Is it really pathological for megacultists to believe that there is an omniscient, omnipotent being intervening in their lives, speaking with them, and - rather inconveniently for the rest of us - applying itself to our existences too?
Of course it is.
All of us know this on some level. Some of us more than others. Cultural trends and community norms are not able to save the situation. This purpose of this post is to demonstrate that my claim (adults with imaginary friends, who believe that their imaginary friends are not imaginary, are mentally unwell) is by no means flippant. I will argue that it is both true and coherent, and I will use observations from, and about, philosophy, psychology, the philosophy of psychology, and the philosophy of science.
First, however, some preparation. I will begin with some metaphilosophy. That is – I will begin by making philosophical and other observations about philosophy itself.
Of Philosophical Things
The philosophy of psychology?
As my Gen-Z kids like to say: "Is that even a thing?"
It is.
As is the philosophy of psychiatry. So is the philosophy of mathematics. The philosophy of physics, too.
These are not just references to people's ideas about different sciences (although those are included). They are formal, rigorous areas of research and study, with formal courses offered by universities and colleges around the world (including in China.) (Although it is safe to say that there are still a lot more such courses at sandstone and Ivy League types of universities. That alone should tell one something.)
Philosophy of psychology units or courses are taught at intermediate and senior level in most large Australian universities both in psychology degrees, and in philosophy degrees.
What about philosophy of biology? (the astute reader might ask.)
The philosophy of information (a topic after my own heart)? Certainly.
The philosophy of language, the philosophy of fiction, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of mind? Check, check, yes, and affirmative.
Philosophy of religion? Of course there is a course.
Philosophy of religion is a good one to mention, because it offers us an opportunity to come to terms with how unusual, and yet common, these analytic philosophical disciplines are. (Analytic philosophy is the Aristotelian variety of philosophy where philosophers pull everything apart – from concepts to theories – and try to understand if and how they work in terms of things like logic, causality, and knowledge. Aristotle is famous for having pulled apart concepts, ideas, emotions, and some unfortunate frogs.)
How so? (Continental philosophy is a bit different, and it is important, but I will leave it be for the purposes of this post.)
Consider this. The leading philosopher of religion in Australia for a couple of decades now has been Professor Graham Oppy, and (at last report) he is not the least bit religious. Professor Oppy has a habit of writing very good books about atheism.
All these analytic philosophical subdisciplines are important and well-respected. Except perhaps by social scientists and physicists.
Well, philosophers do often pick on social scientists, and so that is to be expected.
Physicists often really do not like philosophy. Partly this is because physicists are often no-nonsense hard scientists with no time for bullshit. Partly it is because they are usually physicalist reductionists (they believe that the only things that truly exist are physical, or else reduce to physical things at some level of existence). However, I have a theory that it is because they really like doing metaphysics and they want all the philosophy for themselves. Also – because they are often jealous types, and often their philosophy can be a bit clunky.
Do not get me wrong. I am both a physicalist and scientistic. In an argument about metaphysics - I will almost always back the physicist.
Western universities with large humanities and social sciences faculties have offered ‘philosophy of X’ courses for over a century now. They have existed in forms like their current forms for about half a century, with different manifestations before that.
So, hopefully I have been able to show some of you that there is more philosophy under heaven and earth – and at the local university – than is dreamed of in your phil…
(Okay. That was uncalled for. There is no philosophy of comedy that I am aware of. You can see why.)
Adults with imaginary friends are adults with imaginary friends
So where does someone who has a PhD in philosophy, and has studied the philosophy of science and the philosophy of religion (and most of the others in the above list), and is doing graduate research in psychology, get off saying that people who believe in a god are – well – not mentally well?
Partly it is because such folk cannot possibly be classified as mentally well according to any reasonable assessment of mental wellness and hygiene. People do attempt such classification. They refer to cultural norms, social survivability, pro-sociality, non-truth-tracking adaptation (it does not matter if your brain has wrong information, so long as you survive and thrive as a human agent), and such. It often all sounds very convincing and reasonable (especially the latter).
There is just one problem. Adults with imaginary omnipotent, omniscient friends are adults with imaginary friends. That they really believe such beings are real – and are in communication with them somehow – really makes this status worse and not better. Moreover, epistemic rationality needs to be measured in accordance with the best available knowledge in our society.
For example it matters that there are many reasonable and sensible non-magical and non-supernaturalistic explanations for why the universe exists, and it matters that people are by now generally well aware of them. People are also well aware of the power of the hard and special sciences to achieve really important and spectacular outcomes in a verifiable and publicly obvious and demonstrable way.
