#137 Debunking Arguments for God - Graham Oppy

Hey, I'm going on a tour of the United Kingdom. If you've ever been interested in that big question of God's existence, or try to make sense of religion in the 21st century, or consciousness, or anything philosophical, then join me on stage as I try to work out some of these topics with you. I'll be in conversation with a good friend, but also bring questions because there will be an extensive Q&A, and maybe even an opportunity to hear and rate some of your philosophical hot takes. The tour dates are on-screen. The link to buy tickets is in the description, and I hope to see you there. Graham, I'll be. Welcome to the show. Thanks for inviting me. Welcome back to the show. We have had you on before a few years ago, where we talked about atheism and whether it's a view that needs justification, which was interesting. However, of course, atheism is a view that positions itself contra another position. You've got theism, and the atheist is the person that says, "I don't believe that that's true." And so, a lot of the discussion around atheism is not so much positive cases for why God doesn't exist. But rather, the reasons that people give for believing in God don't really suffice, or don't really do it for us. And to that effect, I thought that I'd bring you back today, as one of the most respected academic philosophers who is an atheist and writes about atheism, to talk about some of the most popular and respected arguments for the existence of God, and see why we think that they might fail if that sounds good with you. Yeah, that sounds fine. So, I think a good place to start. And you wrote a book about this a few years ago, a number of years ago called, "Arguing about Gods." And you started with ontological arguments, but I think maybe a sort of softer way in and a more familiar way in for most people listening might be to start with the so-called cosmological family of arguments, which involves causation. It involves the idea that there must be some kind of first cause or explanation or necessary foundation for things which exist. Cosmology sort of looks backwards to the beginning of the universe, or downwards to the foundation of the universe. How would you best characterize this family of arguments? And what are some of its different forms? Okay, so I think you did a pretty good job there. Lots of these arguments appeal to some kind of principle of causation or exploitation or sufficient reason. And the idea is that you expect to find causes or sufficient reasons or explanations for the existence of certain kinds of things, and then the way that the arguments developed by theists for the cause or the explanation or the sufficient reason turns out to be gone. I think that's that one capture all of them, but it captures enough with them. Now, I think one of the interesting things you said there was that things have some kind of reason, or I can't remember the exact word you used, maybe explanation or something like that. And we're getting at something that's I think's quite important that you've written a lot about, which is this so-called principle of sufficient reason, which underlies probably, I would say, the most popular version of the contingency cosmological argument that I hear today, which is, if I can try to sort of lay out a brief sketch of this, the idea that basically anything which occurs, for anything that happens or anything that exists, there must be some sufficient explanation or sufficient reason for why that thing occurs or why that thing exists. In other words, we're not just satisfied to say that something is true, we want to say there must be a reason that it's true. That doesn't mean we need to know what that reason is, maybe it's beyond our comprehension, but there must be some kind of reason. And then through a series of stages, the theist might say, we're in a world full of objects and events and things, and well, there must be a sufficient reason why this microphone exists. But then whatever the reason for the microphone existing, there must be a sufficient reason for that thing and whatever the reason for that thing is there must be a sufficient reason for that thing. And that can't go on infinitely. And so there must be a sort of self-justifying thing at the beginning of all of this that does have a reason for its existence, but contains its own reason within itself. And that is what you might call a necessary being, something whose existence is like self-explanatory. And that thing typically gets the label of God. So let's go back to the start here and let's look at this really important principle called the principle of sufficient reason that for anything that is true, there is a sufficient reason why it's true. Do you think it's a good principle? It depends what you mean by sufficient reason. What we're going to suppose is needed. If you think that the sufficient reason has to necessitate what it explains, then you're going to get into trouble. I think that if we think about a plausible principle of this kind, it's going to be one that says if something happens, there's any explanation for the happening, but it needn't be determining explanation. It needn't be that this was the only thing that could happen. So if we think about a causal principle of sufficient reason, I think that it's got to be consistent with indeterministic causation. So the world was a certain way that meant there are limited range of options that could happen at the next point. One of them did, there's no explaining where you got that one rather than one of the others. That kind of principle of sufficient reason looks like it's plausible to me, and it's one that pretty much everybody can accept, I think. So how does a theist typically go from whatever their version of the principle of sufficient reason is? What is that reason? How do they go from that to constructing an argument for what they call God? Okay, so there are different ways of doing this. You could think of the principle in the in column arguments. There's a version of a principle of sufficient reason. The principle that says whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning to exist, and it's our cause. That swim straight forwardly, the idea is we trace back things that begin to exist. It can't go back infinitely, so it can't be a reagress. So we're going to come back, we're going to come to something that exists but wasn't caused to exist by anything else. And as you said, there kind of a natural thing to say at this point is that that thing exists of necessity, necessary things don't need causes. So that would be that would be one version. There are there are other versions which say think about the collection of all of the things that have causes or explanations. And think about that sum and ask what explains it. And by construction that sum was all of the things that have explanation, explanations in terms of other things. So whatever is going to do the explaining is something that's not explained in terms of something else. So again, a kind of necessity, it may not be the same kind of necessity that we end up in every case. But the idea is that there's this necessary thing that all of the things that have explanation are explained ultimately in terms. So that will be a couple ways. And then the thing is supposed to be, I mean, this bit of the argument is much harder to make out, the thing that's doing the explaining here is supposed to be God. Yeah, it's always difficult to sort of jump that final hurdle, isn't it? But a lot of these arguments, they don't seek necessarily to establish the God of the Christian Bible or something. You might sort of start with an argument that establishes that there is some kind of primary cause to the universe. And you come up with a bunch of other reasons to come up with the attributes that that being might have. In this instance, I'm intrigued by what I see is quite an intuitive principle. This idea that for anything which occurs, there must be a sufficient reason. And for me, what a sufficient reason means is that it's some kind of explanation which leaves no mystery as to why a particular thing happened. So if something happens and we'll call it event E, then if I have sufficiently explained E, then there's no mystery about why E happened anymore. So when somebody says there could be like non-deterministic causation or probabilistic determination, maybe there's just like an 80% chance that E was going to happen and that suffices as an explanation. To me, I think maybe that plays a part of the story of explaining why E occurred. But as for why it occurred in this case, when it could have not, and yeah, there was only a 20% chance that it wouldn't have, but it did in this instance. And if I ran it a hundred times and 20 of those times, it wouldn't. If I was, as I would be in this circumstance, not entirely clear on why in this instance it happened versus the other, I think there's still some mystery there. And therefore, I don't think that a probabilistic explanation is a sufficient explanation. I think it can only ever be about as sufficient as the sort of percentage probability with which it predicts the event, if you see what I'm saying. Right. So some people do respond that way. I think that if you genuinely have indeterminist, then mystery is no longer an issue. There were a range of things that could happen. You know that for sure. There's just this range of things. And you get one of them. Right. And there's nothing further to say about why you get this one rather than one of the others. And that just means that's all the explaining that it's possible to give. It's not like there's some, there's some further explaining that could be given so that there was a mystery here that could be solved. Now you might not like the idea of indeterminism. That's a different matter. But if you go that, if you go the alternate route and you say no causal indeterminism. So in order to explain something, we have to have something that necessitates it. Right. We couldn't have got anything else. We're going to end up with it looks and so everything's necessary. That's where it looks like that's heading. And there have been fears or there have been philosophers including particulars. I'm theorists have gone that way. So I'll admit it's famously seen to come around to the view that there's just one possible world. The actual, everything, everything that happens happens with necessity. And lots of people think that's not really a comfortable position to land up in. I admit that it's one of the views that you can take. But the alternative is to say, even if you're committed to principal succession reason, right? It's just to say once you've got your complete indeterministic explanation, that's all the explaining there is and we should be happy with it. I think, you know, I'm dissatisfied with probability as an explanation. But for those listening, it doesn't do it for me, but it might help to think in terms of like, you know how atoms are randomly vibrating. And it just so happens that there are so many of them sort of randomly vibrating that they also cancel each other out and objects remain relatively stationary. In principle, there's nothing stopping from all of the atoms in like this microphone or the computer in front of me from just spontaneously all just shifting