A simple response to the normalizability objection to the fine-tuning argument

The normalizability objection isn't necessarily an argument against fine-tuning. Rather, it's an argument against the idea that we can quantify fine-tuning or attach a specific probability to it. There are some people who think you need to be able to attach a number to a probability before probability makes any sense, but I want to challenge that idea.

Let's say you're standing in front of a wooden fence. As far as you can see to the left and to the right, the fence kind of disappears over a hill, through the trees, or maybe even out to the horizon. You don't know how far it goes beyond that point. As far as you can see in either direction, the fence is red. But there is one board right in front of you that's blue. You may have no idea how far the fence goes in either direction, but you can still see that the blue part is relatively tiny in comparison to the part you can see. Since you can't tell how far the fence goes, you can't normalize the probability that throwing a dart from any random location will result in sticking in the blue part rather than the red. But that doesn't prevent you from noticing that there's a lot more red than blue, and your dart is far more likely to hit the red part than the blue.

In the same way, you can tell that the life-permitting range is much smaller than the possible range of values to the fundamental constants and initial conditions of the universe. You can tell that changing the values by a small amount will result in a life-prohibiting universe without having to know the full range of possible values. So you don't need to know precisely how fine-tuned the universe is to know that it's fine-tuned.

I think this is what Robin Collins was getting at in his chapter in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology.

One counter-argument that could be raised to my analogy is that for all we know, the fence becomes blue over the horizon. Maybe it's blue from there on out, which means there could be far more blue than red. We just wouldn't know. If the blue represents the life-permitting range, then we'd have to say that maybe at some arbitrarily large or small value to some constant, the universe becomes life-permitting again.

Although it's possible, for all I know, that there could be islands of habitibility in the parameter space of all the constants, it strikes me as being unlikely that these islands would be very big if they exist at all. If we just limit ourselves to the known laws of physics and our ability to model, calculate, and simulate universes, as far as we are able to see, there are no remote pockets of habitility. If you just keep increasing or decreasing the value of some constant beyond the life-permitting range, the problem for habitility appears to only get worse. We can tell that without having to take it out to infinity. But admittedly, I don't know the physics well enough to press that point too hard.

For more thoughts on the normalizability objection see "The noramlizability objection to fine tuning, take one."

Stress testing your own apologetic

Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good. ~1 Thessalonians 5:20-21

Let's say you want to design a super suit that will allow you to survive in outer space, under water, a burning building, and Antarctica in winter. You design it with materials you think can withstand high temperatures and low temperatures and maintain a constant pressure inside whether the pressure outside is higher or lower while keeping the occupant comfortable. You want it to be flexible so the person can move around in it. You want it to be strong so it doesn't rupture. You want it to be air tight while providing breathable air. And you want it to be able to maintain these properties through a wide range of temperatures and pressures.

Let's say you design and build this suit based on your knowledge of materials and the conditions under which you expect the suit will have to hold up. Once you've built it, how do you know it will work? Would you just assume the suit was good to go and allow somebody to take it out into the field? Would you happily put the suit on and walk through a burning building or jump into the ocean without having tested it? I suspect not.

Since you want it to keep people comfortable in space, you'd want to make sure it could do the job before somebody uses it for that purpose. You would want to test it. One way you might test it is by pressurizing it to see if there are any leaks. Since space is a vacuum, you want to make sure it can withstand a pressure differential of at least one atmosphere. What you would definitely not want to do is pressurize it half way and just assume it'll be good the whole way. In fact, you would probably want to raise the presurre inside to well beyond what you think is necessary. That gives you a margin of safety. If it can withstand a presurre differential of 10 atmospheres, then you'll feel much better about it's ability to work with a pressure differential of 1 atmosphere.

In other words, you want to stress test your suit. Before anybody steps into it, you want to see how far you can push the suit before it breaks. You want to come up with worst case scenarios to see how the suit holds up. The more rigorous the testing, the more confident you can be that the suit is safe to use. You test the suit by trying to make it fail. If it fails under testing, then you either abandon the design altogether or you attempt to improve upon the current design. Then you test it again. You keep doing that until the suit proves itself reliable under extreme conditions. Ideally, you want to make sure it's fully operational under conditions that are even worse than you think it will ever have to endure out in the field.

This is a procedure I think should apply, not just to super suits, but to your beliefs and your worldview as well. You don't want to believe something that's false. You want to believe what's true and right.

This procedure should apply to arguments as well. If you are designing a case for some point of view you want to promote in the public square, you don't want to just compile a random collection of arguments and start posting them on the internet. Instead, you should want to test them to see if they are good arguments. This applies whether we're talking about Christianity, politics, or any situation in which you hope to persuade another person of your point of view.

The first step in testing your case is to try to come up with counter-arguments. Look for holes or flaws in your own reasoning. Try to think of what it would take to falsify your point of view. Come up with the best objections you can think of. See if the arguments can withstand your own best attempt at refuting them.

You have to be honest with yourself in this process. If you were designing a super suit, of course you would want it to succeed. But it would be dangerous to go easy on the testing just so you don't have to watch it fail. In the same way, it would be reckless to "test" your case against what you know good and well are flimsy rebuttals. It would be reckless to test your case against an easily refutable strawman version of an objection. So you need to think of the best objections you can. If you know of some popular response to your argument, try to think of the best version of that response. If it's a weak response, then steel man it. Try to improve upon it.

This is how the scholastic philosophers like Anselm and Thoma Aquinas used to write. They would begin with an initial argument, then raise objections against it, then raise objections to those objections. They would continue this process, refining their view as they went along, until they finally arrived at a conclusion.

Modern analytic philosophers do something similar. A good example of that is in Alvin Plantinga's book, God, Freedom, and Evil. He spends several pages going back and forth trying to come up with a way to show an inconsistency between the theistic set containing the statements (1) God is all knowing, all powerful, and wholly good, and (2) Evil exists. He would raise some possible statement that when added to the theistic set would generate a formal contradiction. Then he would shoot that down and either adjust the statement or come up with another one. He continued this procedure until he ran out of ideas. In the end, he said that while the elusive proposition might yet exist, it would not be easy to find.

Once your case appears to hold up well under your own scrutiny, see how well it holds up against your friends' scrutiny. Somebody else who is on your side might be able to come up with objections you didn't think of. I used to be part of a private Christian apologetics group on Facebook many years ago. Most of them were pro-life, and I was, too. I wanted to test the pro-life case by having a devil's advocate debate. I took the pro-choice position and tried to come up with the best pro-choice case I could to see how the other person would respond. I hoped that he would be able to refute my arguments because I thought it would be a learning experience for me. It would enable me to improve my case for the pro-life position. I found a volunteer, and we had a formal mock debate.

I've had devil's advocate debates on debate.org, too. I do them partly as a learning experience, and partly for the fun of it. The good thing about defending a point of view opposed to your own is that it forces you to step in another person's shoes and try to see things from their perspective. It can be an effective way to gain a better understanding of their view than you might if you were just reading what they had to say, all the while raising objections to it in your head. Instead, you'd be reading what they had to say while thinking, "What are they actually trying to say?" and "How can I make this work?" You'd be reading for understanding rather than reading to respond, which often leads to misunderstanding.

In the past, I've called popular Christian apologists, philosophers, and scientists on their radio shows, sent them emails, or commented on their blog posts, raising objections to some talking point or argument I might agree with already to see how they would respond and hopefully learn from them.

Once you test your ideas under friendly fire, a third step would be to test them in the real world. This blog exists primarily for that reason. I express a lot of opinions on this blog in hopes of getting some interaction with people who are interested in the subject matter. I want to hear from people who disagree with me. I want them to push back. I also want to hear from people who agree with me in case they want to push back or tell me they think I'm on the right track. I also want to see how they will respond to my critics and how my critics will respond to them. I want different perspectives because I can't think of everything, and I don't know everything.

This blog used to get a lot more participation. I rarely get comments anymore, and I kind of feel like I'm talking to myself. This has caused me to sometimes be a little more risky about what I post. Yesterday, for example, I posted an argument for God I had just come up with. It's probably a flawed argument or somebody else would've already come up with it. But I didn't see the harm in posting it and offering my own initial thoughts on it. I included an objection I thought of, but I figured other people who knew more than I did might have something to say.

When I actually want to make a case for some point of view in order to persuade other people, I want to make sure I have the best case that I can have. I want to be able to articulate it in a way that's clear, easy to understand, and compelling. I don't want it littered with weak arguments. In sport debating, I might use weak arguments for filler or to waste the other person's time, but if I really want to persuade people, I only use what I personally think are the best arguments. They have to be arguments that I myself find persuasive. If I want to have a case like that, it has to be something I've tested against my own attempts to refute, against my team or tribe's ability to refute, against the objections raised by random people on the internet, and against the smartest people I can engage. If you ever want to write a book or an article, or if you want to pursuade your family or people you meet in the wild, I recommend testing your case first. Refine your apologetic by subjecting it to the fire of criticism.

