Is there such a thing as an argument from unconstrained possibilities against God?

Question

If God doesn’t exist, and all that exists are natural laws in a brute sense, it seems that the number of possible configurations of the world are tiny compared to the number of possible configurations if god exists.

If god exists, he could create a universe completely hospitable to life, completely lethal to life, a universe full of fairies, demons, goblins, or any of an infinite number of other beings and objects that you can think of. Planets could be squares instead of spheres, the moon could be made of cheese, and we could all be born 70 feet tall or have minds that don’t need brains, etc etc. The possibilities seem endless.

If god doesn’t exist, then reality seems constrained by whatever laws happen to exist. In other words, the probability of a particular configuration being constrained by natural laws seems very high given no god, but very low given god. God wouldn’t need to set up laws in the first place.

It is interesting that this kind of argument can essentially reverse many of the contemporary arguments for theism. For example, a common theistic argument is that if certain parameters were changed by even a small amount, life would not exist. Because this is very improbable, a designer is a better explanation. However, if a designer existed, he wouldn’t need to fine tune life. He wouldn’t need to spend billions of years of time just to create an earth hospitable to life and then spend another billions of years for life to evolve for humans to exist. Yet given no god, that seems to be the only way for life to arise. But given no constraints by an all powerful God, life could have arisen in any of an infinite number of ways imaginable.

What is this kind of argument called? Is there a notion of this in philosophy?

Answer 1

This is a straightforward Bayesian argument. Let H be the hypothesis that God exists, and let O be the sequence of all evidence humanity has ever observed.

P(H|O) = P(O|H) P(H)/P(O)

P(O|H) will be low if H could produce many possible sequences of observations, because the probability mass will be spread thin among all those other sequences of observations. The more "focused" H is towards just exactly the observations actually observed, excluding other observations, the higher P(O|H) will be.

So, yes, if God could have produced any of a huge variety of different universes, then the probability mass for P(O|H) will be spread among many different sequences of observations O, one for each possible universe God could have created, and as a consequence P(H|O) will be low.

Answer 2

The laws don't constrain what can happen. The laws only describe what has happened and what is likely to happen.

It is the events happened that constrain what could happen next.

In the beginning of the Universe nothing had happened yet, there were no constraints, everything was possible. When something happened, everything else was no longer possible. The next event has to be a causal effect of the first event. That constrains the possibilities of what the next event could be. And so on.

Every cause has an infinite number of possible effects. An electron in an atom drops on a lower energy orbital (cause) and emits a photon (effect). But the direction where the photon goes is completely random, only one out of infinite number of possible directions is actualized. That constrains the number of possible futures, only those caused by the photon going to that direction are possible.

This is no argument against or for God. This is just a description of how events are caused and constrained. You can believe that probabilistic quantum events are not random, but instead controlled by God, but that is just a trick to make religion compatible with science.

Answer 3

The first question you need to ask is what makes the laws? If randomness makes the laws, then there is no limit. The random rules which create stability will survive longer, obviously.

So this answers part of your question.

The other thing is that if GOD exists, then s/he must constrain the universe to that which preserves the order of the universe (the "good" side) and separate that which hurts that order (the "evil" side). So this alone will reduce the number of universes.

Answer 4

If there is a god and if it is an unconstrained god, any world other than this in which we found ourselves would still represent just one of infinite possibilities available to god. An infinite number of those possible worlds would presumably have phenomena which appeared to its human inhabitants as 'natural laws', would involve lengthy pre-human histories just like ours, and would also suffer from divine hiddenness. And regardless of what kind of world was created, if God maintained hidden, we would remain at a loss as to what motivated his design and would remain therefore unable to infer anything from any of the world's attributes; unable to determine whether or not design had played a role at all.

Whichever world in which we found ourselves would always seem incredibly 'unlikely'. We would still find ourselves in one particular world with no reason to account for why the world was created in that particular way.

From this perspective, it is difficult to see how an argument from unconstrained possibilities might be successful.

Answer 5

However, if a designer existed, he wouldn’t need to fine tune life.

There is no common definition of creator gods or their powers and limitations.

Supernatural designers as gods of the gaps require no omnipotence to fill some gap.

But if one believes any part of the universe or history is impossible without some supernatural power, no probability argument can make no god more likely than a god.

Even for an assumed omnipotent power, it is invalid to say this power cannot exist because it refrained from doing what appears most efficient or logical. Such reasoning is easily swept away by any variant of "god works in mysterious ways". Inconsistent behavior is no obstacle to godhood, it even renders the whole narrative more interesting, with the cultist spending time in speculating what mysterious reasons their gods had to NOT do the obvious thing.

In the same sense the relative absence of miracles (unless you want to count the love as a miracle) in modern times does not mean nothing supernatural ever existed, a single historical miracle is enough as evidence of something supernatural having existed at least once.

However, assuming ignorance of whether any miracle ever happened or was ever required: the more knowledge gaps a person has, the more motivation there is to believe in a god of the gaps. Knowing laws of nature which act without plan or purpose and observing a universe that follows such laws removes the gaps and the need for gods of the gaps.