I’ve made the point before that really, Christians and Atheists are only arguing over one single thing: whether the ground of all being has thoughts and feelings or not. Otherwise atheists already agree there is a ground of all being, and that everything that exists does have a causal explanation without thoughts or feelings at the bottom of anything. The only thoughts and feelings are ours (inclusive of other animals and robots in varying degrees; and of course alien life in distant galaxies, but none of that is around here). I’ve also demonstrated many times that Christianity is just a weird conspiracy theory as irrational as every other—and that atheists do not (contrary to ignorant Christian propaganda) “believe in nothing.”

And one of the things I’ve been focusing on the last ten years or so is the methodology of error that keeps all people caught in a delusion trapped there—the methods, it turns out, that are the same no matter whether the delusion is flat earth, antivaxx, red pill, lizard people…or Christianity (or Islam or Cao Dai or any religion whatever, secular or supernatural).

What Are We Talking About?

Atheism of course is just a position on a single question (God) while Christianity is a far more specific position (a very specific god). Atheists can be supernaturalists (like some Taoists and Buddhists) or adopt all manner of weird delusional worldviews that just “happen” not to have gods in them. But most educated atheists are scientific naturalists, meaning, they reject the supernatural and anything that fails scientific tests (which is not the same thing as believing only what science has proved—that’s Christian propaganda again; no one actually believes science is the “only” source of knowledge). And most naturalists are physicalists (almost 70% of all godless philosophers, for example; and 80% of specialists in theory of mind). Physicalism is the most promising world model. It is the simplest theory (positing the fewest ad hoc entities; in fact, it derives all phenomena and hypotheses from already known physics); it is the most precedented theory (everything—literally everything, without exception—dug to the bottom has so far turned out to be just physics); and it has the widest explanatory scope, fitness, and power. It makes more sense of all observations together, and is contradicted by none, predicting even weird details successfully; whereas other views have to ignore evidence or make stuff up to fit (see Ten Ways the World Would Be Different If God Existed for a window into what this looks like).

And this really does reduce the question of what Christians and Atheists are arguing about to whether everything is just physics all the way down, or whether the ultimate ground of existence has thoughts and feelings, to the point that, when you dig all the way to the bottom, it’s actually thoughts and feelings at the bottom of it all. Everything else is minutiae. For example, Christians, being almost the oddest theists in history, have bizarre ideas about those grounding thoughts and feelings and who they belong to and the weird decisions he/it makes. But that’s all just a Fabulous Carriage. It still all comes down to “it has thoughts and feelings” on the one side and “it doesn’t” on the other.

How Christians Derail This Conversation to Avoid It

And once we realize that, a second realization arrives: that all arguments for this All Wise and Powerful Protomolecule fall into either of two bins. The first bin contains bullshit. Everything in there is an eye-rolling semantic game, or a turd of assertion(s) ignorant of existing science and history or other documented facts, and thus automatically refuted by any contact with logic or reality. I shall here dub all those arguments for God “Stupid Shit.” There’s a lot of stupid shit (like this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this). But in the other bin are real questions, which haven’t been conclusively sorted by the sciences (in which I include history and thus contemporary history, e.g. responsible journalism and all other competent fact-checking is a science). These arguments play on questions we really do need to answer, or have some idea of what the answer might be. They are important questions. Theists just exploit them to sell their tinfoil hats.

Often these bins get mixed together. For example, “you can’t explain consciousness, therefore God explains it” combines Stupid Shit (the fallacy of ignorance, that if we don’t know x, therefore we know it’s y) with a real question of moment: what does explain consciousness? If all indicators are pointing to physicalism (and they are), how could physicalism explain it? Theists will often play word games here (it happened in my debate with Inspiring Philosophy), resorting to another kind of Stupid Shit that I call the modal and possibiliter fallacies, to produce what amounts to a constantly shifting motte & bailey, a common device used by delusional people to defend their delusion against its contact with reality:

• The modal fallacy consists of confusing a modal argument (pr. mow-dl, for “mode”) with an empirical argument, and switching back and forth as needed. A modal argument pertains to possibility: the assertion “you can’t explain x observation” is formally refuted by “we can explain it,” in other words, to refute an asserted impossibility we need only prove an available possibility. We don’t have to prove that possibility probable. Because that isn’t what you said. You said impossible. And even just a possible thing disproves that.
• Caught, you might then move the goal posts and change your claim to “I meant, your explanation of that is improbable, therefore God is probable,” which is now a possibiliter fallacy, or possibiliter ergo probabiliter, “possibly; therefore probably.” Which is now an inverse modal fallacy: after falsely accusing us of confusing possibility with probability, you resort to yourself confusing possibility with probability. But the fact that one explanation, x, is improbable does not entail any other explanation, y, is probable.