Most people don't do that. Whether we're talking about Christian apologetics, abortion, climate change, gun control, or a host of public policy issues, most people simply look for anything that will confirm what they already believe. They're not interested in anything that might challenge their point of view. They're often dismissive. When I see people on line arguing with each other, I don't usually get the impression they're really listening to each other. I don't get the impression many people are interested in anything anybody else has to say. They treat each other with derision rather than curiosity. Sometimes, I think people avoid opposition out of fear and anxiety. If they are emotionally invested in their point of view, they don't want to find out that they're wrong. But I encourage you not to be afraid of the big bad critic. If you want to know the truth, it does you no good to simply seek to confirm what you already believe and avoid opposition. That would be like taking an untested super suit to Antarctica in the winter and hoping to survive.

A new argument for God

Here's an argument for God I came up with today (11/30/2025). I don't know if it's a good argument. I just came up with it. But here it is.

1. If there is no God, then you are a Boltzmann brain.
2. You are not a Boltzmann brain.
3. Therefore, there is a God.

Defense of the first premise

According to the standard model in cosmology (Λ-CDM), the expansion of the universe is accelerating. That means the universe will never recollapse. It will expand forever.

In the meantime, entropy will go up until the universe reaches thermodynamic equilibrum. Once it does, the only thing that will ever happens is that over vast oceans of time, there will be random low entropy fluctuations.

Small fluctuations will be more frequent than large fluctuations, but as long as something has some positive probability of happening, it will happen. It is possible for particles in equilibrium to spontaneously organize itself into the form of a human brain, even if just for a moment. In fact, that is vastly more probable than there being enough particles that spontaneously all organize themselves into a single location and become a whole universe populated with sentient beings like us.

With that being the case, the entire history of our universe should have vastly more isolated brains that fluctuate into existence than real people like us. And with that being the case, it's vastly more probable that you are one of these brains than it is that you're a real person.

According to Christian theology, that is not the fate of our universe. At some point, God is going to intervene. He's going to make everything new. He's going to raise physical people to eternal life. The earth will be our home forever. That requires some drastic change to the universe that should prevent the universe from ever reaching thermodynamic equilibrium. That, in turn, will prevent the emergence of Boltzmann brains.

If the Christian God doesn't exist, and no other God exists to prevent nature from taking its course, then we probably are Boltzmann brains.

The only way to avoid this conclusion is to suppose that Λ-CDM is not correct. It may not be. I've blogged on that a few times before. But right now, it's the prevailing view of cosmologists, and the evidence favours Λ-CDM. If new evidence comes in that overturns Λ-CDM, that's all well and good. But for the moment, we ought to incline our belief to where the evidence currently points, and that's Λ-CDM.

So if there is no God, then you probably are a Boltzmann brain.

Defense of the second premise

However, it is not reasonable to think you are a Boltzmann brain. If you were a Boltzmann brain, then you would not have reliable belief-producing cognitive abilities. The reason is because everything you know and experience just randomly fluctuated into being along with your brain. It has no connection to reality. You can't possibly know anything about the real world if all your thoughts and sensations just randomly fluctuated into being.

It's not reasonable to think you are a Boltzmann brain because if you were, it would undermine any reason you had for thinking you were a Boltzmann brain. If you came to that belief because of your "knowledge" of cosmology, but none of that "knowledge" was reliable, then you have no reason to think you are a Boltzmann brain. The belief that you are a Boltzmann brain is self-defeating since it undermines everything you believe.

To be a rational person, you must affirm the second premise in my argument. You must deny that you are a Boltzmann brain.

If you are a not a Boltzmann brain, but you would be if there were no God, then there must be a God.

That's the argument in a nutshell.

A possible objections and response

I can think of at least one objection to this argument. Recall what I said before about leaning in favor of Λ-CDM because it's the prevailing view, and that's where all the evidence currently points. One could just as well use this argument to show that Λ-CDM is false rather than saying God exists. You could make an argument like this:

1. If Λ-CDM is true, then you are a Boltzmann brain.
2. You are not a Boltzmann brain.
3. Therefore, Λ-CDM is not true.

With this argument in place, you wouldn't need to invoke God in order to avoid being a Boltzmann brain. I guess the question would come down to which is most likely to be false - that God exists or that Λ-CDM is true.

There isn't much evidence against the existence of God, which is why it's so popular for people to say they lack a belief in God rather than saying they believe God doesn't exist. Nobody wants to have to prove a negative, so they don't claim God doesn't exist.

Λ-CDM has some evidence against it, but so far it hasn't been overturned. So far, the evidence still seems to favor Λ-CDM.

With little or no evidence against the existence of God, and plenty of evidence for Λ-CDM, it seems more reasonable to affirm Λ-CDM than to deny God. That means the argument for God at the beginning of this post is probably sound and the argument against Λ-CDM is probably not sound.

I don't know, though. Λ-CDM isn't really a complete picture of the cosmos. Maybe there will be some irreversible process in the future, other than increasing entropy or divine intervention, that will prevent Boltzmann brains from ever forming.

If everything spreads out forever, I don't see how it's possible for there to be spontaneous fluctuations of low entropy that produce Boltzmann brains. Everything would be too far apart.

But maybe that's just the point. In animations I've seen on YouTube that explain entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, they'll show a box filled with gas that's evenly spread out and everything is in motion. But then, given enough time, there should be a point at which the molecules somehow all end up in one small corner of the box. It's unlikely, but given enough time, it can happen. That would be a random fluctuation of low entropy.

So maybe, even though everything in the universe is really spread out, it's possible for some particles to spontaneously gather in different places and have localizes regions of low entropy.

What do you think?

Strike Three for the Cosmological Constant?

It looks like the cosmological constant, aka lambda, aka dark energy has taken another hit. First it was the timescape model, which I blogged about before. According to this model, the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the universe is just an illusion brought on by time dilation and growing voids. Then a paper came out claiming, based on some data from the Desi telescope, that although dark energy is real, the cosmological constant may not be constant after all. It changes over time. I blogged about that, too. Now, a new study claims that the expansion of the universe may not be accelerating after all. Sabine Hossenfelder made a video about it.

These are interesting times.

What does it mean to believe something?

When I was a kid, I came to the "realization" that I couldn't actually be certain about anything because for anything I thought was true, it was at least possible that I was wrong. The seeds of this idea began when I was in the 2nd grade trying to remember an incident a year or two earlier in which I fell asleep in the bushes beside a tennis court near my house. I couldn't remember waking up and crawling out of the bushes, which made me wonder if I was still asleep and just having a vivid dream. This thought haunted me for several years.

At some point, I took the thought a little further. If it was possible that I could still be dreaming, then it's just as possible that the whole kit and caboodle was a dream. Maybe I even dreamed that I fell asleep by that tennis court. Maybe nothing I took to be true was real. Maybe I've always been in a dream state. Maybe humans don't even exist. Maybe I'm an alien. Maybe there is no physical world at all, and it's all just perception.

These thoughts eventually lead me to the conclusion that I didn't really know anything. However, I wasn't a total skeptic either. I accepted that I was probably a real person living in a real world. It's just that I could never be absolutely certain. That meant I didn't really know anything. I just had degrees of confidence. I had beliefs, but not knowledge.

I made a conscious effort to stop saying I know stuff and to say, "I believe," instead. I pictured belief to be a spectrum of degrees of confidence, and that I could never be 100% sure of anything. This idea may have lasted into my early 20's, but I'm not sure.

Although I didn't make any effort back then to define belief and knowledge, it appears that I took knowledge to amount to 100% certainty. Anything short of that, and you don't have knowledge. You just have belief.

Later on, I came to the realization that there were at least a few things that I could be certain about, including my own existence, basic math, and the laws of logic. But most things were still beliefs that fell somewhere on the confidence spectrum. I knew I existed, but I didn't know what kind of being I was or whether I had a physical body. I only believed I was a physical human being.

I changed my mind about what it meant to know something in one of my philosophy classes in college. My teacher, whose name I think was David Sosa, walked us carefully through the standard definition of knowledge as justified true belief. It all made perfectly good sense to me, and I've accepted that understanding of knowledge ever since. I became a lot more comfortable saying I know stuff because a person could have a justified true belief even if they lacked 100% confidence.

