Keeping Matthew Adelstein In Check
He has a bad tendency to get really sloppy with his reasoning
Introduction
Matthew Adelstein, who runs the Substack Bentham’s Newsletter, recently debated Matt Dillahunty on the existence of God. While I generally consider Matthew to be fairly competent in philosophy—he tends to get things right on important issues like veganism, sentientism, wild animal suffering, insect suffering and else—I think he is completely off the mark when it comes to the topic of theism. There are numerous problems with the arguments he presents for the existence of God, and thoroughly addressing them all would take hours. In this article, I’ll focus on just one representative example of faulty reasoning from his opening statement and quickly debunk it.
The Example
In his opening remarks, Matthew states :
“A second bit of evidence is consciousness itself. If there’s a perfect God, he’d want to create conscious agents, because conscious agents are good things.”
There are several problems with this line of reasoning.
First, it’s a strange and overly simplistic claim to say that conscious agents are "good things." Some conscious agents might be, but many clearly are not. Are individuals like Ted Bundy or Saddam Hussein—just to name two examples—“good things” ? I don’t think so. It’s not even clear that the majority, or even a significant proportion, of conscious agents could reasonably be called “good things.”
Second, even if we grant for the sake of argument that conscious agents are “good things,” it doesn’t follow that it would therefore be good to create them. This resembles a lot a well-known issue in population ethics, specifically in the debate around the intuition of neutrality (ION). The ION, in simple terms, holds that while it is good to make existing people happy, it is neutral to bring happy people into existence. Similarly, it’s far from clear that it would be good to bring new conscious beings into existence, even if we accept that already existing conscious beings are good. Matthew’s reasoning simply assumes that this is false—an assumption that is highly controversial at best.
Third—and most importantly—even if we accept that conscious beings are good, and that it is good to create them (noting again that the former does not entail the latter), it still does not follow that God would create them. And this is not just excessive skepticism on my part. God’s motivational system is a complete black box.
God is perfectly fine with allowing all kinds of extremely horrific things : wild animal suffering, insect suffering (which Matthew considers to be the biggest issue in the world and I probably agree with that), childhood cancer, torture, factory farming, slaughterhouses, wars, genocides, the Holocaust, famine, severe depression, tetraplegia, heart diseases, cases like Junko Furuta’s etc. etc. etc. All of these are apparently compatible with a morally perfect God.
At this point, it becomes clear that we can infer nothing about what God would or wouldn’t do. If allowing all of the above is consistent with moral perfection, then truly anything goes. So it is utterly unjustified to claim that we can predict that God would create conscious beings because it is good to do so, as what God would or would not do, as we saw, is a total mystery.
Conclusion
So that’s a quick debunk of just one of the many deeply flawed claims Matthew makes on this subject. It’s unfortunate that someone who is so clear-headed on critically important issues like veganism, wild animal suffering, and insect ethics can simultaneously make such a mess of reasoning in another domain. Hopefully my article will help him get to some sense again on this topic.
I think the second point is a bit unfair. BB doesn't just assume that it's good to create happy people - he has multiple articles where he argues that the intuition of neutrality is untenable. In a debate with limited time, it makes sense not to go on a tangential arguing extensively for this.
I agree on the third point though. The problem of evil and the problem of divine hiddenness aren't just evidence against God in their own right - they also weaken any argument for God that assumes things about what he would do if he existed, since they show that either God doesn't exist, or he behaves way differently than we would expect.
I'm not sure how these two statements follow from God allowing (horrific) evils.
1. "Anything goes"
2. "What God would do or not do is a total mystery"
At best, only one or two things can follow from this. That God - who is morally perfect under Adelstein's view - can have morally adequate reasons for allowing horrific evils; such as by allowing it, further greater evils will be prevented. From here, to render this implausible, one would have to show God can't have morally adequate reasons for allowing these things or that it is improbable.
A second thing that, maybe, follows from this, is that theists of Adelstein's type, are led into a type of "mitigated skepticism" on what God would or would not do. Perhaps there is a decent number of particular events that we're unjustified in claiming God would do or not do (like creating five million McDonald's on the planet Mars) yet there still is a number of things that the theist is confident in saying what God would do or not do, such as God creating a world where there is a possibility that people come to recognize He exists.
Something analogous to this idea can be van Inwagen's "moderate modal skepticism" when it comes to knowing certain modal truths in remote matters. A quick example is that one is justified in thinking they could've bought a different chair or furniture to sit on at their home. But things become quite unclear if one thinks the moon could've been made of green cheese.
Of course, I do think Adelstein's "God would want to create conscious agents" can be reasonably challenged. But I don't think such a challenge can indeed defeat what Adelstein thinks what God would want (in this case, God wanting to create conscious agents because they're - intrinsically - good).