However, Europeans generally show less religious commitment on this measure than people in other regions. When asked about the importance of religion in their lives, majorities in 23 out of 34 countries say religion is very or somewhat important to them.
Majorities in several of these countries have particularly high levels of religious commitment, saying religion is very important their lives. This is the case in the Czech Republic, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom, where adults are more likely to say religion is not at all important in their lives than to choose any other answer option. On the other hand, more than six-in-ten respondents in Greece, Poland and Italy say religion is very or somewhat important in their lives.
When asked separate questions about the roles that prayer and God play in their lives, more respondents say that God is important than say that prayer is important, though strong majorities in half of the countries surveyed say that both are important to them. Just as respondents in wealthier countries tend to disagree that it is necessary to believe in God to be a moral person, people in wealthier countries generally say that God and prayer are not especially important in their lives For more on advanced and emerging economies, see Appendix B.
People in emerging economies are more than twice as likely as people in advanced economies to agree that prayer is an important part of daily life. Nine-in-ten or more respondents in all the emerging economies surveyed except for Ukraine say that God plays an important role in their lives.
By contrast, less than half of respondents in 11 of the economically advanced countries surveyed consider God to be important in life. In some countries, respondents are less likely to say that prayer is an important part of daily life than they are to say that God is important in their lives.
Muslim Israelis drive much of this sentiment. Views on whether God plays an important role in life differ substantially based on religious affiliation as well. Still, around three-in-ten religiously unaffiliated people in Argentina and the U. There is near unanimous agreement that God is important in life among people of all major religious affiliations in Brazil, the Philippines and Kenya, as well as among all Muslim and Christian respondents in Nigeria. Following well-documented trends that trace the decline of Christianity in Western Europe, the share of Europeans who say that God plays an important role in life has declined since Spain, Italy and Poland had the most dramatic decreases, with declines of 26, 21 and 14 percentage points, respectively.
This trend is mirrored in many other European countries, including Lithuania. Since the collapse of the USSR, Lithuania has seen a 12 percentage point drop in the share of its public that feels God plays an important role in their lives.
At the same time, other former Soviet republics where religion was harshly repressed or effectively banned during the Soviet period have experienced an increase in the percentage of people who say God plays an important role in life. Both Ukraine and Russia have experienced double-digit increases in the share of people who agree that God is important to them.
It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values. Even in a polarized era, the survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions. Use this tool to compare the groups on some key topics and their demographics. Pew Research Center now uses as the last birth year for Millennials in our work. President Michael Dimock explains why. For instance, young Earth creationism is the belief that species were created in their present form —10, years ago, while others adopt old Earth creationism and believe that species were created in their present form over millions of years.
Other Christians may adopt a mix of special creationism and evolution in which groups such as birds, mammals, and fish were created separately from one another by God, but then subsequently evolved creationism with some evolution or that all of life evolved, except for humans who were created separately by God humans-only creationism ; Yasri and Mancy, All of these variants of special creationism rely on a literal interpretation of the Bible to some extent Yasri and Mancy, However, there are many Christians who do not believe special creationism and instead accept evolution.
There are many ways that individuals, including scientists and religious leaders who are Christian, report they have reconciled their religious beliefs with an acceptance of evolution Miller, ; Collins, ; Tharoor, Those who adopt a deistic evolution view may think that their God started the universe but did not have a specific goal or purpose for evolution Yasri and Mancy, Those who adopt a theistic evolution or interventionist evolution perspective may believe that their God created life with a goal or that their God actively intervenes in evolution Miller, ; Collins, ; Yasri and Mancy, The commonality in these views is that all include a belief that life on Earth shares a common ancestor Miller, ; Collins, ; Yasri and Mancy, However, are these views in which God is involved in evolution compatible with the scientific theory of evolution?
It depends on whether one believes that science is, by nature, atheistic. Supernatural entities like God are often described as having characteristics such as omniscience and omnipotence that make them unfalsifiable and therefore unable to be examined through scientific means Popper, This idea that science cannot be used to prove or disprove the existence of the supernatural has been called the bounded nature of science and assumes that science is limited to investigating natural phenomena using natural explanations Southerland and Scharmann, ; Nelson et al.
Although there are vocal scientists who believe that science can disprove the existence or influence of God Harris, ; Dawkins, ; Coyne, ; Krauss, , the majority of scientists and philosophers of science agree that science does not address supernatural entities Barbour, ; Miller, ; Collins, ; Ecklund and Park, ; Ecklund et al. To make a claim about the existence or nonexistence of a supernatural entity is unscientific according to the bounded nature of science.
