It's the Strongest Argument for God in History (SCCC pt 7)

In this video, I lay out the argument from Psychophysical Harmony, and respond to its major objections.

[ApologeticsSquared]

Also, bonus points to whoever finds my typo in this video. :)

[logicalliberty]

Apologetics Squared, please feel free to copy and paste your responses to my comment from the other video. But I wanted to comment these criticisms in case they help people think about a skeptical take on the argument.

Some criticisms:

Firstly, The argument assumes the principle of indifference. However there are quite powerful objections to this principle and it is regarded as very suspect in philosophy of probability. Of course, the guest goes on to talk about weighting the probability toward simple laws and argues that this helps the argument. But that's not the only possible weighting; perhaps there are probabilistic weightings toward harmony itself. The argument needs to give us some reason to think there isn't/shouldn't be such probabilistic weighting, and yet it does no such thing.

Secondly, The guest says that psychophysical harmony is very highly probable on theism. This is extremely implausible. It's not even clear why we should expect God to create anything at all under theism. God is perfectly fulfilled, perfectly self-sufficient even in a world where he doesn't create. That world has an utterly unparalleled purity, elegance, simplicity, and many other goods that can't be found in any other world. Why wouldn't God strongly desire not to create, then? Whence cometh your insight into God's psychology? And even if God chooses to create, there may very well be lots of goods that are only possible if theres psychophysical disharmony. Maybe God is super interested in that; maybe he gets great pleasure from it; maybe it's more interesting than a harmonious world; maybe disharmony for physical creatures is a necessary condition for significant harmony in and significant goods accruing to non-physical angelic beings; maybe an extended duration of disharmony is a precondition for greater goods (perhaps even greater harmony) down the line, just as evil is a precondition for greater goods or divine hiddenness is a precondition for greater relationship goods down the line; perhaps God would prefer to actualize only non-physical creatures to whom psychophysical harmony doesn't even apply; etc. Theism doesn't predict psychophysical harmony; it's compatible with basically all the disharmonious combinations of psychophysical laws (or *no such laws to begin with*) the guest speaks of.

Thirdly, Many atheistic hypotheses predict the data just as well as, if not better than, theism - eg natural teleology, atheistic axiarchism, Draper's aesthetic deism, Atheistic Platonic Form of the Good views (like Eric Steinhardt), etc. These are hardly 'theism adjacent'; they're incompatible with theism. They share only one salient feature with theism, namely, some tendency on the part of something fundamental toward, minimally, harmony (and perhaps goodness as well). (Of course, assuming that theism does deliver this tendency. I'm skeptical that it does, as explained above.)

Fourthly, The argument makes the problem of evil nigh insoluble. Pain and suffering are intrinsically bad. God shouldn't actualize them. The theist response is that, while they're intrinsically bad, they're extrinsically good insofar as they're able to bring about greater goods down the line. But if - per the argument from psychophysical harmony - we're working with epistemic possibilities or conceivable scenarios where the 'phenomenal feel' associated with a causal profile can be different than it actually is, then we can easily imagine scenarios in which the causal profile of actual pain/suffering remains intact (and so you get all the same extrinsic goods) but in which the phenomenal feeling associated with that causal profile is neutral or even pleasurable. It would be atrociously, viciously evil to actualize pain/suffering-filled worlds when there are worlds that are identical (with all the same extrinsic goods) except for those phenomenal experiences of pain/suffering. We would thus expect God with near certainty to actualize one of those worlds. Lo and behold, God didn't.

