Persevering through loss of faith

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD2Hbq04oa8

 

In this talk, Alex Pruss discusses an argument for God's existence.

 

Whatever force the argument may have had though seems to instantly evaporate when at the very end he is asked about the problem of evil.

 

He responds by saying the greatest things in life are virtues, especially moral virtues like forgiveness, generosity, perseverance, and so on. But these virtues require suffering.

 

There are many ways one can respond to this, but here is a unique way. There's a very special virtue that Christians cannot possibly access, which is the virtue of persevering through loss of faith.

 

Let's imagine two people, Alice and Bob.

 

Alice is raised Christian and she never changes her worldview. She lives a normal, basic life of marriage, children, and so on.

 

Bob is raised Christian, and comes to a deep certainty in God and Jesus, and loves God and Jesus with all his heart, mind, and soul. But slowly, doubts creep in. At first, he pushes them away, because his love for God is so great that he cannot bear the thought that God might not exist. But over the years, he develops an obsession to prove that God exists to shut up those evil atheists who clearly just want to sin guilt-free. But in Bob's pursuit of truth, he discovers philosophy and philosophical methodology. He ends up pursuing a degree or two in philosophy. Very slowly, over many years, and in large part due to personal experiences of evil, tragedy, and unanswered prayers, the intellectual challenges to belief in God and Christianity eventually weigh heavily enough on Bob that he just can't believe anymore, despite how badly he wants God to be real and for Christianity to be true.

 

Bob wrestles with truth, with his own self-identity, his view of humanity and the world, the meaning of life, the nature of morality, everything. By losing his faith, life in many ways has suddenly become much harder. Before, he could trust in God, and let God guide him through life. Now, there is no God to protect Bob or validate Bob's existence through divine love. There is no God-given purpose to Bob's life.

 

Bob is in a terrifying place.

 

And yet, bravely, through seemingly miraculous strength, he picks himself up and builds a worldview that can account for morality, the meaning of life, the origins of religion, and so on. He humbly accepts his newfound worthlessness. (Bob smartly believes in a mitigated cynicism, so he doesn't view himself as entirely worthless. But he no longer sees himself as the immortal soul he once did.)

 

Bob bravely accepts that death is the end. There is a kind of ego death in accepting the fact that you are a limited, mortal being with no eternal God to love you or keep you alive. Instead of cowering behind comforting beliefs, Bob follows the truth where it leads, even when it leads to conclusions Bob so badly wants to be able to reject. Bob allows the truth, not desire, to guide his beliefs, and as excruciating as it was to give up his dreams of being with God forever and face the infinite disappointment of life, he perseveres through, through sheer strength, determination, and rationality.

 

Question: Is Bob a virtuous person? More virtuous than Alice? Not only is it true that he is, but he seems to capture some very special and powerful virtues, virtues inaccessible to a person of faith.

 

So Christianity has a problem. It probably relies on some kind of story like the one Pruss gives. The sheer good of perseverance through suffering gives the suffering a purpose and beauty to it. (Of course, as I've written on, I'm skeptical of virtues as being able to justify evils. I think I gave the example of a 9/11 first responder being asked whether he would rather have 9/11 and all the bravery of the first responders and the perseverance of the survivors, or to lose all of that virtue and prevent 9/11 from happening. The answer is so obvious that he's insulted.) 

 

But what better story of perseverance than one like Bob's? Persevering through loss of faith seems to me to be just about the greatest kind of persevering there is (I say with a hefty amount of bias), given how existentially deep it is and how it demands you to be radically open-minded and to be so radically open to not only changing yourself to match up with reality, but to change yourself completely and absolutely. To go from someone who wants God more than anything to a person who is at peace with the godlessness of the world, and at peace with his own mortality, and to go from viewing oneself as a divine, everlasting creature to a creature of limited value, is frankly an achievement so great that it's hard to comprehend.