So, my view is arguably the soundest in terms of being a scientific view, and accords with the best mental health science even if the DSM (the statistical manual used by psychiatrists and psychologists) emphasises the putative healthiness of cultural and social adaptation qua ‘fitting in’ with delusional megacultists and their delusional beliefs. I will say more about this in the next section.
It is also a philosophical position and a strong personal view. I am not the only one that holds it. Many eminent scientists and philosophers of science hold it and say so. Many others hold it and stay silent. To be honest, most non-religious philosophers hold something very like this view. They just do not tell their religious colleagues, nor the general public. Not in so many words, as the saying goes. (If you do not know what epistemic rationality, phenomenal concepts, and epistemic closure under entailment are, then you are probably general public.)
So - I should follow the wise example of those erudite agents and not say it. Right?
Perhaps that largely depends upon how much I want certain things to change.
As I research more and more psychological science, I am increasingly convinced that the position is not only tenable, but correct. That is to say: I believe that it corresponds to the facts, or that it is true. Ceteris paribus (‘keeping constant values for/of’) on the available information and a whole lot of facts about social psychology, psycho-social development, social dynamics, group epistemic updating, evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology, neurology, and memetics (Dawkins’ perfectly serviceable conception of semantic and narratological units that are transmitted between individuals and groups.)
Many readers may argue that this is not a very philosophically mature position.
Want to argue about it? Goody!
Arguing is good. Philosophers love arguing. Sometimes we do not want to do anything else.
(Still - good try with the emotionalised, biased, immaturity thing.)
Some more metaphilosophy: difficult and disturbing views
Philosophical positions are often controversial. The controversial ones are the best ones. They keep things interesting and keep us intellectually honest (well – that is one idea anyway). It does not follow that they are wrong. To say that it does follow that something is wrong just because it is uncomfortable, unpopular, and unpleasant is an example of the logical fallacy named ‘non sequitur’. This simply means that one thing or fact does not necessarily logically follow from another thing or fact (because, for example, it might have followed from something else).
So – does that mean that I do not really believe in my position?
Good thought. In this case – it does not mean that. However, that does happen. It is a thing, as the longsuffering Gen-Z-ers say: this not really believing very much, or even at all, in a philosophical position that one has argued for even in academic journals. It is not the most common disposition and practice, but academic philosophers are allowed, and encouraged, to do it. We are expected to do it at least sometimes (much like lawyers in training are expected to be ‘Devil’s advocate’ in moot court sometimes). It is a good intellectual discipline and exercise, and helps one develop good philosophical reflexes.
Some philosophical views and arguments are very scary, ugly, unpopular, or distasteful to the average sensibility. So, if philosophers were not around to do philosophy, no one would bother to find out if they are, nonetheless, good arguments or views from a logical, epistemic (‘knowy’), ethical and metaphysical (‘stuff-y’ and ‘existence-y’) perspective. After all, if such views and arguments stand up to systematic scrutiny, then we might be faced with the difficult but nonetheless undeniable prospect of paying them due attention.
We might have to pay them a lot of attention. It happens.
There are some great examples of this from all fields of philosophy. Often, they happen at the intersection of the primary subdisciplines. For example a metaphysical theory about what exists, and how and why, might seriously affect some ethical theory, or else alter some set of moral assumptions.
A simple, accessible example is as follows. If there were some kind of male, conservative, patriarchal god-being ruling the universe, and if they somehow have an opinion about how we should all behave, then that probably should affect our practical or applied ethics.
(A digression and note. I have italicised the if and the then in the previous paragraph. Computer programmers and logicians will recognise the sentence as being what is called a conditional statement. The English language proposition is made up of two parts – the one before the ‘then’ and the part after ‘then’. When philosophers and logicians use first order and predicate logic to convert the statement to a logical formula, the ‘if-then’ is called an implication and is denoted by an arrow →, which is called a relational operator, and represents the relational operation of implication.)
If there were such a (very specific and surprisingly anthropic) god being, then it probably should also affect our normative ethics (what we ought to do) and our metaethics (what philosophical theories of ethical facts and theories we endorse and why.) That is a move from metaphysics and ontology (about what stuff exists, how, and why) to moral philosophy and ethics (how we should act, and on what basis, and why).
Another example is called strong metaphysical determinism. That is the idea that everything that you do is determined completely and causally by the prior state of the entire physical universe, including all the complex interacting physical systems that make up your local environment, body, biology, and mind.