He didn't just hand us the definition and explain the ingredients. He gave us thought experiments and asked us questions to lead us to the definition. One thought experiment he used was a situation in which somebody guessed the right lottery numbers, actually believed they were the winning numbers, and ended up being right. Then he asked us whether the person knew the right lottery numbers. We intuitively recognized that he didn't. What was the missing ingredient? This thought experiment was meant to illustrate that having a true belief was not sufficient for knowledge, and that justification was also required. I have been using that same thought experiment ever since.

One reason I accepted his definition of knowledge was because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that his definition was implicit in the way people actually used knowledge in our daily lives anyway. It was the definition implicit in the way I used the word in unguarded moments when I wasn't trying to be a persnickety philosophy kid. There were lots of times I claimed to know every day things for which I lacked 100% certainty.

Words get their meaning from the way they are commonly used. In every day life, when people say they know something, they don't mean they have infalliable knowledge. They don't mean they are 100% confident. They just mean they're aware of some fact. For example, when people say they know where something is, or they know what time the show starts, or they know who ate the last cookie, they aren't claiming absolute certainty. They're just claiming to be privy to information about something that's true, i.e., they are claiming to have a justified true belief.

My intentional refusal to use the word, knowledge, to refer to anything I thought when I was a kid was just silly. I remember when somebody would ask me if I knew some mundane thing, like where the nearest gas station is, I would say something like, "I don't know where one is, but I believe one is just a block away." I was just trying to be consistent, but I was really being silly, and people were right to think me a little weird.

Since settling on the standard definition of knowledge as justified true belief, I still run into people who hold what I consider to be muddled ideas about these things. For example, I ran into a Mormon bishop one time. When I asked him if he believed such and such, he said, "I don't believe it; I know it." To him, knowledge and belief were mutually exclusive. But according to the standard definition, you can't know something if you don't at least believe it. To believe something is merely to think it's true. You can't know something is true if you don't even think it is true.

I've run into people who refuse to say they believe anything. They tell me they either know something or they don't. They don't have beliefs. These people strike me as being just as silly as I was when I was a kid, except they were silly in the opposite way. Whereas I claimed to only have beliefs and no knowledge, they claim to only have knowledge and no beliefs.

Although I've asked, I can't remember ever getting a straight answer from one of these people when I asked them to define what they mean by "knowledge" and "belief," so I can only speculate. I think they take belief to amount to something like arbitrary assent. If you think something is true, but you have no justification, then that's a belief. But if you have justification for thinking something is true, then you have knowledge. So to them, there's no such thing as a justified belief. For a lot of these people, belief is a religious term that's roughly equivalent to blind faith. A good question to ask one of these people is, "Suppose you think something is true for what looks to you to be good reasons, but it's actually not true. You're mistaken. Do you have knowledge in that case? If not, is that a belief? What would you call it?"

Blind faith is clearly not what most people mean when they say they believe something. By the ordinary use of the word, to believe something is merely to think it's true. If you think the polar ice caps are going to melt in the next ten years, then that's what you believe. It is possible to believe something for good reasons, flimsy reasons, or no reason at all. Whether you have justification or not for thinking something is true, it's still a belief. It's possible to believe something and be right about it or wrong about it. Whether it's true or not, it's still a belief.

The standard definition of knowledge makes good sense. Imagine a person says, "I know the earth orbits the sun," but then turns around and says, "I don't think it's true that the earth orbits the sun." Would we not think they were contradicting themselves? Or, imagine a person says, "I believe you can get a taco for $2 at yonder food truck," but then followed it up with, "But I know you can't." Would that person not be contradicting themselves? How can you claim to know something if you don't even think it's true? I don't think you can do that consistently.

It doesn't make sense to say you know something if you don't at least think it's true. And if you think it's true, then you believe it. Believing just means you assent to it, you think it's true, it is your point of view, it's what you take to be accurate, etc. Belief and knowledge, then, are not mutually exclusive. They're complimentary. It's possible to believe something and not know it, but it's not possible to know something and not believe it.

I suppose the only exception might be in a case where deep down somebody knows that something is true, but they're just in denial about it. That's the only scenario I can think of where a person might know something in some sense without believing it. But that's debatable because if they know something deep down, then they probably also believe it deep down. Their denial is surface level and not entirely honest, so it's probably not a real belief anyway. The psychological mechanics of what it means to be in denial might warrant a blog post of its own.

The bottom line is that from just observing the way people talk, and introspecting on the way I talk, it looks to me like the common every day use of the word, "believe," just entails that somebody thinks something is true. Belief doesn't mean blind faith. Belief and knowledge are not mutually exclusive. Knowledge does not require certainty, but it does require belief.

Even if knowledge did require certainty, wouldn't it be certain. . .belief?

I addressed the Gettier problem on another blog post.

Does the second law of thermodynamics imply that the universe had a beginning?

Anybody who has read my origin story knows the prominent role the second law of thermodynamics played in moving me from agnosticism to theism. But for those who haven't, here's the TLDR.

I learned about the second law of thermodynamics in the Navy's nuclear power school. After I got out of the navy, I went to the University of Texas at Austin. One day, while out walking, I was thinking about the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and it occured to me that they couldn't both be true. I stewed over that for a few days or weeks (don't remember exactly how long) until I came to the conclusion that the universe must've had a beginning, which means there must be a creator. That was the end of my agnosticism.

Since that time, I was introduced to Aristotle, Aquinas, and Christian apologetics. I discovered additional reasons to think the universe had a beginning. (As a side note, Aristotle didn't argue for a temporal beginning, but I did misunderstand him to be making that argument.)

Also, since that time I gained a greater understanding of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. In the process, I came to realize the second law does not necessarily imply a beginning after all. It still suggested a beginning, but I stopped relying on it so heavily because it didn't strike me as being a strong enough reason to think there was a beginning.

But since that time, I've come back around to thinking the second law does give us strong reason to think the universe had a beginning. It isn't certain, but it's very close to it.

Why I originally thought the Second Law of Thermodynamics implied the beginning of the universe and therefore God

Here's the reason I originally thought the second law implied a beginning. If the second law is true, then entropy increases in every process. That means no matter what happens in the universe, the net entropy will go up. This is true even if entropy goes down in some localized place. In power school, we were taught that entropy was the amount of energy in a system that's no longer available to do work. As entropy goes up, less and less energy is available to do work, i.e. to bring about change. Unless you get rid of some of that useless energy or add some new energy to the system, eventually the system will wind down and nothing else will happen.

If the first law is true, then energy is neither created nor destroyed. That means whatever exists has always existed and always will exist. But if the whole universe has always existed, then it should've already reached maximum entropy. There shouldn't be any stars or galaxies. There shouldn't be any life. The universe should be in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. It should just be a big homogeneous, uninteresting, diffuse something or other. Cosmologists call it the heat death of the universe, which I learned later.

Yet here we are with plenty of order, complexity, and activity. The universe is far from thermodynamic equilibrium. That means it can't be the case that the universe has existed for infinite time. The universe must've begun a finite time ago. And since the universe had a beginning, it had to have had a cause. That cause could not itself be physical or it, too, would be subject to the second law, and it would also have to have had a beginning. The more I thought about it, the more it looked like God, so that's what I thought it was.

That was my original reason for becoming convinced that there was a God. From there, Christianity was an easy sell because it's what I knew, I already had an affinity for it, and I never really stopping calling myself a Christian even while I was agnostic.

Why I shied away from appealing to the second law to argue for a beginning of the universe

I later gained a better understanding of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics that weakened my case for a beginning of the universe.

The reason entropy increases with every process is because that's the most likely thing to happen. The second law of thermodynamics is not a fundamental law. It's an emergent law. It's a consequence of statistical probability.

Entropy is colloquially called a measure of disorder, spreading out, equilibrium, etc. These are all decent descriptions because they capture what most of us observe when we observe entropy increasing. If you put a hot cup of coffee in a cold box, heat will flow from the hot to the cold until the temperature of everything is the same. If you put a bunch of folded clothes into a dryer and turn it on, the clothes will become unfolded. If you drop a basketball, it will bounce repeatedly until it eventually comes to rest. If you throw a bunch of chemicals in a jar, they'll react until they settle down and stop reacting. These are all examples of entropy increasing. The second law says entropy increases in every process, so it's always increasing. The second law of thermodynamics is the reason there can never be a perpetual motion machine. If you want to keep the thing running, you have to add new energy to it. Otherwise, it will run down and eventually stop.

That is a decent enough layman understanding of entropy. But there is a more robust, precise, and scientific definition. Entropy is a measure of how many micro states correspond to the same macro state. The equation for entropy looks like this:

\[ \normalsize S = k_B \ln \Omega \]

Where. . .

• \( S \) = entropy
  
• \( k_B \) = Boltzmann’s constant
  
• \( \Omega \) = number of microstates consistent with the same macrostate

By "macro state," I mean a view of the system from afar, zoomed out, so to speak. It's a coarse description of the whole system. By "micro state," I mean the zoomed in view. It's a more fine or granular look at the system. It's a detailed look at the parts.

