The BEST EVER Cumulative Case for God

Sup dogs. Welcome back to the Majesty of Reason. I'm Joe Schmid, a philosophy PhD candidate at Princeton University. And today I'm presenting a comprehensive case for Catholicism. You may have seen my recent video in which I announced my conversion to Catholicism. After losing the faith of my youth and becoming an atheist, I studied these topics for about a decade before giving my life to Christ and his church. My aim here is to take you on a similar journey.

conversion to Catholicism. After losing the faith of my youth and becoming an atheist, I studied these topics for about a decade before giving my life to Christ and his church. My aim here is to take you on a similar journey.

Specifically, my goal is to take you all the way from atheism to Catholicism. I'd encourage you to watch the whole thing, even if you need to break it up into chunks. There's going to be a lot of awesome evidence for theism and Catholicism that you've probably never heard of. And later on, I'll issue a challenge directly to you. So, hear me out because this video might just set you on a beautiful new path.

Catholicism that you've probably never heard of. And later on, I'll issue a challenge directly to you. So, hear me out because this video might just set you on a beautiful new path.

God. All of the To give you a sense of where we're going and what you're in for, here is an overview of our journey together. So, first I'll talk about my Catholic upbringing, after which I will talk about my deconversion from Catholicism and my turn towards atheism. Then I'll talk about my turn towards agnosticism and what induced that. After which I'll talk about my turn towards theism. What sorts of considerations led me to start taking theism a lot more seriously.

and my turn towards atheism. Then I'll talk about my turn towards agnosticism and what induced that. after which I'll talk about my turn towards theism. What sorts of considerations led me to start taking theism a lot more seriously.

After that I'll talk about my shift towards theism. And there I'm going to be giving my comprehensive philosophical case for theism. So that'll be a very substantive and very fun part. After that we get to even stronger evidence for God's existence and for Christianity and for Catholicism than even my philosophical case for theism in part five. There we're going to be talking about miracles and the evidence not just for miracles but for miracles that seem to vindicate distinctive Catholic doctrines. Miracles that only seem to make sense if Catholicism is true. After talking about miracles, I'll go through my biggest objections to Catholicism.

for God's existence and for Christianity and for Catholicism than even my philosophical case for theism in part five. There we're going to be talking about miracles and the evidence not just for miracles but for miracles that seem to vindicate distinctive Catholic

Almost certainly some of your biggest objections to Catholicism too are going to be contained therein. That'll be in part six, barrier removal. After that, I'll just talk about some key realizations that I had throughout my conversion process that ultimately culminated in my conversion. But of course, conversion is not just a change of mind. It is also a change in heart.

Almost certainly some of your biggest objections to Catholicism too are going to be contained therein. That'll be in part six, barrier removal. After that, I'll just talk about some key realizations that I had throughout my conversion process that ultimately

So, in part eight, I will be talking about the various factors about Catholicism and Christianity that kind of resonated with me on an existential level. The sorts of considerations that led my heart to change and not just my mind to change. In part nine, I will relatively briefly talk about the metanoia, the complete turning, the complete 180, my conversion itself.

So, in part eight, I will be talking about the various factors about Catholicism and Christianity that kind of resonated with me on an existential level. The sorts of considerations that led my heart to change and not just my

In part 10, I will give my challenge to you. And finally, in part 11, I shall conclude. Okay, y'all. This is Joe post-recording. It turns out I recorded the entire comprehensive case video, and it was 25 hours long. So, what that means is that I've got to break it down into three separate videos. So that outline that I just went through, that's not going to be the outline of this particular video. The outline of this particular video is just going to be my comprehensive cumulative case for God's existence from philosophy alone. So I'll be going through the Catholic upbringing, my deconversion, my turn toward agnosticism, and then my shift towards theism. And so this will just be the comprehensive case for theism.

In part 10, I will give my challenge to you. And finally, in part 11, I shall conclude. Okay, y'all. This is Joe postrecording. It turns out I recorded the entire comprehensive case video, and it was 25 hours long. So, what that

This is my natural theology part of my comprehensive case. That's going to be in this video. My second video, which should be coming out tomorrow, is going to be my comprehensive case for the Catholic miracles. It's going to be around 11 hours, and I'm just going to systematically comb through all the miracles and the vindicatory implications thereof. So, that's a second video in this comprehensive case.

comprehensive cumulative case for God's existence from philosophy alone. So I'll be going through the Catholic upbringing, my decon conversion, my turn toward agnosticism, and then my shift towards theism. And so this will just be the the comprehensive case for theism.

And then the third video, which should hopefully come out by Friday, is just going to be me going through firstly alternative explanations of the miraculous data and explaining why they don't work. So, I'll look at demonic explanations that some Protestants proffer. I'll look at some kind of accommodationist approaches, appeals to a selection effect, and various other putative explanations that ultimately fail. And then I'll just go through all the different barriers that I had to Catholicism like hell and my moral problems and my magisterial problems and my theological problems and various other problems. I'll then go through some key realizations that I had and then the existential resonance, my actual conversion, my challenge to you guys that I'll be issuing. And then finally, I will conclude in that third video. So, this is going to be a three-video series and that means the burden's on you guys to share the videos with everyone. Now, before we embark on our journey, note that I put together a comprehensive resource document containing links to papers and books and videos and articles and some of my own notes on the arguments I'll be covering in this video. Definitely check the link in the description and pinned comment to that document that'll contain ample links to resources that explain and defend in more detail parts of the video. Trust me, check it out. Oh, and of course, patrons have access to my videos over 300-page long script. So, if you'd like that or if you'd like to support my work, my Patreon is in the description. Thank you from my certified grifter heart.

around 11 hours, and I'm just going to systematically comb through all the miracles and the vindicatory implications thereof. So, that's a second video in this comprehensive case.

So, I grew up devoutly Catholic. I was totally on board with the faith. I prayed very regularly. I read the Bible. I frequented the sacraments. I had theology classes almost every day at Catholic school. My dad played Catholic radio every day on the rides to and from school. And I've been extensively debating people online about ethics and theology and philosophy ever since I got my iPod touch in fourth grade. I was totally locked in, as the youths say. But when I learned about evolution in seventh or eighth grade at my Catholic school, I started to wonder how it was compatible with Catholicism. Catholics seem committed to some primordial fall by which our first parents disobeyed God, lost friendship with him, and passed on various effects of that fall to the subsequent generations. For some time, I was struggling to coherently combine these views with a historical picture given to us by science. Soon enough, though, I was introduced to several reasonable models for harmonizing the truths of faith and science. Thanks to the BioLogos Institute and Francis Collins, I learned about theistic evolution. The view that God used the evolutionary process to create biological diversity in general and humans in particular, there are different models for understanding Adam and Eve.

profer. I'll look at some kind of accommodationist approaches, appeals to a selection effect, and various other puditive explanations that ultimately fail. And then I'll just go through all the different barriers that I had to Catholicism like hell and my moral

For instance, maybe God chose two of our ancestral organisms within a larger population and specially infused them with rational immortal souls enjoying various supernatural gifts or graces. And there are lots of other more liberal proposals to boot. But all in all, I had survived the first wobble in my faith. I could see reasonable ways to maintain both evolution and Catholicism, but that survival didn't last very long.

finally, I will conclude in that third video. So, this is going to be a three video series and that means the burden's on you guys to share the videos with everyone. Now, before we embark on our journey, note that I put together a

Near the end of my freshman year in high school, my faith began to deteriorate. I started reflecting more deeply on the evolutionary process and its brutality really troubled me. For hundreds of millions of years, animals have been ripping each other to shreds in predation, parasitizing one another, and languishing from starvation, dehydration, disease, and natural disaster. It seemed like the very mechanism, the very engine of God's creative process was eons upon eons of suffering and death and languishing on the part of innocent animals.

links to resources that explain and defend in more detail parts of the video. Trust me, check it out. Oh, and of course, patrons have access to my videos over 300page long script. So, if you'd like that or if you'd like to

Animals who didn't deserve that suffering, many of whom didn't seem to benefit from it, at least at first glance, and where God easily could have created through much less gruesome means. How could this be the creative choice of a perfectly good, perf...

So, I grew up devoutly Catholic. I was totally on board with the faith. I prayed very regularly. I read the Bible.

I frequented the sacraments. I had theology classes almost every day at Catholic school. My dad played Catholic radio every day on the rides to and from school. And I've been extensively debating people online about ethics and theology and philosophy ever since I got

my iPod touch in fourth grade. I was uh totally locked in as the youths say. But when I learned about evolution in seventh or eighth grade at my Catholic school, I started to wonder how it was compatible with Catholicism. Catholics

seem committed to some primordial fall by which our first parents disobeyed God, lost friendship with him, and passed on various effects of that fall to the subsequent generations. For some time, I was struggling to coherently combine these views with a historical

picture given to us by science. Soon enough, though, I was introduced to several reasonable models for harmonizing the truths of faith and science. Thanks to the Bologos Institute and Francis Collins, I learned about theistic evolution. The view that God

used the evolutionary process to create biological diversity in general and humans in particular, there different models for understanding Adam and Eve.

For instance, maybe God chose two of our ancestral organisms within a larger population and specially infused them with rational immortal souls enjoying various supernatural gifts or graces.

And there are lots of other more liberal proposals to boot. Um, but all in all, I had survived the first wobble in my faith. I could see reasonable ways to maintain both evolution and Catholicism, but that survival didn't last very long.

Near the end of my freshman year in high school, my faith began to deteriorate. I started reflecting more deeply on the evolutionary process and its brutality really troubled me. For hundreds of millions of years, animals have been ripping each other to shreds and

predation, parasetizing one another and languishing from starvation, dehydration, disease, and natural disaster. It seemed like the very mechanism, the very engine of God's creative process was eons upon eons of suffering and death and languishing on the part of innocent animals. animals

who didn't deserve that suffering, many of whom didn't seem to benefit from it, at least at first glance, and where God easily could have created through much less gruesome means. How could this be the creative choice of a perfectly good,

perfectly loving, all powerful God, I wondered. At the time, I didn't find satisfactory answers, and the data here seemed much better explained by naturalism or naturalistic atheism, the view that the natural world is all that exists. And fundamentally or ultimately,

it's purposeless. As Richard Dawkins puts it, there is at bottom no design, no purpose, nothing but blind, pitiles indifference. If naturalism is true, ultimate reality is not aimed or directed towards any end or goal. And so, in particular, it doesn't care about

the flourishing and languishing of sensient creatures, making it seem to me unsurprising that reality would basically be a bloodbath. By contrast, that seemed way more surprising to me if theism is true and there's a perfectly good God providentially orchestrating

reality. Evolutionary animal suffering then seemed to me at the time at least to be very strong evidence for atheism.

So the problem of evolutionary animal suffering deeply disturbed my faith. And soon enough I was just voraciously consuming articles and books and videos and blogs and podcasts about God's existence and religion and everything in that neighborhood. I came across Sam

Harris and Richard Dawkins who emphasized the disorienting contingency in my religious beliefs, right? Like had I been born a few blocks down, I would have been Protestant and had I been born in Saudi Arabia, I would have been a

Muslim. You know, I started to think that I didn't have particularly good grounds to accept Catholicism.

I graduated from the New Atheists in sophomore year after watching a debate between Frank Turk and Jeff Louderder on God's existence. I was impressed at the time with Jeff Louderder's case for naturalistic atheism which mainly drew inspiration from the work of Paul Draper

who was actually one of my letter writers from grad school as I got to study under him in college. I love you so much Paul. So I then read a bunch of Draper stuff uh in high school. I

listened to a lot of philosophy podcasts and soon enough the problems for theism and Catholicism were mounting. I worried about the problem of evil more generally. You know, if God exists, why is there so much seemingly pointless suffering and evil in the world? Why is

there such horrendous suffering and atrocious evil like the Holocaust or torture chambers or a fawn being burned to death in a forest fire? And why does the distribution of suffering seem kind of random? I worried about the problem

of religious confusion. If God exists, why is there massive religious diversity and confusion, especially if God wants a relationship with us? The world contains thousands of religions with competing claims about God's existence, nature, character, desires for our lives and the

appropriate ways of relating to God and achieving salvation. God seemed inept at conveying matters of dire and eternal significance. Relatedly, I worried about divine hiddenness. I and others seemed open to God's existence. We didn't seem resistant to God, and we didn't seem

culpable for being persuaded by the various arguments for atheism. But if God is perfectly loving, he'd want a personal relationship with his beloved creatures. And so, he would ensure that there's no one who doesn't meet the necessary conditions for a relationship

with him through no fault of their own. But then we would expect God to ensure that there are no non-resistant or non-culpable non-believers. But it seemed to me like there were at least some people like that. During this

process, I also lost most of my positive grounds for thinking God exists. It didn't seem like we needed God to explain anything and it seemed simpler to do away with God in our theorizing about the world. And finally, I started

to accumulate difficulties for Christianity specifically. You know, apparent contradictions in the Bible, seeming atrocities in the Old Testament like genocide and slavery and so on and so on and and so on, etc., right?

I put all my research and argumentation about this stuff in a Google doc that I worked on near the end of nth grade and throughout 10th grade which I still have by the way. Um near the end of 10th

grade it was 456 pages long. Uh suffice it to say that uh by the end of this process after accumulating all these objections and losing my grounds for belief I lost my faith in Catholicism and at some point around the end of 10th

grade I became a naturalistic atheist. I thought God didn't exist and that the cosmos was all that ever was, is, and will be. I thought this view made the best sense of the evidence. The world seemed too cruel, indifferent, and

arbitrary to be the product of a perfectly good, all powerful, all- knowing being. Religions seemed like socioultural byproducts, burped up for evolutionary reasons and maintained by indoctrination and the need for belonging, community, and social cohesion. Religious texts felt all too

human, and the world didn't look anything like I would expect a perfect being to make. It looked at bottom blind, pitiles, and indifferent.

But in the summer before my senior year of high school, things started to change. I stumbled across a YouTube channel called Worldview Design and watched a few of its videos. I was fascinated by what I found. I mean, the

creator was like forwarding genuinely novel arguments for God's existence, defending them exceptionally well, anticipating my objections in the videos and cogently but lovingly responding to them. I mean, I mean, I landed on a gold mine, it seems. After binge watching his

videos for a couple days, I formulated several objections to the arguments contained therein. And, you know, I figured that the creator might be willing to talk about them. So, I decided to send him an email. And as you

can see on screen, this is the actual email that I sent him with my old email account naturalistically inclined. So you can see my views at the time.

Wow, look at that date. Summer of 2018. Wow. Hello, Dr. Rasmmanson. Oh yes, indeed. Oh yes.

I have spent the last two days binge watch. See, you guys, I'm not lying to you. I still I got the receipts. I spent I spent the last two days binge watching your YouTube channel videos and I found

them very valuable and provocative. That being said, I have some, you know, questions regarding some of your work and I really hope you can answer them or provide some clarity for me. Okay. So, you know, what followed were several

detailed paragraphs outlining my central misgivings for the arguments Josh presented on his channel. And to my delight, I soon received Josh's extensive and modest answers to my various questions. Naturally enough, I had follow-up questions, and Josh had follow-up answers. And by the end of the

year, we were just extensively corresponding on a very regular basis. He introduced me to his book, Necessary Existence with Alex Puce, which in turn introduced me to Alex Puce's work more generally, and Alex was just like a huge

intellectual influence on me. You know, I read his book on the principle of sufficient reason. I read his book about the metaphysics of modality. I read his book on infinity paradoxes. I I I basically couldn't get enough of of his

work. Josh was also starting to make appearances on capturing Christianity and other channels. And so, you know, I was definitely keeping up with YouTube philosophy religion during this time as well. And, you know, combing through all this material by Puce and Rasmuson in my

senior year, it kind of just like awakened me from my dogmatic naturalist slumbers, I started to find their arguments for a foundational or ultimate or fundamental necessarily existing being quite compelling. You can learn more about these in my contingency

arguments playlist as I continued to be sympathetic with them past high school and of course still now. But here's a basic simplified version of one of their contingency arguments. A contingent thing is something that can fail to exist. It doesn't have to be in reality.

There's some possible way that reality could be such that it doesn't exist. So for instance, you and me are contingent things, right? Like had our parents never met, we wouldn't have existed. My water bottle is a contingent thing. You

know, it's not like my water bottle must exist. In fact, there was a time when it didn't exist and it'll eventually be destroyed. Contrast these with something like, you know, 1 plus 1 equals 2. This is a necessary truth. It couldn't fail

to be true. It must be true. There's no possible world in which it's false. In which, you know, 1 plus 1 equals like 7,812.

In other words, there's no comprehensive way that reality could be such that that claim is false. Likewise, a necessarily existing thing or a necessary thing is something that cannot fail to exist.

It's its non-existence is impossible. It must be in reality. You can think of it as something whose nature almost like demands that it exist. Just like the very nature of the number one and addition and equality guarantees or

demands that 1 plus 1 equals 2. Well, for any contingent things, it seems plausible that there is an explanation of their existence. You know, suppose you and a friend are hiking in the forest and come across a group of shiny

spheres on the ground. Naturally, you'd wonder how they came to be there. If your friend said, "Well, hey, like, listen, there's no reason or explanation for why they're here. You know, their existence is just an unexplained or brute fact. Like, you just stop

wondering. Like, they just are. They just exist." I mean, if he said that, you you'd probably think that, you know, he's lost the plot or, you know, he's pulling a trick or he's gone insane or something, right? Like, it seems like

their existence needs explaining. They didn't have to exist, and they certainly didn't have to be in the forest or be shiny or be spherical or have that exact size. It seems like these facts need explanation. And that spheres would

still need explanation if they were larger, for example, the size of a stadium or even the size of the whole universe. In fact, they'd call out for explanation even more if they were like that. And even if they were produced by

earlier shiny spheres, we would be left none the wiser since we would rightly wonder where those spheres came from.

Even an infinite regress of shiny spheres replicating for all eternity wouldn't remove the need for explanation since the whole infinite series of shiny spheres would call out for explanation, right? Like why is there that series when there easily could have been a

different series of dole spheres or shiny cubes or marshmallows or no infinite series at all? So positing that the shiny spheres are the size of the universe or produce each other one after another for all eternity doesn't seem to

remove the need for an explanation of their existence. And there doesn't seem to be a relevant difference between the spheres and other sorts of contingent things that could account for why the former but not the latter need explanation. Plausibly then for any

contingent things there's an explanation for their existence. And this makes intuitive sense, you know, like both the existence and non-existence of a given contingent thing or plurality of contingent things are real genuine possibilities. And yet only one of those

genuine possibilities is actual as opposed to the other. And that seems to demand some account, some reason as to why it does exist when reality easily could have been such that it didn't.

This explanatory principle is also just like abundantly confirmed by our universal experience, right? Like when we encounter contingent things in our experience, every which way we look, they uniformly have explanations, including quantum particles that indeterministically fluctuate into existence in a law governed way from

causally prior conditions. And this offers strong inductive support for the principle too. And you know, just more generally, the principle just very nicely accounts for our observations.

You know, like if this explanatory principle is false, like why on earth do we consistently and repeatedly find that contingent things have explanations and never stumble across violations of the principle? Like if contingent things really could exist without any deeper

explanation, why don't we witness chaos? Like like bunches of photons, say popping into existence inexplicably on my front porch or all manner of contingent chaos inexplicably existing from eternity past. The explanatory principle provides a nice account of why

inexplicable chaos doesn't pervade reality which otherwise seem to me to be a mystery. Flusters like Alex Puce and Rob Coons have also argued that denying the explanatory principle has disastrous skeptical implications that undermine our empirical knowledge. Uh, one reason

beyond those they give uh is that you know if it really were a live possibility that contingent things exist inexplicably then it would also be a live possibility that inexplicably there exist universes causally disconnected from our own which are filled with

brains that duplicate your brain structure and dynamics for a very short period of time before fizzling out of existence. But if that's a live possibility, then it's a live possibility we have no empirical knowledge and no knowledge of the

future, which is absurd. Because if it's a live possibility that a large proportion of observers who are indistinguishable from you from a first-p person perspective are radically deceived, then that would just undermine your knowledge of the empirical world.

But of course, we do have lots of knowledge of the empirical world. So it can't be a live possibility that contingent things exist inexplicably.

And in that case we can be highly confident that the explanatory principle behind the contingency argument is true.

Now there are lots of other arguments for the explanatory principle besides you know you can see the books and papers on screen for more and together the arguments made it really plausible to me that contingent things both individuals and groups thereof have

explanations. But considering all the contingent things that exist if there's an explanation of their existence it seemed that some necessary thing must exist.

After all, nothing contingent could explain why anything contingent exists. It would invoke as part of our explanation the very thing for which we're seeking an explanation to begin with. It would be like appealing to a penguin to explain why all the penguins

exist. Like no, like that fails to explain why all the penguins exist since it simply assumes rather than explains the existence of the penguin cited in the explanation. From these premises, it follows that some necessary thing exists which explains contingent things. So

that's the first stage of reasoning of a simplified form of one of Puce and Rasmuson's arguments. They have lots of other contingency arguments with more modest premises that introduce possibility operators and use modal logic. And I also found those super

interesting and quite reasonable too. But even if there's a necessary thing which explains contingent things, it doesn't follow that such a thing is God.

That's where the second stage of contingency arguments comes in, which tries to identify such a thing with God.

In high school and college, I found the second stage reasoning interesting and thoughtprovoking, but ultimately not fully convincing. Still, I could see some plausibility to it. So, it was getting harder to maintain my confident naturalism. I could see why people think

the necessary thing would have to be non-physical or immaterial, right? Like physical and material things seem contingent and no physical thing seems relevantly dissimilar to contingent physical things that could account for why one would be necessary while the

others are contingent. I could see why one should posit only one necessary entity since that's much simpler and less arbitrary than other numbers and only one seems needed to explain contingency. And while I wasn't fully convinced at the time, I could

definitely see where Josh was coming from when he argued that the necessary thing would be unlimited in value.

According to Josh, it had at least some value given that it has various valuable powers to produce lots of good things.

And any finite cutoff in value would seem to be an arbitrary unexplained cutoff. That alone seemed somewhat problematic. But it also just seems problematic to posit brute unexplained necessary features of things, especially ones that seem highly arbitrary and

could conceivably be different in hordes of ways. The same reasoning would motivate thinking this reality has unlimited power, too. I mean, after all, it has some power. You know, it made contingent things after all. And a finite arbitrary cut off in power seemed

problematic for the reasons already noted. More generally, it just didn't seem plausible that the necessary foundation could be say, you know, like a turtle or the shape of a Disney princess or a football. Like all these things have arbitrary seeming limits in

shape and size and location and duration and power and whatnot. But arbitrary limits like that seem to call out for deeper explanation. Like why does the limit have that value? Like why that shape or size? Why that precise duration

or location? And if arbitrary limits have further explanations, then the basic attributes of this necessary foundation precisely because they have no further explanation because this is the ultimate explanatory stopping point of reality must be unlimited. And this meshes far better with theism than

standard alternative hypothesis as theism posits a being of unlimited perfection at the foundation of reality.

And there are still other reasons for thinking the necessary foundation is God. You know, like given that this foundation necessarily exists and is the ultimate source of contingency in the actual world, it's very natural to think that in any other possible world

contingent things, it would also be the source of contingency therein. Especially if we grant that contingent things in any world have an explanation and there's only one necessary foundational thing. But then the foundation not only necessarily exists, but is necessarily the ultimate source

of every contingent thing. That alone rules out most views incompatible with God's existence and is exceptionally well predicted by theism. What's more, if this foundation has the ability to bring about any possible state of affairs, that's at least very good

evidence of omnipotence. I also had sympathies with combining stage one of the contingency argument with an inference to the best explanation of various observed features of the cosmos, as you can see in my devil's advocate debate on capturing Christianity from

2020. The second reason is that um this immaterial non-physical necessary being is what is explaining the wonderful world of contingent things we find ourselves in. In itself, this is a core tenate of theism. But more importantly, given that the world is intelligible,

orderly regular consistent rationally investigable and contains massive amounts of stunning beauty, we have reason to think that this non-physical necessary being that accounts for such a world is more like a craftsman or an artist than some impersonal chancy

process. The inference can in fact be put in basian terms. On the craftsman hypothesis, the type of contingent world we see is expected or at least not very improbable. Uh but under the negation of the craftsman hypothesis, it's quite

unexpected. So all in all, I felt some pressure to accept that there was a single necessarily existing non-physical immaterial foundational entity with unlimited value and unlimited power which is the ultimate source of contingency not only in this world but

in any world in which contingency exists and which may very well be intelligent and might even be perfect. Again, at the time in high school while I was coming across this stuff and, you know, early on in college, I wasn't fully convinced

by this stage 2 reasoning, but I thought there's like a decent chance that these or other stage two arguments worked. And that admission naturally pushed me to take theism a lot more seriously to the point that it was starting to become a

live option again and not something I could confidently rule out. Other new arguments for theism that I came across had this effect on me as well. For example, in his 2018 book, Alexander Prof developed various arguments for causal finitism, the view that nothing

can have infinitely many causes, which pretty swiftly delivers the conclusion that there's a first cause, after which we can run various stage two arguments for thinking that such a cause is God.

Rob Coons was also working on arguments to the same effect, and Josh Rasmmanson has made further developments since. We have here the three gigachads of new theism. There's multiple other gigachads to add to the list, but those will come

on later. to take just one example of some of these new and interesting arguments that I was coming across. Um, Kun and Rasmmanson argued that infinite causal regresses lead to viciously circular explanations. If we imagine for example an infinite regress of

alternating black and white dominoes knocking each other over, we might find it plausible that the explanation for why there are fallen white dominoes is that the black dominoes fell and knocked them over, right? And yet the explanation moreover for why there are

fallen black dominoes is that the white dominoes fell and knocked them over. But then the falling of white dominoes at least partially explains itself, right?

Because it partially explains why the black dominoes fell, which in turn partially explains why the white dominoes fell. And it seems like explanation is transitive. In other words, if A explains B and B explains C, then A explains C. But then the falling

of white dominoes at least partly explains itself which is absurd. And this viciously circular explanatory structure is shared by any infinite causal regress since we can imagine labeling the alternative nodes of the regress with black and white labels and

you know the white nodes will partially explain the black nodes which will partially explain the white nodes. So again like late in high school early college I was starting to see reasons for thinking there's some first cause.

Again, I wasn't fully convinced of stage two of these arguments at the time, which tries to identify the first cause with God or anything like that. But again, I thought that there were some reasons for identifying the first cause

with God, which had to be weighed against my reasons for thinking that no God exists. I also read Puce's book on modality, and therein he made a reasonable case that a distinctively theistic account of metaphysical modality has lots of advantages over

rival theories of metaphysical modality. And so my reasons for theism were really starting to mount.

Of course, you know, there were lots of other arguments for theism that started weighing on my mind. For instance, in my why am I agnostic video, I covered both an opori fine-tuning argument as well as an argument from moral knowledge for

theism that kind of pulled on me at the time. But I'll talk more about these in the next part of the video since, you know, a greater appreciation of their force in grad school played a role in my

shift towards theism. And again, right now, recall, we're only talking about the considerations that pushed me towards agnosticism from a state of naturalistic atheism.

And importantly, it wasn't just the first order arguments that decreased my confidence in atheism. It was also the fact that I literally stumbled upon like a halfozen arguments for theism that I had never come across, that lots of

professional philosophers and scientists were rigorously defending, and that I found reasonable. And this indicated that I hadn't taken into account lots of pieces of evidence that bear on the question of God's existence. And so I was premature in judging that God didn't

exist. I was also extensively interacting with theists who are obviously much smarter and more well read than me. Indeed, these were esteemed professional philosophers who could eat my arguments for lunch. So I figured that maybe they're seeing something that I'm not. These higher

order realizations solidified my turn to agnosticism. I could no longer confidently maintain that God does not exist. Partly because there were reasonably plausible arguments for theism that started pulling on my mind.

Partly because I realized I had prematurely judged the question of God's existence without taking into account vast swaths of potential evidence. I mean, like, after all, there was this whole world of arguments and considerations that I was previously

completely unaware of. And partly because I was interacting with brilliant theist scholars who might be seeing something I'm not. These considerations percolated in my mind throughout senior year of high school. And by the beginning of freshman year in college, I

was thoroughly agnostic. In other words, I suspended judgment on whether God exists. I neither believed God exists nor believed God does not exist. I thought the evidence was roughly counterbalanced, or at least it was too unclear to tell which way it pointed.

I remained agnostic throughout college and my first year of grad school, and for reference, I'm about to begin my fourth year in the fall. Near the end of my first year of grad school though, I started coming across some thorns in my

side. So, three things prompted me to start reconsidering theism, and boy, they nagged at me. First, I started to lose my major objections to the standard fine-tuning argument for God's existence. Second, I was introduced to the argument from psychophysical

harmony, which noded at me for a very long time before I eventually relented. And finally, I was introduced to some empirical evidence for supernatural phenomena that I just didn't have a satisfactory atheistic explanation of.