a meter to the left. An object could if all of the atoms happened to sort of vibrate with force in that direction, it could just sort of shuffle along to the left hand side. But that doesn't happen. We've never seen that happen. And you might say, well, why not? You know, why is it sitting still? I say, well, because the probability of those atoms doing that is so, so low that we've just got an extremely high probability that the computer will remain still. Same thing with thermodynamics. If I spray an aerosol can and the smell spreads out across the room, that's all probabilistic. You know, in theory, again, in principle, those molecules that came out of the can could spontaneously, you know, find their way into a cup on the table or something. And when we say, well, why didn't it do that? Why is it spread out? We say because the probability is just so extremely high. And for most people, that does it. That's like, yeah, fair enough. That sort of counts as an explanation. Even though it's not a deterministic one, it's only a probabilistic one. So I think it's a little bit easier to see when the probabilities are are just that high. Why that functions for some people as a sort of sufficient, sufficient reason. But I think it is worth highlighting what you said as well, which is that if you take my view, which is that there's things to have a sufficient reason, they essentially must, like, if P is a sufficient reason for Q, that's the same thing as saying that P entails Q, you know, that you can't have P and not have Q follow it. And I think that is roughly the view that I take. But then, you know, I said I describe this view as intuitive and plausible, but I think it has holes in it as well. But I thought that was worth sort of spelling out for spelling out for people, but take this probabilistic thing, you know, that your championing here, how does that change anything? Like, does the argument no longer run in the same way if we say that, okay, well, a sufficient reason will include things like non-deterministic explanation, but you still have this chain of explanation that even if it's just probabilistic, sort of stretches back into time or stretches down into foundation of reality, and that still has to terminate somewhere, right? That's that's right. So one question will be let's one back to the first bit of causing the first arrow. And I'll ask about, okay, so we, one minute before side of the arrow, we've got something that we're supposing is necessary. On the after sign of the arrow, we've got some contingency because the arrow itself is indeterministic, right? So they could have been different things that came out, but necessary thing. If you put the deterministic view, there'd just be one thing that could come out. But I don't think that it does make a difference. If you did say that against infinite regress, it's not going to make any difference. Your argument for a starting point is going to look just the same. Sure. Okay, so then let's talk about that idea of an infinite regress, right? Because I think most people intuitively, whether they want to accept the principle of sufficient reason in its entirety or not, we'll say, okay, I think yeah, most things require causes. There are some causal chains that exist somewhere in the universe, right? And they do have to terminate somewhere. And they're either going to terminate in something like randomness, things just occur for no reason. That seems a bit sort of dissatisfying. So instead, this kind of seems like it has to terminate in, again, this sort of self-justifying principle, called necessity. Or one option is that it goes back on forever, right? So a lot of atheists have just said, maybe the big bang wasn't the beginning of the universe, maybe there is an infinite past, or maybe there's an infinite sort of downward scientific explanation if you prefer. And that just goes on forever. And you have the so-called "Hume Edwards" principle that, as long as each individual moment in the chain is explained by the bit previous, no "P" is explained by "Q" and "Q" is explained by "R" and "R" is explained by "P1" and so on. Then each individual component is explained, therefore the whole thing is explained. But a lot of philosophers say that this kind of thing just can't go back on infinitely. And I wondered if you could give us the most robust case that you can as to why people think that can't be the case. So that's actually quite difficult to do. There's lots and lots of different attempts that have been made to show that somehow or other, there's something just incoherent in the idea of an infinite regress. It's going to be difficult to establish this because there's nothing incoherent in models that we can make. Like just use the negative numbers, right? -1 minus 2 minus 3 going backwards. It's not somehow other than the arithmetic of the negative integers that's incoherent. So it looks like we can make models of some kind. And the kinds of arguments that you get, for example, the kinds of arguments that have been going around recently based on Benedictine's grim reaper paradox that are supposed to show that you can't have causal infinitism so you can't have an infinitum pass. Those arguments are very tricky. And not I think particularly intuitive either. Yeah, well, a lot of people just sort of point to what they see as a general implausibility of infinity. So people might be familiar with the Hilbert's hotel stuff right where it just seems like "infinity" kind of leads to a paradox. And that's enough for some people to say this "infinity" thing, it just can't exist. It leads to all kinds of problems. If "infinity" minus 1 is infinity, then I can make 1 equals 0. And that's just a huge problem. So that's just not allow infinities. It's like dividing by 0 or something. It's just not something that we sort of allow to to occur. But one of my favorite lines of thought here that I've been talking a lot about recently is this difference between what the philosophers call the "per say" and the "per accident" causal chain. And I want to try to avoid using Latin if possible. So instead I'll call it horizontal and hierarchical causation, even though that's not quite perfect as a term. You'll know what I'm talking about here, but in brief, if you imagine the dominoes knocking each other over, each of those dominoes seems to have its own causal power. Like if I knock over that first domino and then the next one knocks over the next one, the next one knocks over the next one, I can take that first domino and I can throw it away. I don't need it anymore and that chain will keep on going. Another favorite example is how my father caused me to exist, my father could now die, and I would now have my own causal power to bring about a sun, even though he's not there anymore. And you can call this horizontal causation just for ease's sake. But there's this other kind of causation in which the individual components don't have their own causal power. So the microphone in front of me, which gets a lot of attention in these kinds of conversations, because it's always right there, is being held up helpfully by this microphone stand. And so the microphone is kind of caused by the microphone stand, at least its position is. But the microphone stand doesn't have the causal power on its own to hold up the microphone. It borrows it from the ground, because the ground wasn't there. It's not like the microphone stand would just be floating there, so it borrows it from the ground, but the ground that this is on is, well, the floor that it's on is borrowing it from the foundations of the building that I'm in. But those foundations of the building are borrowing that causal power from the earth and so on and so forth. And a difference with this kind of causation is that, unlike being up to remove that first domino, if you remove any more foundational sort of moment in that causal chain, if I remove the floor, for example, then the whole rest of the causal chain disappears instantly and no long the microphone wouldn't be here anymore if that were the case. Now, I know you know all of that, but the reason why I think that's that's useful to think about is because if if in this kind of causation, the microphone stand doesn't have any causal power at all of its own, it only borrows it from something else. But the thing it borrows it from doesn't have any causal power, borrows it from something else, that borrows it from something else, that borrows it from something else. I can see those dominoes stretching back infinitely. You know, maybe domino zero was knocked over by domino minus one, that was knocked over by domino minus two, minus three minus four. Yeah, and that just goes on infinitely. Fine, because each one has its own causal power. But if you have to borrow it from something more foundational, but the things that are being borrowed from don't have any causal power. That's not something that can go back on infinitely, because if you had this infinite chain of causal actors that had zero causal power, then there'd be no causal power in the chain and there'd be no effect. And yet there is a microphone in front of me, Professor Opie, so how could that possibly go on infinitely? There must be something at the ground from which that causal power is all being borrowed. Ergo, in this kind of causation, you can't have an infinite series of causation. What do you make of that? So I think that it's true that if you've got hierarchical chains, they're going to be finite, they're going to terminate. But different chains will terminate in different things, and the things that they terminate in will not be candidates to be got. So take your example of a theme being held up by the earth. So this was a kind of causal chain of things being held up by other things. What holds up the earth? Well, sorry, you've, at this point, we've just departed from any sensible understanding of physics, if you think that there's an answer to that question. The earth isn't held up by anything. And so we get to our sort of unheld up, holed up era at that point. It's the earth. Is that God answer straightforwardly? No. Right. So that's that particular example. Take a different example. One that was also quite common in the literature. There's a ball roll. No, I'll make it a hoop rolling along beside me because I've got a stick. And I'm using the stick to make the hoop roll. And so the stick is making the hoop roll. My arm is moving the stick. I'm moving my arm. Now, what's moving me? At this point, we've reached again the kind of end of the movement chain, but I'm not God. Right. So the plausible examples of the kind that you're giving, I agree. There are these hierarchical chains. But they always, all of the kind of examples that you can come up with. And there are different ones. Like, I mean, here's another one. You watch it. You're at a level crossing. Trains going past. There's a bunch of carriages. Each carriage is pulling the one next to it. But somewhere up the front, there's an engine. And there's nothing that's pulling it along. So it turns out to be the thing that's not merely being pulled along by other things. It's pulling everything. Right. And that's what one terminates. And so the kind of question to ask is, what's the example of something where it's plausible that this terminates in something beyond the