So I’m doing a blog debate with deliberationunderidealcond5105, which will be posted on both of our blogs. I explained that I just don’t do live debates, as I’ve spelled out time and time again on the YouTube channel, because I don’t find them to be worthwhile. There’s too much emphasis on “gotcha” and word games, plus the time constraints, so I just don’t do them.

This is also going to be posted on his blog, which you can find here. It’s being done specifically that way to prevent any hanky panky, not that I’m accusing him of doing so, but it’s always wise to do your due diligence.

This will be his opening statement and my response. No clue how often these will come out, whenever we get done, I suppose. It’s not like these things need to be a rush, it’s just two people hashing out points, and anyone who wishes to comment, please feel free to do so.

There are two things the determine the quality of a hypothesis: first, its prior probability—how initially likely it is before you gather evidence—and second, its explanation of the evidence. If we’re trying to figure out if some person cheated in poker, we’d start by looking if it’s plausible that they might cheat. Because cheating in poker is a more intrinsically probable explanation than that a demon made someone get lucky, we should think, if someone gets ridiculous luck, they cheated. Next, we’ll look at the evidence for their cheating—looking at how lucky they got. When figuring out whether theism is true, we should do the same thing; look at whether it’s initially plausible and then whether it explains evidence. My core argument is that theism is a very initially plausible hypothesis and that it is good at explaining lots of the data.

Plausibility is not really worthwhile if you’re trying to figure out what’s actually going on. As everyone knows, I care only about truth, not faith, not fee-fees, only demonstrable truth in the real world. I don’t care if Bigfoot is plausible, I care if Bigfoot is real. Arguing that Bigfoot could exist doesn’t mean that Bigfoot does exist. Therefore, these kinds of plausibility arguments don’t really get you anywhere. What you really need to bring to the table in these instances is evidence. Verifiable, demonstrable evidence that everyone  can look at freely without having to hold a particular belief in any position first. In the given example of cheating at poker, the question isn’t would person X cheat if given the opportunity, it’s are they actually cheating in the game in question? Certainly, you can speak to their character, if you demonstrably know anything about it, but that doesn’t show that anything is going on in this specific moment. The odds that they could cheat are not the same as the actuality that they are cheating. It’s important to recognize that these are two completely separate things.

What makes a hypothesis good? Well, being simple and not having arbitrary limits. Before we discovered that the speed of light was real, we were justified in thinking that there was no speed of light because it was a limit–and those need explanations. Similarly, it would be irrational to posit that space just ends at some point, for no reason. Theism is a good view for the same reason evolution is: it’s very inherently plausible and it explains lots of other thing

That’s not really workable though. Simple doesn’t mean true and “arbitrary limits”, perhaps not the “arbitrary” part, but there have to be limits based on what we have reasonable evidence to support. When we’re talking about reality, there are inherently going to be limits. You can’t talk about magic unless you have demonstrable evidence to back it up. I use “invisible, intangible, universe-creating pixies” a lot as an example, which is a Matt Dillahunty creation that just caught on, but I cannot use them as a reasonable explanation for anything unless I can show that they exist first. It is not reasonable to invent an explanation in your head and say “X did it!” because the idea makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. There are going to be limits, based on what we can reasonably infer to be true, based on existing evidence. Theism and evolution are nothing alike because evolution is built on mountains of evidence, whereas theism is built on nothing but bald supposition. Paleontology, comparative anatomy,  biogeography, embryology, molecular biology and many, many more, all lend credence to the undeniable fact that evolution happened, and continues to happen in the real world.  As Theodosius Dobzhansky said, “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” You can’t get to anything similar with theism. You just can’t.

