The situations we force on these terrified, innocent, defenseless animals is one that no one would hesitate to call torture if we inflicted it on a dog or a human child. And yet we inflict it on a population more than the number of people who have ever lived for the sake of omelets and chicken sandwiches.

And yet it is relatively easy to do something about it. To end complicity in this deranged holocaust, one must only stop paying for animal products. For just a dollar, one can spare animals from many years in a cage. Evil has no clearer face than factory farming—those nightmare sheds where animals are fattened up and then go to die—and none of us should remain silent in the face of their cries, or be the reason for them.

1 Jude 14-15

(Credit to Dustin Crummett on Facebook for this argument and responses to the standard replies).

Jude 14-15 reads:

¹⁴ Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about them: “See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones ¹⁵ to judge everyone, and to convict all of them of all the ungodly acts they have committed in their ungodliness, and of all the defiant words ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”

This is a quotation from first Enoch, a book not considered scripture except by some of the Oriental Orthodox. Different sections of the book were written at different times. The oldest portions were probably written between 300 and 200 BC; the latest portions around 100 BCE or later.

So it is very implausible that this was written by Enoch himself! For that to be the case, there would have to be a chain of continuous oral transmission for many thousands of years, of which we don’t have any record. And then why wouldn’t 1st Enoch be scripture, if it is written by the Biblical figure Enoch? It would also be really surprising if Enoch really did say this and it just so happened to correspond to the words written in 1st Enoch.

Could it be that Jude wasn’t intending to attribute the statements to the real Enoch? You might say “as Sherlock Holmes said…” without literally attributing the statement to a real man named Sherlock Holmes. But people at the time generally thought that Enoch had written 1st Enoch. His audience couldn’t have been expected to know the quote wasn’t from Enoch. And insofar as Adam was a real guy and Enoch was (as most Christians think), it would be inaccurate to attribute statements to Enoch that he never said. As Dustin put it:

If I quote the Vision of George Washington and claim its prophecy is being fulfilled today, I am pretty clearly committing misattributing the statement to GW.

Now, you could think that Enoch was inspired but then corrupted. This, however, would be super weird. The book is full of all sorts of totally fantastical claims and it claims to have been written by Enoch. Presumably Enoch was not still writing in the year ~200!

So you have to think the following weird sequence of coincidences happened:

1. God decided to inspire 1 Enoch.

2. It then got badly corrupted in about a billion different ways, so it wasn’t counted as scripture.

3. Part of the corruption included who it was authored by. This description of authorship appears right before the prophecy Jude quotes. So while Enoch really said these words, the text somehow changed “Enoch said such and such” into “The words of the blessing of Enoch, wherewith he blessed the elect and righteous...Concerning the elect I said, and took up my parable concerning them.” And note the third person speech at the beginning is standard in prophetic texts, even ones claiming to be first person.

4. Jude attributes these to Enoch when the plain takeaway from any normal person at the time would have been that Jude thought Enoch wrote the book of Enoch.

Similar complaints will apply to the idea that God only inspired that particular passage from 1st Enoch. It would be weird to inspire one random passage in an otherwise apocryphal book, just so it can be quoted by Jude—even though it’s a pretty generic sentiment and Jude could have quoted it even if it hadn’t appeared in 1st Enoch.

In contrast, the errantist has a perfectly good explanation of this. 1st Enoch was held in high regard by the Jews at the time, believed often to be scripture. Thus, Biblical authors might quote it like any other piece of scripture.

Thus, seems like a pretty clear error!

2 Genealogies

Biblical genealogies often conflict. To take one example, Genesis 4 and 5 give similar but slightly conflicting genealogies. Note the mostly preserved order and the near-complete overlap.

Conflicts between genealogies are totally ubiquitous. There are about as many cases of genealogies conflicting as converging. Here is a (hopefully exhaustive though I don’t have all the genealogies memorized, so I’m trusting Claude here, while vetting its answers with Chat GPT) list of all the genealogies that agree.

And here is the list of the genealogies that agree but with only subtle name variations:

As for the genealogies that conflict:

The last list includes repeats like the ones between Genesis 4 and 5.

This means that of the overlapping genealogies that are present in the Bible, around half of them have some conflicts. Note that you would actively expect this if inerrancy is false. It’s pretty difficult to find genealogies that stretch through the distant past. In contrast, while perhaps it wouldn’t be shocking if there were slight differences in genealogy given different literary styles, the sheer degree of divergence is strong evidence against inerrancy. If you want to see more analysis of the divergence between Matthew and Luke concerning Jesus’s genealogy, I discussed it here.

3 Might communion kill you?

Paul seemed to think that taking communion would kill you or cause you to become very sick if you take it unworthily. In 1st Corinthians 11, he writes:

²⁶ For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death till He comes. ²⁷ Therefore whoever eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and ^[a]blood of the Lord. ²⁸ But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup. ²⁹ For he who eats and drinks ^[b]in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the ^[c]Lord’s body. ³⁰ For this reason many are weak and sick among you, and many ^[d]sleep.

(Sleep is often used to refer to death).

Paul’s view seems to be that if you take communion unworthily, you will get sick or die. Presumably this isn’t true—if those who took communion unworthily developed serious bodily afflictions, presumably we’d have noticed by now. So how might we explain this passage?

You might think this only occurred in the relevant time and place. So perhaps only people in the congregation at corinth died when they took communion unworthily. Two problems:

1. This seems immoral! Sure, maybe it’s not great to take communion unworthily, but should God really have been killing people for doing it?

2. The passage seems universal in scope. It’s not just talking about those in the Corinth Church. It says “for he who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself…” and “whoever eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and ^[a]blood of the Lord.” It just seems clear that this is the plain reading!

3. Maybe something about the genre means that this is not asserted. But it’s not clear why. He just outright says it! It’s not like he’s giving some aside when making a larger point.

This isn’t the only time in the Bible when God kills people somewhat capriciously. In Acts, he kills Ananias and Sapphira for falsely claiming to have given the proceeds from a field they sold to the Church. Now, maybe that’s a somewhat bad thing to do, but should it merit immediate death? Other examples include the killings of Nadab and Abihu for offering the wrong kind of fire, the prophet from Judah for being tricked into thinking it was God’s will to eat food, and various others.

4 False cures

Numbers 5:11–31 describes the treatment of a suspected adulteress: she’s supposed to drink water mixed with dust and ink, and if guilty her abdomen swells and she miscarries, while an innocent woman is unharmed and will be able to have children. And various other examples could be given.

A few potential responses:

1. You can think that these cures used to work by God’s divine powers but don’t any more. I grant that this is possible. But isn’t it way more likely that the Israelites got some stuff wrong about biology—very much like other primitive folklore—than that God did a great abundance of miracles to vindicate random advice that resembles standard folklore?

2. You can think that these aren’t inerrant. Inerrancy is supposed to be interpreted in a way that’s genre relative. The genre is giving ritual purity laws, not telling about biology. But still, the ritual purity norms make absolutely no sense unless the underlying medicinal claims are correct. Why should you drink water with dust and ink if this is going to be totally ineffectual?

5 Conclusion

I’m not aiming to present anything like a comprehensive list. But after reading these passages, plus the other ones I cited, I basically think that an inerrancy that has any meaning is impossible to seriously maintain. If there were just a few problematic passages, that would be one thing, but the errant biblical passages cover many different areas: authorship, history, medicine, genealogy, and more. It’s just so difficult to believe that all of these many apparent errors are somehow resolvable given that they are both common, straightforward, and apparently decisive.

1. Thinking those who die before the age of accountability are saved.

2. Thinking most people go to hell.

3. Believing that early stage fetuses are people.

Most fertilized embryos don’t reach full development. Most get “spontaneously aborted,” meaning that they die at some point prior to birth. On the Catholic view, these are already people. There’s already someone there, presumably capable of entering the afterlife.

So if the majority of people die before birth, and those who die before the age of accountability go to heaven, then most people must go to heaven. If spontaneously aborted fetuses go to heaven, then most people must go to heaven.

How might a defender of massa damnata get out of the dilemma?

Presumably they won’t reject 3. I don’t know of any people who affirm massa damnata but are pro choice. Many who affirm massa damnata are Catholic, so they won’t be able to deny that abortion is impermissible. Probably Catholics are committed to the idea that abortion is impermissible because it kills someone, though I’m not positive about this.

They could also think fetuses are people but deny that they have any afterlife. Perhaps people killed at a sufficiently early stage are not resurrected. But this seems pretty weird. If they already are people, why wouldn’t they be raised in the general resurrection? If infants get raised during this period, why not fetuses?

So then probably the way to deny this is simply to deny that those who die before the age of accountability are saved. There are more and less crazy ways of doing this. You could think that in the afterlife, fetuses are super happy but they don’t get the beatific vision. This is standardly called limbo. But then you’ll have to think that this pleasant afterlife is the fate of most people. The early Church fathers who thought most people would suffer forever were wrong. Jesus’s passage in Matthew 7 doesn’t equal eternal postmortem punishment.

The other option is to hold that infants go to a place of eternal postmortem suffering. I assume the kinds of people capable of stomaching massa damnata are also unusually capable of stomaching this dreadful conclusion. Still, if we can be sure of anything, it’s that God won’t send murdered babies to hell for all of eternity.

Here’s maybe the most promising option: you could think that if people die before the age of accountability, they undergo some other set of trials that determine their postmortem fate. Maybe in the afterlife they’re given some set of challenges, where, in order to be saved, they have to make the same kinds of choices that we have to make to be saved. If most of us fail these moral challenges, perhaps most of them do as well.

You can also think this kind of option occurs briefly in life. So maybe right before death, the mental faculties of a fetus are enhanced greatly, and they make a free choice to either choose God or not. I think this one is a bit more promising for Catholics theologically, though I haven’t investigated carefully. Perhaps most don’t choose union with God.

But just know what this option commits you to: if you have a miscarriage, on this view, the soul of the miscarried baby is plausibly in hell—and will forever remain there. Perhaps there is some conceivable being of great power who might arrange such a thing, but it surely cannot be the God of love who theists believe made the universe.

There’s another reason massa damnata pairs poorly with believing that infants and fetuses are saved. These views in combination mean that it’s massively in a person’s interest to be killed as a baby. If someone dies as a baby, they’re heaven-bound, while if they reach adulthood, odds are high that they get sent to the land down under (not Australia) where the worm dieth not and there is weeping and gnashing of teeth (want to emphasize—I am NOT talking about Australia).

At the end of the day, there are only two options for the person who thinks fetuses make it to the afterlife. They either must think that most people have a pleasant postmortem fate or that aborted fetuses have an unpleasant postmortem fate. Either case seriously cuts against the plausibility of massa damnata. Of course, massa damnata was never a plausible doctrine to begin with—and was always evil—but for its defender, one further challenge awaits them.

Reading about what these people did, I find the claim that effective charitable donations are too demanding viscerally unbelievable. Remember: the benefits of donating to effective charities are similar to the benefits of running into a war zone. In both cases, your actions stop children from dying. It isn’t obvious that a death from malaria is less painful than one by machete.

Right now, if you so choose, you can sign the Giving What We Can pledge and give 10% of your lifetime income to effective charities. The best charities save lives for about $4,000. If you make this choice right now, many fewer children will die horribly. At the very least, think about this choice seriously. Think about whether you want to be the kind of person who sacrifices a fraction of your annual income so that multiple children’s deaths are averted every year.

The heroes in Rwanda ran into a warzone in order to save children’s lives. All you have to do is send some money to effective charity. And you complain about this being too demanding? Come on. There are children dying—this is totally preventable—and yet people claim that doing anything about it would be too demanding. Compared to the sacrifice that others have had to make to save lives, this one is minuscule.

Effective charitable donations can be thought of as heroic virtue made easy. You don’t need to display any great courage or self-sacrifice. All you need to do is send some money over to GiveWell top charities, and fewer kids will die. The peacekeepers in Rwanda did not complain about their task being too demanding. How could I complain about mine being too demanding, when mine is nothing in comparison to theirs? That would be pathetic.

Now, here is the obvious objection: we don’t ordinarily think that the peacekeepers’ behavior was obligatory. It was heroic precisely because it wasn’t morally required. They went above and beyond the moral call of duty. So then you can’t use the fact that some burden is lighter than theirs as evidence that it is required.

This is indeed correct. I did not intend to be making any deductive proof from the fact that donating demands less than entering an active war-zone. This example aims to pump your intuitions. Think vividly about what these people do to prevent children from falling to the blade. Then think of what you are being asked to do, so that children do not fall to an equally deadly pathogenic invader. Think about what is at stake. Could it be anything other than an obligation?

Maybe some people don’t have this intuition. I’ve run no polls. But when I contemplate it, it seems super obvious to me. The notion that we have no obligation to make effectively improving the world a core part of our lives strikes me as morally absurd. Here, mileage may differ. But the contrary view, it seems to me, can only be consistently maintained so long as one steadfastly refuses to vividly consider what is at stake.

But even if we grant that it is not an obligation, it is still undeniably worth doing. Even non-obligatory actions may be very good. When I think vividly about the courage of the peacekeepers who stayed in Rwanda or those brave Germans who hid Jews in their basement, it seems the very least I could do is give some of my salary so that innocent people don’t have to die—or to other equivalently good causes. Anything less, even if not violating any moral obligation, would seem pathetic; it would seem I was failing in a deep sense to do what I can to make things better.

This is not the only time I read recently about heroic virtue. I also read about the life of Catholic Saint Maximilian Kolbe. Kolbe was sent to Auschwitz, where ten men at random were set to be executed in response to a single prisoner’s escape attempt. One of the men selected was a husband and a father named Franciszek Gajowniczek.

Gajowniczek and the other nine men were to be left in a bunker with no food or water and left to starve to death. When Gajowniczek cried out about his wife and children, Kolbe offered to be sent to the bunker instead of Gajowniczek. He voluntarily offered to die in place of a total stranger—to be starved in a bunker to save the life of a stranger. With the other men in the bunker, he led singing and prayer, even as their feces piled up around them, even as their parched lips yearned for water, even as they starved and starved and died. From one source on the subject.

“I could only thank him with my eyes,” Gajowniczek said. “I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was going on. The immensity of it: I, the condemned, am to live and someone else willingly and voluntarily offers his life for me — a stranger. Is this some dream?”

Take a moment to think about what Kolbe did. Imagine being so noble as to be willing to die horribly in another’s place. Imagine being willing to be tortured to death in order to save someone else. That is the heroic virtue Kolbe manifested—willingly and joyously.

Kolbe gave his life to save the life of a stranger. He did it because he recognized that a stranger’s life is a thing of such incomprehensible value that it is worth dying for—it’s worth being tortured to death in a bunker for.

You’re not being asked to be tortured to death in a bunker to save a stranger. You’re being asked to give 10% of your annual income, and you will save a stranger every year (or, if you give to other effective charities, do incomprehensible amounts of expected goods in other ways). If a stranger’s life has enough value for it to be noble to starve in a bunker to save it, you can afford to give away a bit of your salary—leaving you still richer than almost everyone who ever lived. To achieve the good that Kolbe did, you do not have to pay the horrible price he had to pay. You just have to give some of your money away. Failing to do that is, in a deep way, failing to live up to Kolbe’s sacrifice—a culpable omission whose cost is measured in dead children.

There are few better examples of this than the recent Lindsay Clancy case.

Here are the facts: Clancy, after the birth of her third child, faced severe mental health challenges. The defense is alleging that she experienced something called “postpartum psychosis.” This is psychosis that occurs in the wake of childbirth! It is not the same thing as postpartum depression, which is depression that occurs in the wake of childbirth.

Clancy claims she heard a voice that told her to kill her children and herself and was gripped by an irresistible urge to follow its advice, so that her body was taken over, puppet-like. Thus, she strangled her three children with exercise bands, slit her own wrists, and jumped out of a second-story window. Her ex husband, along with various others, testified that she was a caring mother who, in a normal state, would never, in a million years, kill her children.