universe? And I don't believe that there's any example of that car. Well, is that, is the problem there just, I guess, like the words that we're using, right? Because I said, you know, the microphone is being held up. And you're quite right. Like, once you say what's holding up the earth, you've kind of lost track of what we're talking about, because to be held up is really to sort of have an object between you and the earth. That's kind of what we mean by being held up in some respect, right? But then maybe instead, I should just say, okay, well, what I really meant then is like, why is the microphone where it is? As phrase it like that. And the same same answer, you know, well, it's where it is. Because the microphone stand is where it is, you know, and the microphone stand is where it is, because the floor is where it is. And then you'd get to saying, well, yeah, why is the earth where it is? You might say, why is the earth not just shifts the problem though, because now let's consider what this where it is is relative to. Once we get to the universe, we can't ask why is the universe where it is? That was exactly the same kind of reference problem that I was thinking comes up in the case of the hole. But then what I'm going to say is, okay, you're quite right. But what you just said there is that, you know, I've pushed the problem back. And that's true. But what if I can keep pushing the problem back until we get to the universe? So what have I said? Okay, fair enough. I shouldn't have said, why is the microphone where it is? I should have said something like, why does the microphone have the properties that it has, right? Which includes its spatial location. And now it might get a bit more complicated, because I might say, well, it's got the properties it has because, you know, it's black because of the designer of the Sure SM7B. Its spatial location is because of the microphone stand, all of that kind of stuff. But if we followed one of those, one of those threats, we might say, well, you know, this property at least, it has the property of its spatial location, because of the stand, and that's because of the earth, and that's because of so on and so forth. Oh, why does the earth have the properties that it does? Oh, because of, you know, some kind of universal laws of gravity and stuff like that. Well, yeah, why? And then we get to the universe, you know, some kind of big sort of collection of everything. And we say, well, why does the universe have the properties that it does? That does seem like a sensible question to me. And it seems like if there were an answer for why the universe had the properties that it has, we are now straying into the realm of a course that sort of exists outside of at least logically separable from the universe. So once you're asking about things, why do they have the properties that they do? There's two kinds of considerations here. One will be some of the reasons why it is the way it is at the moment is because of what other things are doing to it right now. And the other thing will be to do with its history, right? It has the properties that it now, because of the way that it was earlier, the way that other things were earlier. If we're asking the question at the level of the universe, why does the universe have the properties that it does? Once we've got to the universe right now, why is it the way it is? If you're me, you're going to say, well, to answer that question, we look to the past. So we've given up on horizontal exponents. Is that right? No, we've given up on vertical explanation at this point. We're now going to do it horizontally, right? And we're going to go back. If there's a first thing, but it's properties, it has a necessity, right? So it doesn't look like finding these kinds of, I mean, asking these kinds of questions about things in the universe, isn't at least by my words going to take you beyond the universe. I see, I guess what I'm trying to get at is to what extent the impotence of this line of thought is a result of the way that we're wording it, and the fact that we're unhelpfully choosing words like holding up, and how much for this in principle, because like poetically speaking almost, I could say, well, what holds up the earth? Well, that's a silly question. But in a way, I could say, well, you know, the earth is kind of held up by the sun, like in a sense. And as long as you kind of get what I'm saying there, you know that really I've maybe made a bit of a mistake with my language, but the point is still there, but the earth is there because of the sun. And I'm wondering like, is there, do you think there is any sort of perfectly designed version of like the language we were using that could get us to what the theist wants, which is a sort of direct line from the microphone to the to the god of the universe. So I suspect not. I mean, there is a kind of quite good version of this argument that Ed Faser gives in his five proofs book. But the thing that he focuses on from memory is something like unification of essence and existence. It's a very abstract theme, something that you might not think is happening in the world and that kind of requires some external doing. So what unifies your essence and existence has to be something else. And possibly that thing's going to be God. So it's a very short, very cool chain, sort of one step chain. But that's where he ends up with because he kind of concedes a point that about all of the standard examples that they just, I'm sorry, this way, they just peed around. They don't get you outside the universe. Yeah, and I'd recommend that that text as I have done in the past people and Ed Faser has been on this show as well to discuss the the argument from change. I think one thing that's that's probably worth mentioning here before kind of moving on is that I mentioned this to you over email is that one of my favorite objections to contingency arguments, any kind of argument that relies on contingency and necessity is this wonderful observation that was made by Peter Van in Wagon, which is known as the modal fatalism objection. And I think maybe it's worth trying to touch on. It can get a bit complicated, but I wonder if there's a kind of simple-ish version that we can get at. And it first relies on this controversial assumption. Again, we take the principle of sufficient reason. Let me say everything, which happens. There is a sufficient reason for why it happens. And you have to sort of be on my team for this to work. You have to say, well, a sufficient reason is the same thing as entailment. You know, if p is a sufficient reason for q, that means that if p happens, q must happen. p entails q. And I suppose the most interesting part of Van in Wagon's line of thought here is that if p is necessarily true, if it just cannot be false, then if p entails q, seems to imply that the q is also necessary. It would be weird to say that, yeah, p has to be true. And if p is true, then q is true. But q could be false. That doesn't make any sense. So if a necessary thing entails another thing, that other thing is necessary. Yet the first premise of contingency arguments for the existence of God are, there exist contingent objects, which could have not existed and then require an explanation for their existence. And ultimately, the theist wants to say that this is all explained by a necessary being. But if your first premise is that there are contingent objects, your conclusion is that everything is caused by a necessary being, or sufficiently explained by a necessary being, that's where this becomes relevant. Because if a necessary being or a necessary truth sufficiently explains everything in the universe, then because it's necessary and it entails everything in the universe, everything in the universe cannot be contingent. Therefore, the first premise doesn't even get off the ground. I know that's that's far from the entirety of what Van and Wagen says, but it's an interesting thought, you think. So I think that that is what Van and Wagen says. That is the objection that he's making to this style of argument. And I think that if you really want to hang on to the idea that there's a necessary cause, you better give up the idea that the cause or relation is a relation of necessitation, or you better, as I'm sorry, for you better just go with live nets and say, surprisingly, absolutely everything is necessary. Yeah. I think I say that the reason why I say it's not the totality of Van and Wagen's argument is because he gets quite specific about how this all works with his big conjunctive contingent fact and stuff like this, which I think is probably too complicated to get into verbally here, but I would recommend people go and read the paper. I think it's one of the most ingenious arguments I came across when I was first getting into contingency arguments years ago at university. But the basic point that I think is worth reflecting on, that I think not enough people spend time reflecting on, is that if a necessary being is like causally adequate to fully explain a contingent thing, there is a potential paradox lurking in there unless you're extremely careful because necessary things cannot entail contingent things. Or can they? I mean, I suppose that's the question to turn this off. Do you think that at least that part is true? Are we sort of misusing? Because some people have sort of told me that that's not quite how necessity and contingency works on some theories of logic. Is it just sort of, it seems to me almost, you know, like clear and distinct, as Descartes would say, that it seems obviously true that if something is necessary and it entails something, the thing it entails is also necessary. But is that always, is that necessarily true? So I think that that's true if you've got, so I'm just trying to think of the model, a little bit about modal logic now, so we've got necessarily P then Q and we've got necessarily P, right? So in a normal modal logic, we're going to have necessarily Q, that's, we can make weak modal logics in which you don't have that, but there have been very few people who thought that those weak modal logics are going to work for the explanation, relation, or something like that. Maybe it'll work for, you know, a deontic logic or something, something like that. Yeah, and I think, I think we're on the same page there as it were. And I'll try to remember to link all the various things I'm talking about in the description below. But, you know, some people will be listening to this and thinking, okay, cool, this contingency stuff is really interesting, but when I've heard of the cosmological argument, it's because I've seen these debates with William Lane Craig and he's talking about Kalam and things beginning to exist. So I think if, even if only briefly, we are going to have to give some attention here to this famous Kalam cosmological argument, popularized by that Dr. William Lane Craig, who has also been on this show, which is quite simple. Premise one, everything which begins to exist has a cause. Premise two, the universe began to exist. Conclusion, therefore, the universe has a cause. What do you think? Okay, so that's one thing. Sometimes the argument goes like this, whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning to exist. So they're actually two versions of the argument. It won't