definitionally belief without evidence (headcanon), is what allows them to somehow know God and his desires for us.

>>40539732
Reminds me of this https://archive.4plebs.org/x/thread/40405241/

Of our God, the wise can say nothing.

>>40540500
agnostic seems most reasonable to me

>>40515573 (OP)
The existence of god is an irrelevant argument. "God" as an answer for ANYTHING doesn't answer anything. It just moves all the necessary analysis back one layer. For instance, if I ask "How is it that the universe either popped into existence out of nothing, or always existed infinitely with no progenitor event to start the process?", then we have an issue because, logically, one permutation or another of one of those answers MUST be true. But, if you try to answer that by saying "God made the universe", all you've done is redefine the word "universe" to mean "universe + god". All the same questions still exist, just moved back one layer; "How is it that god popped into existence out of nothing, or has always existed with no progenitor occurrence to start the process of his existence?". Again, both answers are straight absurd. "God" answers NOTHING.

It doesn't matter if god exists or not. We live in a universe that is CLEARLY governed by probablistic processes in its deeper systems, and deterministic processes in its macroscopic systems. Nowhere in any of that is there the hallmarks of engineering or PREDICTIVE behavior. The universe's processes on all levels are REACTIONARY to stimulus, not predictive. Whether a god(s) exist or not, there is no agency in play here. We're left to our own devices, to work within the confines of the nature of...well, nature.

To whit, I suggest to you that a god who is not involved is functionally no different from a god who does not exist. God's existence, or not, DOES. NOT. MATTER.

>>40541503
but if god exists then an afterlife exists and that could cause people to live their lives differently

>>40541550
Again, meaningless because nothing about how the universe operates gives us any clue to that business. We have an internal set of rules that, while dynamic, are none the less inviolable outside of very extreme localized circumstances. What I'm saying is, while science wouldn't necessarily be able to measure a supernatural occurrence empirically, because, at least in theory, such an occurrence could operate under an entirely alien set of rules for which we have no metrics to apply, it WOULD none the less stick out like the sorest of thumbs. There would be nothing subtle about supernatural occurrences against the backdrop of either probability or determinism, like a white marble sitting on a black satin sheet.

We don't EVER record these things. EVER. Lots of people make lots of claims. Zero of them ever demonstrate those claims.

Also, you're making a leap in logic here. Just because a god may exist does NOT mean an afterlife exists. For that matter, I can fathom the concept of afterlives that could exist in the absence of deity. One does not intrinsically follow the other, in either direction.

Hypothetically following along, if your claim is that God and an afterlife exists, and one must live one's life in a certain way to achieve that afterlife, then god's doing kind of the worse possible job of making that point clear. Again, ZERO reproducible supernatural occurrences. Z E R O. This is not what a universe in which a god is actively involved looks like...

>>40541612
Should we be good people and try to do the right thing regardless of whether or not god exists but how do we know right from wrong

>>40541644
Some thoughts in no particular order:

- Not one religion in the history of mankind has EVER even one time established a moral precedent that is in any way DEPENDENT on the cosmology of that particular religion. Said another way, no religion has ever made a moral pronouncement that ONLY that religion could make. ALL morality is intrinsically subjective. That may be uncomfortable for you, that would be your problem. Not trying to be a dick about it, but honestly, no one can deal with that but you. Growing up is hard. I'm in my mid 40s and I'm still working on it myself.

- Morality needs no authority to be useful. Empathy is all one needs to come to literally all of the major moral platitudes basically all just cultures adhere to. I know it would harm me materially if someone stole from me, ergo, I won't steal from others because I do not wish them to suffer. Even though there are those who lack empathy, they are far from the majority, and majority-rule is all that is necessary to give even subjective moral codes the authority they need to thrive. No god necessary in any of that equation.

- We learn right from wrong the same way we learn all things. Test, observe, record, retest. Ad nauseam. Until mankind is no longer. There are ZERO instances of 100% tolerance in ANY human endeavor. Nothing is ever known up to an absolute 100% certainty, therefore, no assumptions, no matter how well supported, can ever be assumed to be absolute. There are assumptions that have achieved such a high degree of certitude through rigorous testing that it's unlikely we'll ever have reason to doubt them, but then, never is a dangerous word in a complex universe. Morality is no different. You'll never be absolutely certain of your morals. Indeed, to be moral, it is REQUIRED that you always be active in your examination of yourself, and your actions' effects on your surroundings. I don't think you're going to find any religion that disagrees with that last point, philosophically

>>40541677
Yawn, morale relativism has no basis. Your util arguments are fucked.
Is it morally acceptable to fuck a dead body if noone catches you?
>no assumptions, no matter how well supported, can ever be assumed to be absolute.
Can you know this? - No, just more self-contradictory garbage because you are mid-IQ and brainwashed in government indoctrination by the tiny hats. Don't you know they raised you to hate yourself? Sad. Many such cases.