So the dispute is about whether Clancy was psychotic in a way that would diminish culpability. Thinking that being wholly disconnected from reality when you commit violent acts diminishes culpability isn’t some newfangled 21st century liberal thing dreamt up by a blue-haired feminist professor in women and gender studies at Claremont who thinks math is racist. It has been recognized in some form for about a thousand years.

And it makes obvious sense. There are four standard reasons to punish people: deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and retribution. Those who are insane when they commit vile acts are not blameworthy, and they are not capable of being deterred. Nor do rehabilitation or incapacitation favor imprisoning a person over consigning them to a psychiatric institution. Ben Shapiro of all people has a pretty good video about the case.

There have been other similar high-profile cases, where people have been deemed not guilty by reason of insanity. Michael Laudor, a man suffering from schizophrenia, killed his pregnant fiancée Caroline Costello during a particularly severe bout of schizophrenia. He’s been in a mental hospital ever since. Is Laudor morally culpable for his crime in the same way as Ted Bundy? Should he have simply gone to an ordinary prison—when his debilitating mental condition is the sole cause of his killing.

So in other cases, people are capable of recognizing the basic reality that it’s neither wokeness nor “simping” that leads a person to suggest that one definitively in the grips of psychotic delusion shouldn’t be held criminally liable. Yet for some reason, as this case has become one of the major cases in modern American life, people’s ability to think rationally about criminal culpability has regressed incomprehensibly—and this tragic, horrible case has become a convenient piñata for people to virtue signal about how much they hate killing children. Wow, so stunning, so brave, thank you for this incisive addition to the conversation—that you think it’s bad when children die.

Take the recent comments from Redeemed Zoomer—a YouTuber who spends most of his time defending Protestant Christianity. He has pronounced on the case with a degree of sanctimony so gargantuan as to scare off any googologist trying to represent it numerically, yet still somehow surpassed by both his callousness and the poorness of his reasoning on the subject.

Should you also leave your girlfriend if she has sympathy for Michael Laudor? Is doing so “risking your kids’ safety?” My mother is currently reading Rosen’s “The Best Minds” about Laudor’s case, and feels sympathy for Laudor (after all, being schizophrenic and killing the love of your life in a state of severe delusion isn’t exactly a pleasant fate.) Does this mean that my mother is a risk to children?

It’s just so ludicrous! The people who feel sympathy for Clancy do not think that killing kids is a good thing. They do not feel sympathy for people who kill their kids. Maybe some morons on TikTok do, but the overwhelming majority of people who are sympathetic to Clancy do not. Rather, they feel sympathy for people who are psychotic, and commit terrible acts involuntarily without realizing what they’re doing is wrong—a bit like how you might have a dream where you do something terrible. Imagine waking up from such a dream and then learning that you really had committed the acts you dreamt of.

Now, one can debate whether Clancy really was psychotic. I’d think it’s plausible she was for basically the reasons lays out. But at the very least, it’s not overwhelmingly obvious that she wasn’t. Thus, if someone disagrees with Zoomer about whether to feel sympathy for Clancy, the reasonable thing to think isn’t that they love to murder. It’s that she, unlike Zoomer, actually knows a thing or two about the case.

Zoomer continues:

There’s no law that says you have to opine on topics that you literally don’t know the first thing about. The defense is not that her actions are okay because she had postpartum depression. It’s that she had postpartum psychosis! I realize this may be confusing because both begin with the word “postpartum” but they are different things. Nobody seriously—beyond, I’m told, some insane people on TikTok—believes that being depressed means you’re morally permitted to kill your kids. Being psychotic is a different thing entirely. And if you’re so ill-informed that you just saw the word “postpartum,” pattern-matched it to the postpartum condition you’re used to hearing about, and stopped reading, then you shouldn’t suggest publicly that the issue is so blindingly morally obvious that you should exile anyone who disagrees with you about it from your social circle.

I feel like I am explaining things to a five-year-old. The points I’m making are extremely basic. Yet for some reason, much of the esteemed American commentariat has been unable to grasp them. Honestly, this makes me a lot warier about trusting Mr. Zoomer on any subject. If he can’t get the facts right or reason at a basic level on a subject I know about, why would I think he’s able to correctly ascertain what the Church fathers thought?

Zoomer is not the only person commenting on the case. Seemingly in an effort to outdo Zoomer in poorness of reasoning, Matt Walsh has also weighed in:

Again, he doesn’t appear to know the most basic facts of the case. First of all, she was not lacking in “sentience” when she committed the murders. She had conscious experience, but was psychotic, according to the defense. So talk of regaining “sentience” illustrates basic unfamiliarity with either the case, the meanings of words, or both. Second, Clancy claims she was still psychotic at the time she attempted suicide. So her actions there are also attributable to psychosis if the first ones are.

As for the “half assed suicide attempt,” she slit her wrists and jumped out of a second-story window. This left her paralyzed from the waist down. Furthermore, Walsh is Catholic, so his position, on pain of disagreeing with Catholic dogma, cannot be that any decent person would have committed suicide in her position. Catholics are dogmatically committed to the absolute wrongness of suicide.

He continues:

Again, she was allegedly psychotic when she attempted suicide. So this isn’t some unrelated action that occurred “after” she’d regained sanity. Nor is it true that whenever people kill those they love in a state of psychosis, they want the state to execute them. Laudor didn’t. Most people don’t. If you did something evil in a state of delusion for which you’re not morally culpable on account of insanity, it’s not particularly mysterious why you wouldn’t want the state to kill you! If someone murdered their child while sleepwalking, would it be dispositive evidence that they’re a cold-blooded killer if they didn’t want the state to execute them?

I realize I’m reading a lot of Matt Walsh Tweets, but I think it’s worth commenting on because one of the leading political commentators in America just can’t stop spouting totally moronic garbage evincing total unfamiliarity with anything. Clancy’s defenders are not saying that Clancy is innocent because she has a very sad sob story or was depressed. They are saying she was psychotic and that wrong actions taken in a state of total delusion eliminate moral culpability.

Does Walsh simply deny that a person can be not guilty by reason of insanity? Does he think this feature of American law, present since the 1830s, should be eliminated? There is a big difference between killing people voluntarily, knowing you’re doing something evil, and killing people when in a state of profound psychosis, where you are hearing voices and unable to resist what they suggest.

Regrettably, Walsh doesn’t stop there.

Walsh conspicuously omits the fact that she slit her wrists and was left paralyzed from the waist down. Seems like a pretty serious suicide attempt to me! It’s not that mysterious that a psychotic woman would be less than fully equipped to kill herself. Now, I realize Walsh has only minimal concern for the truth, but how the hell did he type the sentence “This is actually one of the most methodically planned murders we’ve seen in recent history,” without any embarrassment? One of the most? So Clancy’s decision to strangle her kids, slit her wrists, and jump out the window is supposed to be more methodically planned than nearly all deliberate, premeditated killings? There are about 15,000 murders annually—surely this isn’t one of the most premeditated of them all?

Andrew Kolvet decides to join the chorus of voices being obviously unreasonable about the case:

Was America in the 1830s, when Richard Lawrence was declared not guilty by way of insanity, a “society that’s looking for excuses not to punish criminals?” Has roughly every legal system in the developed world for centuries been this way? Again, this isn’t some recent woke development, but a very ancient practice.

Now, what about the claim that “most murderers are insane definitionally?” This isn’t true given the actual definition of the term. If a person has sexual fantasies that lead them to kidnap, torture, and kill an innocent stranger, they’re depraved and grotesque, but they’re not insane. They know what they’re doing and they know that it’s wrong.

Contrast that with Michael Laudor, say. When he murdered his fiancée, he thought that she was a wind-up doll trying to murder him. He then turned himself in to the police, saying, according to Rosen’s book “so I might have killed her or her windup doll, I’m not sure, can we check on her?”

Even if you want to say that both Ted Bundy and Laudor are insane in some sense, there is obviously a big difference between voluntarily, culpably, knowingly, killing someone in cold blood and what Laudor did. The kind of insanity relevant to a legal defense isn’t any kind that might lead you to call the killer crazy. There is a perfectly reasonable sense in which you might say that Ted Bundy was crazy. But it’s not the kind relevant to legal guilt. He knew what he was doing, he wasn’t psychotic, and he knew why what he was doing was wrong.

Again, there can be a real debate about whether Clancy suffered from postpartum psychosis or whether the kind of psychosis she suffered from is exculpatory. But what’s enraging is that this tragic and horrible case has become a convenient political football—leading mainstream political commentators to butcher the barest facts of the case, all in an attempt to score brownie points with the brave, heroic, and unpopular position that it’s immoral to kill children.

Now, to be clear, this is not because I think the SWP is bad. I think it’s an amazingly good charity. It is one of the best charities in the world. But I no longer believe it’s clearly head-and-shoulders above the rest. For a while, my guess was that most of my expected impact came from directing money to the Shrimp Welfare Project. I no longer think that.

My aim in this post is not to get you to stop donating to SWP. It’s instead to argue that you should think that other effective charities are comparably good too, so if you’re trying to get others to give to effective charities, don’t just aim to get them to donate to shrimp. SWP is amazingly good, but there are other similarly good charities.

Here is the first reason I became less convinced SWP beat other charities: it isn’t clear that it’s much more effective than other animal charities. It prevents about 14,000 painful shrimp deaths per dollar. Now, there’s a good amount of uncertainty about how much it reduces their pain, but let’s say conservatively it reduces the pain of death by half. So each dollar is about as good as preventing 7,000 shrimp from painfully dying.

But other animal charities might be similarly effective. Charities helping insects, for example, might affect many thousands per dollar. Even a small impact on the trillions of insects being farmed is enormously impactful in expectation.

In the helping arthropods space, it isn’t clear SWP is much better than its competitors. It looks like one of a number of good options, not qualitatively set apart over its competitors.

Then, compare it to other animal charities. My best guess is that the most effective charities helping chickens spare multiple from a cruel fate per dollar. I’d guess ICAW is the best, and maybe helps ten per dollar. Is 10 years in a cage per dollar better than eliminating the pain equivalent to 7,000 shrimp deaths?

It isn’t clear. That comes out to about two shrimp deaths averted per day of chickens spared from a life in a cage. Shrimp are less conscious in expectation than chickens by, say, a factor of 5. So then it comes out to about two days in a cage per sentience-adjusted death averted. Is the pain of one death worse than two days in a cage? Probably, though not obviously. My guess is that the SWP has more positive second-order effects on lowering the odds of a future where we completely neglect invertebrates, but that isn’t obvious.

So overall, I’d still probably bet that SWP beats the best chicken charities. But it no longer looks like it’s in some league of its own in effectiveness. Both are very effective. Similarly, it isn’t clear it beats GiveWell charities by much—these raise the human population and lower insect populations. Tomasik estimated that each dollar given to the Against Malaria Foundation prevents about 14,000 years of insect life. If insects live two weeks on average, then this is about 365,000 insect deaths averted per dollar. This lowers insect suffering by a lot, but this is a lot messier, and the second order effects are less positive in expectation.

So I think SWP>GiveWell, but it’s not clear the first order effects are substantially greater. And probably giving directly to organizations that grow the EA community—Giving What We Can, Effektiv Spenden, the EA infrastructure fund—has similar first-order effects on wild animals and might have more positive second-order effects.

My old view was basically “SWP is so good that it’s crazy more people aren’t giving there, and it’s much better to give there than to other EA animal charities.” My new view is, “SWP is amazingly good, but so are other EA animal charities, and if one has more funding, funders might prioritize others—thus, we should prioritize spending more on animal welfare rather than aiming to specifically funnel it at SWP.” That realization was the first part of no longer concluding SWP was obviously the best.

The second part was internalizing Longtermism to a greater degree. There are a lot of shrimp. There are even more future people. Bostrom’s best guess was that there could be 10^58 people in the far future. There are reasons to think that estimate was conservative. Even a tiny chance of affecting so many people is very impactful in expectation.

Even going by conservative estimates of impact, dollars donated to Longtermist organizations are ridiculously impactful in expectation. If averting an existential catastrophe “only” adds 10^40 future people in expectation, and ten billion dollars would reduce existential risks by .01%, then each dollar adds 10^26 expected future people. So even by ludicrously conservative estimates, Longtermist donations swamp the first-order effects of donations to SWP. And see here for my defense of Longtermism.

Now, my best guess is that the animal welfare movement—especially when it’s focused on the welfare of neglected animals—has positive expected effects on the far future. I can easily imagine a scenario where we neglect the welfare of future animals, and so they suffer in very large numbers. Organizations promoting animal welfare lower the odds of such a scenario. But still, my best guess is that from a Longtermist perspective, probably SWP is not the best place to donate—but still very good.

In short, I stopped believing that SWP was the best charity because it seemed both that:

1. There were other animal charities that were similarly good.

2. Longtermist charities might be even better.

My assessment of how good SWP is hasn’t really changed. It’s my assessment of other organizations that have changed. I now think they were better than I did at the time. The best charities are amazingly effective!

Tens of billions of animals languish in dark, filthy, miserable, squalid domiciles—covered in feces, lungs burning from the ammonia in the air. Countless future generations that could exist may be wiped out entirely by mistakes made in the present era. Humans acting today have enormous opportunities to make the world a better place with our money and especially our careers. Failing to take these opportunities because we’d rather do other things—while mutilated chickens cry out from the confines of a cage, where babies are snatched from mothers—is a morally culpable kind of malfeasance.

The anthropic argument for theism starts by arguing for the self-indication assumption. This is the view that your existence favors theories on which there are more people. For example, if a coin is flipped that creates one person if heads and ten people if tails, and you are created as a result of the coinflip, SIA says you ought to think at 10:1 odds that the coin came up tails. If ten times more people exist, it’s ten times likelier that you would exist.

From the SIA, it follows that you should think the number of people that exists is some very large infinity. If your existence is 10x likelier if there are 10 times more people and 100 times likelier if there are 100x more people, then your existence is infinitely likelier if there are infinitely more people. The same logic applies to larger infinities too—so from your existence, you should be certain that the number of people is some very large infinity. It must be equal in number to the total number of possible people.

Then, once you think this, theism gets a massive boost in probability. If there is a God, then it’s very likely that some ridiculously large number of people would be created. God has no limit to how much he can create. Creating people is good. So if theism is true, then it’s pretty likely that God would make a ridiculously large multiverse.

In contrast, given that the number of possible people is (conservatively) more than the number of numbers, and a number much too large for an atheistic multiverse to have any non-trivial probability of producing it, given atheism, it is ridiculously unlikely that the number of people that would exist would be the very most there could be.

So three stages:

1. SIA is true.

2. If SIA is true, then the number of people that exists is the very most it could be.

3. The number of people existing being the very most people it could be is vastly likelier given theism than atheism.

A fact is evidence for a hypothesis if it’s a lot likelier given the hypothesis than its negation. Thus, your existence is strong evidence for theism. Tettu has seven objections. Let’s see if they hold up.

1 “SIA and the Epistemic Fragility of the Inference to Abundance”

This section has a lot of different somewhat disjoint thoughts.

Let us begin by granting SIA, although SIA itself is controversial.

It’s controversial for bad reasons.

Applying SIA across cosmological or metaphysical theories presupposes some sufficiently well-defined hypothesis space, probability distribution, reference class, and account of the physical or metaphysical constraints governing observer production.

It doesn’t require any of these. SIA is notable for, unlike SSA, not needing a reference class (this is an advantage of the theory, widely recognized). What matters, given SIA, is the number of candidates for being your present self. If you’re confused what that means, read the Carlsmith piece’s discussion of the minimal reference class.

No, you don’t need a “well-defined hypothesis space” and “probability distribution.” In no other context do we think you need this to update in the face of ridiculously strong evidence. Nobody thinks that before declaring that there’s dark matter based on powerful evidence from physics, we need some well-defined and exhaustive probability space. Nor would it be an adequate defense, after getting 27 consecutive royal flushes in poker, that the person accusing you of cheating doesn’t have a “well-defined hypothesis space.”

