Really interesting argument. Not sure if I am completely convinced yet however. I appreciate that this channel actually seems to produce ideas that I have literally never heard before. Glory to God in the highest
I think that the scale argument is definitely interesting and deserves a lot of thought and consideration, but I just wanted to point out that the objection to the Fine-tuning argument mentioned in the beginning does not completely destroy the Fine-tuning argument. This is because the Fine-tuning argument claims that life would be plain impossible given most sets of physical constants and initial conditions of the universe, not just improbable. Life simply couldn't exist in universes where particles collide every few trillion years, in universes where atoms fall apart, in universes where chemistry is impossible, or in universes where the big bang rebounds on itself after 1/1000000000 of a second.
Well that's becauss fine tuning is just "reality + god did it" lol. Saying "what if reality different, therefore reality unlikely" isn't a coherent argument and most fine tuning proponents will admit it's not evidence of a deity.
@@ShouVertica You have misunderstood fine-tuning if you think the fine-tuning argument is somehow circular or logically incoherent. Firstly, it is worth mentioning that fine-tuning is a neutral term that says nothing about what caused the fine-tuning. The fine-tuning argument just says God is most likely the cause of the fine-tuning. Secondly, we are asking why a life-permitting universe exists, not why our own universe exists. Out of the great multitude of possible life-prohibiting universes, there may be a few other possible life-permitting universe besides our own. We are asking why one of the life-permitting universes exists when a life-permitting universe is far more unlikely.
@ir0nic303 Oh I know it's neutral, the actual proponents don't suggest a god did it and are just pointing out constants and effects if different. Theist hijacked this, just like they hijacked "DNA is a code" to say God did it. I would make the distinction but theist channel and talking about God so... "Why life permitting exist" can be done for any topic though, we are just saying conceptual infinite, one actuality.
This argument seems so strange to me. Lets look at the example where i heard the argument (in general) the first time: Its more likely for you to live in a more populous country, than it is to live in country with a small population. It is also more likely for you to live in a city than it is for you to live in a village. Therefore we can conclude that you the reader most likely live in a city of a populous country. That may as well be, still there are people living in small villages, thus you aren't guaranteed to live in a city. In fact even if everybody but one would live in a city, there is still a chance for you to live in the countryside. This argument does not really tell us anything about the real world. It only tells us, that if everybody that is alive would make the assumption, that they lived in the most populated universe, a plurality would be correct. It could never tell you if you were actually in the plurality.
// It only tells us, that if everybody that is alive would make the assumption, that they lived in the most populated universe, a plurality would be correct. // If we phrase this in terms of probabilities, we would say that one should assign a high prior probability to the proposition that they lived in the most populated universe. Likewise, this video argues that our credence in theism should be high.
@@ApologeticsSquared That is not the same thing. It is a bit like saying: "I should assign a higher prob to living in the city. Huh a posteriori it surely looks like a whole lot of countryside out here. Well looks like cities do not exist." There is no need for a generic worldview to explain why you do not live in a city anymore than there is a need for generic worldview to explain why the universe isn't more populated. The only point were this is relevant is when a worldview makes a point of setting something like "be fruitful and multiply" as a goal of whatever phenomena gave rise to the universe.
@@Finfie // Huh a posteriori it surely looks like a whole lot of countryside out here. Well looks like cities do not exist. // I'm not sure why the latter follows from the former. It seems you would just say, "A priori, I would have expected cityside, but a posteriori, I can see it's countryside." // There is no need for a generic worldview to explain why you do not live in a city anymore than there is a need for generic worldview to explain why the universe isn't more populated. // If one worldview strongly predicts country living a priori, then your country living *would* count as evidence for this worldview. There just isn't any such worldview that makes it predictions (besides ones with super tiny priors, like "it's a law of physics that people are born in the countryside"). However, theism is a worldview that doesn't have a super tiny prior, and it does predict that space big.
@@ApologeticsSquared Ok as far as i can see you made to different arguments in this video. On the one hand you seemed to argue: "Theism has an argument why the universe is empty, but the naturalist would also expect the universe to be full of life (population principle) and it isn't. The naturalist has no argument why it would be that way!" One the other hand in your addendum you seem to argue the exact oposite point: "We live in the multiverse, thus the most populous cosmos, and god predicts that and naturalism does not." Well you successfully shown that theism would be compatible with every option if you strech the concept enough, thus shown that it a priori does not make any useful predictions on that topic. //I'm not sure why the latter follows from the former. My point was that you seemed to try to make claims over the real world. Do we know that we live in the most populous cosmos? No we don't. It very much looks like there could be alternatives to our cosmos that would be filled with more live. And you very much seemed to try to use the population principle as evidence, that we live in the most populous cosmos (especially in the multiverse bid). This is not a valid argument (as i highlighted in my example, where you agreed that the conclusion does not follow).
I think the consequence of flipping a coin have nothing to do with probability of heads or tail. But yes it might effect credence of the person living, and we can blame that on anthropocentrism. And it's pretty easy to influence our reasoning falsely this way
Great vid! However I can't say I agree with your argument. For the second scenario you mentioned, assume the coin has 50/50 odds. Either way, at least one person will be created, which, by the reasoning you described, will think it's much more likely that the coin landed heads, even though both chances were equal. It's quite similar to the reason why the fine tuning argument doesn't work: we can't say that the earth was made with us in mind because we can only exist if the earth had the right conditions necessary for us to exist.
Yep, Survivorship bias. In the criminal experiment, whoever was spared would automatically assume there were 1000 spared. In actuality, I don't think their existence would raise the odds at all. Since, they wouldn't even be able to have a thought if they didn't exist, the fact that they do exist proves nothing. Wouldn't it still just be 50/50 from the initial coin flip? 🤷♂
Do you agree with the evil kidnapper example? The objective probability of the coin landing on heads is 50% in both cases, but in both cases we have new information (namely, "I exist at this moment") which leads us to conclude something about how that event played out.