So whether modal or possibiliter, it’s a fallacy. And fallacies are stupid. So you should know better.

For an example of that fallacy as deployed in resurrection apologetics, see my analysis of it as deployed once by Stephen Davis. The gist is to claim that if the total set of all logically possible explanations can be reduced to, say, ten things, and one of them (like a specific naturalist theory—there being five others still) is “improbable” (like, say, 20% likely), it “follows” (wink wink) that another of them (like a specific supernaturalist theory—there also being five others still) is “probable” (like, say, 80% likely). But that violates the Law of Excluded Middle. All five supernaturalist theories even together (much less individually) could well be 0.00001% likely, which is a million times less probable than the one you were claiming to be “improbable.” This is an inescapable mathematical fact—and thus stupid to deny.

For example, it could be that the evidence entails it is over 99% likely that one of the five naturalist theories is true. Even if each one is only about 20% likely on present evidence and thus every one by itself is “improbable,” that one of them is true is nevertheless well nigh 100% certain. Because ~20% + ~20% + ~20% + ~20% + ~20% ≈ 100%. So just because all five naturalist theories are improbable does not mean any supernaturalist theory is probable, or even probable enough to take seriously. Because the probability that it is naturalism is the sum of the probabilities of all possible naturalist explanations. And that means all—because logical validity requires leaving none out of this account (apologetics thus almost always operates by leaving things out—things that, when put back in, reverse the conclusion the apologist was trying to get). Even if we defend the least likely naturalist hypothesis—let’s say, something only 0.0001% likely to be true—if theism is 0.00001% likely, it is still ten times less likely. So even proving a theory “very improbable” does not get you to “therefore theism is probable.” It may be even less probable than what’s very improbable. And if your theory is less probable than something already improbable, then your theory is probably false, not “probably true.” But since most people are confused by how math works, Christians will exploit that.

Indeed, we cannot even say that something only 0.0001% likely is false. If we have only two options, and one is physically 0.0001% likely (“winning the lottery,” happening only one in every million buys) and the other is physically 0.00001% likely (“rigging the lottery,” happening only one in every ten million buys—in a corrupt country, say), and those are the only two explanations for how you took home a documented lottery payment, then the second option is ten times less likely than the first; and so the final epistemic probability that you won fair is close to 90%, and not 0.0001%; and that you rigged the lottery is only about 10%, not 0.00001%. So even if every option is “very improbable,” because one of the options logically necessarily must be true, its probability of being trus is not the physical probability of it occurring, but derives from the ratio between that and the physical probability of any of the other things happening instead.

I shouldn’t have to explain any of that. It’s annoying every time I have to. But Christian apologetics is almost entirely Stupid Shit like this that requires explaining basic sixth grade math to grown adults. The lesson is “but that’s improbable” is never a valid argument for any alternative—unless you can prove some other explanation more probable. That is, in fact, the only effective thing there is to do. And if you can’t do that, you’re done. If you keep arguing after that, you are Being Stupid (hence we get Formalized Gullibility as a Modern Christian Methodology and Three Common Confusions of Creationists). But this does go both ways. An atheist can try to believe nothing, to “suspend belief” in everything, but that’s actually impossible in practice—you have to make decisions, and your every decision hinges on assuming some thing is true that you were pretending five minutes ago you were “suspending” belief in. So atheists can be stupid too. It’s a human folly, not a distinctly supernaturalist one.

But I’ve covered that before (see Who Is an Atheist? and Misunderstanding the Burden of Proof, as well as Correcting 5 Mistakes Atheists Make About Epistemology). What I want to do today is move past this error-mode and follow the train of thought where it must lead.

If we accept that improbable things can be true, indeed even the most probably true (and as just demontrated, they can), and therefore Christians cannot argue “that’s improbable, therefore God” or “you can’t explain that, therefore God,” what remains is to ask what is a more probable explanation than God for all the things not yet “explained.” I put “explained” now in scare quotes to call attention to how the Christian’s stupid game plays out, whereby they switch at will between two different meanings of the word “explained,” the meaning that “the sciences have explained it,” i.e. we have proved an explanation assuredly enough true (e.g. all biological species arose from evolution by natural selection), and the meaning that “scientists have a variety of working explanations but haven’t proved which is true yet,” i.e. we “have explanations” but haven’t proved any of them yet. Of course the Christian is leaning on the second—God (least of all the weird Christian god) has not been proved “assuredly true” by any science either. So it is hypocritical to set a higher bar for naturalists than they accept for themselves. But that’s their stupid game. And I’m sick of stupid games.