The argument just depends on considering two hypotheses: theism and atheism. Theism makes it likelier that there’d be the most people there could than atheism. So that fact obtaining is evidence for theism.

Now, maybe the idea is supposed to be that you only update in favor of hypotheses where there are more people if there is some precise and well-defined hypothesis space. But there’s no reason to think that. SIA is a theory about how a theory becomes more probable in light of your existence.

There’s no reason that this norm would stop applying when you don’t have super precise prior probabilities. You don’t need some precise and determinate prior in evolution to be pretty sure it happened on the basis of overwhelming evidence. In this case, the evidential update, given SIA, in favor of an infinite universe is infinitely massive! In addition, all the arguments in favor of SIA in general can also be given in favor of SIA for hypotheses where you don’t need a determinate prior.1

I also have no idea why one is supposed to need to know the “account of the physical or metaphysical constraints governing observer production.” I mean, I’m pretty sure I know the standard way people like us are produced: childbirth. If some fact is expected given one hypothesis, and the other hypothesis has to hold out hope for some ad hoc unknown way of explaining the data, it’s evidence for the first hypothesis. Again, if you didn’t grant this, then any theory could explain any evidence at no cost by declaring there to be some unknown explanation.

SIA does not itself settle these background questions. If one theory appears to allow 10^1000 observers and another only 10^50, it would be epistemically reckless simply to declare the former overwhelmingly better supported before evaluating our independent reasons for believing the laws and metaphysics that generate those populations. Otherwise SIA begins to look suspiciously like a machine for awarding probability to whichever theory writes the largest number next to “observers.”

Or, more precisely: if one theory says there are N times more observers than the other, and its prior is less than N times less than the other, then the first is more likely. So if one theory predicts 10^1000 observers and the other 10^50, the first is overwhelmingly confirmed by your existence. Of course, this result is counterintuitive, but it’s backed by about a billion decisive arguments. And on its face, it’s not that weird that if one theory predicts there being 10^950 times more people than another, it makes it 10^950 times likelier that you’d exist.

2. “SIA Points First Toward Maximal Observer Abundance”

Tettu’s next point is that SIA favors theories on which there are a lot of people, not where there are a lot of people with great lives. That’s true. The inference is based on the fact that theism makes it much likelier than atheism that there’d be the right number of people.

Tettu’s argument is that theism predicts fewer people than the biggest atheistic multiverses. After all, you get more people if you create people in both good, medium, and bad states than just in good states. Thus, e.g. modal realism is supposed to be majorly favored by your existence over theism.

I don’t agree with this.

I mean, first of all, I don’t agree with the claim about the metaphysics of people. I think people are essentially souls. God can make every possible soul and then give them all great lives.

Second, theism can get just as many people as modal realism: imagine that God makes the giant modal multiverse and then after one millisecond transfers every single person to the world that’s best for them. Because every person in the modal multiverse still exists, there are just as many people.

Third, comparing infinities of the same cardinality (or both of sizes exceeding any cardinality) is very tricky. God has no limits on how much creating He can do. He can first make absolutely infinity people, then do it again, then do it again, then do it again. It’s not obvious how many people you get this way—nor is it obvious how it compares to modal realism. Both exceed any cardinality and there’s no obvious way to compare them.

Fourth, at least on standard atheistic views, there’s no limit to the number of possible people. After creating the modal realist multiverse, you can always clone it once, then again, then another time. Thus, modal realism can’t secure that every possible person gets created—it just secures that every distinct possible world gets created, perhaps once, perhaps infinite times. So there’s no meaningful sense in which modal realism creates a strictly larger set of people than theism. God can create absolute infinity worlds and clone them any number of times.

Fifth, worst case scenario, this is only a modest update in favor of modal realism. Assume there are equal good, bad, and neutral worlds with observers like us. Then the update in favor of modal realism over theism will be by a factor of 3. That’s not much. And this is more than offset by the fact that basically all the modally realist worlds with you have random counter-inductive nonsense that is incompatible with your present experience.

Sixth, if this is right, modal realism might be likelier than theism. But still theism will get a relative boost in probability from the evidence. One argument rarely settles the debate: it is successful if it boosts the likelihood of the hypothesis that it favors.

3 “Perfect Being Does Not by Itself Predict Observer Abundance”

Perfect being theism doesn’t, by itself, predict the number of people existing being the most that there could be. It needs an extra assumption that:

1. Creating a happy person is good.

2. If 1, God would create a bunch of happy people.

But note: for the argument to give a giant boost to theism, these assumptions just have to be plausible. They don’t have to be certain.

These assumptions are also very likely to be true. I’ve defended the first here. The second is about as plausible as the notion that a maximally evil being would create a bunch of horribly badly off beings. If God is perfect, and can bring about infinite good lives at no cost, and doing so is good, He very likely would.

In addition, none of these affect the degree of the update. If God wouldn’t create, then theism was already false, given that we exist. The claim made by the anthropic argument is that SIA raises the likelihood of theism. “God wouldn’t create” is a fully general objection to theism, which if correct would render theism false. It thus doesn’t affect how much likelier you should think theism is in light of SIA.

4 “The Welfare Problem and the Afterlife Response”

The next objection is that lives as they actually exist don’t look like how you’d expect them to on theism. There are a lot of bad lives. Now, the theist shouldn’t grant that there are actually bad lives—if theism is true, then God is likely to give us an infinite afterlife rather than capriciously snuff us out after a few decades. But still, it’s surprising given theism that some lives are bad during our time on Earth.

Indeed! This is called the problem of evil (see here for my preferred response). It’s not specific to the anthropic argument. Maybe some things about our properties favor atheism and others favor theism (say, the fact that there’s psychophysical harmony, fine-tuning, psychonomic harmony, and more). If we don’t want to make every argument a free-for-all where every other argument slips in, we must hold other evidentially relevant data points in the background. In this case, we hold facts about what our lives are like in the background and just update on SIA raising our assessment of the number of people.

So you can’t rebut every theistic argument by repeating the problem of evil over and over again. This is also, by the way, why it’s silly to rebut the problem of evil by suggesting that evil requires consciousness and consciousness is evidence for theism. When considering evidence, you should consider the pieces one by one, rather than using every contrary argument as an excuse to relitigate your whole case.

5 “The Problem of Predictive Specificity”

The next objection is that if you think that theism only requires that God make a good life overall, He can do that no matter what life people have during their time on Earth. Thus, theism makes no predictions. Fair enough, but I don’t think this is the only thing that theism predicts. It predicts God make a best life if there is one, and if not, a very good one.

6 “The Problem of Evil as Comparative Evidence”

The next objection is the problem of evil. See my comments before. You don’t just get to repeat every argument you have for atheism as an objection to any argument that mentions any feature of human life. Rather, you only get to mention things relevant to that specific feature.

7. “A Neutral Abundance Mechanism Avoids These Difficulties”

The next argument is that if you have some mechanism for generating a bunch of observers, it will predict the right number of people while also explaining evil. A few notes:

1. Tettu never says what this theory is supposed to be! I’ve critiqued the existing proposals here. So far, this is just a promissory note.

2. As an objection to the claim that SIA raises the odds of theism, this objection is impotent. Even if some atheistic hypotheses can explain the relevant data, the probability of one of those being true is super low given atheism. If there is no God, it is very unlikely that you’ll get the right number of people. If all you knew was that there was no God, you’d think it was super unlikely that absolute infinity people existed. And all the leading proposals on the market for getting the right number of people accidentally explode induction, because they don’t secure that most observers are in inductive worlds.

3. Now, maybe Tettu grants that SIA gives evidence for theism, but he just thinks theism is nevertheless improbable even after SIA. Fair enough! Of course, repeatedly taking large independent probabilistic hits each time new evidence is rolled out isn’t a sustainable long-term strategy—but it’s fine to do once or twice. The reason I don’t buy this is that all the proposals for getting the right number of people strike me as ludicrously improbable and don’t adequately explain any of the other evidence in favor of theism.

8 Too many assumptions?

Tettu then says that the argument depends on too many assumptions. You need an adequate theodicy, the idea that creating (infinitely) good lives is good, the idea that God would create a bunch of lives, and the idea that there’d be an infinite afterlife.

All these assumptions, other than that there’s a successful theodicy, strike me as very plausible. I’m more than 90% sure that they’re all true. And a theodicy is needed by any theist. It’s independent of the anthropic argument. If the atheist gets to import the problem of evil here, then I get to import other theistic argument and note that the atheist also needs an explanation of religious experience, psychophysical harmony, fine-tuning, us not being in a skeptical scenario, consciousness, etc.

9 Conclusion

Tettu has seven objections. The first one consists of errors about what you need to apply SIA combined with errors about how SIA’s update works. The second depends on almost surely false claims which, even if correct, only secure that there’s a weak update in favor of one highly improbable atheistic theory over theism. The next notes that theism depends on the assumption that God would create, but that is overwhelmingly plausible and something theists already had to think, so it doesn’t affect the degree of evidential force of the argument.

The next three arguments are just repeating the problem of evil in different garbs. The last one is noting that if there is an explanation of absolute infinity people existing—something Tettu never provides—then it could explain evil better than theism. So we have a fourth repeat of the problem of evil, combined with praise for a totally unspecified hypothesis. Even if this is right, it would, once again, not be an objection to the claim that SIA raises the likelihood of theism.

Thus, Tettu’s objections suffer from twin problems: they are false and they do not have bearing on the question of whether SIA raises the likelihood of theism. Singing the praises of a non-existing hypothesis and repeating other atheistic arguments does not rebut the anthropic argument.

Nonetheless, I think reducing the number of abortions is valuable. Government action that reduced the number of abortions would be a good thing, all else equal. Even if abortion isn’t murder, we should prefer there be fewer abortions.

Why is this?

The first big reason is that there’s some chance you’re wrong. You’ve been wrong before! There are lots of brilliant pro-life philosophers. When you find yourself in disagreement with smart people, you shouldn’t be astronomically certain that you are right and they’re wrong. Thus, you should think the odds aren’t terrible that early abortions kill someone.

Let’s say you think that there’s a 5% chance abortions are murder. There are about a million abortions per year in the U.S.. So this would mean that abortions kill, in expectation, about 50,000 people in the U.S. per year. That’s more than gun violence! And 5% seems pretty conservative! This also gives you a pretty strong reason to refrain from having sex unless you are extremely confident that no pregnancy will result or are willing to raise the baby (for otherwise you are risking killing someone for the sake of sex, which is immoral, unless the risk is very low—you’re morally permitted to drive to have sex with someone, even though there’s some chance you’ll run someone over).

And lest you say that this is a Pascal’s wager or Pascal’s mugging, taking seriously a 5% risk that millions of people are being killed each year is obviously not a Pascal’s wager. If there were a 5% chance of a global pandemic that would kill a million Americans annually, that would be a pretty big deal. You don’t need to be a fanatic about risk to think that.

A second reason: people coming into existence is a good thing. I’ve made this case in more detail here. People tend to live many decades of mostly happy life and have positive impacts on the world. Those who get aborted never come into existence. This is bad.

Even if abortion isn’t murder—even if it’s just like failing to bring someone into existence—it’s good to bring people into existence. It leads to many years of happy life. So all else equal, we should regard abortions as in some way lamentable.

Third, even given standard pro-choice assumptions, plausibly a lot of abortions still kill someone. If a conscious being’s life is ended, then someone has been killed. A mind has been permanently wiped from existence. You can’t be a subject of experience without being someone.

So at what point does the fetus have a mind?

One answer goes: around 20 weeks, when the fetus has a cortex. Another answer is around 12 weeks. Probably about 10% of abortions happen after 12 weeks. So if we assume that there’s a 20% chance that a fetus is conscious at 12 weeks, then about 2% of abortions kill someone. The real number is even higher because of the percent of fetuses terminated after twenty weeks.

Now, maybe you think that the fetus’s diminished mental capacities at the time it’s killed diminish the wrongness of killing it. Thus, early stage abortions, even if the fetus is conscious, aren’t that bad. I have two objections to this:

1. This position is on somewhat dubious ground. If you kill someone while they’re sleeping, this isn’t less bad due to their diminished present mental capacities. If you kill a toddler, this isn’t less bad because of toddlers’ diminished mental simplicity.

2. At the very least, you shouldn’t be overwhelmingly certain of this very controversial position. So still, in expectation, abortions are collectively as bad as killing lots of people.

And bodily autonomy arguments have no force here. A bodily autonomy argument, if successful, establishes that people should have the right to an abortion. It doesn’t say anything about whether abortions are bad.

There’s also one slight more meta point in favor of this: lots of very smart people think that abortion is the central moral issue—that babies are routinely murdered in a way no less culpable than if you shot a two-year-old. These people are reasonable and their arguments aren’t, on their face, completely insane. It’s not as if these people are arguing that the sky is red or that absolute deontology is true.

In general, if reasonable people think that some particular thing is the biggest deal in the world, we should try to take it seriously. I would like if even those who don’t agree with me about factory farming or wild animal suffering took steps to minimize it, if possible. We should all recognize that we’re morally fallible and take steps to minimize the potential catastrophic consequences if it turns out that we’re in serious moral error. If you may be committing a crime like few others in human history, you should tread extremely carefully, even if you’re pretty sure you’re not.

What policies practically would this support? One is research into reducing rates of spontaneous abortion. The majority of fertilized eggs don’t reach full pregnancy. If the pro-life position is true, then this is the worst human scourge in the world. It means that most people will die before birth. It would be about as bad as if some disease caused most babies to die shortly after they were born. Thus, research into lowering rates of spontaneous abortion is hugely important given any amount of uncertainty on the question.

Another policy along these lines is cash transfers to parents. By subsidizing having children, people are likelier to have children and less likely to abort. This also will lead to more total people being born (you get more of what you subsidize), which is a good thing.

Expanding contraception access may have similar upsides but is riskier. On a lot of pro-life views, contraception is immoral. It also likely lowers the population, so two of the main considerations I cited in favor of lowering abortion rates are at least somewhat dubious, and one backfires. Of course, there may be other reasons to ensure ample access to contraception.

Having highly motivated EAs is even more important now. Transformative AI is around the corner and we need brilliant people tackling the range of problems it will raise. I want to emphasize this: each new person getting involved in the EA movement saves many lives in expectation, even given very conservative assumptions about how much good the movement will do. If you contribute to growing the movement, there will be children who will not die because of you.

For this reason, I encourage you to host an EA meeting at your college. It is a very easy way to meet amazing people. Some of the best people I met in college were people I met through my university’s EA group. It is also pretty easy to host. You can read more details about how to host a meeting here. The sign up form for this meeting can be found here. All costs will be paid for by ACX and an organization sponsoring this called NEST.

If you’re going to sign up to host, fill out the form before 8/28. Don’t overthink time and location. Your meetup will also be mentioned on Scott Alexander’s blog, so you can have your efforts advertised by one of the coolest people on the internet who is helping facilitate these events. If you host one meeting, you’re free to host more, but you don’t have to. You might also be able to find someone else to host.

Hosting a meeting is pretty easy. It will give fledgling EAs an opportunity to get more exposed to the crucial ideas, leading to a much higher probability of them getting actively involved in making the world a better place. You will also meet cool people who may become your friends. If the only way to save a child from a pond was by hosting a ridiculously amazing social event where you’d meet some of the most interesting people at your university, doing so would be a no-brainer. This is as well.

The main reason that so many people are converting is all those Catholic miracles. You can peruse Ethan’s Substack for more of them, but Catholicism does seem to have some pretty impressive apparent miracles. St. Padre Pio had stigmata for decades that healed fully at his death, a number of seemingly miraculous healings, and medically inexplicable temperature readings of over 120

At Lourdes, after a girl named Bernadette had a vision as of Mary, where Mary announced “I am the immaculate conception,” there were a spate1 of seemingly medically inexplicable healings. And more abound: eucharistic miracles, Fatima, etc. I’m a lot more skeptical of Fatima, and I totally lack the relevant expertise to investigate Eucharistic miracles, but I’ll admit: I find some of the Catholic miracles spooky, especially Lourdes and Padre Pio.