Fifthly, The guest's response to the 'revenge problem' is not plausible. Firstly, The psychophysical laws describing God's mental states are going to be far more complicated than the guest says. There are connections between God’s first- and second- and third-order desires; there are connections between God’s emotional states (eg happiness and sadness) and potential goings-on in the world (eg, Gods emotional state is rejoicing when a sinner repents or converts; it’s grief when atrocities happen; etc); there are connections between God’s desires and his intentions; there are connections between his intentions and his actions; there are connections between his actions and their effects; there are connections between his response behaviors to prayer input, and these are exceedingly fine-tuned to the kind of prayer, the person praying, their circumstances, the number of people praying, whether those prayer requests are compatible, etc; there are connections between his beliefs and states of the world; and so on ad nauseam. This is extremely complex; far more complex than the guest lets on, and it requires far more to state than the few (quite uninformative and underdetermining) laws/connections the guest cites. Secondly, Perfection doesn’t entail harmony, against what the guest claims. Remember, the argument allows us to conceive of different metaphysically necessary sets of laws. Thus, we can imagine alternative sets of divine psychological laws that are metaphysically necessary. In this imagined scenario, it’s no mark against God’s perfection that he isn’t fully psychologically harmonious, since the laws are necessary — it’s literally impossible for God to be fully psychologically harmonious. Plausibly, then, perfection doesn’t entail harmony. Impossibilities cannot be perfections that God lacks. And so it doesn’t count against God’s perfection in these imagined scenarios with different, not-fully-harmonious necessary divine psychological laws. Thirdly, Even if perfection entails harmony, we still have the revenge problem as a challenge to the intrinsic probability of perfect being theism (as opposed to other, similar theisms). Given the massive complexity of these divine psychological connections, there will be bajillions upon bajillions of alternative theisms that are slightly (and, in some cases, majorly) disharmonious in their psychology and/or its connections to the world. It’s not at all clear why we shouldn’t be indifferent among these bajillions of hypotheses just as we’re indifferent among the different sets of psychophysical laws. Thus, theism gets an exceedingly low prior probability that’s probably similar to the inverse of the evidential confirmation it allegedly garners from psychophysical harmony. In other words, the evidence is only purchased at the cost of intrinsic improbability.

Sixthly, The naturalist could co-opt Malpass’ stalking horse objection to the fine tuning argument for this argument. Just posit some natural thing with the disposition towards producing harmony in minded beings. Yes this adds complexity to naturalism, but it’s at least as plausible as a supernatural mind that also tends toward goodness (and hence harmony in minded beings) that theism posits. You might then complain that it’s super intrinsically unlikely that it would be disposed to harmony as opposed to any of the disharmonious scenarios. But the same can be said of God. You might reply that harmony is good whereas disharmony isn’t, and so God is more likely to actualize harmony. But as explained earlier, disharmony may itself be good if God gets pleasure from it, or is interested in it, or it may be extrinsically good in its connection with outweighing goods either accruing to other creatures (eg angels) or to those disharmoniously-minded physical beings later on in their existence (when, perhaps, they’re more harmonious for a short time to reap those benefits).

Seventhly, The naturalist may very well accept a priori physicalism. Crummett and Cutter themselves admit that this is a way to entirely circumvent the argument. And this thesis isn’t nearly as implausible as the dualists Crummett, Cutter, and Emerson Green let on. Many philosophers are sympathetic with it, it’s defensible, and it isn’t at all fringe, as shown by the fact that - per the PhilPapers survey - 17% of philosophers think that philosophical zombies (and the phenomenal-physical inversions/disharmony that it implies) aren’t even conceivable. For reference, that’s about the number of philosophers who accept libertarian free will. It’s a sizable number. Moreover, the argument requires not only a denial of a priori physicalism; it also requires a denial of the claim that the characteristic causal profiles of phenomenal states are a priori knowable. But that claim is even more plausible than a priori physicalism, and denying it is at least contestable.

[yourfutureself]

You did a better job explaining the argument than the author of the argument did when explaining it on Capturing Christianity. Amazing argument.

[teistadesdelarazon]

OMG I will try to bring this argument to the Spanish-speaking community, ¡excelent job with this video squared!

[davidcates]

Ooh finally, the next video! Can't wait to watch it, I'm sure it'll be great. I'd love to see you cover some more arguments about mathematics or mathematics-adjacent topics - I'm taking symbolic logic next semester with Christopher Menzel which should be super fun.

[fantasypvpvideos]

I have just found out your channel! It is great to have a library of arguments for and against God!

[mesplin]

I threw a dart. Then I drew a target around the dart. What is the chance that I hit the bullseye?

[crabking]

Great presentation of Dustin Crummett's argument from Psychophysical harmony. I think it is one of the strongest arguments for the existence of God, and provides a great, if not overwhelming amount of evidence for theism. That being said, there is technically a "flaw". The argument technically understates the evidence. For the most part, our universe has harmonious psychophysical laws which would be highly unexpected given naturalism, but expected given theism. However, there are some cases of psychophysical disharmony in our universe which we wouldn't expect given theism, but would be unsurprising given naturalism. This can be found in the form of severe mental illnesses and certain environmental conditions which seem to go against the typical normative and semantic harmony found in our universe. Emerson Green gave this objection so credits to him.