And while this section comprises my comprehensive philosophical case for theism, even if you're not convinced by anything in this section, the miraculous case alone should convince you both that God exists and that Catholicism is true.

So my case for Catholicism doesn't ultimately stand or fall on the merits of my philosophical arguments. So don't worry too much if you come away from my philosophical case for theism unconvinced. Uh, it's still important though because seeing a robust case for

theism can make you more receptive to the miraculous evidence. And I do indeed think that the philosophical case for theism is exceptionally robust. But anyway, these three prompings kickstarted a renewed inquiry into theism around the end of my first year

of grad school. And the main fruit of that inquiry was a serious shift towards theism. So, allow me to walk you through what I discovered over the next year or two. And again, definitely check out the resource document in the description and

pin comment for more on these discoveries. Yes, I know you're cringing and I I revel in your cringe. I love your cringe. I embrace the cringe. I am the cringe. So, here's like here Okay, so here's like my master argument that I'm

going to be defending in this section. I eventually realized that theism is a reasonably simple, non-arbitrary, coherent, and elegant hypothesis that offers a unifying explanation of a vast and diverse array of otherwise highly striking data. There is a lot of

evidence for theism from its ability to explain or predict suspiciously fortunate facts about the universe.

Facts that other hypotheses only explain peace meal or take to be brute lucky coincidences.

And if there's a lot of evidence for something, it's very likely true unless it's super improbable prior to taking the evidence into account. But theism isn't like that since it can be relatively compactly stated in fundamental or joint carving terms. It's

highly uniform and non-arbitrary and its various claims fit together or cohhere quite well. These features of simplicity non-arbitrariness uniformity, and coherence make theism a credible contender for the true worldview before taking evidence into account. In which case, theism is very

probably true if it does much better than its competitors in unifying a large constellation of otherwise remarkably striking data. And it does. Okay, so that in a nutshell is what convinced me of theism. But if you want this master

argument in premise by premise form, it's something like this. Premise one, theism is not very improbable prior to taking into account any empirical evidence. Premise two, theism predicts the data much better than atheism. Premise three, if theism is not very improbable prior to taking

into account any empirical evidence and predicts the data far better than atheism, then theism is probably true.

This follows from BA theorem, which we needn't get into. If you want to learn more about it, you can watch my video here. But from those three premises, it follows that theism is probably true.

And you know like depending on how much better it predicts the evidence and how like the extent to which there's a disparity in the prior probabilities the probabilities prior to taking into account the empirical evidence like it'll get the conclusion that theism is

very very probably true. That's kind of the conclusion that I'm going to be going for in what follows. By the way, this is actually the central argument of a new book that I'm currently co-authoring with Brian Cutter, Dustin

Kummit, Philip Swenson, Matthew Adelstein, and Amos Woolen. It's tentatively titled God, an argument, and we're going to be giving the best comprehensive case for theism on the planet. Well, okay, the best comprehensive case after my current video, you know, cuz this video is

clearly the best on the planet. So, in fact, the following defense of the first premise draws from a part that I co-authored with Brian Cutter. So, I'm going to shout out Brian Cutter and give him a lot of credit for what's contained

in the following. So, let's look at the first premise in more detail. According to this premise, theism is not very improbable prior to taking into account any empirical evidence. In other words, theism's intrinsic probability or prior is not very low. The intrinsic

probability of a hypothesis or its prior is its probability independently of any empirical evidence or before taking any empirical evidence into account.

But why do we even need to attend to theism's intrinsic probability to begin with, right? Like why can't we just look at the evidence? Well, consider the following two hypotheses.

Hypothesis one is spatial uniformity. The basic physical laws that govern the behavior of matter, you know, like massive bodies attract, like charged particles repel, etc. These these basic physical laws that govern the behavior of matter hold all throughout the

universe. Compare that with the second hypothesis. We can call that anomalous patch. Those basic physical laws hold everywhere except for one tiny anomalous patch where for no reason at all the usual laws are suspended and that obeys a

completely different set of rules. So those are two hypotheses that we should consider. Now most would agree that it's more reasonable to accept the first theory than the second. But our scientific evidence is about equally good for both. Right? If there's just

one tiny patch, minuscule patch governed by different equations, then it's astronomically unlikely that we would have found it. So the two theories predict our observations about equally well. If we really are justified in thinking spatial uniformity is much more

probable than anomalous patch, then there must be something about the former hypothesis that makes it more probable in itself. In other words, spatial uniformity's advantage is primarily due to a higher prior probability before taking into account any empirical

evidence. The same can be seen through the examples of these two hypotheses. Temporal uniformity says that the fundamental laws of nature hold at all times. And then the second hypothesis here is induction failure. That says that the fundamental laws of nature hold

all the way up until 2050 and then for no reason stop holding at some point in 2050.

Again, both of these hypotheses predict our data equally well. And yet, we all recognize that temporal uniformity is far more likely than induction failure.

So, there must be something about temporal uniformity that makes it more likely independently of the empirical evidence. Something gives temporal uniformity a greater intrinsic probability or prior. And notice that even if there's lots of evidence and notice that even though there's lots of

evidence for induction failure, you know, because it like predicts our predicts the data that we currently have pretty well, it still doesn't warrant our belief since it's just too prohibitively improbable from the get- go. And this shows that we need to

attend to theism's intrinsic probability if we want to mount an evidential case for theism, since even if we have a lot of evidence for something, that won't matter if it's prohibitively improbable from the get-go. So we need to attend to

various factors that affect the intrinsic probability of a hypothesis. One factor is modesty. A hypothesis is modest to the extent that it's unspecific or true in a wide range of possible scenarios. For example, the claim that someone died is more modest

than the claim that Ethan Muse died, which is more modest than the claim that Ethan Muse was murdered, which is more modest still than the claim that Ethan Muse was murdered after 8 a.m. mass by a Fatima skeptic.

Another factor is simplicity. Prior should encode a preference for simpler theories. Most philosophers agree that simplicity has something to do with how many fundamental that is unexplained kinds of entities the theory posits and also something to do with the

elegance or brevity of the theory's basic laws or principles. The preference for simpler theories is a standard diagnosis of what's wrong with conspiracy theories. Right? Like to fit all the data, the conspiracy theory needs to get extremely complicated and

this complexity makes it less probable. Curve fitting is another example. Suppose the observed data approximately fit the hypothesis that Y is a simple linear function of X. Scientists will typically prefer the linear model to a more complicated model that zigs and

zags to hit every data point. The latter theory might achieve an even better fit with the data, but it has extra parameters that make it more complex, and this complexity makes it less probable.

Return also to our examples of spatial uniformity and anomalous patch. We saw that spatial uniformity, the hypothesis that the same physical equations hold throughout the universe, has a higher intrinsic probability than the theory that those equations hold everywhere

except for one small anomalous patch. Plausibly, that's because the uniform hypothesis is simpler in some sense. The relevant kind of simplicity has to do with how succinctly one can completely describe the fundamental elements of the theory. And again, by the way, like the

fundamental elements of a theory are those taken as given by the theory rather than explained by other elements of it.

Describing physics on the uniform theory requires just one set of physical equations. But describing physics on the anomalous patch theory requires describing the set of laws posited by the uniform theory plus another set of laws describing the patterns in the

special patch plus a specification of which laws govern which parts of space. This kind of simplicity might be called compressibility. Now the anomalous patch world is harder to compactly describe without information loss.

Notice also that the spatial uniformity hypothesis is far less modest than the anomalous patch hypothesis since there are many many many more ways that the latter could be true than that the former could be true. Right? Like there's only one way that the spatial

uniformity hypothesis can be true. Namely, the relevant set of equations hold everywhere. Whereas there's an infinite number of ways the anomalous patch hypothesis could be true. One for every candidate location of the anomalous region. And this shows that an advantage with

respect to simplicity can overcome a disadvantage with respect to modesty. And the same is true of temporal uniformity and induction failure. Right?

There's only one way for the laws of physics to hold at all times. But infinitely many ways for the laws of physics to randomly stop at some time in 2050. Like they could conceivably stop 1 second past New Year's or 1.1 seconds

past New Year's or 1.11 seconds past New Year's and so on. Add infinitum. Yet the temporal uniformity hypothesis is overwhelmingly more probable than the induction failure hypothesis.

Hypothesis which posit fundamental uniformities just massively mog hypotheses which posit limits or breaks in those uniformities.

Another related factor that may account for spatial uniformities higher intrinsic probability is that it does a better job of minimizing unexplained arbitrariness.

If there were a small patch where the usual physical equations break down, we would naturally expect some kind of explanation for the anomaly. If instead they just arbitrarily failed to hold under a hypothesis, that detracts from the intrinsic plausibility of the

hypothesis. And this point is illustrated in science with inverse square laws. Right? Like for hundreds of years, scientists justifiably held that the gravitational attraction between two bodies was inversely proportional to the square of their distance rather than their distance to the power of say

2.0000. 00000000000000000000129. Even though both of those hypotheses, you know, with enough zeros, both of those hypotheses fit the observational data equally well. Both two exactly and 2.00129 are equally precise and equally modest.

And yet an inverse square law is plausibly much more intrinsically probable because much less arbitrary than an inverse 2.0000129 law. Similar points apply to the speed of light. Before we had any empirical evidence about its speed, scientists assumed that it was infinite, which is

distinctly non-arbitrary in a way that finite cutoffs aren't leading to a bias in the priors for the infinite value. A final factor affecting the intrinsic probability of a hypothesis is coherence which is which is roughly how well the

various parts or entailments of hypothesis fit together. A hypothesis is more coherent to the extent that the propositions that follow from it support each other. And a hypothesis is less coherent to the extent that the propositions that follow from it

disisconfirm or count against each other. All else being equal, more coherent hypotheses are more probable than less coherent hypotheses.

Note that coherence comes in degrees. A maximally incoherent hypothesis is one that's you know like logically inconsistent or contradicts other things we can know a priori from the armchair independently of sense experience. But other hypotheses suffer from a degree of

incoherence even though they're not maximally incoherent. For example, a theory which says that Jones is generally very honest and reputable and stole $1,000 worth of veggie burgers from the local eery suffers from some incoherence and is therefore quite intrinsically

improbable. After all, the fact that Jones is very honest and reputable makes it very unlikely that he would commit such a heinous unforgivable crime. And you know, it's not just a crime. And you know, it's not just and you know, the

unforgivable crime here is is not just stealing $1,000 worth of veggie burgers, but it's also, you know, like the wrong of like visiating my beloved vegan community. But again, like the hypothesis that Jones is generally very honest and reputable and also stole

$1,000 worth of veggie burgers. Like that's going to suffer some incoherence and it's it's going to be quite intrinsically improbable as a result, you know, like because the fact that Jones is very honest and reputable makes it very unlikely that he would commit

that crime. But even still, right, like the two components of this theory are compatible since occasionally, you know, honest and reputable people do heinous things. And when we apply these various criteria affecting the intrinsic probability of hypothesis to theism, we see that

premise one in my master argument is spoton. Theism does not have a super low intrinsic probability.

We can formulate theism roughly as the claim that there exists a fundamental mind that is unlimited in power, knowledge, and goodness. In other words, a fundamental mind characterized by the three traditional omni attributes.

Omnipotence or being all powerful, omniscience or being all knowing, and omni benevolence or being all good.

Granted, this claim is immodest because it rules out many possibilities. But recall the spatial uniformity versus anomalous patch example. The simplicity and nonarbitrariness of spatial uniformity is more than enough to far outweigh its relative immodesty.

Crucially, theism is simple and non-arbit in a similar way. Right? Like it posits a single being with a few basic attributes, power, knowledge, and goodness had to an unlimited and therefore distinctly non-arbitrary extent. We can imagine instead a

foundational mind with like arbitrary gaps in its knowledge or power. for example, a being that knows every truth except the number of blades of grass on some particular lawn or arbitrary finite limits in other respects. But these theories would be far less intrinsically

probable in much the same way as the anomalous patch scenario is far less intrinsically probable than the spatial uniformity scenario. And this point bears emphasis like I want to bang my gongs very very loud here so that you

get it right. Part of what makes spatial uniformity and a temporal uniformity so attractive is that their fundamental posit is a simple, elegant, compactly describable universal generalization.

Right? Like the basic laws of physics hold everywhere or at all times. Likewise, part of what makes theism attractive is that it characterizes fundamental reality with a small number of simple, elegant, and compactly describable universal generalizations.

Right? Right? Like to say that God is omnisient is to say roughly that God knows everything. To say that God is omnipotent is to say roughly that he can bring about any possible state of affairs and whatever he wills comes to

pass. To say that God is omnibent is to say roughly that God is wholly good and always acts for the sake of the good, including the good of any creatures he creates. Theism is also coherent in much the same way that spatial uniformity is.

Right? Like in the case of spatial uniformity, the very fact that the basic laws hold everywhere apart from a spatial patch gives us reason to expect that they hold everywhere. Positing a limit or break in the universal applicability of the laws would

introduce some incoherence into one's hypothesis. The same holds true for theism. Positing a divine being with great but limited power or expansive but limited knowledge or significant but limited goodness introduces incoherence into one's hypothesis. The very fact that a being has large quantities of

power, knowledge, and goodness gives us reason to expect that it has all power, knowledge, and goodness. In fact, theism is not only highly coherent with respect to individual divine attributes, but also with respect to the collection of divine attributes. That's because all of

God's attributes are or follow from perfections, right? That is valuable attributes that it would be better to have than lack, at least other things being equal. For instance, quite plausibly, it's good to be knowledgeable, powerful, and benevolent.

Theism, therefore, exhibits a striking uniformity across the various divine attributes, which further strengthens its coherence. Now, so far, I've formulated theism in terms of the three traditional omni attributes. But this actually understates theism's simplicity coherence and non-arbitiness. Since these specific

attributes aren't a miscellaneous hodgepodge, they can likely be subsumed under a unifying principle or derived from a more basic attribute. Indeed, even if the omni attributes can't be logically deduced from a more basic attribute or principle, the possession of the omni

properties might be probable or at least not very improbable conditional on that more basic principle or the possession of that more basic attribute. If so, then theism will not be super intrinsically improbable so long as it is not super unlikely that the more

basic principle holds or the more basic attribute is possessed. And this condition is very plausibly met in the case of theism since candidates for the basic principle or attribute from which God's other attributes are derived or rendered probable are compactly

describable in reasonably elegant and coherent terms. Swinburn, for example, takes omnipotence or pure limitless intentional power as theoretically basic and aims to derive or at least probabilify or make probable other attributes there from. A second approach formulates theism as the view

that the fundamental reality is a being that possesses all perfections to an unlimited extent and from there derives the various specific perfections of omnipotence, omniscience and so forth.

As Alexander Pruce highlights in one of my interviews with him, this is a highly simple fundamental posit.

My my preferred take is that uh there is an X such that for all P if P is a perfection X says P.

How do you define perfection? Oh, I don't that's a that's an undefined primitive. Oh, you could say it's like a great making property. Something that necessarily makes it possessor greater.

What about this? Um it entails value but doesn't entail this value. That's going that's probably a necessary condition. Yeah, it may not be sufficient but then it could have all those properties all the properties that entail value that any property that entails this

value. Yeah, but I mean then which still comes down to what the value is, right? Which can be liked for its own sake.

Okay, so we've got this perfect theory according to which there's this perfect being with all the perfections. That's a rough gloss at least. Um why should we accept this view? Because Alexander Pruce relatedly some conrue theism as positing

a being with a single essential attribute perfection or supreme value from which the various specific attributes follow. You know this is the route that you know Josh Rasmmanson takes in his book how reason wait no god to lead can reason out. No no no how

reason can lead to god. Okay. Another approach constru theism as the claim that the fundamental reality is a mind without limits or an unlimited mind. The omni attributes arguably fall out from this simple postulate. Like philosophical tradition, yes indeed

regards mind or spirit as a coin with two sides, intellect and will. That by which the mind apprehends reality and that by which it affects reality. On the side of intellect, an unlimited mind would not apprehend a limited portion of

reality, but all of reality and would therefore be omnisient. On the side of will, an unlimited mind would have no limits and no limits on what it can affect aside from being unable to do the impossible and would therefore be

omnipotent. It's also plausible, or at least not highly implausible, to suppose that being free of internal limitations, its will would be unconstrained by any irrational or irrational preferences that would prevent it from simply desiring and willing, that which its

intellect perceives as worthy to be desired and willed, that which it sees by its omniscience to be good. It would therefore be omni benevolent. Moreover, the simplest and least arbitrary proposal about what the foundational mind values, or at least a highly simple

and non-arbitrary proposal, is that it values value itself. Its basic teological orientation is toward the good. It wants what is good to the extent that it's good. It does all that it does for the sake of the good. In

other words, it's omni benevolent. All right. So let's take stuck because things have gotten a little bit abstract as indeed a substance as properties that is to say.

So stepping back theism is the view that there's a fundamental omnipotent omnisient and omni benevolent mind.

Theism therefore posits a single fundamental being with a small number of attributes that are compactly stable in elegant coherent non-arbitrary terms.

Moreover, there are several reasonable approaches to theism on which these attributes are not probabilistically independent from one another, but instead follow from a simple unifying principle or attribute such as omnipotence or perfection or limitless mentality.

The upshot is that theism is a simple, coherent, and non-arbitrary view in ways that very plausibly outweigh its relative immodesty. Its intrinsic probability is therefore not super low, giving us the first premise of my master argument. And there are other paths to

the first premise too. So for instance, even if you're skeptical of the various accounts I gave for why theism is a relatively simple and elegant hypothesis, as long as you think there's like some non-negligible chance, maybe like a 5% chance that one of those

accounts is right according to which theism is a simple and elegant hypothesis. And as long as you also think that conditional ontheism being a simple and elegant hypothesis, theism is not very improbable before looking at the evidence, then you should simply

multiply that not very low probability by 5% to get a not very low and minimal bound for how probable you should think theism is before taking into account any evidence. And that alone suffices to motivate the first premise of my

argument. So notice that even if you're pretty confident that all the accounts I gave on which theism is a relatively simple hypothesis are false and that theism is instead a hopelessly complicated hypothesis that we shouldn't take seriously so long as it's not super

unlikely that you're mistaken and theism is simple as lots of professional philosophers think and argue that suffices for the purposes of my argument. Another path to the first premise of my argument is that there's at least some pretty small but not

prohibitively low chance that some present or even future a priori argument for God's existence succeeds. For example, some Gordelian ontological argument defended by very capable philosophers like Puce and Rasmusen, Cesar Bernstein, Gustafson and others.

This too should arguably lead to a non-negligible prior in God's existence. And just more generally, it seems bizarre to start out inquiry with a grotesqually prohibitively low probability in something that the vast majority of humanity has believed in and

finds pre theoretically plausible, including absolute towering intellects of the past and present. So I think everyone should accept the first premise of my master argument.

Now before turning to the second premise, I want to address an objection. One of theism's main competitors is naturalism. the view roughly that you know the natural world is all that exists and is fundamentally purposeless.

The objection is that naturalism is bound to be simpler than theism because naturalism posits only the natural universe together with a specification of its basic laws, initial conditions and stock of fundamental natural features. Whereas theism posits both that natural universe and God. And so

theism is going to include all the stuff that naturalism accepts plus more. And so isn't then naturalism bound to explain the character of the natural world at least as well as theism while being simpler than theism and if so

isn't naturalism bound to be more probable than theism in light of the total evidence. Uh no. Uh so this objection firstly we know it goes wrong somewhere because it implies that we should favor naturalism over theism no matter what the natural world turns out

to be like at the physically fundamental level. Even if say we discovered that the initial conditions of the universe spelled out in some atomic soup made by God with love as you can see on screen here in every human language. After all,

naturalism takes those initial conditions as fundamental or unexplained and uses them to explain subsequent states of the universe. And theism posits the exact same initial conditions and a natural universe plus God. But that objection would rightly fall on

deaf ears if we had observed this datim. So we know that the objection must go wrong somewhere. And here's where in neglects that the simplicity of a theory's fundamental posits matters most in comparing theories.

To see this, consider two hypotheses. Solopsism says that I alone exist. There is nothing but my mind and my conscious experiences. There's no external world, no other people or anything like that.

Just me, myself and I. The short past hypothesis says that the universe sprang into existence uncaused a 100 years ago. Everything simply, you know, popped into existence fully formed in the 1920s with a misleading appearance of age. Fully formed human

beings sprang into existence with brain structures encoding false memories of the past. And apparently ancient artifacts and fossils are just, you know, deceptive novelties. Proponents of these theories might champion their allegedly superior simplicity. You like, after all, opponents of solopism posit

both me and lots of other things, right? and opponents of the short past hypothesis add many years of cosmic history before the 1920s. But none of us should find this convincing. What the proponents of these two hypotheses are

missing here is that their bedrock truths that is the fundamental or unexplained truths according to their theory form a hopelessly complicated unsistatizable mess with loads of striking unexplained coincidences under soypism. Like why are my experiences intricately coordinated in ways that

exactly simulate a stable independent environment? And why do my experiences exceptionally and intelligably cohhere with each other both at a time and across time? Solopsism just treats like whole swaths of my mental life as brute posits of its theory without any deeper

unifying explanation that is simpler and less arbitrary than my complex mental life. And for you know for the short past hypothesis why do written records and physical records and memories that the initial conditions cohhere so nicely if they aren't linked to a common cause

like these theories are just highly complex and suspiciously coincidental at the fundamental level. A simpler theory at the fundamental level which explains those complex and coincidental phenomena even if the theory posits strictly more entities is preferable. What primarily

matters in assessing the simplicity of a theory is the simplicity of its fundamental posits. And you know this approach to simplicity and theory comparison explains why scientists rightly prefer larger visions of reality that simplify the fundamental level. For

instance, cosmologists prefer a long past with a much simpler set of initial conditions and laws than that posited by the short past hypothesis. Physicists posit a few basic kinds of fundamental particles like electrons and quarks to explain the diverse and complicated

behavior of macroscopic objects. Biologists explain the rich biodiversity and complex biological systems that we see in terms of a few basic principles like natural selection operating on simple primordial substrates.

And here's the kicker. Theism accomplishes something similar. Unlike naturalism, as we'll see, theism offers a unifying explanation of a large constellation of otherwise remarkably fortunate data in compact fundamental terms. Unlike theism, naturalism posits hordes of striking coincidences that

they have to write in by hand that that aren't predicted by more fundamental simple non-arbitrary coherent theoretical posits.

Finally, one might object that, you know, although theism may be compactly stable, it's not compactly stable in fundamental terms since, you know, for example, knowledge is seems like a highly derivative property in all the cases that we're familiar with. And you

know, what determines the simplicity of a theory is the simplicity of its most compact statement in fundamental terms.

But this objection fails. In order for theism to have a not super low intrinsic probability, it need not be likely that the omni properties are relatively fundamental. As long as it's not super unlikely that they're relatively fundamental, the intrinsic probability

of theism won't be super low. That's all that matters. And in fact, you know, there are lots of reasonable views on which knowledge, power, and goodness are fundamental. You know, there are knowledge firsters in epistemology.

There are dispositionalists and neoaristilians who posit fundamental causal powers. There are non-naturalist realists who posit fundamental moral properties and so on. Right? Besides, like the theist does not need to claim that all of these are fundamental since again there are plausible candidates for

a single unifying principle or attribute from which God's other attributes flow. And for many of those candidate principles or attributes, it's like totally reasonable that the attributes or the notions employed therein are fundamental or at least relatively natural. For example, you know, the

notion of limits or minds or perfection or value or awareness or you know, whatever. So stepping back, I think the first premise of my master argument is on extremely solid footing and I've canvased a bunch of different ways of

motivating it. So let's turn to the second premise. Let's now turn to the second premise of the master argument. Theism predicts the dator. The dator theism predicts the dator much better than naturalism. I'm telling you those darn two naturalists.

The second premise of the argument says that theism predicts the data much better than atheism. In other words, there's very strong evidence for theism.

Now, a fact is evidence for theism or raises the probability of theism if the odds of it are higher given theism than atheism.

My friend Matthew, my good friend Matthew Adlesene gives a helpful analogy here. If your DNA is at the crime scene, that's evidence for your guilt because the likelihood that your DNA would be at the crime scene is higher if you

actually committed the crime than if you didn't. The guilt hypothesis makes that fact more likely than the innocence hypothesis. In other words, the fact is better predicted or less surprising on the guilt hypothesis than on the innocence hypothesis. More generally, a

fact is evidence for one hypothesis over another or a fact favors one hypothesis over another. just in case that fact is more likely or more to be expected or less surprising or better predicted on the first hypothesis than the second.

And the strength of the evidence for the first hypothesis is proportional to how much more likely the fact in question is under the first hypothesis than under the second. And the notion of probability at play here is epistemic

probability or the degree to which one proposition is supported by another. With all that in hand, we can now examine the evidence. I'll start by pitting theism against naturalistic atheism, after which I'll return to theism's non-naturalistic competitors like axiarchcism.

So, you can see here on the screen a bird's eye overview of the various pieces of theistic evidence that I'll be canvasing. I'll be going over contingency, laws of nature, nomological harmony, fine-tuning, and various different aspects of finetuning,

psychophysical luck, so the seemingly lucky and fortunate ways in which consciousness is paired with the physical world. I'll be going through non-skeepticism, moral nuruy knowledge, beauty and aesthetic experience and finally religious experience and then of course all of this is just a preamble to

the just like overwhelming evidence for miracles that we will be covering. So uh stay tuned for that. But onwards we march to the first piece of evidence for theism and it's one that I already covered. The fact that there are any

contingent things at all. I outlined one version of one contingency argument earlier which alone may deliver the result that theism is at least probably true. But we can even make the argument more modest. We don't need to claim that

any contingent things must have an explanation. We can simply operate with the weaker principle that for any contingent things, there's at least a defasible presumption that they have an explanation. In other words, we should expect there to be an explanation of

them and we should think an explanation probably exists in the absence of positive reasons to think the contingent things in question are unexplained. To put it differently, for any contingent things, an explanation of them probably exists, at least other things being

equal. With this principle in hand, we can run the rest of the argument as before, reaching the conclusion that a necessary foundational thing which explains contingent things probably exists, at least other things being equal. If so, then we've made a good

deal of probabilistic headway in motivating this core tenant of theism, and we've diminished the probability of lots of views incompatible with theism, which deny the existence of any necessary foundational reality.

It's noteworthy, too, that theism offers a distinctly plausible account of the nature of the necessary foundation, one that's more intrinsically plausible than views which posit a limited foundation, like a limited god or an initial singularity with highly arbitrary,

finitely degreged values. as philosopher Brian Cutter explains on the uncertainty podcast. So suppose you think that the metaphysical foundation uh is is metaphysically necessary. So here wheel out some off-the-shelf cosmological argument that says that the the universe has its source in some like

metaphysically necessary being. Uh and maybe you do some argument that like the whatever the designer is that's responsible for psychophysical harmony is also going to be this necessary foundation. Now I think it looks a lot more attractive to go in for the

traditional god than limited deities. And this is because of the connection between necessity and non-arbituariness.

So it's it's one thing to say that like the speed of light has a has some or other arbitrary finite value.

But you know that that should be contingent, right? Like where there is arbitrariness there should be contingent. It could have been light or light star that had a a slightly different speed. But where you have necessity, it seems like necessity is

repugnant to arbitrariness. So, so once you're convinced maybe on the basis of other cosmological arguments that the found that the like foundation of reality is this necessary concrete gain, I think that um that gives more boost to the idea that it would be without

arbitrary limits. As a result of all the preceding, theism takes up a pretty decent chunk of the probability space even before looking at other pieces of evidence. And the same result holds even if you aren't convinced of these or any

other contingency arguments. So long as you think they have at least some force or some plausibility. The more force or plausibility is accorded to these arguments, the more prior probability space will be taken up by the view that

the foundation is necessary and the better theism is going to look before taking into account other pieces of evidence. Before moving on, allow me to address one of the biggest objections to contingency arguments. Some people worry that contingent things can't be

explained by a necessary thing since whatever is explained by something necessary would itself be necessary. But this objection fails. It assumes that the explanatory connection between the necessary thing and contingent things is deterministic or necessitating. But the explanation need not be like that.

Right? It might be indeterministic if, for example, the necessary thing has free will to choose among a variety of outcomes, each of which has adequate but non-coercive reasons favoring its actualization.

Anyway, if you want to look into contingency arguments in more detail, check out the resource document for more. But let's turn to our next piece of evidence. Suppose we hold fixed as part of our background knowledge that there are contingent realities. Even so,

there's no guarantee that among them would be laws of nature that govern or specify the behavior of the universe rather than universe with lawless initial conditions which don't evolve forward in time. A universe with unevolved initial conditions without the

addition of laws seems far simpler than a universe with initial conditions and laws. So, it's quite surprising under naturalism that we obtained the latter.