So why am I not planning on converting? I’m not going to go in the weeds on all the arguments (especially because a lot of the historical stuff is dependent on higher-order evidence and above my paygrade). I’m just going to describe at a high level how I’m thinking about this.

Arguments against Catholicism

The first big reason: I find the case against Catholicism really strong. The three things that give me the most pause are hell, normative ethics, and Biblical inerrancy.

On hell, Catholics are committed to eternal conscious torment. I find that view just about as implausible as views get. I don’t think it’s remotely plausible that the best world that God could dream up is one where he consigns lots of people to the flames, where the worm dieth not, and the flames of hell cause them to suffer forever.

Now, maybe there’s a way to avoid the claim that people suffer infinitely in hell. Perhaps their suffering decreases in intensity, so that the total quantity is finite. But even aside from infinite suffering, it’s just so implausible that the ultimate state of people would be this—that God can’t think of a better way.

On normative ethics, Catholics are committed to a kind of absolutism about the wrongness of certain classes of acts. These teachings are binding though not infallible. Examples of these include masturbation, fornication, homosexuality, and direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being (this last one is probably infallible). This would require me to believe four separate things that I find very implausible:

1. Deontology, at least in the minimal sense of thinking that certain acts are ruled out even if they have good consequences.

2. The falsehood of various liberal views of sexual ethics.

3. Absolutism about the moral prohibitions.

4. Absolutism even about the prohibitions on sexual ethics.

Rejecting 2 would come at some cost but not insurmountable. Rejecting 1 would be costly as well. I just find deontology so implausible. It suffers from a number of fatal counterexamples. But 3 and 4 are where things get really bad. Risk arguments destroy absolutism about deontology. And if anything is obvious, it’s that if the only way to prevent everyone on earth from being tortured forever was for a loving gay couple to have homosexual sex, then it wouldn’t be wrong for them to do so. I cannot believe—as a purely psychological matter—that such a thing is false. It’s completely absurd. We’re reaching skeptical scenario levels of implausibility here.

Maybe there are some ways around having to affirm these things as a Catholic through some kind of interpretive acrobatics. But at the very least, I think you’ll have to pay a cost.

Now, I realize Catholics have arguments for why I shouldn’t trust my moral intuitions. Our hearts are darkened by sin, and thus we cannot see clearly. But come on, some views are just so implausible that even if you can tell a story about how we might be wrong about them, it can’t possibly be rational to affirm them. If you tell me that the law of non-contradiction is false, even if you tell some debunking story, I’m just way more confident in the law of non-contradiction than your debunking story. And I find it way more obvious that using contraception to prevent infinite torture would be permissible than I find even the law of non-contradiction. It just can’t possibly be wrong.

Then, the last consideration: Catholics are committed to some kind of Biblical inerrancy. Now, the exact details are debatable. Dei Verbum says, in a passage generally agreed to be without error:

In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by Him (2) they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, (3) they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted. (4)

Therefore, since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings (5) for the sake of salvation. Therefore “all Scripture is divinely inspired and has its use for teaching the truth and refuting error, for reformation of manners and discipline in right living, so that the man who belongs to God may be efficient and equipped for good work of every kind” (2 Tim. 3:16-17, Greek text).

I think the Bible is run through with errors about morality, history, genealogy, authorship, and more. I don’t think it’s plausible that the Holy Spirit would assert a lie about the author of Daniel, for example, or a barbaric moral claim. While one or two apparent errors would perhaps be explicable, they are too numerous and serious for Catholicism to remain plausible.

These are the three considerations that move me the most. But then there are some other things. For example, I’m pretty sure that Jesus didn’t declare Peter the Pope. It would be weird if this was among the most important things he ever did, but it’s only mentioned in one highly ambiguous passage in Matthew. Then, the fact that Peter is the Pope doesn’t really come up at any other point in the Gospels, even during major theological disputes. Also, my sense having not looked too carefully at the historical evidence is that there isn’t good evidence for early Popes, and this is granted even by Catholic historians like Eamon Duffy. My sense is that this is also generally agreed upon by secular historians without a dog in the fight.

Similarly, my sense having not looked into it too carefully is that the Church has flip-flopped on some important issues, like whether there’s salvation outside the Church. Unam Sanctam says, “Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” Admittedly, there’s a complicated debate to be had here, and I could be wrong, but just on its face, it really looks like they flipped. I need to do more reading about this, though.

Similarly, the Marian dogmas seem like they were made up later. We don’t have early evidence for them. The first suggestion that Mary was perpetually a virgin comes in a second century apocryphal text called the protoevangelium of James, where the author was lying about being James. And if Mary was forever a virgin, it’s weird that the Bible refers to Jesus’s brothers without giving any hint that they weren’t biological brothers. The word for brother is adelphoi, and it can occasionally mean broader relatives, and it can refer to step-brothers.

But it would be pretty weird if the New Testament kept talking about Jesus’s step-brothers, using the standard word for brother, without ever clarifying. The word syngenes was a perfectly good word for relatives. Matthew 1:25 says Joseph “but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son,” which implies that they had marital relations afterwards. And various other passages point in a similar direction. The bodily assumption of Mary that Catholics are dogmatically committed to came even later!

I don’t mean to suggest that this is decisive on its own. But it sure seems like a lot of Catholic doctrines are made up later, without outside historical evidence. Combine this with doubts about divine simplicity, general concerns about Christianity, and other weird Catholic doctrine like transubstantiation and Baptismal regeneration, and I find it really hard to believe in Catholicism. The case against strikes me as very strong.

Worse, the case against is cumulative. There are many different kinds of considerations. If the only arguments against were normative, then I might suspect that my moral intuitions are flawed. But when they’re also Biblical, theological, and historical, and when they depend on many different kinds of intuitions, it just seems hard to believe.

Miracles?

In contrast, there is only one argument for Catholicism that moves me at all: the argument from miracles. Now, the miracles are somewhat independent; there are many different types of Catholic miracles. But if it’s possible for clear investigation to turn up one seemingly inexplicable miracle, probably it can turn up a bunch of seemingly inexplicable miracles. If it turns out that there’s a naturalistic explanation of all the Lourdes healings, probably there is one for the Eucharistic miracles too. Some of these miracles strike me as impressive, but if I’m wrong about the impressiveness of the first, probably I’m wrong about the impressiveness of the rest too!

I might just be kind of a dupe when it comes to miracles—underestimating the power of human credulity. Some things that I’m pretty sure aren’t naturally inexplicable but that I was surprised to learn:

1. A bunch of people have thought witches stole their penis. How could you possibly be mistaken about that sort of thing?

2. We have a bunch of testimonies of an obvious con-artist named Sathya Sai Baba doing naturally inexplicable things in broad daylight. People attest that he teleported, read minds, made food appear by magic, bilocated, and had a mysterious odor that could be smelled at a great distance, even by skeptics, just like Padre Pio did. And those aren’t even the only impressive miracles attributed to a Sai Baba!

3. Throughout Iran, a bunch of people said they saw Khomeini’s face in the moon.

4. A bunch of children go into deep trances where they claim to see Mary, move synchronously, don’t blink for many minutes on end, and stop reacting to pain, even in cases where it’s very clearly non-miraculous.

5. Children said that they saw groups of aliens descend from the sky. They didn’t recant (the children, not the aliens. Though I guess the aliens didn’t recant either). We similarly have groups reporting they saw fairies.

6. The Piraha claim to see spirits in broad daylight that outsiders can’t see. In one case, an outsider visiting a tribe saw a skeleton dancing.

7. There are a bunch of examples of people looking at the sun, seeing it spin, seeing it move, seeing it change colors, and witnessing it not being painful to gaze at.

8. We have reports of supernatural healings associated with a Protestant faith healer who makes false prophecies and has visions of rapture theology that led to many conversions. More detail in a footnote.2

9. We have reports of seemingly naturally-inexplicable memories of past lives. Some led people in the direction of Christianity, so it’s not plausible that they’re done by deceptive demons, even given Catholicism.

10. A giant firing squad tried to shoot the Bab, the founding figure of the Bahá'í Faith, and yet they all missed.

In light of these, there are a few different possibilities:

1. Miracles don’t really happen, we’re pretty good at fooling ourselves, and thus we falsely think a bunch of miracles happened that didn’t.

2. Miracles do happen, but God doesn’t care too much about denomination and is even willing to do miracles that lead a bunch of people to false religions. Maybe he’s not too concerned that, say, healing people at Lourdes led people to Catholicism.

3. Miracles do happen, but the only ones with vindicatory implications are Catholic.

4. Miracles do happen but God mostly gives out miracles to Christians pretty indiscriminately. So, for example, he’s happy to let Catholics have major miracles that convert people to Christianity, just like he’s happy to make apparitions of Mary mostly appear atop Coptic Churches, rather than Catholic ones.

I don’t find that the miracle record conclusively favors any of these over the other. If I can be wrong that people won’t think witches stole their penises, that they saw Khomeini’s face in the moon, that they saw a man teleport and read their minds, that they saw a spirit fly in the sky, and so on, why think I can’t be mistaken about Catholic miracles? The difference, in many cases, strikes me as a slight one of degree, not one of kind. I don’t find the miracles attributed to Padre Pio to be on their face much more impressive than the ones attributed to Sai Baba—but we have Sai Baba on video, and it’s pretty clear he’s just doing parlor tricks. Nor do I find Padre Pio’s miracles much more obviously vindicatory than, say, reincarnation miracles.

In addition, the most impressive Catholic miracles don’t seem clearly vindicatory. Lourdes healings and Padre Pio are the most impressive, but it’s not clear they distinctly vindicate Catholicism. Fatima and Eucharistic miracles are the most clearly vindicatory, but it’s very unclear that they’re miraculous (I’m pretty sure Fatima is not, and I’m too scientifically uninformed to evaluate Eucharistic miracles).

So here’s the story at a high-level: aside from miracles, I don’t find the case for Catholicism impressive at all. The miracle evidence is okay, but it’s not much better than the evidence for a bunch of miracles that sit awkwardly with Catholicism. If Catholics explain away those miracles, then theirs are liable to be explained away too. If Catholics grant those miracles are genuine, then probably Catholic miracles can be explained too. And some well-attested apparent miracles just don’t seem at all plausible, like those associated with Sai Baba.

I think I’m pretty good at philosophy. I am demonstrably terrible at investigating miracles. I’ve been wrong over and over again about what bizarre phenomena people will attest to. So when there is a conflict between very obvious philosophical judgments in the world, and contentious miracle claims that are hard to investigate, combined with some other higher-order evidence from history, I go with the philosophical judgments.

The last argument

What about the other evidence for Catholicism?

Obviously, I can’t discuss it all. I’m not equipped to comment on most of it. Much of the evidence for Catholicism runs through first arguing for the truth of Christianity, and then making sort of complicated arguments for why once one accepts Christianity, they should be Catholic. There are tricky disputes about whether the Catholics’ 73 book canon is more historically plausible than the protestant 66 book canon.

I won’t talk about most of those things. I’m just not informed enough about the history relevant to these complex internecine disputes. I don’t even buy the case for Christianity, so I’m less moved by these kinds of arguments. Instead, I’ll just discuss one main argument that I can see moving a person in favor of Catholicism and explain why it doesn’t move me.

Here’s the basic argument: it makes sense that God would set up a Church on Earth. This would be a specific visible institution in order to resolve disputes. If God cares a great deal about allowing people to have knowledge of the truth, it makes sense that he’d set up an authoritative body with the power to lead and promulgate infallibly. In other religions, there isn’t really a plausible analogue.

For Protestants, there’s no plausible analogue. There’s no clear mechanism for Protestants to resolve scriptural disputes. If one Protestant is in error, aside from just convincing them that they’re wrong—often when the Biblical evidence is radically underdetermined on important matters—there isn’t a clear way to resolve the disagreement.

What about the other groups claiming to be the one true Church? Well, most of them have like twelve members. While the Catholic Church has a reasonable claim to be Catholic (universal) the Oriental Orthodox and Assyrian Church of the East do not. Even the Eastern Orthodox churches are ethnically parochial and too fragmented to hold councils or pronounce authoritatively.

I don’t think this is a crazy argument. But it doesn’t move me much.

It’s true that a priori, it isn’t very unlikely that God would set up an institution on Earth. But we must consider the total evidence. It is reasonably surprising that God would set up an earthly institution in a somewhat oblique and unclear way, so that reams of people trying desperately to identify the Church Christ set up are led into error, even after they carefully examine the historical evidence.

It is similarly surprising that the way he’d set up the Church would be by making an ambiguous statement in only one of the Gospels. And there’d be sufficiently little clear historical evidence for the creation of the Church, that it’s at least debatable whether the institution existed in any serious way in the early days of the Church.

It is similarly surprising that this would be an institution that doesn’t clarify that it can speak infallibly until 1870! That major doctrines would go undeclared for enormous expanses of time, with the canon not being definitively declared until the 1500s, and with Marian dogmas not being definitively declared for nearly 2000 years. That it wouldn’t even be clear when it’s speaking infallibly, so that there’s dispute among esteemed Catholic theologians about which doctrines are infallible.

Again, a priori I’m not shocked that God sets up some kind of institution on Earth. But when one considers the full range of facts about the Catholic Church—the scandalous misbehavior of various popes, the lateness of its doctrines, its shaky historical provenance—it becomes much less plausible a priori that God would set up that kind of institution.

Furthermore, the mere fact that it would be good if God set up an institution of a particular sort doesn’t mean its likely that God would. There are many things that could be done that seem good. God doesn’t do most of them. On its face, it would be good to cure malaria; if Jesus didn’t come with a cure for malaria, or do any of countless other good activities, why think that he would set up the papacy with more than negligible odds?

We know that God, if he exists, gives humans lots of freedom to make major errors. He even gave those who penned books of the Bible the latitude to include lines about how glorious it is to dash Babylonian babies against the rocks. So then it is not very surprising that we’d similarly be able to make major theological errors without some definitively corrective institution.

Thus, I don’t think there’s any very strong a priori argument for the papacy. In contrast, it’s very easy to see how an institution like the papacy could have emerged. Many groups throughout history have claimed to be the one true Church. It isn’t that surprising that in one of the groups claiming to be the one true Church, they’d have a single person in a position of unique authority—with the authority to infallibly promulgate doctrine. So even if Catholicism is false, the odds of there being something like the papacy set up aren’t very low.

Conclusion

These are important questions. If Catholicism is true, then non-Catholics are in terrible danger of the fires of eternal torment. It’s worth considering the case carefully. But at the end of the day, I just find it psychologically completely impossible to believe, and I think I should only convert if I really believe that it’s true, rather than wager. At the end of the day, however, if you are a theist, or even if you just think theism is minimally credible, it is worth praying regularly to God to direct you in the direction of doing what’s good and knowing what’s true.

His reward for uncovering one of the major academic scandals of the last several years has been to face suspension and likely firing from Ghent University. The prediction markets say there’s about a 67% chance that he’ll be fired. This is outrageous and should be totally unacceptable to anyone who cares at all about free speech.

Cofnas is a controversial figure who sometimes writes offensive things on the internet. But all of those things were known at the time he was hired by Ghent. If they fire him now, it will be because he exposed a major plagiarist and fabulist. Some precedent to set—that if you expose someone for plagiarism, your career will be in serious jeopardy. Who in their right mind could favor this?

The university has been explicit that the reason they’re investigating Cofnas is because of “the recent public statements” made by Cofnas. So every other controversial statement made by Cofnas is irrelevant. It’s not why he is being suspended. The reason he is being suspended is because he uncovered Arday’s plagiarism and wrote about it in a Substack post. This is an offense so serious, apparently, that it merits suspension and likely firing.

