Common Mistakes about the Moral Argument, Fine-Tuning, and Ontological Arguments

In this fourth installment of my common mistakes series, I cover mistakes relating to the moral argument, fine-tuning argument, and ontological arguments.

OUTLINE

0:00 Intro
0:37 Mistake 105
2:46 Mistake 106
5:33 Mistake 107
15:18 Mistake 108
22:33 Mistake 109
39:54 Mistake 110
51:49 Mistake 111
53:04 Mistake 112
55:52 Mistake 113
58:09 Mistake 114
59:26 Mistake 115
1:02:15 Mistake 116
1:07:49 Mistake 117
1:09:24 Mistake 118
1:11:48 Mistake 119
1:16:03 Mistake 120
1:21:18 Mistake 121
1:31:10 Mistake 122
1:37:30 Mistake 123
1:43:21 Mistake 124
1:44:07 Mistake 125
1:45:29 Conclusion

RESOURCES

THE USUAL...

[MajestyofReason]

*_List of Mistakes (for Part 4)_*

_Moral argument_

0:37 Mistake 105: Confusing moral ontology and epistemology
2:46 Mistake 106: Misunderstanding internal critiques
5:33 Mistake 107: Asserting there can be no grounding of morality under atheism, while ignoring potential groundings
15:18 Mistake 108: Conflating why things _instantiate_ moral properties with _what those moral properties are_
22:33 Mistake 109: "Even atheists think that without God there can be no morality!"
39:54 Mistake 110: Being too hasty with evolutionary debunking arguments
51:49 Mistake 111: Intrinsic value/dignity proves God’s existence
53:04 Mistake 112: Non-theistic accounts can’t explain why human morality is different from animal behavior
55:52 Mistake 113: Theists objecting to certain non-theistic accounts on the basis that they land in brute facts
58:09 Mistake 114: Confusing normative judgements with metaethical judgments
59:26 Mistake 115: Ignoring the distinction between agent and appraiser relativism

_Fine-tuning_

1:02:15 Mistake 116: Chance, design, physical necessity avoids worries about Pr(data | theism)
1:07:49 Mistake 117: Puddle analogy / anthropic principle
1:09:24 Mistake 118: Naive frequentism
1:11:48 Mistake 119: Bad responses to multiverse objection
1:16:03 Mistake 120: ‘The constants and initial conditions are metaphysically necessary’ as a response to the FTA

_Ontological arguments_

1:21:18 Mistake 121: Ignoring the distinction between logical and metaphysical possibility
1:31:10 Mistake 122: Ignoring the distinction between epistemic and metaphysical possibility
1:37:30 Mistake 123: Presenting the MOA while being totally oblivious to the reverse MOA
1:43:21 Mistake 124: Saying that _all_ ontological arguments try to define God into existence
1:44:07 Mistake 125: Ignoring controversy over system S5

[TheOtherCaleb]

You’re a real one, Joe. You woke me up from my dogmatic slumbers of Turek-like apologetics, and I am, in all seriousness, forever grateful for that. I’m still a theist, but just an informed one now. I wish this stuff would trickle down to the popular level audiences.

[TrueShepardN]

Hi Joe a little off topic but I am a Christian and I really want to thank for helping for me learn about philosophy of religion and for having many of
My favorite philosophers on your channel this has both helped me strengthen my faith but also challenge it at the same time which I think is good because it is often great faith that wrestles with these things.

[alexmeyer]

A great public service. Give this guy some money! I certainly do.

[mattgarza]

I'm only finishing the moral argument section but I'm really liking everything you're saying! I think one mistake I would add to that section (unless I missed it) is that even if all non-theistic accounts of morality fail it doesn't follow that the Theistic account is true because it could be the case the Theistic account is just as incoherent or inconsistent as the non-theistic accounts.

[adamjohnson]

1:37:17 I feel like this section on the different types of possibility could very easily apply to the fine tuning argument as well. A common error (at least to me) with some fine tuning arguments is the subtle switch between nomological, metaphysical, and logical possibilities. Proponents will often claim that the constants *could possibly be* different than what they are, yet it is never clear how that can be established. They seem to want to ground the life-giving properties in some nomological possibility, but then talk about these other modes and it’s never clear in what way these other values are *in fact* possible.