>>40541695
>Yawn, morale relativism has no basis

I literally just explained how empathy and plurality form the basis of subjective morality. Your illiteracy is not my responsibility.

> Is it morally acceptable to fuck a dead body if noone catches you?

I'm not going to chase your geese for you. I explained how to apply subjective morality. Run the metrics for yourself. My name is anon, not mommy, not google, not ChatGPT. Had you engaged with me with curiosity and intellectual honesty, this conversation would be different. Since you're being a smarmy little git-bitch, die in a house fire.

> Can you know this?

No! Which, while I see that you don't understand this at all, is precisely my point! N O T H I N G can be known as an absolute. N O T H I N G. Ergo, ALL things must be under reexamination for all time to rout out possible exceptions to what we know, to probe the limits of our hypotheses. You aren't making the point you think you are, and the arrogance with which you're failing is juvenile beyond belief. I pity the woman who ruined her pussy to squeeze you out. Perfectly serviceable cooz stretched for nothing.

> Don't you know they raised you to hate yourself? Sad. Many such cases.

Emulating the speech patterns of Donald Trump is a worrying sign of dementia. See? I can be a dismissive prig, too...

Next time, have a point. I don't care about your feelings.

>>40541713
nta but what about utilitarianism

>>40541751

What about it? Express a cogent thought...

>>40541833
Isn't that how moral realism can be true

Wouldn't have replied if I believed OP were relitive

bump

>>40527891
yes. humans use the word God. it's not tied to one religion. and that's why most don't like it. they think the word God is tied to a religion

So wheres this god of yours?

>>40515573 (OP)
I'll pray for you.

>>40545804
thank you

bump

>>40548424
Too much innuendo. Verbally justify your need for attention here

>>40550475
It seems important

>>40515573 (OP)
Atheism is wasting time arguing against something we have no ability to prove or disprove conslussively, and thus a fool's errand; doubting is one thing, going around harassing people for their beliefs is idiotic.

>>40552660
>going around harassing people for their beliefs is idiotic
I'm pretty sure atheism is only an active, argued disbelief mainly because *theists* went around harassing people for their disbelief too much. And theists usually like to pile all manner of other nonsense on top of theism (religion) that influences society in all sorts of (arguably negative) ways. So arguing for atheism serves the valuable purposes of 1) defending it as a viable option against opposition and 2) undercutting the degree to which religious nonsense can influence society.

>>40552660
I want stem cells legalized Christians want it banned
I want slaughterhouses banned and animal rights codified into law Christians don't

>>40552660
>Theism is wasting time arguing for something we have no ability to prove or disprove conclusively, and thus a fool's errand; believing is one thing, going around harassing people for their doubts is idiotic.
Welp. Don't ever use that line again.

>>40515573 (OP)
>I think God exists, created the universe, fine-tuned the constants, made harmonious psychophysical laws, and loves you (yes you!) This is the single most awesome fact about the world!
And reading the first few verses of Genesis is enough to debunk it. The Bible says he organized matter, not created it ex nihilo. Sadly, people like you are too effeminate to care about what ancient texts plainly say.

>>40541695
>moral relativism has no basis
It might shock you to learn that the Bible's authors did not believe in any "objective morals", just the will of God.

>>40555140
Bentham's Bulldog isn't an Abrahamic last I heard. He's purely a philosophical theist, so his ideas aren't constrained by ancient texts.

>>40515573 (OP)
Being religious or not religious isn’t a rational choice but is rather a product of the subconscious assumptions you have about the nature of reality which are a product of your relationship with your environment.

>>40555318
I have no idea what argument you're trying to make and why it's supposed to challenge what I wrote. Perhaps you replied to the wrong poster.

>>40555996
OP's entire series of posts is copy-pasted from Bulldog's substack, so it's Bulldog's opinion, which isn't derived from Genesis.

... and I just realized that you might've said what you said because Genesis is authoritative for you, not because you think Genesis should be authoritative for OP. I suppose that was the mix-up.