Joe Folley tries to escape Islam; fails.
A while back, Joseph Folley locked swords with Philip Goff on Substack over something called the Awesome Evidence Argument. Basically, the Awesome Evidence Argument is a reductio ad absurdum against any response to the puzzle of cosmic fine-tuning that ends with:
“Fine-tuning isn’t any evidence for theism at all—in fact, no epistemically possible way that the initial conditions of the universe could be set up could ever be any evidence for God’s existence.”
Such is the Audacity of Cope that it comes from theists and non-theists alike. Some theists respond to the puzzle of fine-tuning by saying—jaws clenched and teeth gritted—that fine-tuning provides no evidence for theism over atheism because God’s ways are so inscrutable that no empirical observation could ever be more epistemically probable given theism than given atheism.
(The reason some theists are drawn to say such things is that they want to say the same thing in response to the problem of evil; if no observation can confirm theism, no observation—genocide, factory farming, biologically hard-wired carnivory—can disconfirm it, rendering theism evidence-proof.)
Similarly, some non-theists respond to the puzzle of fine-tuning by saying, “I think the initial conditions of the universe are necessary—so, their being narrowly life-permitting doesn’t favour theism over atheism, since God, if He exists, would not have been able to tweak them”, or, “I don’t think we can justly assign even rough probabilities to any of these things, and so we can’t say, with any justice, that fine-tuning is more likely on theism than on atheism.”
The standard objection to this sort of stuff—which is meant to be a catch-all kill-switch for any response to fine-tuning that, if true, would entails that no discovery about the initial conditions of the universe could ever be evidence for theism—is just to dream up some epistemically possible initial state of the universe that, if discovered, would surely give us at least some evidence for theism over atheism.
Variants on this objection (known as the ‘Awesome Evidence Argument’, due to the awesomeness of the hypothetical evidence) have been given by Michael Huemer, Miles K. Donahue, Luke Barnes, and John Hawthorne; Philip Goff—a sort of Shi’ite Christian—prefers a version that is structurally identical to previous versions, except that it is more woke than previous version because it imagines that the Qur’an is written in the stars instead of the Bible.
Goff writes:
Suppose we discovered the Quran was written in the Big Bang. What do I mean by that? I’m imagining physicists trace back the origins of the universe a little earlier, and identify some highly structured state that they were confident was the initial state of the universe. Of course, we can’t directly observe this first moment, but let’s just pretend all the evidence points to state S being the first state of our universe. As scientists study the rich structure of S, they are flabbergasted that the verses of the Quran, in Arabic, are to be found there, from start to finish. Call this the “Awesome Evidence.”
Why am I telling this imaginary story? My point is that if this happened, it would clearly be strong evidence for the truth of Islam. It’s too improbable that the exact Arabic symbols could be laid out in the first moment of the universe just by chance.
Why is this interesting? Because I’ve just made a probability claim [i.e., the claim that some initial states of the universe are less improbable on theism than on atheism]. And if you can’t make sense of the probabilities at play in the fine-tuning arguments for God (e.g. because we’ve only observed one universe, or because you follow Oppy in thinking that the initial state of the universe had to be the way it was), then you can’t make sense of the probability claim I made in the last paragraph either (for the same reason). In other words, people who claim that fine-tuning probabilities don’t make sense are forced to say that the awesome evidence wouldn’t be evidence for Islam. But that’s absurd!
We can put it as a kind of reductio ad absurdum argument:
Premise 1 – If the probabilities at play in the fine-tuning argument for God don’t make sense, then the probability claims we’d have to make to construe the Awesome Evidence as evidence for Islam don’t make sense either.
Premise 2 – If the probability claims we’d have to make to construe the Awesome Evidence as evidence for Islam don’t make sense, then the Awesome Evidence (if we discovered it) wouldn’t be evidence for Islam.
Premise 3 - But if we discovered the Awesome Evidence, it clearly would be evidence for Islam!
Conclusion – Therefore, the probabilities at play in the fine-tuning argument for God do make sense.
When Joe Folley read this, he scoffed at the credulity of the Believers. “Should we believe like the weak and ignorant?” (2:13), he asked.
Previously Joe had demanded signs in order to believe. He said, “We will not trust you unless you cause a spring to gush forth for us from the ground; or else you come to own a garden full of palm trees and vines, and you cause rivers to gush forth in torrents through it all; or you make the sky fall on us in bits and pieces, as you allege; or you summon God and the angels in our presence; or else you come to own a house made of gold; or you ascend to the sky - nor will we trust your ascent unless you bring down upon us a book we can read” (17:90-93).
Now faced with the prospect of the Book being literally written onto the sky—“…an Arabic Qur’an” so that “you will understand” (43:3)—Joe needed to take a new tack.
I swear by the motions of the stars -
And a mighty oath it is, if only you knew!
This is a glorious Qur’an,
In a Book well-sheltered,
That only the pure can touch;
A Revelation from the Lord of the Worlds. (56:75-80)
In this recent interview with Philip Goff, Joe Folley explains his reservation in some detail.