[jordanh]

Thank you Majesty of Reason for this awesome informative content. This is a huge contribution

[faithbecauseofreason]

Thanks for recommending my video on moral arguments 😊

[manavkhatarkar]

Ngl THE best YouTuber philosopher in the online space has got to be Joe Schmidt... and he's helping me become the same [a good philosopher] :)

[bonbon__candy__]

I recently found your channel and I am SO impressed. I don't think I've EVER met anyone of your intellectual caliber and I can't stop watching your videos now. I am not kidding when I say that you are one of the greatest philosophers in this field at the moment, thank you for what you do!!! 💕💕💕

On the topic of ontological arguments, what do you think about Mulla Sadra's/Tabatabai's Ontological Argument (e.g. in Bidayah Al-Hikmah, free online on Internet Archive)? I think its one of the best ones out there. This is my rendition or my own argument inspired from Tabatabai and I'd LOVEEE to hear what you think about this since the argument is somewhat unknown and I haven't seen many criticisms of it:

(1) There is reality (i.e. all things that exists. we are careful here not to commit reification fallacy)
(2) There is no case under which reality isn't real for it would be self-refuting fallacy. Consider absolute nothingness (negation of any being or absence of all potentiality and actuality, etc.). Such a situation would either be real or unreal or something else. However, if it's not real, then it's non-existent and not possible. So reality is necessary.
(3) This necessity can be derived either internally, externally, or via itself.
(4) It cannot be derived externally, for anything outside of reality would be unreal, and hence, wouldn't exist
(5) It cannot be internally (i.e. on some existent A that happens to be real), for it would implicate that there is some existent A which logically precedes reality itself. This however, is not possible, for if something were to precede reality, it would also be unreal, and hence, wouldn't exist.
(6) Therefore, the only option is that this necessity is self-derived.

Conclusion: There is some "thing" which is identical to reality or existence itself in its essence and cannot NOT exist. Hence, there is at least one Necessary Existence. Also from (5), this Necessary Existence is One (lacks parts). It is timeless for it would precede the universe (contingent) and thus, spacetime. It is immaterial for the same reason. It also must be only one (law of identity of indiscernables, though this is more questionable. I think Spinoza had a better argument for this). Ultimately, you get to a single, immaterial, necessary, absolute, eternal, self-subsisting "Being" which is Pure Existence itself. This is what Classical Theists would call God. You can manually derive some other attributes, but that's besides the point of this argument right now. By the way, I think its also possible to reformulate it to get rid of the Classical Theist ideas i.e. without referring to necessity.

Thoughts?

[jasper]

Wake up babe, new movie-length Majesty of Reason video just dropped

[dzgnhujm]

Do you plan on making a video about Crummett's argument on psychophysical harmony?

You mentioned on another video a while ago that you were studying it and preparing something.

[STARSS]

About #120 I feel like a more charitable interpretation of the of the objection is that the proponent of the FTA is claiming that there's a stochastic process giving rise to the laws of nature, which requires some justification. I guess since the advent of quantum physics it's not as strange to assume some things can be stochastic, but I'm not sure that should be the default either.

[RobJellyBean]

Hi Jo. Really love the content that you upload. This series included. The thing that gets me about many arguments for "God", including the moral arguments, is two fold. 1) If they are true, then they do not prove that Jesus died for our sins or that Mohamed was the last prophet of Allah; they only prove that some god is true or that religion per se somehow produces morality. 2) Because they can be equally applied to any religion, and because most - if not all - religions are incompatible (if one is right, the others are all wrong), these arguments cannot be used to prove anything about any particular religion. I have this niggling feeling that I'm missing something here, but I'm blowed if I can work out what it is ...

[esauponce]

Thank you, again, Joe! Invaluable content. ❤

[silverharloe]

Thanks for including that last mistake. While I don't have a specific reason and haven't done a ton of research into it, my gut reaction to S5 was doubt. I could be wrong and maybe S5 is as solid as Non-contradiction, but maybe I'm right and it's more like the parallel postulate. I don't know, but I'm gratified to hear that I'm not bucking settled philosophy. Also I'm thankful for your providing a starting point for researching it - with the brain damage, I might not understand any of it, but with the brain damage, I for sure wasn't going to find the best papers/books/videos on the topic.

[silverharloe]

What I don't get about the Fine Tuning argument is how they come up with the tiny probabilities of the constants being the values we currently think they are?

Their logic seems to be "if the value has been measured to 60 significant digits, then that's a probability of 1 over 10^60" which seems to treat the possible values as completely and utterly open to any number. So if we do a better experiment and measure the value to 65 significant digits next year, does the probability change to 1 over 10^65 ? If we measure a different value in the 53rd decimal point, what would proponents of fine tuning say then?