This brings me to my first main argument--theism is an extremely simple hypothesis.  It posits just one fundamental thing: unlimited goodness.  A single being of unlimited goodness is God.  And goodness doesn’t break down into simpler units--goodness is irreducible.  When you say something is good you’re not describing the natural features of something--how much it weighs, what color it is, or anything else about its physical properties--you’re describing something fundamental
about it, namely, whether it’s good.  So goodness is fundamental.  But any theory that takes an unlimited amount of a fundamental thing is a very simple theory.  Thus, theism posits just one thing--perfection--which makes it a very good theory.

Except it isn't. Theism isn't simple at all. It posits, entirely without evidence, that an immensely powerful, in fact, all powerful, entity exists and did, somehow, perform creative acts that are not remotely demonstrable. There is no reason to presume that this entity exists at all, outside of "it sounds good to me!" Yet can't I say the same thing about "invisible, intangible, universe-creating pixies"? If I were to say that I got some kind of emotional high from  believing that, would that give it any credence whatsoever or demonstrate that it is true? Of course not. Here, we see the real problem behind religion. Everything that was said is just an empty claim, based on emotion, not demonstrable fact. Who says that God is a single being of unlimited goodness? This is a definition that has just been invented. In the real world, you don't just get to invent definitions of real things. We know what a cow is like, only because we have observed real cows. People cannot declare that cows have wings because they would be wrong. Cows demonstrably do not. So how can they make claims about what God is like without a real god to look at and make these observations? Theism is positing things which are not demonstrably so. In fact, it is just something that they made up. This makes it a terrible theory. It's just a bunch of wild-assed assertions.

For many years, I was a confident atheist.  But as an atheist, there were certain things that I felt I couldn’t explain--things that theism are naturally explained.  So here, I’ll talk about 4 of the various
facts that are best explained by theism, that really kept me up at night when I was a confident atheist.  As an atheist, I began to feel like a denier of evolution, having to sweep facts under the rug that are well-explained by the alternative, simple hypothesis.  The more I studied philosophy, the more of these puzzles I found, where I felt like some new deep problem emerged, that was impossible to solve absent theism.

Your feelings don't matter. A lot of people have a real problem saying "I don't know". The idea makes them uncomfortable, but their discomfort doesn't change actual reality. This is why faith is irrelevant because faith doesn't point to anything demonstrably real. If we don't know what caused a thing, we don't get to make something up because it makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside. That is not a rational way to live your life. There are no facts that are best explained by theism, only things that make theists emotionally comforted. Once you understand that theism is just claims and no evidence provided for those claims, the whole thing collapses like a house of cards. The second that you start to deny demonstrable reality, which is exactly what you are doing if you deny evolution, then you've lost. Game over, time for everyone to go home. I've heard the same thing from Flat Earthers who just can't bring themselves to accept the demonstrable reality because it makes them feel bad. As I said before, your feelings don't matter and if this entire debate is going to be about what you feel, or what provides you comfort, then don't bother. Nobody cares.

First, we have unbelievably complex and finely-tuned laws and constants.  Think about the laws of physics--they’re these complicated equations with all these numbers.  We happened to get one of the sets of laws of physics that produces something interesting.  But the vast majority of possible fundamental laws would produce nothing interesting.  In fact, there are an infinite number of fundamental laws much simpler than ours that would produce nothing interesting--all particles could move in a circle at 1 mile per hour, or 2, or 3, all the way up to infinity: particles could all go right,
or left, or in a square, or triangle, or rectangle, or pentagon, or any of the other infinite shapes.  Each of these laws are much simpler than hours.

Except we don’t. This is the problem that we always see in these discussions. “I don’t understand it, therefore God!” That is an irrational position to hold. It is a purely emotional one. It is the assertion that “God”, this thing that nobody can demonstrate is real, did things that are unverifiable, simply because it strokes the egos of those who believe it. Instead of “I don’t understand it, let’s go look for a real explanation,” we get people who just want to invent something in their heads that provides comfort, but comfort isn’t reality. It might allay fears, but that doesn’t make it true. So far, and I can only respond to what I’ve responded to since I haven’t read any further than this, this comes off as a giant appeal to emotion. “I really want it to be true!” Even if everything that he’s said is true, which it’s not, you still haven’t gotten one step closer to any gods. God is just an assertion and assertions don’t mean anything without corroboratory evidence.