really matter. I don't think we're going to get so precise as to worrying about the difference between them. So there are two key things to think about in assessing the syllogism. One is what you mean by the universe and the other one is what you mean by begins to exist. So if you think that there's an initial state of the universe that's necessary, do we think that that kind of initial surface begins to exist? That's a kind of hard quote to address. If you compare with the situation facing the fierce, the fierce says so as God makes the initial state of the universe, but what about God? Does God, in a relevant sense, begin to exist? Is there a kind of difference between these questions, the sort of what theist of naturals could say in answering that question, is there a relevant difference between the options that they've got? So that does seem like it's the main thing to think about, I think. Yeah, sometimes it feels like the kind of paradoxes and like incomprehensibility that a theist describes to the atheist. Well, a universe can't be eternal and infinities don't seem to make much sense and stuff like that. When you start talking about God, some of these concepts seem to crop up again in various ways where they're treated as though they're a bit different. God is an infinite. He's just timeless. He hasn't existed for all time. He's existed for no time. And it kind of feels like a similar ish trick is being pulled, especially when you consider that modern physics tells us that time is a sort of dimension of the fabric of space time, right? It's just one dimension of the same kind of stuff that the universe has made out of. And so, if you sort of go back to the big bang, let's say, everything gets sort of condensed and everything sort of begins, it sort of feels like that point itself might be kind of described as timeless, you know, because it's this sort of infinite, almost all near infinite sort of density. And we know that mass changing in that way can have huge effects on time and time can slow down and speed up and stuff. And yeah, maybe we just sort of get this timeless thing at the beginning of the universe. And it seems a little unclear, I think, to a lot of people. And one of the points you make in this book I mentioned earlier that crops up quite consistently is like, even if this argument gets you somewhere, it doesn't seem to get you to something that you should call God. It gets you to, yeah, there's something weird going on at the beginning. There's some necessary existence. There's some first cause or bunch of causes, but to call it God seems a little bit misplaced perhaps. Right. Yeah. So that's the way that I'm inclined to respond. There is this other thing about what you exactly you mean by the universe, whether you think that the universe is just all of natural reality, or whether you think of it as our bit, this side of inflation, of our inflation, and there might be a whole lot more stuff, including a kind of background space that maybe goes back infinitely into the past with lots of inflating going on in different regions at different rates of time. And then our universe does turn, maybe turns out to have a cause in that background space, because there's a cause for the inflation to happen. What would give you a very different kind of response? And you kind of have to make a decision about what you're going to mean by the universe before we can really settle. Yeah. In my experience, most atheists I speak to, especially just sort of casually, hearing the column, they reject the second premise most readily, that the universe began to exist. They sort of say, oh, maybe the universe is infinite, or maybe, the universe that is the multiverse or stuff that before the big bang, maybe there's just more to it, and it seems like a pretty easy sort of thing to say. I'm also interested in the first premise, because you said it also, it depends what you mean by begins to exist, because I've made this point quite a lot that things don't really begin to exist, X, N, L, in the way that the theist wants the universe to begin to exist, X, N, L, when God creates it out of nothing. When we talk about things beginning to exist in a colloquial sense, it seems intuitive at first, right? Like everything which begins to exist has a cause, sure. But like, yeah, does a car begin to exist? There's no new material. Nothing's like popped into the universe. Instead, you've taken a bunch of pre-existing matter, a bunch of metal and some rubber and electrical wires and stuff, and you've just kind of arranged it, you should kind of put it in an arrangement and given it a label. And so it never really begins to exist in the literal sense. In fact, given that all of the matter of the universe, which we just rearrange to create objects like cars and microphones and lights and stuff, if that all originated at the big bang, then let's say the big bang is the beginning of the universe. Let's say the universe did have a beginning and it was called the big bang. Well, the first premise of the column is everything which begins to exist. And I kind of want to put in brackets here to make the argument truly valid. We'd have to say everything which begins to exist x, nilo, because that's what we're trying to get to. Everything which begins to exist out of nothing has a cause. Premise 2, the universe began to exist out of nothing. Therefore, the universe must have a cause. But if the only thing that's ever begun to exist out of nothing is the universe, because everything within the universe is just a rearrangement of matter, right? Like there's no new stuff. The only time anything has ever begun to exist in the literal sense is when the universe began to exist. Then the argument now reads like this, premise 1, the universe began to exist, because the premise is everything which begins to exist has a cause. And so sorry, rather, the first premise then becomes, if the first premise is everything which begins to exist has a cause, the only thing that really began to exist with the universe. So the first premise is now just the universe has a cause. Premise 2, the universe began to exist. The first premise becomes identical to the conclusion. I think that the colarm cosmological argument might actually be circular. Right. So it's quite tricky to give a good account of what circularity in arguments. Makes for, but I do think that there's a serious question about the first premise of the kind that you're pointing to. Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its beginning to exist. It really does matter what we decide we're going to main by begins to exist. Because if we decided that God begins to exist, in the relevant sense of begins to exist, there's no prior time at which God doesn't exist. Maybe that's enough to make it the case that God begins to exist. Well, it's no theory. It's going to say, oh, okay, so God's got a cause. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? And you know, when I had William Langraig on my show the first time, I presented this to him quite excitedly at the time. I was very young. And I was like, you know, I kind of think this is circular because I don't think that things really do begin to exist. Like in the way you want them to, I think you just sort of rearrange matter. And he says to me, you know, I don't think you realize how radical the view is that you're proposing. It's this view called myrological nihilism, which has since become a huge part of so many of the topics I talk about and my listeners will be hopefully quite familiar with the concept. But it's funny that that's how I was introduced to the concept because he said, well, you know, Alex, if if if a card, if there's no point in which the car began to exist, that means that right now the car doesn't really exist. And I was like, huh, but I was happy to kind of bite the bullet on that and say, yeah, you know what? I've, I still don't think that the column works, but I now also don't believe in distinct material objects. Thank you, William Lane Craig for giving me that existential crisis. Although I find it, I don't find it troubling a tool to be a myrological nihilist, but I do think as long as you're willing, so in other words, you should be aware of that potential implication. But I think as long as you're willing to accept that, like think about what the argument is saying, everything which begins to exist again, in what sense? Well, because our conclusion, we want to be talking about the universe being created like new stuff. Then to be consistent, we have to be talking about stuff beginning to exist in the same way. So when the premise says everything which begins to exist, we have to mean new stuff, everything which begins to exist as new stuff has a cause. And you kind of want to say, well, how on earth do you know that? Because when have you ever seen anything pop into existence and verify that it has a cause, you know? Right. So that's interesting. And this thing about cars where they begin to exist is really tricky too, because cars are assembled from components that are made in all kinds of different ways. I mean, in all kinds of different locations, typically, and then brought together and put together in a certain way. There's a certain amount of vagueness about exactly when a car begins to exist. I don't know whether that matters, but I mean presumably this is part of what feeds into your meriological nihilism, but you can't, you can't actually, so I mean, here's another part of the same thing. Suppose I like to take my car apart and sort of sits in the backyard, spread out all over the lawn. There's my car still exists while it's spread out all over the lawn. Or does it only exist to meet only when I put it all back together again, if it does, is there a kind of precise point at which I've put in just enough of the components that it now exists before it didn't? Yeah, it's tricky. I mean, the common example that I come across all the time or did when I read about this, I suppose, is somebody taking their watch or their clock in for repair, you know, and maybe the watch gets taken apart and the hands get sent off to one factory and the glass gets sent off to another and the leather strap gets sent off to a different factory and it's like, does the watch still exist? It seems at some point, like if I were to set it on fire and disintegrate it into individual like bits of ash, we probably want to say it's not there anymore. But like, you know, in theory, all the materials still there, the ashes there, the stuff that's sort of burned up and evaporated into the air is somewhere in the atmosphere or something, it's still all there. The people say, no, no, no, the watch doesn't exist. And yet, if I just remove the strap from my watch, we want to say it still exists. And there is, again, this sort of problem of specificity, of resolution, of like, but if we can't even say, meaningfully, when a thing begins to exist, or that it begins to exist, or in what sense it begins to exist, it starts to look more and more dubious that we can have a strong premise, like everything which begins to exist has a cause. It's like, I don't even know if we can sort of agree on what we're talking about here. So some people will hope that we can just lose talk or do. I mean, in a loose sense, most of the time when we talk about things beginning