@@ApologeticsSquaredyes for the same reason. This method of approximating probability doesn’t work. The anthropic principle means the odds of existing doesn't matter so long as it's not 0.
I'm just a layman, but would this be presupposing that a multiverse is possible at all? Couldn't we do something similar in the thought experiments? Wouldn't it be more likely that the murderer is insane and he mistakes 1000 people for 100 million? That would be more people = higher probability. I get the idea of saying something is more likely if you extend it to the max range of people, but how do we know where that ends? I don't see how we could justify assuming infinity for this scenario instead of other scenarios? (Love the video by the way, I lean towards theism. Just trying to correct my potential misunderstandings)
The “100 million people and insane killer” scenario might get a boost to its prior in virtue of having more people, but we could still reject it on other grounds (like someone who makes such simple math errors probably couldn’t orchestrate that many kidnappings). I don’t understand your question about “assuming infinity for this scenario instead of other scenarios.” Could you please clarify? Thanks!
if we swap KILL with LET LIVE and kill 1000 people on heads but only kill YOU on tails does that prove that the scenaeio with less people is more likely? you can say "I'm about to be killed so it's more likely to have been heads than randomly selecting me out of 1000 to be killed."
Interesting argument. Cant put my finger on it but something seems very strange to me about conditioning on the fact that I exist. Musnt this fact be already assumed in order to properly define *subjective* bayesian credences? Feel like there's a difference between conditioning on not being executed and conditioning on existing in the first place... Feels reminiscent of the issues raised by the sleeping beauty paradox - perhaps the inspiration for this video?
Could this reasoning be used with gods too? The more gods that exist, the more likely it is that one of them happens to be any specific god, therefore polytheism is more likely than monotheism?
Christianity doesn't deny the existance of lesser deities (defined as spiritual beings that recieve worship). Polytheism is a *moral* statement, which says that worship of lesser spiritual beings is acceptible, monotheism only claims that worship is due exclusively to the One God, the maximally great being.There are sone polytheists that were or are not aware of the existance of the creator God, and others, like Aristotle, that were. I think you could do a better job explaining your point because I don't see the parallelisms between this argument and the argument that spiritual beings that recieve worship exist.
As a Christian, I have to say I find this argument severely flawed. A being created from the coinflip only knows that at least one person was created. Both scenarios have an equal amount of “at least one person” being created. The probability would only be affected by the existence of my point of if one of the results was a chance of at least one person being created, but also a chance of no people being created, in which case that would be the less likely option.
If I do not exist (yet), then the chance that I will exist is undefined, because "I" is unintelligible when "I" do not exist. Why is the chance above undefined? If "I" do not exist, and we make a statement/proposition about "I" when "I" exist before "I" exist, to judge the truth-value or probability of this proposition when "I" do exist requires continuity of identity from when "I" do not exist to when "I" do exist. But there's no continuity of identity from when "I" do not exist to when "I" do exist, because there's no continuity of non-existing things into existence (non-existing things are not things). Then we cannot judge the truth-value or probability of such propositions. The "Population Principle" relies on such proposition, and therefore on continuity of non-existing things into existence. The "Population Principle" must be rejected.
I personally don’t see any reason to think that’s true. Furthermore, it seems we can easily make meaningful statements like “the probability of my parents having met is less than 50%, so the prior probability of my existence is less than 50%.” Sure, we can’t pin down an exact number, but the concept of the prior probability of my existence is at the very least a *meaningful* concept.
@@ApologeticsSquared The two cases are not similar. The probability of you not having existed is meaningful because "you" and "your parents" are meaningful reference to actually existing things, and the events that lead to you beginning to exist are known (and hypothetical events with meaningful references can have meaningful probabilities). But if you do not currently exist and have not yet existed, the reference "you" is unintelligible (there is no "you") and no identity can be drawn to future existing persons. You can posit whatever you want about things using defined references, but positing something using a reference that point to nothing doesn't make much sense. For example, the statement "You have an awesome channel" is not meaningful if "you" don't exist, becasue the reference "you" doesn't point to anything. This is analogous to how most programming languages work: in ```x=5; if x>5; then...``` the if statement is intelligible because the name x is defined and it points to the number 5, but if we omitted the ```x=5``` bit and skipped straight to that if statement without having defined x, then that if statemnt can't be evaluated; the name 'x' doesn't point to anything. The prior probability of your existence is meaningful if you do in fact exist at the time of evaluating that prior probability. But if you do not exist at that time, what/who is "you" on which/whom we evaluate that prior probability?
@@tafazzi-on-discord That would because "my mother" is a meaningful reference, and "firstborn son" is a meaningful concept which doesn't necessarily refer to a specific person. On the other hand, The probability of me being my mother's firstborn son if I don't exist is not meaningful. To make this clearer with a question: what is the probability that Tim will exist? How do you answer such a question meainingfully (i.e. without saying the probability if between 0 and 1 inclusive )?