Therefore, rather than being anti-theistic, science can be considered non-theistic Nelson et al. Whether someone understands and accepts the bounded nature of science will determine whether he or she considers interventionist evolution, deistic evolution, and theistic evolution as full acceptance of evolution. If one does not understand or subscribe to the bounded nature of science, then one might conclude that evolution is atheistic, which would exclude these views as acceptance of evolution.
However, if one understands and subscribes to the view of the bounded nature of science, then one may conclude that evolution is agnostic rather than atheistic and thus consider views that both include God and do not include God as acceptance of evolution.
According to individuals with these views, acceptance of evolution is not contingent on a view of God, because they have aligned their religious view with science, not the other way around. Huxley wrote: Agnosticism is of the essence of science … It simply means that [we] shall not say [we] know or believe that which [we] have no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe … Consequently, agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the greater part of anti-theology … Agnosticism simply says that we know nothing of what may be beyond phenomena.
Huxley, Considering the bounded nature of science and characterizing evolutionary theory as agnostic rather than atheistic clarifies that a Christian student who believes in God can indeed accept evolution. From our perspective, as well as that of many others, a student who is atheist, agnostic, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, or Buddhist can accept evolution Smith, ; Scott, ; Southerland and Scharmann, However, many students may not be aware of the bounded nature of science, and they may perceive that evolution is atheistic rather than agnostic.
Past qualitative data from several studies indicate that students may have the conception that evolution is atheistic, but we do not know the degree to which this perception exists among biology students. Winslow et al. Many quotes from students who changed from special creationism to acceptance of evolution indicated that they first perceived evolution was atheistic, but then changed to believing that evolution and Christianity could be compatible before they accepted evolution.
In a study by Scharmann and Butler , the researchers asked nonmajor biology students at a community college to journal about their experiences learning evolution. In the paper, the researchers presented many quotes in which students indicated they did not know that they could believe in God and accept evolution. In a past study in which our research team implemented evolution instruction that was designed to be culturally competent for religious students, we asked students what they appreciated about the instruction and many religious and nonreligious students wrote that that they did not previously know that someone could believe in God and accept evolution Barnes et al.
Brem et al. These data warrant exploring the hypothesis that atheistic perceptions of evolution may be prevalent and may influence acceptance of evolution among college biology students. If atheistic perceptions of evolution are prevalent, then this pinpoints a needed area for instructors to address when teaching evolution, particularly if this perception is related to worse affective evolution education outcomes among highly religious students who are most at risk for rejecting evolution.
We conducted an exploratory study to identify what religious ideas students think they have to reject in order to accept evolution and if writing that evolution is atheistic is associated with lower levels of evolution acceptance. Then, in a subsequent study we explored the prevalence of atheistic perceptions of evolution and whether atheistic perceptions were related to lower evolution acceptance, greater perceived conflict between religious beliefs and evolution, and less comfort learning evolution.
We outline here each of our research questions and hypotheses for each study. Although prior qualitative research has shown that students can have concerns about their ability to maintain their religious beliefs and accept evolution Barnes et al. Thus, in study 1, we asked students to answer an open-ended question about the religious ideas that would have to be rejected for someone to accept evolution.
We hypothesized that some students would say that it is necessary to reject a belief in God in order to accept evolution, and we also hypothesized that highly religious students who wrote that evolution is atheistic would accept evolution less than highly religious students who did not. This exploratory study allowed us to investigate potential student perceptions and their association with student levels of evolution acceptance.
In study 2, we wanted to explore atheistic perceptions of evolution in a large number of biology classes across the nation using a closed-ended survey.
The decision to use a closed-ended survey in study 2 was a natural progression of the research aims; in study 1, we were able to identify students who thought to write about an atheistic perception of evolution, but there may have been a greater number of students who had this perception but just did not choose to write about it.
A closed-ended survey allowed us to determine the prevalence of atheistic perceptions of evolution among students in college biology courses, because each student had to choose whether they had an atheistic perception of evolution. Further, a closed-ended survey allowed us to give students the option to choose between an atheistic perception of evolution and an agnostic perception of evolution, something they were not able to do with the open-ended question in study 1.