Simpler laws are more inherently likely.  But if there are an infinite number of laws that are likelier than ours, then our laws must have a prior probability of zero!  If an infinite number of things are more
likely then some event, then that event can’t have anything above 0% probability.  So that means that whatever the fundamental laws are, they will have a prior probability of zero.  Only theism can explain
something this improbable, for we’d expect a God to create laws that exhibit complexity.

Notice that this continues to be nothing but assertions. “It seems to me” isn’t reality. “I don’t get it, therefore God” doesn’t demonstrate that any gods of any kind are actually real. This is why philosophy is the completely wrong tool for the job because there is no ability to demonstrate anything in philosophy. You can only assert things but asserting things doesn’t get you to objective reality, only to the neurons firing inside of someone’s head. If this is just  going to be “it seems to me” repeated over and over again, then I don’t know how worthwhile this is. I don’t care what seems to you. I care what is demonstrably true in the real world that we all share. “I like this idea” doesn’t mean the idea is true. Appeals to emotion fail 100% of the time in any rational discussion.

Positing a multiverse doesn’t help you here because a multiverse is just a set of laws that produce a bunch of universes.  But why did we get one of the fundamental laws that produce a bunch of universes rather than some other fundamental laws?  This just pushes the problem
back a step to the question of why there are the laws that generate a multiverse--something which will again have a prior probability of zero.

I’m not positing anything because I don’t have to. This is a very common thing among a lot of people, religious and otherwise, where they assert that any  position, any belief, that they can possibly invent, if it makes them feel good inside, it has to be better than admitting that they don’t have a rational answer and continuing to look. Again, this is just an appeal to emotion, not to intellect. I don’t care what you want to be true. I care only what you can demonstrate is true, to present data that can be objectively examined by anyone. If you can’t do it, then you’re not going to get anywhere. Other religions are doing the same thing you’re doing. “I don’t get it, therefore Allah!” “I don’t get it therefore Krishna!” “I don’t get it, therefore the Flying Spaghetti Monster!” At least people aren’t serious about the last one. Desperately hunting for an answer that makes you feel good doesn’t make that a legitimate answer. There are things that we don’t know, things that we may never know. That’s just the way it goes. Whether that makes you comfortable or not is entirely irrelevant.

Even on top of the improbability of laws producing anything interesting, have very narrowly finely-tuned constants.  If you tweaked the strength of gravity by a tiny bit, or the strong nuclear force, or the cosmological constant, life couldn’t have arisen, nor
could any complex structures.  As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes “The initial entropy of the universe must have been exceedingly low. According to Penrose, universes “resembling the one in which we live” (2004: 343) populate only one part in 10^10^123 of
the available phase space volume.”  So even once you have laws roughly like ours, the odds that you’d get the force of the laws of physics being in the right range and early conditions of the universe be conducive to life is incredibly low--less than 1 in 10^10^123--that’s
more than googolplex.  There’s also fine-tuning for the laws--delete any of the four fundamental laws of physics and no life could have arisen, as Robin Collins has showed.  So we lucked out getting a set of fundamental laws with a zero percent prior probability, which
exhibit complexity, fine-tuning for their strengths, and fine-tuning for the conditions of the universe. Theism is the only view that can explain that.  If you’re committed to atheism, this will be a deep mystery, one which goes away instantly if you embrace theism.

