There are severe problems in your article that any philosopher worth his salt would notice. I’ll go through them one by one. I will not argue about the simulation part of your article, but about the very roots that you use in order to write this article.
A)The existence of God isn’t the same as the correctness of a given religion. Most of your arguments deal with a benevolent God, but according to your own self-proclaimed definition of “benevolence”. You think we should use a 6 year old’s untrained moral values.
That argument can easily turn against you, after all any 6 years old would refuse that his parents divorce and would refuse to have his mother replaced by another person. Theists will claim this is evidence of the existence of natural law and you would have no way to refute them since you used this hypothetical 6 years old as a moral compass.
But, in reality there are thousands of reasons why a “good person” with the cure to malaria would not give it freely according to utilitarian ethics. As an example, perhaps they want to prevent an overpopulation problem. As an example, perhaps one of the people with malaria has a descendant that commits a genocide that kills 100 million people. Unless you are omniscient and you have access to all possible futures there is no way for an utilitarian to make the best choice.
You cannot pretend that you have that omniscience. Only a child can pretend that they know all the consequences and that those consequences would all be good.
Fundamentally, utilitarian philosophy collapses into nonsense because of the problem of qualia and the non-summation of qualia. It is impossible to sum pleasure and pain, it is impossible to pretend that every single human on earth is an interchangeable object with no individuality.
B)No, a powerful and benevolent “God” would not necessarily stop earthquakes. Isn’t having an active planet as opposed to a dead planet a good thing? An active planet with a magnetic field, with moving crusts, and so on. Those are definitely useful for the sake of biological evolution. Moreover, the physical possibility of earthquakes can’t just be erased from reality without causing reality itself to collapse into being nonsensical.
If you want “God” to magically intervene every single time there’s an earthquake to stop deaths, then your idea of “God” does not correspond to any known religion. If you argue that such a “God” does not exist, then, all religious folk would have to agree with you that indeed, such a “God” does not exist. In the paragraph above I dealt with physical evils. It applies to illness as well and it applies to basically all “natural causes” of death.
Secondly, for the case of human-caused evils, that is a logical consequence of the ability of humans to do either good or evil. If millions of sentient beings exist, some will statistically choose to do evil actions, such as murder, rape and so on. For those things to not happen, it would require that humans don’t have free will and can only choose to do the right action (that is the fate of an automaton, I don’t think most people would agree that it would be a good thing to erase their sense of self)
C)If you were to read any serious religious texts, as an example the Tanakh, there are countless examples of injustice being unpunished. If God directly and immediately rewarded those who did good things and punished those who did bad things, then it’s no longer a free choice, it’s simply an optimization problem. Why should humans, who are sentient beings, be reduced to merely be multi-objective optimization machines?
Reducing human free will to nihil would be a great evil. Would you want a girlfriend who cannot leave you because she doesn’t have a choice? Would you want to be forced to work rather than freely choose your occupation? Most of what is valuable in this world is only truly valuable because it is freely chosen.
In the book of Job, the view that God immediately rewards good and immediately punishes evil is completely refuted. The friends of Job claimed that the reason he lost his sons and that he became poor and ill was that he sinned greatly and that God punished him. They mocked him, insulted him, and told him to repent or else. However, that view is explicitly denied in the Tanakh and Job defends himself and is vindicated. You are arguing against a non-existing strawman.
Your view of God exists neither in christianity, nor in judaism or in islam. Perhaps your view of “God” is compatible with that of the gnostics who think the demiurge is only one very powerful entity among many, but that’s not what most people mean when they talk about God.
Your entire position consists in creating a strawman about what you think “God” is and then declaring that this strawmanned version of “God” doesn’t exist. But no serious theologian or philosopher has argued for the existence of such a “God”. The Jews do not argue for the existence of such a “God”, you will not find a single rabbi that claims those things. How can you claim to have refuted judaism or any religion at all if you invent a “God” they don’t even believe in?
D)When calculating the probability that any event such as atom splitting occurs, God’s existence doesn’t allow anyone to say “that atom is more likely to split”. Likewise, God’s existence doesn’t allow one to predict “This tree should fall”, wouldn’t that be entirely nonsensical?
Classical theism says that God created the universe, with all the laws of physics. God doesn’t usually intervene to make one atom split rather than another, miracles are exceptional by their nature they are not something God does all the time.
E)You have gratuitously affirmed, in your text, that miracles do not exist. You have ignored countless historical testimonies, not only from the Bible but from other sources. You have also ignored the Turin’s shroud (which has been scientifically investigated so many times that there’s a whole specialized literature on the subject), you have ignored scientific investigations into the phenomenon of reincarnation (we do have a scientific litterature on the subject even if we don’t have any absolute proof that the afterlife exists), you have ignored scientific investigation of eucharistic miracles (heart tissues and blood found in pieces of bread), etc. Any one of those phenomenons can refute the atheistic materialist framework.
Don’t you think it is saddening for a Bayesian to simply ignore evidence and do as if it did not exist? Then you pretend that atheists somehow won thanks to a careful investigation of the matters. They did no such thing, they simply buried all the evidence and ignored it. The reason atheists are more numerous in our current society is sociological rather than scientific. Atheism is encouraged, religion is ridiculed. That has nothing to do with truthfulness, after all religion was once revered and atheism ridiculed.