If that is true, then it very probably necessarily follows that free will is in fact just an illusion. You did not really make the decision to read this annoying article. You were always going to read it based on the way that all the causal vectors in the universe were ‘rolling out’ a certain way in your local environment (including in your brain), and in the larger universe, before you read it.
There is an ongoing big argument about this that involves a concept philosophers call compatibilism. That is the idea that there can be strong metaphysical determinism and free will at the same time. There is arguably more than one way for compatibilism to be true – if you find the many arguments convincing.
There are worse examples, but that is enough for now.
Everyone is a philosopher
Just as there are all kinds of philosophy qua philosophical topics, there are also many ways of doing philosophy. For example, the philosophy of science and analytic philosophy in general, are often interested in how different scientific methods and methodologies best serve the objective of doing science.
“Wait just a minute”, you might be thinking to yourself, dear reader. “It’s just philosophy. Why do we care what philosophers think?”
Everyone is a philosopher, right?
Not like this.
Not really.
These kinds of philosophers advise federal court judges and legal theorists about how to handle difficult ethical conundrums and quandaries. These kinds of philosophers advise war theorists and war colleges about how to manage decisions about nuclear weapons management (Of course – there are lots of other kinds of specialist advisers working on these problem domains too.) They are often the smartest people in the room. Not always, but often.
You may have often heard it said that philosophers are not useful for anything. This is, of course, silly (and it is usually some truly useless theologian saying it).
Some examples to undermine the charge of silliness?
Regardless of what you think of Karl Marx (author of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto), his influence on the world was monumental and undeniable. Marx and Engels radically changed the entire political, cultural, and social features of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.
Another example? There was a scholarly tradition among Catholic clerics and educators for centuries. It was called scholasticism (developed by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century). Essentially – it was comprehensively based on the thought of the Greek philosopher Aristotle.
Still other examples?
John Dewey and William James are regarded as philosophers in a very real sense, and they are two of the founding fathers of American pragmatism as applied (in a way lived and experienced by Americans) to government and the education system.
Karl Popper is the philosopher of science who developed the extremely influential idea of falsificationism, or falsifiability of scientific theories. In basic terms falsificationism means that a scientific theory must be apt to evidential disproof. That is to say: it has to be the kind of theory that makes the kind of hypotheses or claims that can actually be tested evidentially and systematically. This idea is still very influential and central to psychological science.
Enough of the apologetic (principled defence) of the relevance and nature of analytic philosophy and the philosophy of science. On now to the philosophy of psychology.
Some actual philosophy of psychology (AND philosophy of science)
This is a good point at which to take the next step in introducing the reader to some actual philosophy of psychology by doing a bit of it.
Popper's falsificationist theory is a good segue into this, since a lot of philosophy of psychology has to do with the methods and methodologies of psychology and the practice of psychology.
So – here we go.
Remember that above I said that philosophers of science (like Popper) are interested in assessing scientific methods and methodologies? Part of this includes determining what seems to be working from an epistemic (knowledge-based), logical, and practical standpoint.
The philosophy of psychology is currently an area of great interest. This is because, dear reader, psychology – the special science of psychology - has problems (the special sciences are all the sciences except for fundamental physics). Not just the scientific problems that it is tasked to solve and investigate – which mostly have to do with human psychology – but problems with psychology itself as a science.
Big problems.
There are problems with its methodology, theory-building, research design methods, statistical methods, handling of evidence, and researcher biases.
So now we are doing philosophy of psychology, with our philosophising set to ‘critical analysis’ mode.
In the last decade, meta-analyses of psychological experiments and research has demonstrated that only about 30% of psychological experiments were able to be replicated and reproduced by other researchers in different laboratories or locales. This has been called the ‘reproducibility crisis’ or the problem of reproducibility. If you thought this was not a very good outcome, then your intuitions are apparently reliable.
So now you might be getting a grip on the problem. If the DSM-V (the current version of the statistical manual used by psychologists) says it is healthy to have an imaginary, omniscient friend, but recently statistical psychology has been found to be only about 30% effective and plagued with problems of theory and method, then one should probably doubt the assertions about religious megacult beliefs per the DSM-V.
There are such things as non-sequiturs. This does not really seem to be one of them. There is enough soundness in the argument (connection with the material facts) to give it teeth. It does arguably sensibly follow from the problems of psychology that it is not giving good guidance regarding megacult delusions. (There are political problems too, but I will leave those aside.)
That problem of reproducibility, which is generally referred to as the reproducibility crisis, is mostly about method. It is a methodological problem. It also involves researcher bias, and problems with researcher expertise and understanding.