Except it doesn’t because theism is just  claims. How can you demonstrate that the god that you’re talking about is your God? How can you know anything demonstrable about your God at all? Remember, faith and fee-fees mean nothing. You mean nothing. Reality is what reality is and if we’re trying to find what reality is actually like, feelings be damned, then your comfort is entirely irrelevant. This is really the problem. Most theists, and I can only speak by experience, both being a theist myself once and the thousands and thousands I’ve talked to over the last 40+ years, they’re not looking for truth. They’re looking for comfort. They want their feelings coddled. They want to wake up and feel good, but that doesn’t mean anything. Saying “all of my questions are answered by my religious beliefs because I’ve just arbitrarily plugged this imaginary thing called God in and it makes me feel good to believe it”, that doesn’t mean anything. All of the “odds” talk that you’re doing still doesn’t get you to any demonstrable gods. This is why I’ve pointed it out repeatedly on the channel that when theists use “God done it!” they are just substituting “God” for “I don’t know” so they can pretend that they do know, but they still don’t. Inventing an explanation doesn’t make that explanation true. You’ve got to be able to back it up and in my 40+ years of doing this, not one theist has gotten anywhere close. Leave your faith and your fee-fees and your “it seems to me” behind and provide evidence that any of the claims you’re making are actually true. If you can’t do that, I don’t know what to tell you.

The second great mystery is psychophysical harmony.  Theism best explains why the physical and the mental go together in harmonious ways.  Think about all the ways the physical could pair with the mental.  Here’s one way: every time any system has any integrated information, there’s a conscious experience that scales in intensity to the amount of integrated information.  That would be much simpler than the pairing in our universe but would produce none of the rich, complex, consciousnesses exhibited in our universe.

Yet theism doesn’t explain anything. Theism just makes claims. “This is what we want to be true!” That doesn’t make it true. Theism is just “we made up a bunch of things that we like so we’re going to believe it because it makes us happy!” Nobody cares about that. If you want to demonstrate a god, which is what you said you could do, then you need to leave your beliefs behind and walk me through the specific steps that you took to verify that a god, any god, is actually real. Not “it seems to me”. Not “it makes me happy”. TRUE! Because if you’re going to talk about experiences, and that tends to come up, but the religious can only assert things about their experiences, they cannot demonstrate that their interpretations of their experiences ever happened as they describe. As I’ve said before, I’ve had tons of conversations with the religious who claim that they’ve had experiences with God. Great, how do you know that? They’ve got some experience that they cannot explain and at some point, they just scream “therefore God!” as if that proves anything. There is a massive leap of illogic between “here is this thing that happened”, which is often not demonstrable to begin with, and “here’s the meaning that I want to attach to it” without showing how they got from one to the other. They ignore all of the other possibilities because that’s the one that makes them feel good. That doesn’t make it true.

By far the simplest ways that the physical could pair with the mental would have it produce nothing of value.  Then, even if you get the ability to think and have a complex inner life, it’s still a vast coincidence that it interacts with the world.  Epiphenomenalism, the
view that consciousness is causally non-efficacious, is much simpler than consciousness interacting with the world--so it’s a vast coincidence that consciousness can affect the world, making me move my arm and move my lips to talk about consciousness.  Then, even after consciousness interacts with the world, it’s super improbable that it would pair in any harmonious way.  Every time consciousness affects the world there is some  physical state--call it A--which is a state of the brain, and A will affect some mental state--call it B--which will be some conscious experience like a thought, and that will affect some physical state--call it C.  But you could switch out B with any other mental state and the world would be physically the same.  Evolution
can’t explain this, because if B was replaced with some other mental states, our mental and physical lives would be in radical disharmony, but the world would be physically the same.  So then it’s a vast coincidence--why do the physical and the mental pair in such a harmonious way.