Anyway, thanks for the resources, because I need to read up on how we are so glibly dismissing the possibility that at least one of those constants is necessarily that value because of some mathematical relation we don't yet understand. Is it not possible that some development in brane theory might show us that the relation between electrons and quarks in the 13h dimension is such that no other ratio of their energies could exist or whatever?

I'm imagining a scenario where we someone might have argued that pi was fine tuned to 50 digits because they hadn't worked out more than 50 digits yet, and that any change to pi would cause planetary orbits to be impossible so naturally it must be fine tuned for life. But jokes on them, pi was slightly larger than they thought because it keeps having more digits after the 50th, and their probability calculation of 1 over 10^50 was wrong because the probability of pi having that value was (and is) exactly 1.

[roderictaylor]

I think you gave a very good presentation on the MOA. I especially appreciated your distinction between logical and metaphysical possibility. This is something that’s generally very poorly understood, and in my opinion responsible for nearly all the misguided attempts to actually use the MOA as a persuasive argument.

Logical possibility as you described it is typically modeled in S4. In S4, we start with logical tautologies together with a set of propositions that are assumed a’priori to be necessarily true, and then anything deducible form this initial set either using the laws of logic or unwinding definitions is also necessarily true. This is an epistemic modality of knowability, demonstrability, or provability. It has actually been used by mathematicians to study the undecidability of the continuum hypothesis. (See Smullyan: Set Theory and the Continuum Problem)

And of course S5 models metaphysical possibility. S5 includes all the axioms of S4 and adds one more: If it is possible a proposition is necessarily true, then it is necessarily true. This axiom is nonsensical in a modality of knowability or provability; even if it is impossible to prove a proposition is not necessarily true, it need not be the case it is necessarily true. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with S5; it is just not appropriate for modelling a modality of logical possibility; it is intended to model a metaphysical modality.

You stated the MOA as follow:

1. God’s existence is possible.
2. God’s existence is either necessary or impossible.
3. So God’s existence is necessary.

I would state this as

1. It is possible a MGB exists.
2. It is either necessarily true or impossible a MGB exists.
3. So it is necessarily true a MGB exists.

God, at least to me, feels like a proper name. Stating the argument using "MGB" in its place makes it clear we are not presupposing the existence of God; rather we are arguing a certain definition is instantiated. Of course once we are satisfied a MGB exists, we may if we wish refer to that being as God. Having said this, I’ve sometimes used “God” instead of “MGB” in these arguments myself because of the emotional and intuitive resonance the term “God” supplies.

In defending premise 2 of the argument, you say. “The idea is if there were to be a God, God would be a necessary being. And so God is going to have to either exist in all possible worlds or no possible worlds. He’s going to have to be either necessary or he's going to have to be impossible.” I would add a bit more explanation here. Beings are only assumed to have their properties when they are instantiated. So if God exists, it follows God exists in all possible worlds, but if God does not exist, it does not follow God can’t exist in any possible world. At least not working in S4. Working in S4, a proposition can be necessarily true in a possible world but false in the actual world. This is where we need S5. Working in S5, a proposition that is necessarily true in any possible world is true in every possible world, including the actual world.



Finally, I would question what you describe as “mistake #124: Saying that all ontological arguments try to define God into existence.” Of course arguments don’t try to do anything. People using them do. But if someone gives a definition, and then argues it must be instantiated purely because of an examination of the character of the definition itself and the concepts within it without any reference to the actual world, how is that not an attempt to define something into existence?



In the MOA Plantinga defines a MEB to be an omniscient omnipotent omnibenevolent being that has these properties essentially. In other words, in every possible world in which the MEB exists, it has these properties. Plantinga then defines a MGB to be MEB that exists in every possible world.

Note that we can define our terms how ever we like, so this choice doesn’t need to be defended.

We then choose to work in the axiom system S5. In working in S5, we are defining what we mean by necessity, possibility, and impossiblity. This is typically how formal axiom systems work; we define a new notion by specifying the axioms it satisfies. Again, like our definition of a MGB, this decision does not need to be defended. It’s only because of this that typically the only disputed premise in the MOA is “It is possible a MGB exists, ” as all the others follow from either the definition of a MGB or the assumptions of S5.

