Why not deism?

[Inqwizitor]

I've read some Leibniz and Plantinga, and the rest is Wikipedia. :-) So all possible worlds exist. This would seem to go way beyond naturalism unless every possible world is causally independent of every other possible world. In that case, we must account for existential causality in each possible world. If something is a causally necessary existent in a possible world, then all causally necessary existents are actual. But then we are just pushing contingency to all possible worlds — what is causally necessary in one world is not causally necessary in another. Wouldn't there still need to be something metaphysically necessary to actualize all possible worlds?

The whole talk about necessity vs contingency can be tricky especially when positing something like modal realism, but the way I look at it is all possible worlds are actualized by necessity because, per the reasoning behind modal realism, you can't have a possible world that is not actual.

If they are spatiotemporally isolated from one another, it does not mean that all these possible worlds aren't part of the same superset world. There is one ultimate actual world in which all these possible local worlds are subsets of, and if they are contingent, then they are contingent on that ultimate world.

The main reason I hold to this view is because I'm a big PSR guy. Why this specific world rather than some other specific world cries for an explanation that traditional theism/deism fails to answer.

It's a really interesting concept; I think it is way more ambitious than classical deism, which really only tries to establish that this world has a reason for its existence, and not really much more than that, unless I'm missing something. I'm thinking of what Antony Flew finally agreed to accept in his latter years: a very, very minimalist "god" — so basic that the word and its connotations could not really be applied to it. There is also the question of teleology; if all possible worlds exist, perhaps teleology is moot.

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That article reminds me the Kantian phenomena/noumena distinction. We can see some things, but we don't know the intrinsic nature of things.

I'm curious how something that necessarily exists is in line with naturalism? Is that like the block theory of the universe?

@BrianSoddingBoru4 — what's the KSA?

'Kalam Stupid Argument', my pet name for the Kalam Cosmological Argument.

Boru

Oh, OK. I'm guessing you're not too impressed with Aquinas, either, then.

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Atheism is an amorphous description of a lack of belief in a god or gods. It could mean that someone has no faith in a religious idea about what a god or gods means, or it could be a philosophical conviction of some kind. 

Something I'm curious about is why deism is virtually non-existent nowadays. There are arguments for the existence of "God", that actually, in the end, don't amount to much more than a hypothetical Prime Mover, or "something" — we don't know what — that is the source of reason, volition and material phenomena. 

Is deism pointless or even dishonest, because it's asserting something as knowledge that we cannot know? Did you ever seriously consider it instead of atheism? Or is there any practical difference?

I think if many atheists if they had to take a position on the God question, they would likely be deists of some sort, just like most nones subscribe to conceptions of God like that. 

Instead they prefer to not take a position as all, prefer to lack a belief one way or the other. They see no real point in believing one way or the other, no relevance in their lives, so to believe in such a trivial conception of god, is as unimportant as having a position on your marital status.

Doesn't truth have its own sort of value, outside practical effect? Are all atheists strict pragmatists? The peripatetics acknowledged a prime mover but in a deistic way, with no practical purpose for them other than contemplation of existence.

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I think one motive for deism is an objection to the "brute fact" idea. Nature is, just because it is. The rational mind looks for the explanation for things, and is motivated by the desire for reasonable explanations.

Yes, but those reasonable explanations do not need to include the supernatural, and the position of "we don't have a reasonable explanation YET" should be acceptable. However, there seem to be many people that can't accept "yet" (basically because of insecurity/fear) so we end up with supernatural. 

Eventually supernatural explanations can get excluded with time.

I get the "god of the gaps" thing. There is a difference between positing something supernatural as a cause of something natural and why that's bad philosophy. Nature has its own causes. The question is, what causes nature, considered simply, rather than its particulars. The naturalist answer is, "it just is." It's a brute fact. A lot of people, myself included, find this anti-rational. I think the "all possible natural worlds exist" argument is a really intriguing way of getting around this problem.

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Atheism is an amorphous description of a lack of belief in a god or gods. It could mean that someone has no faith in a religious idea about what a god or gods means, or it could be a philosophical conviction of some kind. 

For me, my atheism is nothing more than not being convinced god exist, any gods.

My reasons for not being convinced, is that theists, deists, pantheists, etc, have continually failed to provide demonstrable evidence and valid and sound logic to support their theistic claims.

Something I'm curious about is why deism is virtually non-existent nowadays. There are arguments for the existence of "God", that actually, in the end, don't amount to much more than a hypothetical Prime Mover, or "something" — we don't know what — that is the source of reason, volition and material phenomena. 

None of the arguments for the existence of god, hold up to scrutiny, they are ALL fallacious and flawed. This goes for: Kalam cosmological argument, teleological arguments, ontological arguments, etc.

None of them succeed in doing what they are meant to. What they are really meant to do, is give the believer a seemingly rational sounding support for their unsupported beliefs.

I think the strictly deistic kinds of arguments were not meant for a religious purpose originally. They were later rediscovered and co-opted, though. The cosmological argument dates from ancient Greece when religion was a mythical, experiential and imaginative endeavour, whereas philosophy was the intellectual, rational and academic attempt to describe what reality actually is. The "god of the philosophers" was a simple source of existence, and it was not worshipped, at least not directly. I'm thinking mostly of the Aristotelian school. Islam and Christianity later fused philosophy and religion and law/morality, or at least tried to (with mixed success) whereas the pagans had kept them separate matters.

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Why not pastafarianism?

Haha. Too obviously contrived.  

But hey, if all possible worlds exist, the FSM is out there, somewhere! It sounds delicious, by the way.  (I swear, I'm not being ironic).