I think this is a potent case for why Christianity is more probable than, say, Islam (frankly, what isn't), but Christianity still wins out in terms of probability. Your evidence for Hinduism is 1) Hinduism is big and old, 2) God probably exists, 3) Hinduism gets reincarnation right, 4) Hinduism gets right preexistence, 5) It gets Karma right, 6) Religious experience/common consent, and 7) It gets vegetarianism right.
Now, Christianity has in its favor being even bigger and more diverse, which seems to outweigh 1, also predicts 2, and has a lot of powerful religious experiences. I think together these factors mostly cancel out 1, 2, and 6.
I think the empty tomb is good for cancelling out preexistence and reincarnation. Counting preexistence and reincarnation separately is double-counting because reincarnation entails preexistence. It's weird that Hinduism gets it right, but my sense is other religions have held preexistence and reincarnation, so it's hard to give this a Bayes factor of more than, say, 10. In contrast, with the rest of the evidence in the background, on the hypothesis that Christianity is false, you'd assign supremely low odds to Mark saying that women followers turned up an empty tomb.
So now we just have Karma and vegetarianism. I think vegetarianism is more than cancelled out by the Tom Holland point that Christianity brought about an unprecedented moral transformation that brought about a substantial decline in malevolence and barbarism and put the conditions in place required for vegetarianism. So then the only remaining point is Karma. As for Karma, I think it's implausible because desert is implausible. But even if you find it plausible, surely it's not good for the Bayes factor of Paul's conversion + James conversion + the empty tomb + modern Christian miracles like Zeitoun and Joseph of Cupertino + the ubiquitous reports of the disciples seeing Jesus waltzing around posthumously.
I think I've been pretty conservative in the cancelling out and yet there's still a lot left over. So if you reject any of the reasoning, you can use the extra evidence to cancel out the other evidence.
(1) One part you left out was that Hinduism correctly predicts a vast pantheon of gods.
(2) “I think the empty tomb is good for cancelling out preexistence and reincarnation.” To be clear (on the assumption of an eternal past) are you claiming that the evidence of the empty tomb gives stronger evidence than Huemer’s argument for reincarnation gives against Christianity? (Since reincarnation is absent from the tradition).
(3) On the double counting point: I was taking pre-existence to be evidence for reincarnation, precisely because reincarnation entails it. I wasn’t treating it separately, it was in the “evidence for reincarnation” section.
(4) I concede that Christianity wins out on size. (Why is diversity important?)
(5) Other religions (especially Indian religion) have endorsed pre-existence and reincarnation; but Christianity hasn’t.
(6) In what sense do you thing Christianity put the conditions in place *required* for vegetarianism? The conditions were already in place—in India, before colonial rule.
In regards to 1, I misunderstood, I thought that was a response to the claim Hinduism is wrong about that, not a claim in support of it. By this standard Christianity correctly predicts the literal truth of the Adam & Eve story because it probably happened somewhere. I think if the scenario doesn't happen in our world, then while it may technically have happened, it doesn't happen in a way that provides much evidence for Hinduism. I think this is mostly a wash.
on 2: Christianity is not incompatible with reincarnation. So hinduism might get it right and correctly predict it, which favors it, but I don't think it favors it by much more than the empty tomb.
on 3, oh oops.
4) I think diversity matters because it would be weird if God only revealed himself to one group of people. God would be expected to spread his message to many, many people all around the globe. Like, surely it would be bad news for Christianity if it wasn't diverse but just was ubiquitous in China.
5) Right and I agree this is evidence. But I think it's roughly even to the empty tomb.
6) This was a bit quick phrasing, but Christianity brought about a moral transformation that brought about increased care for animals.
I think the most important part of my main point was about the arguments that I think roughly cancel out each other. Are there any you disagree with?
