God Joins the Ranks of Things You’ll Probably Need College to Understand

Perhaps you’ve read this recent post by Bentham’s Bulldog, a brilliant, thoroughly wonderful person from what I can tell:

The Ultimate Guide To The Anthropic Argument

And this older post:

God Best Explains The World

Both posts are rigorous and authoritative. They also depend on a great deal of prior knowledge and cognitive aptitude to understand. But they claim that if you can follow them the natural conclusion is that god exists and he’s perfect.

I read them. I looked up unfamiliar terminology and concepts. I re-read philosophically contorted passages that are intended for, one has to assume, other philosophers.

The result is I can’t make sense enough of the argument to refute or confirm it. I’d guess >90% of Americans can’t. And I’m sure the well-intentioned author understands this since he must know, based on the circumstances he finds himself in, how exotic his intellect is.

Most of us have become grudgingly numb to our own ignorance of how important things work because the things’ explanations are out of our cognitive reach (AI, climate change, quantum physics, the internet, etc.). Now, through principles that fit this criteria, a talented philosopher is arguing that god exists and is perfectly good and right and we can know this is so through reason. The philosopher willingly provides an explanation but it’s complex and full of concepts and formulations that are impenetrable without the benefit of unusual mental agility and a remarkable amount of study. So I and others like me are reduced to accepting the argument on faith, which means “believing” in God without being able to explain why we do so.

This state of affairs makes me uneasy. A good but incomprehensible argument is largely indistinguishable from a bad one. And a fool is someone who does things for reasons they don’t understand, which is precisely what well-meaning experts are increasingly expecting of us. This gap in understanding must have something to do with ballooning skepticism of institutions and academic leadership. I think expert’s intentions are good and their ideas usually sound, but when they aren’t, this underlying lack of understanding leads to outsized resentment and blowback.

I don’t have the solution. All I can suggest is that if you’re smart and have a good idea that you believe should be widely shared, either 1) directly demonstrate its effects to such an overwhelming extent that people can comfortably put aside their inability to understand it or 2) apply more of your enviable cognitive resources to the idea’s most rudimentary explanation.