Psychological research typically has these steps or phases:
- Development of the research question (a question of interest about human psychology that researchers want to answer.)
- Research design, including statement of hypotheses and design of the experiment or study
- Execution of the research and its experiments or studies, including gathering of data
- Analysis of data and findings
- Development and refinement of existing hypotheses and generation of new hypotheses
Experimental psychologists are aware that these phases happen in a cycle, and the cycle follows the plan of Karl Popper's hypothetico-deductivist model for doing science. That is Popper’s fancy term for the process of testing hypotheses using experimentation and evidence, deducing conclusions, and then deriving, or deducing, new hypotheses based on the findings or conclusions, and testing again.
Reproducibility problems are not fatal to psychology, but they are nonetheless very important, and they do have a real impact on the reliability and usefulness of much psychological research.
Although psychological science has many problems, it does not follow that it is by any means useless. However, its current problems are still significant. That is why, when psychiatrists and psychologists tell you that belief in an imaginary, omniscient, omnipotent imaginary friend is not indicative of mental pathology if it is in line with ‘cultural norms’ and community expectations – you should be very dubious indeed.
In fact, I strongly suggest that you are well within your right to ‘call bullshit on that’ as my own generation puts it.
An adult with an imaginary friend is an adult with an imaginary friend. They are not well.
But you cannot assume those things, Dr Long! They are related to the eternal verities. No one knows!
Well – then we should not jump to complicated, positive, moral conclusions and develop entire systems of social rules based upon them. That kind of practice is not epistemically rational.
I mentioned theory building problems in psychology. There is a second crisis in psychology that accompanies the reproducibility crisis. I will address it here only briefly.
The theory crisis in psychology is a reflection of a crisis that occurs throughout the sciences, and it has been a topic of intense interest in the philosophy of science for a century. The problem is that a lot of the concepts used in psychological theories do not seem to be very well, or very clearly, connected to physical facts.
This is important, since before one does any experimentation in psychology, one needs a coherent theoretical basis for the experiments. This prevents people doing psychological experiments based on the premises of – say – astrology, or the Jedi religion, or voodoo, or something.
Well - they can do it, but it won’t get published in any kind of scientific journal.
I will give just one example. The theory of ego depletion is elegant, internally consistent (the terms and concepts of the theory all fit fairly well with each other within the theory) and seems to be intuitively pleasing. I happen to think that ego depletion theory has a lot going for it, and I find some of its concepts, hypotheses, and findings to be quite exciting.
However, ego depletion theory shares some problems with another well known and much older psychological theory: the psychodynamic theory of Sigmund Freud. Freud’s theory has a metaphorical element according to which human psychology and behaviour responds to the different kinds of pressures that build up in the psyche in different ways. Freud’s metaphor is one of a system of plumbing or pipes. It is a kind of hydrodynamics and pressure metaphor.
Metaphors – and mini fictions - can be, and often are, useful in science. Things like perfect spheres, frictionless planes, absolute vacuums and so on (the latter one is a tricky one). However, Freud’s psychodynamic pressure-exchange metaphor is not terribly well regarded. It simply is not clear what the pressure corresponds to, and how it could be measured. Feelings an emotions? Stress hormones? Norepinephrine? Limbic activity? Fatigue?
Ego depletion has similar conceptual and theory problems. There are some reasonable Freudian definitions of ego, but it is not clear how ego corresponds to, or is factually linked to, physically measurable, neurological dynamics in our brains. At some level it is necessary to have this for psychology to be scientific. It does not look – at this point – like ego depletion theory has it. What is ego? Is it psychic energy? Is it will and agency? Is it a system of conscious, cognitive representations of one's desires?
What is it when one asks the question in neurological terms?
So there is a crisis with experimentation in psychology at the level of both theory and method.
The overarching point is that if a psychologist came to you with the DSM-V and an experiment based upon ego depletion suggesting that megacult membership - and corresponding belief in an over-demon - must be a mentally healthy thing: you should be quite doubtful.
Okay. That is enough philosophy of psychology. Time for some metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and philosophy of information (with some philosophy of religion thrown in.
Analytic Philosophy: The ontological argument
So let us do some interdisciplinary analytic philosophy and philosophy of information.
It is precisely the point about the big ontological picture that no one knows 100% for certain what is going on in the universe at large. We are limited informational agents with limited information processing capabilities.
However, in the absence of serious, convincing, reproducible, and publicly experimentally (and that means controlled physical experiment) verifiable, evidence: jumping to conclusions about even the ontological existential basics in relation to such a proposition (about a god existing) is, well, quite irrational and pathological.