to exist, we're going to agree sort of roughly about when it began to exist and when it stopped existing. And yeah, there's this and vagueness, but the vagueness doesn't exist in other centuries, but when I began to exist, it's slightly in the terminate, but it was sometime around the beginning of the 60s, right? It wasn't in the 18s, 60s. Yeah, and it's easy enough when you zoom out in that way. Although, of course, if you speak to a Buddhist or a Hindu or something, they might have a slightly more complicated answer, or perhaps a more simple answer in that, well, he didn't begin to exist in the 60s or the 80s. I guess we sort of all began to exist at the same time. And once again, you've sort of got this only one thing ever begins to exist if anything does. But you know, people sort of, I think one of the reason, one of the motivations for views like that are to sort of try and get away from these seeming paradoxes of things beginning to exist or not existing because I've taken my strap off my watch, and so it doesn't exist anymore. That seems a bit weird to say. And so people kind of want to accept a metaphysical principle that just releases all of that paradoxical stuff into the air. And one way to do that is to say, the watch doesn't exist in the first place. That's what the myrological nihilist says. They just say there is no watch. So it's not a problem for me. You can take as many repairs, you take up for as many repairs as you like, and it's not going to cause me any metaphysical concern. But you know, okay, we might not be able to talk about exactly when things begin to exist. And we're not sure if the universe began to exist in the right metaphysical sense. But let's use that as a segue to move on here. And we spent a lot of time on cosmological arguments, but I wanted, as promised, to cover a couple more. And maybe we can do them with a little bit more haste. Because I think cosmological arguments are probably the most like tricky and technical, especially in this format to get into. But there's this other feature of the universe, whether it began to exist or not, which is that it seems to abide by some perfectly balanced and really finally attuned laws and principles and constants. So famously, this is called the fine tuning problem or the fine tuning argument or whatever you want to sort of label it. Now we're talking here about things like the strength of gravity. We're talking about the expansion rate of the universe, the curvature of space time, the strength of the of the strong and weak nuclear forces that like, you know, hold atoms together. In principle, logically, it seems possible that gravity could be two times as strong. It could be that when you have an object of one kilogram mass, it just exerts twice the bending of space time that it doesn't in the actual world. It could have been the case. And the scientists have been telling us for years now that if that were the case, if gravity had been a little bit stronger, then the entire universe would have collapsed shortly after the big bang. Because the gravitational pull would have been too strong and things would have collapsed in on themselves. If it had been any weaker, then everything would have flown apart so fast that, you know, planets couldn't form. And so this fine tuning argument, I think, is often misrepresented. I think people think we're talking about like, oh, the earth is, you know, the perfect distance from the sun, which is pretty nice. But when you realize there are billions and billions of suns and billions of planets, one of them's going to hit. But we're talking here about the fabric of the universe itself that if these constants had been ever so slightly different, like basically nothing could exist short of maybe like some hydrogen atoms or something like that. So the theist wants to look at this and say, this fine tuning could only be explained in one of three ways. Chance, which seems exceedingly unlikely given just how perfectly balanced these constants have to be, necessity, they just have to be this way. But they certainly don't seem logically necessary. And we don't really have any good reason to suspect that they would be necessary. We don't have any sort of scientific law that says they have to be that way or something like that. And third is design, you know, somebody chose to make them that way so that the universe could come about and no surprises which one they favor. So having laid that out, what do you think? So there's, you've given, you're suggesting there are three options. Let's part design and talk about the other two. Whether it's chance or not depends upon I think when exactly these values are fixed. So one story that you could tell one way that maybe the physics could play out is that at some point there's something like a phase transition in the universe and the values get fixed by the phase transition. And it's just in the in the what like other other things that happen in physics. This is going to be an indeterministic process. Right. Suppose it goes that way. Well, now it doesn't matter what the numbers are. It doesn't matter what the probabilities are. Once you know that it's indeterministic, that it that it really was just a matter of chance, there's nothing left to worry about. It's like suppose we conquer the galaxies, humans, inhabit and we build sort of every star has either a planet that we've colonized or a set of planets that we've artificially constructed. And there are billions and billions and billions of galaxies. Right. I'm underplayed how many there are. And we have we have a universal lottery in which every person on every one of the planets has a ticket. And it turns out that you have the winning ticket. And the odds are astronomically against you getting the winning ticket. But we for reasons that I won't go into we're quite confident that the lottery was one one fair and square. But you shouldn't be worrying about the fact that it was so incredibly unlikely that you would get the winning ticket to think oh, it must have it must have been rigged in my favor. It must have been that that what it reasons unknown to me that the organizers of the lottery decided that I was going to be a person that wins the prize or never. So long as you're confident in the fairness of the process the size of the number doesn't matter. And I think that analogy is going to carry over to the the case of the fine training of the constants. So long as we know that it was just the result of some phase transition in the universe. Okay, so that's the first point. You can't rule out chance as a satisfying explanation until you've ruled out the possibility that there was a phase transition of that kind perhaps back before inflation. So it's physics that we don't know anything about. Yeah, can you just clarify what you mean by a phase transition? So I'm just thinking about something that happens that applies to the state of the whole of the universe in which these various parameters get set to particular values. They would not set to these values earlier. Maybe it's because the universe wasn't at that early point wasn't characterized by those parameters. That's the kind of thing that I've got in mind. Now, have they always characterized the universe? Yeah, who knows. I think thoughts like that are quite plausible or obituative. Yeah, you know, I would think there's no way it's me that I've won the lottery. It's so unlikely but someone had to win it, right? But it's that someone had to win it that I think is key here because we've only got one universe that we know of, right? And people like to talk about a multiverse, that's kind of a version of the charts argument, but shelving that for the time being, there's just the one universe that we know about. And so it seems to me less like doing a big lottery with everyone in the universe and the person who wins is really, really surprised. It'd be more like sort of, I don't know, in the same way that if I don't know how many hands of poker are played every day, probably millions online poker and casinos around the world and probably a royal flush occurs every now and again, right? But I've got to say that if there were only one game of poker that occurred or one hand of poker that occurred and it was a royal flush and it was like the one time that it had happened, I would feel like less inclined to say like, oh, well, you know, like had just as much chance with that hand as any other, it would feel a lot less, less easy. And so in other words, the intuitive force that someone had to win the lottery, it doesn't feel like some universe had to get the constants that they did unless there is a multiverse. If the idea is just that, or something could be unlikely, but as long as we know that it was due to chance, like it shouldn't be a problem, I still think that that would be like a big problem for me. You know, like I find it very difficult to swallow that intuition for the universe unless we're just talking about a multiverse in which case it becomes trivially easy to say, yeah, you know, some universe had to have these constants. So in the case of the poker hand that someone gets a royal flush is actually some evidence that there's some cheating going on, right? In general, if I was really, really confident that they couldn't possibly be any cheating going on, then the one deal and it comes up, well, fine. So that's one thing, but the point about the analogy is just that it's so easily could have happened that the cards come out differently and you didn't get a royal flush. And in the case of the universe, he could easily have happened on this telling of the story where there is a just kind of, I'll say random, even if it's not quite the right way, a random assignment of the values to the constants. It could easily have turned out that if it is the case, it's just one universe, the one universe that there is, I mean, lasted for a tiny fraction of a stake in the blue parts, so rapidly that it never contained anything interesting. And the thing to say would be that's just the way it turned out. But that's on the assumption that there's this kind of uniform random assignment of the values. Well, maybe not very likely, right? The story about the random assignment of the variables that depends on physics stuff. Well, do you think it is plausible? I just want to be clear on what you're saying here. Do you think it is just like plausibly true that there's only one universe and that it has the constants it has? And it could have had different constants and they are like extremely, like, finally balanced with a with a with a unbelievable degree of unlikely hurt. Do you think it's plausible, like a sort of live option to just go, yeah, but it just just so happened to be that way? Sure, just on analogy with the so I happen to win the intergalactic lottery. Yeah. I just, I mean, it's just, I mean, you can make the numbers in the intergalactic lottery as big as you like. You can make them rival the numbers in a functioning argument. It doesn't, it doesn't change anything as far as I can see. I see the lottery thing is more like the multiverse because the way the lottery works is that there is a ticket that's going to win, right? I think it would be more like you run this strange, you run this really strange lottery where like you have to you have to pick a series of of 10 numbers