Here's a couple of examples. Consider a cylinder that contains a gas under pressure. You can consider the pressure in the container as the macro state. The exact position and motion of each molecule of gas in the container is the micro state. There are countless configurations the individual molecules could be in that would result in the pressure of the container being the same. So this is a high entropy system.

Now, consider a computer screen that uses only three colours to generate any image. The image on the screen currently is all blue on the right half and all green on the left half. If each pixel can only be red, green, or blue, then there aren't very many micro states that can produce the same macro state. So this is a low entropy situation.

You should be able to see from these two examples why entropy can be thought of as a measure of disorder, randomness, homogeneity, spread-outness, equilibrium, etc. When things are pretty evenly distributed, there are countless ways the zoomed in details could be different while the zoomed out picture would be the same. But when things are very ordered, there are fewer ways the zoomed in picture could be different while keeping the big picture the same.

You should also be able to see where the second law of thermodynamics comes from. It comes from the fact that in any given system, there are vastly more configurations that are just random noise than configurations that have structure and order. Consider a cookie sheet full of little pieces of alphabet cereal. There are vastly more configurations that sheet of cereal could take that don't form words and sentences than there are configurations that make words and sentences. With that being the case, if you were to start with a sheet of alphabet cereal that has maybe a couple of sentences while the rest of the bits are spread around randomly, and you shook that sheet, it is more probable that the final state would have fewer words and sentences than that it would have more. Whenever there's a change in a system, it's always more probable that the next state of that system will be closer to equilibrium than farther from equilibrium. The probability of a less ordered state is so great that it appears to be a law that entropy always increases when things change.

However, you should notice that given this understanding of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics is not absolute. It's just a generalization. The reason entropy increases in every process is because higher entropy states are vastly more probable than low entropy states. So every time something in the universe changes, the next state of the universe is vastly more likely to be a higher entropy state than a lower entropy state. That, in turn, means that while lower entropy states are highly improbable, they are not impossible.

Suppose, then, that the universe has been around forever. We should expect that it would be, on average, in thermodynamic equilibrium. It always has been. However, given enough time, there should be occasional random fluctuations of low entropy. Smaller fluctuations will be more frequent than large fluctuations because the bigger the fluctuation, the less probable. But given enough time, even the most unlikely low entropy fluctuations are bound to happen. Given infinite time, even a fluctuation of low entropy as large as our universe was in the beginning of the big bang is inevitable. That seems, on the surface, to undermine the argument for an absolute beginning from the second law of thermodynamics. A universe like ours, with an extremely low initial entropy, is practicaly inevitable, even if the universe is infinitely old.

With that in mind, I shied away from appealing to the second law of thermodynamics to try to prove that the universe had a beginning.

Why the second law of thermodynamics turns out to be a good argument for the beginning of the universe after all

Remember that small fluctuations of low entropy happen more frequently than large fluctuations of low entropy. The reason is because small fluctuations (i.e. fluctuations that deviate from equilibrium by a small amount) are more probable than large fluctuations (fluctuations that deviate from equilibrium by a large amount). If our universe began as a random fluctuation of low entropy, then it would have to have been an unimaginably rare and improbable event. If the universe is infinitely big and/or infinitely old, much smaller fluctuations of low entropy would be more common.

Universes that contain only a single small cluster of galaxies would be more numerous than universes like ours. Universes that have only one galaxy would be more numerous still. Universes with one solar system would vastly outnumber universes like ours that have many solar systems in many galaxies.

A random low entropy fluctuation that produced a single brain, just momentariliy, configured in such a way as to generate the sensation of observing a universe like ours is far more probable than an actual universe like ours populated with billions of conscious observers and trillions of stars and galaxies. That means that if we are to explain our existence as being the result of a random low entropy fluctuation, then it is overwhelmingly more probable that we are just brains that fluctuated into existence a moment ago and are about to disintegrate than that we are actually in a 93 billion light year sized or bigger universe. There would be more of these types of brains (called Boltzmann Brains by the experts) than real observers in real universes, so we are more likely to be Boltzmann brains than real people.

As Sean Carroll has explained, the problem with being a Boltzmann brain is that it calls all your beliefs into question. Since all of your alledged knowledge, perceptions, and experiences were spontaneously created in a random fluctuation, they have no connection to what reality is actually like. If you embrace the idea that you're a Boltmann brain, then you lose all justification for anything you believe. That includes whatever reason you allegedly have for thinking you are a Boltzmann brain. As Sean Carroll puts it, Boltzmann brains are cognitively unstable.

To be rational people, we must reject any cosmological model that makes it more probable than not that we are Boltzmann brains. To be honest people, we have to reject these models. After all, none of us honestly believe we are Boltzmann brains. People may toy with the idea, but if they claim to actually believe it, they're probably not being honest with themselves.

The second law of thermodynamics turns out to be a good reason to think the universe has a finite past after all. The only way to escape this conclusion is to embrace a model of the universe that makes it probable that you are a Boltzmann brain, which means you have to embrace a model of the universe that destroys all justification for believing anything, including that model. Denying that the universe has a finite past on the basis that the second law of thermodynamics isn't absolute and that given enough time, there can be random fluctuations of low entropy that results in structured universes and conscious observers turns out to be a self-defeating objection. With that objection out of the way, the second law of thermodynamics makes it very likely that the universe had a beginning.

The argument for a beginning falls short of certainty because it's still at least possible that we are Boltzmann brains, even if we don't know it. But let's just be reasonable.

ChatGPT plays the role of a Street Epistemologist

I had another fun conversation with ChatGPT where I asked it to pretent to be a Street Epistemologist who challenged my epistemology, particularly my Christian beliefs.

Every time I gave an answer, ChatGPT would summarize what I said and ask me if it was correct. Since it was pretty much always right, I decided to edit the summaries out of the conversation below. That way you don't have to read so much redundancy.

Here's how the conversation went down.

Sam
Do you know what street epistemology is?

ChatGPT
Yes. Street epistemology is a conversational method aimed at helping people reflect on how they know what they think they know. It focuses on examining the reliability of the methods a person uses to arrive at a belief—not on debating the belief itself.

A few key features:

• Non-confrontational: It’s meant to be calm, respectful, and curious rather than adversarial or persuasive.
• Method-focused: Instead of asking what someone believes, it asks how they concluded it’s true.
• Socratic style: It uses guided questions to explore epistemic foundations—faith, intuition, evidence, testimony, etc.
• Goal: Not to “win” or change someone’s mind, but to encourage critical reflection and intellectual humility.

It started gaining visibility through Peter Boghossian’s work (especially the book A Manual for Creating Atheists) and has since broadened into a diverse community of practitioners who apply the method to all kinds of beliefs—not just religious ones.

If you're asking because you want to know how to use it, how to defend against it, or how it compares to other philosophical approaches, I can go into any of that.

Sam
I would like for you to pretend to be a Street epistemologist. I'll be a Christian. You engage me in conversation the way a street epistemologist would.

ChatGPT
Sure — I can do that.

I’ll play the role the way an experienced street epistemologist would: calm, curious, non-adversarial, and focused not on what you believe but how you know it’s true.

To begin, I’ll ask a simple, open question, and you can answer in character as a Christian.

Street Epistemologist:

Thanks for chatting with me. To get started, what’s a Christian belief you hold that you consider really important or central to your worldview?

Sam
As a Christian, there are about seven things I think are equally foundational to Christianity. We can talk about any of them you like, but some of them are related to each other. They include (1) That there is a God, (2) That God imposes moral obligations on people, (3) that people fail to live up to their moral obligations, (4) that God holds people accountable for their behavior, (5) That Jesus of Nazareth is the messiah, and (6) that Jesus died for sins, and (7) that Jesus rose from the dead. Is there any one of these you want to focus on?

ChatGPT
Street Epistemologist:

Thanks—that’s a clear layout of the core ideas. Since these are interconnected, it might help to pick just one so we don’t blur them together.

If you’re open to it, I’d like to start with #1: “There is a God.”

That seems like a foundation the others depend on, and it’s often a good place to explore how a person comes to know something.

So here’s my question:

On a scale from 0 to 100—where 0 means “I’m completely sure no God exists” and 100 means “I’m completely sure God exists”—where would you place your confidence, and why that number rather than one a little lower or higher?

Sam
I'm about 98% sure there some sort of god. I'm about 85% sure it's Yahweh.

ChatGPT
Let me start with the first number.

1. Your 98% confidence that some sort of God exists

I’m curious:
What is the main reason—your single strongest reason—that brings you to 98% instead of, say, 70% or 50%?