By contrast, it doesn't seem as surprising under theism since the orderly lawful development of initial conditions is needed for interesting and valuable things to occur in the universe, such as the existence and development of conscious beings capable of love and enjoyment and knowledge and

virtue and rational agency and relationships with one another and God. And God being omnisient and omni benevolent would recognize those values and be motivated to some extent to realize them. To further compound the improbability of the data under

naturalism, there's also no guarantee that laws would exist rather than a universe with lawless initial conditions that do evolve forward in time in a totally chaotic lawless fashion. For these reasons, I think laws of nature favor theism over naturalism.

Now, admittedly, my reasoning here assumes the falsity of humanism about laws of nature, which says that laws are just simple and informative summaries of the mosaic or pattern of qualities in spaceime. Because you know if laws are merely summaries of the pattern of

qualities in spacetime then any spaceime is guaranteed to contain laws. So I grant that my argument here is powerless if humanism is true. I'll say more about why we should reject humanism in the next section. Uh and I'll also say more

there about other views of laws. The point to note for now is that under most of the plausible non-human views of laws, which in my view are the most plausible views of laws by a wide margin, lawless initial conditions are

totally conceivable. And that includes powers theory, by the way, since you know, even if laws are summaries of powers or dispositions, the initial conditions might have been populated only with dispositionless categorical qualities. Okay, but let's go on to some

bigger guns like nomological harmony. Suppose there are laws of nature and contingency. Even then, it's very surprising under naturalism that those laws of nature match or apply to the contents of the universe so as to make the universe evolve through time. Of

course, here I'm adverting to the problem of nomological harmony. Brian Cutter and Brad Sod nicely illustrate the problem as follows.

Our universe is governed by laws that match its contents. There are laws about the behavior of massive bodies and there exist massive bodies for those laws to govern. There are charged particles and there exist laws specifying how charged

particles are to behave. The point can be put somewhat more precisely in terms of a harmonious match between the states of our universe and its laws. There exist states such that applying those laws to those states yields other

states. Matters might conceivably have been otherwise. The world might have been still born with our universe's non-Newtonian initial conditions and Newtonian laws that do not apply to them. Or the world might have had our universe's laws but Newtonian initial

conditions. Or the world might have had any of countless other kinds of law state mismatches. You know, like laws dictating the behavior of smarged particles with states consisting only of charged particles or laws dictating the behavior of massive bodies with states

containing only massive bodies and so on for countless conceivable uninstantiated physical properties like schmass and smarge and uninstantiated physical kinds like huons and benons which are possible kinds of fundamental particle that don't actually exist.

As a useful analogy, we might think of the universe as akin to a game. The states of the universe correspond to configurations of pieces on the board, and the set of laws corresponds to the rule book, specifying how game piece

configurations can or must change over time. Rule books and gamepiece configurations can be mismatched. A rulebook for Monopoly will provide no guidance for how states of a go board are to evolve. A rule book for chess would have nothing to say about how

checkers pieces should move. A universe with mismatched laws and states would be like a game whose rule book and peace configurations are mismatched in this way.

So nomological harmony consists in the fact that the fundamental laws of nature match the contents of the universe in a way that results in temporal evolution.

When you apply the basic laws of nature to the contents of the universe, it generates subsequent states. It results in the evolution of the universe through time. This datim is quite striking since a match between laws and initial

conditions is a special outcome that would be very unlikely absent some further explanation. Nomological harmony is special in the sense that it's you know all but required for anything interesting to happen in the universe like cosmic evolution, life, knowledge,

meaningful relationships and whatnot. Nomological harmony is unlikely in the sense that it's surprising or improbable without any deeper explanation. After all, if you're choosing at random out of all possible rule books and game pieces, it would be incredibly surprising if you

picked a rulebook and game pieces that actually match. In much the same way, if it's just a matter of chance or just a brute fact without any deeper explanation which among all possible laws and initial conditions obtain, then

it would be incredibly surprising if the laws matched the initial conditions. There are literally infinitely many conceivable fundamental properties and relations. So if as we ordinarily suppose the initial conditions and the fundamental laws only involve a small set of fundamental properties and

relations it seems extremely unlikely that there would be a match without some further story. You know like if the universe is filled with A's at the most fundamental level we hit the nomological jackpot when the laws actually specify

how A's are to behave instead of you know talking only about B's or C's or D's or any of infinally any other uninstantiated physical conditions.

Theism of course makes nomological harmony not particularly surprising. Again, a match between laws and initial conditions is needed for just about anything interesting or valuable to occur in the universe. So, it wouldn't be surprising that a god sensitive to

and motivated by facts about value would realize nomological harmony. But under naturalism, nomological harmony looks like a cosmic coincidence. Meaning that nomological harmony is significant evidence for theism. Now to appreciate the force of this argument, we should distinguish among the three main

competing conceptions of laws in the philosophical literature. First, there's humanism about laws which says that laws are just simple and informative summaries or descriptions of regularities in spaceime. A bit more precisely, laws are the axioms or theorems in the best systematization of

the mosaic of particular qualities in spaceime where the best systematization is the one which best balances simplicity, informiveness, and fit with data. But if that's what laws are, and if we're holding fix that there are laws of nature, then isn't it totally

unsurprising that the laws match the contents of the universe in a way that results in temporal evolution? And if that's right, then can't the naturalist just adopt humanism to predict nomological harmony just as well, if not better, than theism?

No. For starters, there are very strong grounds for thinking that humanism is false. There's the supervenience problem. Lots of philosophers find it plausible that there could be two universes which have the same mosaic of non-dispositional qualities in spaceime,

but which differ in which laws of nature hold in those universes. Say because one contains an extra law specifying how a particle which never in fact exists would behave if it came to exist. Or because two kinds of particle never

interact in either world, but if they did interact, they'd interact differently in each world. But the best systematization of the mosaic of qualities would be the same in both worlds. And so the laws of nature must be the same if humanism is true. And

that seems to be the wrong verdict. And so humanism cannot capture this intuitive desitter. There's also the vicious circularity problem. Humanism seems to land in a vicious explanatory circularity since it seems like the laws of nature together with the initial

conditions explain later occurrences in spaceime even though according to humanism the laws of nature are themselves partially explained by those very later occurrences. So it's like the qualities in spaceime seem partially explained by the laws but the laws seem

partially explained by the qualities in the mosaic. So we got a kind of vicious circularity. A explained by B, but B explained by A. There's the inductive skepticism problem. Philosophers like David Wules and Aaron Seagull have argued that humanism leads to inductive

skepticism. I can put some links to their papers in the resource document if you're curious on reading those. There's the subjective laws problem, right? So Coons, Bonavac and others have argued that humanism implausibly implies that which laws exist depend on our practical

interests since they depend on our interest relative theoretical preferences. There's the problem of making consciousness exttrinsic. So John Hawthorne argues that humanism implausibly implies that whether you and I are conscious depends on facts about what happens in billions of years. Since

consciousness depends on various causal relations and humanism implies that which causal relations hold depends on the global pattern of qualities in spaceime. There's also the the famous cosmic coincidence objection which says that humanism just makes it a cosmic

fluke that spacetime itself is highly regular. You know, if all that fundamentally exist are just loose and separate qualities pixelating the space-time mosaic, then it's extremely surprising that the resulting mosaic is an orderly, coherent, reasonably intricate, intelligible hole rather than

just like a jumbled, chaotic mess. You know, like if which pixels populate a screen had no deeper explanation, the screen would almost certainly display a chaotic or jumbled image, not an orderly coherent intricate intelligible picture. So, so this is

just like one general reason why I don't think going in for humanism will help the naturalist all that much. just because like humanism is just like beset with massive problems. But even if the naturalist wants to embrace humanism

despite its manifold costs, nomological harmony is still pretty surprising. Even under humanism, it's totally possible for the human mosaic of qualities in spaceime to last only a single instant.

In fact, there are infinitely many of those one-instant long human mosaics, one for every conceivable way of arranging qualities. Moreover, hordes of these one-in-l long human mosaics, indeed infinitely many of them, are basically maximally simple, uniform, elegant, and compactly describable since

they don't include any other time slices the laws need to capture. And if, as seems to be the only plausible way to avoid the cosmic coincidence objection, the human recognizes a truly overwhelming bias in the priors towards simpler mosaics, then it's then it's

surprising under naturalism that we didn't get one of these infinitely many maximally simple one-instant long human mosaics. In which case, it remains surprising under naturalism that the laws match the universe in a way that results in temporal evolution. And

hence, nomological harmony remains a mystery. So, not only is humanism deeply problematic, but it also leaves a good deal of force to the argument for nomological harmony. Let's turn now to the powers theory of laws. On this view,

laws simply describe the powers things have. You might think this view like relatively easily explains nomological harmony since if we're holding fix that there are laws, well, then, you know, the laws must match the contents of the universe on the powers theory since laws

are nothing but descriptions of the powers of the things in the universe. But alas, things are not so easy for the naturalist because the powers theory just raises an exactly analogous problem of powers harmony, right? Like why do

the powerful properties and relations featuring in the initial conditions harmoniously align so as to induce temporal evolution, right? Like this is an utterly fortuitous occurrence since it's entirely conceivable that the initial conditions feature powerful properties none of whose stimulus

conditions are met, right? Like the initial conditions might have only featured X's with the sole ability to interact with Y's or to interact with Y's when X's and Y's stand in some Newtonian spatial relation. If however the initial conditions feature no Y's or

only feature relativistic spatial relations well then temporal evolution won't ensue. And we can likewise imagine many sets of initial conditions involving properties all of which are either non-dispositional properties or passive powers in which case nothing would do or change anything. As Matthew

Adlesene puts the problem of powers harmony like why do bzzons have the power to interact with firmians rather than x's where x's are some type of fundamental particle that doesn't exist.

It's thoroughly surprising that the fundamental things have the powers to interact with other things that happen to exist rather than one of the infinitely many non-existent things. And likewise, it's thoroughly surprising that the fundamental things have the powers to interact under certain

conditions that happen to exist rather than one of the infinitely many non-existent conditions. So the powers theory ultimately just relocates the mystery of nomological harmony to the mystery of powers harmony. Like why do the powerful properties and relations

featuring in the initial conditions harmonize with one another in such a way that they do in fact induce temporal evolution rather than remaining stillborn? Because we can imagine hordes of different combinations of powers and things and conditions in the initial

conditions which are mismatched in a way that doesn't lead to temporal evolution. The third main theory of laws is the governing view which takes laws to be a unique kind of thing which governs or constrains the conditions of the

universe. Such laws exist over and above the mosaic of qualities and or powers in spaceime so as to influence or constrain them. This view or more accurately collection of views certainly faces the problem of nomological harmony in full

force right because it's just positing these like unique sui generous entities that are kind of like existing kind of independently of spaceime and which kind of like you know exert their force over spacetime so by itself you know this

governing view of laws will definitely not help the naturalist. Finally, the naturalist might posit a vast and diverse ensemble of laws, initial conditions, or both in order to explain nomological harmony. Like, after all, if there's a huge paniply of laws

or initial conditions or both, then it's unsurprising that some law matches some initial conditions and results in temporal evolution.

But admitting a paniply of fundamental laws is just scandalously nomically unparimious. So any theory which posits as much takes a massive hit to its probability. Numological parsimony by the way is a particularly important theoretical virtue. One which concerns

the number and complexity of fundamental or unexplained laws posited by a theory. It's also scandalously unparimious to posit a huge paniply of initial conditions each differing in which fundamental properties it features so as to make it unsurprising that somewhere a

match will occur. Right? like doing so massively proliferates the the theory's fundamental ontology, the fundamental kinds it posits and its fundamental ideology which again will seriously detract from the theory's probability.

Now regarding the ensemble of laws, I do think some of these costs can be mitigated by positing an additional fundamental planitudinous metal law which says that a maximal consistent set of first order laws exist from which we can then derive that there you know

would be this enormous ensemble of laws. But that view is still nomologically unparimious in positing a radically new kind of additional fundamental law. It still massively proliferates the theory's basic ideology and it suffers from some of the problems I'll mention

next including a variant of the skepticism problem. A further problem for these ensemble solutions is that these ensembles aren't recognized anywhere in science. So positing them grates against the spirit of naturalism which aims to hue closely to the posits of the natural sciences.

Again like consider the sort of multiverse posited by ensemble solutions which proliferate initial conditions.

Such a multiverse needs to include universes that differ with respect to the fundamental physical properties instantiated in their initial conditions with some including mass others including schmass others including schmarge others including like benons or whatever non-existent particles that

there could be but crucially this is not the sort of multiverse taken seriously in certain quarters of physics. So arguments in physics and cosmology for the multiverse don't actually support these ensemble solutions.

There are three further problems with ensemble solutions that proliferate universes with different initial conditions. I think the first one is very serious, though I'm I'm a bit less confident about the other two, but I I do think they still deserve a mention.

So, first, these ensemble solutions threaten radical skepticism. In the absence of striking coincidences concerning which sorts of initial conditions populate the ensemble, duplicate realizers of your current experiences likely figure in countless initial conditions that evolve in accordance with the laws. In other

words, there are going to be countless universes with initial conditions that feature brains which exactly duplicate down to every last microfysical detail.

your brain at the present moment and that evolve forward according to the laws the same way your brain will evolve forward over some short duration in the future. These brains will be temporarily experientially indistinguishable from you from a first person perspective.

Assuming that a significant portion of beings sharing your current experiences figure in initial conditions, which by the way is pretty likely since such brains require only small localized pockets of relatively low entropy compared to the gigantic pocket of low

entropy needed to sustain you and the solar system in all of history. These ensemble solutions will imply radical skepticism. For then you should think that there's a significant chance that you're one of these radically deceived brains which share your current

experiences. And recall that planitudinous metal law approach that I mentioned earlier as a kind of aside in passing. That approach likewise threatens skepticism since there are tons of maximal compossible sets of laws which include laws generating an abundance of localized

brains in skeptical scenarios. For example, there could be laws that create or employ additional fields, dimensions, stochastic processes, vacuum transitions, or particle interaction channels to assemble large numbers of localized brains in skeptical scenarios.

Given that there are so many more ways to have localized short-lived brains in skeptical scenarios than brains enjoying a long evolutionary history and vertical contact with their environments, there will plausibly be many more conceivable maximal compossible sets of laws which

result in a large proportion of skeptical observers than sets of laws which result in a small proportion.

Heck, if we're even in the dark about which such sets a planitudinist metal law would be likely to choose by chance, then we're in the dark about whether the actual law set generates a large proportion of skeptical observers. And

that's enough to defeat our empirical knowledge. So we need a pretty coincidental maximal composible set of laws to avert skepticism. Okay. A second problem for you know these ensemble solutions that proliferate universes with different initial conditions is that arguably they only explain why some

universe's laws match its initial conditions. But we know more than that, right? We know that this universe's laws, that is our universe's laws match its initial conditions. Positing a multitude of universes with varying initial conditions doesn't appear to

substantially raise the probability that our universe, this universe, would be among the privileged elite whose laws and initial conditions match. So the data might simply remain extremely improbable under naturalism, even assuming that one of these ensembles exists.

Third, and relatedly, arguably theism is supported by nomological harmony, even if there's an ensemble of universes varying in initial conditions. Given the it doesn't seem like super unlikely that God would give rise to a vast multiverse with an abundant assortment of valuable

creatures, especially now that we have the existence of at least one universe in our background. Moreover, it may be that the expected number and proportion of nomologically harmonious universes is much higher in theistic multiveres than atheistic ones. For again, nomological

harmony is all but required for anything interesting or valuable to happen in a universe. If this is right, and again I'm I'm less certain about these second and third responses than the first response, then any given universe is

much more likely to exhibit nomological harmony under the theistic multiverse hypothesis compared to the atheistic multiverse hypothesis. In which case, nomological harmony in our universe favors the former over the latter. But anyway, I think nomological harmony provides pretty good evidence for

theism. And up next is an even stronger evidential chip favoring theism. And that evidential chip is finetuning.

Sup babe, you're looking mighty fine. I hope we're in tune about wanting to go on a date.

Please clap. So let's let's suppose that there is contingency. There are laws of nature and the laws of nature match the initial conditions of the universe so as to induce temporal evolution. Even granting all of that in the background, it's

still then extremely surprising under naturalism that the matching laws of nature are strikingly fine-tuned to allow for life and really anything interesting or valuable to occur. Yet, this is far less surprising under theism. Holding fix that God creates a

contingent universe which evolves forward in time according to laws of nature. It wouldn't be hopelessly unlikely that he'd select members of the tiniest sliver of conceivable law structures and constant values which actually allow for super valuable things like significant beauty and various

cosmic and biological structures. a coherent developing narrative arc to reality's unfolding. Conscious embodied creatures who can experience joy, love one another, build relationships with each other and with God, cultivate and manifest virtue, display rational agency, inquire and gain knowledge about

the world, manifest their agency in the material world in valuable ways. By contrast, it is hopelessly unlikely under naturalism that the law structures and constant values would fall within the exceedingly narrow ranges that enable these valuable results.

Consequently, fine-tuning provides exceptionally strong evidence for theism. Now, there are four different kinds of fine-tuning that I want to focus on.

Finely tuned law structures, finely tuned constants and initial conditions, fine-tuning for discoverability, and opriori fine-tuning. Let's start with finely tuned law structures. Here we need to distinguish between the structure of laws and the constants within those laws. As an example, here's

the general structure or form of Newton's gravitational law. The magnitude of the gravitational force between two bodies equals G times the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between their centers. G here is a

constant, which is basically just a quantity whose value stays fixed within the equation. In this case, G fixes the overall strength of gravity. A different value of G would preserve the same structure of the law while making gravitational forces uniformly stronger

or weaker. Now, traditional presentations of the fine-tuning argument simply hold the actual law structures fixed as part of the background information for running the argument. As Luke Barnes notes, the reason why we restrict our focus to universes with the same law structures

as ours is that assigning precise probabilities and investigating life permitting outcomes over the entire space of possible universes, including those with different law structures, is too difficult. By contrast, when we hold the law structures fixed, we can get a

purchase on the precise probabilities that the constants would fall within the lifeping ranges. But it's worth noting that we don't actually need precise probabilities to run a successful basian argument for a hypothesis. We can apply basian reasoning to lots of messy real life

cases as long as we can make rough and ready comparative judgments. Judgments to the effect that you know two assumptions are roughly equally plausible or that one is a bit more plausible than another or that some observation is much more surprising on

one assumption than another. The evidence in a court case is almost never quantified using exact precise probabilities or even ballpark estimates. Instead, judges and juries rightly make rough but highly plausible comparative judgments about how expected or how surprising certain pieces of data

are on the guilt hypothesis relative to the innocence hypothesis. Moreover, even if we can't assign precise probabilities here, obviously it would be fantastically strong evidence for theism if the fundamental law structure is somehow encoded in binary the entire

Bible, right? Like, and that's because this is an overwhelmingly, grotesqually unlikely structure to obtain by chance.

It's a highly specific, intricate, and coincidental law structure. And intuitively, only the tiniest fraction of conceivable law structures encode meaningful messages. And while this law structure would also be super improbable under theism since there are, you know, lots of other law structures God could

have made and lots of other messages God could have written, it wouldn't be as grotesqually improbable as it is by chance, right? And so it would represent super powerful evidence for theism even in the absence of precise probability

estimates. Now, as it happens, the actual law structures we got are compatible with life in the sense that the actual law structures contain life permitting parameter ranges. But if you sit down and think about it, this is fantastically fortunate. A vast space of

conceivable law structures generate worlds that are too simple, too homogeneous, too low-dimensional, too short-lived, too static, too periodic, or too chaotic to contain anything like stable complexity or embodied conscious agency. Intuitively, only a tiny fraction of the total space of

conceivable law structures is compatible with life. And to make matters worse for the naturalist, the simplest law structures seem life precluding.

To make this vivid, consider how easily we can describe possible law structures that are far simpler than the actual laws, but plainly incompatible with life and more generally anything particularly interesting and valuable. The fundamental law might have specified

that no concrete objects exist. That's an extremely simple law with only one quantifier, a negation sign, and a single predicate. Or the law might have said that exactly one space-time point exists or exactly two or exactly three or whatever. The fundamental law might

have said that only one particle exists and its position at t is given by the sign of t. This law is far simpler than the actual laws and the resulting world contains only one simple thing moving back and forth forever. Or the

fundamental law might have specified that this one particle moves in a straight line forever or moves in a circle or stays at rest or moves along a triangle or square. Or the fundamental law might have specified that a simple

fundamental particle exists and periodically enters an excited state for all eternity or periodically emits bursts of very low energy for all eternity or whatever. Or the law might have said that exactly two particles exist and orbit their common center

forever. Or the fundamental law might have specified that a single one-dimensional point exists with its trajectory given by a simple linear equation among infinitely many such simple equations or a simple quadratic equation and so on for infinitely many

other totally uninteresting and barren laws that are far simpler than the actual laws. Or the fundamental law might have specified that a single simple two-dimensional shape persists eternally for each of infinitely many compactly specifiable shapes like different sizes of triangles, different

sizes of octagons, etc. Or the fundamental law might have specified that the shape moves periodically or rotates in place or does any other extremely simple movement. Or the fundamental law might have specified that there is exactly one scalar field

such that all spacetime points have the same constant scalar value. The resulting world is extremely uniform and therefore highly coherent and super compactly specifiable in fundamental terms. Yet it's completely undifferiated and totally devoid of interesting or valuable phenomena. Or the law might

specify that the scalar values are uniform across all of space but just oscillate between two scalar values for all eternity back and forth. Or the fundamental law might have specified that the universe is an all zero cellular automaton with every cell in an

infinite two-dimensional grid taking on a zero value. or that every cell might have taken on a one value or that the infinite grid might have been a checkerboard or that each cell might simply copy the cell to its left or to

its right or whatever. Or that a cell takes on a one value if and only if exactly zero of its neighbors take on a one value and a zero otherwise. Or the fundamental law might have been a pure

expansion law specifying that all distances between fundamental things simply increase uniformly forever with no attractive or binding forces in which case no complex objects would ever form.

Or the law might be a pure repulsion law stating that every object repels every other object with no attractive or binding interactions. This law too would never result in stable complexity.

Listen dude, I could do this forever. Each of these infinitely many law structures totally precludes basically anything interesting and valuable from occurring. Yet reality suspiciously sailed over this vast sea of extremely simple, elegant, and uniform laws to instead actualize much more complicated

ones that allow for life. Moreover, intuitively, most of the complicated law structures would just result in chaos.

So, reality also suspiciously avoided them, too. Like, come on, dude. Like, you know something's up. Like it's clearly not a matter of chance or brute unexplained fact that we got the law structures we did.

Yet naturalism says precisely that. Right? According to naturalism, the fundamental law structures in nature are at the bedrock of reality and don't admit of deeper explanation in terms of anything beyond nature. This is not credible. To put the argument in basian

form, because I'm a basian babe, it's far more surprising under naturalism than theism that the universe landed on the actual law structures which are at least compatible with life, which at least have ranges for parameter values that are life permitting rather than law

structures from the unfathomable infinite abyss of lifehitting law structures. Consequently, the actual law structures are very powerful evidence for theism over naturalism, and we haven't even gotten to the science yet.

Let's now turn to finely tuned constants and initial conditions. Suppose we did hit the cosmic jackpot by getting the particular law structures we did. It's still then shockingly unlikely under naturalism that the constants within those laws would fall within their

exceedingly narrow life permitting ranges and did over various initial conditions of the universe. To take just one example, the cosmological constant governs the rate of expansion of the universe. If the cosmological constant had been larger by a factor of one part

in 10 the^ of 120 then the universe would have flown apart so fast that no stable complex structures could have formed. If the cosmological constant had been smaller by one part in 10 to the 120 then the universe would have

collapsed back in on itself immediately after the big bang. And there are other constants in initial conditions with exceedingly narrow life from ridding ranges too. Taking these and the cosmological constant into account, physicist Luke Barnes estimates that the

likelihood of a life permitting universe on naturalism is less than one in 10 ^ of 136.

Now, because this is a bit abstract, Philip Goff gives a helpful analogy to make the numbers here more vivid.

Imagine you rolled a die 70 times in a row and got a six every single time.

Nobody who saw a die come up six 70 times in a row would happily say, "Ah, well, you know, it's just a fluke or there's no deeper explanation for this." You know, it's just like a basic or fundamental or brute fact. Like, no, we

think there's something fishy going on. You know, perhaps a loaded die, something that explains why the number six comes up each time. Well, how does this compare with fine-tuning? Well, the odds of getting six 70 times in a row

with a fair die is 1 in 10 the^ of 55. On a conservative estimate, the odds of getting a universe finally tuned for life are 1 in 10 the^ of 136. So, if it's irrational to put 70 optimal rolls

of a die down to chance, then it's certainly irrational to put the finetuning of our universe down to chance as well. To take another example, there are around a 10 to the^ of 89 particles in the observable universe. So

the odds of like the constants falling within their life permitting ranges under naturalism are far worse than picking out a single particle at random from the entire universe. But let's turn to the light side, not the dark side of

naturalism. The light side of theism. God being perfectly good would be aware of and motivated by facts about value.

So it doesn't seem nearly as improbable as like 1 in 10 to the^ of 136 under theism that the constants would actually allow for conscious living beings with rich mental lives, stable environments in which they can act and learn in a

cosmos that is mathematically elegant and beautiful and at least potentially useful to those beings. Indeed, even if this were hopelessly, ludicrously, pathetically improbable given theism and our background on the order of say 1 and 10 the^ of 100, that would still confirm

theism by a factor of 10 the^ of 36, which is, you know, almost decisive evidence for theism.

But suppose we hit the jackpot not once but twice. Not only do our law structures miraculously contain a life-permitting range that constant values could fall in, but the constant values actually miraculously fall in those exceedingly narrow life permitting

ranges. Even then, a still further kind of fine-tuning offers yet more support for theism over naturalism, namely fine-tuning for discoverability. This kind of fine tuning was discovered by Robin Collins, and a number of physicists have double-cheed his calculations. You know, granted, this is

cutting edge work, right? So, so we should definitely have some higher order uncertainty about whether the physics checks out. But if it does and the preliminary findings suggest as much, then we have yet more powerful evidence for theism on our hands. And here I'll

be drawing from two excellent posts linked in the resource document by Matthew Adelstein and Dustin Crummit. It turns out that certain physical parameters need to fall in a very narrow range for the universe to be discoverable to us to a significant

degree. If the parameters fell outside that range, living creatures could still exist, but they couldn't do science or develop technology anywhere near as well. To take just one example, Collins calculates that the baron to photon ratio could have had any of a wide range

of values without compromising the ability of the universe to support life, but that within this range, it's finely tuned to maximize the intensity of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the feature of the universe which allowed us to discover the Big Bang.

Collins estimates that the odds of fine-tuning for discoverability by chance are on the order of one in a trillion trillion. And as Matthew Alstein points out, while you sometimes should think and probable things happen, you should never never never assume a

one in a trillion trillion coincidence happen when there is an alternative viable theory believed independently by a number of smart people. That's about the odds that if a present human was selected at random, you'd be selected, then selected again, then that you'd

enter a lottery where your odds of winning were one in 100,000 and then win that, too. Like, we easily could have existed in a much less discoverable universe. And if Collins is correct, we should strongly expect to be in such a

universe under naturalism. On the other hand, writes Crmit, "We can see why a good God would have reason to favor the intellectual goods involved in learning and comprehending the fundamental workings of the world along with the ability to appreciate the

beauty God had instilled in the deepest workings of creation, so that we have more reason to expect these features if the universe is created by God.

Discoverability too therefore provides powerful evidence for theism. And this evidence goes beyond the fact that the constants fall within their exceedingly narrow life permitting ranges, further compounding the evidential case for theism. The final kind of finetuning I'll focus on is a priority fine-tuning.