I want to get to the other bin, the one not Full of Stupid. Christians keep wasting our time, like streetcorner loons, on The Stupid. But let’s steer away from that and go to the hip cafe across the street, where the few remaining marginally sane Christians agree with us on The Stupid and want to talk about unstupid things instead. Here we all agree that any explanation that works and has not been refuted with evidence is worth talking about—and everything else isn’t. So these Christians aren’t going to roll our eyes with hypocritical semantic dances around what it means to “have” an explanation for something. Rather, they want to take seriously what our best explanation is, and we’ll repay the courtesy by taking seriously what their best explanation is, and then test those two competing theories against each other on the metrics:

• Simplicity. How many unevidenced assumptions do we need to get it to work—and how improbable on all previous scientific and historical knowledge are those assumptions? Because if two theories have these assumptions, but one relies on more, or more improbable ones, it loses on this criterion to the other theory (a mathematically unavoidable fact).
• Precedent. How well does our explanation match and fit previously successful explanations of everything that has been “explained” in that other sense of already proved to a reasonable certainty? If we’ve dug a million holes and always found rocks at the bottom, the epistemic probability that these other holes we are digging will also have rocks at the bottom is far higher than that they will have candy there, or mysterious glowing orbs, or a talking dirt god.
• Evidence. How well does our explanation predict all the evidence we have—all, not some; and especially the weirdest or most peculiar details? Does our explanation perform well, or poorly? Do we have to make excuses for why it fails? Do we have to handwave and talk about mysteries as an excuse for why our theory fails to predict all the oddities we see? These are admissions of failure on this metric, not defenses against its failing. A theory that does better at this is simply more probable.

There is no other metric to win by (as I formally prove in chapter four of Proving History). These are it.

Who Wins?

Christians like to talk about winning debates because they believe in winning, not the truth. That is a defining feature of all delusions. Having a clinical delusion is like having a little homunculus in your head constantly steering you away from discovering the truth. Apologetics as a discipline and a practice is not about getting at the truth but defending a belief against the truth. It’s all about evasion. Evasion can take a direct form (leaving or avoiding a conversation altogether; siloing; filtering; getting angry and flipping the table, literally or figuratively, to avoid continuing a conversation) or an indirect form (changing the subject; moving the goal posts; straw manning; semantic maneuvering; fallacy-chasing; talking in circles; motte & bailey; etc.).

The last resort (albeit in result a common one) is simply lying. Lying about what someone said. Lying about what the facts are. Lying about what facts you checked. Lying by omission or false light. This is evasion because the entire point of the lie is to avoid the consequences of instead telling or facing the truth. If you lie about what someone argued, to refute some fake thing you pretend they said instead, you have thereby evaded what they actually argued—you have not rebutted it. You only pretended to.

But if we care about discovering the truth rather than “winning,” we can redefine winning more honestly as having the best case objectively rather than emotionally. An emotional win is creating the false appearance of having been right through emotional abuse and manipulation, like gaslighting, browbeating, chest pumping, pwn clipping, blustering—relying on projected confidence alone, rather than knowledge or legitimacy. This often relies on emotionally assertive language, mocking language, winning by attitude and pretense rather than logic or facts. But an objective win is when you actually had all the correct facts and your inferences were actually sound and valid and not fallacious. Because with that there is no way to be wrong, other than by improbable chance accident. For example, with all true facts and logic, you might reach a conclusion of admitted uncertainty about something—which is sufficient to refute an opponent’s assertions of certainty on it. This is a valid modal argument: prove a thing uncertain, and you have disproved another’s certainty. That does not require proving they are wrong; “we can’t know that’s true” is not “we know that’s false.” But proving you don’t know something still does mean you don’t know it.