There are severe problems in your article that any philosopher worth his salt would notice. I’ll go through them one by one. I will not argue about the simulation part of your article, but about the very roots that you use in order to write this article.
A)The existence of God isn’t the same as the correctness of a given religion. Most of your arguments deal with a benevolent God, but according to your own self-proclaimed definition of “benevolence”. You think we should use a 6 year old’s untrained moral values.
That argument can easily turn against you, after all any 6 years old would refuse that his parents divorce and would refuse to have his mother replaced by another person. Theists will claim this is evidence of the existence of natural law and you would have no way to refute them since you used this hypothetical 6 years old as a moral compass.
But, in reality there are thousands of reasons why a “good person” with the cure to malaria would not give it freely according to utilitarian ethics. As an example, perhaps they want to prevent an overpopulation problem. As an example, perhaps one of the people with malaria has a descendant that commits a genocide that kills 100 million people. Unless you are omniscient and you have access to all possible futures there is no way for an utilitarian to make the best choice.
You cannot pretend that you have that omniscience. Only a child can pretend that they know all the consequences and that those consequences would all be good.
Fundamentally, utilitarian philosophy collapses into nonsense because of the problem of qualia and the non-summation of qualia. It is impossible to sum pleasure and pain, it is impossible to pretend that every single human on earth is an interchangeable object with no individuality.
B)No, a powerful and benevolent “God” would not necessarily stop earthquakes. Isn’t having an active planet as opposed to a dead planet a good thing? An active planet with a magnetic field, with moving crusts, and so on. Those are definitely useful for the sake of biological evolution. Moreover, the physical possibility of earthquakes can’t just be erased from reality without causing reality itself to collapse into being nonsensical.
If you want “God” to magically intervene every single time there’s an earthquake to stop deaths, then your idea of “God” does not correspond to any known religion. If you argue that such a “God” does not exist, then, all religious folk would have to agree with you that indeed, such a “God” does not exist. In the paragraph above I dealt with physical evils. It applies to illness as well and it applies to basically all “natural causes” of death.
Secondly, for the case of human-caused evils, that is a logical consequence of the ability of humans to do either good or evil. If millions of sentient beings exist, some will statistically choose to do evil actions, such as murder, rape and so on. For those things to not happen, it would require that humans don’t have free will and can only choose to do the right action (that is the fate of an automaton, I don’t think most people would agree that it would be a good thing to erase their sense of self)
C)If you were to read any serious religious texts, as an example the Tanakh, there are countless examples of injustice being unpunished. If God directly and immediately rewarded those who did good things and punished those who did bad things, then it’s no longer a free choice, it’s simply an optimization problem. Why should humans, who are sentient beings, be reduced to merely be multi-objective optimization machines?
Reducing human free will to nihil would be a great evil. Would you want a girlfriend who cannot leave you because she doesn’t have a choice? Would you want to be forced to work rather than freely choose your occupation? Most of what is valuable in this world is only truly valuable because it is freely chosen.
In the book of Job, the view that God immediately rewards good and immediately punishes evil is completely refuted. The friends of Job claimed that the reason he lost his sons and that he became poor and ill was that he sinned greatly and that God punished him. They mocked him, insulted him, and told him to repent or else. However, that view is explicitly denied in the Tanakh and Job defends himself and is vindicated. You are arguing against a non-existing strawman.
Your view of God exists neither in christianity, nor in judaism or in islam. Perhaps your view of “God” is compatible with that of the gnostics who think the demiurge is only one very powerful entity among many, but that’s not what most people mean when they talk about God.
Your entire position consists in creating a strawman about what you think “God” is and then declaring that this strawmanned version of “God” doesn’t exist. But no serious theologian or philosopher has argued for the existence of such a “God”. The Jews do not argue for the existence of such a “God”, you will not find a single rabbi that claims those things. How can you claim to have refuted judaism or any religion at all if you invent a “God” they don’t even believe in?
D)When calculating the probability that any event such as atom splitting occurs, God’s existence doesn’t allow anyone to say “that atom is more likely to split”. Likewise, God’s existence doesn’t allow one to predict “This tree should fall”, wouldn’t that be entirely nonsensical?
Classical theism says that God created the universe, with all the laws of physics. God doesn’t usually intervene to make one atom split rather than another, miracles are exceptional by their nature they are not something God does all the time.
E)You have gratuitously affirmed, in your text, that miracles do not exist. You have ignored countless historical testimonies, not only from the Bible but from other sources. You have also ignored the Turin’s shroud (which has been scientifically investigated so many times that there’s a whole specialized literature on the subject), you have ignored scientific investigations into the phenomenon of reincarnation (we do have a scientific litterature on the subject even if we don’t have any absolute proof that the afterlife exists), you have ignored scientific investigation of eucharistic miracles (heart tissues and blood found in pieces of bread), etc. Any one of those phenomenons can refute the atheistic materialist framework.
Don’t you think it is saddening for a Bayesian to simply ignore evidence and do as if it did not exist? Then you pretend that atheists somehow won thanks to a careful investigation of the matters. They did no such thing, they simply buried all the evidence and ignored it. The reason atheists are more numerous in our current society is sociological rather than scientific. Atheism is encouraged, religion is ridiculed. That has nothing to do with truthfulness, after all religion was once revered and atheism ridiculed.