 

In fact, there's a kind of dual virtue taking place. Bob has the sensitivity, love, blamelessness, empathy, and compassion needed to love God and to desire ultimate justice for all people, and needed to recognize just how much we lose when we lose God. At the same time, Bob has the love of truth, open-mindedness, humility, discipline, bravery, and patience to follow the truth where it leads.

By promoting the value of virtue to save Christianity from the problem of evil, the Christian ironically promotes the value of the virtues involved in persevering through loss of faith. And if existential perseverance is one of the greatest virtues there are, then it's not clear that the Christian has any advantage over the non-Christian when it comes to capturing the goodness of virtue. If anything, the ex-Christian who demonstrates dual virtue has the advantage.

 

If I'm not mistaken, Richard Swinburne once evinced a kind of regret over not changing his worldview, because doing so is such a strong demonstration of intellectual virtue (assuming you're changing your worldview for the right reasons).

 

Edit: Found it: YouTube: Oxford Academic (Oxford University Press), "Has your worldview changed since you started doing philosophy? | Richard Swinburne" --  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxlYAssgD58

 

"I often feel guilty about this because I greatly admire people who had a certain worldview and then come to have certain important life experiences or been exposed to certain arguments and suddenly abandoned it and given up that view and adopted a different one, and I think these are highly rational people . . ."

David Bentley Hart on Hell and Autism

Taken from the preface to the Paperback Edition:

My friends' son is now old enough to grant me permission to tell this story, but it happened more than a dozen years ago, when he was only seven or eight. The year before, he had been diagnosed as having Asperger's syndrome. He was an extremely intelligent child, shy, typically gentle and quiet, but occasionally emotionally volatile—as tends to be the case with many children classified as "on the spectrum." They are often intensely sensitive to, and largely defensive against, extreme experiences: crowds, loud noises, overwhelming sensory stimulation of any kind, but also pronounced imaginative, affective, or moral dissonances. So perhaps to should have surprised no one when he fell into a state of panic for three days, and then into an extended state of depression, after a Dominican homilist who was visiting his parish happened to mention the eternity of hell in a sermon. . . . his reaction was despair. All at once, he found himself imprisoned in a universe of absolute horror, and nothing could calm him until his father succeeded in convincing him that the priest had been repeating lies whose only purpose was to terrorize people into submission. . . . As a result, they have not gone to mass since that time . . . Now, to me it seems obvious—if chiefly at an intuitive level—that this story is more than sufficient evidence of the spiritual squalor of the traditional concept of an eternal hell. After all, another description for a "spectrum" child's "exaggerated" emotional sensitivity might simply be "acute moral intelligence." As difficult as it sometimes makes the ordinary business of life, it is precisely this lack of any very resilient emotional insulation against the world's jagged edges that makes that child incapable of the sort of complacent insensitivity that permits most of us to reconcile ourselves serenely to beliefs that should, soberly considered, cause us revulsion.

Richard Swinburne on metaphysical necessity

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhJ2XaGbYZ4, 15m

I've asked the question whether there is anything meaningful about the idea of 'metaphysical impossibility', and concluded that it can be reduced to logical impossibility. https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2024/10/physical-possibility-vs-metaphysical.html

Swinburne says before the 1970s, the only notion of necessity was logical necessity where denying the truth of something entails a contradiction. Then Kripke and Putnam presented the example of denying "Water is H2O." Water is necessarily H2O, but denying that water is H2O does not entail a contradiction. So here you have something that is necessary but not logically necessary, and here is where we need the notion of 'metaphysically necessary.' Facts of essences, or essential facts, are metaphysically necessary. We can think of it in terms of possible worlds. In all possible worlds, water is H2O. It's impossible for water to not be H2O. And yet, there is no contradiction in saying water is H3O or some other chemical composition.

Swinburne rejects this. If by 'water' we mean 'H20', then denying 'H2O is H2O' does entail a contradiction. It is logically necessary for everything to be identical to itself. If by water we mean 'blue stuff in our rivers and oceans,' then 'water is blue stuff in our rivers and oceans' is not necessary. There are possible worlds in which water is not (perceived to be) blue or not in our rivers or oceans.