Here I am aiming at more than “we don’t know God exists” but “we know it’s most probably physics all the way down,” which entails God does not exist (at least nowhere around here). I drew up the following diagram to capture the program this puts us on:

In the center is “known reality,” everything we’ve dug to the bottom of, through all the sciences and direct personal experience. That contains everything humanity knows is true to an effective certainty, including unknown things we know enough things about to an effective certainty. For example, we might not know exactly what happened to Flight 370 but we know it catastrophically crashed into the sea somewhere; and even if we didn’t know that, we’d know it wasn’t downed by gremlins or flew to the moon or slipped through a time warp on a failed mission to kill Hitler. So all this sort of stuff, stuff we know to a very high probability, is in that center circle. Around that central circle I have placed eight circles of unfinished programs in science; and at bottom, uncircled, a ninth catch-all category, of all that Stupid Stuff I mentioned that gets nowhere.

The first thing we learn from this is that, oddly, everything—literally everything—inside that center circle is all natural, in fact all physicalist; not a single instance of the supernatural. Which is why Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them. It is extremely improbable that all supernatural facts would so successfully and consistently “hide” from us, showing up only in legends from distant jungles and other conveniently isolated places where no real tests could prove them. There is a reason all UFO photos are blurry nonsense; and that miracles only show up in scams and fables. This is evidence that there aren’t any of these things. If Christianity were true, the world should look very different than this.

So Christianity loses on precedent. A lot. Indeed, catastrophically. Whereas physicalism wins—by lightyears. To try and “fix” this failed prediction by making excuses for why God (and, apparently, Satan and every other supernatural power and thing, up to and including human souls) deliberately hides all this evidence, you trade a tie on evidence for a catastrophic loss on simplicity. You already lost by adopting many improbable assumptions (supernatural cosmic monsters with oddly convenient and unprecedented properties and powers) but now you are sinking your case further by attributing to the superman you invented even stranger goals and motives than are humanly conceivable. If your theory has to become “God made sure to make the entire world look exactly like it would look if there was no God,” you have just invented a Cartesian Demon, the least probable explanation of anything. That is not a defense. That is a confession—that your God theory is too improbable to credit. Physicalism doesn’t have this problem.

Okay. So that’s bad. But maybe the stuff outside that circle can turn this around? Outside the circle is just those two bins I mentioned: Stupid Stuff; and real interesting philosophical questions.

We can toss all the Stupid Stuff. There are supposedly over a hundred arguments for God, though most are duplicates (the same argument restated). But if we chew the list down to nonredundant arguments, most of what’s left is Stupid Stuff (semantic trickery or ignorant bullshit). And this includes things like the Argument from Reason, the Argument from Free Will, and the Argument from Beauty. In reality these are already settled facts in the center circle. That the physicalist account of free will (formally called compatibilism) is the only account actually employed in the real world is literally settled law worldwide. Debates remain only in the ivory tower, divorced from reality. Indeed only 30% of godless philosophers think there is any debate left; which is plausibly about the rate of bad philosophers generally. But even most of them think the debate is only about what words to use—they are almost all still determinists. Only 11% of godless philosophers are undecided about that. Similarly, none of the things claimed to be mysterious about how humans can think logically, or how thinking logically more reliably gets to the truth, actually exist—science has answered them all. Likewise how and why humans have a beauty response. Physicalism has explained (through cognitive evolution) even the specific kinds of beauty we do and don’t “see” and react to. It outperforms God at this task. But more to the present point, this is all already settled science. It’s not even an open question anymore. Only someone ignorant of the science would make it into an argument for God.

That leaves bin two: all the questions left over that are actually unsettled (in that sense). As best I can tell there are only eight of these. So the question becomes: how well does Christianity perform against physicalism in explaining those eight things? We cannot here mean “explain” in the proven or “proven enough” sense because none are in the center circle. There is no scientific proof that God explains these things. So the theist can’t appeal to that. They can only appeal to hypothetical explanations. And therefore they are on the same ground as physicalist explanations. The Christian cannot claim “but that’s just a hypothesis,” as that would refute themselves. God is also “just a hypothesis” here. So we are comparing hypotheses, not proven conclusions. As a hypothesis is God simpler, more precedented, and more evidenced than physicalism on any of these eight things? The obvious answer is no. This does not mean we’ve “proved” physicalist explanations for them all. What it means is that physicalist explanations exist that are far more probable than Christian explanations—because they win on simplicity, precedent, and evidence.

Scoring Physicalism’s Defeat of Christianity

I have already explained elsewhere all the ways the following conclusions are true, listing all the evidence and arguments and whatnot there. So if you want to guffaw at any of the following declarations, use this blog’s search box above, or category drop down menu above right, to hunt down the complete coverage of each subject. Here, I’m just listing the results.

