Don Page - Is This the Best of All Possible Worlds？

Don, philosophers of religion who believe in God have to deal with the problem of evil, of course, and they believe in an all-powerful, benevolent God, so how to explain evil? And one of the ways they begin, one of their assumptions is that this is not the best of all possible worlds, because we have evil in it, so that's obvious. And the approach is there cannot be a best possible world that God created. That's logically impossible, and so therefore, that's the basis that we start. It gives them some flexibility. You actually will take issue with that. You believe there is a possible best possible world, and I'd like to understand how you get there. Yes, well, I do believe that God has created the best possible, or well, he's created the universe to make the world the best possible subject to his nature. I will admit that if you put absolutely no restrictions on the nature of God, it's hard to see how that there'd be any limits to the value, and therefore, it'd either be infinite or else you'd just say that there's no, just like there's no largest integer. I mean, that is, and I can't be sure that that's not right, but my assumption is that... I want you to challenge all these other guys. Right, okay, so I can't prove them wrong. I'm proposing sort of an alternative in which I'm saying that the nature of God is that such that he values certain things, but there's conflict between the things. It's just logically impossible to satisfy all of the desires that God may have in this, and so I think he would have a desire for humans to be happy. I mean, that would be at least one desire, but he also has other desires, and because there may be conflict, then he has to choose the best compromise from this. So what are the other desires? So others, now traditionally, I think many Christians have said that God places a high value on libertarian free will by creatures, and so that, and then this libertarian free will leads to choices that are against God's will that lead to evil. Libertarian meaning that you can do otherwise other than some deterministic system. Right, right. In some sense, it's really, it's not just that you're doing as you please, but what you please is in some sense not determined by God or by anything. Yeah, it's just that it's determined by you. Now, I think I'm... So in some sense, this is a greater good defense for the problem of evil. If there's some other good that overbalances it, then they'll say it's free will. Now, for me personally, I find it difficult to believe that there's libertarian free will because I believe that God totally created everything from nothing, and if he totally created everything from nothing, it doesn't seem to me that there's room for anything to make separate choices. So in essence, you have two problems as a believer. You have the problem of evil, which you got to deal with in terms of the universe, and you can't use the free will defense because you don't believe in libertarian free will because of your other assumptions. Right, right. So now you got to solve the problem without the free will defense to the problem of evil. Right, right. Go for it. Right. So in my mind, I think what God has a high value besides the happiness of sentient experience is that I think God loves elegance. I'm of course biased in this because my view as a theoretical physicist, I see an enormous elegance in the equations of physics. I mean, the theory of gravity, I mean, we can summarize it by Einstein's equations, which we can write G equals T, and then the equations of electromagnetism, usually they're written as four equations, but we can actually combine them. We can combine them into one, delta dA equals J. So they're very succinct equations, and we don't know the ultimate equations, but based on our past experiences, we suspect that it may be. And so the idea is that God loves this elegance so much that he creates a universe using these elegant equations and using an elegant quantum theory with no collapse of the wave function. But this leads to different branches, and in some branches things happen that are painful for humans. There's quantum amplitudes which lead to mutations that can lead to cancer. So what you're saying is that because of quantum theory, you believe in the many worlds version. So in terms of the wave function of quantum mechanics, the universe is branching always into all different terms. But you believe that God has programmed or structured or created the entirety of this massive multi-world ensemble. Yes, I believe God has crafted the thought, but I think it's impossible to have the whole ensemble without having pain and suffering in various ones, and in fact usually for each human at various times. So therefore, I think God could have cut it off. He said if an unpleasant experience is about to happen, maybe God could have collapsed the wave function some other way. But we don't see evidence that he's doing that, and my hypothesis is that that would have made things sufficiently more complicated and more ugly that God himself does not desire that. And therefore, it might have increased the value of sentient experiences within the universe. It would increase their happiness, but God's sentient experience would go way down, would go down even more. Because God is messing around with the elegance of the laws that he created. Right, right. So whereas he could do it, I think he finds it undesirable to do that, except for special occasions. I do tend to think the resurrection of Jesus Christ was an occasion important enough that God really did do something different from the usual laws of physics. Okay, but that's a rarity. Yeah, that's a rarity. So you're working into this idea that therefore, this is the best possible world, because you're defining it in terms of sort of the weighted average in some way of the totality of human positive sentience, net of the, in some calculus, net of the negative experiences, with God's own appreciation for the elegance of the laws. So when you add that together, it's sort of an optimization. Right. And that becomes the peak. Is it something like that? Yes, yes. So I'm saying it's taking account, not only the experiences within the universe, but also God's experiences. So I'm saying, I'm saying we're very important to God. And I think he has sacrificed when he came to earth as Jesus Christ, he suffered a lot in order to help us, to improve us. Yeah, but he could suffer a little more if he let himself have a little less elegance and have us have less suffering. Yes, you could say that. But I think if that would, if that would reduce the total happiness in the world, including God's, I don't quite see it's fair for us to ask that. I mean, you know, we might ask for God to be totally disregard his own desires and just do things to please us. But I don't know, it seems to me it would be best for him to maximize the happiness of everything, including, you know, including himself in this. And so when you say this is the best possible world, the this you mean is the total ensemble of multiverses and in all different fashions, the multiverse that may came from inflation theory, the multiverse that comes from quantum theory, the total ensemble of all the universes and cosmology and quantum mechanics, the totality of that, it'd be, you think, impossible to be better than that. Well, that plus God. Plus God. Yeah. So it has to be, it has to be plus because that all that you talked before is what God's created. Right. So that plus God, I think is, is, is what I, what I believe is, is, is maximized. So we're very important, but we're not the only thing, I think, that's important to God. I think God has made the best world for the totality for everyone himself included.