>God would be expected to spread his message to many, many people all around the globe
Then the true religion is the Perennial Philosophy -- and you are wrong in assuming that Christinaity, Hnduism and Islam are mutually exclusive. Having said that, Hinduism -- sanatana dharma, the eternal teaching -- is already close to perennialism , and some Hindus regard Christ as an avatar.
Very minor point, but virtually all Hindus I’ve ever met do abstain from eggs. Lacto vegetarianism (under which eggs are grouped alongside meat) seems to be the dominant form of vegetarianism in all the Vedic traditions - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacto_vegetarianism.
I appreciate that your argument re meat consumption doesn’t depend on Hindus abstaining from eggs, but it does seem notable that most Hindu traditions would discourage the eating of eggs.
I'm wondering what the issue with eggs actually is? The "potential for life" of eggs? But the quote from Dustin Crummett in the post seems to have eggs produced in battery cages (or using a similarly harmful approach) in mind, no? Then what about free range eggs, for example?
This tracks not at all with my experience, even within the core Tamilian Brahmins (of which I am one), who are one of the groups most strict about their vegetarianism. I've been eating plenty of eggs my whole life, as have most of the Tam/Brahms I know – either still living in India, or who are first- or second-generation Americans (of which I am the latter). There are certain days and ways on which eating eggs is discouraged, but that's about it.
I think for many Christians, Hinduism is off limits because it's *another* religion. But if Christians were convinced that the core of the Christian message is *fully compatible* the mainlines of Hinduism, then I think a door would be open for evidence for Hinduism to flow more freely.
Btw, I think a better formulation of the anthropic argument is:
New formulation of the anthropic argument:
1) If SIA is true, and the collection of all people has some magnitude, if M is the magnitude (magnitude is either cardinality or size of the collection if there's no cardinality) of the collection of all people, then if a theory predicts that M people exist with probability N times greater than another theory, then your existence favors the first theory over the second by a factor of N. '
2) Theism predicts that if there is a collection of all people of some magnitude, M people would exist with much higher probability than atheism.
3) SIA is true.
4) Therefore, if the collection of possible people has some magnitude, your existence favors theism over atheism by many times.
5) If the collection of possible people has no magnitude then if one theory predicts a much higher probability that the collection of actual people would be any very large infinity than another theory, if SIA is true, your existence favors the first theory by many times.
6) If the collection of possible people has no magnitude, theism predicts a much higher probability that the collection of actual people would be a very large infinity than athiesm.
7) Therefore, your existence favors theism over atheism by many times.
As a Hindu, this was a super interesting perspective. I've recently started doubting karma as we commonly understand it. On the surface, it is a reasonable explanation for the problem of evil: past good/bad actions can explain why some people in this world live comfortably while some face extreme hardships. Everyone has their prarabdha. However, there are two truths that I'm struggling to reconcile with karma.
1) Wild animals suffer immensely from starvation, predation, disease and more. There is a popular explanation for this based on karma. Those who misuse their human free will to commit grave wrongdoings (or excessively indulge in material desires) reincarnate as animals to pay off their karmic debts. Animals do not have free will, only instincts, and so they cannot generate any new karma. They exhaust past karma over several births and deaths until they reach human life again. So all is well, maybe there's still divine justice in all this - animals are suffering due to their actions in past human lives. (Although, there are far more conscious animals existing at this moment than the number of humans who have ever existed in history - maybe not an argument against it, but not too sure what to make of it either.)
2) Regardless, if biological evolution is true, then life *started* with suffering, and that would have nothing to do with satisfying deserts. What could be an explanation for this? Also, if we accept that humans have free will (which is necessary to generate karma) and non-human animals don't, then at what point along our evolution did we develop free will?
Would love to hear people's thoughts on this, because I feel I might be missing something here!
2) I think what Hindus should say, with regard to both the 'number of animals being greater than the number of humans' objection and the 'life started before agency' objection is that there's an infinite multiverse with an infinite number of souls, and that God causes souls to move between different universes. This gets around both problems, since it's compatible with the number of humans being smaller than the number of animals in *this universe* and origin of life coming before the origin of moral agency in *this universe*. (The guilty souls just came from other universes!) It's also implied by the anthropic argument I gave for God having created every possible person.