And admittedly, this is actually super similar to the finetuning of the law structures. So, I'm not saying that this is another, you know, largely independent piece of evidence for theism. Still, I think it illustrates that we don't actually need fancy math

or science to see that finetuning is very powerful evidence for theism. So, I'm I'm keeping it in nonetheless. The basic idea is that the universe conceivably might have been chaotic, barren, or trivially simple. That it instead contains complex, coherent, and

value supporting structures cries out for explanation. This is extremely unlikely on naturalism but not extremely unlikely on theism and therefore constitutes strong evidence for theism over naturalism. Right? Like take a flip book. I I had I had chatbt try to

generate this image and you know it looks kind of silly because like look look where the apple is falling in the second image there but then somehow it like shifts to the left and falls on it's a mess. AI is still a mess. I I

can't if you if any of you know how to use how to use this stuff like please hit me up. Tell me like out of the space of all conceivable drawings on a given page, only a tiny fraction form coherent

scenes rather than random scribbles. And of the space of all conceivable sequences of pages, only a minuscule fraction form coherent stories. As the number of pages increases, the proportion of coherent story books shrinks exponentially. So, if we encountered a long flip book depicting a

smooth, intelligible animation, say Newton discovering gravity after an apple bonks his head, we would be virtually certain that it was produced by an agent aiming at that result rather than by random assembly. Likewise, out of the space of all conceivable universe

histories, only a hopelessly minuscule fraction unfold in a coherent extended lawned way with embodied conscious agents living in intelligible environments. A purposeless, value indifferent stitching together of conceivable states would almost certainly yield either chaos or trivial and uninteresting simplicity, not

interesting structures that support valuable beings with intelligent and coherent life stories. And appeals to laws of nature, uniformity or simplicity don't solve the problem. For every chaotic universe history, there's some conceivable set of laws and initial conditions that would produce it. the

proportion of law conditions combinations yielding valuable universes appears just as tiny as the proportion of valuable universe histories themselves. Nor will it do to suggest that simpler or more uniform laws or mosaics of qualities in spaceime are intrinsically more probable. Since the

simplest and most uniform epistemic possibilities, say a fundamental law specifying that no concreta exists, or any of the infinitely many varieties of trivially boring universes in which a single fundamental particle or field or whatever behaves in an extremely simple

uniform way, are vastly simpler and more uniform than our rich and delicately ordered cosmos. Our universe exhibits a fine balance between uniformity and disun as well as simplicity and complexity that enables value without collapsing into utter chaos or trivial

monotony. Opriori. This is incredibly surprising and theism predicts it much better than naturalistic atheism. Brian Cutter gives a really nice summary of the Apriori fine-tuning argument in his interview here.

There there's a variant on the finetuning argument that maybe for me I find a bit bit more powerful which is a kind of more opriori version of the fine-tuning argument. The thought being like you can just know a priori that the

fundamental ingredients and structures and laws of the universe have to be fine-tuned to a considerable degree in order to get any kind of interesting organized complexity at all. Because a priori we can just see that a very wide

range of possible laws and structures and basic setups for the universe would just not lead to anything interesting or any kind of organized complexity at all.

I mean setting aside like the details of what what we know our physical universe is like and the structure of its laws.

So, you know, the the universe could have just been like an empty three-dimensional uklidian space, or it could have been just like a space with a bunch of particles where the only law was everything moves in a straight line

forever. Or it could have been like a an arena where things just move in circles forever. Or it could have been just like a one-dimensional cellular automaton that just develops according to simple rules. And I mean, actually thinking

about cellular automata like the game of life is kind of instructive here. So mathematicians have investigated kind of a class of mathemat mathematically possible worlds called cellular automa.

So you can think of like the game of life is the most famous one. It's a two dimensional grid that evolves according to simple deterministic laws. And actually we've discovered that like most most possible laws governing these two

dimensional cellular automata they don't lead to anything interesting at all. They either lead to just like simple repetitive loops or everything dying out really fast or just utter chaos. Now, the game of life is famous because it's like one of the very few sets of

possible rules that lead to kind of interesting emergent complexity and like interesting structures at various scales and so on. But even then, you need to significantly fine-tune the initial conditions. So, if you've ever played around with like a game of life

simulator on online, you know that like if you just kind of randomly populate the cells, most of the time it either dies out or just gives you like like repetitive blinking structures. It's only a very small range of possible

initial conditions that leads to like interesting novel kind of on the edge of chaos kind of like this nice mix of like chaos versus order that we find in our world. And so I think just kind of thinking through the range of like

possible ways that a reality could be, it's very clear that like a lot needs to be tuned just right in order to get a world where like that's not completely lame and boring. a world where there's like interesting structures and

organized complexity and interesting narrative structure like most most possible ways for a physical universe to be just considering the point opriori and not learning anything about like the the structure of our laws are just like not hospitable to life and not

hospitable to like anything interesting at all. So I think it's just like a very striking fact that it's not at all to be expected given a fundamentally purposeless universe that there would be kind of cool and interesting stuff at

all. So that that's like a I I I could go on, but considerations along those lines, just how hard and demanding and fine-tuned fundamental reality needs to be in order to get anything cool and interesting happening in reality at all

makes it particularly surprising that our world is kind of cool and interesting to say the least and I think much more expected on theism than on on atheism. So that that that's a a family of arguments that I find pretty

compelling. Of course, there are lots of objections to the fine-tuning argument, but I don't think they work. I'll rebut 17 of them, as you can see on screen here.

Hopefully, your your pet objection is on the screen here. And rebutting all 17 should provide good higher order evidence that objections not on the list are problematic, too. And by the way, there are just like lots of more general

points about philosophical theorizing that you can learn from going through these objections and seeing the ways in which they're mistaken. Uh and these points also just like apply to lots of other basian arguments for theism. Uh like the same sorts of problems uh with

the objections arise again and again. So going through these objections is hopefully going to be uh super helpful in uh combating the manifold errors that I see on the internets uh about these arguments. And you know what? You know

what? The gloves are coming off. We're going to the script to respond to these objections. You know, it's not a Majesty or Reason video without me sharing my screen and reading along while doing impressions. So, here we go.

You're not going to stop us today. Ride. Okay. Sweet. Um, okay. So, first up is the puddle analogy objection. Douglas Adams asks us to imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, "Ah, this is an interesting world I find myself in.

An interesting hole I find myself in. Fits me rather neatly, doesn't it?" In fact, it it fits me staggeringly well.

It must have been made to have me in it. You know, the puddle, we think, is here reasoning faciously. The hole wasn't fine-tuned for the puddle, but instead the puddle was adapted to the hole. But likewise, the universe wasn't fine-tuned

for us. We simply adapted to the universe. Okay, now first this is just you know a clearly false analogy. The puddle would fit the hole no matter the shape of the hole since puddles always conformed to the shapes of the holes

therein. The same obviously can't be said for life. Life would not exist no matter the values of the constants. I mean right just like think about it like while a puddle can adapt to any hole life can't adapt to any set of constants

or initial conditions. In non-fineetuned worlds there isn't any life around it to adapt. So Adams is just confused if he thinks the existence of life can be explained by adaptation in the same way as the fit between a puddle and the hole

it's in. In order for there to be any life around to adapt to anything, you need the constants to fall within an exceedingly narrow life range. And they need not have done that. So like this is this is just like not getting the

fine-tuning argument. Second, I agree with Miles Donghue from our discussion that, you know, so long as theism makes fine-tuning for life more likely than naturalism or chance, fine-tuning is evidence for theism that follows just by, you know, the application of the

likelihood principle in Baze theorem. There's no comparable design hypothesis in the whole case. You like there's nothing especially valuable about puddles. Puddles are totally mundane and easily obtainable phenomena given Earth's existence as we find it. And puddles can exist again in pretty much

any hole shape. So the whole designer hypothesis doesn't predict the hole's shape any better than chance. I mean this is like obviously relevantly different from fine-tuning. There is something especially valuable about conscious creatures like us and those creatures are extremely unlikely to

obtain since they can only exist given a small slice of the physical parameters bait. A more apt analogy would be a key finding itself fitting perfectly inside a lock. The key should infer design in that case since a strikingly tuned lock

that fits it exactly is highly unlikely to arise by chance. And we can see why a designer might be interested in producing such a lock for the key to fit in. And third, and finally, you know, the puddle analogy doesn't even touch

fine-tuning for discoverability. So, so it's it's just a mess. We're moving on to the anthropic principle objection.

Listen, Joe, we shouldn't be at all surprised that the constants fall within the narrow life permitting range. Like, after all, we couldn't have observed a universe in which the values fall outside that range. And consequently, fine-tuning is no evidence for theism

over naturalism. But this is just bad reasoning. Suppose you're brought before a firing squad and there are a hundred professional marksmen pointing their rifles at you. Someone shouts three, two, one, fire. The shots ring out.

Astonishingly though, you survive. The fact that they all missed obviously favors some sort of conspiracy or intentional missing hypothesis, even though you couldn't have observed a world in which they don't miss, right?

And also like listen, my existence is evidence that my parents didn't use infallibly effective contraception even though I couldn't have observed a situation in which they did. And more generally, even if we could only exist given that the relevant evidence

obtains, that evidence could still be far more likely given some hypotheses than others and hence could still strongly favor some hypotheses over others. So, so the anthropic principal objection is just confused and also of course it doesn't touch fine-tuning for

discoverability since we since we could have existed in a much less discoverable universe. Okay, third objection, other life forms.

I know we're starting with uh some doozies here. Doesn't the fine-tuning argument neglect that there might be other very strange life forms, like ones that aren't carbon based or maybe are made up of complex glass clouds or something? Uh, no, it doesn't. The

examples of finetuning that I canvased have nothing to do with carbon, but instead with the very possibility of any complex or stable structures at all. As Philip Goff notes, whatever kind of life you're envvisaging, it's not going to be

able to exist if the universe collapses back in on itself after a split second, which would have been the result of a negative cosmological constant. And it's also just manifest that this doesn't touch law structure fine-tuning or opriori fine-tuning or fine-tuning for

discoverability. So, so again, it's just it's just a mess. Onwards we march to frequentism as an objection is the fourth objection.

Well, hey, listen Joe, we've only observed one universe. We have no frequency data about proportions of life permitting universes and our sample size is literally just one. So we have no grounds to think life permitting constants are extremely improbable under

naturalism. How do I respond to this? Well, first we know that this objection must be wrong since it problematically overgeneralizes. It faces the awesome theistic evidence parody which will be a recurring theme. Imagine that the initial conditions sit spelled out in

some atomic soup made by God with love in every known human language. Clearly, that would be awesome evidence for theism. But the objection at hand would absurdly imply otherwise. Like, oh, after all, we've only observed one set of initial conditions. We have no

frequency data about proportions of message containing initial conditions of universes. And our sample size here is literally just one. So, you know, we have no grounds to think that these initial conditions are extremely improbable under naturals. Like, no, be

quiet. Stop talking. Second, the objection at hand assumes a frequentist account of probability on which the probability of an event is identical to or grounded in how often it occurs in a relevant class. But as Goff points out, the plain fact of the matter

is that it's impossible to do science with only recourse to a frequentist conception of probability as it renders us unable to theorize regarding one-off events such as continental drift, the evolution of humanity, or indeed the origin of the universe. One major source

of evidence for continental drift was the similarity between animal and plant life on Africa and South America millions of years ago. As we know through fossils, scientists made the plausible judgment that this kind of similarity would be very unlikely if the

continental drift hypothesis were false, but very likely if the continental drift hypothesis were true. By the likelihood principle or B theorem, this fact of similarity supports the continental drift hypothesis. But how did scientists reach this probability judgment? I mean

on a frequentist account of probability they would have to have observed many earths with continental drift and many earths without continental drift and then note that like a greater proportion of those with continental drift had similar animal and plant life on Africa

and South America. But of course, you know, that's not something that we're able to do. And so scientists must have formed this probability judgment in some nonfrequentist way. And third, we actually can get a purchase on frequencies here by performing

cosmological simulations and altering the constant values therein. Um, and when physicists actually do this, you know, we find that lifeing conditions are extremely rare. So the objection here is just a mess. Okay, the fifth objection. Hey, the fine-tuning argument

rests on an unjustified assumption. Doesn't it just like assume without good reason that the constants really could have been otherwise? But like, you know, how do we know that?

Well, first, the fine-tuning argument doesn't actually assume that it's really or objectively or metaphysically possible that the constants could have been otherwise. All the argument needs is that it's conceivable that they be otherwise. In other words, them being

otherwise is compatible with what we can know a priori or from the armchair by rational reflection. For then it will still be extremely epistemically improbable that the constants would happen to fall in the narrow life permitting range. As Brian Cutter notes

in our co-authored book, when we engage in basian reasoning, we distribute probabilities across conceptual possibilities, including conceptual possibilities that may for all we know turn out to be metaphysically impossible. When we say that a certain observation is likely or unlikely given

a hypothesis, we aren't commenting on their metaphysical compatibility. We're describing the degree to which the hypothesis rationally supports or makes it reasonable to expect the observation.

As long as alternative constant values are conceptual possibilities, and they are, it makes sense to say that it's surprising or unlikely or not to be expected that they'd be life permitting under naturalism. To illustrate, consider another case where conceptual

possibility may come apart from metaphysical possibility. Many philosophers would say that your specific DNA sequence is essential to you in the sense that you could not have existed without it. You know, of course, your parents might have had a baby with

a different DNA sequence and there might be alien life forms with no DNA at all, but you know, no such being could have been you. That just that would have been a different child, for instance. Now, according to this view, it's not

possible metaphysically for you to exist with a different DNA sequence or no DNA at all. But even if these scenarios are metaphysically impossible, they obviously aren't conceptually impossible. You can't like deduce by pure reason that you'd have such and

such specific DNA sequence or that you know you'd have DNA at all from the fact that you exist because there are conceptually possible scenarios in which you have any of a number of different DNA sequences or no DNA at all. Like we

need we needed empirical investigation in order to find out that you have DNA and which DNA you have. And if we want to reason in a basian way about say your ancestry, right, we'll do so by distributing probabilities over various

conceptual possibilities that may turn out to be metaphysically impossible. So for example, we might reason like the following. You know, it's to be expected that you'd have such and such genetic marker on the assumption that you have Italian ancestry. But on the opposite

assumption, you'd likely have a different genetic marker. So the fact that you have this genetic marker is evidence that you have Italian ancestry.

And notice that like here according to the operative view we're like we're reasoning we're doing basian reasoning about these metaphysical impossibilities. It's totally listenit makes total sense. We do this all the time. You like when scientists were investigating the microchemical

structure and composition of uh water. They formulated various hypotheses and then generated predictions about you know what they'd expect to obtain in various experiments under those hypotheses. So under the assumption that water is in fact H2O, then we'd expect when we hydrayze water

to get two moles of hydrogen for every one mole of oxygen. But by contrast, under the hypothesis, even though as as we now know, it's metaphysically impossible for this to be the case.

Under the hypothesis that water is H30, what would we expect when water is hydrayed? Well, we'd expect to obtain three moles of hydrogen for every one mole of oxygen. Okay? And then we go and perform the experiment and we see that

we get actually two moles of hydrogen for every one mole of oxygen. Okay, that very strongly confirms that water is H2O even though you know a lot a lot of these hypotheses some of them were even metaphysically impossible but still we

were distributing our credences over them and we could generate epistemic probabilities here over this space of you know metaphysical metaphysical impossibilities and necessities and it's that sort of epistemic reasoning that reasoning in the fine tuning argument and my later argument

from psychophysical luck and so again like my first response to this objection is that like we don't actually need to claim to run the fine-tuning argument that it's really or objectively or metaphysically possible that the constants be otherwise because we're

using epistemic probabilities here. Second, the objection at hand just faces the awesome theistic evidence problem.

Again, imagine that the initial conditions had spelled out made by God with love. Clearly, that would be powerful evidence for theism. But the objection at hand would absurdly imply otherwise. Like, oh, after all, like how do you know that those initial

conditions could have been otherwise? You know, like isn't that just an unjustified assumption? Third, I'll touch on this in response to the next objection, but actually fine-tuning is simply evidence for the conjunction of theism together with the claim that the constants could have been

otherwise since that conjunctive hypothesis, that combo predicts the data far better than alternative hypothesis.

And fourth, and finally, in any case, we arguably do have good reason to think the constants really could have been otherwise, since, you know, they're extremely arbitrary and highly precise numbers. They seem like they could be otherwise and it's totally conceivable

that they be otherwise. And you know these considerations plausibly give us reason to think that they're contingent rather than necessary. Okay. Onwards we march to the sixth objection uh the necessary constants objection. But what if what if the constants are

metaphysically necessary? Then isn't the probability one that they'd fall in the lip printing range? And doesn't this adequately explain them? So you know the naturalist can just say that the constants are necessary and the argument loses its force like the constants are

necessary. Boom. Fine-tuning argument debunked. Uh, no, that that's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. So, first, this objection also faces the awesome theistic evidence problem. Again, imagine that the initial conditions had spelled out made by God

with love in every known human language. Clearly, that would be powerful evidence for theism, but the objection at hand would absurdly imply otherwise. Like, after all, maybe it's just metaphysically necessary that the initial conditions be that way. Well,

then the probability is one that they'd spell out this message. And you know, wouldn't their necessity adequately explain them? So, you know, the naturalist can just say that the initial conditions aren't necessary and this argument from the initial conditions

loses its force like like no, that that's silly. Yet, if the objection at hand worked against the fine-tuning argument, it would also work against this argument from the initial conditions. And since it doesn't, it also doesn't work against the

fine-tuning argument. Second, remember that we're working with epistemic probabilities in the fine-tuning argument. Now the hypothesis that the values of the constants are metaphysically necessary is ambiguous.

It could be either the general hypothesis that wherever the constants fall it's metaphysically necessary that they fall that way or it could be the specific hypothesis that it's metaphysically necessary that the constants fall specifically within the narrow life permitting range. Now the

general hypothesis here doesn't do anything to affect the epistemic probability that the values of the constants would fall within the narrow life permitting range, right? Like it literally gives us no information about where they would fall. So it's still

overwhelmingly unlikely that they'd fall within the narrow life permitting range and hence theism is still going to get massively favored over naturalism. Again like the general hypothesis just says like well wherever they fall it's necessary that they fall there. That

doesn't tell you where they fall. It doesn't give you any information. So this so this hypothesis doesn't affect the epistemic probability that the values of the constants would fall specifically within the narrow life peritting range. By contrast, if you're

just building into your hypothesis from the get-go that it's necessary that the values would fall specifically within the narrow life peritting range, then what you gain in predictive power, you lose out on intrinsic probability. the naturalistic hypothesis is then just

like hopeless on the priors because it's equally conceivable that the constants would necessarily take on any other value in this massive range. So you're just predicting purchasing so you're just like purchasing predictive power at the cost of correspondingly lowering

your intrinsic probability. And in fact like we can show this mathematically right let C be the generic hypothesis that the constants wherever they fall necessarily have the values they do and let L be the specific hypothesis that the constants fall within the

exceedingly narrow life breeding range. If the hypothesis that the constants are necessary is just the generic hypothesis C then the probability of L given naturalism and C is still exceptionally small. In fact C doesn't even raise the probability of L at all. And in that

case, theism is still monstrously favored over naturalism. By contrast, if the hypothesis that the constants are necessary is the conjunction of L and C, in other words, the claim that the constants necessarily fall within the exceedingly life-mitting range, then the

conjunction of naturalism together with L and C is just ludicrously unlikely on the priors. That's because the probability of this conjunction is actually equal to the probability of L given C and naturalism times the probability of C and naturalism. And as

we've seen, the first value here is exceptionally small. Right? Merely given naturalism and the generic hypothesis does not make any probabilistic headway in making L more likely. And so the naturalist has then simply decreased the prior of her overall theory to exactly

the same extent that L was initially surprising on naturalism. And heck, it's actually worse than that for the naturalist here because C itself is pretty implausible conditional on naturalism. It's pretty implausible that the constants would be necessary given

those various reasons that I mentioned. So, so the naturalist has actually decreased the prior of naturalism even beyond the extent to which L was initially surprising on naturalism. And so the necessary constants objection is just a mess. And so as with the other

objections, the necessary constant objection is just a mess. And there's and there's a third problem with it too.

So third, fine-tuning is simply very powerful evidence for the conjunction of theism together with the claim that the constant values are contingent. Brian Cutter and Dustin Kummit give the Boulder Island analogy to illustrate why.

You're about to visit the island of boulders. You don't know whether anyone has been there before. You're fairly but not extremely confident that the boulders are not humanly movable. And so even if there were previous visitors, they couldn't have controlled the

arrangement of boulders on the island. You know, boulders are very heavy after all. When you arrive at the island though, you observe the boulders arranged in a beautiful circular pattern like Stonehenge. Intuitively, you should now be fairly confident in the following

conjunction. There were previous visitors and they could control the arrangement of the boulders. Similarly, even if we were initially pretty confident that the constant values were metaphysically necessary, upon observing the highly striking fact that they take on lifebitting values, we should simply

conclude both that theism is true and that God controls the contingent values of the constants.

Okay. What about the seventh objection? Divine fine-tuning. Like who fine-tuned the finetuner, huh? Isn't God just as complex as the universe? And so, doesn't he need just as much fine-tuning as the universe? Uh, no. Well, uh, God doesn't

have highly specific parameter values that need to be set in exceedingly narrow ranges in order for him to exist.

More generally, God is not beset by highly arbitrary coincidental features that call out for explanation. In fact, God isn't built up out of any parts at all. He's the ultimate fundamental reality. And so, he doesn't depend on parts that make up his being or that

need to strikingly align in fortunate ways to exist. Moreover, as we saw in my defense of premise one of my master argument, theism is actually a very simple elegant non-arbitrary uniform coherent hypothesis. As a result, God is much more plausibly the sort of thing

which is fundamental or ultimate than, you know, complex, inelegant, highly arbitrary, coincidental constants in physics. Finally, this objection also faces the awesome theistic evidence problem. You know, like if the objection worked against fine-tuning, it would also work against the awesome theistic

evidence argument. You know, like after all, uh, who designed the designer of the initial conditions? Like, isn't God just as complex as the initial conditions? So, doesn't he need just as much fine-tuning as them? Like, no.

Again, stop talking. Objection number eight, life ain't special. Hey, Joe. Uh, there's nothing special about life or consciousness or rationality or virtue or love or agency or beautiful cosmic and biological structures. Sure, we prefer these things. We think they're valuable. We

value them, but they're not valuable or good in any absolute or objective sense. Yet, the fine-tuning argument mistakenly assumes otherwise.

Okay, so how do I respond to this? Well, first, this is just wrong. There are indeed objective facts about what's good and bad and right and wrong and whatnot.

You know, it's clearly wrong to rape, torture, and dismember children to death just for fun. And it would still be wrong even if we all thought that that was okay and preferred to do it on weekends. So, there are moral truths,

and they're not fixed by our preferences or our beliefs. uh and if so clearly virtue and love and enjoyment and rationality and whatnot are good.

Second, suppose you don't accept that. That's fine because fine-tuning is almost overwhelming evidence for the conjunction of theism together with the view that there are facts about value.

So, we can simply build into our theistic hypothesis from the get-go that there are indeed such moral facts. And fine-tuning simply massively confirms this package deal. After all, that package predicts fine-tuning overwhelmingly better than naturalism.

And even if you think it's extremely implausible that there are moral facts, it's not hopelessly unlikely given theism. At the very least, you clearly shouldn't think there's only like a one in 10 to the^ of 100 chance that a moral

realist theism would turn out true. Moral realism is at least a serious view defended by the majority of philosophers for which there are lots of non-silly arguments. Like a moral realist brand of theism is just like obviously not as

improbable as say rolling a fair die and getting six 70 times in a row on your first try and then entering a lottery with every human who has ever existed, winning it, then entering it again, winning it again, then entering it two

more times and winning both times and then getting struck by lightning. And even that is only about 1 in 10 the^ of 105 chance, which is still overwhelmingly more likely than getting the constants to fall in the life range

by chance. And that's and that's even and dude that's even setting aside fine-tuning for discoverability and fine-tuning of the law structures and opriori fine tuning etc etc right and all the other evidence for theism. And my third response is the following like

listen suppose you're still in the grip of the objection and not convinced by my first two replies. No worries because we can generate theistic predictions without drawing on God's sensitivity to objective value. We can appeal for example to God's love. It wouldn't be

hopelessly surprising that an allloving being might want to create other beings capable of love with whom he can share his love.

And that and that alone suffices for the fine-tuning argument. We don't even need moral realism.

Okay. Ninth objection, the epistemically illuminated range objection. Listen, we don't know the probability of life under naturalism and theism since we can't put a measure on the space of possible law structures. We simply have to hold those fixed. And then okay, maybe holding

those fixed. Yeah, the constants seems to fall within an air life burning range. But we're totally in the dark about the probability of life as such under naturalism alone and theism alone since we can't put any measure on the

space of possible law structures and so we don't know how probable it is that we'd get the exact law structures that we in fact got. Okay, this objection fails. First, we can simply put the law structures in our background knowledge

when evaluating how likely the constants are to fall within the life permitting range conditional ontheism and naturalism. We should simply we should simply update on the character of the law structures first. That is we treat them as data and take into account their

evidential impact on the hypothesis and after we update on them the proper basian procedure is to then put them in our background knowledge from which we then go on to assess the probability of other pieces of evidence given theism

together with that background knowledge and compare that with the probability of those pieces of evidence given naturalism together with that background knowledge. That's the proper basing procedure. So there's nothing illicit here. So there's nothing illicit here.

We can just put the law structures in our background knowledge actually up first update on them. So you know to make this a little bit more mathematical is indeed mathematics. Yes. Uh if the fact that our law structures exist is L,

theism is T and naturalism is N. We first compare the probability of L given N with the probability of L given T.

That is we compare how likely it is that we'd get our law structures given naturalism and theism. We then update our confidence levels in naturalism and theism proportional to the ratio between those likelihoods. Now, for reasons already given, L will be very powerful

evidence for theism, even if we can't put a precise probability measure on the space of conceivable law structures. But even if you disagree with that and think that L is a wash between the hypothesis, the proper basian procedure is to then

put L in our background knowledge. And when we go on to consider the evidential import of the fact that the constants fall in their life pering ranges, call that fact f, we then simply compare the probability of f given n and l with the

probability of f given t and l. In other words, we hold l fixed when assessing how probable f is under naturalism and theism. F will then massively favor theism over naturalism. And the fine-tuning argument survives the objection unscathed. My second response

to the objection is that like I just think it can be reduced to absurdity. I think it succumbs to a reductio. Suppose the constants had to fall within the most absurdly small range like imaginable to permit life like one in

Google to the power of a Google to the power of a Google to the power of Google to the power of Graham's number to the power of Graham's number.

There's no way that happened by chance and it would just manifestly call out for a divine explanation. But you know, we can imagine the objector here coming to us and saying,"Well, actually, you know, we have to hold fixed the law

structures." So really, we naturalists don't have to worry about this. Like that would be ridiculous. Okay, nine dead. Let's kill the 10th. Uh the measure problem. The range of lots of these purportedly fine-tuned constants is infinitely large. You know, maybe

like negative infinity to positive infinity. And there's no plausible way to assign probabilities over an infinite possibility space such that all the probabilities add up to one. But that just means we can't put any probabilities on the space at all since

probabilities of a space of mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive outcomes must add up to one. So the fine-tuning argument just rests on illicit probability assignments. Okay, so first my understanding is that this objection plausibly misstates the physics at least for the cosmological

constant. There's subtle math in figuring out the probabilities for the constants falling in the relevant ranges. With the cosmological constant for instance, it's basically affected by massively large values of lots of other parameters which add and subtract together in ways that lead to an

extremely tiny number just slightly above zero uh which results in the universe expanding in life peritting rays. For the cosmological constant for instance, it's basically affected by massively large values of lots of other parameters which add and subtract

together in ways that lead to an extremely tiny number just slightly above zero which results in the universe expanding in life permitting ways. And we can give a reasonable answer to the question of how probable it is that all

these different values that go into the cosmological constant would line up in exactly this way. Or at least that's my understanding based on what like physicists say. Second, the objection here faces the awesome theistic evidence problem. Once again, imagine that the

initial conditions spelled out made by God with love. This would clearly be powerful evidence for theism, but it wouldn't be if the objection here worked against the fine-tuning argument. After all, the total range of possible initial conditions is infinitely large, right?

There are infinitely many different messages, strings of messages that could have been written in there. And you know, according to the objection, that would prevent these hypothetical initial conditions from confirming theism. But that's obviously absurd. And my third

response, if you're aware that there's at least some finite range R of values that a constant falls in and only a hopelessly small slice of R allows for life and the value falls within that small slice, that still seems like very

powerful evidence for theism because we can first update on the fact that the value falls in R, which is arguably a wash between theism and naturalism, and then after that update on the constant falling within the tiny slice given R,

right? And that'll strongly favor theism. Right? So to give an analogy, imagine a gigantic, infinitely long white wall in an infinitely large warehouse. A truly gigantic portion of this white wall is illuminated for millions of miles, but the rest is dark.

In the illuminated region, the wall is entirely blank and featureless except for a single fly. You then hear a shot ring out from somewhere in the warehouse and it hits the fly. This seems like a very good evidence that someone was

intentionally aiming at the fly even though technically the whole space is infinite. And that's because we can first update on the fact that there is this very large finite region in which the bullet fell. And then conditional on

the bullet falling within the finite region, it's much more likely under the intentional direction hypothesis than the chance hypothesis that the bullet would specifically hit the fly.