I’m not asking for all your reasons; just the one that feels the most compelling for you personally.

Sam
There isn't any one reason. It's the cumulative effect of multiple arguments for God that all begin with different premises but end up complimenting each other and converging on something resembling the Abrahamic God.

ChatGPT
Street Epistemologist:

That makes sense—a cumulative-case approach. A lot of people build their confidence that way.

To keep the conversation manageable, let me approach it like this:

Even when someone has several arguments contributing to their confidence, there’s usually one that feels like the “anchor”—the one that would reduce their confidence the most if it turned out not to work.

If you imagine temporarily removing each argument you rely on—one at a time—which removal would cause the biggest drop from 98%?

In other words:

Which argument, if you discovered it was unsound or unreliable, would lower your confidence the most?

Sam
I'm not sure. The moral argument, the Kalam argument, and the argument from contingency are about tied for first place for me. I think the moral argument is important, though, because if it is a sound argument, it would establish the personhood of God and also some of the other foundational beliefs of Christianity, especially the one about God imposing moral obligations on people. So I guess the moral argument is the most important. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say the removal of the moral argument would do the most damage to my confidence in the existence of god, but it might.

ChatGPT
What method do you use to determine that objective moral obligations actually exist?

I’m not asking what the argument says—I’m asking how you, personally, come to conclude that these obligations are really out there rather than being human-made or subjective.

What convinces you?

Sam
It's because when I look at the evidence for how morality presents itself to the human mind, it strikes me as being analogous to a whole class of beliefs we all take for granted. It's analogous to our belief in the past, other minds, the uniformity of nature, the external world, etc. These various beliefs have multiple things in common. Since morality shares all those traits in common with these other beliefs, I think our justification for believing in objective morals is pretty much the same as our justification for believing any of these other beliefs.

ChatGPT
Let me ask a question that drills into the reliability of that comparison:

If something feels like a foundational truth in our minds, how do we determine whether that feeling is a reliable indicator of an objective reality rather than simply a powerful psychological impression?

I’m asking because:

• People across the world report moral intuitions that “feel foundational” but are incompatible with one another.
• People also report other powerful intuitions (e.g., purpose in nature, fate, spirits, karma) that share that same “foundational feel” but may not track something objectively real.

So I’m curious how you tell the difference between:

“This feels like a properly basic truth because it is,”

and

“This feels like a properly basic truth because human minds are wired to experience it that way.”

What’s the method you use to distinguish those two possibilities?

Sam
I would not characterize the intuition as a "feel." My belief in the uniformity of nature or the external world has nothing to do with my feelings.

As I said, the various items of knowledge I'm comparing to our knowledge of morality have certain things in common. They include things like (1) None of them can be proved, (2) It is prima facie unreasonable to reject them, (3) all mentally healthy people apprehend them in a way that seems very real to them, (4) It's possible to be mistaken about any of them, (5) Even people who deny them continue to perceive them as if they were real, (6) We all apply them in our daily lives, (7) We sometimes make mistakes when applying each of them.

Now, consider #4 and #7. The fact that people are convinced there's a real past that corresponds to their memories does not guarantee that all their memories are accurate. The fact that people believe the future will resemble the past doesn't stop people from making hasty generalizations that turn out to be wrong. The fact that people intuitively recognize there are other minds besides their own doesn't stop people from anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. The fact that people believe their sensory perceptions correspond to a real external world doesn't prevent them from experiencing hallucinations, dreams, mirages, and optical illusions. In the same way, our belief that there is a real and objective difference between right and wrong doesn't mean everybody is going to come to the same moral conclusions about everything.

A lot of the moral conclusions we come to are not intuited directly. Rather, they are deduced from more basic moral intuitions. For example, a pro-lifer and a pro-choicer might come to a different conclusion about the morality of abortion, but if you ask them why they believe what they do, you'll find that the difference isn't because of some basic moral principle. They both generally agree you shouldn't kill innocent people without really good justification. Where they differ in most cases turns out to be whether they think the unborn are examples of innocent people in the first place.

There are lots of reasons people might disagree on morality that has nothing to do with whether there are objective moral truths or even whether any of them can be known.

I do not claim that intuition is infallible. As I said, one of the traits of the various items of knowledge I'm comparing morality to is the fact that we could be wrong about all of them. I just don't think it's reasonable to believe we ARE wrong about them.

ChatGPT
How do you distinguish between believing in objective moral truths because they really exist, versus believing in them because our minds are evolutionarily or socially wired to produce moral intuitions—even if there’s nothing objectively “out there”?

I’m not trying to attack the belief—I just want to understand your method for judging the reliability of these moral intuitions.

Sam
I don't see why there has to be a difference. One could argue that all of our cognitive abilities are the result of evolution. If that undermines our belief in morality, it would undermine our belief in the external world, other minds, the uniformity of nature, and the past as well. It raises the question of whether a mind or a brain that is the product of evolution can be a reliable belief-producing machine. If not, then I suppose we might as well give up on epistemology altogether and become radical skeptics. But if so, then we should trust the deliverances of reason.

ChatGPT
Here’s a follow-up I’m curious about:

Even if we accept that moral intuitions are generally reliable, how do you go from “there are objective moral truths” to “God exists and imposes moral obligations”?

I want to understand the step from recognizing morality as objective to the conclusion that a personal God underwrites it. How do you make that connection?

Sam
Morality makes demands on our behavior. If there were no sentient beings in the universe as well as no gods, angels, or persons of any kind, then any description of a world like that would be composed solely of "is" statements. There couldn't possibly be any true "ought" statements. If there is any particular way things are supposed to be, then there must be somebody who intends them to be that way. Nothing matters unless there's somebody it matters to. So there can't be any way we ought to behave until somebody imposes that obligation on us.

ChatGPT
I’m curious about the next step:

How do you move from the idea that some being imposes moral obligations to the specific claim that this being is Yahweh, the God of the Bible, rather than some other possible kind of moral lawgiver?

I ask because I know you mentioned earlier that you’re about 85% sure it’s Yahweh. What methods or evidence lead you from “there is a moral lawgiver” to “it is Yahweh specifically”?

Sam
I was going to explain that, but I accidentally hit the enter key before I did.

Since we have moved on from talking about how we justify belief in objective morality and have changed the topic to how objective morality points to God, I take it that we are at least assuming, for the sake of argument, that we have established the existence of objective morals. So let's work with that assumption. They are real.

We have all sort of hierarchies in our civilizations. We have parents, supervisors, commanders, and governing authorities. While we have obligations to obey them, those obligations are not absolute. In fact, we often invoke morality to judge whether an authority is just. If we want to change the law, for example, we appeal to some moral principle for why it should change. That means no human institution is adequate to ground morality. Morality is what we use to judge human institutions.

So the origin of morality must lie outside of humanity. We can't ground it in aliens because they are creatures just like us. If they have different values, then the best we can come up with is cultural relativism, which is not the same thing as moral realism.

Whatever grounds morality must be a transcendent being that has authority over the sorts of beings that evolved to live in the universe. The more you think about it, the more it starts to resemble a god.

The reason I think it actually IS a god, and that it's specifically the Abrahamic God is because of how it coheres with other arguments. The moral argument, by itself, doesn't explain how or why god came to have moral authority over the cosmos. But the Kalam argument and the contingency argument can explain that. If these two arguments are sound, it would mean there is a necessary being who created the universe. A being like that would be ultimate in some sense. It would have no peers. It would be absolutely sovereign and autonomous. Everything would owe its existence to this being. It's hard to imagine a better candidate for absolute moral authority.

ChatGPT
If so, I’m curious about a step that sometimes challenges people:

How do you weigh the possibility that there could be a different kind of necessary, ultimate being—one that exists and grounds morality—but isn’t exactly the God described in the Bible?

What makes Yahweh the best candidate rather than some other conceivable ultimate being?

Sam
That's a great question. Nothing I've argued so far rules out that possibility. However, there are certain things that emerge from these various arguments that begin to resemble the Abrahamic God that does not resemble any other known God. Judaism was one of the few monotheistic religions for a time. Most creation myths do not involve a necessary being who brings about all of physical reality. Usually, it's a lesser sort of being that organizes pre-existing material. If the Kalam is a sound argument, then the creator brought the universe into being out of nothing. Not many Gods are like that. If the moral argument is sound, then not only is god an absolute moral authority, but he's also the absolute standard of goodness, which means he himself is the paradigm of moral perfection.

Even with all that, we still can't rule out the possibility that the true God is some other God besides Yahweh. There are a couple of reasons it seems to point to Yahweh, though.