So the confusion arises from equivocating on essential vs non-essential properties. If we define water in terms of essential properties, then denying that water is H2O is a logical contradiction. If we define water in terms of non-essential properties, then it's not necessary for water to be that. So we do not have an example here of something that's both necessary and yet not logically necessary.

This reminds me of a very similar confusion, if not the very same, that motivates the Water/H2O / Superman/Clark Kent response to the objection against identity theory that identifying thoughts with brain states immediately violates Leibniz's Law. Joshua Rasmussen explains things nicely here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhJ2XaGbYZ4

Swinburne reduces metaphysical necessity to logical necessity too. Neat!

The Problem of Salient Suffering: Saving vs preventing

In this post (https://benstowell.blogspot.com/2025/03/the-argument-from-salient-suffering.html) I argue from salient suffering to the non-existence of God.

 

When a person is in fact suffering from a max salient evil, then the best thing for them – a max salient good – is to save them. This faces the following objection:

 

How does salience transfer from intrinsic goods to depriving evils, or from intrinsic evils to saving goods? If saving / depriving means preventing, then unborn creatures suffer a max evil by being deprived of max goods. But intuitively, unborn creatures cannot suffer at all, and certainly not maximally. Maximal suffering is salient, and salient suffering depends on consciousness.

 

(I guess you could try to cash things out in terms of the consciousness of God. God is consciously aware of how much better it would be for non-existent creatures to become conscious and enjoy max goods. Indeed, wouldn't that be the basis for God's motivation to create other creatures? But intuitively to suffer (in the worst way) is to suffer consciously. So if the unborn are suffering (in the worst way) from deprivation, then they are suffering consciously. But non-existent persons cannot suffer consciously. Whether salience transfers may depend on whether there are modal facts and whether God, being omniscient, is aware of all the creatures that would exist and what goods they would enjoy were God to create them. If there are no modal facts, then God is off the hook. If there are modal facts, then perhaps facts of would-be consciousness provides the conscious facts needed for salience.)

 

Certainly there is a self-evident conscious difference between suffering consciously and not. So does God need to allow someone to suffer from a max salient evil for a moment to transfer salience from the intrinsic suffering to the saving good? That seems silly. Surely it's even better to not suffer maximally for even one moment.

 

It's not that God is ever rescuing people from worst possible fates, it's that he's preventing these fates from occurring, because even the one moment is unjustified. But then how does salience transfer? If there is no actual suffering, only "modal" suffering, then does that commit one to modal facts? This person would suffer a maximal evil if God doesn't intervene, so God has to intervene? I don't want to commit myself to modal facts, in case the grounding objection, and other objections, prove too powerful.

 

If a single person suffers a single moment of max evil, then it will have been the case that God is not perfect. Obviously, God cannot allow this. So it can never have been the case that God is not perfect. So it can never be the case that someone will suffer a max evil.

 

So it's not modal facts, but future facts (facts of the closed future) that allow salience to transfer from intrinsic goods/evils to preventative goods/evils. It cannot be the case that intrinsic evils are salient without it being the case that future intrinsic evils are salient.

 

But maybe even open future facts can do this too. If there is a 10% chance for a person to experience unbearable suffering, then there's a 10% chance for God to not exist. Obviously, that's absurd. So open future facts about unbearable suffering are impossible; it's always 0%.

 

If someone is enjoying a max good, it can never be the case that this person will cease to enjoy this max good, as this would be a max depriving evil, with salience transferring from the max good to the depriving evil by way of direct comparison. So it can never be the case that someone will enjoy a max good only to cease enjoying it. Max depriving evils enable max saving goods – being saved from the depriving evil. So once someone is in heaven, God cannot possibly take them out.