For study 2, we hypothesized that a significant proportion of students would have an atheistic perception of evolution. We aimed to explore whether atheistic perceptions of evolution among highly religious students were associated with evolution education variables. In addition to being less accepting of evolution, we hypothesized that highly religious students who have an atheistic perception of evolution would perceive more conflict between their religious beliefs and evolution and feel less comfortable while learning evolution.
This is potentially important, because students who are less accepting of evolution and perceive more conflict between their religious beliefs and evolution may be unlikely to use evolution in their thinking about science in the future or to pursue further learning about evolution beyond what is required of them in the classroom.
Indeed, in group settings, student comfort has been shown to be related to student outcomes such as persistence in a program and final grades in a course Micari and Drane, ; Eddy et al. We surveyed students from 10 introductory-level majors and nonmajors biology courses at a large public research-intensive university in the southwestern United States in which the population is moderately religious on average Barnes et al.
Students were surveyed in the last 2 weeks of their courses and all courses included evolution instruction. Instructors of the courses offered students extra credit as an incentive to complete the survey. The email recruitment told students that they would be filling out a survey about their conceptions of evolution. Students were surveyed at the end of the semester after most evolution instruction had occurred.
We used two separate measures of evolution acceptance that served different purposes. One measure let students define evolution acceptance for themselves self-defined measure and asked students to rate on a scale from 0 to the extent to which they accepted evolution; this is similar to measures used in other foundational studies in evolution education Bishop and Anderson, ; Sinatra et al.
The second measure we used is a published instrument called the Inventory of Student Evolution Acceptance I-SEA that predefines evolution acceptance for the respondents as the extent to which they agree with 24 items on a five-point Likert scale Nadelson and Southerland, The I-SEA has three subscales: acceptance of microevolution e.
We chose to use the I-SEA instead of other published instruments e. Further, there are claims that the I-SEA addresses many limitations of other evolution acceptance instruments Barnes et al.
We measured student religiosity using a previously published scale Cohen et al. List as many things as you can think of. Inductive methods were used, because this specific question had never been explored among students, and we did not want to bias our findings, so we let themes emerge from the data.
A rubric was created by M. Next, the rubric was used independently by H. We used multiple linear regressions to determine whether writing that evolution is atheistic was related to lower levels of evolution acceptance depending on student religiosity level.
After each regression model was fit to the data, we performed full regression diagnostics to make sure the statistical assumptions of this method i. All results we report in the Results sections have passed the full diagnostics. Seventy-one percent of students were biology majors and the average end-of-semester GPA for these students was 3. This is similar to the overall student population at this institution, although the Asian students are slightly overrepresented in our sample compared with the broader population at the university, but that may be because Asian students tend to be overrepresented in biology National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, Students reported an average of 80 out of on the 0— self-defined evolution acceptance measure.
A list of subthemes and their descriptions can be found in Section 1 of the Supplemental Material. Forty-one percent of students correctly reported that to accept evolution, a person would have to reject a literal interpretation of Judeo-Christian religious texts. Most biologists would agree that one would not be able to believe literally in many of the creation stories in the Judeo-Christian Bible to accept evolution.
TABLE 1. Students in this category most often indicated that a person would have to reject the existence of God or reject that God was responsible for the creation of life if that person were to accept evolution Table 1. We call this an atheistic perception of evolution Smith, ; National Academy of Sciences, , ; Gould, ; Scharmann, ; Nelson et al.
This suggests that perceiving evolution as atheistic is prevalent among highly religious students as well as students who score low on religiosity. For instance, the least religious student who is a biology major with a 4.
Figure 1 illustrates this interaction effect of student religiosity and writing that evolution is atheistic on evolution acceptance scores from all four evolution acceptance measures. Unstandardized predicted values from regression models predicting evolution acceptance scores plotted against student religiosity and labeled by whether the student indicated an atheistic perception of evolution.
In our exploratory study 1, a large percentage of college biology students wrote that evolution is atheistic, and this was prevalent among both religious and nonreligious students. Further, we found that writing that evolution is atheistic was associated with lower levels of evolution acceptance, particularly among the most religious students.
However, using an open-ended response item may have caused us to misestimate the prevalence of atheistic perceptions. First, students could have had an atheistic perception of evolution but did not think to write about it; this would lead us to underestimate the number of students with an atheistic perception of evolution.
Thus, to estimate the rate of atheistic perceptions of evolution, we developed a closed-ended survey in study 2 that asked students to choose whether evolution is atheistic or agnostic. Students were surveyed at the end of their courses, and all courses included evolution instruction.