And as always, Brian Cutter has good things to say about measure theoretic objections. This this kind of objection doesn't trouble me. It it strikes me as a merely technical issue for yeah regimenting the argument within a basian framework

that doesn't undercut at all the intuitive force of the argument. So maybe a way of pushing this point is to note that you can basically run a version of this concern for any abductive argument for more or less

anything. But I um I I maybe it'll be clearest to think about like other hypothetical abductive arguments that you might run for for theism that intuitively seem really really good given certain sets of data but where these technical challenges

would arise. So, um, you know, you see you you you do some physics, you find out that in the interior of the atom, there's, uh, the the prologue to the Gospel of John spelled out in in in New

Testament Greek. Um, intuitively, this is just massively strong evidence for theism. Um, and if you wanted to be kind of rigorous and write a philosophy paper about it, you might couch it in a basian framework and you might say, "Look, the

probability of the gospel of John being in the interior of the atom conditional on theism is higher than the probability of this conditional on atheism." And then someone could raise the same technical challenge like there's infinitely many things we might have

found in the interior of the atom. this this space of possibilities is is kind of unruly. We can't put a natural measure on it. So, how can you say that finding the prologue of the Gospel of John in the interior of the atom is is

is more likely. We can't assign probabilities here at all. I think this this is purely 100% a a technical challenge for dealing with probabilities in infinite probability spaces, but it doesn't at all undercut the the force of the argument. And I I I guess I'm

inclined to say the same thing with the the similar technical challenges to both fine-tuning and to psychophysical harmony. Um there there are tricky issues that arise in the infinite case, but we shouldn't we we shouldn't confuse uh kind of technical challenges for a

certain kind of mathematical apparatus for thinking about abductive reasoning with problems for just the the abductive reasoning itself.

Okay. Okay, objection number 11, the principle of indifference. Does the fine-tuning argument assume the principle of indifference, which roughly says that we should by default assign equal probabilities to all the possibilities unless there is some reason not to do so, as humor put it.

For the fine-tuning argument seems to treat each value of the constants as equiprobable under naturalism, precisely because there's no reason under naturalism why we should expect them to take on certain values as opposed to others. But there are famous puditive

counterexamples to the principle of indifference. So, it's a problem if the argument assumes it.

Well, first, there's surely at least some correct principle in the vicinity of the principle of indifference, which in turn will plausibly legitimate the fine-tuning argument. The reason is that there are lots of intuitively impeccable inferences that seem to require

something like the principle of indifference to go through. Michael Hume gives the following example. I show you two envelopes and tell you that one of them contains $100 and the other contains nothing. The two envelopes are indistinguishable to you. One of them

isn't fatter than the other. I'm not holding one of them closer than the other, etc. They're just completely indistinguishable in all relevant respects. What probability should you assign to each envelope containing $100?

Well, it seems really plausible that the correct epistemic probability to assign here is 50%. And as Miles Donny, who has shared with me in private correspondence, we can even imagine that instead of me giving the envelope, an alien brought it to you, right? So, you

can't like appeal the frequency data here. Uh, and even if you could, like the point would just be that even if you had no frequency data, it's still intuitively plausible that the probability is 50%. And it's hard to

deliver this verdict in the absence of at least something like a principle of indifference that would also enable the fine-tuning argument. Second, it's just false that the fine-tuning argument rests on the principle of indifference.

We might think that her priors are determined exclusively by other considerations like modesty, coherence, simplicity, and non-arbitiness. Or the priors might encode biases toward hypotheses that score well on these desitter. But on naturalism, the actual constant values don't appear any

simpler, less arbitrary, or more coherent than values outside the lifepermitting range. So even if the principle of indifference plays no role in determining our priors, we can still justify the equal probability assignments. Yet another reason the argument doesn't assume the principle of

indifference is that many of the constants in the argument are fundamental constants that don't admit of deeper explanation, at least under naturalism. The argument could then simply be run with a principle of indifference restricted to the fundamental level which humor argues is

immune to the standard counter examples to an unrestricted principle of indifference. And finally, Brian Cutter once again nicely addresses this objection.

I don't think we appeal to anything quite so strong as like a spelled out version of the principal indifference from which you could derive the usual problematic results. So I agree that it's you know the the principle of

indifference it it it initially strikes you as pretty plausible but then you can look at these like cube factory cases and see that it gets you contradictory results and you know one one response is to say um there's something true in the

vicinity and we just need to qualify it to avoid these problematic results. That's what I'd be inclined to say by the way. Another is to say is to just chuck it entirely. Um, I so while I am inclined to think that there's there's

got to be some truth in the vicinity of the principle of indifference that I don't quite know how to spell out precisely, I don't think we need to rely on anything quite so strong. I mean, it's it's true that we rely on something

that looks a bit like indifference reasoning, but a couple points. So first we we do think that there's going to be a we we we allow that there will be a strong bias towards uh simple laws. So it's not merely that we enumerate all

the conceivable laws and then go for a uniform distribution over all of them. So we we allow for biases towards simplicity which is maybe against the spirit of of the indifference principle.

Um and secondly, I guess this returns to my essentially the same point I made in response to the infinity worry. Um, it it seems to me that there there are many cases of just clearly good reasoning that have to appeal to something that

looks kind of like indifference in the way that our reasoning looks kind of like indifference, but where the reasoning is just clearly pro clearly problematic in where it would be just very confused to try to say the the

reasoning was bad because it appeals to something like indifference. So again, uh you you see uh well, you know, you you go into your yard and you see the the leaves spelled out to form a message like hello, hello,

Miles. Um and and you reason in a basian way that it was it was very unlikely that the the leaves would spell out a message given that no one was there to visit you and comparatively more likely that they would spell out a message if

someone did come to visit. So you think very likely in the posteriors someone someone intentionally arranged these leaves to to spell out a message. And you know, I looking over your shoulder point out, oh, did you just appeal to an

a principle of indifference? It looked like you did because you were saying you like implicitly you were thinking like the vast majority of ways in which leaves could be arranged would not spell out a message. It's just a very small

measure of the the possible arrangements of leaves that correspond to a message. Ah, that looks like elicit uh indifference style reasoning. You can't reason that way. Okay, so clearly I'm the one who's confused in this case. I mean, it's true that your reasoning is

relying on something in the vicinity of indifference reasoning, but it's also just completely entirely legitimate.

Like, this is the correct way to reason in this case. I know guys, I keep playing Brian Cutter, but he's just like serially correct about things. Like, what am I supposed to do? All right, objection 12. Mostly lifeless. So,

listen, the universe is mostly barren and even hostile to life. Doesn't this show that our universe wasn't designed with life in mind? At the very least, it seems very surprising on the hypothesis that the designer is interested in life

that the designer basically produced a universe 99.9999999% of which is lifeless. Well, in response, first, as Miles Donu pointed out prepping for our video on fine-tuning for his channel, the fine-tuning argument only requires the premise that a life-pitting universe is

non-negligibly likely given theism. since actualizing all the goods enabled by a life- permitting universe is not a ludicrously absurd motive that God might have. But notice that this reasoning doesn't at all commit the fine-tuning proponent to thinking that the

probability of a lifeabundant universe would be ludicrously high under theism such that our failure to observe life abundance would be huge evidence for naturalism over theism. Nothing in the fine-tuning argument implies or justifies that probability judgment. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Right?

If, as fine-tuning proponents often urge, a modest amount of epistemic humility is called for in making judgments about what God would or wouldn't do, that actually motivates the thought that even if the likelihood of a lifeabundant universe given theism is

very high, it wouldn't be astronomically high, like on the order of 99.99999% likely, right? That's just an implausibly inflated probability assignment under theism. And more generally, we just have two different pieces of data on our hands. First that

the constants are lifepermitting and second that life is rare in the universe. We first update unlifermitting constants. This datim massively favors theism over naturalism. We then put that datim in our background knowledge. Next we consider how well the conjunction of

theism and life permitting constants predicts the rarity of life compared to the conjunction of naturalism and lifeing constants. Even if the rarity of life favors the latter over the former, it won't be anywhere near as good evidence as life permitting constants in

the first place. Second, there are just lots of non-negligibly likely reasons God might have for making life relatively rare in the universe that we've observed.

A vast and mostly lifeless universe gives us a sense of precariousness and radical dependence and insignificance, which in turn can cultivate profound humility and awe and reverence. Maybe there are aesthetic reasons for a large and mostly lifeless universe. Like I

don't know, deep space and deep time are super cool. Maybe a large and mostly lifeless universe is required in order for the universe itself to cooperate with God in producing life. Right? Just think like you need a lot of time and

space to forge the chemical elements needed for life in the guts of stars and then for those guts to be spewed throughout the universe as a result of supernova. And maybe it's good that God's creation itself cooperates with

God in bringing about valuable results. At the very least, a lot of empty time and space seems to be needed for the universe to cooperate with God in producing life. Conditional on are law structures and initial conditions. And

those law structures or initial conditions themselves don't seem better predicted by naturalism than theism. In fact, as we've seen, the opposite is true. Robin Collins notes in an interview with Matthew Adelstein that a truly vast universe is also needed for

discoverability. And if that's true, then even if God intended to populate just a few galaxies or even just one, he could still have good reason to create many more galaxies.

A large and mostly lifeless universe gives life forms therein opportunities for colonization and interstellar or even intergalactic travel eventually. In fact, the difficulties introduced by deep space is part of what would make this such an awesome achievement. And

also, you know, like we need lots of empty lifeless places to potentially colonize, right? Also, maybe a universe more jam-packed with life would lead to a far greater potential for disastrous consequences like far worse catastrophes subjugation slavery war

factory farming, etc. And listen, like I could go on, but together these various reasons significantly dent the evidential force of life's rarity. And I'm not saying that these are definitely God's reasons. I'm just trying to identify not to implausible reasons God

might have for making the world like this. Uh so as to blunt the force of the datim of life's rarity pretty I mean it just seems manifest clear to me that its force just utterly pales in comparison to the force of fine-tuning. So that's

my second response. Third, is there anything especially valuable about packing the universe tightly at all moments with life as opposed to creating say infinitely many conscious creatures throughout an endless future or a spatially infinite cosmos or an infinite

multiverse. Regardless of how locally rare life is at any given moment in cosmic history, both the high density of life strategy here and these various low density of life strategies allow the same number of conscious creatures to exist. So it's unclear why God would

prefer the former over the latter. But so long as that's unclear, then it's not going to be too surprising that God might opt for the latter over the former. In which case, we shouldn't be too surprised to find a low density of

life in the universe conditional on theism. As a result, the datim of life's rarity is basically a complete nothing burger. It's not good evidence against theism. Just deal with it. And like all we can reasonably conclude from our

empirical evidence is that the local density of life is low. But there's no good reason to think that if theism were true, the the local density of life would be high. Like I mean at best, one could argue that if theism were true,

the absolute number of people would be high. But many if not most of the ways that God could create an absolutely large population would not involve creating a highly dense population. So that's so that's my third response.

Here's my fourth response. The objection succumbs to the awesome theistic evidence parody. Imagine that you wake up and start making coffee. Since you're distracted watching Majesty of Reason, you spill your coffee on your dining table. And since you're emotionally

fragile, you start crying. But as your tears begin to fade, you notice that the coffee on the table starts rearranging itself seemingly of its own accord to spell out the entire Gospel of John with John 16:22 underlined, which reads, "So

you also are now in anguish, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice and no one will take your joy away from you." Finally, suppose this only happens to you. No one else receives any messages. I mean, listen,

clearly this would be good evidence for theism, but the objector could equally reason that the environment around every other person is messageless and even hostile to messages. So, like, doesn't this show that there isn't a designer who had this message in mind? Like, at

the very least, it seems very surprising on the hypothesis that the designer is interested in writing messages that the designer basically produced a world where 99.99999% of people don't get messages. So for these four reasons, I think the mostly

lifeless universe objection fails. Onwards we march to the electrons in love objection. Sorry. Even under theism, it's monstrously improbable that the constants would fall within the narrow life permitting range. Indeed, it's just as improbable as under naturalism. Because no matter where the

constants fell, even if they fell outside the narrow biological life permitting range, God could still have created valuable embodied conscious creatures. How could God do that if for example the closest particles were light years away? Well, just by creating

different psychophysical laws, which are laws that specify which conscious states are paired or correlated or associated with which physical states. In particular, God could just pair consciousness with different physical entities like electrons and protons so that they can engage in heartfelt

communication and love and whatnot. And there doesn't seem to be any particular reason to opt for a biological organisms in love world as opposed to an electrons in love world. And so we should be indifferent under theism across the full

range of constant values. So theism does not better predict the fine-tuning data than naturalism. Okay. Uh this is not a good objection. First we can simply put the actual psychophysical laws in the background when evaluating the fine-tuning argument. To do that, we

first treat the actual psychophysical laws as a datim and evaluate the bearing of this datim on theism and naturalism.

As I'll explain in the next section, the actual psychophysical laws will almost certainly just like massively confirm theism given how harmonious and coherent and intelligible they are. And then after taking their evidential effect into account, we then simply put them in

our background information when evaluating other pieces of data like fine-tuning. And then we get yet further evidence for fine-tuning. Sorry. And then we get yet further evidence for theism from fine-tuning holding the actual psychophysical laws fixed. Now, as it happens, I know I chose a

different order to update on things for this video since I think it's the easiest way to present the evidence, but it's mathematically provable that the order in which you update on different pieces of evidence doesn't matter. It doesn't make a difference to the

probabilities of hypothesis after taking all the evidence into account. So, my presentational choice here is totally compatible with my first response. And I think that's response alone just suffices to put this objection to bed.

Second of all, we can grant that the odds that God would make a conscious organism world as opposed to an electrons in love world is low. But it seems manifestly wrong to say that the odds here are on the order of like 1 in

10 the^ of 136. A plausible upper bound on the probability of getting a life permitting universe. A plausible upper bound on the probability of getting a life permitting universe by chance.

Sure, there are lots and lots and lots and lots of ways you can have electrons in love by setting the constants to any of the values outside the biological life permitting range, but these are basically just like lots of different

ways of doing broadly the same thing, namely making an electrons and love world. And it's not like hopelessly unlikely that God might attend to and be relatively indifferent across the broad kinds of embodied conscious creatures he could make rather than being indifferent

across the particular instances of all the kinds. So long as that choice procedure on God's part isn't hopelessly unlikely and so long as it isn't hopelessly unlikely conditional on God's adopting that choice procedure that he opts for biologically embodied conscious

agents. Both of which strike me as like eminently plausible claims. The probability of biologically embodied conscious agents under theism won't be anywhere near 1 in 10 the^ of 136. To put it in other terms, suppose it's like a one in octillion chance that's like 1

in 10 the^ of 127 that God would attend to these broad kinds of embodied conscious creatures in choosing what to create. And suppose also that conditional on God attending to these broad kinds of creatures, it's then a one inctilian chance that God would opt

for this sort of world containing biologically embodied creatures. Well, then theism will assign fine-tuning a one in octillian octillian chance. And that will still result in basically decisive confirmation of theism over naturalism.

And listen, just like take taking a step back, here's an analogy that illustrates where the electrons in love objection goes wrong. Suppose I'm a painter. I could make an abstract expressionist piece or a painting of your mother. Now,

because abstract expressionist artworks have so many more degrees of freedom than a painting of your mother, it turns out that there are like, let's say, 10 the^ of 100 more ways of making an abstract expressionist piece than a

painting of your mother. But quite clearly, we shouldn't be 10 the^ of 100 times more confident that I would make the former over the latter. And that's because it's at least not terribly unlikely that as an agent, I might first

and foremost attend to the choiceworthy kinds of artwork available to me rather than specific instances of those kinds.

But the same is true of God. It's at least not hopelessly improbable that as an agent, God might first and foremost attend to the choiceworthy kinds of embodied conscious creatures available to him rather than specific instances of those kinds. Oh, and by the way, this

analogy also illustrates that just as the atheist can say, "Oh, like God could have created an electrons in love world, which wouldn't have required fine-tuning, the a painterist can say, ah, you know, like a painter could have painted an abstract expressionist

painting, which wouldn't have required extremely intricate brush work." But like clearly, the fact that the painting you're looking at contains extremely intricate brush work is extremely powerful evidence that it was painted by a painter. Similarly, the fact that the

universe is fine-tuned for life is extremely powerful evidence that it was designed. The possibility of electrons in love notwithstanding. Here's my third response to the electrons in love objection. Uh it isn't hopelessly improbable under theism that God would

make a multiverse containing universes with different sorts of conscious entities. Some of which are, you know, hydrogen soup universes full of conscious electrons and love. Some of which are universes like ours with conscious organisms, etc. And plausibly we couldn't have been electrons. So,

it's not surprising that we find ourselves in one of the conscious organism universes. Given all this, it's nowhere near as unlikely under theism compared to naturalism that we'd find constants of our universe to be biologically life permitting. Fourth,

there are plausible reasons favoring conscious biological organisms over conscious particles. And it isn't hopelessly grotesqually ludicrously unlikely that God might act on those reasons. After all, after all, being biological organisms enables us to manifest or embody our agency in the

physical world in lots of ways that electrons can't. You know, think of the arts, significantly instrumentalizing the environment and so on. A fifth response to the objection is inspired by the amazing Amos Woolen, fantastic young philosopher there. Um, aesthetic

objectivism, so the view that there are objective aesthetic values, is a serious view which shouldn't be assigned a negligible probability, conditional ontheism.

And together with theism, it much better predicts richly structured, complex, and interesting cosmic and biological evolution over the hydrogen soup world because there's lots more beauty in our kind of world. Oh, and again, like we're only looking for numbers here that

aren't as low as like 10 the^ of -36 here, right? So, oh, and finally, this is my sixth point.

Man, the failure of these objections is just like multiply overdetermined. Um, the electrons in love objection grants the conceivability. This I guess this isn't quite response to the objection.

My other five points were direct responses, but this one is just a fun interesting thing to note. Finally, the electrons in love objection grants the conceivability of alternative psychophysical laws, right? Because it requires us to be able to like

understand them and do the do reasoning about them and like compare the probabilities of various hypotheses um with these alternative psychophysical mappings. Um, but that is a key premise in the psychophysical harmony argument which I think is unassailable once that

premise is granted. But you know, we'll get to that argument later. Stay tuned. Stay finely tuned as I say. Okay. So, onwards we march to the stalking horse objection. Right. So, here's that objection. Merely positing that there's a designer does not actually predict

fine-tuning better than naturalism. Absent some specification of the desires of a designer. A designer could want anything including any value of the fundamental constants and any law structures. So fine-tuning is not evidence for design over naturalism. Of course, in order to predict the data,

the theist might posit that the designer wants life permitting values. But then the naturalist can also predict the data by positing a fundamental disposition of natural reality towards life permitting values. So once again, it's a wash between the hypothesis.

Okay, so there are many problems with the stalking horse objection. First, the stocking horse objection faces the awesome theistic evidence problem.

Again, imagine that the initial conditions spelled out made by God with love. That would clearly be powerful evidence for God. But it wouldn't be if we accepted the stalking horse objection to the fine-tuning argument. For the stalking horse objection would also

afflict the reasoning in the awesome theistic evidence argument. Oh, like merely positing that there's a designer doesn't actually predict that message better than naturalism. Absent some specification of the desires of a designer, a designer could want anything, including any initial

conditions. So that message in the initial conditions is not evidence for design over naturalism. Of course, in order to predict that message in the initial conditions, the theist might posit that the designer wants this message there. But then the naturalist

can also just predict the data by positing a fundamental brute disposition of natural reality towards this message.

Listen guys, clearly something must have gone wrong somewhere here because that would obviously be evidence for theism, but it wouldn't be if the stalking horse objection succeeded. And Miles Donghue actually has a nice clip making the same point.

In my opening statement, I'm going to set the stage by explaining in more detail what awesome theistic evidence or like the at response is and defend one instance of it against a prominent objection, my favorite skeptical objection, the stalking horse objection.

And specifically, I'll talk about it as an objection to the fine-tuning argument for theism, but my reply will generalize to other theistic arguments as well. So some terminology um awesome theistic evidence at evidence no just at evidence is already in there is commonly cited

cases um as they're they're ostensibly extreme and obvious possible empirical observations that would be evidence for God's existence if we had them. So for example the stars realigning to spell out the first 12 verses of the Gospel of

John in Greek uh peering into a microscope and seeing made by God etched into the side of every molecule. However the physics works out on a molecule having something etched into it. Um or one that I will add is the second return

of Christ of Jesus Christ and his subsequent millennial reign on earth. If the idea here is that in each of these cases if you were party to these observations you would have evidence for theism for God's existence.

So then theistic arguments the the resolution makes mention of standard or main theistic arguments which I will probably I'll refer to as fine-tuning at al as a catch-all term. Uh these would be things like the fine-tuning argument, the psychophysical harmony argument, the

nomological argument which is the idea that the order inherent in the laws of nature is evidence for God's existence.

the argument from the applicability of mathematics that the rich mathematical structure of the universe is evidence for God's existence and and other empirical arguments for theism. So against these arguments there are actually um overlapping objections.

There are a few family of families of objections that seem to apply to all of them. So for example take the stocking horse objection here. The idea is that just as theism is a specific version of the general design hypothesis that there

there is a designer of the universe um so too we should compare theism against a specific version of naturalism. So Alex Malpass for instance has proposed augmented naturalism the hypothesis that the universe has a disposition to incline towards constants that are life

permitting. So this would arise in the context of the fine-tuning argument for theism. that hypothesis, augmented naturalism, does seem to make fine-tuning for life just as likely as theism. Um, and so the idea is that if the theist can opt for a specific

version of the design hypothesis, namely theism, an all powerful, all- knowing god, then so can the naturalist. But then fine-tuning is evidentially inert.

It doesn't give us any reason to prefer theism to naturalism. Now, the at response goes like this. The general form is something like this. Premise one, if objection X works in the case of fine-tuning at al, it would also imply

that there is no possible evidence for theism. Two, there is possible evidence for theism. And here enters the awesome theistic evidence that I delineated earlier. Three, therefore, objection X does not work in the case of fine-tuning at al these standard arguments. So, in

the case of the stalking horse, I contend that it overgeneralizes. It proves too much. Imagine standing outside of Jesus's tomb in 33 CE and seeing the stone roll away of its own accord seemingly and a radiant beaming figure walk out from the tomb dressed in

white. You speak with him, walk with him, eat with him, go with him into town where he meets others as well. Clearly, this would be at least some evidence for theism over naturalism. You ought to increase your credence in theism

compared with naturalism just even a little bit. But it would seem that one could press with equal force the stocking horse maneuver as we did in the case of fine-tuning, namely with this hypothesis. The universe has a disposition to allow for spontaneous

spontaneous resurrections of crucified victims in the year 33 CE in Jerusalem. But this would obviously do nothing to undermine the rationality of your inference to theism. And so the objection proves too much. If it if it undermines the inference here, it seems

parallel. it undermines the inference in the case of fine-tuning or or vice versa. And so if it if we still do have evidence here for theism, then it can't work in the case of fine-tuning is the idea. Now, in my debate with Alex, he

replied by biting the bullet and at least implying that witnessing the resurrection of Jesus wouldn't be any evidence at all for theism over naturalism. Instead, it might be evidence, say, for aliens or some other exotic but still natural hypothesis. Um,

but you can, if you'd like, believe in aliens if you witness the resurrection of Jesus. But I think that most of us concede that that would be a wildly implausible imprint. Um, but I won't repeat what I said in my debate with

Malpass. Instead, we can just shift to talking about any other possible empirical observations. Pick anything.

Miraculous healings when we pray to God to have our prayers answered. Ancient prophecies being fulfilled. Visions from God, for example, telling us how future events will unfold and then they do unfold in exactly the detail in which they were conveyed. Um the point is the

stocking horse objection seems to imply that we can have no possible empirical evidence for theism over naturalism um for any logically possible observation.

There will always be parody between theism and naturalism if you grant the machinery and the logic of the stocking horse objection. But that's a radical and deeply implausible thesis. Oh, and by the way, if you're curious, I've put

some further stages of the dialectic on screen. You can pause the screen on these three slides. So here's slide number one. Here is slide number two that you can pause. And then here is slide number three that you can pause if

you want to read them. Um or you can read them in the stalking horse document linked in the resource document in the description. But let's move on. These are just like further stages in the dialectic of you know people will try to

respond to the uh awesome theistic evidence response to the stalking horse objection and I don't think that their responses uh succeed. So one two three and we shall move on.

A second problem for the stalking horse objection is that some designers are much more probable than others because they're simpler, more compactly describable in fundamental terms, less arbitrary, more coherent, etc. Theism has a lot of these theoretical virtues

that give it a much higher prior than most other forms of the design hypothesis. And it's not terribly unlikely that a theistic designer would value life permitting constants since they enable lots of profound goods and God being a perfect being would be

motivated by the good. Put differently, some specific design hypotheses are way more probable than others and lead to nonuniform non-indifferent probabilities over the space of possible constant values. As I've argued, theism is a very simple, elegant, uniform, coherent design hypothesis, and it

biases toward life permitting values. And theism is obviously much more intrinsically probable than some random, arbitrarily limited designer with some arbitrary brute preference for the constant value 0.00000000395291701.

000000 39529171486561. Like come on, dude. More generally, there are characterizations of the designer which one take up a decent chunk of the design probability space since they characterize the designer with only one or a few fundamental features held to a

very natural, uniform, elegant, non-arbitrary extent, as in perfect being theism, and which too render it not particularly surprising that fine-tuning would obtain since there are reasonable, intelligible motives that the aforementioned designer so characterized may possess. Given one and

two, their bare design hypothesis renders fine-tuning not terribly surprising. By contrast, naturalism does not have similarly plausible sub hypotheses which similarly well predict the data. By far the most intrinsically plausible versions of naturalism, like the ones with the extremely simple life

precluding law structures, I canvased predict fine-tuning horrifically. And even the most intrinsically plausible versions of naturalism which share our law structures, such as single universe naturalism, also predict fine-tuning horrifically. Other salient versions of naturalism tend to either have

prohibitively low priors, very poorly predict the data, or be very strikingly coincidental in lots of other ways, or all these. All in all, the objection is just wrong that the predictions of the bare design hypothesis are equivalent to

those of naturalism since the predictions of the bare design hypothesis are a weighted average of how expected life permitting constants are on the various specific designer hypotheses. And some specific designer hypotheses like theism are not very intrinsically unlikely and render the

life permitting constants not terribly improbable. By contrast, I'm unaware of any similarly elegant, compactly describable non-arbitrary coherent and uniform specific naturalistic hypothesis which renders lifemitting constants not terribly improbable and which doesn't face other insupable difficulties.

Here's my third response to the stalking horse objection. Proponents of the stocking horse objection sometimes want to push stalking horse type objections to all or most theistic arguments, but in doing so they make an important probabilistic mistake. Specifically,

they neglect the snowball probabilistic effects of successive confirmations of theism. Suppose we first apply the stocking horse objection to the fine-tuning argument. Then after updating on fine-tuning, we can even spot the stalking horse objection proponent that the posterior probability

of the bare design hypothesis is not greater than the posterior probability of naturalism. Crucially though, we will then have significantly raised the probability of subhypotheses of bare design and naturalism which predict fine-tuning and theism and other valued directed design hypotheses will be

foremost among these sub hypotheses of bare design. This means that by the time we investigate our next piece of data, say psychophysical luck, much more of the bare design probability space is assigned to such valued directed design subhypotheses.

And since these subhypotheses decently predict psychophysical luck, it will then turn out that bare design will decently predict psychophysical luck much better than naturalism does.

Granted, naturalistic s hypothesis which nicely predict fine-tuning will be taking up a much larger proportion of the naturalism probability space after our first update on fine-tuning. Grant that. So going into our assessment of the psychophysical luck data, the degree

to which naturalism predicts psychophysical luck will largely be a function of how well the fine-tuning predicting subotheses of naturalism also predict psychophysical luck. Yet I see no good reason to think that such subothesis would predict psychophysical luck particularly well. If anything, I

see reasons to think that that wouldn't be the case since merely securing fine-tuning is perfectly compatible with these psychophysical principles or laws being radically disharmonious and unlucky and simple or boring in any which way. And so the broader pointer

behind my third response to the stocking horse objection is that as we successfively update on more and more data, theism and other valued directed design hypotheses will be taking up more and more of the bearer design probability space and hence will lead to

bare design predicting subsequent data much better than it predicted earlier data and importantly much better than naturalism. Since there does not seem to be a comparably intrinsically plausible naturalistic subhypothesis which unifyingly predicts each successive piece of strikingly fortunate data in

our successive updating. Okay, so I don't think Stocking objections work. Let's turn to objections from divine psychology.

Hey Joe, we need to be able to predict what God would or wouldn't do in order to run the fine-tuning argument since the argument assumes that fine-tuning the universe is something God would do.

But we can make no such predictions, right? Like God is totally beyond our ken. He's infinitely more cognitively sophisticated than us. And we've got no good reason to think that the range of divine reasons of which we're aware is

representative of the full range of divine reasons that there are. So the fine-tuning argument fails.

Uh oh, contrary, the divine psychology objection fails. First, the objection overgeneralizes. I know at this point I'm just like uh a resounding gong or a clinging symbol, right? I'm just going on and on and on about like the same problem because

these objections face the same problem. Imagine that the initial conditions of the universe spelled out made by God with love in every human language.