Not a Hindu, but fwiw, most Hindu vegetarians I know -- most Indian vegetarians even -- don’t eat eggs. India has mandatory labeling of food products as vegetarian or not, and eggs are, by this labeling law, classified as not vegetarian (while milk products and honey are still classified as vegetarian). Although many Hindu vegetarians eat eggs too, I’d guess they’re outnumbered by the vegetarians who don’t.
Coming at this from a traditional Hindu (sat-sampradāyika) perspective, there are a few comments I have:
What I especially found to be interesting here is that you accurately pre-empt many doctrinal contentions actually made by various Hindu subtraditions. The existence of the irredeemably corrupt (tamo-yogyas) is indeed posited by the Tattvavāda vaiṣṇava sampradāya, but with the caveat that these entities have a "perverse" enjoyment of lasting condemnation, meaning that God's condemnation of them is, in a sense, a form of mukti for such entities. Additionally, the existence of temporary grace-periods of "mukti" is also universally accepted in the Hindu tradition— souls with sufficient punyam ("good karma") can be reborn as entities of incredible longevity in Svargaloka (the mundane celestial realm) or even as devas. Your points on the infinitude of past are also both intuitive and convincing from the perspective of the Hindu śāstras.
That said, there is room for clarification on various points of Hindu theology, and cases in which I feel the evidentiary arguments you present actually count against Hindudharma rather than for it. For example, your argument for the existence of the devatās, is, if I'm correct, that than an unsurpassably good God would perform the unsurpassably good act of creating every type of entity that could lead a good life— and that this would include entities of such beautitude that they could plausibly be identified as devatās. The caveat here is that the beautitude of the devatās not of their intrinsic nature (svabhāva). Their beautitude is a property of the bodies they have assumed as a result of accumulated punyam. Other than that, they are jīvas (souls bound to saṁsāra) just like us, and like us, they are also mortal. This does not detract from your argument so much, as it can be rephrased in terms of an unsurpassably good God creating every type of psychophysical aggregation that was such that any soul inhabiting them could lead a good life.
That said, Huemer's argument for reincarnation is, however, fundamentally inconsistent with the Hindu conception of the matter. It is impossible, on a Hindu account, for one's punarjanmas ("reincarnations") to be Poincaré clones of oneself, because the psychophysical aggregation that constituted one's body in this lifetime was the result of specific constitution of one's prārabdha karma for this lifetime, and that specific arrangement of prārabdha karma has been irreversibly fructified by the time of your death, meaning that it is *conceptually impossible* for any future psychophysical aggregation one assumes to meet sufficient identity conditions with one's past lives purely on a physical basis. Additionally, there is no Hindu school that posits that saṁsāra is absolutely inescapable. Akshay Gupta's argument is, however, far more amenible to a Hindu understanding of reincarnation, as are your points on pre-existence.
Now, onto karma— I think it may not be helpful to consider karma as founded on a principle of desert. This is because, over an infinite amount of past lifetimes, we have accrewed an infinite backlog of unfructified (anarabdha) karmic fruits known as our sañcita karma. While this is temporarily depleted with the fructification of a certain amount of karma in a given lifetime (our prārabdha karma), the karmas we performed in the circumstances conditioned by our prārabdha (our āgāmi karma) replenishes the sañcita karma. What this means is that our sañcita karma, as accumulated over an infinity of time and as progressively unfurling in concert with the causal interrelationships between individuals, bares very little resemblance to a direct "equal-and-opposite" reaction to what individuals do. This system is the way that it is because Hindudharma takes a compatibilist approach to the nature free will, which refers to the extent of one's identification with the causal potencies inherent in the psychophysical aggregation you identify as "your body." This system allows for causal determination to remain even while the underlying nodes remain the agents operating within it.