and it's not that like everybody gets a ticket and somebody's going to win. It's like there's only one player, right? Because there's only one universe. There's only one player and they have to pick, you know, 500 million numbers in a random order and I've written down 500 million numbers and if you pick the right numbers, you know, you're going to win the lottery. You're going to get a million dollars and the person just randomly guesses 500 million numbers in a row and I go, gosh, you know, like after however long it takes me to check them, I go, yeah, congratulations, you've won, right? That seems to be more like the situation where there's one universe and those constants have to be exactly as tuned as they are in order for basically anything to exist and it no longer becomes plausible to me for the person who won the lottery to go like, yeah, well, you know, I guess, you know, it's. So what's the explanation for the numbers that they write down, right? What matters is the ruling out any other possible explanation. So I mean, I agree that it seems massively implausible, but that's because you'll be, you understand it to think, well, they must have cheated, they must be using cameras, there must be somebody with a microphone, they must have an earpiece and someone's just dictating the numbers to them or something like that. And that will bring a more plausible hypothesis than they just guess them all. But that thought was, we rule all of that out. And then what's the option? You just accept it. Hmm, I suppose, in that case, like if I just knew that the person genuinely had just randomly chosen and just gotten lucky, then yeah, I would just have to accept that as a matter of fact. But I suppose if somebody said that a live option, and for me, like when I look at fine tuning, like, yeah, God designing the universe is a live option for me. I don't think it's the like true one. I don't have enough reason to think that's the case, but yeah, it's possible. Yeah, maybe God designed the universe. If my only other option, let's say, were chance, because that's the one we're considering right now, I think I would have to choose the God explanation, because it would be like if there were two explanations for how that person got that number. Either they randomly chose or somebody had secretly like psychologically designed it, so they'd pick those numbers. And I would in a heartbeat, I would pick that second explanation. And would you do the same? Yeah, yeah, well, I'd agree about that. Well, I'm just thinking about, can you rule out chance? Absolutely. And at this stage, we haven't compared the other hypotheses. I think that's worth pointing out. I think you're right at the very least that the chance thing just gets brushed over, doesn't it? When people are talking about this, they go like, so it could be chance, but we know it's not that. So let's talk about, yeah, no, let's slow down. Let's take a moment. Let's think about it. Okay. So what about our other options here? We sort of got necessity and design. At least that's the way that it's often painted. So are those are only remaining options? So, so how are we going to classify multiverse? So, yeah, we've trials here. And the constants are just assigned randomly to an incredibly vast array of initial states of universes and a few of them take off and the rest of the most spectacular failures. Is that missed? I should say that that's a version of the chance because you're saying that like, yeah, we find ourselves in a finely tuned universe just by chance because this is like the lottery thing where there are like trillions and trillions or maybe an infinite number of universes and yeah, like of course by chance some of them are going to be finely tuned. But now I'm thinking about it in a way, it's also maybe a version of the necessity argument because if there's a multiverse of every possibility, you want to say that like necessarily one of those is going to have finely tuned constants. So, maybe it kind of sits outside and should be its own option. But yeah, I mean, it's probably the most popular popularly discussed response to this is the multiverse. So, however we classify it, some people posit the existence of a multiverse in response to the fine tuning problem. Others think they have other reasons to believe in a multiverse anyway and then conveniently that sort of solves this problem for us. Do you think it is as neat a solution as atheists often claim that if a multiverse exists, then fine tuning problem just disappears? So, I think that it's an important question whether we have independent reason to believe that there's a multiverse. Yeah, it seems like it's very expensive if you're postulating a multiverse just to explain the fine tuning of the constants theoretically expensive. So, but there are certainly physicists working on interesting multiverse models. So, this is something that's consistent with physics as we have it now. I don't know because cosmology of the early universe seems to be always in a state of incredible flux. So, I don't know. Yeah, much like the early state of the universe itself. I just did an episode with with Phil Halper, a friend of mine, and NIS AF Shorty. They wrote a book called "Battle of the Big Bang" and it's about all of the competing models. And yeah, there's a lot going on there and I think it would be fruitless, even for a physicist to try to speak too confidently on what's going on back then, let alone us to. But I understand what you're saying. It sort of, it gets a bit complicated. But the philosophical point, it seemed to me like what you were saying is it shouldn't be quite enough to say, well, we've got this fine tuning problem and the multiverse would solve it. So, let's believe in the multiverse. Instead, it's only really going to be satisfying if you have other reasons to believe in the multiverse, which you then apply to fine tuning and see that it offers a solution. Yep, so I'm fine with that. So now we've got chance and multiverse as two things that might be satisfactory, but on their own, neither of them seems particularly appealing, I think, is not white. So just. Okay, and so we've got this multiverse thing going on. We've got this potential for chance. What about necessity by which I want to say there's only one universe and there's just some reason why the constants had to be the way that they are by necessity. Do you think that's a plausible option? So I think that that's a viable option and if forced to choose between the three options that we're now discussing, it's probably the one that I like the most out of the three, but not that I'm enormously confident that it's the best one of three to pick, or maybe that's not the right way to say it, not that I'm not enormously confident that it's the correct answer. Well, a lot here turns on what you think about the metaphysics of modality. What's the story that you want to tell about necessity and contingency? And broadly speaking, there are two competing schools of thought. There's one school of thought that seems to think that basically our powers of conceivability tell us about the range of metaphysical possibility, right? So if we can kind of consistently conceive of something, then it's metaphysically possible. And if you're thinking about it that way, it seems very implausible to take the necessity right. There's a different quite different approach to the metaphysics of modality, which I take it goes back to, Aristotle, but there have been lots of people in the history of philosophy. It's gone this way, who think that modality is grounded in the actual world. So somehow are the actual world determines what's possible. Now, the particular version of this that I want to go with is that possible worlds share some history with the actual world and diverge from it only as interterminism. Of course, interterminism applies out differently. Now, if you've got, and you think that the constants were fixed, all right, so the values have always been the same, then it's a consequence of that view that the values of the constants are necessary. But there's no point history where they could have taken on a different value. They've always taken on the value that they do, and there's no mechanism for changing them as the universe evolves. So there's no possible world where the values are different from how they are. So it turns out that they're necessary. That's the position. Yeah. Now, okay. And some other people will say that they have sort of a trust in this necessity argument in the sense that they're searching for this so-called theory of everything. If you could sort of solve science, my regular listeners will know that I'm suspicious of the extent to which science can actually explain anything at all. I think it's a purely descriptive enterprise. But for those who take an explanatory view of this, they say, okay, well, we haven't got there yet, but one day I'm sure we will unlock the key, which tells us there's one simple equation or something which predicts or entails all of the constants as we currently have them. I think you still probably have a problem of why that equation is the way that it is, but maybe when we get there, we'll see that it's self-justifying or something. And so, even though we don't have it, there's this idea that there is some necessary reason that we just haven't discovered yet. So we've got some broad strategies here. And you said of the three that we've been discussing, your favorite is the necessity thing, not in that scientific way, but in the modality sense. But the way you caveat it that by saying, you know, of the options that we've got hit, like, maybe think, is there a response that you have to the fine-tuning problem that doesn't abide by these categories? Like typically speaking, if somebody presents this argument to you, what is your actual view? Like yourself, you don't believe that the universe was finely tuned by a creator deity. So how do you sort of suspect we can account for the finely tuned constants? So, well, what I'm going to say is there's this range of options and it's kind of, we aren't in a position to decide between. If you insist that I just answer the question, I'm only allowed to pick one, then I'm going to pick necessity. And I've written a couple of books where I try to elaborate the kind of worldview that I see as being based on this necessity answer. But, and in those books, I don't say what I'm now saying, which is, okay, so this is where at every choice point, I pick the view I like the most, but not necessarily confident in the choices. Yeah. For all worldview, isn't one that I'm enormously confident in. It's just that, at least, it gives you a kind of complete worldview to discuss. Yeah, I was about to move on and try to wrap up with something on the ontological arguments. But just before doing so, I nearly forgot that every time I ever talk about fine-tuning or see it discussed on the internet, somebody comments about the puddle. I can't remember which writer it is that talked about the puddle. It's like the person who goes, wow, I like how wonderfully designed the shape of the hole is for the water that fills it. Now, which is obviously a parody. The idea is you've mistaken the way round that this goes. It's not that the hole was designed for the puddle. It's that the puddle just fit the hole that