Clearly, that would be good evidence for God's existence. But the divine psychology objection absurdly implies otherwise. After all, well, we need to be able to predict what God would or wouldn't do in order to run the initial conditions argument since the argument

assumes that writing into the initial conditions is something that God would do. But we can make no such predictions, right? God is totally beyond our ken.

He's infinitely more cognitively sophisticated than us and we've got no good reason to think that the range of divine reasons of which we're aware like no stop bad. Like I'm spraying you with water. Second, it's just false that we

need to be able to predict what God would or wouldn't do in order to run the fine-tuning argument. All we need is the highly plausible claim that God is not overwhelmingly absurdly ludicrously pathetically unlikely to make a life

permitting universe, at least conditional on there being a universe with our law structures. If anything, epistemic humility should lead us to assign a non-extreme probability here, thereby vindicating the fine-tuning argument. To avoid the argument, you need to be overwhelmingly confident,

seemingly irrationally, that God definitely wouldn't do this. And that of course just runs contrary to the very objection that that's being posed.

Alternatively, you might say that the probability is inscrutable. But as Nevin Kleinhagga has shown, that means theism's probability given our evidence is also inscrutable. And hence so is atheisms. In which case, atheism is not probable given our evidence. And so the

atheist who wants to say that the probability is inscrutable is just like shooting themselves in the foot. Also, if the probability that god exists and would fine-tune things or prevent evils is inscrutable, then it seems like the probability that God exists and would

prevent the universe from persisting in existence tomorrow is also inscrutable. But that of course undermines our inductive knowledge leading to an absurd inductive skepticism.

Also just a more general point. We don't need data to be expected under a hypothesis to be extremely powerful evidence for that hypothesis. Right? The data simply needs to be much more expected on the truth of the hypothesis

than its falsity. Right? That's compatible with the probability of the data conditional on the hypothesis being super low. Right? So for instance, if I'm on a deserted island with a friend and I wake up one morning to see written

in the sand, I went for a swim. That would be extremely powerful evidence that my friend wrote me a message, even though it could still be extremely surprising under that hypothesis that he would write this in the sand.

Like, I might know that he hates swimming. I might know that he's actually very bad at it and recognizes that it's dangerous to him. I might also know that he only ever posts written messages on my door, like he's never

done it in sand. And maybe also just like I know that he really doesn't like sand. So given these stipulations, the datim here is actually extremely surprising on the hypothesis that my friend wrote me a message. Even still,

the datim is overwhelming evidence in favor of that hypothesis since the datim is far more surprising on the falsity of the hypothesis since you know like the random forces of nature would be far more unlikely to produce that linguistic

display. And then my third and final response to the divine psychology objection is that listen, the objection would just completely destroy all the best arguments for atheism. If you want to justify atheism by appealing to evil or hiddenenness or religious diversity

or basically anything pertaining to the character of the world around us, then according to the objection, you're making unjustifiable assumptions about what God would or wouldn't do. So if the objection worked, it would also be a massive blow to atheism. All right, 15

objections down. Let's let's move to the 16th objection. Come on, stay with me, guys. Wake up. Wake up. Come on. Wake up. I need that. I need that uh spray can of water back so I can spray you

again. Okay. So, the 16th objection is the deeper laws objection. Hey, there might be deeper laws or some deeper physical theory that predicts the finely tuned values of the constants or that even requires all the constants to take on

their particular values thereby removing the need for the constants to fall within an exceedingly narrow range of possible values in order for life to exist. First, I think the objection probably faces the awesome theistic evidence problem, right? Like imagine

that every subatomic particle contained a tiny inscription of the first 14 verses of the book of John in perfect coin a Greek. This would clearly be strong evidence for theism. But like if the deeper laws objection worked against

the fine-tuning argument, it seems like it would also work against, you know, the design argument based on the coin a Greek inscription, right? Right? For there might be, oh, there might be deeper laws or some deeper physical theory that predicts or even requires

this inscription on subatomic particles, thereby removing the need for the particles to possess features within an exceedingly narrow range of possible features in order for the inscription to exist. Like that would rightly fall on deaf years. Second, we can conceive of

all different sorts of deeper laws and only a tiny fraction would lead to the values of the constants falling in the narrow life permitting ranges.

Epistemically speaking, there could be deeper laws or physical theories resulting in any of the values that the parameters might conceivably take on.

Absent reason to think those deeper laws or physical theories are significantly more likely to produce constants within the narrow life permitting ranges, it seems monstrously improbable that they'd produce finely tuned values rather than the overwhelmingly more numerous non-finely tuned values.

And by the way, this is like roughly the same problem afflicting the necessary constant subjection to the fine-tuning argument. Recall that problem. The generic hypothesis that whatever the laws are, it's metaphysically necessary that they have those values doesn't

raise the probability of the data. Namely, that the constants fall in the life permitting range. Whereas the specific hypothesis that it's metaphysically necessary that the values take on such and such exact numerical values within the life permitting range

that entails the data, but you know, only at the cost of having a correspondingly low prior. The same dilemma plagues the deeper laws objection. The generic hypothesis that whatever the values are, deeper laws result in them doesn't actually raise

the probability that the constants fall in the life permitting range. Whereas the specific hypothesis that deeper physics results in such and such exact numerical values entails the data but you know only at the cost of having a correspondingly low prior given that

there's no antecedent reason to think laws resulting in these values as opposed to others would be you know simpler, more uniform, more elegant, more modest, etc.

Although you know I grant that if such an anticcedent reason can be supplied then that would undercut to some extent the force of the argument from finally tuned constant values the extent of undercutting would be proportional to the probability that there are deeper

laws uh as well as how probable it is conditional and there being deeper laws that the constant values would fall in their specifically in their narrow electroning ranges. My third response to the objection at hand is that it doesn't

even touch the argument from finely tuned law structures or a priority fine-tuning. Even granting that there are deeper laws that entail or predict life permitting constant values, those laws won't be nearly as simple as the extremely simple and elegant laws that

preclude anything interesting or valuable occurring. Fourth, my limited intent of understanding is that there are scientific grounds to at least think the finetuning of the cosmological constant will survive potential deeper physics. Luke Barnes covers these in some of his work. You can see, for

example, his paper here and his dialogue here. And also note that we can't discount our best physical theories simply because they have free parameters that can take on a very large range of values. After all, it can turn out that

the universe itself has basic features that could have taken on a wide range of values. That doesn't seem like hopelessly unlikely. Uh and my limited understanding is that our current physical theories which involve fine-tuning are indeed very well

confirmed. Moreover, it is in absolute terms non-negligibly likely that the parameters would take on the actual values conditional on our physical theories since that probability is a weighted average of the probability that they would do so given our physical

theories together with theism and then together with naturalism. And even if the second probability is extremely low, the former isn't. And this is a point that my friend Nolan Mccay makes in a post that I've linked in the resource

document as well. Okay, onwards we march to the 17th and final objection to fine-tuning, which is the multiverse response. So, according to the multiverse hypothesis, there's a vast and diverse array of universes, each varying randomly in the values of its

physical constants and initial conditions. Given this hypothesis, it's totally unsurprising that some universe would be life permitting. And of course, it's not at all surprising that we would find ourselves in one of those universes because those are the only ones we could

find ourselves in, right? So fine-tuning is not evidence for theism over and against multiverse naturalism at least.

Okay, first even if we grant that fine-tuning is not evidence for theism over and against a particular version of naturalism, fine-tuning can still be very good evidence for theism. Like after all, it's a totally mundane occurrence that one piece of data can be

good evidence for multiple incompatible hypotheses, right? Like if we're guessing a randomly drawn card from a fairly shuffled deck, uh, and I guess the four of hearts, while you guess the ace of spades, our hypotheses each start out about like 2% probable. If a machine

draws the card and then informs us that the card is either the four of hearts or the ace of spades, the probability of each of our hypotheses is now 50%.

So the new information here is good evidence for two competing hypotheses. Both of hypotheses just went up in probability like 25fold.

And with respect to finetuning, like listen, my primary aim here is to establish that fine-tuning is powerful evidence for theism. Not necessarily that it favors theism over like specifically multiverse naturalism. But of course, but but of course that's just

my first response. And and I do think we can make an even stronger case against the multiverse objection. So let's turn to my other responses. So my second response is that the multiverse hypothesis certainly doesn't explain fine-tuning for discoverability since we

could have existed in a far less discoverable universe. So you know theism still mogs. Third, the multiverse hypothesis doesn't significantly dent the force of the argument from finely tuned law structures or the more a priori fine-tuning argument, right? Like

even getting a multiverse with law structures containing life permitting ranges would itself be a highly fortuitous result given the vast abyss of extremely simple lifecluding law structures that could have reigned across the multiverse or that could have existed instead of a multiverse. So I

think fine-tuning still very significantly favors theism even over multiverse naturalism. My fourth response to the multiverse hypothesis is that it faces a very serious Boltzman brain problem. Even in universes that are a diffuse soup of hydrogen and helium for all eternity, which will far

outnumber universes like ours in the multiverse, random events will rarely occur in which a fully functioning human brain fluctuates into existence, briefly persists, and then snaps out of existence. These Boltzmon brains will tend to predominate the class of

observers within a multiverse. Since Boltzman brains only require small localized pockets of order or low entropy to exist, whereas long and drawn out evolutionary processes in large complex structured orderly universes like ours require gargantuan pockets of order or low entropy. So as an analogy,

like the multiverse explanation of fine-tuning is kind of like positing hordes of monkeys randomly typing on typewriters to explain why an entire work of Shakespeare was typed. Like sure if there are zillions upon zillions of monkeys randomly typing somewhere one

will type up an entire work of Shakespeare but like way more often than typing up an entire work of Shakespeare they'll type up like a sentence or a paragraph of Shakespeare right so if you think of your current experiences like a

sentence from Shakespeare you should be shocked under the multiverse hypothesis that you find yourself in a complete work of Shakespeare that is a massive region of order rather than a tiny one In other words, you should be shocked to

find out that you're not a Boltzman brain. And this also means that the multiverse hypothesis threatens radical skepticism since most of the beings experientially indistinguishable from you are going to be Boltzman brains under that hypothesis. So you can't be

confident that you're not one of them, which is an absurdly skeptical result. My fifth response to the multiverse response, and you know, I'm less confident in this response, but you know, it may work. You can see my back

and forth with Miles Donahghue on this particular response to the multiverse objection to fine-tuning. Um the multiverse hypothesis only makes it likely that some universe would be life permitting. But we know that this universe that is our universe is life

permitting. Positing a multitude of universes with varying constants and initial conditions doesn't actually make it more likely that this universe's constants and initial conditions which were still determined by a chance process would happen to fall in the narrow life permitting range. So

contrary to the multiverse objection, our most specific data concerning fine-tuning isn't at all predicted by the multiverse hypothesis.

Sixth, and finally, and relatedly, Michael Roa argues that theism is still confirmed by fine-tuning even assuming that there's a multiverse since theism much better predicts the naturalism that a non-negligible proportion of universes within a multiverse would be life

permitting and hence much better predicts that this very universe would be life would be fine-tuned. To put it differently, almost certainly on naturalism, only a hopelessly small fraction of the universes will be fine-tuned. And so, it's still extremely

surprising that this universe in particular will be fine-tuned. By contrast, on theism, it wouldn't be particularly surprising that a sizable fraction of universes would be finely tuned given how valuable life is. And so, theism much better predicts that

this particular universe would be fine-tuned. All right? So, like I spent so much time on fine-tuning because I want you guys to really feel its force. I want you guys to see its resilience in the face of objections. This was one of the first

considerations that started pulling me away from agnosticism and toward theism and I hope it pushes you in the same direction. Suppose we now include in our background knowledge the two-fold miracle. Not only do the fundamental laws of nature possess life permitting

ranges for their constant values, but the constants actually fall within those precise ranges. Even then, it's very surprising under naturalism that the life forms which develop would be conscious. And even if conscious life does develop, it's still profoundly

unlikely under naturalism that the conscious experiences of those life forms would be incredibly orderly, coherent, intelligible, and rational in light of their physical states and behavior. By contrast, neither of these facts is nearly as surprising under theism. In fact, there's actually a

collection of facts here that together comprise astoundingly powerful evidence for God's existence. These facts are all kinds of psychophysical luck, which is the general fact that consciousness is integrated with physical reality in striking and suspiciously fortunate ways, ways that would be incredibly

unlikely in the absence of design. In what follows, I'll proceed through each fact in turn, drawing heavily and directly at various points from one of Brian Cutter's chapters in our book. So, fact number one, there are psychophysical laws. So, this is the

only fact on the list whose evidential force presupposes the truth of dualism. I mean, technically non-reductive forms of pansychism also make this fact evidential, but I'm going to set those aside. I mean, everything I say in this section could easily be reformulated to

accommodate that. Now, dualism is the view that consciousness and matter are fundamentally distinct kinds of realities. Here, consciousness refers to subjective experience. Something is conscious if it has experiences. Or as philosophers like to say, something is conscious if there's something it's like

to be that thing. There's some way it feels from the inside or from the subject's perspective. On the dualist picture, consciousness and matter are not reducible to each other, and neither is reducible to some secret third thing.

Consciousness or mentality is a metaphysically basic category that's not explainable in more fundamental terms.

Minds are not built up out of or constructed from more basic ingredients like mindless particles. The same is true of matter. It's a basic category.

Not built up out of or constructed from minds or consciousness. Consciousness is consciousness is fundamental.

particles are aware. Sorry. Again, it's not it's not it's not a Majesty reason video without like an impression of Philip Goth. Okay.

Dualism contrasts with physicalism or materialism, which is the view that ultimately at bottom everything is physical or material. Consciousness is then nothing over and above matter moving or combining or functioning in a certain way. That's just what consciousness is. Now, one motivation

for dualism is that consciousness just seems like radically different from material configurations and processing.

Like, it's utterly mysterious why atoms bumping into one another in certain ways would be associated with subjective experience. Like, it seems like all this processing could have gone on in the dark with like no one home inside to

experience any of it. Yet, somehow the storm of electrical and chemical activity in your brain is associated with a rich stream of consciousness, right? like vivid experiences of colors, smells tastes sounds emotions and thoughts. These subjective, privately accessible experiences have a conscious

character or feel that just seems completely different from the objective, publicly accessible physical aspects of brains like their shape or their size or, you know, their velocity. Even if we knew every physical fact about the brain's composition and functioning,

including all the positions of its atoms, the rate at which its neurons fire, the amount of acetylcholine traversing each synaptic gap, there would remain the question of why these physical processes are associated with any subjective experience at all and why

they're associated with one kind of experience rather than another. We can imagine a robot performing the same behaviors and processing information in the same ways without experiencing anything. Indeed, it seems that we can coherently imagine someone physically like you down to the finest molecular

detail with no interior subjective experience whatsoever. We can also coherently imagine a physical duplicate of you with different experiences. So for example, you know, someone with inverted color sensations experiencing green where you would experience red and you know vice versa. So like when this

physical duplicate of you sees a stop sign, the experience that they have subjectively, the way it feels is the way that you feel subjectively, the way things seem to you when you see, for instance, like a green light. That's

totally imaginable. You know, kids wonder about this all the time. Like, oh yeah, I wonder if my red is like the same as your red. You know, to put the motivation here for dualism differently, even if we had a complete understanding

of the physical objective aspects of a bat's brain and behavior, we still wouldn't know what it's like from the bat's inner perspective to echolocate.

That's just a different kind of fact from all the physical facts that we can investigate with the tools of science.

Similarly, even if a neuroscientist blind from birth has never seen color and comprehensively knows down to every microfysical detail all the brain processes implicated in visual experience, she still wouldn't know what it's like to see red. And you know, if

you presented to her something which was red and something which was green, she wouldn't she wouldn't know like, oh man, which one of these is the red one? Which one of these is the green one?

And yeah, like if she gains her sight and sees an apple for the first time, she'll learn something that goes beyond all the physical information that she already had access to. In particular, she'll learn something about conscious experience, which is different from

brain processing and behavior. Now, I've been gesturing towards some reasons to accept dualism, but I'm not interested here in giving anything approaching a comprehensive case for dualism. uh that you know that would be its own like 12-hour video and I've

already done content covering arguments for and against dualism. Moreover, only this first fact about consciousness, only this first like facet of the problem of psychophysical luck presupposes dualism to have evidential force. So dualism doesn't like significantly affect the strength of my

case here. And for that reason, I'm just going to sort of take it for granted in the remaining discussion of the first fact that the fact that there are psychophysical laws. If you're interested in the many quite powerful

arguments for dualism, you can see the subsection of the resource document linked in the description and pinned comment on dualism for a small sampling.

But even if consciousness is distinct from matter, conscious experiences clearly depend in some way on what happens in your brain, right? Like there are robust correlations between brain activity and conscious experiences. And you know, we can alter your conscious

experiences by altering your brain activity. like we've known for quite a long time that if you bonk someone on the head their conscious experiences are going to change.

So under dualism then there are going to be principles or laws by which consciousness is linked to physical states of material systems like brains.

So the final theory of the universe will include not only fundamental physical laws but also fundamental psychophysical laws which just specify how consciousness is linked to physical states of matter. These fundamental psychophysical laws would provide answers to questions like you know what

kinds of physical systems are associated with consciousness. I mean like we know that some physical systems are associated with consciousness like human brains and presumably some aren't you know like rocks.

The ultimate psychophysical laws would tell us which physical things belong in each camp. And among physical systems that are conscious the psychophysical laws will specify which specific physical states are associated with which states of consciousness. You know like in the human case we know that some

brain states are associated with red experiences others with coffee taste experiences others with you know experiences of laughing at my jokes which are you know profoundly funny you know etc. The psychophysical laws would provide a general mapping from physical

states onto states of consciousness that is an assignment of conscious states to physical states which takes physical states as input and delivers as output the conscious states associated or correlated with them. In other words, the psychophysical laws describe the

pairings or the correlations between physical states and conscious states. But wait a second, like isn't it a bit like suspicious that there are these additional fundamental laws that make provision for consciousness? Like in addition to the fundamental physical

laws governing the movements of matter, our universe's catalog of fundamental laws includes laws for the generation of consciousness.

But that's kind of whack if you think about it, right? Like consciousness is required for most if not all forms of value in the universe. It's needed for there to be love and meaningful relationships and enjoyment and virtuous

rational agency and valuable knowledge and pretty much anything else of significant value. Instead of a universe like ours, there could have been a far simpler universe with only physical laws. It would be very surprising for a fundamentally purposeless universe to

have extra fundamental laws concerning the key ingredient required for significant value. Under naturalism, there's no reason to expect things to be set up this way and actually good reason to expect them not to be since the universe without these extra fundamental

laws would be far simpler and therefore much more intrinsically probable. By contrast, it's not at all surprising that our universe would include psychophysical laws if God exists.

Like it's not unreasonable to expect that a perfect being, you know, a being who aims at the good would create laws securing the key ingredient consciousness required for significant value in the universe. So since it's much more likely that the universe would

contain psychophysical laws under theism than under naturalism, the fact that there are psychophysical laws is significant evidence for theism over naturalism.

The second fact involved in psychophysical luck is psychonomic harmony. In order to get a universe that includes consciousness, it's not enough for it to have fundamental laws specifying that consciousness arises under certain conditions. Those laws also need to be harmonized with the

physics of the universe. Specifically, they need to link consciousness to physical states that actually occur in the universe. Even if there are laws specifying that a physical system generates consciousness when its parts are arranged in a certain way, we won't

get consciousness if this material arrangement never occurs. So even if there are psychophysical laws, it's a separate question whether they actually match the physical contents of the universe in the sense that they assign consciousness to physical states that actually exist.

Explaining this fortuitous match is the problem of psychonomic harmony which is developed in a forthcoming article of mine that you can see on screen which you can read in the resource document.

But before explaining psychonomic harmony in more detail, allow me to introduce and use the term psychophysical principles rather than psychophysical laws. Here I will treat psychophysical principles as descriptions of which physical states are paired or associated or correlated

with which conscious states leaving it open whether these principles correspond to identity relations, grounding relations or causal relations. I opt for the term psychophysical principles because I want to be neutral going forward on whether dualism is true. So

I'm not going to presuppose that there are extra fundamental psychophysical laws in what follows. As I'll explain, all the remaining facts are significant evidence for theism even if we reject dualism. Everyone should grant that there are conscious states associated or

connected in some way with physical states even if you think they're identical or one is reducible to the other. And the psychophysical principles are just, you know, descriptions of which conscious states are paired or associated with which physical states.

And that's neutral as to whether they're paired with them or associated with them because they're identical or because they're reducible or whatever. So psychonomic harmony consists in the fact that the psychophysical principles pair consciousness with physical states that

actually exist. And as it turns out, this is pretty striking. The psychophysical principles might have said that a physical system only gets to be conscious when its parts exhibit a certain five-dimensional spatial pattern that can't occur within our

four-dimensional spaceime or when its parts exhibit an arrangement so complex or so specific that it never occurs in the history of the universe. For example, a galaxy sized brain or when it has a certain degree of integrated information that is larger than any

degree that ever comes to exist. Alternatively, the psychophysical principles might have said that a physical system only gets to be conscious when its parts have a brain-like functional organization realized in a different material substrate like iron or helium that would

never evolve naturally in a world with our physics. Or the psychophysical principles might have specified that only certain kinds of non-existent matter support consciousness. For instance, the principles might have paired consciousness only with schmassive bodies where again you know

schmass if you recall from nomological harmony refers to a possible physical property similar to mass but which doesn't actually exist or the psychophysical principles might have beared consciousness only with unrealized functional states that say emit x-rays in the direction of and

proportional to the strength of incoming gravitational influences. In fact, many of these psychophysical principles are overwhelmingly simpler than the actual psychophysical principles. For instance, the psychophysical principles might have uniformly mapped every massive particle onto the sensation of redness. That

principle is far more uniform, elegant, and compactly expressable than the actual psychophysical principles that pair highly complex patterns of a rich array of conscious qualities to highly specific, extremely complicated brain structures. Now there are infinitely many conceivable configurations,

substrates and functions and the vast majority of them never come to exist. You know, including non-existent ones that figure in extremely simple and elegant psychophysical principles. And so even holding fixed that there are psychophysical principles and a life

permitting universe, it's still extremely surprising under naturalism that the psychophysical principles pair consciousness with physical configurations, substrates, or functions that actually exist. But but this is nowhere near as surprising under theism.

Psychonomic harmony is required for a universe to include consciousness and hence the most significant forms of value. Given that God creates a life-pitting universe with psychophysical principles in the first place, it's therefore utterly unsurprising that those psychophysical principles would match the contents of

the universe so as to result in conscious subjects. Importantly, adopting physicalism won't help the naturalist with the problem of psychonomic harmony.

Suppose you think that the psychophysical principles are metaphysically necessary either because they're ultimately psychophysical identities, in other words, identities between conscious states and physical states, or because they're ultimately grounding laws.

That doesn't affect the argument because alternative psychophysical identities or grounding laws are still perfectly conceivable. Even if we had a complete physical description of the world, we can't logically or conceptually deduce from the armchair which conscious states would be paired with which physical

states. You know, otherwise we'd be able to know what it's like to be a bat just from getting an exhaustive description of its brain, which isn't plausible. And we also wouldn't be able to coherently imagine beings just like us physically,

but who don't enjoy conscious experiences or where their, you know, visual experiences are swapped like red and green or whatever. Yet, we can make sense of that. We can form it into coherent sentences and understand the sentences and we can reason about such

worlds. So there's still an epistemic gap between the physical world and consciousness. For all we could know a priori or from the armchair by rational reflection, consciousness might have turned out to be identical to or grounded in any of a number of different

material configurations, including configurations that don't physically occur in our universe, such as a five-dimensional spatial pattern or type of information processing that would require a galaxyized brain or whatever.

Thus, it's still extremely epistemically improbable that the psychophysical identities or grounding laws would be psychonomically harmonious, even if we assume physicalism. Indeed, just about any conceivable disharmonious causal law corresponds to a conceivable disharmonious grounding law or psychophysical identity. So, embracing

physicalism won't make any headway in solving the problem of psychonomic harmony for the naturalist. on any plausible view in the philosophy of mind. Psychonomic harmony is powerful evidence for theism over naturalism.

Let's turn to fact number three. Consciousness involving goods. This third and final collection of facts is inspired by Brian Cutter and Dustin Kit's fantastic article on psychophysical harmony.

Suppose we got psychonomic harmony, right? So suppose that the psychophysical principles do miraculously match the physical world.

That only means that consciousness exists in the universe. But that leaves us completely in the dark about the precise ways in which consciousness is paired with the physical world. If naturalism is true, it's yet another mostly independent miracle that the

psychophysical principles link mind and matter in a way that gives rise to a wide range of significant consciousness involving goods. Things like enjoyment, love, interpersonal relationships, aesthetic experiences, virtuous rational agency, conscious thought, accurate conscious perceptions, true conscious beliefs about the world, and so on and

so on. naturalist. Again, this doesn't come for free given psychonomic harmony. Just as there could conceivably have been a universe physically like ours without any conscious experiences, there could conceivably have been a universe physically like ours in which conscious

experiences are linked to physical states in very different ways. In fact, the overwhelming majority of these alternative psychophysical principles, including the simplest ones, would not have enabled those consciousness involving goods. And this makes it astronomically surprising under naturalism that the psychophysical

principles are sufficiently orderly and complicated to enable those goods. By contrast, this is nowhere near as surprising under theism given that God might plausibly be interested in securing those goods. Hence, we have extremely powerful evidence for theism over naturalism on our hands. To see the

force of this argument, let's run through the manifold different psychophysical principles that might have held, as well as the resulting ways in which the world could have been devoid of significant forms of value.

First, the psychophysical principles might have been contemptably simple and boring. We can imagine a universe physically like ours with a single simple psychophysical principle assigning boring gray sensations to every physical state. Or they could have assigned any one of continuum many

conceivable color sensations to every physical state. Or they could have assigned simple color sensations only to electrons or only to protons or only to quarks or only to nutrinos or only to butane or only to neon atoms or only to

copper. Or the psychophysical principles could have paired every physical object with a conscious experience of a ringing sound with a constant pitch or a ringing sound with a pitch proportional to the object's mass proportional to its Shannon entropy or proportional to its

density. Or the principles could have assigned to every physical object a sensation of tepid bathwater or the taste of chocolate or the smell of lilacs or warmth or pain or desire to move or the sound of C major or any of

infinitely many simple visual tactile auditory gusts factory cognitive affective or hedonic states. Or there could have been a principle that assigns to each physical object a slightly different TV static-like experience that mirrors the object's chaotic micro structure or the microructure of one of

its parts. Or there could have been a principle that assigns simple brightness sensations to material bodies, where the sensation's intensity is proportioned to the object's temperature. Or there could have been a principle that only assigns experiences to elementary particles, say

a simple hot or cold sensation depending on whether the particle has positive or negative charge, leaving macroscopic physical systems like human bodies, bereft of consciousness. A universe with these principles would be devoid of basically all the significant consciousness involving goods we find in

our world. Right? Like just as a universe with intricate configurations of matter but no consciousness would be devoid of significant value. The same goes for universe with intricate configurations of matter plus a sea of super added ringing sensations or TV

static perceptions or tepid bathwater experiences or sensations of brightness or red or whatever. Right? Like in these alternative universes there's no one who experiences beauty or pleasure. There's no one who enjoys rich conscious awareness of their environment. There's

no one who experiences any sort of conscious understanding of what their world is like. There's no one who has the sorts of experiences required for conscious agency such as the experience of weighing different options and making conscious choices in light of reasons.

There's no one who has the sorts of conscious states required for friendship or love or meaningful relationships such as, you know, the experience of concern for another's well-being or even the conscious awareness of the existence of other selves. In the fine-tuning part of

the video, I noted that countless conceivable physical laws, including more or less, you know, all the very simplest ones, would yield boring worlds where nothing interesting happens.

Notice that the same point holds for these psychophysical principles. Like many, plausibly most conceivable sets of psychophysical principles would make for experientially boring worlds devoid of significant value. To get the significant consciousness involving goods we find in our world, it's not

enough to have principles that link consciousness to matter in some way or other. Right? Like the principles need to be finely tuned to result in the right forms of consciousness and link these to matter in the right way. This

would be extremely surprising under naturalism as there's literally a vast infinite sea of different kinds of psychophysical principles yielding experientially boring worlds devoid of significant value. And to make matters even worse for the naturalist, the simplest psychophysical principles seem

to be pathetically boring. Right? Like all the laws listed earlier look vastly simpler than the actual psychophysical principles. Right? like they all involve a straightforward mapping from simple physical magnitudes to a simple pallet of conscious qualities. By contrast, the

actual psychophysical principles are way more complicated. Right? So, first their physical inputs are super complicated.