Seems like strong claim? Not really, but okay: more argumentation.
At the very least it is what philosophers and cognitive scientists call epistemically irrational: it would be irrational to say that one knows otherwise.
And it is important that the positive ontological, or existence, claim, is not the same thing as saying “let’s not posit anything without evidence”. Not at all. In fact the more informational complexity is required for something to exist, the more and stronger proof is needed. You must prove the existential basis of all of the complex properties and structure, not just a brute existence claim.
Put otherwise, even if you manage to prove that some kind of general god being exists (which is no easy task) you don’t get that it is gendered, omniscient, omnipotent, or even an epistemic agent for free. All of those things have to be objectively and reproducibly additionally, and painstakingly, demonstrated. Let us be a little more systematic about this argument.
What do I mean by ontological existential basics, and an existential basis? Compare these two statements as claims:
1. A god (of some kind) exists
2. A male-gendered, omnipotent, omniscient, masculine, misogynistic, unbelief-hating, jealous, angry, vengeful, apostate-hating, adultery-hating, individual, unique, and solitary god exists.
One does not have to be a trained analytic philosopher to understand that (2) is making a far more specific and extensive set of existence claims. It adds a whole bunch of properties to the basic existence claim (existential ontological claim) of (1). Some of those properties are complex, psychological, and very anthropic (human like) properties.
Put otherwise: the god of (1) is very non-specific, and could be just about anything. It could be an anthropic cosmological awareness (the universe being somehow aware of itself). Thus the bar is not set very high for proving complex informational properties for god (1). It could be a transcendental idealist emergent dynamic (cosmic consciousness somehow happens due to – say – cosmological evolutionary processes.) It could be just a general term for evolutionary cosmology. It could be something that we cannot possibly even grasp or understand.
Either way - no one has ANY verifiable, provable evidence of god (1) existing.
None.
And, no: dreams induced by eating too much curry do not count. At all.
Therefore, asserting the existence of (2) is obviously very nutty, really. But I digress.
Without going into systematic philosophical argumentation: asserting (2) makes a LOT more assumptions. No one has even made it as far as being remotely close to proving (1) yet. Not that lots of people – from Anselm to Blaise Pascal to Kurt Godel have not tried to provide logical-cum-ontological proofs. These theorists and philosophers are just a few that have tried to prove or pose versions of what is called the ontological argument.
You cannot just point to the universe and just say ‘Aha! Must be because of a god!’ You cannot even do that for god (1), let alone way-out-there, variously complex, and psychologically complicated Mr god (2). That is a basic non-sequitur.
We have no testable, experimentally demonstrable evidence for any prime-mover (Aristotle’s term) type of initial causative agent. Certainly not one with teleological agency (purposed will, or purpose and will.) Most certainly not one with a personality, gender, moodiness, and moral preferences.
Between physics and scientifically inspired metaphysics, there are LOTS of other explanations for why the universe might exist. One of the best is sheer accident due to massive, infinite available time and space (or whatever there possibly was or was not before space and time). Another is that it is impossible that it (the material universe) not exist. This latter possibility is quite like the ontological argument for a god, so let us look at that briefly.
Saint Anselm of Canterbury’s version of the ontological argument is the best known and understood (to the degree anyone can make sense of it). However, I will not explain it in detail. It essentially effectively says that:
...God [is] a being than which no greater can be conceived. ...[I]f such a being fails to exist, then a greater being—namely, a being than which no greater can be conceived, and which exists—can be conceived. But this would be absurd: nothing can be greater than a being than which no greater can be conceived. So a being than which no greater can be conceived—i.e., God—exists. (Source: Oppy, Graham, "Ontological Arguments", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/ontological-arguments/
Normally this kind of argument - which is called a reductio or a reductio ad absurdum - is very strong. However Anselm's application of RAA always sounded daft to me. It is not super well-regarded because the move from conceivability to material actuality is a bit iffy. A lot iffy, really.
Still - Anselm was alive in the 13th century, and so we cannot be too hard on the guy. So I will try to help him out.
Pursuant to offering a stronger form of the argument, I am going to put aside conceivability, and focus on possibility and probability (my allusions to conceivability will be via metaphysical possibility).
AA: A god is metaphysically possible, and therefore, because it is god type of thing that is possible, then it follows that it (a god) must exist.
The idea of AA is that a god type thing gets existence from being possible, whereas non-god type things do not necessarily get the same outcome. Put otherwise – the properties of a possible omnipotent god type thing are such that it follows from it being possible that it must - necessarily – also be real. Somehow.