Edit 8/22: Richard points out that this might reference other controversial statements Cofnas made recently. E.g. he made a joke about being “head of the department of eugenics and race science at Harvard.” You should also not be fired for jokes! It is also clear that given that he has made lots of controversial statements before, the backlash Ghent is facing is at least counterfactually responsible for his likely firing.

Now, even if Cofnas’s recent remarks had been immoral or outrageous, it would still be wrong to fire him. Free speech permits academics to say outrageous things on their own time. It would be very bad if universities fired academics whenever they made statements outside their job that the university doesn’t like.

Anyone who bothers to think for themselves will end up holding some beliefs that are widely regarded as offensive. For example, I think that factory farming is worse than any crime ever inflicted on humans. Should I be fired for that? Should I be permanently unhirable? Should we leave determining what utterances are beyond the pale to a group of unaccountable and largely unimpressive administrators?

Of course, doing so is likely to lead to an extremely politically biased academia. Insofar as left-wing academics decide which items of political speech are beyond the pale, one is far likelier to be punished for offensive right-wing speech than offensive left-wing speech. This is why defenses of free speech must be content neutral. If we take free speech at all seriously, we must defend even speech that we don’t like. If we don’t want academics to live in constant fear of being sacked for unpopular speech, we need to be extremely permissive in the speech we allow. This is why I don’t think academics should be fired for being holocaust deniers, defending Hamas’s activities on October 7th, defending factory farming, supporting violent communist revolution, or having almost any other view, however offensive.

But it’s all the more outrageous because Cofnas’s recent speech, for which he’s come under fire, hasn’t even been outrageous. His article exposing Arday’s fabrication and plagiarism is unusually understated for him. What he wrote is both objectively correct and important. Should we fire all people who expose plagiarism?

What, in the view of Ghent University, should Cofnas have done? Cambridge had already been contacted about Arday’s plagiarism. They did nothing. Should he have remained silent? Is the general rule that one should shut up about plagiarism and fabulism? Insofar as we take academic misconduct remotely seriously, we cannot persecute the people who expose it. It’s embarrassing that this even needs to be said.

Had Arday not died, would Cofnas still have been investigated and fired? Surely the standard cannot be that whether or not you are fired for speech depends on its downstream causal effects—even ones that you didn’t predict. Your culpability depends on what was known to you at the time you acted, not later effects of your actions. And it is very very dangerous, if our aim is to stop suicide, to posthumously exalt those who engaged in serious misconduct, but only if they die.

This case will set an alarming precedent. If you find out that another academic plagiarized or made things up, the best approach is to keep quiet about it. If you speak up, you might be fired. Who can trust the reliability of academic publications in such an environment? In this way, we are all Cofnas. If Cofnas is fired, it will do serious violence to the already frayed liberal norms that academia purports to champion.

This is not the only effort to restrict free speech in light of Arday’s tragic death. A major petition has sprung up in support of a law restricting the number of news articles that can be written in any specific period of time about one person. This would be a terrible law. It would mean that people were unfree to discuss major scandals without legal jeopardy so long as they’d already been majorly covered.

And, of course, when the pendulum swings, those who worked to erode freedom of speech will be the victims of their own actions. Those who live by the sword will die by it when the next witch hunt comes along. Erosion of liberal norms is a flamethrower: you try to direct it at your enemies, and it ends up getting turned back on you. Just ask the people fired from elite institutions for their statements about Israel. Or the people thrown into detention centers.

It’s been an elementary liberal principle recognized for centuries that being serious about free speech means defending speech one hates. The old-school leftists recognized this. Few defended free speech more staunchly than Noam Chomsky. He recognized, correctly, that insofar as the general policy is to shut down radicals, that is good news for conformists and bad news for anyone with any radical view. If today’s universities have sunk so low that those who say true and important things—exposing lies, plagiarism, and fraud—get fired for their speech, then lady liberty lies bleeding indeed.

You cannot claim to represent free speech in the abstract and then favor every particular case where a person who you disagree with is punished for his free speech. Free speech means little if it doesn’t permit Cofnas’s offensive remarks, and it means nothing if it doesn’t permit Cofnas’s unoffensive and true ones. Ghent University has disgraced itself completely.

Andrew Wilson is a guy who does “bloodsports” internet debates. He’s debated Destiny, Aella, reams of OnlyFans models, and others. Candace Owens is a crazed conspiracy theorist who sometimes cites her dreams as evidence that Charlie Kirk was betrayed, thinks Kirk was killed as part of a Satanic ritual, and believes the CIA stole Sumerian technology and hooked it up to computers to see the future. She claimed that the odds Robinson killed Kirk were 0%, meaning that it’s likelier that you’d throw a dart randomly across the observable universe and hit the same atom ten times in a row than that Robinson killed Kirk. This is the caliber of intellect we’re dealing with.

The debate was a giant dumpsterfire, but it didn’t go how you’d expect.

Read more

In a recent article titled Why I’m Staying Out Of The Substack Religion Debate, Kabbalistic fiction author1 Scott Alexander wades into the Substack religion debate. In it, Scott explains at a high level why he thinks it unlikely that God exists, setting aside all the little details of all the arguments. And he replied to your favorite Substacker, who I’ll leave unnamed out of modesty. In my view, carefully considering Scott’s case makes clear precisely why God’s existence is so plausible.

Scott opens his argument with the following parable: imagine a group of people who thought aliens assisted Napoleon in his rise. Now, there is actually a lot of evidence for this hypothesis. A bunch of stuff about Napoleon is weird and can be explained by alien assistance. So you can imagine an alt-world where Substackers make complicated Bayesian arguments for the hypothesis that aliens assisted Napoleon and Lydia McGrew claims that the evidence for alien interference is good for a Bayes factor of 10^44 or whatever.

But this is a terrible hypothesis, obviously! Why is it terrible? Scott’s answer: same reason theism is a terrible hypothesis. Specifically, his diagnosis is that the hypothesis is:

1. Very complex and ad hoc. Why would the aliens intervene secretly to rescue Napoleon?

2. Doesn’t even explain the data that well. Why do the aliens remain hidden? Why did Napoleon lose sometimes? Anytime you posit some super ad hoc hypothesis involving powerful hidden entities that don’t even do exactly what you’d expect, your theory pays a big cost.

As Scott puts it:

The very strongest version of the overfitting penalty should go to theories of the form:

Why did this anomalous thing happen? Because there was a powerful entity trying to make that specific thing happen. No, you can’t see it, it hid all evidence of its own existence. Yeah, the outcome doesn’t match any sane entity’s plausible goals, but I can sort of tell a story for why they kind of sort of vaguely resemble those goals. No, you can’t apply human limitations to it, the entity is an exotic form of intelligence for which we have no other evidence.

I agree that these theories are generally bad. But I don’t think this applies to theism for two basic reasons. First, it isn’t true that we have “no other evidence” for theism. Second, I don’t think theism is ad hoc.

2 The evidence

It would be one thing if God were just being trotted out to explain one or two random anomalies. Instead, God provides a good explanation of about 30 features of the world. Now, when you pad your list with 30 arguments, they won’t all be winners. But there are a bunch of good arguments on the list—at least the first nine strike me as very forceful, even considered on their own.

These arguments don’t require positing weird eccentric motivations of God—they posit more general facts like “a perfect being would prefer life to random floating clouds of hydrogen gas,” “if God’s going to create at all, it’s not terribly unlikely he’d do a lot of creating,” and “God prefers agents with minds to random mental static.” None of these require that we guess God’s favorite toothpaste flavor!

And sometimes we do posit that there’s an invisible entity with weird properties to explain observable evidence. Case in point: dark matter. It is literally invisible mostly undetectable matter that you can’t see or measure directly. And you need very finely-tuned invisible matter to explain the data—not just any invisible matter will do. Nonetheless, we’re pretty sure it exists because it explains a lot of otherwise mysterious features of the world. So sometimes inferences of the form “positing this invisible thing and adding some auxiliary assumptions explains the world way better than alternatives, so we should believe in it,” are correct.

Note that any time you use an agent to explain anything, you’ll posit an agent who doesn’t do exactly what you expect. The prior probability of any agent doing any particular thing is very low. If I see a crude drawing on your desk, though my prior in you making a crude drawing is low, I’d be pretty sure you drew it.

Suppose I come back to my home and see that many of my valuables have been stolen. However, surprisingly, a good number of valuables weren’t taken. Positing that a burglar broke in involves thinking:

Why did this anomalous thing happen? Because there was a powerful entity trying to make that specific thing happen. No, you can’t see it, it hid all evidence of its own existence. Yeah, the outcome doesn’t match any sane entity’s plausible goals, but I can sort of tell a story for why they kind of sort of vaguely resemble those goals.

Now, neither this example or the dark matter example are exactly like theism. We have independent evidence for burglars. But if we can have reason to think that invisible entities lacking outside evidence caused anomalies, and we can have reason to think that particular unevidenced agents caused anomalies, then it’s not clear why we can’t think that invisible agents caused anomalies.

In addition, it’s not true that God is some totally bizarro hidden entity that leaves no evidence behind. A giant portion of the world has had a direct experience as of God. Most people throughout human history have believed in him. If a giant chunk of the world claimed to have directly seen the aliens who had helped Napoleon, and the theory also explained many different anomalies, I’d start taking the theory more seriously!

Scott complains that the world isn’t what you’d expect given theism. But neither is it what you’d expect given atheism. Given atheism, I would expect a world with nothing of value, because most conceivable sets of laws don’t give rise to anything interesting. The theist has no monopoly on surprise.

Scott then gives the standard god of the gaps argument: in ancient times, primitive people used gods to explain everything. You’d see thunder and blame the gods. You’d have a headache every time you drank hot chocolate, so they’d say the gods cursed you. As we’ve learned more, we’ve seen otherwise powerful theistic arguments blown to smithereens by the steady march of science. Through science, we’ve learned that lightning is caused by electric discharge and the pain you get whenever you drank hot chocolate is caused by you not taking the spoon out. The argument for Zeus from lightning, while once a powerful argument beloved by the natural theologians, has fallen seriously out of favor.

Now, it isn’t actually true that throughout history people cited random unexplained bits of the natural world as evidence of a creator. Pagans thought that lowercase g gods were behind these phenomena, but monotheists didn’t cite random natural phenomena as evidence for God. As Aron Wall put it:

This type of reasoning (which is quite common, although I phrase it in my own words) tends to glide imperceptibly from popular pagan polytheists (who thought there was a divinity for every major or minor phenomenon) to the Hebrew monotheists (who resisted this trend as superstitious and wrong).

It was perfectly obvious to any pagan philosopher or early Christian that Nature proceeds according to orderly laws, and natural processes. Modern Science can take credit for unifying the description of many phenomena into common mathematical frameworks, but to act as though the existence of order in Nature is a modern discovery is simply absurd. It is true that this fact is in considerable tension with certain forms of Animism or Nature Polytheism. But certainly almost any astute monotheist living in the last two thousand years, is going to admit that God causes most things to happen, not through whim but through the operation of certain natural processes, which can be understood to some extent by human reason.

But even if they had, this wouldn’t be evidentially relevant. If people frequently make ridiculous inferences, that doesn’t cast doubt on any vaguely similar inferences. The argument for God from lightning is a terrible argument. In order for a fact to be evidence for God, it has to be likelier given theism than given atheism. There’s no obvious special reason why God would directly make thunder, beyond his general reasons for making an orderly world.

The argument for God from fine-tuning is not a ridiculous argument! And sensible theists aren’t just looking to random unexplained natural phenomena—nobody thought that God must be directly boring holes in Swiss cheese before we had an explanation of Swiss cheese. Instead, they cite facts as evidence for theism when they involve the deepest underpinnings of our world, are extremely implausible, and are extremely valuable.

So you shouldn’t cite God as explanations of mundane natural events absent extremely strong evidence. You should only cite God as the explanation of features of the world that are plausibly fundamental—not explained by anything deeper. By induction, we learn that God doesn’t monkey around in the random daily workings of the natural world—we learn little about what explains the deepest features of the world.

With that methodological clarification out of the way, there is only one really good theistic argument that has ever been defeated by scientific advance: the argument from life. Before we discovered evolution, God seemed like the only reasonable way to explain life. Now that we know about evolution, we have a better account. In its place, we have gotten many new good theistic arguments in just the last few decades. The psychophysical harmony argument is younger than I am—the fine-tuning argument is younger than my parents, the anthropic argument hasn’t even had its third birthday. So overall, the case for theism has gotten better with time.

One final point: all these methodological complaints pretty clearly give way in the face of really strong evidence. If the stars spelled out the first three chapters of the Gospel of John, that would obviously confirm theism or something like it. So if the case for theism is really strong, that’s enough to overcome Scott’s methodological worries.

3 Intrinsic probability

The intrinsic probability of a hypothesis is how likely it is before you look at any evidence. The main reason that the aliens assisted Napoleon hypothesis isn’t any good is that it has a very low intrinsic probability. Before considering specific evidence, you should think that it’s ridiculously unlikely. Scott thinks that God’s existence is the same way.

I disagree. I think God is very simple and non-arbitrary, so his existence starts with a not unreasonable prior. Here’s my preferred story about how it is that God is simple: God is simply a mind without limits. Having no limits, nothing bounds either his powers or abilities, so he can do anything and knows everything. Because he knows everything, he knows all the moral facts. If you know that something is good, and you don’t have any contrary psychological inclinations, it’s plausible that you’ll have a default motivation to follow it. So once God knows everything, he’ll always do what’s best.

Now, is this account right? Certainly there are a few moving parts to it. You have to think each of the following:

1. The mind is non-physical.

2. If you knew everything and were fully rational, you’d always be motivated to do what’s best.

3. The idea of a limitless mind is simple, makes sense, and entails omnipotence and omniscience.

I accepted 1-2 even when I was an atheist. 3 seems a bit shakier, but still not crazy. None of the premises are trivial, but they’re not obviously false either. If they hold, then theism has a very high prior probability. So I think theism starts with an okay prior—not extremely high, not extremely low. Certainly it starts out much more plausible than that aliens helped Napoleon.

Scott has criticisms of this hypothesis. I’ll talk about them, but first, let me give three reasons at a high level why I think you shouldn’t assign theism an outrageously low prior probability.

First, if these moves work, theism is really really simple. It’s the kind of theory that physicists dream of: one fundamental parameter set to infinity. If you have a theory of debatable internal coherence, but extreme simplicity if it works out, then a lot of the probability space will be occupied by the theory.

Analogy: suppose you’re considering between two theories of physics. One might just be totally horribly broken and incoherent. But if it works, it’s ridiculously simple. The other is definitely very complicated. Overall, you should prefer theory 1 to theory 2. Because theories that are a bit simpler have a much higher prior, even with only a low prior on theism being coherent, it will still gobble up a lot more of the probability space than naturalism. I talk about this more here, if you’re interested.

Second, much of fundamental reality ends up being pretty weird when probed. Look at quantum mechanics or the foundations of math. As Alexander Pruss puts it, discussing various puzzling Catholic doctrines:

But to reject the doctrines for this reason alone would be mistaken. For similar points can be made about Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics. To say that simultaneity is relative or that a physical object has no position but rather a probability distribution over positions borders on contradiction, and the philosophical moves needed to defend these seem ad hoc designed to save the theories. If we’ve learned one thing from physics in the 20th century, it is that the true physics of the world is very strange indeed.

Nor are theology and science the only places where things are strange. Similar things can be said about the mathematics of infinity, or even just common sense claims such as that there is change (think of Zeno’s paradoxes) or that material objects persist over time (think of the Ship of Theseus and the paradoxes of material composition).

We can, thus, be very confident that created reality is very strange indeed. And hence, shouldn’t we expect similar strangeness—indeed, mystery—in the Creator and his relationship to us?

Thus, it wouldn’t be that surprising if we couldn’t see how a simple ultimate reality was simple. We’re just monkeys in shoes.