Your other points on religious experience, ethical vegetarianism, et cetera are all entirely fine and perfectly consonant with Hindudharma. Overall, I think this is an incredibly solid (and tightly written) and a valuable contribution to fill the dearth of PhilRel content on Hindudharma.
" Hence, you should update in favour of Theory #3 over Theory #2. From the fact that you exist, the theory you have most evidence for on anthropic grounds is Theory #3: that God creates all possible people."
I think this type of reasoning is incorrect, because it doesn't pit all theories/groups of theories we should consider against one another, but just a select few.
Here's an example: I have a room
containing X apples and 1 pear. The room has space for up to 1000 apples (+ 1 pear). I randomly pull out fruit from the room and it turns out to be an apple. Let's look at some theories:
Theory 1: The room contains no apples.
Theory 2: The room contains 12 apples.
Theory 3: The room contains maximally many apples (1000).
As you've correctly described, based on the evidence, theory 3 beats its competitors - the more apples are in the room, the less likely we are to draw the pear. It would be fallacious to conclude from that, however, that theory 3 is most likely overall. Instead, theory 3 names the spcific amount which has the highest probability of being correct. But what about theory 4: There are 98 or 99 apples? Individually, the disjuncts are less likely, but taken together they needn't be. Yet clearly theory 4 is incompatible with theory 3. More concretely, what is more likely: theory 3 or theory 5: There are <1000 apples in the room. Clearly it is theory 5, because it is a disjunct of many other theories which are themselves relatively likely given the evidence. So we should actually NOT believe in theory 3 overall - it is merely the case that 1000 is where the peak of our distribution lies.
I think this is a potent case for why Christianity is more probable than, say, Islam (frankly, what isn't), but Christianity still wins out in terms of probability. Your evidence for Hinduism is 1) Hinduism is big and old, 2) God probably exists, 3) Hinduism gets reincarnation right, 4) Hinduism gets right preexistence, 5) It gets Karma right, 6) Religious experience/common consent, and 7) It gets vegetarianism right.
Now, Christianity has in its favor being even bigger and more diverse, which seems to outweigh 1, also predicts 2, and has a lot of powerful religious experiences. I think together these factors mostly cancel out 1, 2, and 6.
I think the empty tomb is good for cancelling out preexistence and reincarnation. Counting preexistence and reincarnation separately is double-counting because reincarnation entails preexistence. It's weird that Hinduism gets it right, but my sense is other religions have held preexistence and reincarnation, so it's hard to give this a Bayes factor of more than, say, 10. In contrast, with the rest of the evidence in the background, on the hypothesis that Christianity is false, you'd assign supremely low odds to Mark saying that women followers turned up an empty tomb.
So now we just have Karma and vegetarianism. I think vegetarianism is more than cancelled out by the Tom Holland point that Christianity brought about an unprecedented moral transformation that brought about a substantial decline in malevolence and barbarism and put the conditions in place required for vegetarianism. So then the only remaining point is Karma. As for Karma, I think it's implausible because desert is implausible. But even if you find it plausible, surely it's not good for the Bayes factor of Paul's conversion + James conversion + the empty tomb + modern Christian miracles like Zeitoun and Joseph of Cupertino + the ubiquitous reports of the disciples seeing Jesus waltzing around posthumously.
I think I've been pretty conservative in the cancelling out and yet there's still a lot left over. So if you reject any of the reasoning, you can use the extra evidence to cancel out the other evidence.
A few things.
(1) One part you left out was that Hinduism correctly predicts a vast pantheon of gods.
(2) “I think the empty tomb is good for cancelling out preexistence and reincarnation.” To be clear (on the assumption of an eternal past) are you claiming that the evidence of the empty tomb gives stronger evidence than Huemer’s argument for reincarnation gives against Christianity? (Since reincarnation is absent from the tradition).