The simplest way that gets you where you want to go. Whether you like it or not, we don’t have all the answers. We will probably never have all the answers. How you feel about that is entirely irrelevant. Reality is what it is. In order to actually have a credible answer, you have to be able to show that said answer is true. Of course, all answers are provisional because we learn new things all the time. It’s entirely possible that tomorrow, we might find something that proves gravity is wrong. It’s unlikely, given how well our current models have worked for a very long time, but we still test the force of gravity, just in case. We could discover that we are completely wrong about the speed of light. Until we do though, we go with what demonstrably works, with the understanding that  future data can change our conclusions. Most people, I find, are looking for the eternal. Rules and ideas that will never, ever change so that they don’t have to think about it anymore. They want certainty in a world that is inherently uncertain. That’s a failure in their epistemology. We really need to do away with the idea that our ideas are automatically right because we were brilliant enough to dream them up. Sorry, that’s not how it works. You are proving that the real and the mental are not harmonious. There are tons of different religions out there, all of which have different ideas about reality. There are 45,000+ distinct sects of Christianity, all of which disagree with each other. Where is the  harmony there? Please explain.

Let me be clear on what the three challenges are:

Why are there complex conscious states at all.  The simplest pairings would produce nothing interesting of valuable, just very basic experience.

Oh good, an appeal to common sense. “It seems to me” doesn’t mean anything. Here, you are just interpreting things in a way that you find comforting, not in a way that is demonstrably true. “Complex” is a wiggle word. Complex according to who? Complex in what demonstrable way? All of the words that you’re using are wiggle words. Interesting. Valuable. These do not demonstrate anything objective. It’s just feelings and feelings don’t matter.

Why does the mental interact with the physical.

Because the mental IS physical. You are nothing but the electro-chemical output of the 3-lb sack of meat in your head. I know that makes a lot of people unhappy, but too bad. Your emotions mean nothing to objective reality. If you damage that meat sack, then who you are demonstrably fundamentally changes, depending on the amount of damage done and where you do it. It can completely overwrite your personality, it  can delete some or all of your memories, there are split-brain patients out there where one side of the brain is a theist and the other side is an atheist. Yes, I can provide evidence and examples for all of this, I’m trying not to go too crazy, but if you want those citations, just ask and I will provide. Now, demonstrate that the intellect isn’t a product of the physical human brain. I don’t think you can do it. Just because you don’t like the idea, that doesn’t make the idea untrue.

Why does it interact in a harmonious way so that, for instance, the thing that causes me to move my arm is my thought “I want my arm to move,” rather than some other mental state.

Because that’s how you evolved. Keep in mind that there are all kinds of involutary, autonomous things that will make you move your arm entirely beyond your direct mental control. There are diseases like Tardive Dyskinesia and chorea that result in involuntary movements that can only be controlled through medication, if at all. Are you assuming that this physical pill that you put in your mouth can somehow affect your incorporeal mind? We can measure the electrical impulses in the brain, all the way down the nerves to the muscles, yet this “my mind is non-corporeal” is entirely undemonstrated. It seems that you don’t really understand basic brain chemistry.

Evolution can’t explain any of these things.  It can’t explain complex conscious states because that’s about the fundamental laws--trying to explain why there are physical states that can generate complex conscious states is a bit like trying to explain gravity by evolution. For evolution to select for something it must be physically possible. That’s also why 2 is not explained.  3 isn’t explained by evolution because a disharmonious world--where you behave the same way but your thoughts are different--would produce the same kind of selection. Evolution cares about what you do, not what you think, and the puzzle here is explaining why what we think matches what we do.

Sure it can, you just don’t want it to. You, like most people, seemingly want to feel special, but you’re not. Humans are just animals and when we inevitably go extinct some day, which absolutely will happen, nobody is going to miss us. If aliens find our remains, we’ll be a biological curiosity, nothing more. This is the reality that you actually live in, like it or not. If humans had never evolved in this universe, then things would still be going on as they are because the functioning of the cosmos doesn’t depend on us. Stop reacting emotionally because so far, that’s really all that you’ve been doing. Nobody cares what you want to be true, only what actually is.

Similarly, even if you are a physicalist and think that the pairing between the mental and the physical is necessary, that doesn’t resolve the problem for the following reason.  Say that something is necessary
doesn’t explain the puzzle of why it’s a certain way when there are a lot of other ways it could be.  If you ask me why I keep getting royal flushes in poker and I say “because it’s necessary” that’s a bad explanation.  But thinking that consciousness is necessarily caused by
certain physical states doesn’t resolve the mystery--even if it’s necessary, it doesn’t explain why that, in particular, is necessary, whenthere are so many possible ways reality could be.