You shouldn’t take this too far. You shouldn’t think that the aliens helped Napoleon hypothesis has a decent prior of being super intrinsically likely for reasons unknown. But I think it’s pretty clear when you consider God’s essentially limitless properties and mysterious nature that it isn’t outrageously improbable that he’d be a simple sort of entity. Simple things can have many properties and effects—a simple electron exerts effects all throughout the universe.

Third, there are a lot of other potential ways of God being simple. Other views of how God is simple:

1. The divine simplicity view according to which God doesn’t have any properties or attributes—being literally the simplest conceivable thing.

2. God is simply a perfect being: possessing all perfections. I’m suspicious of this account because I don’t think perfections are real and joint-carving elements of reality, but it’s not obviously wrong.

3. God is a limitless agent. An agent is a mind that pairs with the world in some way: this without limits=a being whose mind matches the world (omniscience) and for whom the world matches its mind (omnipotence). We’ll come back to this idea later.

4. God is a mind of limitless power. If power is joint-carving, because power entails the power to bring facts to mind, it also entails omniscience—and then you get omnibenevolence for free.

5. God is a being of infinite goodness. Set a thing’s goodness score to the maximum degree it will go, and you get God. I have my gripes with this account, but it’s not obviously ludicrous.

6. God is pure act. I don’t really know what this means, but my Thomist friends think it means something and entails divine properties.

God’s existence might also follow from certain necessary truths. Godelian ontological arguments try to show this. Now, I’m pretty sure they’re all unsound, but the odds one of them works aren’t, like, one in a million.

One of these accounts succeeding doesn’t seem outrageously unlikely. It seems that you should think there’s at least a 1% chance that one of these accounts succeeds on which God has at least a 1% intrinsic probability. Combined, that gets you at least an intrinsic probability of 1/10,000.

But anyway, Scott has an objection to my account according to which God is a limitless mind. He even calls my argument “especially bad.” Here’s the first bit of his objection.

This relies on a sleight of hand where you pretend to be subtracting something to make your target simpler, but the thing you’re subtracting is “limits” or “incapacity”. But these are negatives (ie the positive is capabilities). When you claim at the end that all of this subtraction has produced a very simple thing, you’re wrong, because you’ve been subtracting negatives, ie adding.

If this trick worked, it should be easier to build a starship than a biplane. You would start with aircraft-without-limits, and then you’d only need to add a few limits to get the starship, but you would need to add many more before you got the biplane.

Suppose we have two theories. Theory 1 says the universe is infinite. Theory 2 says the universe is 10 quintillion meters across exactly. Should we say theory 2 has a higher prior because theory 1 is “subtracting negatives, ie adding?” No! Sometimes theories that posit more total things are simpler. The theory of modal realism—that every possible world exists—is a lot simpler than the theory that every possible world exists except one, even though it has one more world.

When does a theory pay a cost for having a limit? Dustin Crummett has a great post on this, but two contributing factors:

1. When the simplest way to describe it involves describing the thing without limits and then adding a limit. The simplest way to describe a being that knows every fact but one is to describe a being that knows every fact and then add a proviso about it not knowing one fact. It’s not to list every fact that it knows in order.

2. When the limit is in some way arbitrary. If God doesn’t know some fact, why that fact rather than another one?

This is why the theory that nature is uniform is much better than the theory that nature breaks down in one random patch somewhere. The simplest way to describe the patch theory is to describe uniform laws and then add a proviso about them not being uniform in some region. The theory is also arbitrary. Why do laws break down in that patch rather than some other one?

So if we can characterize all of God’s properties in terms of a single unlimited thing set to infinity, then theism is a very good theory. I claim we can: God is a mind set to infinity. And minds are fundamental bits of the universe, not reducing to any non-mental thing.

My guess at Adelstein’s response: he is a nominalist about aircraft, but a realist about mind. You can’t improve airplanes by removing their limits, because “airplane” is a semi-fake concept that we apply to a particular object which must be laboriously constructed component by component. But Mind is just a thing that floats out there in the void, so it’s fair to ask what it would look like if allowed to wax to its full power.

Yes, that’s correct. Simplicity is (something like) how long it takes to describe something in an ideal language. The ideal language has to be able to include talk about any fundamental things, otherwise you could never describe them because they wouldn’t reduce. Aircrafts are complicated physical things. Minds are irreducible. So just as it’s fine to invoke math when describing the physical world, because math is fundamental, it’s fine to invoke minds. You get to build a symbol for minds into your language. You can’t build a symbol for airplanes.

Can we reject this assumption? A common view is that the physical language has to describe everything in terms of math. But if minds are fundamental things and they don’t reduce to math, then this is just to declare minds infinitely complex by fiat. It doesn’t seem that laws that give rise to conscious experience are automatically infinitely complex.

But most applications of dualism to this debate on another sleight-of-hand. Consciousness is complicated and mysterious and hard to explain. Therefore, maybe it happens on some exotic substrate. A reasonable name for that exotic substrate would be Mind. And we all know that the Mind is where computation happens. Therefore, maybe computation happens on an exotic substrate.

I agree that consciousness is complicated and mysterious and hard to explain. I sort of suspect it won’t turn out to have an exotic substrate, but maybe I’m wrong about that, and I don’t want to speak with confidence here.

But computation isn’t complicated and mysterious and hard to explain. Normal neural nets explain it fine. We have great Himalayan mountains worth of evidence that computation happens on the ordinary physical substrate of the brain:

[proceeds to list a lot of that evidence]

But the dualist portion of the argument for divine simplicity (and therefore for God) relies on an exotic substrate for computation in particular. The argument isn’t that God might be maximally conscious (although if He exists, this is likely true). It’s that “mind without limits” is enough to buy unlimited computation (eg know everything, design the universe). If we unbundle Mind into the explicable parts that we know happen for natural reasons, and the inexplicable parts which might have exotic substrate, computation is in the explicable-natural part, and so any exotic substrate that consciousness forces us to posit is useless for getting us infinite computational capacity.

First, one terminological note: the thing I’m arguing for isn’t actually what theists mean by divine simplicity. Divine simplicity is a technical term that means that God has no attributes or parts that aren’t identical to himself. It’s a pretty wonky doctrine and not one that I accept. It doesn’t just mean that God is very simple!

Second, Scott mischaracterizes the arguments for dualism (even just applied to this domain). The zombie argument, say, depends on the conceivability of zombies and the bridge from conceivability to possibility. Mary’s room depends on the idea that Mary knows every physical fact but doesn’t know what it’s like to see red. The master argument against physicalism goes that the physical facts are exhaustively about structure and function which isn’t even in principle the subject matter of consciousness.

Think what you want about these arguments. But none of them depend on the inference “Consciousness is complicated and mysterious and hard to explain. Therefore, maybe it happens on some exotic substrate.” There are lots of things that are mysterious and hard to explain: quantum mechanics, to give one example. No one posits an exotic substrate. The reason people are dualists is that there are arguments not just for consciousness being mysterious but for it being irreducible.

In an earlier draft, Scott said “most good arguments for dualism rely on another sleight-of-hand” instead of “most applications of dualism to this debate on another sleight-of-hand.” I do not get how the second thing changes the meaning. It’s not like we give different arguments for dualism when arguing for theism.

Now, I agree that you shouldn’t think of God’s essential property as being infinite computation. Infinite computational abilities are derived from his deeper properties, not things that we build in. Because God is omniscient, he can do infinitely complex calculations. But that’s not because we’re building into the concept of mind that it is identical to computing.

As an analogy, consider Scott’s favorite theory: Tegmark’s mathematical realism. On this theory, every single mathematical structure is instantiated. Every world that you can describe with math exists. Across the infinite worlds, there is infinite computation. But that’s not because you’re building in at the ground level infinite computational ability. Rather, you’re deriving it from the fundamental elements of the theory.

But why is a mind “allowed to wax to its full power” omniscient and omnipotent? Why not just infinitely intense conscious experience? I agree this step is the shakiest, but let me say two things about it.

One: just intuitively, a mind that doesn’t know something is limited in some essential respect. Something lies outside the bounds of its awareness. Imagine a mind wishing for something to be done but being unable to bring it about. Definitely that’s limited in some way! Now, there’s a deeper question about whether this kind of unlimitedness gets to be built into our fundamental theory, but it at least doesn’t seem like the answer is obviously negative.

Second, minds pair with the world in two distinct ways. One line of influence runs world to mind, and this refers to how the mind represents the world. The other runs mind to world, and this refers to the mind’s ability to bring about effects in the world. To know the essential facts about minds, you need to know both how the mind produces effects in the world and how the world produces effects in the mind.

Take both of these to infinity. Then the mind can produce anything in the world and anything in the world shows up in the mind. From there you get omniscience and omnipotence. If a mind’s match with the world is set to infinity, then from there, you get all the divine attributes. Infinite computation comes for free!

Again, I admit that this is a bit wobbly. My claim is modest: it is not outrageously improbable that some account along these lines will work. If that’s right, then theism doesn’t start with an outrageously low prior. I go back and forth about how high theism’s prior is—sometimes I think it’s higher than naturalism, while other times, I think it’s pretty low. But in any case, if the evidence is really good, you should be a theist.

Scott closes his piece:

If computational dualism is unsustainable, then the trick of increasing simplicity by removing limits works no better for minds than for airplanes, and we can no longer wiggle out of the penalty for pseudo-conspiratorial powerful-entity-based explanations by calling it a simplicity penalty and claiming that our hypothesis is infinitely simple; theism must face the penalty’s full weight. Its buckling under that intolerable burden produces the feeling of “although the evidence for and against this theory is hard to quantify on its own terms, it should have been ruled out preemptively and never come to our attention in the first place, the same as an alien-Napoleon theory”. And that feeling makes me less excited than I once was to participate in the weeds of religion-vs-atheism debates.

(and by “I’m not participating”, I mean “I’m participating by writing this post about how I won’t participate”. Sorry!)

But those are a lot of ifs. Insofar as your argument for theism being ridiculously implausible depends on a number of controversial claims, then you should think odds aren’t terrible that you’re mistaken. Thus, if the case for theism is really good, you should become a theist. So any argument of the form “theism should be ruled out of as a serious theory because of contentious assumptions X, Y, and Z,” involves playing the game, rather than getting a reason not to play it.

I saw a video recently cataloging some of the most disturbing books anyone had ever written. The author had read them all, at least in part. I’m rarely disturbed by books, even ones that others describe as pretty disturbing, so I decided to read the highest-ranked one that had an actual plot—instead of just being lurid descriptions of brutal torment. I read it in one sitting, between midnight and 4:30 am.

Shockingly, the rumored second most disturbing book ever written turned out to be pretty disturbing. But it wasn’t only disturbing because of the horrible things described in the book. The main reason it was disturbing was that it provided a peek into the human propensity for evil, showing how humans do such horrible things. It was based on a true story.

The video I watched was titled i read the 10 most disturbing books ever written. Topping the list was the Marquis De Sade’s book The 120 Days of Sodom. Apparently the book doesn’t have much of a plot beyond just being descriptions of terrible and disgusting things happening. Didn’t seem very interesting! So I decided to read #2 on the list—Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door.

The plot of The Girl Next Door is that a girl named Meg and her sister Susan move in across the street from the main character, David. Meg’s parents were killed in a car accident, so she was taken in by her aunt Ruth. Ruth begins abusing the two daughters, especially Meg, in ways that grow increasingly extreme—culminating in brutal torture and sexual assault.

Ruth’s two children join in at various points. The main character, David, is good friends with one of Ruth’s children. He learns about the torment, but doesn’t do anything for the vast majority of the book, even though he takes a liking to Meg. Somehow, he manages to tell himself that what’s happening isn’t so bad, even as a girl is chained in a bunker and being tortured.

The book is a very depressing read. It’s mostly about horrible things happening to sympathetic children. You hope it will stop. It doesn’t. What’s worse, it’s psychologically believable because we know something very much like it happened. The story is based on the real-life murder of Sylvia Likens, who was tortured, starved, and murdered by her caregiver Gertrude Baniszewski, Baniszewski’s children, and various neighborhood friends.

The events in The Girl Next Door are disturbing beyond measure. The book opens “You think you know about pain?” It then goes on to detail events that are painful beyond measure—the kind of torments that make their victims wish for death, raw agony in degrees that the human mind isn’t meant to comprehend. Yet it is more disturbing to know that something like it happened. And it is still more disturbing that as it is occurring, you can see how a thing like this can happen.

There were two main features that allowed the crimes described in the story to go on as they did without the perpetrators being ratted out. The first was acceptance from a position of authority. Ruth, the woman directing the torture, was a well-liked figure of authority. She was the cool Mom who let the neighborhood children drink beers. And we know from the Milgram experiment that most people are willing to torture an innocent person because they’re instructed to by an authoritative man in a white lab coat.

The second feature was gradualness. The abuse slowly escalated. Each crime inflicted on Meg was a lot like the things previously done to her. Those who had been complicit in the previous crimes couldn’t well claim that, though their previous actions were justified, this one was different. This feature was also present at Milgram. The electric shocks increased gradually. Had they gone up from 0 to 450, likely most people would have stopped. But they increased so gradually that in the minds of the perpetrators, none seemed to make the decisive moral difference.

When both gradualness and social approval are present, there is almost no limit to the horribleness of the things that many people will do. Look at the Nazi officers as they took their victims into gas chambers, often without feeling much guilt. Look at the rest of the world as it remained silent, complicit. Look at Rwanda, where children were hacked to death with machetes, women died of HIV contracted through rape, and the world sat around doing nothing.

Look at the standard practice among people of spending money on luxuries, even as children die—children whose deaths we could have prevented. We make excuses for it. Most people think you can save lives for just about $100, yet never bother doing this at any point in their lives (the real number is $4,000). Even as people in far-away lands suffer and die horribly, very few people bother doing anything about it. Suffering akin to that experienced by Meg in fiction and Likens in reality is seen as a cause for solemnity and lamentation—not for action.

Some disturbing books are just shocking. They tell you nothing about the world beyond the fact that the author had a lot of disturbing ideas (shocking to learn that the Marquis de Sade, from whom the term “sadism” originated, was a nasty guy). But the books that are disturbing in ways that make you think tend to stay with you for longer, and aren’t just a complete waste. Insofar as a book gives you some insight into how evil occurs—how it is that humans rape each other and hack each other to death with machetes in military conflict—then it is not a waste, even if it is unpleasant to read.

These kinds of books are at their best when they expose you to the blackness in your own heart, the evil that you are capable of in the right settings. It is very easy to look at atrocities and judge others. The harder thing to do is to recognize it in yourself. While perhaps you wouldn’t have done that, you would, in the right settings, do other evil things.

It is very easy to recognize ways that others are bad. It is hard to recognize the ways that you are.

Oh and one last notable feature about the situation, if you’ll permit me a moment on my soapbox, is its resemblance to factory farming. Every one of the abuses Meg suffered—starvation, sexual assault, branding with a hot iron, scalding with boiling water, and forced confinement—is ubiquitous throughout the meat industry, inflicted on beings with minds like primitive humans. That’s not because Ketchum aimed to teach a lesson about factory farming. It is just because all the cruelest, most wicked tortures that humans have dreamed up are widespread in factory farms.

So when you read a disturbing account of someone innocent being locked in a dark torture dungeon and think “I would never be complicit in this kind of thing,” just know that you are each time you purchase animal products. Know additionally that it costs about ten cents to spare an animal from a year in a cage. Probably knowing those things won’t change your behavior in any way, because you are more like Meg’s torturers than you’d like to think. As am I, as is your brother, as is everyone. There is a monster inside us all.

Of course, you’ll tell yourself that it’s different.