(3) On the double counting point: I was taking pre-existence to be evidence for reincarnation, precisely because reincarnation entails it. I wasn’t treating it separately, it was in the “evidence for reincarnation” section.
(4) I concede that Christianity wins out on size. (Why is diversity important?)
(5) Other religions (especially Indian religion) have endorsed pre-existence and reincarnation; but Christianity hasn’t.
(6) In what sense do you thing Christianity put the conditions in place *required* for vegetarianism? The conditions were already in place—in India, before colonial rule.
In regards to 1, I misunderstood, I thought that was a response to the claim Hinduism is wrong about that, not a claim in support of it. By this standard Christianity correctly predicts the literal truth of the Adam & Eve story because it probably happened somewhere. I think if the scenario doesn't happen in our world, then while it may technically have happened, it doesn't happen in a way that provides much evidence for Hinduism. I think this is mostly a wash.
on 2: Christianity is not incompatible with reincarnation. So hinduism might get it right and correctly predict it, which favors it, but I don't think it favors it by much more than the empty tomb.
on 3, oh oops.
4) I think diversity matters because it would be weird if God only revealed himself to one group of people. God would be expected to spread his message to many, many people all around the globe. Like, surely it would be bad news for Christianity if it wasn't diverse but just was ubiquitous in China.
5) Right and I agree this is evidence. But I think it's roughly even to the empty tomb.
6) This was a bit quick phrasing, but Christianity brought about a moral transformation that brought about increased care for animals.
I think the most important part of my main point was about the arguments that I think roughly cancel out each other. Are there any you disagree with?
>God would be expected to spread his message to many, many people all around the globe
Then the true religion is the Perennial Philosophy -- and you are wrong in assuming that Christinaity, Hnduism and Islam are mutually exclusive. Having said that, Hinduism -- sanatana dharma, the eternal teaching -- is already close to perennialism , and some Hindus regard Christ as an avatar.
Very minor point, but virtually all Hindus I’ve ever met do abstain from eggs. Lacto vegetarianism (under which eggs are grouped alongside meat) seems to be the dominant form of vegetarianism in all the Vedic traditions - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacto_vegetarianism.
I appreciate that your argument re meat consumption doesn’t depend on Hindus abstaining from eggs, but it does seem notable that most Hindu traditions would discourage the eating of eggs.
Thanks! Didn’t know this
I'm wondering what the issue with eggs actually is? The "potential for life" of eggs? But the quote from Dustin Crummett in the post seems to have eggs produced in battery cages (or using a similarly harmful approach) in mind, no? Then what about free range eggs, for example?
This tracks not at all with my experience, even within the core Tamilian Brahmins (of which I am one), who are one of the groups most strict about their vegetarianism. I've been eating plenty of eggs my whole life, as have most of the Tam/Brahms I know – either still living in India, or who are first- or second-generation Americans (of which I am the latter). There are certain days and ways on which eating eggs is discouraged, but that's about it.
I think for many Christians, Hinduism is off limits because it's *another* religion. But if Christians were convinced that the core of the Christian message is *fully compatible* the mainlines of Hinduism, then I think a door would be open for evidence for Hinduism to flow more freely.
☝️
Btw, I think a better formulation of the anthropic argument is:
New formulation of the anthropic argument:
1) If SIA is true, and the collection of all people has some magnitude, if M is the magnitude (magnitude is either cardinality or size of the collection if there's no cardinality) of the collection of all people, then if a theory predicts that M people exist with probability N times greater than another theory, then your existence favors the first theory over the second by a factor of N. '
2) Theism predicts that if there is a collection of all people of some magnitude, M people would exist with much higher probability than atheism.
3) SIA is true.
4) Therefore, if the collection of possible people has some magnitude, your existence favors theism over atheism by many times.
5) If the collection of possible people has no magnitude then if one theory predicts a much higher probability that the collection of actual people would be any very large infinity than another theory, if SIA is true, your existence favors the first theory by many times.