Great video. However, I do believe the atheist could appeal to ignorance of our understanding of how probabale life is, given we have explored basically nothing of the universe. Perhaps life is more probable than it seems. Perhaps, assuming the predictions of how the universe may carry out its existence, we are among the first few life forms and there may be trillions of other future life in the predicted quadrillions of years of matter staying close enough to be able to perform chemistry and biology. Moreover, life being rare, in my personal opinion, wouldn't be enough to convince an atheist (especially a staunch one). They may argue the universe doesnt see difference between life and non life like we categorise it. It could just be a natural consequence of physical laws. How those laws are the way they are could be due to infinite reptitions of big bangs, uncaused multiverse stuff, or maybe there are uncountable number of combinations of physical laws that all lead to rare events. If life is a rare event and nothing special to the universe, then other combinations of physical laws could also lead to improbable circumstances. If a mind type thing were to exist in one of these (or any observing object which can calculate probability) it could just as easily say this is highly improbable, therefore special. Long response, idk if anyone will even read this, its 1 am and i have college tomorrow. Adios
This is a misunderstanding of the argument from scale 1. The argument deals with not only the size of the universe but also the amount of time and the fact it's hostile to life. The idea of aesthetic value being the explanation not only is unsatisfactory to account for scale (is aesthetic value good in itself or is it value when people experience it?), but it doesn't account for the other factors, heck, it actually makes it worst. 2. This principal is, the more X is created, assuming that Y can be X, if follows there is a higher likelyhood Y is created. However A)this principle says doesn't say if a situation of there being more X is likely or not. B) there are billions of humans, and since of origin of life for humans is earth, this principle has little consequence to the likelihood of human life. Though this does touch on a paradox is science, i think it's called the Fermi Paradox. It is rather odd that we can't see much life in the universe. However the naturalist can bite the bullet and say "yeah that is werid" or hypothesize some explain like life is a rare thing to spawn naturally. A Theist on the other hand has no explanation good explanation for why the universe is empty and hostile to life, and every possible explanation you gave only makes theism worse by comparison to naturalism.
One technical thing: you say that worlds with more people have higher priors. That's not really the right way to think about it. Their prior is the same, I just update on the fact that I exist to think they're more likely.
Hmmm… I can’t think of any implications of our theory of identity. The most interesting response I can think of is that a pantheist would say “Well, there’s always only one person, namely God. Whether there are a zillion or a billion ‘people,’ there’s always really a single person which we are manifestations of” or something (I’m not sure what terminology pantheists use). Now, 1) they still need to deal with the thought experiments in the video and 2) we could just re-run the argument with manifestations (or whatever) instead of persons.
"Population principle: the more people that exist in hypothetical scenario, the higher the prior probability of that scenario." Why? The probability of my existence is 100% (I think, therefore I am). Suppose I went looking for Waldo, and I knew Waldo was in a specific building. The probability of finding Waldo in a certain room is proportional to the number of people in that room. But your population principle doesn't apply to myself. I already know where I am. I'm looking for Waldo.
@@ApologeticsSquaredThe prior probability distribution represents our prior knowledge or beliefs, while the posterior probability distribution represents our updated knowledge or beliefs after taking into account new data. Since I have a prior probability distribution, this entails that I must exist. Therefore, the concept of probability of my own existence doesn't make sense.
@@mesplin3it does make sense: the two worldviews addressed here (naturalism and theism) are models of the world independant of your existance, because they claim to map a past that did not include your existance. Do you understand what the point of the human-making machine was?
I understand that you are more probable with more people in the universe, but you are equally as probable as any possible person, so if someone exists, I don’t see the problem of us being here alone in the universe (although I am a theist and I think there are other compelling arguments for God.)
Note: the evidence that I have is not *just* that someone exists, but I actually know that I exist. There’s a distinction, and the latter is a piece of evidence that leads to the conclusions in this video.
I am uncertain about the population principle. It would imply that if you don't know your biological parents/your birth family, you should assume that your parents has as many children as possible because that gives the highest chance of you existing. But that seems counter intuitive. On the other hand, I think the multiverse counter to the fine tuning argument works, and that uses the population principle: the existence of our universe is probable if it exists within a multiverse. (But that in turn would mean naturalism also predicts the multiverse, so theism and naturalism end up equal again.) Btw I do agree that theism predicts a multiverse, but I think God creates not based on the goodness of universes but on the goodness experienced by the individual creatures. But since more universes allow for more creatures to experience goodness, God creates many universes.
Regarding the argument about coming from families with more kids, we happen to know there are fewer such families. So, that’s why we would usually assign such families a lower prior probability. If we didn’t know that such families were rarer, I think we should assign such families a higher prior! Regarding a naturalistic multiverse: just because a naturalist might need a multiverse to exist in order to handle the a posteriori data of fine-tuning, that doesn’t mean naturalism predicts a multiverse a priori.
No, a priori knowledge in this case gives us actually nothing. Analogy between coin-tossing machine creating lives and universes with zillion people is not analogous. In the case of machine you know a priori that machine has 50/50 chances to flip heads or tails and then create thousand people or just one person. This is granted by the way you created this scenario. However where is proof that there could exists an universe with zillion people at all? Or what is the probability of such universe coming to an existence? What if probability of such universe is also zillion times smaller than ours? Where did you get the numbers? You did there silent assumption that totally flips your conclusions. Without knowing those probabilities you end up with nothing actually.
Your two arguments here are contradictory. Either God has created all possible good universes, a lot of which would likely (IMO) have far more people, and thus it's very unlikely you'd exist in such a sparsely populated one, or God has created one special universe. You can't do both!
Also, the naturalist does have an explanation most of the universe being hostile to life: the range of possible universes that are *somewhere* habitable is simply way bigger than those that are *mostly* habitable, so it's very reasonable that vast majority of possible people live in mostly hostile universes. TBH personally I am suspicious of trying to assign probabilities to ranges of possible universes in the first place, as well as anthropic reasoning.
I'm not gonna debunk you cause I haven't yet watched the video(and probably won't) but looking at your response I have two critiques. One, it not being probable to happen to be in a sparsely populated universe, sure it's not probable but some people are bound to be in one and you can't conclude you aren't simply because of probability, you might've won the lottery. 2, having two arguments while being contradictory together does nothing to falsify either one, someone can use either to defend the belief because they both work. The two explanations being contradictory simply means they can't both be true, not that either is definitely not true.