I’m a methodological naturalist because the natural is all that we have ever found any evidence for. In fact, I just had a discussion with a theist who claimed I would never accept evidence for the supernatural (or the non-material) and I asked what evidence for those things would even look like. He couldn’t come up with an answer. At  best, the supernatural or the non-material are just concepts and concepts aren’t real, except in the sense that they represent specific brain states within the mind of those considering them. If someone finds a way to objectively demonstrate the supernatural, I’ll believe it. So far though, no one has. It doesn’t matter what someone wants to be true, it only matters what is actually true. Interpretation really doesn’t matter and that seems to be all that you have.

The third mystery for the atheist is why we have a priori knowledge. A priori knowledge is the kind of knowledge that you don’t get exclusively through sense experience.  For instance, I can know that torture is wrong even if I haven’t seen any torture.  Every view will have to believe in a priori knowledge because in order to justify induction--the view that the future will be like the past--you have to think that worlds where the future is like the past are more likely.
But that can’t be determined through sense experience.  Both the theory that the laws of physics will work the same way tomorrow and the theory that they won’t and instead the universe will be replaced with a cucumber make the same predictions about what we’ve already
observed.  So if you think you’re justified in thinking the world won’t be replaced with a cucumber tomorrow, you need a priori knowledge.

We do? Since when. Granted, you’d need to provide an better example of such that stands up to critical scrutiny and if you want to provide that, we can revisit, but the example here is just nonsense. You were raised in a society where torture was considered to be wrong. You believe it  because you were indoctrinated into it from a young age. That’s how morals work, after all. It’s empathy mixed with enlightened self-interest. We don’t want to be tortured, so we don’t torture others, in hopes that other people will reciprocate. That’s how societies work. That’s how laws work. You don’t want someone to steal your stuff, so you, along with others, push to have stealing made illegal. A law is passed and hopefully applied equally to all, although we all know it doesn’t work that way. Saying “God says torture is wrong” doesn’t mean anything, aside from the fact that it’s demonstrably untrue. God, in the Bible, is perfectly fine with murder and torture and rape and slavery. There isn’t one place in the Bible where God or Jesus say “don’t keep other people as property”. Your god is kind of a dick. Yet today, most people, at least in the western world, accept that slavery is wrong, mostly because they don’t want to be slaves. God has nothing to do with it. This is not knowledge, this is belief.

But how does atheism account for it?  Here’s a plausible principle: for you to have knowledge of A on the basis of B it must be that A explains why B happens and that A makes B more likely.  If, for instance, I think there’s a chair because I see one, but I know I’m hallucinating, then I’m not justified, because I’d see the chair even
if there wasn’t one.  But this means that for us to be justified in having this a priori knowledge, they must explain why we have the intuitions about them.

Atheism doesn’t have to account for anything because atheism is the answer to one and only one question. “Do you believe in any gods?” If you answer yes, you’re a theist. If you answer anything else, you’re an atheist. there is nothing to atheism but that. There are a number of secular solutions, secular humanism and the like, but I don’t necessarily agree with any of them and I’ve done videos on that if you want to go and look. However, I already answered this question. This is a matter of your own misconception, not any flaw in “atheism”. This is what you want to be true, not what demonstrably is. And yes, I can show that there is no such thing as objective morality, but that’s off-topic.

On a simple naturalistic account of reality, it can’t do that.  The fact that torture is wrong can’t move around atoms in your brain.  So therefore for you to have moral knowledge, your beliefs can’t just come from the physical behavior of the brain.  From this it follows
that there must be a generic faculty by which we can grasp the truth about morality, metaphysics, and induction--but that’s super unlikely on atheism while naturally explained by theism.