 

Of the non-existent persons who will never come to be, there are no future facts for them. Because future facts are what carry salience, and because there are no future facts for the non-existent persons that never come to be, non-existent persons that never come to be never suffer maximal salient depriving evils.

 

Or, we can scratch all that and say there are max modal depriving evils and a perfect being is obligated to create an infinite number of creatures who each enjoy max goods. Which, there's probably reason to believe this anyway – a perfect being must create the best possible state of affairs, and what else could be the best possible state of affairs except the maximum possible number of creatures living fundamentally good lives?

 

This also nicely explains away the brute fact of your existence. Why do you exist rather than some other person in your place? Because you literally have to exist – everyone does. Only impossible persons do not exist.

 

Of course, we are not living fundamentally good lives, which are lives where a person never rejects consciousness (i.e., never prefers non-existence to existence) and always lives. Some of us do reject consciousness, which entails unbearable suffering. So, this cannot be the best possible state of affairs, and there cannot be a best possible being.

What does it mean for something to exist? The data view

I've heard a few definitions of existence over the years:

1) To exist is to be the value of a bound variable.

2) To exist is to instantiate at least one property.

3) To exist is be an indispensable property. 

4) To exist is to explain at least one point of data; to explain our experiences.

The last one is interesting. To exist is to explain data. We have two kinds of data: privately accessible and publicly accessible. Both cry out for explanation. If I have a religious experience where I strongly feel the presence of God, then we broadly have two explanations for this data: 1) God exists. 2) God doesn't and something else is causing this feeling that is being misperceived as the presence of God.

There are two kinds of data, again: a priori data and a posteriori data, or data that depends on perception, observation, and science, and data that depends on concepts, language, meaning, and understanding.

To not exist is to fail to explain any data. Does God exist? That depends. Is there any data that God explains, that could not be explained otherwise? Theists say yes: The beginning of the universe, contingent facts, the advent of life (especially: life capable of feeling love from and for God), the advent of consciousness, and morality are five key data points theists say require God for explanation. Non-theists argue that we do not need God to explain the beginning of the universe (maybe because there isn't one), contingent facts, the advent of life, the advent of consciousness, or morality.

Do numbers exist? That depends. Is there any data that numbers explain that could not be explained otherwise? Nominalists will say we don't need numbers to explain numerical data, only ideas or thoughts about numbers. After all, we don't need unicorns to explain our thoughts about unicorns, we just need the thoughts! Just as fictional entities are explained by ideas in the mind, so too are numbers explained by ideas in the mind.

Realists can say that this doesn't cut it, because we can trace any fictional entity to real properties (or to real objects that have properties). We can trace fictions to an author's mind. While we cannot trace the unicorn to a single author, we can trace the unicorn to ideas of horse, horn, magic. We can further trace magic to real properties. So thoughts about unicorns are thoughts about <list traceable properties here>. If numbers don't explain data, and only thoughts about numbers do, then what are the traceable properties of numbers?

What is data if not experiential? And so to explain data is to explain our experiences. This includes direct data, like when we see a tree in front of us, and indirect data, like when we hear scientists talk about quarks and leptons. I experience scientists talking about these things. What explains this experience? Here is an explanation: scientists are talking about quarks and leptons as if they exist because the scientists have experienced reading experiment reports, or conducted experiments themselves, that cause them to experience data that cries out for explanation, and they have posited quarks and leptons to explain that. So we have degrees of "directness" of data. Some data is direct, most of it is inferential.

Moral data, therefore, in the form of intuitions, is absolutely data. Anything we experience is data. If someone wrongs me and I feel strongly that they have done something truly incorrect, what explains that feeling? Or when we hear about a dog owner locking her dog up in a room and then going on vacation for weeks so that she can get rid of her dog, and the dog slowly dies of thirst trapped in that room, and we feel so strongly that this was an evil thing to do that ought not be done, what's causing this strong feeling we have? Are there moral facts that cause us to feel these convictions, or is it just evolutionary programming?

