杰克·桑兹论击败邪恶上帝挑战与多元宇宙泛神论

Dr. Jack Sands: I'm Dr. Jack Sands, I'm a philosopher and YouTuber currently at Durham University. I'm best known as the host of the Panpsycast philosophy podcast. My most recent book is defeating the evil god challenge. Today on Big Think, I'll be talking about defeating the evil god challenge and multiverse pantheism.

Narrator: This Big Think interview is brought to you by Panagram. Navigating an internet filled with AI-generated content is a frustrating experience. It is becoming harder to separate real from fake and human from machine. Panagram is the most trusted AI detector backed by rigorous public research. Panagram can tell you how much of what you're reading is AI-generated. If there's an image you think was made by AI, Panagram can detect that, too. To regain trust over what you read and see, go to www.panagram.com. And now, back to the interview.

Narrator: Chapter 1: Defeating the Evil God Challenge.

Dr. Jack Sands: I think there are three fundamental questions in philosophy. The question of where the universe came from, i.e., why is there something rather than nothing? The question of how the fundamental laws of nature came to be finely tuned, i.e., the problem of fine-tuning. And the problem of consciousness. How is it that our physical brains give rise to subjective experience? Why does the world smell, taste, or feel like anything?

Dr. Jack Sands: Those are the questions we typically associate with philosophy. But philosophy, best put, is how it all hangs together. Philosophy is the study of everything that exists. It's trying to piece together all the things that exist and are true and rule out the things that couldn't possibly come into being.

Dr. Jack Sands: It's also the practice of clarifying concepts. It's about understanding the world and the words that we use, and that's fundamentally where philosophy sort of has its origin in understanding Socrates thought, what is justice, what is love, what is beauty, and trying to make sure we know what philosophers call the necessary and sufficient conditions of things. And we see this play out in in our public discourse. Conservatives always want to ask us, "Well, what is it that makes a woman?" Right? Or we want to know what it makes a gene selfish. Uh so, those sorts of words and clarifying what they mean is a part of the philosophical task as well. Another prominent one, what is what is a fact? What grounds a fact in a post-truth era? Those are sorts of things that uh philosophers are interested in.

Dr. Jack Sands: And so, I think those questions are completely untouchable by science for various different reasons. Science can report the Big Bang. Science can report the constants, the laws of physics. Science can explain what's going on in your brain, but science can't explain how consciousness arises. If you if you think that, you don't understand what science is as a methodology. Galileo takes consciousness out of the picture, takes the subjective out of the picture in order of us to get on with objective science.

Dr. Jack Sands: The same with the finely tuned laws of nature. We agree that the laws of nature are finely tuned. The question is, how did they become like that? One of the least appealing answers that it was merely chance. And finally, the origin of the universe. Right? Science looks at past events and tries to explain future events in the light of those past events. It's the study of dispositions, of cause and effect. Science explains what things do, but not what they are. So, how could science reach beyond before the Big Bang? That sort of thinking is uh I think it's scientism if you think you can explain those questions merely by science alone.

Dr. Jack Sands: People typically think this because of the amazing advances that science has made. Puts man on the moon, discovers the age of the Earth, discovers evolution by natural selection. Right, so people are rightly on the science train and thinking that these seemingly unsolvable problems actually have studyable solutions and there are evidence that we can pick out in the physical world.

Dr. Jack Sands: And it was particularly picked up by the new atheists at the beginning of the 21st century when we saw a spike in the most vivid religious terrorism. We saw the dawn of new media. And we saw a group of thinkers that said, "Hey, you don't really need to think carefully about these questions. Science has all the answers, so get on board."

Dr. Jack Sands: Right, and so I I found myself default in that atheistic position. I think the atheistic position is one that tries not to posit too many entities for a lack of a better phrase. What does that mean? Well, it means we should appeal to theories that introduce the least amount of things to explain the data. So, if you can explain the entire world merely in physical mechanisms, then you ought to do so. And if you have to introduce something else like souls, angels, or gods, then you've made the picture too messy. You're paying too much for your theory. This is called the principle of parsimony in philosophy, that we want to make sure that we're not positing entities beyond necessity. Right, so posit the least or introduce the least amount of substances and properties that you need to explain things.

Dr. Jack Sands: And one of the central ways the new atheists, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett approach theism was called a reductio ad absurdum. So, we take the underlying premises and beliefs of uh the religious and we show them why they're absurd or ridiculous. So, the great thing about the new atheists is they don't play the game. If you read their books, they don't tend to actually engage with philosophical arguments in the way that philosophers do. They just go, "Haha, what a load of rubbish." and they try and poke fun of it. And that's why they gained traction.

Dr. Jack Sands: But within them, and I think all of the four horsemen of new atheists had some version of what's known as the evil god challenge. In 2010, Stephen Law published the evil god challenge, and that's the title of the paper. It was the most downloaded paper in one of the best journals, religious studies, and the third most cited paper as well.

Dr. Jack Sands: The evil god challenge asks why belief in a good god is significantly more reasonable than in an evil god. Why do people believe in a good god and not an evil god? What argument can we give for one over the other? According to the challenge, belief in an evil god is ridiculous. Nobody believes in an evil god. No one's ever believed in a monotheistic singular evil god with a capital G. But the majority of the world's population believe in the good god.

Dr. Jack Sands: The challenge progresses by saying, "Well, look, when we look at all of the relevant arguments, when we map every single argument for a good god, we can give an equally or roughly as reasonable argument for an evil god. You need a first cause for the universe? Well, that could be good god or evil god. You need a fine-tuner to bring the laws of nature into being? That could be either as well. You need moral laws to obey or disobey? That could be either." So, it ends up that they're both roughly as reasonable. They're about the same in terms of their credibility. But given that belief in an evil god is ridiculous, we should think that belief in a good god is equally as ridiculous.

Dr. Jack Sands: And so, when I was exploring atheism, obviously this idea was in my head, and people were talking to me about it. And the more I explored it, the more I realized that actually this is the sort of argument that deals with everything in one go. This is an argument, the evil god challenge, which allows you to take the whole of theism as one go. Every single argument and mirror the theist back to themselves by showing how ridiculous they look by saying, "Hey, this is what you're wearing, right? This is These are your arguments. I'm using them for an evil god. Look at them. Look how silly they look when I construct my own worldview out of them. Why don't you think you look like that? Why think that your view is any better?