You’ll say that the pus-filled wounds that result from prolonged contact with the feces they must lie in all day, barely able to walk, are categorically different from Meg’s wounds. That the creatures we torture aren’t our species, cannot talk, cannot understand, and that of course you condemn factory farming (though you pay for it). Not clear that those make much difference to the badness of being burned with an iron. Meg’s torturers had their own excuses too. But at the end of the day, after all those excuses, there is just an innocent being facing extreme violence in some dark dungeon, branded with a hot iron, starved, and beaten; a crowd of complicit humans who tell themselves that what they’re doing is okay because they enjoy what they do; and terrible, terrible pain.

It turned out, as uncovered by , that Arday was a serial plagiarist. A lot of his work had been copied from others. A lot of his life story was likely totally fabricated. And his work didn’t seem up to the kinds of academic standards one would expect from a professor at Cambridge. After quite extensive media coverage of his plagiarism, scholarly errors, and fabrication, Arday was found dead—likely from suicide.

Undeniably, this is a tragic situation. Arday, whatever you think of him, should be alive. It is tragic whenever anybody dies. When a public campaign drives a man to the point of likely suicide, we should all mourn. I found some of the right-wing cackling in response to his death pretty ghoulish.

The reaction from many left-wingers to Arday’s death was vindication. Many people felt like his death indicated that the pile-on had been unreasonable and excessive. Ibram X. Kendi claims “The Media Lynched Jason Arday.” Karen Attiah comments on “What Jason Arday’s death by media mob says about the old machinery of anti-Black terror in the algorithmic age.” Kate Manne suggests “Gossipy Academics Helped Kill Jason Arday.”

So was the press coverage unfair or excessive?

Before we answer this question, one preliminary note: we should not judge the behavior of those who criticized Arday differently because he died. One’s culpability for behavior depends on what was known at the time the behavior was taken. Unpredictable things happening later don’t affect culpability. It is also very bad to whitewash and venerate people’s bad behaviors after they commit suicide, as one of the beliefs that often drives people to commit suicide is that it will be the ultimate way of showing up all those who persecuted them in life. This is one reason the show 13 Reasons Why may have led to an increase in suicide rates.

Nonetheless, I think there is a case that the wall-to-wall media coverage of Arday’s misconduct was excessive. I don’t agree with this argument, but it’s at least worth considering. The basic argument for its being excessive is the standard argument against giant internet pile-ons. Even if people do bad things, they do not deserve to have the whole internet turned against them. It’s bad when random people who cheated on their spouses become the internet’s main character and are judged by tens of millions of people.

What Arday did is less bad than, say, domestic violence—but I would be opposed to random perpetrators of domestic violence being made into a sensational national story. So if you agree that those who commit ordinary crimes shouldn’t be subject to this kind of media feeding frenzy, one could argue on similar grounds that you should oppose the coverage of Arday.

Now, one objection you might have at this point: maybe there is no in-principle problem with excessively covering bad actions of individuals. Maybe, if the entire internet covered some moderately serious crime, that wouldn’t be unjust. The problem with woke cancel mobs, on this view, is that they targeted behavior that wasn’t actually bad. But if behavior is bad, then perhaps public shaming is appropriate.

I find this pretty implausible. Seems obvious to me that the internet weighing in on random acts of misconduct isn’t the right way to adjudicate these things. One reason is that the internet often lacks key details, jumps to implausible conclusions based on weak evidence, and subjects people to punishment that isn’t proportional to the seriousness of their offense.

Another reason is that enforcement of norms ought to be regular and consistent, to maintain both fairness and deterrence. To the extent that internet mobs are enforcing justice, this will be justice of the mob not of the law. There is no way to make internet mobs proportionate, fair, or consistent. Arday shouldn’t be punished 100x more severely than other plagiarists.

Here is the reason I don’t think this coverage was excessive: this was a major news story. The important aspect of it wasn’t that Arday plagiarized, but that Cambridge learned about the plagiarism in 2023. They did nothing. This story is debatably an example of DEI-related lowering of standards for minority professors. Just as it is appropriate to cover police killings as a microcosm of broad issues in the criminal justice system, arguably there can be similar reasons to cover this story. Insane misconduct from one of the lead institutions in the world is noteworthy.

Then, when various people uncovered Arday’s plagiarism, he contacted the police. In one of these cases, the police investigated the man for four months. This element of the story is a notable illustration of the totally absurd disregard for free speech in the UK.

The other notable reason this was a story was the totally bonkers reaction from a number of high profile left-wing professors. The Good Law Project, for example, summarized the situation as “Rightwing newspapers are trying to smear him with fake accusations of plagiarism.” Their petition on this got signatures from members of Parliament and from the Green party’s leader.

Here is an analogy: imagine that a well-regarded conservative think-tanker was on video harassing a coworker in a way that was exactly as immoral as Arday’s plagiarism and fabrication. This, on its own, would maybe be a minor news story but not a significant one. But now imagine that he contacted the police, who investigated a journalist for four months for uncovering the story. Then, after the video came to light, huge swathes of the conservative establishment rushed to defend him. They claimed that “leftwing newspapers are trying to smear him with fake accusations of harassment,” and got a petition going in his defense. This was signed by leading members of the UK Reform party.

This would obviously be news. It would be a bit unfair to the guy that his misconduct became a major public news story, just as it was a bit unfair to Arday. But it wouldn’t be unreasonable to cover it. Sometimes, stories of individual misconduct really are newsworthy, and in such cases, covering them isn’t unreasonable. The difference between Arday and standard cases of massive internet mobs condemning people is that Arday’s conduct really warranted major news coverage.

We should hold in our heads two conflicting thoughts. First, the coverage really was unfair to Arday. It’s unfair for a person to become the laughingstock of the whole internet for doing things that are less bad than various items of less-serious malfeasance. Second, this really was newsworthy. It is sometimes permissible to cover stories even when they’re a bit unfair to someone. It is reasonable to cover cases of ambiguous but justified police shootings, even though they’re unfair to the perpetrators.

Now, one final point is that obviously many of the people now most loudly criticizing the coverage are total hypocrites on the topic. Had a right-wing public figure seriously plagiarized, many of these people would have joined massive internet pile-ons. They certainly wouldn’t have condemned the pile-on. (Ask: how many of these people are on the record as having opposed any left-wing pile-on ever?) Many of the same people complaining about the coverage of Arday have mocked the deaths of right-wing figures.

Overall, I think that some of the internet reaction was a bit excessive. Arday was not really a public figure in any major sense. Scorn and mockery directed at a private citizen by tens of millions of people for misconduct that, while real, is far less serious than lots of common misconduct carried out by lots of people is wildly disproportionate. But while the Arday situation was extremely tragic, it doesn’t seem like covering it was unreasonable. This really was a newsworthy situation, and sometimes uncovering the truth burns those who behaved badly.

1 “You’re not a baby cow”

Often when vegans are explaining why it’s wrong to drink milk, they will say “cow’s milk is meant for the mother cow’s babies. But you’re not a baby cow.”

Now, the second sentence is certainly true. But this is a dumb argument against consuming dairy. The reason it’s wrong to consume dairy is that it causes harm to cows—dairy cows are repeatedly forcibly impregnated, have their babies snatched from them, are mutilated, and suffer various other horrors. Whether their milk is “meant” for their babies is irrelevant. If drinking milk didn’t harm cows at all, then it would be fine even if it was “meant” for their their calves in some way. Seeds and grains are “meant” for turning into plant offspring, but nonetheless, they’re obviously fine to eat.

This line is also very ingroupy. Non-vegans are obviously not going to be convinced by the argument. But it gives you a line that permits you to signal about how weird and gross animal products are. As vegans, we have good arguments. We don’t need to make bad ones.

2 The h-word

Often vegans refer to the mass killing of animals as a holocaust. Now, for what it’s worth, I don’t think this is an inaccurate term given one way the word can be defined. Often holocaust just means “mass killing”—e.g. when people talk about a nuclear holocaust. I’m also aware that holocaust victims like Alex Hershaft have themselves drawn the comparison. There are some nuanced settings in which I think the comparison might be okay to make.

But in general, I think we should be wary about using the term for purely persuasion-related reasons. I have a faint recollection of seeing a Faunalytics study years ago presenting empirical evidence that it generally makes people less persuaded, though I haven’t been able to find it, so maybe I dreamed it up.

In any case, the basic reason that I think you should not use the word holocaust is that it makes your position more controversial than it needs to be. The core case for veganism is really very simple: you shouldn’t hurt others a lot for small personal benefit. Nearly all animals undergo nightmare conditions that we’d call torture if inflicted on a dog—so you shouldn’t fund the operations that produce more creatures in these horrifying conditions.

There aren’t any good objections to that position. Thus, non-vegans are always looking for a way out—some controversial premise that they can disagree with. I’m not suggesting they’re being deliberately deceptive; I’m just noting that people are motivated to find flaws in arguments for conclusions that they reject. Non-vegans will constantly start talking about other issues like whether it’s okay to slaughter a pig on a desert island.

In light of this, you should try extremely hard to stray away from controversy. You should only defend the most minimal premises needed for your conclusion. By using inflammatory language of debatable accuracy, you turn the dispute into one about whether the term “holocaust” is appropriate, rather than about whether it’s okay to eat meat in standard settings.

This is also why, even if you’re a utilitarian, you shouldn’t argue for utilitarianism when defending veganism. Utilitarianism is way more controversial than the idea that you shouldn’t hurt others a lot for small personal benefit. That’s the only premise you need to establish that most meat-eating is wrong. So you shouldn’t stray into excess controversy.

I even think it’s a bad idea to talk about the in-principle wrongness of meat-eating. Most people reject that meat-eating is wrong in-principle. However, most people think that it’s wrong to eat animals that were tortured for their whole lives (why they oppose foie gras and veal). So to convince people that meat eating is wrong in 99% of cases, you just need moral premises that the people already accept conjoined with true factual premises.

If someone asks about, say, eggs from backyard hens, the thing to say is “that might be okay, but obviously that won’t be relevant to the vast majority of meat-eating—so let’s try to get agreement on the standard cases before we talk about weird edge cases.” When making a moral argument, defend the minimum claim needed to establish your conclusion, rather than volunteering controversial claims that aren't necessary.

3 Environmental concerns

Meat is bad for the environment. Often, vegans present this as a main argument as a reason not to eat meat. I generally think this is a bad idea.

First of all, it’s not enough to establish the impermissibility of meat eating. People do other things all the time that are worse for the environment, like take flights. This will establish some reason not to eat meat, but not a reason that’s decisive overall.

Second—and this is the bigger problem—if people buy this argument, it might make their meat consumption much worse. The animal products that emit the most are beef and lamb. These are, incidentally, the ones that cause the least suffering. Chickens are small. The average meat eater consumes about 2,400 chickens and 11 cows; the number of sheep is supposedly 30 but probably more like 3. Chickens are treated much worse than cows and sheep.

If you’re going to eat meat, it’s a lot better to eat red meat. However, environmental arguments encourage people to eat less red meat and more non-red meat. This means its effects are likely negative. This is also why I’m wary about making health-based arguments for veganism. If people are convinced by them, they’ll eat less beef and more chicken.

4 Condemning meat reduction

Often, vegans have scorn and mockery directed at those who reduce their meat consumption. A common line you’ll hear is some variant of “I went from beating my wife ten times a week to only five times—yay, progress!”

This is counterproductive. If everyone reduced their meat consumption by 20%, that would reduce production as much as if 20% of people went vegan. A period of reduction very often precedes complete elimination of animal product consumption. In general, it’s bad to condemn people doing rare actions that are very good—even if they fall dramatically short of what they ought to do.

Now, I agree that eating meat occasionally is seriously morally wrong, just like torturing puppies occasionally is seriously morally wrong. But if almost everyone tortured puppies 10 times per week, and someone started only doing it twice per week, and said they were trying to completely eliminate their torture of puppies, I would praise them, not condemn them.

5 Weird diets

Sometimes, vegans promote weird and fringe diets. Some vegans argue that you should only eat fruit or only raw food. Often these lead to a host of serious health conditions that pose major risks to people.

Vegans should try eating a normal diet. If you only eat a narrow category of foods, you’re likely to face serious nutrient deficiency. Promoting these diets isn’t just bad for health but is also counterproductive. If people encounter serious health issues after going vegan, they’re a lot likelier to go back. For this reason, I think we should be pretty clear that these diets are alarming and dangerous and should definitely not promote them.

6 Humans are herbivores

That humans are omnivorous is confirmed by anatomy, archeology, features of our jaws, and features of our intestines. The contrary arguments are very bad. Normally these just involve highlighting features that humans share with herbivores (e.g. sweating through our pores) without explaining any kind of principled connection between those features and being herbivorous.

Aside from being false, it’s also a giant distraction. Whether humans are biologically meant to eat plants isn’t relevant. Obviously we are capable of eating both plants and animals. When people say that it’s alright to eat meat because we’re omnivores, the obvious premise to dispute is the ridiculous moral premise—that it’s okay to eat meat because we can—not the factual premise which is on much firmer ground.

If people make an argument with a true factual premise and an unbelievably idiotic moral premise, dispute the moral premise, not the factual premise.

7 “You were never really vegan”

A line you hear decently often is that ex vegans “were never really vegan.” This line has always seemed weird and culty to me. People can be ethically vegan at one time and then stop being at a later time.

It also seems to misunderstand how morality works. Sometimes people change their mind about moral issues, even in dumb ways. The fact that people are correct about an issue at a time doesn’t mean they can’t be incorrect at later times. Other times, people start doing wrong things when doing the right thing is costly or difficult. What are we, once saved always saved evangelicals?

8 Conclusion

I’ve suggested that vegans should stop saying a bunch of things that they often say. The main thing these lines have in common is being false. The ones that aren’t false make it harder to persuade people. In general, when defending veganism, one should avoid making extreme claims.

We’re already making extreme claims: most times people eat food, they’re doing something wrong. Those extreme claims happen to be supported by decisive arguments. We don’t need to make weird extra claims like that meat consumption technically counts as a holocaust. Instead, one should aim to say what’s true in as plain and uncontroversial a way as they can muster.

Here is the basic argument for animal universalism: animal welfare is a good thing. It’s good for dogs and pigs to be happy. When a dog lies in the sun and feels happy, that is good. God is morally perfect (on the standard religious views which we’re considering). Thus, if God is choosing between capriciously snuffing out animals or giving them an eternity of bliss, he’d give them an eternity of bliss.

For a parallel case, imagine that a deer is dangling off a cliff. You can either:

1. Let it die.

2. Rescue it at no personal cost and take it to a farm where it will live forever in infinite sublime bliss.

Clearly the second option is better, and God saving animals is relevantly like it! God, in his infinite wisdom, can think of a better fate for animals than being wiped from existence. God, in his infinite goodness, would actualize this better state. Thus, all dogs, pigs, fish, and shrimp go to heaven. This is basically the argument that Dustin Crummett makes in his paper on the subject.

There are a few other arguments pointing in the same direction. For instance, if you think animals go to heaven, you have an easier time explaining why animals are permitted to suffer so much in this life. That is easier to explain if their pain and hardships are infinitely outweighed in the life to come. In addition, for those who take at least the Hebrew Bible seriously, there are passages like Isaiah 11:6 which are best explained by animal universalism:

The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling^[a] together;
and a little child will lead them.

But the basic argument—it’s good for animals to be happy, so God would make them happy forever—strikes me as by far the most decisive. It’s enough to settle the debate. The standard arguments for humans going to hell don’t apply to animals. Pigs and sheep can’t understand right and wrong, and thus they cannot deserve to suffer. Nor can they repeatedly culpably sin or lock the gates of hell from the inside. I am thus a lot more confident that all dogs go to heaven than that all people do—and I’m pretty confident that all people do.

So what are the arguments against animal universalism, aside from prejudice against anything that sounds vaguely liberal?

I decided to watch Brian Besong’s opening statement in his debate with Alexander Pruss on the subject to hear his argument. I didn’t find any of his arguments at all convincing.

His first argument is that heaven consists of receiving the beatific vision—a direct encounter with God. But animals, lacking rationality, couldn’t receive the beatific vision. Thus, they can’t go to heaven.

