Beyond religion and atheism: The secret third answer to big questions
The Big Think Interview
Beyond religion and atheism: The secret third answer to big questionsPhilosopher Jack Symes explores the space between devout religion and atheism.
For decades, atheists have used one move to dismantle the case for God: swap in an evil one and show that the arguments work just as well. Philosopher Jack Symes was convinced by it and was 50,000 words into a book defending atheism when he noticed that the exercise kept tipping toward goodness. He threw out the manuscript and started over. About the speaker: Jack Symes is a philosopher at Durham University and the host of The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast. He is the author of Defeating the Evil-God Challenge: In Defence of God’s Goodness.
Timestamps00:00:21 Chapter 1: Defeating the Evil-God challenge Prefer to listen to our interviews on Spotify? Explore our episodes here:
TranscriptBelow is a transcript of the first five minutes of this video interview. This is a true verbatim transcript that captures the conversation exactly as it happened. If you’d like to read the full transcript while following along with the video, click here. I'm Dr. Jack Symes. I'm a philosopher and YouTuber, currently at Durham University. I'm best known as the host of the Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast. My most recent book is Defeating the Evil-God Challenge. Today on Big Think, I'll be talking about defeating the Evil-God Challenge and Multiverse Pantheism. Chapter 1: Defeating the Evil-God challengeI think there are three fundamental questions in philosophy. The question of where the universe came from i.e. why is there something rather than nothing? The question of how the fundamental laws of nature came to be finely tuned i.e. the problem of fine-tuning and the problem of consciousness. How is it that our physical brains give rise to subjective experience? Why does the world smell, taste, or feel like anything? Those are the questions we typically associate with philosophy. But philosophy best put is how it all hangs together. Philosophy is the study of everything that exists. It's trying to piece together all the things that exist and are true and rule out the things that couldn't possibly come into being. It's also the practice of clarifying concepts. It's about understanding the world and the words that we use. And that's fundamentally where philosophy sort of has its origin in understanding Socrates thought. What is justice? What is love? What is beauty? And trying to make sure we know what philosophers call the necessary and sufficient conditions of things. And we see this play out in our public discourse. Conservatives always want to ask us, well, what is it that makes a woman, right? Or we want to know what it makes a gene selfish. Uh so those sorts of words and clarifying what they mean is a part of the philosophical task as well. Another prominent one, what is what is a fact? What grounds a fact in a post-truth era? Those are the sorts of things that the philosophers are interested in. And so I think those questions are completely untouchable by science for various different reasons. Science can report the big bang. Science can report the constants, the laws of physics. Science can explain what's going on in your brain. But science can't explain how consciousness arises. If you if you think that you don't understand what science is as a methodology, Galileo takes consciousness out of the picture. Takes the subjective out of the picture in order of us to get on with objective science. The same with the finely tuned laws of nature. We agree that the laws of nature are finely tuned. The question is how did they become like that? One of the least appealing answers that it was merely chance. And finally, the origin of the universe. Right? Science looks at past events and tries to explain future events in the light of those past events. It's the study of dispositions of cause and effect. Science explains what things do but not what they are. So, how could science reach beyond before the big bang? That sort of thinking is uh I think is scientism if you think you can explain those questions merely by science alone. People typically think this because of the amazing advances that science has made. puts man on the moon, discovers the age of the earth, discovers evolution by natural selection. Right? So people are rightly on the science train and thinking that these seemingly unsolvable problems actually have studyable solutions and there are evidence that we can peck out in the physical world. And it was particularly picked up by the new atheists at the beginning of the 21st century when we saw a spike in the most vivid religious terrorism. We saw the dawn of new media and we saw a group of thinkers that said, "Hey, you don't really need to think carefully about these questions. Science has all the answers, so get on board." Right? And so I I found myself default in that atheistic position. I think the atheistic position is one that tries not to posit too many entities, for a lack of a better phrase. What does that mean? Well, it means we should appeal to theories that introduce the least amount of things to explain the data. So if you can explain the entire world merely in physical mechanisms then you ought to do so. And if you have to introduce something else like souls, angels or gods then you've made the picture too messy. You're paying too much for your theory. This is called the principle of parsimony in philosophy that we want to make sure that we're not positing entities beyond necessity. Right? So posit the least or introduce the least amount of substances and properties that you need to explain things. And one of the central ways the new atheists Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett approach theism was called a reductio ad absurdum. So we take the underlying premises and beliefs of the religious and we show them why they're absurd or ridiculous. So the great thing about the new atheists is they don't play the game. If you read their books, they don't tend to actually engage with philosophical arguments in the way that philosophers do. They just go, "Haha, what a load of rubbish." to try and poke fun of it and that's why they gained traction. But within them and I think all of the four horsemen of new atheists had some version of what's known as the Evil-God challenge. In 2010, Stephen Law published the Evil-God challenge and that's the title of the paper. It was the most downloaded paper in one of the best journals Religious Studies and the third most cited paper as well. The Evil-God challenge asks why belief in a good God is significantly more reasonable than belief in an evil God. Why do people believe in a good God and not an evil God? What argument can we give for one over the other? According to the challenge, belief in an evil God is ridiculous. Nobody believes in an evil God. No one's ever believed in a monotheistic singular evil God with a capital G. But the majority of the world's population believe in the good God. The challenge progresses by saying, well, look, when we look at all of the relevant arguments, when we map every single argument for a good God, we can give an equally or roughly as reasonable argument for an evil God. You need a first cause for the universe, well, that could be good God or evil God. You need a fine-tuner to bring the laws of nature into being, that could be either as well. You need moral laws to obey or disobey, that could be either. So, it ends up that they're both roughly as reasonable. They're about the same in terms of their credibility. But given that belief in an evil God is ridiculous, we should think that belief in a good God is equally as ridiculous. Click here to continue reading the video transcript.Related Video
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