Dr. Jack Sands: So, this is what we call a shallow argument. A shallow argument sounds bad, right? A shallow argument sounds like it hasn't got depth or it's not particularly uh well thought out. But, a shallow argument in philosophy is a good thing because it merely allows you to look at the surface level. It allows you to go, "Well, I don't need to get bogged down in the minutiae, the detail, the nuance of the argument. I can just

Speaker: ...take what you're saying, say, "All right, then, fair enough. Let's pretend that we need a first cause for the universe. Let's pretend there needs to be a fine-tuner. Let's pretend that your objections to the problem of evil are reasonable objections for a moment. But, now watch me use them for a being that you definitely don't believe in." Now, see that I can use arguments to defend God's maliciousness, God's malevolence, instead of God's benevolence. And I think that argument just had all of those virtues in its ability to deal with any argument that the theist threw towards the atheist.

So, in the case of the evil god challenge, I was halfway through writing this book defending atheism, my main book where I was going to be defending what I thought was the very best argument for atheism. And I found myself finding all of these asymmetries, all of these little arguments that favored good god over evil god, and they were piling and piling up. I was about 40,000, 50,000 words into this book, and I sort of realized I was writing it in the shadow of this huge pile of objections. There's an elephant in the room, right? This big awkward problem that I was just refusing to acknowledge.

I thought, "I just can't do this, right? I'm not doing philosophy to sort of justify the things I already think. I need to start again." So, I threw out the whole manuscript and began writing from the very beginning. This time not in defense of atheism, but in defense of God's goodness.

Speaker: What I will say is it's incredible to be on the one side of the aisle and then completely flip and be on the other cuz you sort of know all the objections. You know what the opponent thinks the best arguments are. You don't want to say you know your enemy, but you know your opponent. You know the things that you need to be careful of. And so, when I was going through I managed to do this careful analysis of the arguments for good God.

And what I started to find was that the evil God challenger was making a fundamental mistake. And that mistake was they were going, "Suppose God was good, but now suppose God was evil and look, the evidence fits them both just as well." But that's not what religious believers do. Right? People don't just go, "Suppose God's good." And it's ignorant of the school of thought known as philosophical theology to think that they do. There are reasons that religious believers give for thinking God is good. And that's what the evil God challenger was missing.

There are three main schools of philosophical theology. They are perfect being theology, i.e. God by definition must be perfect. Now, what is it to be perfect? There is creation theology. Suppose God created the world, then what would God be like? And finally, revelation theology, i.e. what can we know about God through religious experience, miracles, or scripture?

Now, these arguments within these three camps of philosophical theology, and this is really really important cuz people miss this all of the time. They say absolutely nothing about whether or not God exists. Philosophical theology is the school of thought which says, "Hey, if God existed, then what would God be like?" Now, a unicorn, right? Is a horse with one horn on its head. Uni one, cornu horn. If it had more than one horn, then it wouldn't be a unicorn. If a triangle had more than three sides, it wouldn't be a triangle. And so, in the same way, the word God has an un-negotiable meaning, that God, if God existed, would have to be perfect.

Speaker: So, as I wrote in the book, I was going through all of the different reasons why religious believers give God with a capital G the properties that they do. And the one I was most concerned about was obviously goodness rather than evil. And I looked at about 15 of these arguments that span across the three different schools of philosophical theology that I cited. And I only found two to support both hypotheses in the same sort of way. Roughly is reasonable for both.

But the other 13 arguments could be used to support God's goodness and not God's malevolence. So, that seemed to me to be a cumulative asymmetry. I.e., we had loads of little reasons, maybe one of them wasn't enough, but 13 to two is a pretty strong score. And so, if the evil God challenger is being sincere, and they're not just trying to defend their view for the sake of it, and they're actually concerned with what the truth of the matter is, then I think they'd have to put their hands up and go, "That is a significant asymmetry for thinking that if God existed, then God would be good rather than evil."

Speaker: So, within perfect being theology, we ask what would a perfect being be like? Well, we typically think it's greater to be good rather than be evil. And given that God would have to have all great-making properties, God would be good rather than evil. Other arguments in that realm might include if God knows all of the moral facts, and good acts are true, and to do evil is false, is something you ought not do, then God would be motivated to do good and couldn't be motivated to do evil.

There are views as that evil is merely a privation of goodness, that you have good things and bad things are just lacking in their goodness. Right? When you turn that the other way around, things start to look like they actually do in the world. Right? You would think that a complete being would be a good being and a functioning being, one that's healthy. You don't think that the end or goal of a non-human animal or a human is to be unhealthy and wicked and horrible. We see the completeness of being to coincide with goodness. Existence in its complete sense and goodness are two sides of the same coin, evil a deprivation. A privation rather than a completion of an entity.

The only place which the evil God challenge takes hold is within creation theology. It says, "Hey, there's good and evil in the world. Why think God is good rather than evil?" And that's the only place it works. It only works for intrinsic evils, i.e. evils that are bad just for the sake of themselves, or instrumental evils, i.e. some people believe that a good God would give us lower-order evils, even if they give us higher-order goods. Sure, fine, that argument works.

But when we look at intrinsic values, we have another asymmetry. It's better to be conscious than not conscious, better to have free will than not have free will. It's better to recognize beauty and have beauty in the world rather than something else. And on the whole, I think the world is more beautiful than it is ugly, all other things being equal. I think that consciousness is valuable in itself and life valuable in itself. And there are relatively few intrinsic disvalues in the world, with the exception of things like death.

Speaker: One of the most fundamental arguments that's emerged in philosophy of religion over the last 20 or 30 years is the argument from reformed epistemology. Reformed epistemology says that there are some things that we just don't have arguments for. Right? I had breakfast this morning, I [ate] Pop-Tarts and Red Bull. And although that might not be the healthiest breakfast in the world, I know that I had it. And why? Because I was there, I experienced it. I can't give you an argument for it. I can't tell you the premises that lead to the conclusion that I had Pop-Tarts and Red Bull this morning.

It's what philosophers call a properly basic belief. It's proper cuz my faculties are functioning properly. It's basic because it depends on no other arguments, and I believe it to be so. I believe that the world wasn't created 10 minutes ago. I believe that I had that for breakfast. And in the same way, those fundamental building blocks of our belief can reveal other things, say the Christian philosophers especially. They think that you can have a properly basic belief in God. That we are instilled with what the Reformation philosophers called the sensus divinitatis, the seed of faith.

That when you walk around, your conscience reveals things. This is good, this is not good. Your sensus divinitatis, your sense of the divine, reveals to you things like God put that tree there or God is good. That is beautiful, and a good God put it there. And that can be the consequence...