This still sounds a bit daft to me, but to be frank: it is not so bad as the first one looks. It can be given a pretty strong representation. Especially when one considers more contemporary metaphysical arguments about the nature of – well – nature and the universe. Even more so, perhaps, if one take ideas about the multiverse seriously.
A lot of it turns out to depend rather centrally upon whether nature (the universe or multiverse or whatever we live in) is materially infinite. If there is an eternal, temporally and spatially – and materially – infinite amount of everything for ever in every direction, then that matters. It makes available possibilities – and probabilities – that would not be available if somehow all the stuff is not infinite but instead ends somewhere at some point or at some boundary: with nothingness, or oblivion, or whatever.
(Yes, I am aware that there are arguments about what ‘nothing’ even means, and what it even could be, and that both physicists and philosophers are interested in them. I will ignore these in this post. I cannot do everything.)
So now I will do what good philosophers are supposed to do and give (an outline of) the strongest possible representative case supporting the argument I reject. To being with, I am just going to leave the god bits out of it altogether.
As a capable philosopher of information, I suggest to those readers who are philosophically trained that you might find this interesting and original. In other words: I am not messing around.
I will do this by way of using something like a Platonic dialectic (two philosophers arguing in a discussion like Plato and Socrates in the Agora) and deduction (the more modern approach to going from premises to conclusions.)
Let us pose a simple question first:
Q: Why does the material universe exist?
Now let us pose a hypothesis:
Hyp: If there is infinite existing stuff (spacetime? Pre-spacetime? Nothingness?) of some kind, or even a big enough amount of it, then it is statistically and materially impossible for the universe to not exist.
This hypothesis relies upon a premise that I will call the ‘initial causal spark’ premise. It is the simple, well known, idea that the material universe we inhabit started at some point, and that before that it did not exist. The term is metaphorical. I have no idea if it was a spark. But I have no idea what it could have been at all, and so ‘spark’ will do as a way of referring to – whatever it could have been.
Just to make matters more interesting: I am not discounting the possibility that there was no 'spark', and no beginning. We atheist types are all very happy to consider that there was NO beginning, and stuff, or some kind of unstuff, or nothing of some kind, has always just existed. Also super weird. Maybe serious nothingness (whatever that is) is in fact totes impossible.
*Shrug*
(How does nothing exist? Now you are just being difficult.)
I do not know how there being no beginning would work either, and I will return to it briefly at the end of the ‘dialectic’ (between Jill and Jen) later.
Going back to the spark just to keep things simple, the idea is that – given infinite spacetime – or else infinite whatever existed before spacetime: the causal spark had to happen sometime just out of sheer weight of scale and statistics/probability.
Another way of saying it is that it had to happen some time. If the chances of it happening were infinitesimally tiny, then that does not matter much if one has infinite available chances! The infinite chances probably mean that the virtually impossible thingy will happen.
Or that is the general idea, anyway.
One more time for the perplexed. The idea is that even if the initial ‘spark’ was phenomenally, extraordinarily, massively, spectacularly statistically unlikely: then given enough spacetime, or pre-spacetime, or whatever, it still had to happen. The accompanying idea is that infinite constitutes enough in our hypothesis above (Hyp).
What? You do not like ‘spark’?
Err: How about ‘flash’?
Pop?
Ping? Bang? Zip?
Incipient Quantum Event? Incipient string field? Emergence of the quantum field? Incipient perturbation of the quantum vacuum? Incipient quantum vacuum type thingy? Weird thing that – despite what Jesuits say all day – came from absolutely nothing (whatever that is according to Stephen Hawking and others)?
We are setting up the premises and the argument. Work with me here.
What we are getting at – gradually – is that the bad news for non-atheist types is you cannot get even god (1) for free from infinite existing stuff (Remember from above the god (1) is the really general nonspecific one that just exists with no special particular properties).
See what I mean about not jumping to positive existential conclusions? Of course, you do.
But that puts our focus back on the task at hand: our adjusted Anselm’s type of ontological argument for the existence of a god (2), or at least of a god (1) leading possibly somehow to a god (2). I promised you a strong version of the argument, which I have said is not as terrible as it sounds given this infinite possibilities and possible infinite chances with infinite stuff stuff.
I am approaching Anselm’s old (and no longer very well-regarded) argument from a new direction. I am leaving possible gods out of it for a bit and just focussing on the material stuff. Or else the existing - err - nothingness.
So back to our question "Q: Why does the material universe exist?" and our hypothesis "Hyp: It is statistically and materially impossible for the universe not to exist because there is infinite opportunity."