happened to be there and gave the illusion of a perfectly sort of designed hole. And the reason I want to point that out is because I think that's a very clever sort of response to some versions of these design arguments, like the distance of the earth from the sun and stuff like that. But I want to point it out because it kind of frustrates me when I see that because when faced with the possibility that the universe as a whole could not have formed molecules, it's not enough to say something like, oh, but you know, it's a bit like seeing a puddle and thinking that the hole was designed for the. No, there's no water, there's no hole, there's no concrete, there's no helium, there's no anything. This strong version of the fine-tuning argument is not applying to, you know, like, oh, well, you know, like it's not like this sort of, oh, this thing looks designed a bit like a watch or something like that, although we're in the habitable zone. It's like the fabric of reality would not exist as you know it if these constants were not finally tuned. And so I just want to say that that puddle analogy only applies to a very limited scope, I think, of so-called fine-tuning arguments and it does not respond adequately, even closely adequately to something which is about the existence of anything at all made a physical matter. There would be no water and no hole in the ground for it to fill if the constants weren't finally tuned. Anyway, I just want to say my piece, unless you. Maybe you have something to say on that, yeah. Yeah, so I think that that's absolutely right, the kind of cosmic fine-tuning argument that puddle analogy isn't any help at all. I had a suspicion that maybe Dawkins was the person who originated that analogy. No, it was a fiction, it was a writer-affictional, I'll figure it out while you're speaking. I'm not sure what else to add really at this point. Okay, it was Douglass Adams, by the way. It was too, actually. It was. It was Douglass Adams who came up with it. I'm not sure where exactly, but yeah, the puddle analogy, imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, this is an interesting world I find myself in. An interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact, it fits me staggeringly well, it must have been made to have me in it. It's funny, it's clever, it's a good bit, but it's very limited in its scope. The puddle analogy is very good for evolutionary, and for responding to evolutionary arguments for design, because the evolutionary story tells you about how your features fit the world as it now is. Yes, and that's where it's so genius. Somebody who thinks, wow, look how brilliantly designed the human eye is to perceive color and the environment and stuff, and the point here is like, no, no, no, your eye evolved for the environment. It's not that the environment was designed for your eye or whatever, it just evolved to fit the space that it was in. Douglass Adams here is giving a wonderful illustration of that by saying the hole wasn't designed for the puddle, the puddle just fit the environment in which it was in. That's right. But for some reason, I see this like Douglass Adams quoted more in response to fine-tuning than to any evolutionary arguments, which is extremely strange, because I think it just doesn't apply at all. It's just like a bit of a PSA to people listening like, think about it for a moment, that doesn't quite apply. Although I'm sure some of you have already commented it down below, and some of you may even think that despite what we've just said, it does still apply. And if you think that's the case, please do let us know why. Having said that, we are kind of running out of time, and it's also very late for me because you are on the other side of the globe, but I think we would be remiss not to mention what I think is one of my favorite arguments to the existence of God. And that's the ontological family of arguments, because you can do them from an armchair. It's great. You can sort of sit down, close your eyes, just think about stuff and guarantee the existence of God. There are lots of versions of this, I think too many, of course, to cover here, but I think there are two that are the most famous and widely discussed. The first is Anselm's original argument, in which Anselm essentially asks you to do something quite simple. He says, "Just conceive in your mind of the greatest conceivable being." And I want to be clear, Anselm does not say God, at least not yet, because he's just asking you to do something which, by definition, is possible. Conceive of the greatest conceivable being. So that means take all the qualities it could have, power, knowledge, goodness, whatever, and turn them all up to their maximal conceivable quality. Again, not say infinite, just whatever you can conceive. Okay, you got it in your head. And here's the question, does that thing exist in reality? Most people say, "No, it only exists in my head." I say, "Well, then you're not doing what Anselm asked you to." Because if that being existed in reality, it would be greater. It would be a greater conceivable being, because it would have more existence. It would have more reality, you know? There seem to be like levels of existence. It seems that, you know, Hamlet doesn't exist in the way that I do. So it exists, Hamlet exists less than I do, but also there are all these characters that Shakespeare never wrote that never existed. They seem to exist even less. And maybe logical contradictions like a foresighted triangle seem to exist, maybe even less than that. And Anselm kind of wants to say that these levels of existence, or maybe you only think there are two, existence and non-existence. He says there's like existence in the intellect, that is just your imagination, and there's existence in reality. And a being which exists in reality as well as the intellect is greater, has more stuff than the one that only exists in the intellect. So like I said, Anselm was asking you to do something which, by definition, you can do, you can imagine the greatest conceivable being, but a being that exists in reality, rather than just in the mind, is greater. And therefore, as long as you're doing what you're told to do, which you can do, you're imagining a being which exists in reality. Therefore, the greatest conceivable being must exist in reality. And this, Anselm says, all men call God. What do you think? So what I want to say in response to that is kind of what Cornelot said in response to Anselm, sort of within a year of Anselm's producing this argument. But the way that you just described it, I can certainly conceive in my mind of, I don't know, let's be very specific. There's a multiple choice test that I've just done with 100 questions on it. And the sort of my greatest conceivable performance on that test, I can certainly conceive of that. And clearly, my greatest conceivable performance for me on that test is going to be real rather than dusting my mind. And now it becomes with the reasoning. And so that greatest performance on that test exists in reality, which is great because I didn't study and I just guessed a hundred times, but I'm guaranteed to get a hundred from the test. That cannot be right. There's something wrong with the reasoning going on here. That's not specific to stuff about the attributes with the sort of greatness of the being. I wouldn't go near as an example was the greatest conceivable island. Yeah, the greatest conceivable island, the greatest conceivable pizza, the greatest conceivable horse, unicorn, whatever you like. It's a sort of a scheme of response. It's a parody. It's a way of saying, well, if that logic holds, then the greatest possible island exists as Anselm had it too. And I think it'll be easier to I've got a response to this that, you know, actually a good friend of mine, Ryan, if you're watching, we used to spend ages talking about this. And I think I ended up coming around thinking he might have been right about this, which is that it'll be easier to see this with something like a pizza or an island, I think, than the test score, although I think it does apply. So let's say, okay, I can imagine the greatest conceivable pizza, just like the maximal desirability of cheesiness and whatever toppings you like and all that kind of stuff. But clearly, a pizza that exists in reality is greater than the pizza that only exists in my imagination. Therefore, as long as I can conceive of it, it must exist, right? But that doesn't work. Why not? Well, here's one response. Anselm has asked us to imagine the greatest conceivable thing. Across all categories, he's not asked us to imagine the greatest conceivable like car or the greatest conceivable God even or the greatest conceivable, you know, conscious agent, just the greatest conceivable thing as all the qualities get turned up. Now, if I think about that greatest conceivable pizza, a pizza that only exists in my mind versus a pizza that exists in reality, you know, the pizza that exists in reality is greater in the sense that it has more stuff. It's got more existence. But is it a better pizza? Because we've restricted our scope now. We've said, you know, we're talking about the greatest conceivable pizza, right? And is a pizza that exists in reality? Actually, a better pizza. It's unclear to me whether that's the case because like all of the great-making properties of pizza, cheesiness, you know, fluffiness, temperature, all of that kind of stuff, those exist of the pizza in my mind. And so it doesn't seem to me that making that thing exist in reality makes it a better pizza. And I know I said I wouldn't do this, but I'm going to have to use a Latin word here, which is the word qua, which means sort of, you know, in regards to or something like that. So is the pizza a better pizza, qua pizza when it exists in reality? Some people want to say not really, but people listening like what are you talking about? Of course, of course, the pizza is better if it exists in reality. Well, yeah, it's better qua thing. If you then expand your scope and say a pizza that exists in reality is a better thing or sorry, a greater thing than a pizza that only exists in the mind because it's got more stuff. Yeah, that's fine. But if you've expanded your scope now to be talking about things again, you know, you're talking about the pizza that exist in reality, being a greater conceivable like thing. Well, I can take that pizza and I can make it an even greater thing by giving it, I don't know, omnipotence. Yeah, it's an omnipotent pizza. It's an even greater thing now and else. It's an omniscient pizza and it's existed for a eternity. And suddenly I would just be describing God again. So the only way that I can parody the argument is to not talk about things like as a general sort of broad category, which is I think crucial to Anselm's argument, I've restricted my scope. And now I'm talking about things where their existence and reality doesn't make them better qua that category of thing. And it's a hard intuition to get across because when you first hear that, you're like, of course, a pizza that exists in reality is a better pizza. But I'm not convinced that it is because when we say the pizza that exists in the head, it will have all of the qualities like temperature and cheesiness and tassiness just in the imagination. Okay. So