Amos Wollen

We argue that adopting the Self-Indication Assumption (SIA)—a thesis about self-locating evidence, according to which your existence favours theories on which there are more observers who you yourself might be over theories on which there are fewer—strongly confirms the disjunction of theism, modal realism, or axiarchism. We say that if SIA is correct, your existence becomes highly surprising on garden-variety atheism. For almost certainly, if each of these views are false, only a proper subset of possible observers who you might be would exist, if any. In contrast, on some forms of theism—forms of theism on which God must create an unsurpassably good world—it’s not so unlikely God would create every possible observer, to love and/or benefit each one. Something similar is true of axiarchism, and modal realism entails that every possible observer exists. As a result, we argue, your existence strongly confirms the disjunction of maximizing theism, modal realism, or axiarchism over garden-variety atheism, conditional on SIA.

Proponents of Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against Naturalism often quote Charles Darwin’s 22 April 1881 letter to William Graham to imply Darwin worried that his theory of evolution committed its adherents to some sort of global skepticism. This niggling epistemic worry has, therefore, been dubbed ‘Darwin’s Doubt’. But this gets Darwin wrong. After combing through Darwin’s correspondence and autobiographical writings, the author maintains that Darwin only worried that evolution might cause us to doubt particularly abstruse metaphysical and theological beliefs, and beliefs arrived at by ‘intuition’ rather than evidence-based reasoning. He did not worry that unguided evolution should lead us to doubt all of our beliefs in the way Plantinga and others have implied that it does.