Speaker: ...of your sense of the divine, just as my eyes reveal properly basic beliefs that I don't have arguments for or my ears do. My other sensory modalities give me loads of beliefs I don't have arguments for, and my sense of the divine does the same. And so that corresponds and fits nicely with the evidence for why the overwhelming majority of the world's population have and probably always will have some kind of religious belief. Now, I don't buy that argument myself. I don't think there is a sensus divinitatis. I think we should posit as least and as few things as possible. But the evil God challenge says, let's assume the fundamental ideas are reasonable. And which ones do they favor, a good God or evil God?

Speaker: Clearly they favor good god. No one's ever believed in an evil god, and I doubt anyone's senses divinitatis reveals to them that evil god is punishing them. There are a few exceptions in the literature, but I think these are certainly exceptions to the rule. And then within revelation theology, there are three broad arguments. They are scripture, religious experience, and miracles. The evil god challenger thinks that there's evidence for an evil god cuz god reveals himself to lots of different people and reveals himself in contradictory ways, in ways that generate conflict and wars between Jews and Muslims and Christians. And that's what an evil god would do, give people different revelations to make them fight.

Speaker: And that's another place where I think there's an asymmetry because the Christian, the Jew, or the Muslim doesn't believe in all world scripture. They believe in their specific scripture. So, what's more reasonable? Believe in one scripture or all world scriptures? Well, all world scriptures would contain more contradictions. So, all other things being equal, you should favor the scripture that contains fewer contradictions or no contradictions. So again, you've got good god belief supported by the limited scriptural and revelational beliefs of specific worldviews, and the evil god challenger has to depend on this underlying principle that no one's going to take seriously.

Speaker: So, the question is this, if scripture, if religious experience, and if miracles were evidence to support good god or evil god, which one would they favor more? Cuz remember, this isn't like should we believe in scripture or should we believe religious experiences? We're going here, let's assume that the broad framework of theism is reasonable and try and show that it's ridiculous and goes towards an evil god. So, you have to assume those underlying premises, that underlying framework, and try and build your reductio, your refutation off the back of it. You say, "Let's play by your rules, and you still lose." So, let's take the challenge seriously and do that.

Speaker: Take scripture. Uh it's believed through various estimations that the God of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian scriptures more generally kills around 2 million at the lowest to the highest about 25 million people directly. The reason it ranges so much is because the Noachian flood, when God floods the world, we're not sure how many people were in the world when he only left a handful of people alive. But, outside of the flood, we think it'd probably be about 2 million. Stephen Wells in his book, Drunk with Blood, does this estimation. So, God commits what you might think are evil acts. So, one point to the evil God challenger. One point for thinking God is evil.

Speaker: And some evil God challengers say, "Hey, Christians, Jews, and Muslims believe that God did these things. They already believe in an evil God. It's not actually that absurd. They already believe in the being that we're trying to make fun of them with." I don't think that's right for this reason. That God also performs good actions in scripture, right? Trivially speaking, God creates all good and evil, cuz they all stem from God. God commits good actions, and God commits evil actions. But, here's where the asymmetry kicks in. Because God also reveals his intentions. He says, "In the end, he has plans to prosper us and not harm us." He does these, quote and quote, evil things for some other reason, divine justice or some future project of divine benevolence and love.

Speaker: Even better, now we're at two one to the theist, right? We got this extra thing. You can reconcile the evil acts with God's intentions. So, you can say good and evil acts, God has these intentions, and I can account for that evil evidence there through God's revealed intentions. So, it ends up being like three one to the Christian, the Jew, or the Muslim. And again, I was defending and exploring this as an atheist. And once you accept the underlying premises of the evil God challenge, you do have to do that math as objectively as you can and accept the score where it is.

Speaker: And you might think that's a minor that's a minor asymmetry and we shouldn't believe in scripture anyway. That's breaking the rules in my view of the evil god challenge. The point was to assume the premises and then show they were ridiculous. You can't run away as soon as you lose in it the game of chess. You can't flip over the board and say, "Oh, I wasn't interested in playing anyway." Right? But it applies to the other arguments, too.

Speaker: In the case of religious experience, some of the biggest philosophers of religion across the world, people like Richard Swinburne, for example, thinks there isn't enough evidence to believe in what we call negative religious experiences. Now, religious experiences are typically suspensions of the laws of nature, things not explained by physical science, and there is a benevolent agent such as God, Jesus, or God's other angels who are doing something positive on towards us. They're revealing some knowledge, they're appearing as an agent or as a person, and they're making us feel good in some broad sense as well. But there are also negative religious experiences and this is something that people completely ignore.

Speaker: In the 1980s, the Alister Hardy Research Centre asked people to submit their religious experiences. Tell us about your religious experiences, we're interested. 6,000 people wrote in. They were surprised to find that about 5% of them were negative. A negative religious experience, it might sound oxymoronic, right? You think of a religious experience as being a good thing. A negative religious experience is a suspension of the laws of nature that has negative harmful effects on to which is done by an evil agent such as Satan or his demons. So, this includes demonic possessions. This includes being overwhelmed by a sense of evil. This includes people not being able to go outside and shaking and trembling and taking their own lives. And in throughout the history of the world, anthropologists have have looked at a bunch of these and it seems like a universal claim that it seems that demonic possession is just an everyday occurrence throughout world history and across all cultures.

Speaker: So, you might think all right, well, it looks like we've got evidence for an evil god there. Right, it looks like we've got positive religious experiences that support a good god, and we've got these horrible experiences that ruin people's lives that supports an evil god, and there might be a symmetry between them. But, here's the kicker. When I looked at all of these different accounts, across all of those submitted to places like the AHRC, the Alister Hardy Research Centre, I looked through all of the negative religious experience accounts. I couldn't find a single experience that somebody's had in which they claimed that the bestower of that experience, the person who was there as the object of their experience, was god or something like god.