They don't map simple physical magnitudes like mass or charge on conscious states. Instead, they actually map complex information processing structures or neural configurations involving billions of brain cells and trillions of particles onto conscious states. any description of the physical

basis of consciousness in fundamental physical terms would likely be extremely complex. Second of all, the conscious outputs of the actual psychophysical laws are way more complex than these alternative simple boring psychophysical laws, right? Like the actual principles don't just yield a single type of

conscious state or a single unified family of conscious states. Instead, they produce conscious states belonging to many distinct families like sensory, emotional, cognitive, etc. each of which features in turn many distinct families of conscious qualities, right? Like colors and tastes and sounds and

echolocative qualities and so on. Under naturalism, we would very strongly expect to get one or more of these extremely elegant, simple and uniform psychophysical principles since her pyrus plausibly include biases towards simplicity and elegance and uniformity.

But this just makes it all the more striking that we have the kinds of psychophysical principles that we have.

The very simplest psychophysical principles would link simple physical magnitudes onto a limited pallet of conscious states, yielding experientially boring worlds like those that I described earlier. Fortunately, those aren't the principles we got, right? It's as if the universe is going

out of its way to select complex psychophysical principles that make significant experiential goods possible, passing over just like an infinite field of far simpler psychophysical principles that would preclude significant conscious value. Like that's so sus.

Like how do you not see? Oh, this is overwhelmingly sus. And while it's hard to believe that a fundamentally purposeless universe would be set up that way, none of this is especially surprising under theism, right? Like it wouldn't be hugely surprising for God to

prefer complex psychophysical principles that make significant value possible over simpler ones that preclude the most valuable forms of consciousness. Okay, so again like recall that we're going through like a litany of different ways that the psychophysical principles might

have been that would not have resulted in like the kinds of significant forms of value that we see uh in the world around us. So like we're just we're going through the manifold different psychophysical principles that you know

conceivably could have held and you know the resulting ways in which the world could have been devoid of you know significant value. So that was the first way just like pathetically contemptably simple and boring laws. The second way

is if you know the psychophysical principles make our perceptual experiences radically discordant with external reality.

Think about our actual perceptual experiences, right? Like generally speaking, they correspond to external reality. So for example, changes in the spatial layout of objects in your environment produce corresponding changes in the qualitative character of your perceptual experiences. Your

perceptions thereby mirror the external world in a way that allows you to be consciously aware of your environment which in turn enables you to rationally form many true beliefs about the world.

Of course, there are exceptions like hallucinations and dreams and so forth. But this is the general pattern. This pattern is very fortunate if you think about it since there are countless conceivable psychophysical principles that don't correspond to the external

world in a way that enables perceptual knowledge. Of course, you know, evolution can explain why we have physical structures that mirror our environments and produce appropriate behaviors in response to environmental stimuli.

But the point is that in order for us to enjoy perceptual knowledge about the environment, not only do we need those physical structures, but we also need psychophysical principles that are sensitive in very specific ways to those highly specific brain structures. While

that first fact can be explained by evolution, you know that we have internal physical states that mirror our environments and produce appropriate behaviors in response to environmental stimuli. The second fact that I mentioned can't be explained by evolution. You know that the

psychophysical principles are the right way to enable perceptual knowledge. Like evolution only explains the development of physical states and behavior. It doesn't control which conscious states are mapped on to which physical states.

I'll talk about evol I'll talk about evolution more later, but let's just continue on with the train of thought here. The fact that psychophysical principles are sensitive to highly specific brain structures in ways that enable perceptual knowledge requires

very finely tuned psychophysical laws. Right? So like first it requires principles that associate our experiences with activity in the brain rather than other organs. Right? Like if our experiences were sensitive to physical states of the liver, we we

would not be consciously aware of our environments. You know, since the liver doesn't contain physical structures that richly mirror our environments. Second of all, it requires principles that associate our experiences with certain parts of the brain, right? Namely, the

part whose activity systematically co-varies with features of the external world. If our experiences were instead sensitive to like activity and different parts of the brain, you know, such as the cerebellum or the brain stem, we would not be consciously aware of our

environments because again like those different parts of the brain don't contain the right sorts of physical structures that you know at least approximately mirror the external world.

Third, it requires principles that associate our experiences with the right physical properties of the relevant brain regions, such as patterns of neural spikes. If our experiences were sensitive to other physical properties, such as the temperature or mass of the

relevant brain regions, we would not be consciously aware of our environments since those brain regions don't use temperature or mass to model the world.

Fourth, it requires principles that assign conscious states that themselves structurally correspond in the right way to the right physical properties of the right structures of the right organ.

Right? Like if instead the principles assigned like randomized conscious states to those physical properties or assigned a single simple conscious quality like a sensation of brightness to them again we wouldn't be significantly consciously aware of our environments. Like it's almost

impossible to believe that a fundamentally purposeless universe would be so sensitively fine-tuned to enable knowledge of and rational engagement with the environment in these compounding ways. Here's like maybe a little bit more of like an formal way of

seeing the argument that I'm developing here. Like if you think of your visual field like a TV screen, like there are bajillions of different ways of filling in the pixels with color, brightness, and saturation. The overwhelming majority of pixel arrangements are just

like, you know, like a chaotic jumbled mess. So if it were up to chance which pixels fill a TV screen, you know, it would be extremely improbable that the pixels would form a coherent, orderly, intelligible image that corresponds to

some, you know, facet of the environment. If we saw such a pixel arrangement, we would immediately infer design, right? But the psychophysical principles connecting brain states with perceptual experiences could conceivably have pixelated our visual field in any which way, right? With any combinations

of, you know, colors and brightness and saturation. And so we should similarly infer design given that the pixels form a coherent, orderly, intelligible image that corresponds to the environment. But anyway, we've just canvased a second class of ways in which the

psychophysical principles could have resulted in a world, you know, devoid of significant forms of value or at least, you know, a world devoid of like knowledge and awareness of our environment. Let's move on to a third way. So third, the psychophysical

principles might have resulted in irrational responses to the character of our experiences. All right. All right.

So a third way that the psychophysical principles might have been such that the world would have been devoid of at least a lot of the significant forms of value that we do in fact have is normative disharmony. In other words, the

psychophysical principles might have resulted in irrational responses to the character of our experiences. When you feel pain, so consider that when you feel pain, this tends to be followed by avoidance behavior. Conversely, when you feel pleasure, this tends to lead to

pursuit behavior. Of course, you know, there are exceptions, but this is the general pattern. What's notable here is that there's a kind of normative harmony between your experiences and your behavior. Your experiences are correlated with behaviors that are

rationally appropriate in light of those very experiences, right? Like pain is bad. It's an intrinsically sucky experience. All else being equal, the more of it you have in your life, the worse off you are. So, all else being

equal, you have reason to avoid and eliminate pain. Lo and behold, that's what you tend to do, right? You tend to avoid and eliminate pain. So like pain gives you reason to avoid it. And lo and behold, the sorts of behavior that pain

is correlated with is avoidance behavior, right? So what pain rationalizes, the sort of behavior that pain rationalizes, namely avoidance behavior, is precisely the actual behavior that pain leads to. Right? So there's a kind of harmonious mesh between the normative role of pain, what

it gives you reason to do, and the kind of causal role of pain, what it leads you to do. On the flip side, pleasure is good. But it's an intrinsically nice experience. And all else being equal, the more of it you have in your life,

the better off you are. So again, all else being equal, you have reason to pursue pleasure. And lo and behold, that's what you tend to do. And this fits a more general pattern. By and large, there's a rationally coherent

connection between your consciousness and your behavior, right? Like your spoken words reflect your conscious thoughts. Your spoken arguments reflect your conscious reasoning. Your spoken descriptions of your feelings match your actual feelings. Your outward behavior corresponds to what you consciously want

and choose to do. All of this too is very surprising under naturalism because we can imagine all different sorts of alternative psychophysical principles that don't result in these rationally appropriate psychophysical connections.

So for instance we can imagine a hedonically inverted world a world physically just like ours but with different psychophysical principles that swap pleasure and pain. So in this hedonically inverted world pleasure is associated with tissue damage and avoidance behavior whereas pain is

associated with fitness enhancing stimuli like eating and having sex and pursuit behavior. In such a world where you know the conscious states of pleasure and pain are swapped, we we still would have pursued sex and food and drink and we still would have

avoided fire and predators and illness and disease, right? Because again like tissue damage is associated with pleasure and pleasure leads you to engage in a engage in avoidance behavior, right? So when you stub your toe, you're going to avoid doing that in

the future even though it causes you pleasure. Similarly, when you know you put your hand in a fire, it causes pleasure. But the pleasure in this world kind of wackily leads you to pull your hand out of the fire. So evolution would

have unfolded in exactly the same way in this world as it did in our world. But on the inside, in that world, we would have been miserable wretches, right?

Like we would have systematically avoided pleasure and pursued pain. We would systematically inflict unpleasant experiences on friends and loved ones while preventing and eliminating pleasant experiences. There is a radical disharmony in this world between what our experiences give us reason to do and

what we actually do. And our our lives in that kind of world are just like a pathetic farce. And you know, hedonic inversion is just an extreme case involving like active disharmony between experience and behavior. But almost every imaginable alternative set of

psychophysical principles would have resulted in at least a lack of harmony between experience and behavior. The harmonious alignment between mind and matter is therefore cosmically surprising under naturalism but not under theism. Right? Like if God goes through the trouble of making conscious

beings because you know again we're we're backgrounding the fact of psychonomic harmony. If God goes through the trouble of making conscious beings, it's not especially surprising that he would generally make their experiences rationally align with their behavior so

that their lives aren't pathetic farsces. Finally, even if the psychophysical principles endow us with rich mental lives that rationally align with our behavior and enable rational agency and knowledge of the world, it's quite striking that the psychophysical principles result in only one conscious

subject in my immediate vicinity. So, conscious subjects are bearers of conscious properties. They're the things which are conscious. And we can easily imagine psychophysical principles that assign consciousness to hordes of massively overlapping things in the immediate vicinity of my brain and body

which share a lot of the matter of my brain and body. For example, as Patrick McKe points out, if the psychophysical principles assign consciousness to the intrinsic physical properties of a system, that is those physical properties that characterize it as it is

in itself independently of its relations or lack thereof to things in its environment, then there will end up being hordes of conscious beings in my vicinity. since tons of distinct physical entities in my vicinity share those intrinsic properties. Right? So

for example, if consciousness is paired with the intrinsic functional architecture of certain parts of the cerebrum, well, it turns out that many overlapping distinct physical entities share that functional architecture, right? Like the organism shares that functional architecture as as a part,

right? The brain shares that functional architecture. The cerebrum as a whole shares that architecture. The relevant parts of the cereum share that architecture. The brain as a whole minus an electron in its periphery shares that architecture and literally zillions of

other such entities share that intrinsic architecture. So then the psychophysical laws will be assigning consciousness to like all different sorts of conscious entities in my vicinity. And so there are going to be all different sorts of subjects in my immediate vicinity. It's

also conceivable, of course, that a planitude of psychophysical principles obtain with some psychophysical principles assigning consciousness to brains, others assigning consciousness to cerebra, others assigning consciousness to cortices, others assigning consciousness to brains minus an electron, still others assigning

consciousness to organisms, and so on down the list of physical things that overlap each of us. If there had been such an ensemble of psychophysical principles, we would each be accompanied by boatloads of conscious subjects that massively overlap our brains and bodies.

To avoid overlapping subjects, the psychophysical principles need to be strikingly fine-tuned. For example, maybe they need to incorporate certain highly specific exttrinsic conditions for being conscious in addition to intrinsic conditions. But not only does this complicate the principles and

thereby make them far less likely under naturalism, it also requires a remarkable degree of fine-tuning to get the right sorts of extrinsic conditions.

Thus, it's quite striking that psychophysical principles pair consciousness with physical things in ways that vindicate our common sense beliefs about the number of conscious subjects in our vicinity. It's also pretty valuable that we don't contain massively overlapping subjects since

that would imply highly revisionary normative consequences. For example, that larger people or people who live longer in expectation should be given preferential treatment since they contain more overlapping conscious subjects for simple combinatorial reasons, right? Like they got way more

parts. Once again, theism has a neat explanation of this lucky seeming feature of the psychophysical principles, whereas it's much more surprising under naturalism. So like all in all, we hit the psychophysical jackpot, my dudes. Like if dualism is

true, we first got really lucky that there are psychophysical laws to begin with. But even setting dualism aside, we got very lucky that the psychophysical principles pair consciousness with physical states that actually exist. And we then got even luckier that the

precise way in which consciousness is paired with matter enables significant consciousness involving goods. Our mental lives aren't simple and boring.

Our perceptual experiences tend to match or mirror or correspond to the environment in ways that enable knowledge about the world. We tend to respond rationally to the character of our experiences and our speech and actions. And we don't overlap hordes of

other conscious subjects in ways that undermine our common sense beliefs and induce radically revisionary ethical consequences. The naturalist is faced with positing one extreme coincidence a top another here. Whereas the theist has a wonderfully elegant unifying explanation of data that are totally

unsurprising if God exists. And as a result, psychophysical luck is extremely strong evidence for theism. Naturally enough, there are objections. Uh I'll be covering eight objections to the argument from psychophysical luck, beginning with natural selection. So like this is one of the main criticisms

that like Graham Mappy has forwarded against the argument. Uh the objection is that evolution by natural selection explains psychophysical luck. You know like creatures whose experiences don't match the world or rationally coher with their behavior would be at a selective

disadvantage, right? Like you know if you can't accurately perceive a predator, you know, like you're cooked, right? Uh uh no. Uh this just fundamentally misunderstands the argument from psychophysisical luck. I mean for starters, right? Like natural selection clearly isn't responsible for

fundamental laws of nature. It can't explain the first fact under the banner of psychophysical luck which you recall was the fact that there are any psychophysical laws to begin with which you know again assumed dualism or at least non-reductive panychism. Nor can

natural selection explain psychonomic harmony. Natural selection favors the development of conscious experience only if conscious states are already paired with behavior relevant physical states in which case puditive evolutionary explanations of psychonomic harmony simply presuppose psychonomic harmony.

Right? like to see this thing like if the psychophysical principles had instead paired a phenomenal states with states of say massive particles these kinds of particles that don't even exist then natural selection couldn't have favored the development of consciousness

because natural selection can only operate on you like the pregiven stock of physical things that we have namely like massive particles and things composed of them which per the psychophysical principles under this conceivable regime and boatloads of other regimes might not have paired

consciousness with right they might have instead paired consciousness with like unrealized functional states or unrealized substrates or unrealized configurations etc.

Natural selection also can't explain any of the other facets of psychophysical luck. As Philip Goff writes, "The most common response I've had when explaining the mystery of psychophysical harmony, that's kind of like a subset of psychophysical luck, by the way, is, you

know, natural selection solves it." But if you think natural selection is the answer to psychophysical harmony, you haven't understood the problem. This is because any evolutionary explanation of the character of our conscious experience already assumes a solution to

the problem of psychophysical harmony and therefore cannot also solve the problem on pain of circularity. Natural selection will be motivated to make us feel repulsed by eating excrement only if we are generally going to respond rationally to that conscious aversion by

avoiding eating excrement. But the fact that we tend to respond rationally to our experiences is the very thing we're trying to explain, right? And also recall that all the alternative psychophysical mappings that we considered held fix the physical facts

about the universe. These conceivable worlds are physically identical to our world. So, so evolution proceeds in exactly the same way. The same physical stimuli are associated with the same physical processing which has the same physical effects. All we're imagining to

be different about these worlds is which conscious states are associated with which physical states. But then evolution is unable to explain psychophysical luck since evolution proceeds in exactly the same way in these psychophysically unlucky worlds.

So evolution can't be sort of like the decider among these worlds. Brian Cutter Brian Cutter combines both of these points quite nicely.

Um natural selection is only going to be sensitive to the physical behavior and functioning of organisms. like what determines which which organisms live and which ones die and which ones reproduce and which ones don't reproduce. That's simply a matter of the

physical behavior and functioning of those organisms. Um but you know it's you know so but you know under all these alternative psychophysical mappings the behavior would have been exactly the same. So evolution wouldn't have been sensitive to uh differences in in the

the mind matter mapping principles. So you know if if the psychophysical map if the psychophysical laws had been different in all these ways that we've been talking about evolution would proceed in exactly the same way because again evolution is only sensitive to

like the the physical structures the physical behavior and functioning of of organisms. Um and so we would get physically speaking the same results under these alternative psychophysical laws but since the the experiences would be different we would get psychophysical

disharmony. So that's that's the basic reason why an evolutionary explanation is not going to account for the basic fact of of psychophysical harmony. Now here's what an evolutionary explanation can do. Um, if we presuppose that pain is kind of lawfully linked to avoidance

behavior and and other similar behaviors, then we have a good explanation for why we would feel pain in response to bodily injury because there's a good evolutionary explanation uh for for why we would exhibit avoidance behaviors in response to

bodily injury. So that would lead us to expect that we should experience pain in in addition in response to a bodily injury on the assumption that pain is lawfully connected. Now that's a perfectly fine explanation of why we

feel pain in response to bodily injury. But that's an explanation that presupposes the basic datim of normative harmony. Namely that pain is lawfully linked to things like avoidance behavior, elimination behavior, and the like. So that's a perfectly fine

evolutionary explanation of why would why we would feel pain in response to bodily injury. But it's not an explanation that explains psychophysical harmony. It's an explanation that presupposes psychophysical harmony.

And you know what? Because this is the most common response to psychophysical luck. And because it's been like a main response of the foremost atheist philosopher in the world, and because people still don't see that it fails, I'm just going to play a litany of

people explaining why it fails. This explanation it doesn't explain psychophysical harmony. It doesn't explain why pain is associated with avoidance behavior. It presupposes psychophysical harmony. So it it presupposes that pain is going to be associated with avoidance behavior. So

given that pain has this this like nomically robust association with avoidance behavior, you can see why evolution would want to give us pain would select for creatures that have pain in response to bodily damage because that's going to lead to the

avoidance behavior. um but and and wouldn't want to have us experience pain in response to like eating nutritious berries because the the the the creatures that exhibit avoidance behavior in response to nutritious berries are not going to survive very

long. They're not going to pass on their genes. So that that explanation for why we tend to experience pain in response to you know potentially harmful maladaptive stimul stimuli uh it looks like it it presupposes psychophysical harmony. It doesn't explain it. I think

it's fine to presuppose this this general fact about how pain is associated with avoidance behavior in explaining why we tend to feel pain in response to bodily damage. Um that's a perfectly good explanation, but it's not an explanation of psychophysical

harmony. It's an explanation for why we tend to feel pain in response to bodily damage, not why we tend to exhibit avoidance behavior in response to pain.

Right? I guess one way so I fully agree with that of course and one way that uh I like to think about this is suppose that the psychophysical mappings had been different. Suppose that uh pleasure had been mapped on to the various brain

states that uh cause avoidance behavior instead of pursuance behavior and suppose that um you know the experience of pleasure also was did I say pain originally? I meant pleasure. Whatever pleasure suppose that pleasure is associated with the various brain states

that cause avoidance behavior. Suppose also that pleasure is in fact associated with um the bodily states which are typically you know tissue damage other noxious stimuli cause that suppose that that was the psychophysical map. Well then evolution actually would have

selected the organisms which feel pleasure in response to the tissue damage and what because that would that's what's actually associated with avoidance behavior. So the these organisms are going to be systematically avoiding what causes tissue damage and noxious stimuli and other sorts of

things. So given that it seems like evolution really isn't explaining psychophysical harmony. It's comes early in the explanatory chain in their work.

Okay. I also think that evolution uh doesn't explain psychophysical harmony. Um maybe I'll comment briefly on this. I think this is most obvious if we assume causal closure of the physical. So this is the kind of picture that David Schalmer's defends in

his book the conscious mind. So we've got fundamental uh conscious conscious properties over and above the physical states but um they they don't kind of make a nonredundant causal difference to to to what happens in the physical world. So in that case uh if if we

assume causal closure then if the psychopysical mappings had been different uh the physical world would have preceded just the same physical evolution would have preceded just the same. Um, so you know, if the laws had ex instead mapped the actual physical

basis of pain onto pleasure, physical evolution would go in just the same way, but with the disharmonious result that now we're systematically uh avoiding pleasure. Um, you might think interactionism will help with this.

Actually, I think on reflection it doesn't. Uh, really briefly, given interactionism where we assume that experiences have some kind of top- down causal influence on physical processes like physical processes in the brain. Uh given this view we should say that the

the psychophysical laws they assign experiences a certain nomological role. That role is going to include both physical causes and physical effects. Um but if the laws had uh swapped the nomological roles of pleasure and pain uh the overall physical facts would be

unchanged but we would get the disharmonious result that again we're systematically avoiding pleasure and pursuing pain. Uh similarly, if if an evaluatively neutral experience had been slotted into the actual nomological role of pain, then we would be systematically

avoiding experiences uh that we have no objective reason to avoid. So again, we'd have a mild form of disharmony or at least a lack of harmony where the actual world features a striking harmony. Um it's true that given that

pain is lawfully linked to avoidance behavior and and and the like. Uh there's a good evolutionary explanation for why we would feel pain in response to things like bodily injury rather than in response to things like nutritious berries. Uh but this explanation

presupposes normative harmony. In particular, it presupposes the instance of normative harmony that you know pain is lawfully linked to uh avoidance behavior. the very kinds of avoidance the very kind of a a behavior that it justifies or rationalizes that

evolutionary explanation doesn't uh explain psychophysical harmony now I want you to imagine the following hypothetical world in this world we get some very strange psychophysical laws every physical state is connected with experiencing the taste of strawberry that is whenever sea fibers fire the

taste of strawberry is experienced rather than pain whenever dope Damine receptors fire, the taste of strawberries is experienced rather than pleasure. Whenever anything in your brain happens, the taste of strawberries is experienced. There are no other mental experiences ever produced at all.

No sounds, no smells. People's minds are just filled with experiencing the taste of strawberries all the time, no matter what their brains look like. Obviously, if these were the psychophysical laws that were true, evolution could not actually ensure that we feel pain when

our bodies get damaged. Evolution can only make it so that we experience the taste of strawberries when our bodies get damaged.

Hopefully, through this thought experiment, you're starting to understand something important about psychophysical harmony. Evolution can only give you accurate mental experiences if it's been dealt the right psychophysical laws. If you give evolution garbage psychophysical laws, then evolution can only give you garbage

mental experiences. But you might be thinking, fine, you could come up with a contrived set of psychophysical laws that make it impossible for us to evolve an appropriate mental response to our bodies getting damaged. But this is just

one really weird example. Well, actually, this example involves a set of psychophysical laws that's much simpler than our own psychophysical laws that we actually have. So arguably the strawberry world is more intrinsically probable than our own. So given atheism,

we should be surprised we don't live in something like the strawberry world. If you don't understand what I'm getting at here, then once again, I urge you to check out my original video if you haven't already. Anyways, setting aside

the strawberry world, even a world like the one we're considering earlier where pleasure is the result of stubbing your toe, even that cannot be ruled out by evolution due to the fact that evolution needs to work with the psychophysical

laws that it's been given. Why is this? Well, before answering, we need to briefly get back to discussing theories of the relationship between physical things and mental things. We need to ask the question of whether or not mental

things cause stuff to happen in the physical world. Let's assume first that they don't. This view is called epiphenomenalism.

Some philosophers take this stance because they don't want the laws of physics being violated by mysterious mental things. Now, if epiphenomenalism is true, then no matter what psychophysical laws obtain, evolution would act in exactly the same way.

Whether pain or pleasure or the taste of strawberries was the outcome of stubbing your toe, there would be no physical difference in the world. So evolution would have no reason to select for one rather than the other. Thus, if

epiphenomenalism is true and there is no god, this is what the history of our world looked like. Once upon a time, evolution started blindly chugging along, producing increasingly complex organisms, not caring about the mental lives these creatures had because their

mental lives didn't do anything in the physical world. We could be experiencing literally anything, and evolution couldn't care less. And then one day, evolution produced us creatures who experience negative things when something negative happens, like our bodies getting damaged. And we

experience positive things when something positive happens like eating good food. Since evolution wasn't trying to produce this result and there is no God tinkering with the psychophysical laws, this was just one big coincidence.

The end. Now, if the psychophysical laws were different, no part of that history would change except that our mental lives would stop making sense. If pleasure were the result of C fibers firing, then evolution would not care at

all. it would still make sea fibers fire when you stubbed your toe because mental experiences don't affect the physical world given epiphenomenalism. And so your physical body would act the same way when those sea fibers fired. Your physical body would still protect its

toe and it would still yell out, "Ow, my toe." And it would still move that annoying chair that it kept stubbing its toe on. This is because given epiphenomenalism, your body is only governed by the laws of physics. And

those actions are what the laws of physics make your body do when you stub your toe and see fibers fire. So under epiphenomenalism, if there is no god, it's actually incredibly surprising that we do feel pain when we stub our toes

given that there is absolutely no reason this should be the case. Okay, but what if we reject epiphenomenalism? What if mental things can causally affect physical things?

Well, then pain has some sort of influence on physical things. What is this influence?

Let's assume for illustrative purposes that pain somehow activates the motor neurons that make you pull your limbs toward yourself. So, if you touch your hand to a hot stove, then sea fibers fire, which leads to the experience of

pain. And then this mental thing, the pain, activates the physical motor neurons that pull your hand away from the stove. This is why evolution has ensured that when you stub your toe or touch a hot stove, you feel pain because

it protects your body by activating the correct motor neurons. Coolio. However, we can imagine a world where pleasure rather than pain does the exact same thing. It activates those particular motor neurons. In that world, if you touched a hot stove, sea fibers would

fire, which leads to the experience of pleasure because the psychophysical laws are different in this world. And this mental thing, the pleasure activates the motor neurons that pull your hand away from the stove. These two worlds, the one where pain activates such and such

motor neurons and the world where pleasure activates those motor neurons are equally intrinsically probable on the assumption that there is no God.

So on atheism, we're actually just lucky that we feel pain rather than pleasure when we touch a hot stove.

Now all these points generalize. If the mental thing pain does something else than activating motor neurons, we can still imagine pleasure doing the exact same thing. Whatever physical effects are brought about by the experience of pain, we can just as easily imagine

pleasure bringing about those physical effects. So if you respond, well, forget activating motor neurons. That's not what pain does. Actually, pain affects our brains in such a way. It activates all the right neurons that it causes us to have the thought process, hey, I

should avoid that harmful action in the future. And because pain causes us to have this thought process, evolution would promote it when we damage our bodies.

Well, we can imagine a world where pleasure has this effect. it activates those particular neurons and leads us to have this exact thought process. This world is just as intrinsically probable.

I think people have difficulty with this point because they can't imagine liking pain and disliking pleasure. However, as long as pain actually does something to the world and as long as pleasure actually does something to the world, we

can imagine swapping what they do. And as long as the mental experience of liking something actually does something to the world, and as long as the mental experience of disliking something actually does something to the world, we can imagine swapping what they do as

well. To put all this another way, if you want to posit that pain has some mysterious and very specific physical effect on the world, and that's the real reason evolution selected for it to be the mental thing produced when you stub

your toe. Well, it's just as easy to posit that pleasure has that mysterious physical effect. Both of these hypotheses would have the same prior probability.

Now, here's another point that generalizes. We've been discussing a hypothetical world where pain is replaced by pleasure, but we can run the same logic with other experiences, too.

Like a world where pain is replaced by the visual experience of the color green, or a world where pain is replaced by the smell of cheese or any other experience. Almost all of these would be really bizarre mental responses to

something negative happening. So we're actually super duper lucky that we feel anything remotely coherent like pain when we damage our bodies.

So in conclusion, evolution can only bring about psychophysical harmony if the psychophysical laws are first designed very precisely to bring about psychophysical harmony. This is easily shown with the strawberry world. Now if epiphenomenalism is true then evolution has no tendency to bring about mental

experiences that make any sense whatsoever. But if epiphenomenalism is false evolution would only bring about the right mental experiences in a given set of circumstances if those mental experiences had the proper physical effects. But we can just as easily

imagine assigning those same physical effects to the wrong mental experiences. So we have no reason to assign a high prior probability to the proposition that we would experience the proper mental experience in a given set of circumstances. In fact, given just how

many mental experiences would be inappropriate in response to a given circumstance, we should overwhelmingly expect our mental lives to be utterly incoherent if there is no God.

Anyways, that's the end of this video. Thank you for watching. I'll see you in the next one. You know, natural selection seems like it would be the easiest way to explain psychophysical harmony because surely selection would favor harmonious minds over

disharmonious minds. That certainly won't work on dualist a phenomenalism right? Because there the conscious states are making no difference to anything. And so, um, the evolutionary story would have played out in exactly the same way regardless of whether our qualia were

absent or were inverted or were screwed up in some weird way or whatever, right?