Each step of this seems very dubious. Why think that rationality is required for the beatific vision? Why think that God couldn’t equip animals with whichever faculties are needed to allow them to receive the beatific vision? Humans are, in this life, wildly psychologically defective—if God can equip us to receive the beatific vision, why can’t he do that for animals? In addition, even if animals can’t receive the beatific vision, they can still receive eternal reward in the afterlife. Perhaps this wouldn’t technically count as heaven on the Catholic view, but it still means animals would have an eternal postmortem paradise.

Besong’s second argument is that one needs to cooperate with Christ to go to heaven. One can only go to heaven, on his view, if one merits entrance into heaven. We merit entrance into heaven by cooperating with Jesus. But animals can’t deserve anything, so they can’t get into heaven.

Again, it’s not clear why God can’t equip animals with whichever faculties are needed to make morally significant decisions in the next life. Presumably he could slowly increase the intellectual abilities of animals until they were capable of making consequential moral decisions. So why wouldn’t he?

In addition, the inference from “humans need to merit heaven,” to “animals need to merit heaven,” is very dubious. Humans are capable of deserving things. Animals are not. So while it makes sense that humans wouldn’t be able to go to heaven unless they deserve it, it makes a lot less sense for animals.

Lastly, even if animals don’t deserve the beatific vision, they still presumably either deserve other reward or don’t need to deserve reward for it to be good to bestow it on them. Nobody thinks it’s wrong to give dogs belly rubs on grounds that they’re undeserved. Why not an eternity of belly rubs?

Besong then argues against the idea that animals could have an eternity of happy life on grounds that animal happiness depends on bodily processes like eating. However, if they were eating, they’d be hungry, and if they were hungry, there would be variations in their blessedness. He then questions whether they would defecate and expresses incredulity that heaven would contain defecation.

This seems like a totally bizarre chain of inferences. First of all, animals could be happy without eating. God is infinitely powerful and smart. You think he can’t think of a way to make animals happy forever without needing them to eat food? God designed the psychophysical laws and all the physical facts about animals. Heck, I can think of a way to have animals be happy forever without eating (just make them naturally happy)—and God is infinity times smarter than me.

Second, to eat, they wouldn’t need to get hungry. They could just be motivated to act without feeling hunger pains. Third, even if there were variations in their blessedness, why in the world would that be so decisively bad as to make it not worth giving them eternal afterlives? Fourth, God in his omnipotence and infinite wisdom could dispose of waste without needing animals to poop (say, by spontaneously causing food to disappear once it enters their stomach). Fifth, even if they did have to poop, God could obviously clean up their poop by miracle.

These arguments outrageously underestimate God’s ability. Remember, we’re talking about the Lord of the universe here. He’s not going to be stymied by engineering challenges.

Besong then suggests, “it would be strange to think that in the heavenly landscape you’ve got dogs copulating off behind a tree.” The responses to the point about hunger apply here as well. God can make dogs happy without needing them to copulate. But in any case, is the fact that Brian Besong personally finds dogs copulating to be strange a good reason to think that God would capriciously snuff them out instead of allowing them to be happy forever? Maybe the copulating dogs could be off in their own separate area.

He also then worries that if dogs in heaven were copulating all the time, there would be “exponentially large” numbers of animals. Surely God can think of a way to prevent dog sex from leading to reproduction! In any case, if dogs being in heaven is good, why would the number increasing be bad?

Besong then argues that if dogs were made happy all the time, a bit like a drug overdose, that would be a “placation” of an animal’s nature, not a fulfillment of it. But surely it is possible for God to work out some pleasures that neither have whatever objectionable features are present in drug overdoses, nor required the various Fs: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and reproduction. Animals could enter states akin to those reached during deep meditation, appreciate the beauty of nature, feel deep joy and gratitude, or be given the ability to grasp deep intellectual truths. They could enjoy one another’s company.

Another argument that people sometimes give against animals going to heaven is that they have “animative souls.” These kinds of souls apparently can’t grasp universals or persist after the death of the body. Now, I am very dubious about this metaphysical view. It isn’t at all clear what the connection is supposed to be between the diminished rationality of animals’ nature and their inability to survive bodily death.

But even if there was such a connection, God could simply teleport animals away from harm whenever they were about to die. He could replace them with physical duplicates of their corpse and allow the animal to live forever in paradise. That seems better. Now, obviously this would be a bit weird, but if doing something weird is the only way God can prevent dogs, cows, and pigs from being wiped permanently from existence, then he would.

Up until now, almost every sentient being who has ever lived has died a horribly painful death after just a short period of time. If you think God wouldn’t rectify that situation, despite being able to do so, to an infinite degree, at no cost, I think you have badly underestimated either his ingenuity or his goodness.

Matthew: My general view on the God question is that I think there are quite a few different individual bits of evidence for God’s existence, each persuasive individually, and decisive in combination. Take, for instance, the fine-tuning argument, which proceeds from the fact that we have both constants and law structures that are conducive to life. The cosmological constant, for instance, falls in a tiny range that gives rise to life roughly one googolth of the possible values it could have taken on. That strikes me as quite surprising and good evidence for God. If there is a God, life permitting laws and constants are expected—if not, they’re quite striking.

This is just one of the many lines of evidence. You combine that with psychophysical harmony, the anthropic data, and a bunch of other considerations and it seems pretty decisive. What would you make of that, Richard?

Richard: I worry that those arguments may ultimately prove to be sophistry, and am more drawn to a kind of flat-footed empiricism: Does the world look more like it contains or lacks a God? Seems lacking to me. The problems of evil and divine hiddenness loom especially large from this perspective.

Here’s one way to put the contrast: There are any number of ways the universe could be, given atheism. Some look like ours. Many don’t (and aren’t even capable of supporting life). It’s not at all obvious why there’d be something like this rather than something different or nothing at all. Maybe it’s just brute. So the fine-tuning and psychophysical harmony arguments are on to something when they point out that the atheist has to take our (mentally coherent) existence to be a striking piece of good luck. It’s surprising!

Theism puts more “selection pressure” on expected outcomes. The problem is that the universe we’d expect from a perfect God is one very different from ours—we’d expect much less wild animal suffering, for starters, and more divine chit-chat. So whereas atheism doesn’t steer us towards any particular style of universe, theism would seem to steer definitively away from ours.

Matthew: I agree that the world is, in many ways, not the one we’d expect if there were to be a God. But crucially, I think that this is also not one we’d expect on atheism. So one has to compare relative probabilities. As an analogy, on the hypothesis that I’m cheating, it’s very unlikely that I would be so stupid as to deal myself ten royal flushes in a row. But if I do get ten royal flushes in a row, that is obviously very strong evidence that I’m cheating.

The way of going about this, in my judgment, is straightforward: be a Bayesian. Look at how likely you’d guess the facts of the world to be if given atheism vs if given theism. If you were an atheist disembodied mind floating freely, you would not expect the universe to contain fine-tuning, laws capable of producing any structure, or psychophysical harmony. Nor would you expect the shocking anthropic fact that you, Richard Chappell, happen to exist out of the infinite possible agents that could exist.

Now you say that it could just be brute. But declaring a fact brute does not do anything to raise the probability that the fact would obtain on bare atheism. What matters is how likely you’d expect the fact to be given atheism vs given theism.

Why accept this methodology? Why be a Bayesian even when applied to the earliest bits of the universe? This is the right methodology to apply to other kinds of things (for instance, it is quite a serious probabilistic hit if hypothesis A merely must declare fact B brute, when B is not expected given A but B is expected given views other than A). But why should theism and atheism be any different? Epistemology doesn’t work differently just because you’re working with God! (And note, there are various betting arguments for Bayesianism applied in other contexts).

Now, if that’s the methodology then I think that atheism will likely lose. There are a great many features of the world that are quite shocking given atheism and only one that is really surprising given theism. That feature is that the world is filled with pointless evil. Fortunately, I think that while this fact is surprising, the theist can explain it without taking too much of a probabilistic hit—both because there’s a not totally crazy theodicy and there’s the possibility of a great many unknown reasons.

But compare that to fine-tuning. On atheism fine-tuning is extremely unexpected (on the order of having a probability of one in googol, provided you either use the indifference principle or some other natural procedure. (Clarificatory note added later: I am not quite sure why I said this! I obviously don’t think the odds of fine-tuning given atheism are one in googol. I think those are the odds assuming fine-tuning has no explanation, but obviously the odds of a multiverse are way, way, way more than that. Probabilities are never one in googol.) Additionally, I don’t think there are any plausible naturalistic explanations of fine-tuning that really take away the sting much.

I think probably evil and fine-tuning basically crash into each other and cancel out—then on the theist side we’re left with the anthropic argument, psychophysical harmony, the fact that there are laws at all, nomological harmony, the fact we’re not in a skeptical scenario, moral knowledge, and far more. On the atheistic side we’re left with little. So I guess I’d ask you Richard: what do you think of my support for the broadly Bayesian methodology? And do you think there’s some not-super-implausible way to explain fine-tuning?

Richard: I think you really just have two arguments: anthropics and fine-tuning. The various harmony arguments are thematic variations on fine-tuning, and seem likely to stand or fall together.

I’m not sure how to assess the anthropic argument; it’s interesting, for sure. But I disagree that evil and fine-tuning “cancel out”: I think the former is orders of magnitude stronger. Some might take the problem of evil to establish that God’s existence is strictly incompatible with the world we observe, whereas there’s no question that atheism is at least compatible with our observations. So a lot hangs on whether one finds any theodicies to be remotely plausible. (Not a debate we can settle today!)1

Neither atheism nor theism especially predicts the particular world we find ourselves in. Theism concentrates probability on the best possible world, not ours. The fine-tuning argument cherry-picks general features of the best possible world that happen to be shared by ours—it contains life!—and pretends that this means that theism predicts our situation. But that’s a trick, like p-hackers testing 20 variables and only reporting back on the one that suits their narrative. What theism really predicts is a very different life-supporting world than the one we observe.

Picture a probability distribution layered over a space of possible worlds. Theism sucks up probability from outlier worlds and pipes it all to the best possible world. Theodicies poke holes in the pipes, in the hopes that some probability might leak back into our world. The contest between our rival arguments then comes down to whether we should expect our world to gain more probability from inbound leaky pipes than we lose to the “best possible” pump. My money is on the pump.

One last point I want to stress in response to your arguments is that we have very little idea what the “natural” probability distribution over possible universes should look like. You suggest that fine-tuning has “a probability of one in googol, provided you either use the indifference principle or some other natural procedure.” But this neglects higher-order or model uncertainty. The likelihood that your background assumptions are wrong is much higher than one in a googol!2 It’s genuinely obscure to me what priors we should have across the space of possible universes, and I think we should give some weight to priors on which a world like ours is much more likely than you suggest.3

Let’s shift angles. Up till now, we’ve assumed a particular conception of God: one on which he is all good, and hence actualizes better worlds (containing life) over worse (empty) ones. But isn’t that cheating? Why not expect God to love paperclips rather than people? Isn’t it a striking coincidence that, out of all the possible gods in logical mind-space, we got the one-in-a-googol whose motivations are fine-tuned for life?

Matthew: You’re right that evil might be incompatible with theism while fine-tuning is definitely not incompatible with atheism. But that doesn’t tell us much about the relative force of the arguments. Compare: me getting ten royal flushes is not incompatible with me playing fair poker. In contrast, it might be that various facts in physics are incompatible with the standard model—and you wouldn’t have expected them on the bare standard model. Nevertheless, obviously me getting ten royal flushes is better evidence that I’m cheating than anomalies in physics are against the standard model. What matters is probabilities not whether some hypothesis has a chance of being incompatible with the other hypothesis.

I also agree theism doesn’t predict our world. My claim is merely that it predicts it better than atheism. Compare: if I see a piece of paper in front of you that contains some crude drawing, it would be evidence that you drew it rather than that you randomly spilled ink that was in that pattern. This is so even though my prior in you making a crude drawing is rather low.

Now, regarding why I think God is good—I’ve sketched this out in a bit more detail here, but let me give the brief outline. I’m a dualist (I know you are too Richard, but a lot of the audience won’t be—so I’ll link Richard’s powerful arguments for dualism). I think that mind and matter are, therefore, distinct and don’t reduce to each other. The world is, therefore, filled with three kinds of things: minds, physical stuff, and abstract objects.

Now, I think of theism—of the sort I advocate—as the hypothesis that simply one of these things (mind) exists totally without limit. God is a mind without limit. Being unlimited, nothing restricts his power or knowledge. Because he has no rational constraints, following Parfit, he’d be motivated to always do the right thing.

Now, it’s true that a limitless mind is just one of infinite conceivable designers. But crucially it’s a much simpler and more modest hypothesis than the other designers with random built in desires, powers, and bits of knowledge. It posits one of the fundamental things exists without limit. Just as the theory that space has uniform laws all throughout is much better than any of the infinite theories on which the laws of physics break down in a random patch, I think the theory that there’s a totally unlimited mind has a higher prior than the limited god hypotheses. Then, when we observe that it fits the data way better than alternatives, it’s worth believing. (Note: I think even if you think there’s a low but non-trivial chance that theism is very simple, it will still start with a big share of the prior space for reasons I lay out here).

One final point about P-hacking: I think almost all atheistic worlds wouldn’t be expected to have any conscious agents at all. So it’s not like I’m just picking random good things that are a bit unlikely. I think the fact the world has even a tiny sliver of value is very much more expected given theism than atheism—especially because most conceivable laws produce nothing of value, plus we need finely-tuned constants, and there’s no reason for any physical arrangements to give rise to consciousness.

Richard: So it all comes down to whether “mind without limit” entails moral perfection. I don’t see why it would. Wanting things other than what one objectively ought to want doesn’t strike me as a metaphysical “limitation” on a mind. A paperclip God has just as much Mind as a beneficent God; it’s just directed towards different ends. We happen to have a simple-sounding concept that unpacks into some specific set of (potentially very diverse) ideal desires. But I don’t think the simple tag we apply to it makes the ideal desire set any “simpler” or more metaphysically “modest” than a singular desire for nothing but paperclips. Perfect virtue may be an extremely complex psychological property, and not one we have any reasons of parsimony to especially expect to see realized.

Perhaps we can wrap up with a look at the practical implications of theism. People often move rather quickly from a philosophical belief in theism to acceptance of some particular world religion (such as Christianity) that memetically evolved to demand proselytizing. If you think the fate of others’ immortal souls depends on their converting to your religion, missionary work could start to look a lot more important than literally anything else.

But a truly good God couldn’t possibly be so petty as to punish honest non-believers who are trying their best to make sense of the world in which they find themselves. So I can’t imagine why God would want us to do anything other than what would be independently good and worth doing whether he exists or not. If I’m right about this, then—intellectually stimulating as this debate may be—the outcome probably shouldn’t make any difference to how we live our lives. What do you think?

Matthew: I didn’t mean to suggest that being evil is inherently a limit. I don’t think it is intrinsically, at least not qua mind. What I suggested was that being ignorant of some facts is a limit on a mind. It means its awareness is restricted. So therefore if a mind is totally without limit, it would know every fact and lack any rational constraints so always pursue the good. Just as a rational agent would, as you’ve noted, care about their own interests on a future Tuesday, they’d also care about the interests of others.

Note: you don’t have to think this is very probable. All it needs to start out is not astronomically improbable. Then when you update on all the surprising things about our world, you get a high likelihood of theism.

I agree with you that a good God would not send people to an eternal hell. I suppose I think the practical implications of theism are:

1. You should, after learning there’s an afterlife, prioritize how things go throughout eternity over trivial pleasures. So you should prioritize building relationships over short term pleasures.

2. You should seriously investigate various religions to see if any are correct.

3. You should pray and attempt psychologically to cultivate a relationship with God.

But I would grant that most of the normal EA causes are just as good as they’d otherwise have been even if we’re theists. In fact, they’re likely better!