At the end of his excellent book, The Nature of Contingency: Quantum Physics as Modal Realism, Alastair Wilson offers a game-changing undercutting defeater for fine-tuning arguments for theism. It's a real advance in the literature, as it offers a persuasive reply to Roger White's celebrated "this universe" objection. The basic idea is that Everettian quantum mechanics implies the existence of a multiverse, and if you (rightly, in my view) accept the Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics as abductively best, and if you antecedently come to the data of fine-tuning with a low credence in theism, then you thereby have good reason to think the diversity of universes to be of the right sort to explain the fine-tuning of our universe. Highly recommended.
Quick Links
- Book
- 200 (or so) Arguments for Atheism
- Index: Assessing Theism
- Why Mainstream Scholars Think Jesus Was A Failed Apocalyptic Prophet
- What's Wrong With Plantinga's Proper Functionalism?
- Draper's Critique of Behe's Design Argument
- The Failure of Plantinga's Free Will Defense
- 100 Arguments for God Answered
- Thomistic Arguments for God Answered
- On a Common Apologetic Strategy
- On Caring About and Pursuing Truth
- A Priori Naturalism, A Priori Inerrantism, and the Bible
Rdzak's Nice Paper on the Incompatibility of PSR and Libertarianism
Rdzak, Brandon. "The Principle of Sufficient Reason and Libertarianism: A Reply to Pruss", Philosophia (2021), https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00364-0.
Abstract: Alexander Pruss’s Principle of Sufficient Reason states that every contingent true proposition has an explanation. Pruss thinks that he can plausibly maintain both his PSR and his account of libertarian free will. This is because his libertarianism has it that contingent true propositions reporting free choices are self-explanatory. But I don’t think Pruss can plausibly maintain both his PSR and libertarianism without a rift occurring in one or the other. Similar to the old luck/randomness objection, I contend that Pruss’s libertarianism is susceptible to what I call “the inexplicability objection”, which attempts to show that agents’ free choices involve contingent brute facts. Pruss may be able to partially explain a proposition such that Jones freely chose A for reason R, but he cannot adequately explain a contrastive proposition such as that Jones freely chose A for R rather than B for R*. The result is that either PSR is too explanatorily permissive for libertarianism, or libertarianism is too explanatorily impermissive to satisfy PSR. After considering what I take to be Pruss’s best response to the inexplicability objection, I conclude that his attempt to reconcile PSR and libertarianism is unsuccessful.
The Argument from PSR to Monism
Here's yet another argument to add to the list. A commitment to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) is commonly thought to go hand in hand with a commitment to traditional theism. However, as Michael Della Rocca has recently argued, PSR entails monism. Therefore, to the extent that one has reason to accept PSR, one has reason to reject theism.
A Quick Objection to the Modal Ontological Argument
(From an old Facebook post of mine back in 2018) Assume Platonism about properties, propositions, and possible worlds. Such is the natural b...