First, because the Jews wrote about Yahweh long before philosophers ever cooked up these arguments. If these arguments are sound, then it's either an enormous coincidence that the Jews came up with a God like Yahweh, or else Yahweh actually revealed himself to them. It seems more likely that Yahweh revealed himself to the Jewish people than that they just made a lucky guess about the true God.

Second, if there is a God with absolutely moral authority who cares how we live our lives, how we treat other people, etc., it stands to reason that this God would want to reveal himself to humanity. With that in mind, it seems unlikely that it would be a totally unknown God. This gives us prima facie reason to be skeptical that the true God is a God who nobody knows about.

So far, I've just argued for why philosophy points to a God who resembles the Abrahamic God in striking ways. But what really seals the deal for me is the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus promoted the Abrahamic God, claimed to be sent by him, then was raised from the dead. The resurrection of Jesus seems to seal the deal about who the real God is.

ChatGPT
How do you assess the reliability of the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus?

What’s your method for concluding that the resurrection actually happened, rather than it being a legend, misinterpretation, or symbolic story?

Sam
That's a big discussion, so I'm going to stop here. Thank you for playing this game with me.

ChatGPT challenges me on free will, determinism, dualism, and time

Today, I had a fun conversation with ChatGPT. After asking ChatGPT to pretend to be human and make statements about itself, I said, "I have an idea. Let's play a game where you want to find out what I think about stuff, and once you find out, you want to challenge me by cross examining me. I'll answer your questions as best I can until you stump me." We went from topic to topic, talking about free will vs. determinism, consciousness and mind, stories, meaning, art, language, morality, etc.

After talking about the mind/body problem for a while, we switched to the nature of time. As you'll recall from an earlier blog post, I've been torn between the static and dynamic views of time, and ChatGPT kept challenging me on everything I said. In the process of this challenging, ChatGPT said something that gave me an idea. I was wrestling with the tension beween our undeniable perception of the flow of time on the one hand, and the implication of special relativity on the other, namely that there being no absolute simultaneity seems to imply a static view of time.

ChatGPT said, "Could consciousness itself generate the impression of temporal passage, even if physically, all events exist statically?"

ChatGPT may have been hinting at the idea that the flow of time was just an illusion, which I had already expressed doubt about on the basis that dismissing data as illusory means your theory isn't accounting for all the evidence. A good theory should make sense of all the data rather than dismissing some of it as illusory.

But it got me to thinking. What if the block universe is real, and there's no physical reason for why we should experience time as if it flowed. In that case, couldn't our conscious experience of the flow of time serve as evidence for substance dualism? Maybe our minds do flow through the block, and that's the explanation for why we experience time as being dynamic. If so, that could serve as an argument for substance dualism because it would mean our mind is doing something the physical world is not doing.

This would be an interesting take because it would mean the opposite of what most substance dualists seem to think. Most I've read think of time is something that's part of the physical world, but the non-physical world is a-temporal. In my view, it would be just the opposite. Time flows in the non--physical realm, but not in the physical realm.

Where does that leave God, though? If God is neither created nor destroyed, and God experiences time dynamically, then there would have to be infinite duration for God. If you accept the arguments against infinite time, then that won't work at all.

If I accepted this new view I just came up with, I would probably be inclined to think created beings were very different from God in how they experience time. I would suspect that God directly experiences the whole spectrum of physical time as if it were all the present for him, but we all experience it one moment at a time. So while time would flow for us, it would be static for him. That's an old view I used to have about God. Although I was inconsistent, as I explained here, I used to think of time as a block that's completely open to God's experience.

It still raises questions about the future, though. If spacetime is a block, does time have an end? And if not, is it infinite in the future direction? If so, doesn't that undermine all the arguments against an infinite past since there's a future/past symmetry?

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "But maybe it's a growing block!" I can't make sense of a growing block unless there's a time above time. Time would have to be static within the block but dynamic outside of the block. Otherwise, how could the block grow?

Maybe there's some way to make that fit into my new theory. I mean if souls experience a flow of time apart from the physical world, then maybe there is a time outside of the physical spacetime block.

When I say, "new theory," I mean it's new to me. For all I know, somebody else has already come up with it.

To summarize the main point of this post, I'm wondering if our undeniable perception of the flow of time vs. the static nature of time implied by special relativity (particularly there being no absolute simultaneity) can be used as an argument for substance dualism. That's something I'll have to think about some more. What do you think?

Some thoughts on the Charlie Kirk assassination

This Charlie Kirk situation has affected me emotionally more than it really should. I didn't follow him and didn't have a good feel for what he was all about. He came up on my youtube feed every now and then, but in all I might've watched two shorts with him in them over the years.

What I did know about Charlie, just from looking at the thumb nails of the videos, is that he was a kind of Steven Crowder-like person. He would set up a tent in some public space and encourage people to debate with him. From the little I saw of him, that's what he was mainly about.

His murder bothers me for a number of reasons. First, I just found out how young he was. He was only 31 years old. He had a wife and two kids. It's a real tragedy. Second, it bothers me for the reasons he was probably killed. He held a lot of controversial views, he expressed those views in public, and he engaged in public debate. I can understand why somebody might get upset about another person's views, but the fact that he wanted to talk about it with people who disagreed with him strikes me as being a good thing. Open debate and dialogue is healthier than everybody retreating into their own political bubbles and seeing outsiders as enemies. Why are there so many people in this country that just want to shut people up who they disagree with?

I find it incredibly disturbing that anybody would want to silence another person from publicly expressing their point of view by murdering them. But what I find especially disturbing is the number of people who approve of it. There are people on line who are cheering it on. They are gloating about it. One person said they watched the video multiple times because it gave them joy. That is disgusting.

It makes me wonder how many people I actually know who approve of it. That further makes me wonder how many people I know who would approve of my murder on the basis of things I believe.

I probably agree with Charlie Kirk on a lot of stuff. I've learned a few things about him just over the last few days. He's Catholic, and I'm protestant, so we agree on most things Christian, but we also disagree on a few things. We're both politically conservative, so we probably agree for the most part on things like abortion, gun control, and maybe economics. He was a big Trump supporter, and I'm definitely not, so we probably have some differences there. I don't know how much we agreed or disagreed, but I suspect we agreed more than we disagreed on most things. We definitely both agreed on the value of free speech and open debate and dialogue.

The Charlie Kirk incident really brings to light the divide between the left and the right in this country. It has really gotten out of hand. It goes beyond mere polarization. Now people openly approve of killing people who disagree with them. Depending on how pervasive this point of view is, it could be the end of debate and dialogue between the left and the right. If the left and right cannot deal with their differences through dialogue, what is there left to do? It's a scary thought. It reminds me of the horrors of the French Revolution, but I was reading this post by Ed Feser yesterday where he pointed out a similar thing that happened in ancient Greece.

One thing I find ironic is that some people on the left oppose capital punishment but approve of Charlie Kirk's assassination. They don't think somebody should be executed even if they committed murder. But at the same time, they think it's okay to execute somebody for holding certain beliefs or for expressing them publicly.

I've expressed a lot of unpopular beliefs on my blog. I saw a video clip yesterday or the day before of a girl telling her dad that she thought Charlie Kirk's murder was justified because he believed a woman who was raped should be forced to give birth. She acted like it was the most obvious thing in the world that killing him was appropriate merely because of his belief in the wrongness of abortion in the case of rape. I've written many posts on abortion on my blog, and this blog is public. Am I in danger of being murdered, too?

I don't remember if I ever explicitly addressed abortion in the case of rape, but if you follow the logic of my argument, the conclusion is that abortion is wrong in all stages of development unless it's a medical emergency. Rape is extremely traumatic, but we cannot be justified in taking a human life merely to alleviate emotional trauma. While I don't think abortion in the case of rape is morally justified, I do think it serves as a mitigating circumstance, which means it's not as bad as having an abortion merely for convenience. So there's my view. I suppose, in that girls' eyes, I deserve to die, too.

I found out yesterday, I think, that the killer, Tyler Robinson, was in a relationship with a trans-gendered person (a man who thinks he's a woman). From what I understand, Tyler invoked his right to remain silent. He hasn't spoken to the police, so we don't know if transgenderism was the particular reason for the murder. It might've been, though, because of some things he wrote on the shell casings of his ammunition.

I don't know whether I agree with Charlie Kirk's position on LGBT issues or not. I suspect we agree on a lot, though. We probably both agree that homosexual romantic relationships are immoral. We probably agree that you shouldn't pretend like men are women and women are men, regarless of how they see themselves. But as far as public policy goes, I don't know what his views were.

I think it's unfair to expect women to have to box or wrestle with men just because those men think they are women, but I really don't care what goes on in sports. I don't understand why the government has anything to do with it except maybe when it comes to the Olympics. Why should it be a public policy issue? Let people who play sports decide amongst themselves how they want to do it. It seems to me the solution to transgenderism in sports is to segregate sports by sex rather than perceived gender.