To be fair, even with this evidential chip in favor of naturalism, it probably doesn't even come close to offsetting the evidential weight provided by psychophysical harmony. Our world seems to be more psychophysically harmonious than disharmonious.

[mistermkultra]

Hey bro, you should make a tier list of all the arguments for the existence of God
(It would be an entertaining video, you are one of the apologists who knows a wide variety of arguments)

[seastone]

Really enjoy your videos!

- Agnostic Atheist

[karolgajko]

Well that is really interesting argument.

The one thing I'm not sure how to respond to is critique in lines of:

Given any set of psychophysical connections, we cannot say if those would or wouldn't be psychophysically harmonious. If we had different psychophysical laws, we would just make sense of the universe in accordance to those laws. It isn't necessarily true that most psychophysical connections different from our own would be incoherent mess. It would be for us now, as we would compare it to our own psychophysical laws that are here, but if someone of the different reality looked into our world, it would seem equally incoherent. For instance, the thing we experience as pain, in different reality could instead be experienced as pleasure from our perspective. We say that effect is psychophysically disharmonious, but we can say it only if we have our own psychophysical laws as a point of reference. If our point of reference was a different set of laws, then our own universe is not psychophysically harmonious. Unless there is meta-psychophysical law that states that there's only few psychophysical sets of laws which are truly harmonious, we cannot declare our own psychophysical reality as something remarkable and special.

Maybe I don't fully grasp the argument yet, but I think this wasn't addressed on the video.

[MrGustavier]

25:48 "I would actually really appreciate it if you the viewer shared this video so that if there is a flaw we can all find it"

The flaw :

In the beginning of the video, you compare the argument to the fine tuning argument. I think that one of the response to the fine tuning argument applies to the psychophysical harmony argument :

In the fine tuning argument, at some point one needs to evaluate the prior probability that the universe exist as it is, given theism. The problem is that there isn't any way to calculate that prior probability. Simply saying "I believe that a theistic god would WANT to create the universe as it is" isn't gonna cut it. This is entirely ad-hoc. One needs to give a separate argument to justify that a theistic god would indeed create the universe as it is. Absent that argument, any universe could be created by a theistic god. In fact, a one to one correspondance can be established between every different combination of physical constant in the naturalist hypothesis, and every different universe that a god could have created in the theistic hypothesis, rendering the argument entirely mute.

The same critique applies to the psychophysical harmony argument.

A separate argument needs to be given to justify that god would indeed want to create psychophysical harmony. Otherwise any difference in the priors would be entirely ad-hoc. And the argument would be mute.

[norabelrose]

This argument backfires by making the problem of evil much worse. If qualia and behavior can come apart, then God could have eliminated suffering while keeping our behavior the same.

[bartolo]

I am not sure I understood all the details. But I tend to doubt that epistemic possibility/probability helps at all or put differently, that it is abused here. It seems too easy to argue for all kinds or crazy stuff along similar lines. It seems to me one could make a very similar, simpler argument for the existence of physical laws demanding theism. Because starting with a humean mosaique, i.e. some distribution D property instantiated at each point of space (or initial values on points of some cauchy-surface) at t0 there could be any other distribution D1 of property instances at t1, and another D2 at t2, etc. So there would be gazillions of "laws", i.e. sequences of patterns Dx of property instances, most of which would be totally chaotic (i.e. no way like laws in the standard sense). Without adding more structure/restrictions to the patterns and sequences the epistemic possibilities would be immense and any additional structure (to get to laws as we know them) could be contested in some way. So we should expect total chaos because there are so many more possibilities for chaos ("pseudolaws" in the sense above) than for order. But not with God who creates order, ergo T far more probable than non-T, because we have order, not chaos.

[Dissandou]

nice video. question: at 6:45, multiplying probabilities is allowed if each event is independent. why assume that psychophysical laws are independent?

[danielwalley]

The argument is circular - reality is coherent because reality is coherent. Which means it's really just saying coherent reality = God. But that's a sneaky substitution - coherent reality only equals coherent reality, and one can imagine an infinite number of coherent realities, and they don't have to involve a God. Though I do think it's fair to say that the coherence of reality is *mysterious*, but beyond that point it's just conjecture.