So with these assumptions, if no MEB exists, then it is logically impossible it’s the case it could be metaphysically possible a MGB exists, because given the definition of a MGB it can’t be possible a MGB exists unless it’s possible it’s necessarily true a MGB exists, and given the axioms concerning possibility in S5, it can’t be possible it’s necessarily true a MGB exists unless a MGB exists, and of course it’ can’t be true a MGB exists unless a MEB exists.

In other words, given the modality we’ve chosen to work in and the way we’ve defined a MGB, if no MEB exists, then it will be metaphysically impossible a MGB exists purely because no MEB exists, because of the definitions we’ve made and the modality we’ve chosen to work in, and for NO OTHER REASON.

Suppose someone argues the definition of a MGB exists is coherent, and therefore we should grant the main premise of the MOA argument together with the conclusion. The problem is there is nothing, absolutely nothing in the MOA that says if no MEB exists then the definition of a MGB will be somehow incoherent. There is nothing, absolutely nothing in the MOA that says if no MEB exists then it will be impossible a MGB exists because the definition of a MGB will be incoherent. Given its assumptions, the MOA tells us that if no MEB exists then it will be impossible.a MGB exists purely because no MEB exists and for no other reason.

Or suppose someone argues we have symmetry breakers that favor the metaphysical possibility of a MGB over its impossibility. There is nothing, absolutely nothing in the MOA argument that says if no MEB exists, then there will fail to be symmetry breakers favoring the possible existence of a MGB over its possible nonexistence. If no MEB exists, then it will be impossible a MGB exists purely because no MEB exists, because of the way we’ve defined our terms and of the axiom system we have chosen to work in, and for no other reason.

There could be hundreds of symmetry breakers favoring the metaphysical possible existence of a MGB, but if no MEB exists it will still be the case it will be metaphysically impossible a MGB exists purely because no MEB exists, because of the way we’ve defined our terms, and the axiom system we’ve chosen to work in, no matter how many symmetry breakers there are. To complete the argument, we must explain why it can’t be the case those symmetry breakers exist and yet no MEB exists, which would make it metaphysically impossible a MGB exists. In other words, we must show how those symmetry breakers give us good reason for concluding a MEB exists. But if we had that, we would not need the MOA! We’d just use this new argument that somehow the symmetry breakers show us a MEB exists and stop there. The MOA would not help us construct such an argument, because there is nothing in the MOA that says if a MEB doesn’t exist then there won’t be symmetry breakers. It only tells us that if a MEB doesn’t exist, then it will be impossible a MGB exists purely because no MEB exists, because of the way we’ve defined our terms and the axiom system we’ve chosen to work in. Either way, it is completely useless.

The MOA gains its illusionary persuasive power because we find it very difficult to separate our intuitions concerning epistemic vs metaphysical modalities. We find it difficult to grant it is impossible a MGB exists. We ask, how can you say it’s impossible a MGB exists? That seems a farfetched notion. But the answer is if no MEB exists, then it is impossible a MGB exists purely because no MEB exists, because of the way we’ve chosen to define a MGB, because of the modality we’ve chosen to work in, and for no other reason.




I do like the MOA. I think it involves many subtle ideas, and I’ve learned a lot by studying it. But as a genuine argument to support the existence of God it is, in my opinion, absurd. Ultimately, it is completely empty of content. It simply notes that two logically equivalent assertions are logically equivalent. I find it astonishing all the work that goes on, using higher order logic or other techniques to try to somehow justify it as a genuine argument for the existence of God.

[fubilosophy]

Aah yes.. another playlist for my workout

Great video ❤

[roderictaylor]

Working in S4 which models an epistemic modality of logical necessity and provability, it makes sense to attempt to defend the premise “It’s possible a MGB exists” of the MOA using arguments that treat possibility as epistemic possibility. But the MOA is not valid in S4.

Working in S5 which models a metaphysical modality, the MOA is valid. But in this modality, it doesn’t make sense to use arguments that assume intuitions appropriate to epistemic possibility to support the premise “It’s possible a MGB exists” of the argument. S5 includes an axiom which is appropriate to a metaphysical modality, but which is nonsensical when interpreted within the epistemic modality modeled in S4.

All attempts I’ve seen to justify the MOA involve trying to have our cake and eat it too. They cite S5 to show the argument is valid, but then they use intuitions appropriate to possibility as epistemic possibility to justify the possibility premise that would only make sense if we were working in S4.

I’d be interested if you have a counterexample.