6) If the collection of possible people has no magnitude, theism predicts a much higher probability that the collection of actual people would be a very large infinity than athiesm.
7) Therefore, your existence favors theism over atheism by many times.
As a Hindu, this was a super interesting perspective. I've recently started doubting karma as we commonly understand it. On the surface, it is a reasonable explanation for the problem of evil: past good/bad actions can explain why some people in this world live comfortably while some face extreme hardships. Everyone has their prarabdha. However, there are two truths that I'm struggling to reconcile with karma.
1) Wild animals suffer immensely from starvation, predation, disease and more. There is a popular explanation for this based on karma. Those who misuse their human free will to commit grave wrongdoings (or excessively indulge in material desires) reincarnate as animals to pay off their karmic debts. Animals do not have free will, only instincts, and so they cannot generate any new karma. They exhaust past karma over several births and deaths until they reach human life again. So all is well, maybe there's still divine justice in all this - animals are suffering due to their actions in past human lives. (Although, there are far more conscious animals existing at this moment than the number of humans who have ever existed in history - maybe not an argument against it, but not too sure what to make of it either.)
2) Regardless, if biological evolution is true, then life *started* with suffering, and that would have nothing to do with satisfying deserts. What could be an explanation for this? Also, if we accept that humans have free will (which is necessary to generate karma) and non-human animals don't, then at what point along our evolution did we develop free will?
Would love to hear people's thoughts on this, because I feel I might be missing something here!
Thanks! A couple of thoughts:
1) I think there's a real problem in the neighbourhood of karma and animal suffering. You might find this of interest: https://wollenblog.substack.com/p/karma-desert-and-battery-hens
2) I think what Hindus should say, with regard to both the 'number of animals being greater than the number of humans' objection and the 'life started before agency' objection is that there's an infinite multiverse with an infinite number of souls, and that God causes souls to move between different universes. This gets around both problems, since it's compatible with the number of humans being smaller than the number of animals in *this universe* and origin of life coming before the origin of moral agency in *this universe*. (The guilty souls just came from other universes!) It's also implied by the anthropic argument I gave for God having created every possible person.
This was great. Would love to read a continuation of this that explicates some Hindu texts.
At some point is definitely will!
*I
Not a Hindu, but fwiw, most Hindu vegetarians I know -- most Indian vegetarians even -- don’t eat eggs. India has mandatory labeling of food products as vegetarian or not, and eggs are, by this labeling law, classified as not vegetarian (while milk products and honey are still classified as vegetarian). Although many Hindu vegetarians eat eggs too, I’d guess they’re outnumbered by the vegetarians who don’t.
Wonderful!
Coming at this from a traditional Hindu (sat-sampradāyika) perspective, there are a few comments I have:
What I especially found to be interesting here is that you accurately pre-empt many doctrinal contentions actually made by various Hindu subtraditions. The existence of the irredeemably corrupt (tamo-yogyas) is indeed posited by the Tattvavāda vaiṣṇava sampradāya, but with the caveat that these entities have a "perverse" enjoyment of lasting condemnation, meaning that God's condemnation of them is, in a sense, a form of mukti for such entities. Additionally, the existence of temporary grace-periods of "mukti" is also universally accepted in the Hindu tradition— souls with sufficient punyam ("good karma") can be reborn as entities of incredible longevity in Svargaloka (the mundane celestial realm) or even as devas. Your points on the infinitude of past are also both intuitive and convincing from the perspective of the Hindu śāstras.