(Now you will not be surprised, dear reader to learn at this point that there are serious questions around the relationship between statistical and material possibility. These I will also leave alone in this article. You might be more surprised to learn that some serious scientists and philosophers of science suggest that probabilities are physical, and others that stochasticity or randomness is also physical!)
Enough chatter: here goes. We’ll use the nice, easy dialectic to start with. I will not bludgeon the good names of Plato and Aristotle by using them, and it might be confusing. Let us propose a couple of fictional philosophers: Jill and Jen.
Jill: “The material universe exists. It had to start somewhere, sometime, somehow”
Jen: “I agree it does exist, Jill. But – did it have to have a start? Maybe it has always been there, somehow?”
Jill: “I will allow that, Jen. It certainly gets rid of the problem of what there was before spacetime. Nothingness is very tricky. However, we seem to have a different kind of what, but no explanation of why? So why has the material universe always existed?”
Jen: “Maybe it is, and always has been, impossible for it not to exist, dear Jill?”
Jill: “Well I find the impossibility of non-existence easier to grasp if we go back to it having a beginning: initial causal spark. It seems to me that – beginning or not – we’re now trying to explain the reason for the existence of the universe statistically, or probabilistically, by referring to its non-existence being impossible, and therefore effectively having 0 statistical likelihood.”
Jen: “But then the problem seems to be that there was a point at which our impossibility becomes unstuck, Jill. We cannot say that it is statistically impossible for there to be nothing, when we are also saying that there used to be nothing (of some kind) but it was impossible for the nothing to be sustained perpetually?”
Jill: “Ah. Yes. So perhaps let us instead agree that one way or another, spark or no spark, beginning or no beginning, it is impossible for nothingness to either persist or exist forever or perpetually, and that material existence is statistically inevitable?”
Jen: “And let us consider the more bizarre possibility that oblivion and material existence both exist at the same time?”
Jill: “Perhaps, but that would seem also to favour the impossibility of blanket, or total, non-existence, and favour the truth that it is inevitable that the material universe does exist?”
Jen: “Quite so, Jill. So we’ll leave that aside too.”
Getting the idea? Or would a flowerpot full of mud be clearer?
Assuming that you are keeping up - the idea is that, deductively:
Premise 1: The material universe obviously exists
Premise 2: From Premise 1 it follows that perpetual, complete nothingness – if it ever threatened to exist - must necessarily have always been impossible (since - like - here we all are)
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Conclusion: It is statistically and probabilistically impossible for the material universe not to exist
This seems to be a pretty strong argument for the statistical inevitability of the material universe (or multiverse, or whatever the heck it is.) It works with a causal spark and a starting point or without one (Jesuit assertions or no Jesuit assertions. Whatever).
However, I promised the reader a good, strong statement of AA (Adjusted Anselm’s ontological argument).
So now we must toy with the ideas of
a. Infinite metaphysical possibilities
and
b. Infinite material resources for the realisation of infinite metaphysical possibilities
Let us pretend we have established that the material universe (or multiverse, or whatever) is materially and statistically inevitable, and that it is commensurately statistically impossible for it not to exist. Now we must figure out if it follows necessarily from this that god (1) is not only possible, but also inevitable or statistically (effectively) certain. After all – if there are infinite chances available, then shouldn’t all of the metaphysically possible things happen at some point?
There is a contemporary theory in philosophy and logic due to David Lewis which says something like this. It is very famous and is part of Lewis’ theory of possible worlds. It is called the theory of modal realism, and it essentially says that all and every metaphysically possible world is completely material and concretely real. Unfortunately, this includes the worlds where babies are turned inside out over long periods of time (Remember our discussion about unpleasant philosophical ideas?)
(Technically there is apparently no probability of 100% for any given value for a statistical continuous random variable in formal statistics, but let us not let that little detail get in the way of a good argument for the time being).
Whether infinite chances and stuff gives us all possible things inevitably – including a god (1) - seems to rest squarely upon whether all the metaphysically possible things will exist, or only some of them. This in turn seems to depend upon whether infinite material resources exist to ensure them all AND whether infinite material resources existing are all that is required. We are back to the question of the adequacy of infinite material resources or stuff for getting a god (1) again.
(This touches on the contrast between conceivability and possibility, which is itself a huge debate in philosophy. Anselm wanted conceivability to deliver reality. That's way too strong for most of us nowadays.)
Maybe to get god (1) we don’t need infinite material stuff, but just a really super, enormous, incredibly large amount of it and some luck?