Challenges to Christian Belief: Rundown

Capturing Christianity recently made a community post stating that Christianity is true. Make no mistake: Christianity is almost certainly false. Sometimes I'm tempted to drop the 'almost'. I do argue that we can be certain that infernalistic Christianity (where God sends people to eternal torture) is false, assuming that the Christian God is perfectly loving and good. Hell and perfection are logically incompatible. (You can even argue, as Graham Oppy does, that any imperfection at all is logically incompatible with perfection, let alone something as infinitely imperfect as hell.) David Lewis also argued that hell and perfection are logically incompatible. This is significant, because Christian traditions have largely taught hell. If hell and perfection are logically incompatible, then these traditions have been embarrassingly wrong about a doctrine of infinite importance. This destroys their credibility.

Let's give a very, very quick rundown of the sheer challenge to Christian faith.

1) Challenges from psychology, sociology, and evolution.

We have reason to be deeply suspicious of religion for evolutionary reasons. We know humans reproduce sexually. We know sexual reproduction is social in nature. We know humans rely on societies for resources. So both the individual and the species need social structures to survive. These social structures naturally lead to cliques or clique-like structures, tribalness, hierarchies, and so on. Religions provide substantial psychological benefits and provide rituals and practices that are enabling of reproduction. For example, beliefs in an afterlife alleviate anxiety, same with belief in a God who has everything under control and is on your side. Confidence is overwhelmingly valuable for us humans, and religious belief instills a great deal of confidence – a sense of purpose, a sense of protection, and a sense of understanding the world and your place in it. Church services unite young males and young females, leading to marriage and children.

This picture gives us a unified theory of religion – unified in the sense that we can explain all religions in terms of social and psychological laws emerging from biological laws. Christians cannot avail themselves of this powerful unifying theory because it would undermine Christianity. So Christians, along with all other religious believers, must engage in special pleading or ad hoc explanations for why other religions are false but their religion is not. (Christians blame Satan or demons for the existence of other religions.) By failing to acknowledge evolutionary, psychological, and sociological facts, Christians (and other religious believers) find themselves awkwardly opposed to data.

2) The irrationality of belief in hell.

Covered above.

3) The disappointment of the Bible.

The Bible contains mistakes of various kinds, to the point that Christian scholars happily admit this. They would say these mistakes needn't destroy core Christian doctrine. But what if these kinds of mistakes didn't exist? This would grant strong evidence that there is something special about the Bible. But as it stands, these mistakes (mistranslations, copy errors, typos, grammatical errors, suspicious authorship, contradictions, empirical falsehoods, etc.) make the Bible look like an ordinary work of human writing. For someone wanting a supernatural, God-made book, the Bible is disappointing.

The Bible also fails to include: 1) Uncontroversial, highly specific, highly important predictions for modern audiences; 2) Advanced knowledge of any science, mathematics, logic, or anything; 3) Any teachings on life that are so profound that they couldn't possibly come from anywhere but a supernatural source; and so on.

You also have problematic moral verses. Jesus teaches that you cannot get a divorce unless there is infidelity. So if a husband is violently abusive, you cannot get a divorce as long as he is not unfaithful.

Catholics will defend transubstantiation by saying that because followers of Jesus rejected his teaching of eating his flesh and drinking his blood, Jesus must have been saying something so crazy that it's unbelievable. This supports a transubstantiation interpretation. (How on earth is this a defense of Christianity and not an embarrassing confession is beyond me. You're admitting that your doctrine sounds crazy!)

But by this same logic, Jesus must have really been teaching that you cannot get a divorce unless there is infidelity, because there too Jesus' disciples said that if his teaching is true, it's better to not get married. (I imagine his male disciples were not worried about abusive wives. They probably had something else in mind. But domestic abuse by wives against husbands is a real thing, even if it's a minority of cases.)

A number of Paul's verses seem clearly misogynistic. Though, in contradiction, some also seem surprisingly egalitarian. We know Paul wasn't always writing; he was dictating and had scribes, so perhaps contradictions like this appear for that reason.