This is a ridiculous argument. Why on earth would I accept the population principle. You can use it to predict all shorts of things. There's the simulation argument, so we should all be in a computer. I live in a country that doesn't have the largest population. Isn't that weird. Baring some freak accident, most people will live in the future, so where's my hover board? What priors are you using to compare your probabilities? It makes no sense. Naturalism has a very simply explanation for and empty universe such as ours. Most things that can be aren't conscious, so we expect most things not to be conscious. Consciousness will only ever exist in little pockets. And what do you know that's exactly what we find. Besides, how do you know there are only finitely many people in universe? As far as we can tell the universe is infinite. We are simply limited in the amount we can observe.
This feels like a cope video, not gonna lie. [The Aesthetic argument (is bad)] 0:15 "The universe is fine-tuned for life" 0:30 "Most of the universe is inhospitable for life" 0:45 "But it's pretty" Uh.... isn't this just conceding the argument though? I'm not convinced by fine-tuning but I think changing the subject from life to aesthetic isn't something someone who believed it was fine-tuned for life would do. 0:50 "God makes valuable things" Value is just a subjective value in relation to a topic, "god makes (things)" doesn't really add anything to the argument. 1:30 "People with wealth do things." I would be interested in why they did this, but...I guess Squared doesn't actually care. 1:42 "When we extrapolate to an omnipotent being" But why would you? 2:10 "They can provide some explanation" Having an explanation means nothing, that explanation being convincing and useful is everything. You're just admitting that theist can make up stuff, "oh well god wants it" isn't a good explanation lol. [Problem of Scale is (not) a problem for Naturalist] The problem of scale is an internal critique of ID. It's similar to the problem of evil. Saying "it's a problem for the naturalist as well" is just fundamentally not understanding the problem of scale. Naturalist don't have an issue with the universe being large and inhospitable lol. [Bad thought experiments: Conflip edition] 2:30 This doesn't work. 50% chance does not dictate that outcome A(1 person) is 99% likely to be heads. That's not how probability works, it's still 50% likely to be heads or tails because you're getting the same result without any distinguishing factors and you already stated it's 50%. Lets do this again. "You are 50% likely to have X result and 50% likely to have Y Result." "We don't know which one it is, what are the odds?" Nothing you can say will dictate X or Y are not 50% likely because you established this from the start that it's 50% chance. ["The population principle"] 4:50 "The more chances the higher probability of it occuring." Kind of weird it wasted an entire script and examples just for this but ok. 5:50 "there'd be people everywhere" Which means this (our) universe is not fine tuned for life. 6:12 "our own universe is not what we'd expect." lol what, that's not how it works. >If you roll X 5000 times you are more likely to get a jackpot at the casino! >Well why didn't you roll it 5000 more times? You just skipped over the whole "why" part lol. Why is our universe the way it is? Oh right..... Squared doesn't care. "cus god" lol. Ignore cosmology (again) I guess. [Multiverse] Assuming it's "good for god to create" is just kind of silly, also defeats the entire ID argument since the universe is created without life in 99%. You either have to bite a bullet where god creates this exact universe with this exact life count over and over or god creates a "more" or "less" fine tuned universe. Just dumb to bring up and shows a lack of understanding by Squared of the subject.
Hi this is the first video from you that I watch, here's a response that I'd anticipate from a naturalist: they'd assume that the probability distribution of the laws of physics makes it so a Universe with people in the billions is more likely than a Universe with people in the "zillions", as you put it (meaning a wholly inhabitable Universe). They'd say "instead of a coin, the murderer tosses a 1-million sided dice (die?), and only lets all 1000 live if it lands on a specific number; under those circumstamces, if you live you'd expect that you're the lucky one of a thousand rather than one of the 1000 lucky people out of a million possible worlds." I'd be interested in how you'd address this objection. I really liked this presentation, I'll check out the rest of your content
Naturalist don't have a problem with the argument of scale, it's an internal critique of ID's claims. They'd just point to cosmology as the explanation for why we have what we have.
// they'd assume that the probability distribution of the laws of physics makes it so a Universe with people in the billions is more likely than a Universe with people in the "zillions", as you put it // If my argument works, then the equation for the Population Principle is: P(zillions of people world)/P(billions of people world) = (P(physics permitting zillions of people world)(1 zillion))/(P(physics permitting billions of people world)(1 billion)). Even if P(physics permitting zillions of people world)/P(physics permitting billions of people world) is super small, this gets multiplied by the (1 zillion)/(1 billion) term and so P(zillions of people world)/P(billions of people world) is still going to be high.
@@ApologeticsSquared You should probably address the argument from scale in the negative, because you're just saying "X=X so therefore god" in the end. If 10% more life, is it "more designed" or 10% less "less designed"? Just seems to ignore the whole "why do we have X" question in favor of pointing to something and saying "God did it"
Really interesting argument. Not sure if I am completely convinced yet however. I appreciate that this channel actually seems to produce ideas that I have literally never heard before.
Glory to God in the highest
I think that the scale argument is definitely interesting and deserves a lot of thought and consideration, but I just wanted to point out that the objection to the Fine-tuning argument mentioned in the beginning does not completely destroy the Fine-tuning argument. This is because the Fine-tuning argument claims that life would be plain impossible given most sets of physical constants and initial conditions of the universe, not just improbable. Life simply couldn't exist in universes where particles collide every few trillion years, in universes where atoms fall apart, in universes where chemistry is impossible, or in universes where the big bang rebounds on itself after 1/1000000000 of a second.
Well that's becauss fine tuning is just "reality + god did it" lol.
Saying "what if reality different, therefore reality unlikely" isn't a coherent argument and most fine tuning proponents will admit it's not evidence of a deity.