I won’t score any more on precedent, as God always fails on that: we have zero evidence backing the existence of any supernatural property or thing; while physicalism relies on only physical things, which all have precedent, either directly (particles make brains, distorted space makes gravity, etc.) or indirectly (as particles and warped spaces are established, positing more kinds of them has precedent). So physicalism always wins precedent on the current state of evidence—leaving only to compare each theory on simplicity and evidence.

• 1. Existence. Why does anything exist at all? Because nothing existing is the least likely possibility. When no thing and no one is around to decide what is more likely to exist, that logically entails every possibility is equally likely. And when every possibility is equally likely, a single zero state is infinitely unlikely to exist; while chaotic multiverses, infinitely more likely. Physicalism therefore entails a world will exist. By contrast, on theism, there is no inherent reason why God, being perfect and complete, would create any world at all, as doing so would be an admission that he lacked something needing to be made.
  • Therefore no matter what P(E|p) and P(E|G) are, P(E|p) > P(E|G). Physicalism wins. On no ad hoc suppositions at all; whereas God requires at least one. Physicalism also predicts why existence is so indifferent and dangerous; theism does not—without stacking more, and implausible, ad hoc suppositions.
• 2. Ground of Being. What is the ground of all being, the thing at the bottom of everything that keeps it going and gives it all its properties? Physicists call this a Theory of Everything. Currently the most promising physical grounding theory that covers everything to be explained (the extended Standard Model covering all four known forces) is string theory, now more comprehensively known as “M-Theory.” Already the four forces and extended standard model explain all observed facts. So all we really do need explain is why spacetime and subatomic particles have and maintain the properties they do. M-Theory can reduce it all to fluctuations in hyperspacetime, leaving only to explain why those exist, which is answered by problem 1 above.
  • “But you don’t know that’s what it reduces to” is, again, not a relevant objection here. Other theories may end up being better. But right now, M-Theory can explain it all with few ad hoc elements. It proposes more dimensions of space at small scales, but that just adapts things already precedented (warped dimensions). Everything else follows. By contrast, “God” does not explain why we need twelve different quarks glued together by eight different bosons with the few specific wavelike properties they have (like spin and wavelength) and don’t have (like essences, e.g. none “are” water or love or bark). M-Theory does. It thus outperforms God in predictive match to the evidence, with fewer suppositions, and only with suppositions of substantially greater precedent and thus probability. So in the death match between this and God, God hits the mat, dead before first bell. Again P(B|p) > P(B|G).
• 3. Fine Tuning. Why are the fundamental grounding properties conducive to life? They actually aren’t (99.9999% of the universe is lethal to life); this is actually the least hospitable universe you could make and still have any life arise at all. Which is the highest probability observation on physicalism, whereas God does not need to tune universes at all. In fact, all logically possible godless worlds observed will be finely tuned. P(F|p) = 100%. Whereas God has no reason to do that. He can just make any world he wants work, without convoluted tuning of needless physical constants. P(F|G) < 1.
  • Therefore, P(F|p) > P(F|G). Fewer assumptions gets us more and more accurate predictions. The Utter Destruction of the Fine Tuning Argument.
• 4. Biogenesis. Life originating by chance is extremely improbable even in this supposedly finely tuned universe, so how did it arise? The Law of Large Numbers. On physicalism, only chance accident can do it; and the probability of that is only high in worlds vastly old and large, so physicalism predicts we’ll observe a vastly old and large universe. God does not entail that observation; physicalism does. Likewise, chance accident (and thus physicalism) entails we’d see evidence life evolved from a single molecule across simpler PNA to progressively more complex RNA and then DNA and into ever more complex single celled organisms, only after a billion years figuring out mono-tissued multicellular organisms, and multi-tissued multicellular organisms only a billion more years after that—and all subsequent life would be cooperating stacks of these same single-celled organisms. That is 100% expected on physicalism because it is then the only possible pathway for life. God, however, has no need of any of this, and therefore does not predict (and therefore does not explain) any of this, without stacks of implausible ad hoc suppositions.
  • Therefore, again, P(L|p) = 100% and P(L|G) < 100%, ergo, P(L|p) > P(L|G). Physicalism’s explanation is simpler, better precedented, and far better evidenced.