I already explained how it does. “Torture is wrong” isn’t a fact, no matter how much you wish it was. There are places you can go right now where torture is fine, according to the social morays of the culture. There are places in the Middle East that you can go right now, where throwing gay people off of roofs or mudering your daughters in an “honor” killing are perfectly acceptable. You can go to places in China where murdering your daughters is perfectly acceptable because they have less social value than sons. You may not like those things, and I, being from a similar culture, agree with you, but what you like isn’t reality, just  because you like it. This is still fee-fees and fee-fees don’t matter. There is no demonstrable moral knowledge, just what you wish was true, demanded as true, because it makes you feel good to think that it is. That doesn’t make it true.

Let’s consider this applied to moral knowledge specifically, but as I say, it applies to all a priori knowledge.  If you have moral knowledge then the moral facts must explain your moral beliefs.  But moral facts can’t move atoms--the fact that torture is wrong can’t
move atoms in your brain.  So then you must have some other way to know the moral facts by directly grasping them with your mind, but only theism explains that.

Nobody has moral knowledge of anything as I’ve already explained. Therefore, I’ll just move on.

My last great mystery is why I, in particular, exist.  Suppose that God exists.  Well then we’d expect God to create every possible person.  God is maximally good and would do the best thing.  Creating someone is good if you can give them a good life--which God can do--so
God would create all possible people.  This means that if theism is true, then it would be guaranteed that I’d exist.

Again, all just assertions. I’m not going to suppose anything. I care what is actually real, not “what if”. Give me what  demonstrably is. You are just making assertions about this imaginary father figure in the sky that you can show no reason whatsoever to think is remotely true. What you want doesn’t matter. If I’m caught in an avalanche and a huge boulder is rolling toward me and I can’t escape, imagining that the boulder is suddenly not affected by gravity and will float away harmlessly into the sky, that doesn’t mean anything. I’m going to get smooshed. That’s how actual reality works. You don’t get to declare that your God is real and here’s all the things you “know” about him, without showing that your claims are demonstrably so in objective reality. I am going to call you out on this every damn time that you do it. We also don’t play “if” is “because” games because those are dumb. God exists only if God exists and the only way to demonstrate that God exists is to provide evidence that God exists. God is not an automatic placeholder for anything that you don’t understand or like about the real world. That’s not how rational people work.

In contrast, if atheism is true, it’s very unlikely that you’d exist.The number of possible people was shown to be Beth 2 by David Lewis--and I think it’s even more.  Beth 2 is a really big infinity. No atheist--other than Lewis with his modal realism, and other spin-offs, all of which are very implausible--has ever had a view on
which there are Beth 2 people that exist.  Even if the universe is infinitely big, even if there’s an infinite multiverse, that would still only have aleph null people, much less than Beth 2.  So then on atheism, only 0% of possible people would exist, which makes my
existence in particular extremely improbable.

Atheism isn’t true or false. It is the state of being unconvinced by the claims made by the religious. It isn’t a positive position. It is the answer to one and only one question. Why is this so hard for the religious to figure out? There is an upper limit to the number of possible unique individuals, just given the number of unique combinations of our DNA, but that doesn’t make any of them impossible to exist, other than those whose DNA makes life impossible. Two people with identical DNA are still individuals because their life experiences make them that way. It is possible that sometime in history, there was someone on the planet that was genetically identical to you. That doesn’t make them you. Sorry, but most of the things that you’ve said here really come off like ego. You want to be special and that colors your perception of reality. Your perception is irrelevant though. Only reality matters.

Now I know what you’re thinking: where are all the people?  Well I didn’t say God would make everyone in this universe.  My view is God would create every possible person and put them in the universe that’s
best for their moral and spiritual development.