@@ShouVertica You have misunderstood fine-tuning if you think the fine-tuning argument is somehow circular or logically incoherent. Firstly, it is worth mentioning that fine-tuning is a neutral term that says nothing about what caused the fine-tuning. The fine-tuning argument just says God is most likely the cause of the fine-tuning. Secondly, we are asking why a life-permitting universe exists, not why our own universe exists. Out of the great multitude of possible life-prohibiting universes, there may be a few other possible life-permitting universe besides our own. We are asking why one of the life-permitting universes exists when a life-permitting universe is far more unlikely.
@ir0nic303 Oh I know it's neutral, the actual proponents don't suggest a god did it and are just pointing out constants and effects if different. Theist hijacked this, just like they hijacked "DNA is a code" to say God did it.
I would make the distinction but theist channel and talking about God so...
"Why life permitting exist" can be done for any topic though, we are just saying conceptual infinite, one actuality.
Thank you I now have an excellent example to cite whenever I need to show someone what a False Equivalence fallacy looks like.
Very nice argument that basically proves God exists.
What exactly do we know about God here?
Nice title 👍
This argument seems so strange to me. Lets look at the example where i heard the argument (in general) the first time: Its more likely for you to live in a more populous country, than it is to live in country with a small population. It is also more likely for you to live in a city than it is for you to live in a village. Therefore we can conclude that you the reader most likely live in a city of a populous country.
That may as well be, still there are people living in small villages, thus you aren't guaranteed to live in a city. In fact even if everybody but one would live in a city, there is still a chance for you to live in the countryside. This argument does not really tell us anything about the real world. It only tells us, that if everybody that is alive would make the assumption, that they lived in the most populated universe, a plurality would be correct. It could never tell you if you were actually in the plurality.
Thank you. I think that was what I was feeling was intuitively wrong with the population theory.
// It only tells us, that if everybody that is alive would make the assumption, that they lived in the most populated universe, a plurality would be correct. //
If we phrase this in terms of probabilities, we would say that one should assign a high prior probability to the proposition that they lived in the most populated universe. Likewise, this video argues that our credence in theism should be high.
@@ApologeticsSquared That is not the same thing. It is a bit like saying: "I should assign a higher prob to living in the city. Huh a posteriori it surely looks like a whole lot of countryside out here. Well looks like cities do not exist." There is no need for a generic worldview to explain why you do not live in a city anymore than there is a need for generic worldview to explain why the universe isn't more populated. The only point were this is relevant is when a worldview makes a point of setting something like "be fruitful and multiply" as a goal of whatever phenomena gave rise to the universe.
@@Finfie // Huh a posteriori it surely looks like a whole lot of countryside out here. Well looks like cities do not exist. //
I'm not sure why the latter follows from the former. It seems you would just say, "A priori, I would have expected cityside, but a posteriori, I can see it's countryside."
// There is no need for a generic worldview to explain why you do not live in a city anymore than there is a need for generic worldview to explain why the universe isn't more populated. //
If one worldview strongly predicts country living a priori, then your country living *would* count as evidence for this worldview. There just isn't any such worldview that makes it predictions (besides ones with super tiny priors, like "it's a law of physics that people are born in the countryside"). However, theism is a worldview that doesn't have a super tiny prior, and it does predict that space big.
@@ApologeticsSquared Ok as far as i can see you made to different arguments in this video. On the one hand you seemed to argue:
"Theism has an argument why the universe is empty, but the naturalist would also expect the universe to be full of life (population principle) and it isn't. The naturalist has no argument why it would be that way!"
One the other hand in your addendum you seem to argue the exact oposite point:
"We live in the multiverse, thus the most populous cosmos, and god predicts that and naturalism does not."
Well you successfully shown that theism would be compatible with every option if you strech the concept enough, thus shown that it a priori does not make any useful predictions on that topic.
//I'm not sure why the latter follows from the former.
My point was that you seemed to try to make claims over the real world. Do we know that we live in the most populous cosmos? No we don't. It very much looks like there could be alternatives to our cosmos that would be filled with more live. And you very much seemed to try to use the population principle as evidence, that we live in the most populous cosmos (especially in the multiverse bid). This is not a valid argument (as i highlighted in my example, where you agreed that the conclusion does not follow).
Hello
I see what you did there. This is actually very clever. Well done, Square.
I think the consequence of flipping a coin have nothing to do with probability of heads or tail. But yes it might effect credence of the person living, and we can blame that on anthropocentrism. And it's pretty easy to influence our reasoning falsely this way
Great vid! However I can't say I agree with your argument. For the second scenario you mentioned, assume the coin has 50/50 odds. Either way, at least one person will be created, which, by the reasoning you described, will think it's much more likely that the coin landed heads, even though both chances were equal. It's quite similar to the reason why the fine tuning argument doesn't work: we can't say that the earth was made with us in mind because we can only exist if the earth had the right conditions necessary for us to exist.
Yep, Survivorship bias. In the criminal experiment, whoever was spared would automatically assume there were 1000 spared. In actuality, I don't think their existence would raise the odds at all. Since, they wouldn't even be able to have a thought if they didn't exist, the fact that they do exist proves nothing. Wouldn't it still just be 50/50 from the initial coin flip? 🤷♂
Do you agree with the evil kidnapper example? The objective probability of the coin landing on heads is 50% in both cases, but in both cases we have new information (namely, "I exist at this moment") which leads us to conclude something about how that event played out.
@@ApologeticsSquaredyes for the same reason. This method of approximating probability doesn’t work. The anthropic principle means the odds of existing doesn't matter so long as it's not 0.