[jimmyfaulkner]

Hi Apologetics Squared 👋🏻. Great video! I am wondering though is it possible to avoid this unique argument if a person was to adopt an idealist position (epistemological or metaphysical)? I ask because if one adopts idealism, then this entails that it phenomenal truths are fundamental and physical truths either don’t exist or are grounded in phenomenal truths. Given this is the case, doesn’t this successfully avoid the argument altogether in a similar manner (but inverted) to the way that Type-A physicalists (including analytical functionalism, eliminative materialism/illusionism and certain forms of liberal naturalism) avoid the argument due to P-Zombies not only being impossible, but also inconceivable (phenomenal states/truths are identical to physical functions/behaviors and this can be known a priori). Thanks!

[MrGustavier]

25:48 _"I would actually really appreciate it if you the viewer shared this video so that if there is a flaw we can all find it"_

The flaw :

In the beginning of the video, you compare the argument to the fine tuning argument. I think that one of the response to the fine tuning argument applies to the psychophysical harmony argument :

If one sees a dart in the center of a target, two scenarios can be thought of : the target was there, and the dart reached its center. Or the target was drawn around the dart.
If our universe is the result of a dice throw, which fell on a face, then nothing needs to be explained, as a dice throw necessarily falls on a face. However, if it appears that the dice fell on a red face, and that the dice only possesses a single red face, then arguably, something needs to be explained (especially if the dice has an extremely large number of faces).
But then the same two scenarios apply : either the red face was already there, and the dice fell on it, or the face was painted red after the dice roll.

The same applies to the psychophysical harmony argument.

There is indeed a very large amount of ways to couple physical states and mental experiences, however, pretending that only one is "harmonious" can be interpreted as similar to painting the face red after the dice throw, or drawing the target around the dart. Every association of a physical state and a mental experience could be equally harmonious, since the only thing that changes from one coupling to the next, is the meaning of the words used to describe the mental experience.

The entire argument hinges on pretending that if one stubs one's toe and feels the _"smell of grass"_ then one's _"internal experience of the world would get really crazy"_ (10:32)... But this, of course, needs not be the case. In a universe in which every conscious entity has always described their internal mental experience after stubbing one's toe as _"smell of grass"_, then attributing the mental state of "pain" to stubbing one's toe would be considered disharmonious !

There needs not be any preferential association of a physical state with a mental state.
I encourage you to read about the "twin earth thought experiment" from Putnam. The only way to argue for a preferential coupling is to argue for "semantic externalism".
This seems to be an enormous weakness of the argument.

[Nickesponja]

13:14 about the point you make here. I don't see why it would be just as likely for pain to cause effect X, than for pleasure to cause effect X, if effect X is "nursing your toe" (after hitting it). Obviously pain is more likely to make you nurse your toe than pleasure. Evolution couldn't possibly select creatures that nurse their toes when hitting them is pleasurable, because such creatures would just stub their toes constantly, seeking pleasure. Am I missing something here? Like, to say that a psychophysical law could be that pleasure caused you to want to stop the source of the pleasure, seems to be like saying that a square circle could exist. If it matters, my view is that the mental *is* physical.

Also, at the end you say that God could make a particle have consciousness, which I think is related to this issue. Consciousness is something that brains (or complicated, brain-like systems) do. I don't understand what it means to say that a single particle has consciousness, or conscious experiences. What does that statement tell us about the particle?

[psylegio]

This is hard to grasp as a layman but I do have a few thoughts that may or may not be relevant.

How does programmed cell death fit into this argument? If 50% of neurons die during a normal brain development, how does that not postulate a biologically driven, that is evolutionary driven, process that prevent needless connections like those described as chaotic/disharmonious. This is concerning both each individual as well as in the evolution of the species as a whole?

How perfect does the harmony have to be? The neural firings that I Perceive as licorice could be the taste of cherry in your experience even if we both call it mint. We can have disharmony and not know it as not all of reality is shared.

How do we know that how we experience things are not just learned interpretations of neurological static of varied pitch? I am thinking of cochlear Implants where a person can be relearning how to hear from just electric impulses. With time one can differentiate speech, various sounds etc. If our experiences are fluid and under development then an organised harmonious outcome could result from that change rather than a preset order, no?

As a whole I can not quite see how change fit into this model.

This said Christianity is true.
God bless!