Speaker: All of these negative experiences were demons, they were Satan, they were the Antichrist. They were lesser deities or lesser spirits. So, on the one hand, you've got god himself revealing himself and doing something good, or Jesus is the incarnation of god doing something good. But, on the other hand, you've just got these lesser spirits and demons. So, if you're a religious believer, I think, and you take religious experience seriously, what you have to do is go I also believe in negative religious experiences. But, in terms of the evil god challenge, this is another notable asymmetry where we've got evidence for a good god and not an evil god. We've got

Philip Goff: evidence for a good god and evidence for lesser evil deities. And those are two examples of the 13 that I write about in the book where you've got all of these little bits of evidence that pile up pretty quickly in favor of god's goodness, rather than god's malevolence. There's something embarrassing with admitting that we've got something wrong. And I think that taps into our evolutionary reasons for giving arguments and motivations. Say if two people were out hunting boars in the wild and one says to the other, "Why are you hunting that boar instead of this one?" You'd hope that the person hunting with you had a damn good reason for doing it. You don't want to go hunting with someone who just does things without thinking about them. So, you offer a justification for it. So, if someone can find themselves falling into an atheistic or a religious belief and live their whole life in accordance with it, and when you press them on it or press yourself on it, you'll find yourself giving these justifications that perhaps you didn't even think of before you picked up the mantle of that view.

Philip Goff: One of my or probably my greatest intellectual hero is Eugene Nagasawa, who's based at the University of Oklahoma. And I first met Eugene about eight or nine years ago and he told me he was once an atheist and a materialist. But, then he came across an argument known as the ontological argument. The ontological argument says, "God is possible and given the fact God's possible, God must exist because God is by definition a necessary being, I E, would have to exist. So, if God contains no internal contradictions, then God is actual. God exists." It's as simple as that. And I was like I sort of blown away by his honesty with it. And we we often mistake intellectual certainty with intellectual honesty. And it's important obviously for the philosopher to to make sure they're not a victim of their own prejudices. Make sure they've got the best reasons for holding such a view.

Philip Goff: So, the evil God challenge I thought was the best objection to religious belief. And then I came to see that the argument was essentially a non-starter. That the argument wasn't a good reason to reject religious belief at all and I realized that the other arguments had fallen away as well. Yeah, I found myself being absent of a reason to be an atheist and fell into this form of radical agnosticism, which is a view I was defending for the last four or five years. I didn't think it was sensible to claim that we had answers to the three fundamental questions of philosophy, of existence and fine-tuning and consciousness. I thought that theism didn't hold the answers and I thought that atheism's arguments for its pure materialism and physicalism had fallen away as well. So, I defended the view that we can't be certain in our answer to these things and that the probability doesn't lead us towards one view or the other.

Philip Goff: I'm very privileged to get to do philosophy for a living and although I absolutely love teaching at Durham University in the UK despite the weather and despite us having the best students in the world, which is something I'm contractually obligated to say, I found myself a bit depressed, right? I found myself sort of in this moment of agnosticism for a bunch of reasons, personal and philosophical and you know, in my dusty Durham office with the unending email list and sort of logic chopping in my armchair, I sort of felt like I wasn't getting what I wanted from philosophy. I didn't have the lived philosophy. I didn't have the sort of principles and ways of navigating the world. I didn't have a world view. And so, the university very kindly gave me some time off to go and to write a new book and my went back to my hometown and in in the middle of England and in my dad's work shop, he had an old Ford Transit van there and he gave it me to next to nothing and I spent three months doing up this van and turned it into a camper van and for last 12 months or so, I've been driving around Europe traveling and seeing the world and sort of reflecting on the lives of history's philosophers and the life lessons that they can teach us. And it's on this trip over the last few months that I've come to believe in a sort of God. I've come to believe in the God of pantheism. Pantheism claims that God is the world and the world is God. And that's very different to atheism and religious belief, but I think it's the view which naturally emerges from both of them and I think solves the three fundamental questions of philosophy.

Narrator: Chapter 2, multiverse pantheism, a unified answer to life's biggest questions.

Philip Goff: Pantheism is the view that God and the world are the same thing. God is the world and the world is God. They're just two different words for the same entity. Contrast that with another view, panentheism. The en there means in. So, some people think, panentheists that is, that the world is in God, that there's a world and there's another extra bit outside of the world which is God. Which is very similar to the Hindu world view. It's also found in views like Taoism or Confucianism. The Tao, the way, there's a spirit and essence of the world that is God-like. Plato believes in a world soul. He didn't believe that God or the world soul created it from nothing. It wasn't a traditional concept of God, but he thought there had to be some guiding principle underlying the world and that was a fundamental soul. Obviously, Spinoza, probably the most famous of all the pantheists, held that God and the world were the same thing. And the thing they were tackling there was the idea that we do find consciousness and power and knowledge and goodness, things that are great, in the world. So, why say those things are separate? Why say that the fulfillment of those things is some distinct entity? I think both of these views have their merits. I personally describe my view now as pantheism. I think that God and the world are the same thing. I think pantheism solves the three fundamental questions of philosophy, where consciousness comes from, why there's something rather than nothing, and how the universe became fine-tuned.

Philip Goff: So, the problem of consciousness. What we found is that there are these emerging theories within philosophy and science that bring new life into pantheism. Panpsychism, the view that consciousness is fundamental, and it's becoming wildly popular now. There's been a an increase of philosophers who are really interested in panpsychism. And now today, a lot of my students I think the majority of them say panpsychists. What is panpsychism? Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness, i.e. subjective experience, is a fundamental feature of the cosmos. It's fundamental, pervasive, and ubiquitous. Consciousness is everywhere. You need some rudimentary bits of consciousness for evolution by natural selection to develop and create the interesting kinds of consciousness that human beings and other non-human animals enjoy. You can't get consciousness from physical properties alone, so you need some bits of consciousness there. So, panpsychism says those bits of consciousness are everywhere. In my view, that consciousness is one big unified mind. I think that's the most persuasive and coherent and elegant theory of consciousness we have, that we have one big consciousness that underlies all of physical fundamental reality.

Philip Goff: This is what they call the silence of physics. Physics explains what things does, but not what they are. It tells us what the dispositions of things are, but it doesn't tell us what the intrinsic nature of physical things are. So, we plug the gap. We say what the essence of things are by taking consciousness and putting it into the center of our picture of reality. We don't know how consciousness fits into the world. We have this gap in physics, so we plug the gap with consciousness. The next question that comes to mind is where all of this stuff comes from to begin with, the problem of existence. Where did the lake, the consciousness, the hills, the sun, the wine, where did it all come from? The religious believer says that the entirety of existence comes from a non-physical mind. That the non-physical mind is the uncaused cause from which all of the things owe their existence. Well, I think there's a fundamental conscious mind

Speaker: to which all things owe their existence, too. The atheist tells us that all that exists is the world. And I think that, too, right? I think all there is is consciousness and the manifestations of consciousness. So, it has the spirit of both of these views. The last problem remaining would be the problem of fine-tuning. How is it that the constants, the laws of physics hold? How did they become so delicately balanced?