I'm just a layman, but would this be presupposing that a multiverse is possible at all? Couldn't we do something similar in the thought experiments? Wouldn't it be more likely that the murderer is insane and he mistakes 1000 people for 100 million? That would be more people = higher probability. I get the idea of saying something is more likely if you extend it to the max range of people, but how do we know where that ends? I don't see how we could justify assuming infinity for this scenario instead of other scenarios? (Love the video by the way, I lean towards theism. Just trying to correct my potential misunderstandings)
The “100 million people and insane killer” scenario might get a boost to its prior in virtue of having more people, but we could still reject it on other grounds (like someone who makes such simple math errors probably couldn’t orchestrate that many kidnappings).
I don’t understand your question about “assuming infinity for this scenario instead of other scenarios.” Could you please clarify? Thanks!
if we swap KILL with LET LIVE and kill 1000 people on heads but only kill YOU on tails does that prove that the scenaeio with less people is more likely?
you can say "I'm about to be killed so it's more likely to have been heads than randomly selecting me out of 1000 to be killed."
Interesting argument. Cant put my finger on it but something seems very strange to me about conditioning on the fact that I exist. Musnt this fact be already assumed in order to properly define *subjective* bayesian credences? Feel like there's a difference between conditioning on not being executed and conditioning on existing in the first place...
Feels reminiscent of the issues raised by the sleeping beauty paradox - perhaps the inspiration for this video?
Could this reasoning be used with gods too? The more gods that exist, the more likely it is that one of them happens to be any specific god, therefore polytheism is more likely than monotheism?
Christianity doesn't deny the existance of lesser deities (defined as spiritual beings that recieve worship). Polytheism is a *moral* statement, which says that worship of lesser spiritual beings is acceptible, monotheism only claims that worship is due exclusively to the One God, the maximally great being.There are sone polytheists that were or are not aware of the existance of the creator God, and others, like Aristotle, that were.
I think you could do a better job explaining your point because I don't see the parallelisms between this argument and the argument that spiritual beings that recieve worship exist.
@tafazzi-on-discord polytheism is not a moral statement lol. What.
As a Christian, I have to say I find this argument severely flawed.
A being created from the coinflip only knows that at least one person was created. Both scenarios have an equal amount of “at least one person” being created.
The probability would only be affected by the existence of my point of if one of the results was a chance of at least one person being created, but also a chance of no people being created, in which case that would be the less likely option.
If I do not exist (yet), then the chance that I will exist is undefined, because "I" is unintelligible when "I" do not exist.
Why is the chance above undefined? If "I" do not exist, and we make a statement/proposition about "I" when "I" exist before "I" exist, to judge the truth-value or probability of this proposition when "I" do exist requires continuity of identity from when "I" do not exist to when "I" do exist. But there's no continuity of identity from when "I" do not exist to when "I" do exist, because there's no continuity of non-existing things into existence (non-existing things are not things). Then we cannot judge the truth-value or probability of such propositions.
The "Population Principle" relies on such proposition, and therefore on continuity of non-existing things into existence. The "Population Principle" must be rejected.
I personally don’t see any reason to think that’s true.
Furthermore, it seems we can easily make meaningful statements like “the probability of my parents having met is less than 50%, so the prior probability of my existence is less than 50%.” Sure, we can’t pin down an exact number, but the concept of the prior probability of my existence is at the very least a *meaningful* concept.
@@ApologeticsSquared The two cases are not similar. The probability of you not having existed is meaningful because "you" and "your parents" are meaningful reference to actually existing things, and the events that lead to you beginning to exist are known (and hypothetical events with meaningful references can have meaningful probabilities). But if you do not currently exist and have not yet existed, the reference "you" is unintelligible (there is no "you") and no identity can be drawn to future existing persons. You can posit whatever you want about things using defined references, but positing something using a reference that point to nothing doesn't make much sense. For example, the statement "You have an awesome channel" is not meaningful if "you" don't exist, becasue the reference "you" doesn't point to anything. This is analogous to how most programming languages work: in ```x=5; if x>5; then...``` the if statement is intelligible because the name x is defined and it points to the number 5, but if we omitted the ```x=5``` bit and skipped straight to that if statement without having defined x, then that if statemnt can't be evaluated; the name 'x' doesn't point to anything.
The prior probability of your existence is meaningful if you do in fact exist at the time of evaluating that prior probability. But if you do not exist at that time, what/who is "you" on which/whom we evaluate that prior probability?
What if I talked about "my mother's firsborn son"? Would statements about the probability of my mother's firstborn existance not make sense?
@@tafazzi-on-discord That would because "my mother" is a meaningful reference, and "firstborn son" is a meaningful concept which doesn't necessarily refer to a specific person. On the other hand, The probability of me being my mother's firstborn son if I don't exist is not meaningful. To make this clearer with a question: what is the probability that Tim will exist? How do you answer such a question meainingfully (i.e. without saying the probability if between 0 and 1 inclusive )?
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.
Exactly my thoughts after watching this.
doesn't seem like it
More likely cope.
Great video. However, I do believe the atheist could appeal to ignorance of our understanding of how probabale life is, given we have explored basically nothing of the universe. Perhaps life is more probable than it seems. Perhaps, assuming the predictions of how the universe may carry out its existence, we are among the first few life forms and there may be trillions of other future life in the predicted quadrillions of years of matter staying close enough to be able to perform chemistry and biology. Moreover, life being rare, in my personal opinion, wouldn't be enough to convince an atheist (especially a staunch one). They may argue the universe doesnt see difference between life and non life like we categorise it. It could just be a natural consequence of physical laws. How those laws are the way they are could be due to infinite reptitions of big bangs, uncaused multiverse stuff, or maybe there are uncountable number of combinations of physical laws that all lead to rare events. If life is a rare event and nothing special to the universe, then other combinations of physical laws could also lead to improbable circumstances. If a mind type thing were to exist in one of these (or any observing object which can calculate probability) it could just as easily say this is highly improbable, therefore special. Long response, idk if anyone will even read this, its 1 am and i have college tomorrow. Adios
This is a misunderstanding of the argument from scale
1. The argument deals with not only the size of the universe but also the amount of time and the fact it's hostile to life. The idea of aesthetic value being the explanation not only is unsatisfactory to account for scale (is aesthetic value good in itself or is it value when people experience it?), but it doesn't account for the other factors, heck, it actually makes it worst.