That said, there is room for clarification on various points of Hindu theology, and cases in which I feel the evidentiary arguments you present actually count against Hindudharma rather than for it. For example, your argument for the existence of the devatās, is, if I'm correct, that than an unsurpassably good God would perform the unsurpassably good act of creating every type of entity that could lead a good life— and that this would include entities of such beautitude that they could plausibly be identified as devatās. The caveat here is that the beautitude of the devatās not of their intrinsic nature (svabhāva). Their beautitude is a property of the bodies they have assumed as a result of accumulated punyam. Other than that, they are jīvas (souls bound to saṁsāra) just like us, and like us, they are also mortal. This does not detract from your argument so much, as it can be rephrased in terms of an unsurpassably good God creating every type of psychophysical aggregation that was such that any soul inhabiting them could lead a good life.
That said, Huemer's argument for reincarnation is, however, fundamentally inconsistent with the Hindu conception of the matter. It is impossible, on a Hindu account, for one's punarjanmas ("reincarnations") to be Poincaré clones of oneself, because the psychophysical aggregation that constituted one's body in this lifetime was the result of specific constitution of one's prārabdha karma for this lifetime, and that specific arrangement of prārabdha karma has been irreversibly fructified by the time of your death, meaning that it is *conceptually impossible* for any future psychophysical aggregation one assumes to meet sufficient identity conditions with one's past lives purely on a physical basis. Additionally, there is no Hindu school that posits that saṁsāra is absolutely inescapable. Akshay Gupta's argument is, however, far more amenible to a Hindu understanding of reincarnation, as are your points on pre-existence.
Now, onto karma— I think it may not be helpful to consider karma as founded on a principle of desert. This is because, over an infinite amount of past lifetimes, we have accrewed an infinite backlog of unfructified (anarabdha) karmic fruits known as our sañcita karma. While this is temporarily depleted with the fructification of a certain amount of karma in a given lifetime (our prārabdha karma), the karmas we performed in the circumstances conditioned by our prārabdha (our āgāmi karma) replenishes the sañcita karma. What this means is that our sañcita karma, as accumulated over an infinity of time and as progressively unfurling in concert with the causal interrelationships between individuals, bares very little resemblance to a direct "equal-and-opposite" reaction to what individuals do. This system is the way that it is because Hindudharma takes a compatibilist approach to the nature free will, which refers to the extent of one's identification with the causal potencies inherent in the psychophysical aggregation you identify as "your body." This system allows for causal determination to remain even while the underlying nodes remain the agents operating within it.
Your other points on religious experience, ethical vegetarianism, et cetera are all entirely fine and perfectly consonant with Hindudharma. Overall, I think this is an incredibly solid (and tightly written) and a valuable contribution to fill the dearth of PhilRel content on Hindudharma.
Extra piece of evidence - One time I did acid and it became clear that something like Hinduism is true. Basically a knockdown argument tbh
" Hence, you should update in favour of Theory #3 over Theory #2. From the fact that you exist, the theory you have most evidence for on anthropic grounds is Theory #3: that God creates all possible people."
I think this type of reasoning is incorrect, because it doesn't pit all theories/groups of theories we should consider against one another, but just a select few.
Here's an example: I have a room
containing X apples and 1 pear. The room has space for up to 1000 apples (+ 1 pear). I randomly pull out fruit from the room and it turns out to be an apple. Let's look at some theories:
Theory 1: The room contains no apples.
Theory 2: The room contains 12 apples.
Theory 3: The room contains maximally many apples (1000).
As you've correctly described, based on the evidence, theory 3 beats its competitors - the more apples are in the room, the less likely we are to draw the pear. It would be fallacious to conclude from that, however, that theory 3 is most likely overall. Instead, theory 3 names the spcific amount which has the highest probability of being correct. But what about theory 4: There are 98 or 99 apples? Individually, the disjuncts are less likely, but taken together they needn't be. Yet clearly theory 4 is incompatible with theory 3. More concretely, what is more likely: theory 3 or theory 5: There are <1000 apples in the room. Clearly it is theory 5, because it is a disjunct of many other theories which are themselves relatively likely given the evidence. So we should actually NOT believe in theory 3 overall - it is merely the case that 1000 is where the peak of our distribution lies.