Speaker: Well, I can raise my right hand, I can raise my left, I can take a sip of wine, I can pull down my hat. My consciousness is able to move the matter around me. And if my mind's able to do that in my body, you sure as hell that massive mind that underlies the cosmos is allowed to do the same.

Speaker: So, I think this is an elegant and persuasive theory that takes the biggest problems in philosophy and just takes them to their natural conclusion. I don't think it's wacky. I don't think it's out there. I don't think it's spiritual mumbo jumbo hippy nonsense, right? I think this is just the consequence of the arguments. And I think we ought to follow them there.

Speaker: And I think rather than going back to the religious traditions of the past, and rather than pretending that new atheism can transcend its cultural context, we should go beyond God and atheism and let the true dialectic unfold and take the best of both of those views and solve the key questions of philosophy.

Speaker: I don't think this way of thinking is unique to philosophy, right? I think physicists and scientists of all different disciplines posit different things to explain the data. They posit dark matter, black holes, they posit the length and age of the universe, they posit theories like evolution by natural selection, gravity, things that are a lot of the time strictly unobservable on naive physicalism. You can't go back and see the Big Bang, you can't go back and see our earliest ancestors. You have to have the very best guess at what theory can explain the data.

Speaker: And in the same way, I think pantheism does something very, very similar, if not the same thing. Pantheism says, "Look, we we're conscious. The first and most immediate thing we know is that we're conscious." Descartes said the same. The the only thing we can be absolutely sure of is that we are thinking things that are conscious. Everything else can be an illusion. So, it's the one fundamental thing you know more than anything else. The only thing you can know with 100% certainty, you exist as a thinking thing. So, consciousness is the greatest and most fundamental bit of evidence that we have.

Speaker: But how does my consciousness emerge from these physical properties alone? Well, probably the least appetizing answer to this question is physicalism. That something magical happens when atoms come together brain-wise and give rise to consciousness. I think that is introducing magic, and I think that's a and sort of a non-starter.

Speaker: Some other physicalists, some other atheists especially, think that consciousness is merely an illusion. That there isn't something extra called subjective experience, but it's just a trick of the mind, like a magician showing you there's a beetle in a box, but not really there's a beetle in the box. He's just making your brain think there's a beetle in the box. So, consciousness is that beetle. Galen Strawson, the philosopher, said that illusionism made and was the silliest thing that's ever been said in philosophy. Because the illusion itself is an instance of the thing that they're trying to refute. Just calling it illusion doesn't solve the problem. It There is something there, there is subjective experience.

Speaker: I don't think that dualism is a sensible solution to this view as well. Positing the existence of something entirely separate, i.e. a non-physical soul, seems to add too much metaphysical baggage to our picture of the world. It also creates problems with how non-physical souls can interact with physical bodies. And if we did have souls, when we scan our brains, we'd expect our brains to light up in all sorts of ways, like there was a poltergeist pulling strings on the neurons in our head. But actually the physical firings of our neurons can be explained by physical causes. So, it doesn't look like there are unexplained brain activities in the physical sense.

Speaker: So, that question of where that consciousness comes from is the question that we're ultimately trying to settle there. We're going, here's consciousness, I'm conscious, where does that consciousness come from? Moses Mendelssohn said, I think, therefore there's a God. What do you mean by that? He said, I'm a thinking thing, but I couldn't come from nothing. Right? There must be a cause that brought me into existence, unless I'm God himself. So, either I'm God or I'm not God. And then you go, all right, well, where did I come from? And I'm conscious, where did my consciousness emerge? How did the complexity of my consciousness arise? It must be finely tuned. And the best explanation for that is a necessary conscious mind. It posits the least amount of stuff.

Speaker: And so, the pantheist looks at the world and says, look, there are these three fundamental questions. I'm not positing anything which is outside of what the atheist or the religious believer say. The atheist believes in consciousness. The atheist accepts the fact the laws are finely tuned for existence. The atheist accepts the fact there is something rather than nothing. They just don't want to say that it's beyond the universe. The religious believer says that it's finely tuned, that there's consciousness, but it all comes from a non-physical sort of mind, a conscious soul-esque thing, which again is at the heart of the cosmos. So, I'd challenge the atheist and the religious believer to say, what is it in pantheism specifically that you disagree with?" Because it takes the spirit of both of those views and enables them both to answer those three fundamental problems.

Speaker: The odds of us being here are incredibly unlikely. It would take us from the moment of the Big Bang up until now writing out merely the digit for how likely it was that we'd be here, that stars would form and life would emerge. So, we need an explanation of that. And the best explanation isn't just to say it's chance. However, the atheist will typically say such a thing. And they'll say, "Well, the puddle would think, 'Oh, this a hole was built perfectly for me.'" And they'll try an argument like that. And we just find ourselves here and it doesn't need any explaining.

Speaker: The religious believer obviously thinks that there's a better explanation, which is God tweaked the laws of nature and twiddled the knobs in certain directions to make sure that life could emerge. But the pantheist takes again the spirit of both of these answers and says, "You're sort of both right in a way that the world just is finely tuned in the way that the atheist thinks, but the reason for that fine-tuning is because at the heart of the cosmos is a mind which is God-like. I think that is actually God's in a trivial sense definitionally, which we could get into. But fundamentally the idea there is that there is a mind. It is able to bring the laws of nature into perfect balance. And that isn't incompatible with either atheism or theism.

Speaker: In terms of existence, the problem typically goes, "Well, everything has a cause and the causes go back all the way to the Big Bang." And even if you thought that we had a cyclical universe rather than it just being a linear one. So, rather than thinking that we go back to the Big Bang, you thought as some of the Eastern traditions do that we have a constant Big Crunch and Big Bang that the world is like an accordion for infinity's end, constantly coming in and out of existence. Even if you thought that that was the case, you still have to explain where that came from. Where did this circle come from? This chain of cause and effect going on for an infinity's end come from? You have to step outside of that and say, "What's necessary? What's the uncaused cause? What's the prime mover? What's the ground of all being?"

Speaker: And so, what the pantheist does is it says you could believe in a cyclical universe, you could believe in a linear universe, you can plug in the sort of cosmology that you want there. What you'll find though is that fundamentally the universe is the necessary uncaused

Jack: ...thing. The universe itself is all there is. There has never been anything outside of the universe, there will never be something outside of the universe. We're already home, we're already there, we're already in the place that ever was and ever will be. We're already unified with the totality of being.