There are many problematic verses besides these pertaining to violence and slavery in the Old Testament. There are also many apparent contradictions. 

One example: 

Luke 9:50: But Jesus said to him, "Do not stop him, for whoever is not against you is for you."

First of all, it's just false that 'whoever is not against you is for you.' Neutrality does not imply allyship. You might say that Jesus was saying this because if someone can cast out demons, they must be on God's side. Okay. Then why didn't Jesus say: "Do not stop him, for whoever casts out demons does so by the authority of God"?

Second, just two chapters later we read:

Luke 11: "Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters."

It's also straight up false that when someone is not with you they are against you. Neutrality does not imply hostility or rejection.

But certainly it cannot both be the case that neutrality implies allyship and hostility!

You might say that the first applies only to his disciples, while the second applies only to Jesus. But why would Jesus be an exception to the first?

4) Christian reliance on secular methodology, and not the other way around.

Christians go to school. Why? To learn math, science, history, and so on. Non-Christians do not go to school to learn about Christianity (usually). They don't need to. Christians are forced to abide by methodological naturalism. Naturalists are not forced to abide by the Bible. You will not find a single non-Christian begrudgingly opening up a Bible because they need to solve a math problem, advance science, invent something, or in any way survive or gain any kind of practical advantage. The only context I could see this would be a fiction writing begrudgingly opening up a bible to read its stories to gain insight in story structure. That would make sense, as the Bible's stories are very well-structured, and frankly Hollywood could use all the help it could get.

Christians rely on an ordinary education so they can get ordinary jobs. There is nothing remotely extraordinary about Christians, their abilities, or their lives. If anything, Christianity tends to hold Christians back for various psychological reasons (discussed below under meager moral fruits).

5) Divine hiddenness

Enough said. WLC's "haunted house" response is one of the worst arguments in all of philosophy that I've heard.

6) Evil and the failure of theodicies

I've written on this somewhat extensively, though there's always more that can be said. I go through 13 theodicies and show severe problems with all of them.

Recently, the problem of evolution and animal suffering has had a massive impact on discussions around evil. It's really hard to see how a perfect being could create our world with such a "nasty, brutish, and short" kind of process to develop life. Animal suffering also is quite resistant to most theodicies. I've argued that we should expect a clear winning theodicy to be apparent to us if God is good, and yet we do not have one.

7) Evil and the failure of skeptical theism

I've written on this too. I think skeptical theism has multiple failure points. Just recently I attacked Hendrick's idea that existence is necessarily intrinsically good. To my shock, he admits that this idea is needed to defeat what he calls the strongest argument against skeptical theism. So if my attack works, the strongest argument against skeptical theism is back on the table.

8) Meager moral fruits

Christians are not supernaturally endowed with gifts of knowledge, competence, intelligence, wisdom, virtue, the ability to predict things, or anything. If they were, we would know by now. Now only are Christians not apparently noticeably better than non-Christians when it comes to moral knowledge or moral practice, but we can give psychoanalyses that explain how Christian belief could make one a worse person morally.

The following are practices or attitudes associated with Christians, Christianity, or the past of Christians or Christianity (not an exhaustive list):

• Being pro-life. There are significant arguments in favor of the pro-choice position, and Christians are not supernaturally gifted in responding to these arguments. Pro-life policies undeniably lead to morally abhorrent situations, such as when pregnant women facing complications are turned away from life-saving care out of fear of legal repercussions, leading to the death of the mother, and, ironically, the baby.
• Tribalism. You see this in church culture. Christians fail to overcome or rise above the biologically explicable tribalism that we find in all social contexts. Christians slot right into a naturalistic, evolutionary view of humanity.
• Slavery, racism, homophobia, demonization of human sexuality, false and harmful teachings causing religious trauma, blasphemy laws and violent punishments, corrupt collusions with states, exploiting people for money (think megachurches, televangelists, the prosperity gospel, and indulgences), sexual abuse of children, the covering up of the sexual abuse of children, and the failure to supernaturally detect and prevent the sexual abuse of children. The Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Mormon church all have skeletons in their closet. Except, those skeletons are out of the closet now. 

