I am about to graduate from one of the only universities in the world that has a high concentration of high-caliber analytic philosophers who are theists. (Specifically, the University of Notre Dame, IN) So as not to miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I have sent out emails asking many of them if they would like to meet and discuss their theism with me. Several of them have responded already in the affirmative; fingers crossed for the rest. I'm really looking forward to this because these people are really smart, and have spent a lot of time thinking about this, so I expect them to have interesting and insightful things to say.
Do you have suggestions for questions I could ask them? My main question will of course be "Why do you believe in God?" and variants thereof, but it would be nice if I could say e.g. "How do you avoid the problem of X which is a major argument against theism?"
Questions I've already thought of:
1-Why do you believe in God?
2-What are the main arguments in favor of theism, in your opinion?
3-What about the problem of evil? What about objective morality: how do you make sense of it, and if you don't, then how do you justify God?
4-What about divine hiddenness? Why doesn't God make himself more easily known to us? For example, he could regularly send angels to deliver philosophical proofs on stone tablets to doubters.
5-How do you explain God's necessary existence? What about the "problem of many Gods," i.e. why can't people say the same thing about a slightly different version of God?
6-In what sense is God the fundamental entity, the uncaused cause, etc.? How do you square this with God's seeming complexity? (he is intelligent, after all) If minds are in fact simple, then how is that supposed to work?
I welcome more articulate reformulations of the above, as well as completely new ideas.
I think theism (not to be confused with deism, simulationism, or anything similar) is a position only a crazy person could defend because:
God is an ontologically basic mental entity. Huge Occam penalty.
The original texts the theisms these philosophers probably adhere to require extreme garage-dragoning to avoid making a demonstrably false claim. What's left after the garage-dragoning is either deism or an agent with an extremely complicated utility function, with no plausible explanation for why this utility function is as it is.
I've already listened to some of their arguments, and they've been word games that attempt to get information about reality out without putting any information in, or fake explanations that push existing mystery into an equal or greater amount of mystery in God's utility function. (Example: "Why is the universe fine-tuned for life? Because God wanted to create life, so he tuned it up." well, why is God fine-tuned to be the kind of god who would want to create life?) If they had evidence anywhere close to the amount that would be required to convince someone without a rigged prior, I would have heard it.
I don't have any respect for deism either. It still has the ontologically basic mental entity problem, but at least it avoids the garage-dragoning. I don't think simulationism is crazy, but I don't assign >0.5 probability to it.
I pay attention to theists when they are talking about things besides theism. But I have stopped paying attention to theists about theism.
I don't take the argument from expert opinion here seriously because:
A. We have a good explanation of why they would be wrong.
B. Philosophy is not a discipline that reliably tracks the truth. Or converges to anything, really. See this. On topics that have been debated for centuries, many don't even have an answer that 50% of philosophers can agree on. In spite of this, and in spite of the base rate among the general population for atheism, 72.8% of these philosophers surveyed were atheists. If you just look at philosophy of religion there's a huge selection effect because a religious person is much more likely to think it's worth studying.
Edit: formatting.
Thanks for engaging with me. I'm afraid you'll have to say more than that though to convince me. Of course I know about Occam's Razor and how it can be applied to God. So do the theist philosophers. My uncertainty comes from general uncertainty about whether or not that is the right way to approach the question, especially given that Occam's Razor is currently (a) unjustified and (b) arbitrary. Also, I think that it is better to be too open-minded and considerate than to be the opposite.
Such expl... (read more)