Jack: When I came to this realization that I thought the three fundamental problems could be solved by positing this unified conscious mind underlying the cosmos, I didn't really care whether it was God or not. I thought it was God-like and I wanted to use the word God. But if an atheist or a theist was to tell me, "You're just using the label wrong, that's not God," I wouldn't have particularly minded. I mean, this was Schopenhauer's critique of pantheism as well. Schopenhauer says that pantheism claims nothing: you're just giving the world a different name.

Jack: Right? I'm Jack, I'm a son, I'm a friend; to the police I'm maybe a person of interest; to other people I'm someone that they might be watching. Doesn't matter what you call me, right? You can call me whatever name you like under the sun, I'm still the same person. You call me God, and that might be a mislabeling. You're not really saying anything different about me as a being.

Jack: So, whether you're calling the world God or God the world, maybe in my case, I'm just engaging in some nature-loving atheism. Maybe I just spent too much time out there in the world looking at the beautiful sights of Europe, and I've just decided that this is a really beautiful thing, and I just want to call it God. You know, that's crossed my mind a bunch of times.

Jack: But, some words have unnegotiable meanings, and this is the main point. A square has four corners, four sides. Unicorns have one horn. If a unicorn didn't have one horn, it wouldn't be a unicorn. In the same way as triangles and unicorns, God has an unnegotiable meaning.

Jack: The word God means the greatest conceivable being. The word God means the perfect being. I know of no philosopher outside of John Stuart Mill, and perhaps Philip Goff, a contemporary philosopher, who thinks that God would be anything less than perfect if God existed. Even the most militant atheist would agree.

Jack: The atheist says, "Yeah, okay, definitionally God is perfect. Sure, but you know, can God create a rock so heavy that God can't lift it? Can God, who knows everything, know the actions of free agents and they'd still be free? Could this God have the power to sin? Could God clench his fist and punch a baby square in the face?" No, he couldn't, right?

Jack: And that would be perfect in the sense that if God was perfect, he'd have to have all powers and be perfectly good. But, that thing they think, says the atheist, is logically inconsistent. That's the thing they're trying to refute, right? They're trying to refute the idea that God is perfect, and that perfect being could exist.

Jack: So, what is it to be perfect? Ask the question. Why is, in my view, the world more perfect than what the traditional theist would say God is? Well, there are some non-contentious things that make something perfect.

Jack: A perfect being is one which holds all great-making properties to the highest possible degree. To be great is to have all of the properties we'd rather have than not have. We'd rather be conscious than not. We'd rather be alive than not. We'd rather have powers than be weak. We'd rather be knowledgeable than be stupid.

Jack: Those things are good for the sake of themselves. And given that God is the fulfillment of all greatness, God would have to possess all of those properties. The perfect being, on some interpretations, would have each of those properties to the maximum degree. I.e., traditionally speaking, God would have all powers, be omnipotent, have all knowledge, be omniscient, and be perfectly good, omnibenevolent. That's the omni-God thesis.

Jack: There are alternative interpretations of this, though. A views like the maximal God hypothesis. The maximal God hypothesis says, "Hey, the perfect being wouldn't have every single property to the maximum, but the best combination of them."

Jack: Right? It might be better for God to lack some power, such as the power to sin. It might be better for God to not have all knowledge, i.e., knowledge of what free agents will do in the future. So, there are some views that say that God doesn't have to have every single property to the maximum, but has the best combination.

Jack: In the same way you don't want a wrestler to be too big or too small. You don't want a football player to be too strong or too slow. You want the best combination of things so they can perform their function to the best of their ability. And in the same way, you might think that God has to have a certain combination of properties in order to be perfect.

Jack: So, God is the perfect being, and that might cash itself out as having everything it's better to be than not to be, or having the best combination of things that it's better to have than not have.

Jack: So, when it comes to goodness, we think that it's better to be good than not be good. Goodness is good. There's no other reason to be good than for the goodness itself. Goodness is an end in itself. Someone said, "Why are you being good?" You think they're missing the point, right? To be good is purposeful for its own sake.

Jack: In the same way, I think it's valuable to have knowledge. It's better for me to know this chair is made of wood and some padding than it is to me think this chair is made of jelly, right? I think I have some valuable bit of knowledge in knowing what its construction is. In the same way of knowing whether there was life on Mars a million years ago. Yes or no, it might not affect things here, but I think it's valuable to know.

Jack: And it's better to have powers than not have powers. It's better to have control of our environments. The philosopher Nelson Pike gives us a great thought experiment for figuring out what these things would be.

Jack: He says, "Imagine there were two doors, and on one door was written the name of some property. On the other door, there was written the negation of that property. For example, one door might say conscious, and the other door says not conscious." He says, "Destroy one object knowing nothing else about it and save the other." So, everyone destroys the not conscious thing and saves the conscious thing.

Jack: Powerful or not powerful, save the powerful. Knowledgeable or not knowledgeable, save the knowledgeable. Living or not living, save the living. So, what you end up with is probably four or five really obvious intrinsic great-making properties that atheists and theists typically agree on. Things that it's great to be than not to be. And that's where we get the traditional concept of God.

Jack: The philosopher Eugene Nagasawa, my philosophical hero, and Katherine Rogers, they both say that they don't know of anybody who's ever defended anything less than a perfect being if they believe in God. So, if God's perfect, God would have to have those properties.

Jack: But why the world, right? How does being a part of the world make one greater than not great? So, it's just after Christmas of last year, and between Christmas and New Year, I was parked up in my camper van on a farm on the outskirts of Florence, on the same farm that Machiavelli was exiled to by the Medici family.

Jack: And I was looking out at Florence, probably the most beautiful city in the world, right? And I was looking at the hills, and I was looking at the cathedrals. I sort of thought the hills are great and have beauty, sure, but they have greatness for another reason, too, that they're huge, they're big, they draw my eye. They seem to have value in virtue of their size. The same for the cathedrals. The reason we build cathedrals so high and so big is because there's value in their size, as well.

Jack: Also, their longevity. Right? The reason people flock to Florence, of all places, because of the city's history, because of its age. I don't think Florence would be as valuable if it was created 10 years ago than if it had this long history. The Great Wall of China, the Great Barrier Reef, the Great Ocean Road. Hell, the Great Fire of London is called great because the fire burned for so long and the flames went so...