I was not thinking any of that and I don’t care about your opinions of what an undemonstrated imaginary man in the sky might do. I don’t care about your views, I care about your evidence and so far, no surprise, you haven’t had any. In fact, you have repeatedly demonstrated that God is just a concept you have in your head, a place to park your own personal emotional desires and say “God done it!” Sorry, I have no reason to think that God did anything until you can demonstrate in some verifiable way that God is real. You might want to get on that.

Why think that the existence of more people is more likely?  Two reasons.  First, it follows from the straightforward probabilistic reasoning I gave before.  If there are more people, it’s likelier that I’d be one of them.

It’s not all about you. You are not important. This is just ego talking and ego doesn’t matter either.

Secondly, if you deny this, you get absurd results.  For instance, you get the result that the world will 
probably end soon, because if a universe with more people is no more likely to have me, while a universe with fewer people guarantees that I’d be earlier in the
universe, then I should think the universe won’t last long.  This is called the doomsday argument and can be shown to follow from any view of anthropics that doesn’t say that more people existing is more likely.

Now you’re just piling all of your own personal wishes and dreams on things, which is not rational. “Absurd results” in the sense of results that you do not personally approve of, are irrelevant. I care about true results. The existence of the universe has nothing at all to do with people. Stop assuming that humanity is automatically special. We are an irrelevant species on an irrelevant planet in an irrelevant solar system in an irrelevant galaxy, one among hundreds of billions. The idea that everything that exists is there only for us is some of the most ludicrous, egotistical thinking ever. We don’t matter!

From this, one can get even crazier results.  Imagine Adam and Eve are in the garden and considering having sex.  They don’t know that they’re the first people.  So they think “if the first people have many offspring, it’s super unlikely that we’d be the first two people,
because we could be any of the many offspring.”  Suddenly, God tells them that they’re the first two people.  Now, because they’re the first two people, and that’s unlikely if the first people have many
offspring, they get good extremely strong evidence that that the first people will not have many offspring, and consequently that they won’t have many offspring.  Thus, they can be confident that, for instance, if God tells them he’ll make many offspring from them unless they get
a royal flush in poker, that they’d get a royal flush, because they’ve already gotten super strong evidence that they won’t have many offspring.  But clearly, this is crazy.  The fact that they’ll have lots of offspring unless they get some outcome in poker doesn’t make
it likelier that they’ll get the outcome in poker.  If you  buy this reasoning, then you’ll think that in such a scenario, Adam and Eve can avoid hunting by having sex unless a deer drops dead at heir feet,and that because it’s so unlikely that they’ll have many offspring,
probably a deer will drop dead at their feet.  But this is absurd!

Adam and Eve are a ludicrous concept. There never was a single man and a single woman. In fact, for a very long time, modern humans (homo sapiens sapiens) were still interbreeding with australipithicenes, Neanderthals and other hominins. There never was an instant where this being was suddenly “human” and other things were not. It’s when groups of creatures started looking a whole lot more like X than Y that we started referring to them as X. It’s a spectrum, no matter how much that hurts the feelings of a lot of people. Then you just  get back into “if God does X” and that’s entirely useless without a good reason to think God exists.

So the challenge is this: the arguments I’ve given show that one should think that every possible person gets created, because only that makes it likely that I, in particular, would get created.  If only a few billion or trillion or even a small infinity people get created, the odds I, in particular, would be created would be zero. What is the atheistic view on which every possible person gets created?

Everything that you’ve said has been wishes and dreams and no evidence presented for any of it. “It seems to me” is irrelevant. I am not going to go into this with your assumptions intact. I expect you to be able to back all of this up with something other than “I like it!” So far, that’s really all you’ve done and I have debunked every last bit of it. You might not like that, you might not agree, but the whole point of a debate is to convince the other side that what you are saying is true. It’s not to make claims, it’s to provide evidence. So far, you haven’t done it. I’m certainly willing to give you the opportunity to do better in the future, but you are not debating with someone who is going to automatically take your faith seriously. I don’t care about your faith. I care about your facts. How about we focus on that from here on out?