2. This principal is, the more X is created, assuming that Y can be X, if follows there is a higher likelyhood Y is created.
However
A)this principle says doesn't say if a situation of there being more X is likely or not.
B) there are billions of humans, and since of origin of life for humans is earth, this principle has little consequence to the likelihood of human life.
Though this does touch on a paradox is science, i think it's called the Fermi Paradox.
It is rather odd that we can't see much life in the universe. However the naturalist can bite the bullet and say "yeah that is werid" or hypothesize some explain like life is a rare thing to spawn naturally.
A Theist on the other hand has no explanation good explanation for why the universe is empty and hostile to life, and every possible explanation you gave only makes theism worse by comparison to naturalism.
One technical thing: you say that worlds with more people have higher priors. That's not really the right way to think about it. Their prior is the same, I just update on the fact that I exist to think they're more likely.
Thanks for the vid! Does this argument require a particular account of personal identity? Are there some accounts that it wouldn't work with?
Hmmm… I can’t think of any implications of our theory of identity. The most interesting response I can think of is that a pantheist would say “Well, there’s always only one person, namely God. Whether there are a zillion or a billion ‘people,’ there’s always really a single person which we are manifestations of” or something (I’m not sure what terminology pantheists use). Now, 1) they still need to deal with the thought experiments in the video and 2) we could just re-run the argument with manifestations (or whatever) instead of persons.
@@ApologeticsSquared hm cool, thanks
"Population principle: the more people that exist in hypothetical scenario, the higher the prior probability of that scenario."
Why? The probability of my existence is 100% (I think, therefore I am).
Suppose I went looking for Waldo, and I knew Waldo was in a specific building. The probability of finding Waldo in a certain room is proportional to the number of people in that room. But your population principle doesn't apply to myself. I already know where I am. I'm looking for Waldo.
The posterior probability of your existence is 100%, but not the prior. The probability is much smaller until you update on the fact that you exist.
@@ApologeticsSquaredThe prior probability distribution represents our prior knowledge or beliefs, while the posterior probability distribution represents our updated knowledge or beliefs after taking into account new data.
Since I have a prior probability distribution, this entails that I must exist. Therefore, the concept of probability of my own existence doesn't make sense.
@@mesplin3it does make sense: the two worldviews addressed here (naturalism and theism) are models of the world independant of your existance, because they claim to map a past that did not include your existance.
Do you understand what the point of the human-making machine was?
@@tafazzi-on-discord How does one observe the probability of theism or naturalism without assuming an agent to observe that probability?
@@mesplin3 we don't observe probabilities, we estimate them.
I understand that you are more probable with more people in the universe, but you are equally as probable as any possible person, so if someone exists, I don’t see the problem of us being here alone in the universe (although I am a theist and I think there are other compelling arguments for God.)
Note: the evidence that I have is not *just* that someone exists, but I actually know that I exist. There’s a distinction, and the latter is a piece of evidence that leads to the conclusions in this video.
@lynx7873 ok furry
@lynx7873fantastic argument. Theism has been crushed
@lynx7873Atheism can't be true.
@lynx7873theists after hearing this flawless argument: 😯
Can you post your math so that you can show how you got 99.9%?
I am uncertain about the population principle. It would imply that if you don't know your biological parents/your birth family, you should assume that your parents has as many children as possible because that gives the highest chance of you existing. But that seems counter intuitive. On the other hand, I think the multiverse counter to the fine tuning argument works, and that uses the population principle: the existence of our universe is probable if it exists within a multiverse. (But that in turn would mean naturalism also predicts the multiverse, so theism and naturalism end up equal again.)
Btw I do agree that theism predicts a multiverse, but I think God creates not based on the goodness of universes but on the goodness experienced by the individual creatures. But since more universes allow for more creatures to experience goodness, God creates many universes.
Regarding the argument about coming from families with more kids, we happen to know there are fewer such families. So, that’s why we would usually assign such families a lower prior probability. If we didn’t know that such families were rarer, I think we should assign such families a higher prior!
Regarding a naturalistic multiverse: just because a naturalist might need a multiverse to exist in order to handle the a posteriori data of fine-tuning, that doesn’t mean naturalism predicts a multiverse a priori.
@@ApologeticsSquaredSo...select aposteriori knowledge when convenient and ignore all inconvenient stuff like evolution and cosmology? Lol.
No, a priori knowledge in this case gives us actually nothing. Analogy between coin-tossing machine creating lives and universes with zillion people is not analogous. In the case of machine you know a priori that machine has 50/50 chances to flip heads or tails and then create thousand people or just one person. This is granted by the way you created this scenario. However where is proof that there could exists an universe with zillion people at all? Or what is the probability of such universe coming to an existence? What if probability of such universe is also zillion times smaller than ours? Where did you get the numbers? You did there silent assumption that totally flips your conclusions. Without knowing those probabilities you end up with nothing actually.
Your two arguments here are contradictory. Either God has created all possible good universes, a lot of which would likely (IMO) have far more people, and thus it's very unlikely you'd exist in such a sparsely populated one, or God has created one special universe. You can't do both!
Also, the naturalist does have an explanation most of the universe being hostile to life: the range of possible universes that are *somewhere* habitable is simply way bigger than those that are *mostly* habitable, so it's very reasonable that vast majority of possible people live in mostly hostile universes.