what I want to ask you is, do you kind of see where I'm coming from here? And then like, maybe you might think it's nonsense, but if you don't, can you at least like back me up for the audience that are not completely talking nonsense and then tell me why you think that that line of argumentation fails? Or maybe you do think it's nonsense. Yeah, so I can say where you're coming from, but there is an intuition here that you might simply not share, right? The pizza that only exists in your head is not much of a pizza, in my opinion. Certainly it's not going to satisfy me if I'm hungry. And it's not that I was thinking it's fine as pizza, it's just falls down on being a thing, right? So I don't, so I'm inclined to put back against intuition, but I can see where I can see why if you wanted to defend and so this would be a way up. Well, you know, what I might say to that is that I agree with this intuition here, like you want to say, but if we drill down into it, it might not be quite so simple because you say like, well, if a pizza only exists in my head, it's no good to me because I can't eat it, you know, like in order to be a good pizza, I have to be able to eat it, right? And I could say, all right, so now imagine that there's a pizza that exists in reality, but it's like, you know, it's behind a locked door, it belongs to somebody else and they're not going to let you eat it, right? And I've got a different pizza, which I'm able to eat. And I might say I prefer the pizza that I'm able to eat versus the one that I'm not able to eat that's behind the locked door. But it seems to be like better for my circumstance, or it seems to like suit me more, it seems to be that when I expand my scope to include just like the world that I'm living in and my preferences, like, yeah, this is a better sort of situation for me, but to say that it's a better pizza, qua pizza, just because I can access it rather than it being behind a door, it seemed like a very weird thing to say, right? It's not a better pizza because I can touch it. And I kind of want to say the same thing about the imaginary pizza and the one in the real world. Yeah, the one in the real world is one that I can actually physically eat and touch and see with my eyes, and that's all cool. But it's not a better pizza for that reason. It's just a kind of pizza that I would prefer to have because, you know, I'm feeling pretty hungry. Now, again, I also want to, I want to say that to the audience who are still with us, listening, saying, Alex, you've lost your damn mind. What are you talking about? Look, I'm trying my best here, and Selm's argument is a notoriously difficult one to defend. I do actually think there's a lot of truth in this line of thought, but it's a bit too complicated to fully explain why right now. But that's one little pushback, you know? The pizza being behind the door is a bit like the pizza being in the imagination. It doesn't make it a worse pizza. So, oh, and I guess to come to where I would really want to go and push him back again and stuff, and Selm's assuming that there's this distinction between, I'll say, themes in being something like that. There are different grades of existence, and that I don't accept, right? When he talks about the pizza in his head, that's no kind of pizza at all, according to me, that kind of my longing and way of thinking about there being non-existent themes is something that I just want to repudiate all together. So, probably I should have started there rather than staying things like, "Oh, the pizza in your head is no use to me. I should have just said the pizza in your head is no pizza whatsoever." Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting area of philosophy, like things which don't exist and the way in which they do exist. I mean, to say that because for Selm, there are, like I said, there are these levels of existence, which I think is an intuition that maybe isn't shared as much today, which is that like, yeah, something can exist in the intellect, like Hamlet, you know, Shakespeare's character, Hamlet, like that exists in the intellect, but not in reality versus the characters that don't exist even in the intellect. It kind of seems like there are like levels to it. And Selm is treating those things that exist in the head, almost as like actual objects or like real things, they're just real in the intellectual realm. And I think probably as a result of our like materialistic reductionistic sort of popular views now where we think, you know, there aren't really little characters running around in the intellectual realm. It's just like Neuron's firing, that we've kind of abandoned that way of looking at the world. And I think without that, this argument does kind of struggle to get off the ground. But having tried my best to defend poor Selm, again, I don't know, yeah, I almost don't want to do this because with so short on time, but I feel like I said that there were two. The other is the modal ontological argument, right? And just for brevity, I'd usually spend some time explaining this. I've talked about it before. If you don't know what the modal ontological argument is, then you need to listen to more of my podcasts, but also go and look it up. But more or less, like you can talk about possibility in terms of possible worlds, right? I could have worn a blue shirt today, but I didn't. It's black. But the fact that it's possible I could be in a blue shirt, I can just represent that by saying there is a possible world in which I'm wearing a blue shirt, right? If something is necessarily true, then it's true in all possible worlds. Two plus two equals four is true in all possible worlds. If something is contingent, I mean, it could be true. It could be false. It's true in some possible worlds. There are a bunch of possible worlds in which I'm in a blue shirt, a bunch possible worlds in which I'm in a red shirt, a bunch possible worlds where I don't exist at all, all of that kind of stuff. Okay, if God exists, then God is a necessarily existing being. That's what we were talking about earlier with the contingency argument and stuff. This necessary foundation of everything that exists. Necessary beings exist in all possible worlds, right? And then the argument is quite simple. Premise one. If it's possible that God exists, then God exists. Premise two. It is possible that God exists, conclusion, therefore God exists. So why should we accept that first premise? If it's possible that God exists, then he exists. Well, because if it's possible that there is a necessary being, that means that there is a possible world in which there is a necessary being. But if a necessary being exists, he exists or it exists in all possible worlds. And so as long as we just accept the premise that it's possible that God exists, then we know that a necessary being exists in at least one possible world. But that being being necessary would therefore have to exist in all possible worlds, including the actual world, therefore God exists in the actual world. A relatively shambolic and lazy attempt to summarise as quickly as I can the argument. Perhaps we can have a less lazy and less shambolic attempt, but equally brief response from you. So if we hold fix the idea that if God exists in that God either exists in no worlds or in all of them, then the kind of standard response is going to be, "Look, you thought it's possible that God exists, but surely it's possible that God exists, surely it's a world where God doesn't exist." But if God doesn't exist in one world, then it follows that God doesn't exist in any of them. So actually what we should be concluding here is that it's necessary that God doesn't exist. That's the immediate response to the argument. There's a parallel between two arguments, one of which gives you God necessarily exists, God exists. The other one gives you necessarily God doesn't exist. God doesn't exist, and there's a symmetry. As things stand, there's nothing that breaks the symmetry between those two arguments, so we haven't got them anyway. Yes, because if you want to say that something is necessary, you don't even really need to say that it's necessarily true or false. You just need to say that if it's true, it's necessarily true, and if it's false, it's necessarily false. So the language you used, it's either in all possible worlds or it's in no possible worlds. It can't be an only sum. So my argument was to say, "Oh, it's possible that God exists." So there's one possible world in which he exists, but it's either all or none, so he must also exist in all of them, including ours. But like you say, there is this reverse modal ontological argument, which says, "Oh, premise one, it's possible that God doesn't exist." Maybe you want to go, "Yeah, sure, why not?" That seems to make sense. Well, that means that there's a possible world in which God doesn't exist, but he either exists in all of them or none of them, and if he doesn't exist in that one, he can't exist in any of them. Therefore, God doesn't exist in the actual world. And like you say, philosophers are working up a great sweat trying to come up with a symmetry breaker. Some people think that they've got them, most spoken to a few people who do, but I agree with you that that's kind of where we land with the modal ontological argument. But still a very fun exercise in thinking, whatever you think of the ontological arguments in general and the modal one in particular. I think they're great. They're great fun, aren't they? You can just sort of sit around and think God into existence somehow. It's kind of interesting. So I also like good old argument, but we shouldn't know. Even approach that topic. Yes. And in fact, you have an entire book dedicated to ontological arguments, don't you? Yeah, which though it's old. So I wrote it in the early 90s. I've peered, I think it appeared at the end of 1995. It doesn't really cover girdles argument because it was only just starting to see the light of day and do not see the early 90s. So where could people go for if they're interested in a, I guess, slightly more more mathsy approach to this? Where could people go for an overview of girdles ontological argument? Is there anything you've written or would you just point them to like the SEP or something? So I don't think anybody's written a book about the girl arguments. Alex produces written a bunch of good papers. It's something kind of takey. Everything right? Takey, that will be a good place to start. Yeah, sweet. Well, I already mentioned arguing about gods is another book you wrote which covers more of these arguments. It talks about the stuff that we've been discussing today, but a bunch more too. I guess more of an overview. I think extremely readable given the subject matter. So I'll make sure that's linked in the description. I say I'll make sure. My editor will hopefully remind me, Alex, I'm looking at you to put those links in the description and we'll get them down there eventually. But having said that, Graham Hoppy, thank you for this whiffle-stop tour of I think three of the most popular reasons that people give for believing in God. We of course have only scratched the surface as people always like to say at the end of podcast, but I suppose that's mostly what we're here to do. So thank you for your time and yeah, it's been fun.