It can't make any difference to anything that happens in the physical world. And of course, evolution is about what happens in the physical world. So, that wouldn't work. So, maybe maybe it will be helpful to just run through the

different sorts of views one might have. Suppose that you were um an interactionist dualist. So you think well you have conscious states but they can affect what happens in the physical world. Wouldn't that solve the problem there? We say no because what that does

is sort of push the problem back into the question of the laws governing causal relations between the physical and uh the mental. So it seems perfectly conceivable if you already agree with the duelist that you know pain and

pleasure could have been inverted or whatever. It also seems perfectly conceivable that their causal roles could have been inverted, that having pleasure states caused aversion behavior, right? Or vice versa. So, uh merely merely introducing causal interaction doesn't doesn't help. Sorry,

my cat is here trying to get uh merely introducing interaction as dualism, we say, would be a little bit like this.

Suppose that there's a a machine uh and the machine makes noises and then there's another machine and the other machine um prints out uh something every time the first machine makes a noise and um the uh it turns out that

there's semantic correspondence between these two things. So the first machine will uh play a rising tone and then the second machine writes out rising tone or it makes a beep boop sound and the second machine prints out beep boop and

we wonder why is there this match? Merely suggesting the first machine is causing the second machine to do this does not solve the problem of the match.

Right? it if it it could it could have been that the first machine makes a noise and the second machine that causes the second machine to just print out some unrelated thing, right? Uh in order to explain the correspondence, you need

to say not only is the first machine causing the second machine to print this thing out, but it's presumably been designed in the right way that what it prints out is a description of the noise that the first machine made, right? Um

and in a similar way we suggest uh if our mental states are non-physical and are causing physical states then we need um a certain sort of fine-tuning of the causal laws in order for that to produce rationally and semantically uh

appropriate behavior. So the the causal laws could have been different and that's what you're honing in on.

Yeah, it seems it seems so. Yeah, it seem um so that's the the thing to say to duelist interactionists. What might we say to say a pansychist? Well, uh, pansychists often will agree that, uh, you could have had like the

same structural properties, what people usually think of as physical properties while varying the uh, the internal intrinsic character, the quiddities of of the entities here, the the what the panzy identify with the conscious with the qualia, right? So they'll say, look,

we can agree with all these dualist conceivability arguments and stuff because we'll say, look, yeah, it could have been that what we ordinarily think of as the physical could have been the same, but uh conscious experiences were inverted or whatever. And then you get

the exactly the same problem you had with with dualism because why how is it that we got the the right set of quiddities, right? Now, when it comes to physicalism, this is the hardest case, right? So um we have to distinguish

op priori and apoststeriori physicalism. So the a priori physicalist thinks there's some sort of like conceptual connection. There's some sort of a priori connection between the mental and the physical. Uh you can just tell by reflecting on the concept of pain and

the concept of uh avoidance behavior that those things had to be linked in the way that they are or something like that. That view would solve the problem.

that view. Okay, so nothing else is even conceivable, right? Uh nothing psychophysically disharmonious is even conceivable. That solves the problem.

Okay, that view is false though, right? Um and and most physicalists reject that view. Most physicalists say, look, obviously we can conceive of philosophical zombies or inverts or whatever. We can conceive of all the scenarios I've been describing. I don't

think anybody watching has been hearing me talk about these scenarios. They're like, "What?" Like, I literally can't even conceive of any.

Clearly, it's not like a round circle or something. What they say is, "Yes, these things are conceivable, but they're not metaphysically possible." Uh, it's an aoststeriori truth that actually mental states and physical states are the same thing. There's this synthetic identity

between them just like water and H2O or whatever. Um, and so it's it's necessary. These these scenarios I've been describing are metaphysically impossible even though they're conceived. Here's what we say about that. So the aposteriori physicist, which again is the significant majority

of physicalists, all the same all the same physicalists, right? The aposterior or I physicalist says all these things that the duelist thought or at least most of these things that the duelist thought were metaphysical possibilities there's still a priori epistemic

possibilities and what that means is going in apostasteri physicalism does not predict epistemically psychophysical harmony and uh we suggest what matters here are the epistemic probabilities and so because theism the the epistic probability of harmony is much higher

than on a posterior physicalism. It's good evidence for theism. So an analogy suppose we're talking about the the cosmic fine-tuning problem and suppose someone comes along and they say okay I I've got the solution for you. I'm a

spinist. I think that there the universe is necessary. There was just this universe and it's just necessary and it just had to have uh these constants. the constants had to have these values.

Okay, is that a satisfying answer to the psychophysical or to the the cosmic fine-tuning problem? And we're inclined to think no because okay, but spinism itself doesn't predict I mean it could you could anything was the necessary set

of values for the constants, right? Spinism itself doesn't predict fine-tuning. What predicts fine-tuning is in fact one very specific version of spinism. the version that says not only are the constants necessary but this set of constants is necessary and of course

the op priori probability of that version is correspondingly small I mean it buys its predictive power by just selecting you know this one little bit at the the epistemic probability space in this case uh it looks like theism

predicts psychopysical harmony we can say okay well maybe this was necessary but that's you know a post hawk uh okay we're we're going to endorse this one very specific version of physicalism, the one that says that the harmony is

what's necessary. Um, but that requires rejecting all of these a priori possible uh other alternatives. I mean, this is this is the hardest part of the argument. Did that make sense?

Yeah. I mean, let's just uh like go through that again. So, it's like physicalism. We said earlier, you know, you don't need to reject physicalism to to like, you know, take this as a good argument. But there is one caveat there

which is you do have to reject a priori physicalism. But the thing is most physicalists reject a priori physicalism. you know, it's it's not um the favored version and it's um that would entail that like these aren't even

epistemic possibilities that we're talking about like disharmony is not like you know they're they're saying I can't even conceive of qualia inversion which seems slightly disingenuous because of course you can but um yeah so so like we're could you try could you try it again?

Yeah. Yeah. This might be due to a lack of imagination on on your part, but um but yeah, so a posteriori physicalism which is more popular, this argument does apply to to that form. So that's where the conceivability point still

kicks in because the aposteriori identities could have been different. Um they epistemically they could have been different.

They couldn't have been, but epistemically they could have been a priori they could have been.

Right? If you're if you're an aposterior or a physicist, um you still think that these are like metaphysical necessities, like the connection between the functional state and the phenomenal state, like yeah, they're they're um you know, identical or realized by one

another or something. They're like connected by necessity in some way, but the point is they're epistemically possible. So we can still say, you know, we can assign some kind of probability to them. And the analogy that you gave

was with, you know, say that you're a necessitarian. And you know in the paper you mentioned like the you know the arrangement of the stars in the sky. Um okay so that's metaphysically necessary but that doesn't mean that like your theory

predicts this exact arrangement of stars in the sky and like say that that there's a message in the stars that says I'm the alpha and the omega you know. So necessitarianism doesn't make that go away like just because it's necessary

that things would have turned out this way that there would have been that arrangement or or at least it only makes it go away if it just makes everything go you know like we we walk in on on Donald Trump

holding a big bag of money that says from Vladimir Putin and we say isn't this so much more likely if Vladimir Putin and he says no it's metaphysically necessary it's it just had to happen it just appeared here you know like if if you go

this route you just destroy all all ability to reason empirically, right? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So, so like the odds of that of that message in the stars, you know, or whatever example you choose, like obviously that is

evidence favoring some hypotheses over others, even though you know, the way that things turned out is like necessary somehow. Um, so like the difference between like metaphysical and epistemic possibility like it does open up the way for this kind of argument. And if you

want to say that like, oh well, aposteriori physicalism actually answers this or or I'm a necessitarian or a determinist or something, so this isn't a problem for me. Like then that would also commit you to saying, you know,

like a message in the stars would not be evidence because determinism is true. Yeah. Yeah. Which of course would it would be an absurd an absurd position.

Correct. Um so the reason we initially got all into all that is because I brought up natural selection.

So ah yes yes. Okay. Okay. Very good. Very good. Very good. So point being um a natural selection will um select for harmony assuming that certain preconditions obtain. Right? So we said epopenomenalism you know the mental states don't affect natural selection

whatsoever. On views where mental causation occurs, where mental the physical causation occurs, then natural selection is going to select for harmonious, it's going to select for harmonious behavior and so forth only assuming that the causal connections run the right way. So if it's the case that

pain causes avoidance behavior say then uh or you know causes whatever the preconditions for avoidance behavior are pain causes some behavior that is uh evolutionarily advantageous and is harmonious then natural selection will select for the harmonious course of

action right um but not otherwise if you imagine the world where pain and pleasure are inverted and their causal profiles are inverted.

So, not only does pain occur under the conditions where pleasure currently occurs, but it has the same impact, causal impact on the physical that pleasure currently has, then that's not going to make any difference to natural selection, right? That's going to

produce all the same behaviors even though it's it's disharmonious. So, uh natural selection ultimately is not really going to help. A lot of people think that it does, but we think ultimately it's not really going to help because

you have to get um you know harmonious sets of causal relations in place uh before um natural selection is is going to lead to harmonious behavior and judgments and that sort of thing. So I I don't think that any controversial

question about the ontology of natural laws or psychophysical laws should make any difference here. We we could even replace maybe the term law with like correlation pattern or something like that. Correlation description. Um so I mean the psychophysical laws you know

there are different views about what laws of nature are. Are they mere descriptions? Are they uh statements about relations between universals? Are they divine decrees? Are they blah blah blah blah blah? Right? But I think uh for our purposes the the things I'm

calling psychophysical laws which we could call correlation patterns or whatever uh there'll be statements of the form you know when such and such physical state occurs such and such mental state occurs if there is mental to physical causation maybe we could

include also statements of the form and when such and such mental state occurs such and such physical state will will occur right or it will have this causal input on the physical state or whatever.

All we really need is is that you can just think about all these statements like that and what are those reflecting ontologically or is it a mere human mosaic? Is there something else to it?

Uh that shouldn't really matter. I don't think the trick is when it comes to the natural selection point. I mean, of course, if it's the case that avoidance behavior in in the presence of pain and pursuit behavior in in the

presence of pleasure, if it's the case that those things are evolutionarily advantageous, then of course natural selection will be able to explain why you do the one and are disposed to do the one and and to do the other and not

to do the inverse, right? But if pain and pleasure had been inverted, including their their causal roles, if it had been the case that every time the damaging stimulus occurs, you felt pleasure and then the pleasure caused you uh to engage in avoidance behavior,

then that would be just as good from the perspect from from the perspective of natural selection. And if the inverse was true for pain, that would be just as good. And this would be like conceivable on aposterior physicalism or recelian

monism like the idea that the physical so it gets a little tricky because the talk about laws maybe seems particularly inapt on aosterior physicalism on aosterior physicalism what is a priori conceivable is that pain turns out to be

this physical state that results in pursuit behaviors. Oh I see. Okay. And yeah, and pleasure turns out to be this physical state that results in avoidance behavior. Um, in fact, they're the other things. And we've learned this austeriori. So the

apostasori physicalist things, but had they been the had it been the other way, of course, we would behave the exact same way. The physical states would be the same. They would just be different mental states. Um, and that would be

just as good from the perspective of natural selection. If if the identities had been inverted, counterpossibly if the identities had been inverted, then we would behave in exactly the same way.

So whatever makes it the case that you know the identities are what they are like natural selection doesn't affect those. It's just acting on like adaptive behavior and like that sort of thing.

Yeah. Natural selection, if it's correct to talk about psychophysical laws or psychophysical identities or whatever, natural selection is not selecting between those. Natural selection selects with those in place. And so unless you have those finely tuned in the right

way, natural selection is not going to lead to harmonious behavior. So it's sort of like, you know, natural selection is not affecting the mass of the electron. It's just kind of working with whatever mass it was given.

Let me be clear. I'm not denying that there is say an evolutionary explanation in some sense of why you know sex feels good or whatever right it's just that had the psychophysical laws been wildly different then there would be an equally

good evolutionary explanation about why it feels bad or you know what right you know like natural selection it still does do all this explanatory work but you're just saying that like the thing in question really are these laws of

nature you know and natural selection can't affect that yeah yeah and had and had they been different then uh natural selection could have played out in the same way with disharmonious disharmonious states instead.

He says how do you answer the objection that evolution tunes the connection between mental and physical states to produce harmony based on natural selection. For example, liking pain could be fatal.

Yeah. So this this is an objection that comes up very often. Uh I mean it's an objection people often have. I I don't think that it has any real force. Um I mean it's easiest to see if if we just

suppose up a phenomenalist dualism again, right? So uh mental states are distinct and they have no causal influence. Um it's true obviously liking if you like pain and like given which things are actually painful uh then um you're you're gonna uh have a bad time

in terms of reproductive fitness. Um but the suggestion here is suppose that different things were painful but this made no causal impact on your behavior.

Um suppose that uh reproduction is extremely painful here uh but like the fact that we switched around the pain and pleasure states that doesn't have any causal impact on your behavior. Um then uh in that world liking pain is

extremely extremely beneficial to you, right? Um the the thought is you're if the physical is causally closed, you're going to behave the same way no matter whether your pain states and your pleasure states are inverted, no matter whether

uh uh you have no conscious states, no matter whether your conscious states are only white noise. Um and so really what matters is that you be like uh behaviorally disposed to pursue the reproductively fitness-enhancing things. Um but it

doesn't actually matter whether those are pleasurable or painful on or nothing uh on epiphenomenalism because that doesn't have any causal impact. Um now when it comes to other views um you know suppose we we're interactionists you know I said in order for things to

be for that to produce harmony you have to have the right sorts of causal connections um we can say the same thing interactionism solves the problem if it's the case that pleasure is causally related to the physical in such a way as

to produce pursuit behavior and pain is causally related to the physical in such a way as to produce avoidance behavior and blah blah blah. Um but again that requires a kind of fine-tuning. So um basically yes given the actual

correlation beings that pursue the things that are actually painful uh will not be reproductively fit. But uh there's a kind of harmony that has to happen in terms of the correlations and the causal connections if there are any

um in order for that to be the case. Okay. So I mean I hope that gives you guys a sense of why this objection is not good. If you think evolution explains psychophysical luck, you don't understand the argument from

psychophysical luck. Okay. The second objection, physicalism with a twist. So for reasons already explained, everyone should grant that the argument from psychophysical luck does not assume that physicalism is false from the get-go.

Again, all the argument requires is that alternative psychophysical mappings are at least conceivable. They make coherent conceptual sense. Once we grant that, it's going to be extremely epistemically improbable under naturalism that conscious states align with physical states and behavior in the ways

described, whereas it isn't nearly as improbable under theism. This is true even if conscious states are identical to or grounded in physical states since we can conceive of psychophysical identities or grounding connections being different in just about all the

ways described. Still, there might be a lingering worry here, right? Like if physicalism is true, then the psychophysical principles are necessary, but then wouldn't they be beyond God's control? And if so, then it's hard to see how they could be evidence for

theism since God isn't responsible for their character in that case. So maybe the argument does assume non-physicalism after all. Well, this objection is wrong-headed. First, it overlooks that psychophysical luck is simply exceptionally strong evidence for the conjunction of theism and the claim that

the psychophysical principles are contingent. If theism is true, and if the psychophysical principles are contingent, then God can control them, and he has good reason to make them psychophysically lucky in all the canvased ways. By contrast, denying this

conjunction by saying that either naturalism is true or even if theism is true, the psychophysical principles are necessary. That denial of the conjunction makes the psychophysical luck data fantastically unlikely. And thus, the psychophysical luck data is just fantastic evidence both that God

exists and can control the psychophysical principles. Right? Like return to Cutter and Kermit's Boulder Island analogy. Suppose we've heard of, you know, large boulders on Boulder Island. We don't know for sure whether they're movable as no one has ever been

there to confirm with certainty. We you know we've just heard various like testimonial reports of varying quality and you know we know that they're huge so they're pretty hard to move and you know so some philosophers hypothesize that the boulders are really just like

large outgrowths of a mountain underneath and so they are immovable by humans. Other philosophers though hypothesized that the boulders could be moved by humans cooperating to push them around. Now, you are the foremost philosophical proponent of the immovable

boulder hypothesis, pointing to the solid testimony in its favor from several reputable sources. But suppose you accompany me as we travel for the first time to Boulder Island. As we're about to land, we see from our helicopter those boulders arranged to

spell out, "Welcome to Boulder Island. Enjoy your stay." Now I exclaim like, "Wow, this place must have been colonized and by English speakers, no less, as you know, they've evidently designed these boulders to form that message." You, however, remain

unconvinced retorting "Well actually if the boulders are immovable, well then, you know, this message arrangement of boulders is not evidence for the human design hypothesis since if they're immovable, well, then their arrangement is outside the control of human

designers." And so, Joe, you're you're just assuming that the boulders are immovable in your argument here. So, you know, like listen, this response is confused because it neglects the fact that the boulder arrangement is simply overwhelming evidence for the

conjunction of human design and the movability of boulders. And likewise, psychophysical luck is simply overwhelming evidence for the conjunction of divine design and the movability of the psychophysical principles. Second, I actually think it's false that the necessity of the

psychophysical principles voids the psychophysical luck argument of force and for two reasons. First, even if God doesn't have control over the psychophysical laws due to their necessity, their rational, orderly, and harmonious character can still significantly favor theism over

naturalism. And the rough reason is that on theism, it's not super unlikely that even many necessary truths are somehow grounded in, dependent on, or explained ultimately by God's perfect essence.

Many theists in the tradition have held that the various creaturely essences for instance which would include the essences of neurological systems and structures as well as the essences of conscious qualities are somehow variegated reflections or imitations of the divine in some way. They somehow

manifest aspects of God's perfection and partially capture his character. conditional on this being so and granting the objector that the psychophysical principles are necessary.

It's not super unlikely that the psychophysical principles would somehow be grounded and dependent on or explained ultimately by God's perfect essence which in turn makes it not so unlikely that they would exhibit a generally benevolent harmonious orderly intelligible character in partial

imitation of the perfect essence in which they're sourced. Even if these claims have a pretty low probability conditional antheism, which will result in a pretty low probability of psychophysical luck, conditional entheism, their probability won't be overwhelmingly fantastically grotesqually low, which is how likely

psychophysical luck is going to be on naturalism. And so even if the psychophysical principles are necessary, psychophysical luck can still be significant evidence for theism. And you know, like here's an analogy for this.

Like suppose we examine the initial conditions of the universe and again see they spell out made by God with love. If the initial conditions are necessary, we might initially think this fact provides no evidence for theism over naturalism

since the initial conditions are then by supposition beyond God's control. But that seems wrong, right? Like even if the initial conditions are necessary, the necessary initial conditions saying made by God with love is serious evidence for theism. And that's because

maybe something about God's nature somehow necessitates this striking display of his power in the initial conditions. Or like you know maybe we could use the same just so story I gave earlier about imitating or manifesting or reflecting God's nature. And again

like while that story is not very likely on theism it's actually going to be very improbable under theism it's not going to be as absurdly unlikely as we are to get that arrangement under naturalism.

So that's like the first reason why I don't think even the necessity of the psychophysical principles would void the argument from psychophysical luck of its force. Here's the second reason.

Even if the necessary psychophysical principles are in no way dependent on God, the following conjunction is not super improbable conditional on theism.

First, God can still influence which necessary and independent psychophysical identities or grounding connections are actually instantiated in the physical world. And second, somewhere in the infinite space of all possible psychophysical identities or grounding relations, there are compossible physical states of creatures which

systematically harmonize with their associated conscious states. So long as this conjunction is not super improbable under theism and right, that seems right. It won't be super improbable under theism that God would actualize those composible physical states of creatures which systematically harmonize

with their associated conscious states and hence psychophysical luck won't be super improbable under theism. By contrast, it remains super improbable under naturalism and so it remains significant evidence for theism. All right. The third objection is the phenomenal powers view. This view sets

that conscious qualities necessitate their characteristic effects in virtue of how they feel. Moreover, this necessitation is knowable a priori in the sense that it's inconceivable that conscious qualities exist without having or exercising those powers. Like pain is an intrinsically repulsive and sucky

experience by its very nature. And this nature is transparent to those who have the concept of pain. It therefore seems inconceivable that pain could exist without avoidance behavior. And so the alternative psychophysical principles envisioned in the psychophysical luck

argument are not conceivable after all. Okay, so this is totally wrong-headed. First, even when defenders of the phenomenal powers view are introducing it, they say it's inconceivable that a subject would feel pain and not try to avoid it. But even if that's right,

trying is just another conscious state. Right? So all we've concluded is that there's an opriori necessary connection between certain conscious states. That clearly doesn't mean that there's an opiori necessary connection between conscious states and physical states. So alternative psychophysical mappings

remain entirely conceivable and that alone suffices to put the objection to bed. But I've got a bunch of other responses. So second, as articulated, the objection here is just like manifestly false. Like it's just clearly conceivable that a subject feel pain and

not engage in avoidance behavior, right? Right? So for instance, like disembodied minds in pain are like obviously conceivable, right? Like we can make coherent conceptual sense of them.

Likewise, it's at least conceivable that you're in a cartisian skeptical scenario with, you know, a demon just feeding your mind sense impressions that delude you into thinking that there's a physical world or, you know, just like locked in syndrome, right? Where some

people can be consciously aware and in pain without engaging in any avoidance behavior. Third, most of the alternative psychophysical mappings are just plainly conceivable. Even if you think hedonic inversion specifically is inconceivable.

So for instance, it's just like plainly conceivable that creatures have chaotic TV static experiences that mirror the microfysical goings on in their brains or bodies. Fourth, I actually think it's totally conceivable that one experience pain and not even try to avoid it. I

mean that just makes like complete conceptual sense to me. Like I I what are you talking about that that doesn't make conceptual sense to you? In fact, it's literally happened in my own life, right? Like I felt pain and I haven't I

haven't even tried to avoid it. uh and there are many people in history such as martyrs to whom this has happened as well. Okay, so like I don't know I just think like the fundamental powers view is false on independent grounds. And

fifth and finally you know the fundamental powers view clearly doesn't explain the existence of psychophysical laws. So it won't explain the first fact under the banner of psychophysical luck and nor does it explain psychonomic harmony like even granting that if there

are any phenomenal qualities instantiated in the physical world at all then they will operate their characteristic effects. The antecedent of that conditional remains deeply surprising on naturalism and the phenomenal powers view doesn't explain why the antecedent there is met. Why

phenomenal qualities are indeed instantiated in the physical world to begin with. For that you need psychonomic harmony and to get psychonomic harmony you need striking coincidences.

Okay. Next up is the contingent normative roles response. This view says that conscious states have their normative properties in virtue of the contingent causal roles that they play.

So for example, pain is bad precisely because we tend to avoid it. Whereas pleasure is good precisely because we tend to pursue it. And if conscious qualities are good or bad in virtue of our pursuit or avoidance of them, it's

totally unsurprising that conscious states rationally align with behavior. No matter what conscious states we pursued or avoided, we would have acted rationally, right? Since pursuing some conscious state is precisely what makes it good, and avoiding it is precisely

what makes it bad. Okay. So, uh, in response, this seems ridiculous, undeserved excruciating torturous agony is bad and it would remain bad even if it were experienced by a disembodied mind causally unrelated to physical behavioral states. And so, that

just shows that pain is not bad in virtue of, you know, leading to, you know, avoidance behavior or something.

And besides, like this response would only explain normative harmony and probably only the hedonic subariety thereof. And that's just like an extremely narrow facet of the argument from psychophysical luck. So the argument would remain just about as strong even if we granted the objection.

Okay, multiverse response. So hey, you know, the argument from psychophysical law is ultimately a kind of fine-tuning argument just applied to the psychophysical principles. As we've seen, one response to the cosmological finetuning argument is the multiverse.

This response has two components, right? So first it posits a large and varied collection of universes large and varied enough that we would expect it to include at least some life permitting universes. And second of all it invokes

an observation selection effect to explain why the universe we observe is one of the life permitting universes.

Like even if the vast majority of universes in the multiverse are inhospitable to life, it's unsurprising that we'd find ourselves in one of the lifepitting runs since those are the only ones that contain conscious observers.

But it's just manifestly obvious that standard multiverse hypotheses don't explain psychophysical luck at all.

Standard multiverse hypotheses only give us a paniply of physical conditions and laws. They don't touch the psychophysical principles. Right? If the psychophysical principles had been contemptably simple and boring, say assigning a simple gray sensation to all physical states, then the multiverse

would just contain a vast sea of physical entities experiencing gray, right? And just like more generally, the multiverse will only spit out psychophysically lucky creatures if the psychophysical principles are already systematically fortunate in the various ways canvased. And consequently,

standard multiverse hypotheses are totally impotent to explain psychophysical luck. Now, of course, like you might try to posit a non-standard multiverse hypothesis on which universes vary randomly in which psychophysical laws obtain therein. Like if the collection is sufficiently vast

and varied, it's bound to include at least some universe with lucky psychophysical laws like ours. So wouldn't that undermine the argument from psychophysical luck? First, such a view is just scandalously unparimmonious. Like now we're just positing gazillions upon gazillions of

extra fundamental laws in order to avoid a single argument for theism. Like come on, man. Come on. Come on, man. Second, an observation selection effect is essential to multiverse explanations, right? Like otherwise we could invoke the multiverse to explain away just

about any piece of evidence for anything. Oh. Oh, five students turned in word for word identical papers. Well, you know, before you accuse them of foul play, consider that in a sufficiently large multiverse, this sort of thing was

bound to happen somewhere, right? Like this is ridiculous. Here, the multiverse objection clearly fails. And the reason is that although the multiverse predicts that some group of students somewhere would independently produce identical papers, it doesn't predict that we'd

find ourselves in a situation where such an improbable thing occurs. But for exactly the same reason, the non-standard multiverse explanation of psychophysical luck fails. It's just clearly false that conscious observers can only exist in a psychophysically lucky universe. Right? That conscious

observers exist under hordes of alternative psychophysical laws. None of which are anywhere near as lucky as our psychophysical principles. And so multiverse explanations don't predict that we'd find ourselves in a situation where psychophysical luck reigns. And so they don't even explain our actual data.

Also, these like psychophysical law ensemble solutions just like massively proliferate conscious subjects in our vicinity and they undermine our knowledge of other minds and various other things that I talk about in my uh my problem of psychonomic harmony paper

that's linked in the conversion video resource document. All right. So the sixth objection is suboptimality and disharmony. Hey Joe, you know the psychophysical principles are suboptimal. They're imperfect and they're disharmonious in lots of ways.

Like human memory is flawed and prone to error. We suffer from addiction and neurological diseases. We experience hallucinations, illusions, and other mistaken perceptual beliefs. And our psychophysical principles make us feel a lot of pain. Right? Like aren't these

facts very surprising under theism but not under naturalism? Well, first it's not actually clear that these are cases of psychophysical disharmony. Like take memory for example. holding fixed my behaviors. If my phenomenal memories were more accurate, there'd be a perverse mismatch

between my behaviors and my memories. Like, so for instance, I'd verically remember leaving my keys on the counter, but that would lead me to irrationally to go look in the cupboard. By contrast, if I'm looking in the cupboard while I

misremember my keys being in the cupboard, well, then that memorial state rationalizes my actual behavior. And just like more generally holding fix the physical facts, it's not clear that there could have been much more psychophysical harmony. And this point

will recur with many of the other cited cases of you know alleged disharmony. So consider for instance cognitive biases like if my phenomenal judgments were more epistemically rational well then holding fixed my behavior there'd be an irrational mismatch between my judgments

and behavior. Second continuing with the example of memory and you know the point applies to all the other cases. We cannot overlook the staggering degree of accuracy and coherence among our memorial states. Among all the conceivable ways we could populate a

mind with memorial states, only a fantastically overwhelmingly small fraction of them have at least as much accuracy and coherence as ours. This general fact is extremely surprising in the absence of theism or some kind of theism adjacent hypothesis. More

importantly, the degree to which this general fact confirms theism over naturalism just dwarfs the extent to which the more specific facts about suboptimality confirm naturalism over theism given this general fact. And this is especially plausible once we notice

like lots of not terribly unlikely theodysies that could naturally extend to these suboptimalities and then you know sprinkle in some mild skeptical theism where this mild dose of skeptical theism is just a recognition that it's not like super improbable that God has

adequate reasons of which we're unaware for actualizing apparently suboptimal but still very valuable psychophysical principles. Brian Cutter gives a helpful analogy here. So the library of Babel is a fictional library containing every conceivable book formed from every conceivable string of characters. So you

know now like the overwhelming majority of books in the Library of Babel are then going to be like extremely low on literary quality. In fact, most of them, you know, you're just going to like open up the pages and it's just going to be

like complete gibberish, complete random nonsense. If you hand me a book and I start out unsure between two hypotheses, randomism, which says that the book was picked randomly from the library of Babel, and then masterism, which says that the book was written by a literary

master, then when I open the book and see that it's a comprehensible, readable 200page book with sentences in a rational order and a plot that makes sense, then even if the book seems like a seven out of 10 on like the literary

quality scale, comparable to what like an average 9th or tth grader could write, intuitively the select book just conclusively refutes randomism. Of course, you know, we'd probably want to consider the mediocre writer hypothesis instead of like the literary master