Speaker: high. There's greatness in encompassing more time and space. The longer an entity lasts for, the longer it exists for, the longer of a life that you live, the greater in the scope of the space you occupy, the greater of an entity that you are. And given the fact that encompassment, i.e. stretching across time and space, is a great-making property, it's valuable for its own sake, and given the fact that God is the greatest thing, God would have to have that property. So, if it's great to occupy time and space, then God would occupy the most amount of possible time and space. So, God would occupy our universe.

Speaker: But, it goes further still. Because if you thought God occupied all the time and space, one universe seems like a pretty modest accomplishment. There are universes that are possible that extend beyond us. Physicists like Sean Carroll defend the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. The philosopher Max Tegmark believes in a mathematical universe. 2,000 years ago, Epicurus thought it would make no sense for there to be an edge of the universe, so the universe expands infinitely and bubbles off into every single possible combination of things.

Speaker: So, given God must by definition be perfect, and to be perfect is to be everything that's great than the things that aren't great. Given that goodness, knowledge, consciousness, power, and my introduction there and encompassment, i.e. occupying time and space, given those are all things that are intrinsically great, i.e. great to have than not have, God must have them all. And so, what you end up with is a view of God which is very similar to what the traditional theist believes in, but now it's in the world. Now you've got all power and knowledge and consciousness as a part of the multiverse.

Speaker: So, God becomes the world, the world becomes God, and this is the view which I call multiverse pantheism. God is the multiverse and the multiverse is God. Every single possible power is realized across every single possible state of affairs. Every single thing that can be possible to know is known by somebody somewhere in some universe. Every good thing that possibly could happen is happening right now. All the good, the power, and the knowledge, and consciousness is realized. There are universes probably where there are no physical beings, there's just God's consciousness. God enjoys that simplicity. There are worlds perhaps where you've got soul-like things that are unified with God in a perfect state of harmony.

Speaker: So, many of the things that the religious traditions have spoken about become scientifically and philosophically feasible in a way that transcends the historical and spiritual context and in ways I think that the atheist should get on board with this well. I still don't care if people call it God. I know that there are cultural hooks to that idea that drag against us when we use the word. Pulling out a dictionary and finding a word isn't going to tell you what it actually means, what the essence of it is, what the necessary and sufficient conditions for it are.

Speaker: For example, if you went into your dictionary and pulled up the word consciousness, your favorite dictionary will tell you that consciousness is an awareness of your surroundings. But consciousness isn't actually just an awareness of your surroundings. When I'm dreaming, it's a conscious state. When I close my eyes, I put my fingers in my ears and I think 1 + 1 = 2 or I imagine a pink elephant, that's a conscious state as well. It's not just merely an an awareness of my surrounding. Conscious states can be evaluative, my fear of flying. It can be cognitive, me doing mathematics. It can be dream-like states. And in the same way, I think it's true of God.

Speaker: I don't care what the word God means in a dictionary. Meaning, the essence of the word God is perfect being, is greatest being. If there was a greater being, then that would be more deserving of the label God. Right? The thing that you thought was God isn't God cuz there's something greater. God has to stand at the top of the chain of things that it's better to be than not to be. And given the fact that occupying time and space is great, then God would have to occupy time and space. I think that the God of traditional theism falls further down the list of things that it's great to be. I think it's great to extend across every single thing that's logically and metaphysically possible rather than just be absent from time and space completely.

Speaker: So you could call it the fundamental being. You could call it the ground of existence. You could just call it the world. But you're still talking about the same thing, regardless of the word that you're using. I think there is a multiverse. I think that it is perfectly good. I think that every power, knowledge, and conscious entity is realized in that. And I think the three fundamental questions of philosophy are all solved within this view in a way that atheism nor theism can accommodate.

Speaker: As far as I'm aware, I'm the only philosopher who has pinned their colors to this flag and said, "Hey, I'm a multiverse pantheist." It doesn't bother me too much. I'm not overly upset because multiverse theories taking hold in amongst the scientific community and alternative concepts of God are only starting to be taken seriously in the last 20 years or so as genuine alternatives in philosophy of religion. There's been relatively little research in that, mainly because of the cultural and funding practices in philosophy, which we're seeing good changes in. The reason I'm the only person to defend this though is because the idea was introduced and rejected within the space of the same paper.

Speaker: Yujin Nagasawa wrote a paper which is about eight pages long in which he said, "Hey, consider multiverse pantheism. Doesn't this view look fascinating?" And he went, "But hold on, just before you want to carry on reading, there's a massive problem with this view which means we shouldn't take it seriously." And the biggest problem for multiverse pantheism was the multiverse problem of evil. On traditional theism, you only have to deal with the actual evils in this world. You know, you have to deal with factory farmings and genocides and that's pretty damn bad, right? That's the main reason why people don't believe in God. But for a multiverse pantheist, you might think that you have to explain every single possible instance of evil. It's not just actual evil, it's possible evil.

Speaker: So, there may be worlds where little boys and girls are brought into existence, tortured and mutilated for their whole lives, and have their throats slit and are thrown into the fire. A miserable, awful world that's completely incompatible, says the multiverse problem of evil, with a perfectly good God. And every single possible scenario would be realized. When I reflect on this problem, though, I thought there are parallels that are offered by traditional theists that can solve this problem. And in a word, the best solution to this problem is that evil universes aren't possible universes.

Speaker: The reason why we're positing the multiverse from the pantheistic point of view, the reason why we think there are other universes, is because God's great and must encompass the greatest amount of things. So, if the universe isn't born out of God, then fundamentally they would have to align with God's perfect goodness. And you see parallels within traditional theism, such as the problem of divine sinning. You know, could a perfectly good God, with every logically and metaphysically possible power, sin? Does God have the power to sin? Well, the consensus is God would lack that power. It's like a square circle or a married bachelor. And in the same way, a world or a universe can't be both God and not God. So, because the universes are born out of God, they have to be perfectly good.

Speaker: Now, the last objection to this was the reason why I wasn't a traditional theist, fundamentally. And the thing that brought me over to the evil God challenge, the biggest reason why people don't believe in God, is the traditional problem of evil. I think we can solve the multiverse problem of evil for that reason. Evil universes aren't possible universes, but when we look in this world, we find there are such evils. Again, factory farming, genocides, wars. Non-human animals in particular suffering by evolution by natural selection.

Speaker: What reason can you give for their suffering? For my suffering, you might think it makes me greater, it gives me a greater character, allows me to go broke and build myself back up again. You know, I need bad things to appreciate good things. Whatever theodicy or reason or defense for that evil you can offer. But what reason is there for a non-human animal to suffer just for our pleasures, just for our own selfish happiness?