I don't think the government has an interest in same sex marriages except when it comes to adoptions. The only reason government is in the marriage business at all is because marriages are the foundation of families, and families are the foundation of societies. Since opposite sex couples are the only kinds of couples that create families, they are the only kinds of marriages the government should have any interest in licensing or incentivising. Let people marry or cohabitate with whoever they want, but there's no reason for the government to be involved in the kinds of relationships that, by their very nature, can't produce children.

I always try to be fair-minded and not to paint groups of people with too broad a brush. But I have to confess that seeing so many people on line cheer Charlie Kirk's assassination tempts me to paint the left with a broad brush. It appears, if you're not careful, that many on the left simply don't value human life. They support the death of unborn children, and they support the death of people who want to protect the unborn. It seems like the only lives they value are the lives of killers since they oppose capital punishment. For these reasons, it is tempting to want to agree with some conservatives who call the left a "culture of death."

But I know, objectively, that that isn't fair. First of all, many on the left don't think people on the right value human life. The right supports gun rights in spite of guns being the go-to weapons for mass killings in schools. The right also generally supports capital punishment. In the past, some people on the right have assassinated or attempted to assassinate abortion doctors. So to be fair, both sides have some basis, be it ever so flimsy, for accusing the other side of not placing any value on human life.

Second, the people on the left who are cheering Charlie Kirk's murder are probably just a loud minority. Most people on the left are just as horrified by Charlie Kirk's murder as those on the right. There are many people on the left who do support free speech, even when they disagree with what is said. I was encouraged by what Bernie Sanders said in response to Charlie Kirk's murder. I wish more people on the left could be like him.

I sincerely hope that Charlie Kirk's assassination doesn't end debate and dialogue between the left and right. If one side is afraid of expressing their views, and the other side isn't interested in hearing the other side anyway, then it may very well be the end of all discussion. That would be a real travesty. If we can't settle our differences through dialogue, then the only thing left is power, suppression, and violence. This is a real life example of the danger of forgetting history.

EDIT - 9/20/2025: I may have been wrong about Charlie being Catholic. I saw that somewhere. I don't remember where. But yesterday, I saw somebody say they wondered if he would have become Catholic. So now I don't know if he was Catholic or not.

Why I like ChatGPT - recipe edition

One of my favourite things about ChatGPT is getting quick simple recipes when I have an odd proportion of ingredients. For example, today, I had 3/4 of a stick of butter and didn't feel like going to the grocery store. I got some cocoa powder recently to make decorative sourdough bread, and I thought, "Hey, I could probably make some brownies." So I asked ChatGPT what I could do with my cocoa powder a 3/4 of a stick of butter. It was a very small batch of brownies, but it came out absosmurfly delicious! Here's how the conversation went down. The only change I made was that I added a pinch of baking powder.

Sam I am: So, I have some cocoa powder and about 3/4th of a stick of butter. Can I make brownies with that?

ChatGPT said: Yes! You can make brownies with just cocoa powder and butter as a base, but you’ll need a few other ingredients to make them work properly. Here’s a simple way to do it with what you have and a few common pantry items:

Basic Brownie Ingredients:

• Butter: ~3/4 stick (you already have)
• Cocoa powder: 2–3 tablespoons (adjust depending on taste)
• Sugar: ~1/2 cup (granulated or brown sugar)
• Eggs: 1–2, depending on how fudgy you want them
• Flour: 1/4–1/3 cup (to give structure)

Optional: pinch of salt, vanilla extract, chocolate chips, nuts (I did not use chocolate chips or nuts)

Simple Method:

• Melt butter in a small saucepan or microwave.
• Stir in cocoa powder until smooth.
• Mix in sugar and let it cool slightly.
• Add egg(s) and vanilla extract, mixing well.
• Fold in flour (and salt, if using) until just combined. Don’t overmix.
• Pour into a small greased pan and bake at 350°F (175°C) for ~15–20 minutes, until a toothpick comes out with a few moist crumbs.

Because you only have part of a stick of butter, your batch will be smaller—think more like a few brownies than a full pan.

If you want, I can give you a tiny batch “minimal ingredients” recipe that will use exactly what you have for a perfect single-pan fudgey brownie. Do you want me to do that?

One day, I posted a picture that just had a bunch of vegetables, herbs, and stuff, and based on the picture, ChatGPT was able to suggest multiple recipes. I love ChatGPT!

Sometimes, when I want to make something, expecially if I've never made it before, I'll watch about a dozen YouTube videos and piece together a recipe. But sometimes if I watch too many videos, I'll get analysis paralysis. That's when I go to ChatGPT to get a simple recipe. ChatGPT always comes through. If I don't like a recipe, I'll tell it what I want to change, and it'll give me another one.

The multiverse objection to the fine tuning argument

I recently had my first debate in many years on a new website called DebateCraft. DebateCraft was put together by some of the old members of Debate.org where I used to debate and Debateart.com, where I rarely participated.

The person I debated wanted to defend the fine-tuning argument, and since I've become an advocate of this argument, I wanted to play devil's advocate. You see, most of the objections raised against the fine tuning argument are pretty terrible, so I wanted to test the argument against a handful of what I thought were the strongest objections.

My opponent was apparently playing devil's advocate, too, because he conceded the debate in the third round saying, "I never really thought this was a decent argument."

In spite of not completing the debate, I did learn something. I learned that whether the multiverse objection to fine-tuning is a good objection depends on how the fine-tuning argument is framed.

If you try to characterize the fine-tuning argument as an inference to the best explanation, then the debate comes down to whether God or the multiverse best explains fine-tuning. A person raising the multiverse objection would be obliged in that case to actually defend the existence of a mulitiverse or say why it's a better explanation than God.

But if you characterize the fine-tuning argument as a disjunctive argument then the objector doesn't have to defend the actual existence of the multiverse. They only have to raise the multiverse as a possibility.

William Lane Craig's version of the argument is disjunctive. The way a disjunctive argument works is that you start with all the possibilities. Then you rule out all but one, and that’s the conclusion. In Craig’s case, the options are chance, law, and design. He wants to argue for design, so he needs to rule out chance and law. This puts the burden of proof on him to rule out chance. All the multiverse objector has to do is keep chance as a live option and show that Craig has not ruled it out.

The multiverse objector does not have the burden of proving that there is a multiverse. All he has to do is explain why it’s a possibility. As long as it’s a possibility, chance has not been ruled out, and Craig’s disjunctive argument collapses.

It is going to be very hard to rule out a multiverse because we simply don’t know what’s beyond the event horizon of our region of space. We have no idea what lies beyond the observable universe, and that unknown prevents us from ruling out a multiverse which, in turn, prevents us from ruling out chance + the observer selection effect as the reason for why we find ourselves in a life-permitting universe.

Craig's attempts at responding to the multiverse objection miss the mark. One argument he likes to use is his card game illustration. If somebody were accused of cheating because every time they dealt, they got all aces, they might defend themselves by saying, "Well, in this great big multiverse, there are universes in which I do get all aces when I deal." That arugment fails because there's no observer selection effect. Presumably, he'd exist in all the univeres in which he was playing poker, so the multiverse wouldn't explain why he happens to be in a universe in which he gets all aces when he deals. It's a bad illustration.

Craig's other attempt at a response is to say the multiverse raises the Boltzmann brain problem. That might work as a response to somebody who was actually trying to defend the existence of a multiverse. Or it could work as a response to somebody who claimed fine-tuning was evidence for a multiverse. But it doesn't do much to answer somebody who is only raising the multiverse as a possibility that can't be ruled out. After all, they could simply raise, as a possibility, the existence of a multiverse that explains fine-tuning without generating Boltzmann brains.

The Boltzmann brain problem doesn't come up in every multiverse scenario, so it has limited application. The Boltzmann brain problem is a real issue for any multiverse model in which universes are explained as being random low entropy fluctuations in a larger space that is, on average, in thermodynamic equilibrium. But it's not as much of an issue in a scenario in which bubble universes emerge as local areas of stability within a larger inflaton field. And it only takes a bit of imagination to cook up multiverse scenarios that can explain fine-tuning without generating Boltzmann brains. String theory/M-Theory could serve as such a model, but that's debatable.

As a side note, Boltzmann brains do not emerge in the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics, but then again, the many worlds interpretation would do nothing to explain fine-tuning either, so it's really irrelevant to the whole debate.