TBH personally I am suspicious of trying to assign probabilities to ranges of possible universes in the first place, as well as anthropic reasoning.
I'm not gonna debunk you cause I haven't yet watched the video(and probably won't) but looking at your response I have two critiques. One, it not being probable to happen to be in a sparsely populated universe, sure it's not probable but some people are bound to be in one and you can't conclude you aren't simply because of probability, you might've won the lottery. 2, having two arguments while being contradictory together does nothing to falsify either one, someone can use either to defend the belief because they both work. The two explanations being contradictory simply means they can't both be true, not that either is definitely not true.
This is a ridiculous argument. Why on earth would I accept the population principle. You can use it to predict all shorts of things. There's the simulation argument, so we should all be in a computer. I live in a country that doesn't have the largest population. Isn't that weird. Baring some freak accident, most people will live in the future, so where's my hover board? What priors are you using to compare your probabilities? It makes no sense. Naturalism has a very simply explanation for and empty universe such as ours. Most things that can be aren't conscious, so we expect most things not to be conscious. Consciousness will only ever exist in little pockets. And what do you know that's exactly what we find.
Besides, how do you know there are only finitely many people in universe? As far as we can tell the universe is infinite. We are simply limited in the amount we can observe.
This feels like a cope video, not gonna lie.
[The Aesthetic argument (is bad)]
0:15 "The universe is fine-tuned for life"
0:30 "Most of the universe is inhospitable for life"
0:45 "But it's pretty" Uh.... isn't this just conceding the argument though? I'm not convinced by fine-tuning but I think changing the subject from life to aesthetic isn't something someone who believed it was fine-tuned for life would do.
0:50 "God makes valuable things" Value is just a subjective value in relation to a topic, "god makes (things)" doesn't really add anything to the argument.
1:30 "People with wealth do things." I would be interested in why they did this, but...I guess Squared doesn't actually care.
1:42 "When we extrapolate to an omnipotent being" But why would you?
2:10 "They can provide some explanation" Having an explanation means nothing, that explanation being convincing and useful is everything. You're just admitting that theist can make up stuff, "oh well god wants it" isn't a good explanation lol.
[Problem of Scale is (not) a problem for Naturalist]
The problem of scale is an internal critique of ID. It's similar to the problem of evil. Saying "it's a problem for the naturalist as well" is just fundamentally not understanding the problem of scale. Naturalist don't have an issue with the universe being large and inhospitable lol.
[Bad thought experiments: Conflip edition] 2:30
This doesn't work. 50% chance does not dictate that outcome A(1 person) is 99% likely to be heads. That's not how probability works, it's still 50% likely to be heads or tails because you're getting the same result without any distinguishing factors and you already stated it's 50%.
Lets do this again. "You are 50% likely to have X result and 50% likely to have Y Result." "We don't know which one it is, what are the odds?"
Nothing you can say will dictate X or Y are not 50% likely because you established this from the start that it's 50% chance.
["The population principle"]
4:50 "The more chances the higher probability of it occuring." Kind of weird it wasted an entire script and examples just for this but ok.
5:50 "there'd be people everywhere" Which means this (our) universe is not fine tuned for life.
6:12 "our own universe is not what we'd expect." lol what, that's not how it works.
>If you roll X 5000 times you are more likely to get a jackpot at the casino!
>Well why didn't you roll it 5000 more times?
You just skipped over the whole "why" part lol. Why is our universe the way it is? Oh right..... Squared doesn't care. "cus god" lol. Ignore cosmology (again) I guess.
[Multiverse]
Assuming it's "good for god to create" is just kind of silly, also defeats the entire ID argument since the universe is created without life in 99%. You either have to bite a bullet where god creates this exact universe with this exact life count over and over or god creates a "more" or "less" fine tuned universe. Just dumb to bring up and shows a lack of understanding by Squared of the subject.
Least 10 strawman/sec dawkinite:
@@Tzimiskes3506 What did I say that's a strawman? Or did you just learn a buzzword?
🤓
Hi this is the first video from you that I watch, here's a response that I'd anticipate from a naturalist:
they'd assume that the probability distribution of the laws of physics makes it so a Universe with people in the billions is more likely than a Universe with people in the "zillions", as you put it (meaning a wholly inhabitable Universe). They'd say "instead of a coin, the murderer tosses a 1-million sided dice (die?), and only lets all 1000 live if it lands on a specific number; under those circumstamces, if you live you'd expect that you're the lucky one of a thousand rather than one of the 1000 lucky people out of a million possible worlds."
I'd be interested in how you'd address this objection. I really liked this presentation, I'll check out the rest of your content
Naturalist don't have a problem with the argument of scale, it's an internal critique of ID's claims.
They'd just point to cosmology as the explanation for why we have what we have.
@@ShouVertica who's ID
// they'd assume that the probability distribution of the laws of physics makes it so a Universe with people in the billions is more likely than a Universe with people in the "zillions", as you put it //
If my argument works, then the equation for the Population Principle is:
P(zillions of people world)/P(billions of people world) = (P(physics permitting zillions of people world)(1 zillion))/(P(physics permitting billions of people world)(1 billion)).
Even if P(physics permitting zillions of people world)/P(physics permitting billions of people world) is super small, this gets multiplied by the (1 zillion)/(1 billion) term and so P(zillions of people world)/P(billions of people world) is still going to be high.
@@ApologeticsSquared You should probably address the argument from scale in the negative, because you're just saying "X=X so therefore god" in the end. If 10% more life, is it "more designed" or 10% less "less designed"?
Just seems to ignore the whole "why do we have X" question in favor of pointing to something and saying "God did it"
@@tafazzi-on-discord man I can't actually put "intelligent dsgn" as a statement lol, YT censored it.