Here is one way that Christian belief can hold a Christian back: because they believe this life is temporary, sin-cursed, and so on, and they believe that they will go to heaven when they die, they can lack ambition in this life and basically treat this life as a throwaway. This leads to significant laziness. This gets exacerbated when the Christian believes in the power of prayer and that God, because he loves them, will save them from awful life circumstances. Prayer of course never works and so the Christian develops a kind of learned helplessness stemming from expectations of rescue from God. Christian belief can utterly paralyze the Christian and cause inaction, leading to a significantly worse life than would otherwise have been lived had the Christian instead understood that prayer does nothing, God isn't going to save you, if you want to be happy in life you need to fight for it. That's another thing that can exacerbate this: Christians are taught to accept their awful circumstances because if God allows it then it must be part of God's plan. This leads to an awful pathetic-ification where Christians are turned into spineless doormats who roll over and accept their awful circumstances instead of trying to proactively change them. "It's my cross to bear I guess...", or "This is God's plan, I guess...", or "God has his reasons...", they think. Tragic.

A clear moral failing on the part of Christians is revealed in a story by Rhett and Link. It's a really heartfelt story, and I'm so grateful for Rhett and Link speaking out about their deconversion when they could have stayed silent if they wanted to, when in some ways that would have been the easier thing to do socially speaking.

The story is that they had a friend who was dying from cancer. They were Christians and wanted to make sure he was saved. So they awkwardly preached the gospel to their friend, and it was a kind of awful thing, they admit. But they were doing the right thing. They were following the rules. Because they loved their friend they wanted their friend to be saved and go to heaven. But this desire led to treating their friend not as a human being, but an "object of salvation", or someone to be preached to. Josh Rasmussen in his interviews has mentioned the very same thing, that he had a change of heart at one point and realized how wrong it is to treat people as objects of salvation. I'm guilty of this very thing myself. Again, Christians have good intentions: they literally want to save someone. But because Christianity is false, this "saving" amounts to ignoring the human being in front of you, ignoring their pain, ignoring their needs, ignoring all of the truth of the real moment that you are in with that person, pushing all of that aside and forcing this conversion onto someone, when that is not how human psychology works. You cannot force someone to believe something that doesn't make sense to them! God, of all people, as the creator of humans, should understand this! And yet God seems to not understand the sheer awkwardness he has wrought by sending Christians on this mission to convert as many souls as possible before it's too late. If God is supposed to be a God of love and relationship, then he especially should be profoundly disturbed by the idea of people being treated as objects of salvation, which God should know would happen if he commanded the Great Commission!

9) Failure of Christian metaethics

Divine command ethics is challenged by the Euthyphro Dilemma. And WLC's response (I think from Bob Adams?) that God commands because he is good is poor. This still fails to define goodness. If you say God is literally the measure of goodness, then this is just straightforwardly false. This would mean "God is good" is a tautology, like saying "The meter bar is a meter long." But surely saying "God is good" is not so trivial. There is something else we mean by 'good.' Not to mention, it's obvious that we do not, and need not, invoke God to talk about good things, like good movies, good food, good friends, a good life, and so on.

10) Issues of doctrine:

Three doctrines border on incoherence, and at the very least come with severe theoretical costs: Trinity, Incarnation, and the Atonement

I would add the Eucharist and Faith as problematic doctrines. Inerrancy and inspiration are problematic too.

The Bible is filled with wisdom and beautiful stories. The idea of God incarnating as the race of creatures he creates to save them in some morally profound way that involves sacrifice, death, and resurrection is a very cool story. Christians like to say it's the best story ever told. Sadly, it's a story full of holes, and it's too good to be true.

