In his Unbelievable discussion, Max Andrews
stated that he has noted in himself, when shaping apologetic arguments, the tendency
to beg the question of god. You may recall that begging the question is, at base, a fallacy of circular reasoning, even though the circularity
might be subtle. It appears that he and I might have some alignment here in that I have noticed, on the part of
apologists, the exact same tendency. That
said, while I agree that many arguments for god presume god, or something
attributed to god, I would not, however, have necessarily included fine-tuning based
arguments in the list.
These are the apologetic arguments that, off the top of my
head, include some element of begging the question:
Moral Argument
Ontological Argument
Argument from First Cause
Argument from Resurrection
Argument from Revelation
Argument via Inference to Best
Explanation
A good example of the sort of apologetic question begging involved
appears in this video by Dave S at
theglobalatheism, which concludes that the ontological argument proves no more
than that if god exists, then god exists (which is the law of identity: if X,
then X, or X=X).
Another video by Dave S, on the argument
from resurrection, also hints at begging the question, pointing out that to get
a high-ish likelihood that god exists (Pr≈0.5)
you need to assume that claims that god raised people from the dead were true. Think about this for a moment. If you assume, up front, that claims that your
god raised people from the dead are true, this necessitates the assumption that
your god actually exists. You should
find this a little odd, because it would mean that, rather than adding support
to the notion that the apologist's god exists, the resurrection argument reduces
the likelihood of that god's existence.
This seems odd to me.
Anyway, what about the fine-tuning argument. Does this include an element of begging the
question?
Perhaps there is. The
fine-tuning argument first suggests that the universe is fine-tuned (arguing
the reality of fine-tuning is a speciality of Andrews' partner in the
discussion, Luke Barnes). But that's
insufficient to show god. To show god,
the apologist has to go one step further and argue that nothing else explains
fine-tuning other than their god.
This is where a question can be comprehensively begged, on
two levels.
Firstly, there is the definition of "god". As indicated above, it can be argued that the
ontological argument can fail based on the fact that it tries to define a god
into existence. The fine-tuning argument
fails on the same grounds, because of begging the question. The apologist pressing this argument is effectively
trying to define their god into existence via the claim that their god can do
anything that is necessary to prove that existence. Their god can make a universe that looks like
ours and seems incredibly unlikely, but you can bet your bottom dollar that if
it ever starts to look like the universe is incredibly likely, the same
apologist will argue that their god can make an incredibly likely universe as
well. Or an eternally inflating multiverse. Or a quantum multiverse. Therefore, their argument collapses into "if
our universe were created by the sort of being that can make universes of the
sort that we live in, then our universe was created by the sort of being that
can make universes of the sort that we live in, let's call it god".
Secondly, there is the sheer unlikeliness of our universe
versus typicality. In this argument,
there is no assumption of a god followed by a conclusion of a god, it's more an
assumption of atypicality followed by a conclusion of atypicality which feeds
into a "this is so surprising, therefore god" argument. Ignoring for a moment the fact that
multiverse theory arises totally independently of counter-apologetics, if we
were to posit a multiverse to solve the unlikeliness of our universe, the counter-counter-apologists
then rush in to say that, if there were many different kinds of universes in
this multiverse, then our type of universe would be atypical - and, therefore,
we have an obligation to explain why we are in this atypical universe.
This atypicality is often expressed in terms of a Boltzmann
multiverse, the sort that fails on the basis of Boltzmann brains. In a Boltzmann multiverse, each universe is a
fluctuation of order in a vast, enduring region of comprehensive disorder. In such a regime, small regions of order
would be far more likely than regions like our observable universe and we would
indeed be unusual. However, all this
does is put a kibosh on a Boltzmann multiverse.
But no-one is seriously positing a Boltzmann multiverse (I will do so semi-seriously
in a later article though).
Nevertheless, when people regurgitate WLC's argument against
the multiverse (including people like Barnes) they assume a Boltzmann
multiverse and conclude that a multiverse is impossible. Thus they are arguing that an impossible form
of multiverse is impossible, which is trivially true.
The other element of the argument is based on the assumption
that we must be typical. This seems similar
to the argument that leads to (counter-apologetically derived) multiverses, but
there is a subtle but important difference between very highly unlikely and
very highly atypical. When you bring the
multiverse to bear on the problem, the likelihood of a very highly unlikely universe
existing increases, towards 100% as N (the number of universes) approaches
infinity. At the same time, as N
approaches infinity, the number of atypical universes increases, the number of distinct
chances of being atypical increases.
Think of it in terms of jellybeans with the probabilities
being indicative, rather than rigorous.
If one in every 100 jellybeans was atypical, then with a sample of 100
jellybeans, you would expect on average that one would be atypical and there
would be only chance to be atypical. If
there were 10,000 jellybeans, then we'd expect there to be 100 chances to be
atypical. Agreed, there would still be a
lot more typical jellybeans than atypical ones, but the increased number of
atypical jellybeans would increase commensurate with sample size. If we introduced a filter that only permits a
certain shape of atypical jellybean to pass through, and used a very large,
approaching infinite sample size, then so long as the shape is possible,
then we should not be surprised to see one.
This is the situation that we find ourselves in. We are in a universe which, although atypical,
must be the way it is for us to find ourselves in it - because it's precisely the
sort of universe in which we could develop as persistent intelligent life
(rather than Boltzmann brains).
In other words, our atypicality is very much the point,
rather than being a failure of the multiverse to explain our fortuitous existence.
---
Curiously enough, Dave S includes, as further reading for
the resurrection video, which was posted a year ago, both my Sweet Probability and Max Andrews' dissertation on Bayes Theorem and the
resurrection. Some nice
recognition there for both of us, even though I at least hadn't noticed it.