The first problem with this non-infinite suggestion is that now it looks like AA is in trouble, and we do not have inevitability or statistical certainty anymore. In other words, as soon as stochasticity and luck are back in the picture due to limited (non-infinite) material, spatiotemporal resources, then our metaphysical possibility of god (1) is, necessarily, no longer a certainty. Even with huge amounts of material stuff, god (1) might be too improbable, and too statistically unlikely.
Also, as we will see in a moment, there might be a problem with natural laws.
So it looks like we need infinite materiality – infinite material existence and spatiotemporal resources - to even consider the idea that god (1) necessarily must exist gets off the ground, as it were.
In other words, to ever get an inevitable god (1), we must have full-on, strong, material infinity: limitless, never ending, unbounded stuff, and the infinite metaphysical chances that go with it.
This is of course a big problem! No one has the first clue if the material, spatiotemporal stuff is limitless. In fact, cosmic background radiation and the big bang and so on seem to strongly suggest otherwise, in terms of the limits of what we can observe.
As for whether there was infinite existing nothing: do not even get physicists started on nothing.
However, let us continue to cheer for Anselm and AA, and assume that – against all available evidence – there IS an infinite amount of spacetime and spatiotemporality, or spacey and timey stuff.
(Do not start with cheeky questions about what time is either. That is a waste of time. I will call your smarty pants posturing about the nature of time, and raise you an eliminativist theory of time that says there is no time and that only space exists. Just to shut you up.)
So it looks like IFF (you may recall from high school maths that this means ‘if and only if’) the material universe is materially truly endless and has an actual unlimited amount of spacetimeyness in it, then god(1) might have to necessarily exist.
That is the strongest version of AA I can give you. To be honest, it is pretty damned strong. The idea is that, if god (1) gets its foot in the existential door by dint of infinite chances and infinite spacetimey stuff, then god (1) might have certain properties that make it logically inevitable too (this is a different thing, and quite strong). Anselm would probably like that.
However, sadly for serious god (1) fans, there are, at minimum, three serious problems (some of which we have variously alluded to):
I. It is not at all certain that the material universe is infinite and without limit, and the actual evidence we have suggests otherwise. Actual material evidence is pretty important, as it turns out. Without it one does not get to the moon, or get vaccines, or ECGs, or MRIs, or The Internet, and so on.
II. Even if the material universe is infinite and without limit, there might be some kind of nomic constraint(s) or natural law(s) that somehow prevent the existence of god (1). Those laws, or natural nomic constraints, might just as easily also exist infinitely.
III. Many fans of god (1) think it needs to have the property of existing before, and apart from, the material universe, which means that the whole argument does not support the necessary existence of god (1). This is almost always a property of Mr God (2).
There are lots of other problems, but these are sufficient to see god (1) off, along with AA.
Now that is all a lot of trouble to go to. What is the primary ‘take-home’ from all of this?
The primary take-home point is that we cannot even rationally and sensibly assume god (1). You do not have to be a philosopher or scientist to grasp the reasons for this, but a moderately systematic exploration drives the point home rather nicely.
Property-heavy god (2) is not even getting its foot in the door. Moreover, we are all aware that there are plenty of sensible scientific theories like evolutionary cosmology that are pretty good for explaining the material universe, and moreover we (and by we - I mean everyone with a secondary school education in the first world) know science is spectacularly successful and pretty much the best thing we ever came up with for knowing anything worth knowing. We also know that Mr God (2) sounds an awful lot like something a human psychology would make up, concoct, or construct based on its own existence and experience.
Conclusion
So in the first couple of sections I made you aware of philosophy and the philosophy of science, and a bit about how they work, and why they matter. Then I engaged with some philosophy of psychology, philosophy of information, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of science. We even did a bit of metaphilosophy, and so now you have a new way to impress at the pub.
Then I did some actual argumentation by way of dialectic (a very old approach) and deduction (a newer approach).
Jumping to the conclusion of god (1) is a serious stretch. Going full Mr God (2) is just irrational and wrong-headed. It is in fact reasonable to say that believing there definitely is a god (2) is delusional. Making social rules based on some characterisation of Mr God (2) is – I am sorry to say - quite insane.
We just do not have anything like that kind of information required to give us any sound reason to posit a god (1), let alone a Mr Omniscient Moral-Moodiness God (2). Psychological science does not save the epistemically irrational from these problems. At all. Psychological science has enough problems saving itself from incoherence and the reproducibility crisis.
Moreover - Western people in first world nations know this.
I am less confident in calling the Christian and Islamic megacultists that lived in the 13th century mentally unstable. Contemporary megacultists do not live in the 13th century.