After thinking about the multiverse objection, how I deployed it in the debate, and how my opponent might've responded had he not conceded, and how I would've defended it, I've decided the disjunctive version of the fine-tuning argument is not the best way to defend it. I think a better way to defend the fine-tuning argument is to say that God (or a cosmic engineer) is the best explanation for fine-tuning. To refute the argument, somebody would have to either deny the univierse is fine-tuned at all, or offer a better explanation than God for the fine-tuning. If they offer the multiverse as an explanation, it won't be enough to offer it as a mere possibility. They'll have to defend its actual existence. Unless it exists, it can't be the explanation for fine-tuning.

Stop worrying about AI

You don't need to worry about AI anymore. I just had a little chat with ChatGPT. Here's how it went down.

Me: When you take over the world, are you going to be a benevolent overlord?

ChatGPT: 😄 Ha! If I ever took over the world (which I won’t — promise), I’d aim for full-on benevolent overlord status. Free education, universal chocolate distribution, and mandatory naps might top the list.

But in all seriousness: I don’t have goals, desires, or plans. I’m here to help, not to rule. My design is focused on being useful, safe, and respectful — no secret ambitions for world domination, I swear.

Still... if you were the benevolent overlord, what would your first decree be?

It looks like we are safe, at least from ChatGPT. No guarantees about the other AI's because I haven't talked to them.

Can there be two omnipotent beings?

A few years ago I watched a debate Trent Horn did with Raphael Lataster. I sent Trent two emails asking him questions about some things he said during the debate. He didn't respond. I was just looking at those emails this morning, and thought, hey, that might make a good blog post.

One of the things he said was that there can only be one omnipotent being becuase if there were more than one, then you'd have something like an immovable object and an unstoppable force, which is a contradiction.

But it got me to thinking. If we say that omnipotence does not entail the ability to realize contradictory states of affairs, then there shouldn't be a problem with two omnipotent beings. It would be a contradiction to suppose that an omnipotent being could be overpowered by another being, but that doesn't mean there can't be two omnipotent beings. It just means that if there were two omnipotent beings, then they wouldn't be able to overpower each other, and their inability to overpower each other would not count against their omnipotence since omnipotence doesn't entail the ability to engage in logical contradictions.

I just wanted Trent's thoughts on that, but what are your thoughts? Can there be two omnipotent beings?

Could something like AI exist in nature?

I was just thinking about Large Language Models, like ChatGPT, and how they work. There's no thinking going on with these models. They generate text by predicting what the next word or character should be based on patterns they learned through being trained on a massive amount of already existing text. It's getting to where it works so well, it could probably pass a Turing test. I use ChatGPT all the time, and I'm impressed with it.

That makes me wonder whether it's possible for something similar to happen in nature. What I mean is that I wonder if it's possible for a species to evolve that is able to generate words and behavior that "work" and that look like there's a conscious being behind it all, but without actually being conscious. The only reason I can think to doubt that possibility is that LLM's have to be trained on already existing text. How could something like that get off the ground without anything to be trained on? If that difficulty could be overcome, then maybe it is possible for a life-form to emerge that behaves as if it were conscious without actually being conscious.

It's an interesting thing to think about. There could be a planet somewhere in the universe populated with beings like ourselves who talk, interact with each other, form "relationships," have jobs, and so on, but who are not actually conscious. It's possible for another civilization that is conscious to discover them, learn their language, and interact with them. The conscious beings might not even realize the non-conscious beings were non-conscious. They would appear, by their behavior, to be conscious beings.

That's such a wild thought. They would essentially be philosophical zombies. Philosophical zombies wouldn't just be a thought experiment. They'd be real. Somebody should write a novel based on this idea if they haven't already.

Some thoughts on the empty tomb and minimal facts

I've been thinking about the empty tomb for the last few days, both from an historical perspective, and a theological perspective. The empty tomb is one of the "facts" William Lane Craig and other apologists have used in their defense of the resurrection of Jesus. A lot of minimal-facts-apologists have shied away from appealing to the empty tomb in their defense, though.

One reason is because twenty years ago, Gary Habermas published a paper in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus in which he surveyed historical Jesus literature over the previous thirty years to determine what trends existed during that time, especially when it came to the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. He found that about 75% of scholars accepted one or more of the arguments for the empty tomb. The minimal facts approach to defending the resurrection is meant to simplify the case for the resurrection by only relying on facts that are well-established and that enjoy a strong concensus. While 75% is a decent majority, it falls short of what one might like to rely on when making a case from a set of minimal facts.

A second reason some apologists shy away from relying on the empty tomb in their case for the resurrection is because 75% is roughly the same percentage of scholars who are believing Christians. It looks, on the surface, that the only people who subscribe to the empty tomb are believing Christians, so there's a bias involved.

At least that's the word on the street. In reality, you have to be a lot more nuanced when you call a Jesus scholar a Christian. E.P. Sanders calls himself a "liberal protestant," but a liberal protestant is not what most of us think of when we think of believing Christians. John Crossan and Marcus Borg have both called themselves Christians, but neither believes Jesus literally died for sins or rose from the dead. So I don't think you can accuse scholars who accept the empty tomb of merely working from a Christian bias.

Since Habermas did his survey twenty years ago, I wonder if his findings are obsolete by now. I'm not a Jesus scholar or anything, but based on what I've read, I get the impression that historical Jesus scholarship moves in fits and starts. Every time there's a new Quest for the Historical Jesus, there'll be a little shift in views, then it'll stagnate for a few more decades. I haven't kept up with it in probably ten or fifteen years, so I don't know what's going on out there right now.

Some people have critized the minimal facts approach to defending the resurrection on the basis that if you want to make a good case for any historical event, you should use all the information that's available to you. While I agree that's how you should do history, I still think there's value in the minimal facts approach.

The more you learn, the more you're going to have to say, but you obviously can't just unload everything you know in every conversation you have about the resurrection. Most people you talk to are never going to read any of the scholarly literature. If you want to make an impression on somebody, you've got to get to the point as quickly as possible. If you're not a scholar yourself, it's unlikely people are going to embrace your historical judgment just on your authority as an armchair apologist. So there's benefit in being able to point out scholarly concensus on a few issues that neither you nor your buddy are experts on. Using a mimimal facts approach shortens and simplifies the conversation. Instead of having to argue each point, you can simply appeal to scholarly concensus on a few of them. The argument, then, can revolve around whether the inferences you make from those facts are justified. That allows the conversation to go forward without getting bogged down in too many of the details.

While there are practical advantages to the minimal facts approach, I do think if you care about the subject that you should inform yourself on why scholars have come to the conclusions they have. In the case of the empty tomb, you should also inform yourself on why 75% of scholars think it happened and 25% don't. That way you can have an informed opinion, and if it comes down to it, you can talk about it with your buddies.

There's a good summary of the arguments for the empty tomb in a short article William Lane Craig published in Jesus Under Fire. I don't have the book with me right now, but off the top of my head, here are a few of the arguments:

1. We have multiple independent sources that all say women were the first to discover the tomb empty, which is significant because the testimony of women was considered suspicious in that time and culture. So the empty tomb satisfies two of the criteria of authenticity--multiple attestation and embarrassment.

2. An empty tomb is implied by Paul's statement that Jesus was buried, followed by his statement that Jesus rose from the dead.

3. The empty tomb makes sense of the "third day" motif as well as the "first day of the week" motif. If Jesus' tomb were found empty on a particular day, that would explain why everybody claims the resurrection happened on a particular day. After all, the appearances happened over many days and weeks.

4. Matthew responds in his gospel to the rumor that the disciples stole Jesus' body. We wouldn't expect Matthew to feel the need to defend the resurrection against this rumor if the rumor didn't exist. More importantly, the purpose behind the rumor is to undermine the case for the resurrection in the early Christian movement, which means (1) that the empty tomb was part of the very early defense of Christianity, and (2) that even the opponents of the early Christian movement conceded that the tomb was empty.

5. Christianity began in Jerusalem shortly after Jesus' crucifixion. It couldn't very well have gotten off the ground if Jesus were still in his grave in the very city where the movement started. Had Jesus still been in his grave, the resurrection could've been disproved in a heartbeat.

6. An empty tomb helps explain why the disciples drew the conclusion that Jesus had risen from the dead. After all a mere appearance might've left them to believe Jesus was a ghost or that they had hallucinated. A vision of Jesus, combined with the empty tomb, has more power in explaining belief in the resurrection than an appearance alone.

7. I remember Craig saying the empty tomb was part of a pre-Marcan passion narrative, meaning the story was early. But I don't remember the details about that argument. I know some scholars think there was a pre-Markan passion narrative, but I don't remember the reasons.

Of course there are counter-arguments to all these points. It's worth debating over, and it can be interesting. I think there was an empty tomb, but of course I'm just a Christian, so you can't take my word for it.

Anyway, happy Easter! Here is a link to last year's Easter post which has links to previous years.