• 5. Qualia. The only thing about consciousness (and thus things like love, beauty, thought, experience) that remains to be completely explained is the quality of it, the “what it is like” to see, hear, feel, think. But here the evidence is thoroughly predicted by physicalism, which has perfectly coherent and complete explanations of it all; with evidence that is not at all what we expect on theism. Essentially no suppositions are needed for physicalism to explain observations here but the hypothesis of computationalism itself, and what we observe is 100% the only thing we could observe—this is the only way we could exist on physicalism. The same is not true for God. God therefore fails at predicting all we see; and any attempt to fix that fails at simplicity.
  • So no matter how you cut it, P(Q|p) > P(Q|G).
• 6. Abstract Objects. The catch-all for abstractions, propositions, ideas, all the things that don’t seem physical or in need of the physical. Physicalism readily explains it all on the original model of Aristotle, that every thing in this category (word or proposition) refers to a physically instantiated pattern, and exists either potentially (as what existing things could be reshaped into) or actually (as what existing things are shaped into). This would be true in all possible universes (it is not logically possible to have a universe in which physical arrangements cannot even potentially arise—even if you imagine some force preventing it, the logical potential exists to remove that force). So there is nothing for God to explain here (All Godless Universes Are Mathematical, All Math Is Real, There Is Always a Spacetime to Warp, and God Is Not Needed for “Information” and “Laws”).
  • Here, P(A|p) = P(A|G), because God couldn’t even prevent this being the case if he existed.
• 7. Moral Facts. Should we be caring and honest, or all cutthroat sociopaths? This doesn’t really evince anything. If it were true that we should all be cutthroat sociopaths, that would be annoying, but it wouldn’t make God any more likely. But we do believe people should be caring and honest. Why? Theists propose God is a good answer. But he’s not. If God were the reason, the universe should exhibit God’s caring and honest nature (it wouldn’t be a mindless cutthroat sociopath; and God would not hide but make himself honestly and reliably available as a friend and consultant). Physicalism predicts that we would instead observe exactly what we do: only thousands of years of meandering human trial and error inventing better ways to live together (which just obviously happens to be by not being cutthroat sociopaths). Otherwise, moral facts exist in all possible universes. So God could not explain them even if he existed. Otherwise, all the evidence or moral facts is exactly as predicted by physicalism, not God.
  • So, again, P(M|p) > P(M|G).
• 8. Reason to Live. Usually vaguebooked as the “meaning of life” or “life’s purpose,” what people are really asking when they ask this question is, “Why bother?” That’s the only actual question to answer. And once you realize that, and think about it, it does tend to answer itself: because no matter how you drew this lucky straw, you’ve been handed a whole hope chest of opportunities, to live, love, know, create, help—to experience and enjoy life and people. Which is inherently better than having not been. This even transcends the question of death, since “Why should I spend a trillion billion million years adoring God in heaven?” also begs an answer. The only answer could be, “Because you’d like that.” Which means anything you like suffices. So it doesn’t have to be that (and really, when honest, everyone admits it absolutely would not be that). Like moral facts, this really can’t ever be evidence for God anyway, since “life is pointless” would never make God’s existence more likely (the fallacy of Argument from Desire is actually Stupid). But the pertinent evidence (that we are accidentally popped into a capricious world only to die a few decades later, and thus have to make the best of what that leaves us) is actually what physicalism predicts, not God. If heaven is a better world than this one, God could never have morally made this one. He’d just put us in heaven and manage it better. And making excuses for “why God wouldn’t do that obviously more intelligent and moral thing” is, again, a confession not a defense—its just covertly admitting God does not fit the evidence, so you have to invent implausible fantasies to force God to fit it. But either way, God again fails on either evidence or simplicity.
  • It’s P(R|p) > P(R}G). Again.

And that’s that. God wins on no metric, and loses on seven of them. God’s done. Physicalism wins on all eight. It’s obvious who’s right.

Conclusion

So in the end, Christianity, even as just the most stripped down theory of God, is much less probable than physicalism by every remaining test. It doesn’t win on established reality. It doesn’t win on stupid stuff. And it doesn’t win on the eight remaining frontiers of scientific knowledge, completing all the furniture of existence. And Christianity is never really that anyway. It is always in fact a gigantic monstrosity of far more bizarre claims about blood magic, celestial wars, pointless ontological contortions, and long lists of absurd cosmic plans and dogmas. It’s a patently stupid looking religion…when you step back and look at it. But the actual thing itself is trillions of times less probable than even the stripped down ultra-simple God hypothesis apologists drag out to the public as their show-pony in debates instead. And yet even that slick, fake show-pony is bollocks, compared to the far more successful model of scientific naturalism.