Christianity faces numerous and severe challenges. There's a reason why the vast majority of humans are not Christian, especially those who are well-educated. I may fully agree that life would be infinitely more awesome if some version of Christianity were true. (Who doesn't want a perfect being to set everything straight on judgment day? Who doesn't want to go to an eternal paradise?) You can accept the parts of Jesus and God that are beautiful and instructive. You can accept the parts of the Bible that are true. I think meditating on what a perfect being would say to you can be an incredibly powerful personal practice. Praying for conviction of sin is one of the few genius inventions of Christianity. (Though how many Christians do you think pray for conviction of sin?) Though I'm not sure it's right to call it an invention of Christianity. But in any case, prayer as a practice of regular moral introspection is absolutely genius and non-Christians are worse off for not practicing it. In this regard Catholic Confession may alone make Catholicism superior as a practice to Protestantism.

There are so many problems with Christianity other than these. The problems are so deep and so wide. This is just a snippet, but even this is enough to see.

My free will skepticism is compatible with a variety of views on consciousness

I was worried for a second that because my view on free will involves making a sharp distinction between the self as a subject that chooses (or experiences the choices its brain makes) and the self as an organism or animal, that I commit myself to a very specific theory of mind. The problem then would be that I would feel compelled to defend that theory of mind not because I thought it was true, but because I need it to be true for my view on free will to make sense. I guess I hoped that it only commits me to aspect dualism, which is a hill I'm happy to die on anyway, because I cannot imagine dispensing with either mental or physical properties.

But now it seems to me that we can obviously distinguish between the self as mental and the self as physical on a variety of views. My free will skepticism is openly available.

Identity theory says that there are mental properties, but these properties reduce to physical ones. So we have the mental self, which is a special subset of the human organism's physical properties (brain properties), and we have the non-mental self, which is the set of the remaining physical properties. No one chooses their brain properties, and so no one chooses their mental properties. But all deeds done are done by brain properties. So all deeds done are traced to factors outside the person's control. You still have good and bad people, it's just that no one is responsible for their goodness or badness.

I'm pretty sure epiphenomenalism immediately entails free will skepticism anyway, so that one doesn't matter. (Identity theory probably does too, but whatever.) Epiphenomenalism says that there is no mental causation. So you don't cause anything; everything that you experience is caused by your brain interacting with your environment. Not only are you not responsible for your actions, but technically you don't have any actions to be responsible for. Your soul is a pure byproduct, a spectator.

I'm pretty sure behaviorism immediately entails free will skepticism too? If consciousness is just behavior, then the self is just behavior, and so there is no self that causes the behavior, and so there is no self to blame. Behaviorism is so easily refuted that it's a moot point anyway.

Functionalism is trickier. Can the self / qualia / subjectivity be analyzed in terms of function? If functionalism implies that philosophical zombies can be conscious, then that's a problem. But why couldn't we say qualia is a function? You certainly have a sharp break between the mind as a function and the material that gives rise to the mind. So there you have the two senses of "I" and "You" that I need for my free will skepticism. But functionalism might immediately lead to free will skepticism anyway because if the self is a function and functions are traced to factors beyond the control of the function, then traceability will apply to the functional self.

Now that I think about it, it's really hard to see how free will can fit on any theory of mind. It certainly doesn't fit on eliminativism.

That seems to leave only substance dualism and monistic idealism as refuges for free will. But again traceability concerns apply, not to mention all the arguments against these views.

I guess free will just really doesn't make sense to me at all.

Recently, getting into action theory, I wondered whether you could defend free will on the basis that if someone does something knowingly wrong, then surely the person who causes this action is morally responsible for it. But two things came to mind: one, I'm highly suspicious of the possibility of akrasia, the weakness of will needed for this kind of deliberate evil, and two, even if akrasia is possible, you could run into traceability problems there. People who have akrasia don't choose to have it, and we can trace their akrasia to their genetics, environment, etc. So even something as solid as the idea of deliberately doing wrong doesn't save free will.