Speaker: I think pantheism offers a unique solution to this. I'll give it by way of analogy. Say if my right hand administers an injection into my left arm. You know, I push the injection in. My right hand, from its naive perspective, might think it's the perpetrator of some evil. And my left arm might find itself being the victim of some evil.

Speaker: But from God's perspective, or the perspective of my brain, I'm able to reconcile these two things and appreciate that these lower order evils give rise to some higher order goods, i.e. my immunity to the infection or disease. What we have here is the ability for God to reconcile alternative perspectives. We are fundamentally God, individual perspectives within God's mind.

Speaker: And so, for the non-human animals that suffer, it's not that they're suffering in isolation, an individual agent separate from the rest of the world are suffering. It's one part of God suffering. In the same way as my part of the arm here might suffer.

Speaker: And right, you do this with a heavy heart, right? With God's on trial here for every single crime that's ever been committed. Every crime is actually committed by God on pantheism. It's God who has the bad thought, God that slits the throat. It's God who's committed every act of terrorism and war and has it's perpetrated every unjust murder.

Speaker: So, what philosophers have done historically is try and give theodicies. And a theodicy is the actual reason for why God allows evil to exist. But theodicy isn't the order of the day. All we need is a defense. God's on trial. And in a court of law, we need to show it's beyond all reasonable doubt that God is guilty of allowing gratuitous, i.e. unnecessary, evil to exist.

Speaker: So, all we need to give are possible reasons for why evil exists. And I think that example of of a defense is one possibility. And if it's possible that God has those reasons, then we shouldn't rule out the fact that that reason might justify such unnecessary evils or what we think are unnecessary evils.

Speaker: And as well, that problem of evil needs to be weighed up against all the reasons that we've given, fine-tuning, existence, consciousness, other arguments as well such as the ontological argument. There are a whole host of arguments to support the pantheistic conclusion. And so, you have to weigh all of these up against the problem of evil and then recognize there are defenses we can give as well.

Speaker: Of course, if you just look at the problem of evil alone, you'd probably conclude that there is no God, there's no perfectly good thing. You could even strip away that goodness from the world if you wanted and end up with something that's very much like God but isn't God. You could still have a fundamental conscious mind with every power and knowledge and aspect of beauty that simply isn't perfectly good. That wouldn't be deserving of the label God, but I think that's still spiritually pantheistic. Right, it's not actually God, but you still end up with the great cosmic mind that wills itself into being. You still end up with every individual person just being another aspect of the same person that's looking back on itself.

Speaker: So, it's very much been a journey from atheism to agnosticism to belief in pantheism. And what I've ended up with is a a worldview which sort of changes one's everyday experience of reality. What we have now on the pantheistic view is a world in which it's not just created by a spirit, but it's very much inspirited.

Speaker: If we think of the history of of world religions and belief systems, whether it's the indigenous Australians or the Afrikaner philosophies or the pagans of Europe, they have an extra reverence for nature. They believe that the river isn't just a mechanism, but is embodied by a sort of agency. That the forest is inspirited, not merely created by one. And so, it's deserving of this further respect.

Speaker: On the atheistic worldview, or the religious worldview of the Abrahamic faiths, sure, human beings and non-human animals enjoy agency, personhood, and consciousness. But on the pantheistic view, the whole universe is brought together by one single unified mind. And so, you owe nature, in addition to non-human animals and humans, this extra bit of respect, extra bit of moral treatment. Which I think speaks to our intuitions about how we should treat the natural environment.

Speaker: I think it'd be wrong to destroy Mount Everest and drop a bomb on it. Right? I think it'd be wrong to drain the ocean. Not merely because there are conscious creatures that depend on it, but because destroying that thing would be badness itself. And so, I think the pantheist has an extra thing to consider. Like, the world is valuable because the world is fundamentally a person, just like you or I. And it's not like it would be in a pagan philosophy that the forest is a person and the river is a person. But the whole world is a person. So, I think he goes further than all of these views in the end.

Speaker: One question might be, if God's perfect and God's the world, then what's the point? Right? What's the point in doing anything? It's already going to be perfect. There's a sort of determinism there. It can't fail to be anything less than perfect, because by its nature it has to be. So, what's the point?

Speaker: What's the point if 100,000 children are born every day, which they are here in world one in universe one on earth one, let's say. Right here in our world, 100,000 children are born each day. What does that say about my nephew, who was born two weeks ago? Does that make my nephew's life any less valuable, because everything's happening and there are so many children being born in one go. What does that mean about the value of the world if across the multiverse everything that has happened and could happen is happening?

Speaker: I don't think it makes my life any less meaningful. The great thing about intrinsic great-making properties is that they're always great to have. It's always great to have more power, more knowledge, more goodness brought into being by individual agents, regardless of how much of it is external to you.

Speaker: The last thing to say is I think this is a significantly more optimistic worldview than atheism can offer. I always believing in atheism as a worldview and thinking that the world on the whole was probably a worse place than it was a good place, mainly because of evolution by natural selection. Right?

Speaker: And the religious believer has an extra card there. They can go, "Well, actually, it's not the fact that the world is merely a bad place because there's this extra bit of the world, you know, heaven or God, something which outweighs the evil in the world. There's this greater goodness, this bigger story beyond us." In the same way, I think the multiverse pantheist can do the same. We're just a speck, one little universe, amongst an uncountable number or possibly infinite number of universes. Our world might be the worst of every single universe that there is, but we can be optimistic in knowing that existence on the whole is a good thing. That we can be optimistic in thinking we should be happy and pleased to be alive.

Speaker: But if you're an atheist and you believe in the multiverse, then I think you should be bloody miserable if you genuinely think it's true. If you genuinely believe that every logical and metaphysically possible thing is happening right now across every single universe, then there are worlds which are just built so genocides can happen cyclically. That there are worlds where people are just tortured over and over and over again. There's an uncountable number of evil acts happening all the time.

Speaker: and given the fact that there's an uncountable number of evil acts, and possibly an uncountable number of good acts, I don't think that means you can weigh up the value of existence and be an optimist. At best, you can say that all breaks even.

Narrator: Four times a year we print a magazine worth putting your phone down for.

Narrator: Big Think's premium print magazine is built with custom artwork and expert insight from the world's biggest thinkers. No AI slop, no rage bait, just big ideas for curious people. Support the media you want to see in the world. Go to bigthink.com/join to become a member today.