...The Argument for God from Psychophysical Harmony
(Part 1 of many)
Since I'm limiting myself to chunks of text between 500 and about 1,000 words, I know the full explanation of this argument will take a while. So I will try to take things one piece at a time until it is complete.
Statement of the Claim
The fact that our psychological (mental) experiences are harmonious with physical reality provides strong corroboration for the existence of a God of the type normally associated with Christianity.
Structure of the Argument
The argument compares a priori epistemic probabilities in a Bayesian structure in terms of how likely theism and atheism a priori (i.e, before experiments) would have predicted the result of the experiment on an epistemic basis. All the italicized terms will eventually be defined, either in this post or some later one. Then the Bayesian model of revising epistemic probabilities can be applied to see which option (atheism or theism) is more probable and by approximately how much.
If you believe that one side or the other is absolutely certain, no amount of Bayesian manipulation can alter that. But that means you are convinced that the other side is absolutely impossible, But to know that, you would either need to be able to show deductively that such is impossible or would have to know absolutely everything that can possibly be known. And considering that theism is the belief that there is at least one such being exists, it would make you a god, and therefore a theist.
Possibility and Impossibility
There are three types of possibility (and therefore the same three types of impossibility). The first is logical possibility, which deals with whether something violates a law of logic. "This car is both black and not-black" is a logical impossibility, because it violates the law of non-contradiction. "The moon is made of green cheese" is logically possible, even though it is false, because there is no law of logic violated by that statement. Statements that are logically possible have a definite truth value (they are either true or false), but we may not know what that value is.
The second is epistemic possibility. An epistemic possibility is something that could be true "for all we know". If we don't know, we can theoretically assign a credence value based on our own intuition of how likely (expressed as a number between 0 and 1, with 0 meaning no credence and 1 being complete credence) the statement is to be true.
The third idea is metaphysical possibility. A metaphysical possibility is often associated with things that can legitimately take different values at different times, like the flip of a coin or the roll of a die. Such an event might be predictable if you know every variable involved (the position of the coin or die before the toss, the force and direction of the vector tossed, height above the surface, etc.), but no one has all that information. For this argument, we will not deal with metaphysical possibilities. We will focus on epistemic possibilities (and probabilities) but the arguments apply just as well if we are talking about the probability of a logical possibility being true.
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