A summary of the courses recruited for this study can be found in the Results section. The research team sent emails to the instructors of the courses asking them to disseminate the survey link to their students after the students had been taught evolution. Instructors offered extra credit to students who completed the survey.
We used similar instruments to measure evolution acceptance in study 2 as in study 1. Further, we wanted to reduce survey fatigue among students in our studies, and in think-aloud interviews some items on the full religiosity survey were confusing for nonreligious students i. Thus, eliminating these items increased the content validity of the measure for nonreligious students. To determine whether students perceived evolution as atheistic or agnostic, we adapted a published instrument originally created to categorize the views that students have on the relationship between religion and evolution Yasri and Mancy, This instrument was not published when the data from study 1 were collected.
The instrument lists different views on the relationship between religion and evolution and asks students to choose among the views in a closed-ended survey Table 2. TABLE 2. Options students were given for their personal view of evolution and then what they thought most closely represented the scientific view of evolution.
The list of views includes young Earth creationism, old Earth creationism, creationism with some evolution, humans-only creationism, interventionist evolution, theistic evolution, deistic evolution, agnostic evolution, and atheistic evolution.
The procedures for adapting and validating the instruments in their entirety are available in Section 3 of the Supplemental Material. We also created two new instruments see Section 4 of the Supplemental Material for development and validation of these measures. Students were asked to select from 0 none at all to 10 a lot for each of these items.
Unlike other instruments in which the respondent can only choose a binary option Nehm et al. The second instrument measures how comfortable students felt while learning evolution and has eight items e. Students were asked to answer on a six-point Likert scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. No previously developed instruments existed at the time of the study to measure either perceived conflict or comfort learning evolution.
These instruments are available in their entirety along with the procedures for development and validation in Section 4 of the Supplemental Material. Although it was not our main research aim, our research design allowed us to examine the percentage of college biology students who believe that life shares a common ancestor.
Because these data have never been collected among college biology students across this many U. Therefore, we examined the percentage of students who chose special creationist options for their personal view on religion and evolution and report those percentages. To examine whether students perceived evolution as atheistic or agnostic, we calculated the percentage of students who chose atheistic evolution and agnostic evolution as the most representative descriptions of evolution.
We were interested in exploring differences among highly religious students who perceived evolution as atheistic versus agnostic. The same model diagnostics were performed on these data as in study 1 i. Of these students, TABLE 3. Summary of courses recruited and student response rate by course. After they had learned evolution, we found that Finally, See Table 4 for the percentage of students who chose each view on religion and evolution. TABLE 4. We identified students as highly religious, and within this sample of highly religious students, Table 5 shows a comparison for the percentage of nonreligious and highly religious students who perceived evolution as atheistic or agnostic.
TABLE 5. Student perceptions of the definition of evolution a. Next, we focus on highly religious students only and compare those who perceived evolution as agnostic with those who perceived evolution as atheistic.
Table 6 shows a comparison of the demographics of these students. Highly religious students who perceived evolution as atheistic or agnostic were similar with respect to major, gender, and race, but there was a lower percentage of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints LDS students who perceived evolution as atheistic and a higher percentage of Catholic and other Christian students who perceived evolution as atheistic.
There are also panentheistic and process theistic Gods, as well as a variety of other God-concepts, both of Western and non-Western origin, that are largely ignored by even the most well-informed atheists. Philosophically sophisticated theists, for their part, often act as if refuting naturalism establishes the existence of the particular sort of God in which they believe.
Diller distinguishes local atheism, which denies the existence of one sort of God, from global atheism, which is the proposition that there are no Gods of any sort—that all legitimate concepts of God lack instances. Global atheism is a very difficult position to justify Diller 11— Indeed, very few atheists have any good reason to believe that it is true since the vast majority of atheists have made no attempt to reflect on more than one or two of the many legitimate concepts of God that exist both inside and outside of various religious communities.
Global atheists might object that, even if atheism and metaphysical naturalism are not identical, a belief in the former can be based on a belief in the latter; in other words, if one has good arguments for the view that nature is a closed system, then that removes any burden to consider each God-concept separately, so long as all legitimate concepts of God imply that God is a supernatural entity—that is, an entity that is not natural, yet affects nature.
This is no easy task, especially given recent work on naturalist forms of theism e. The crucial point, however, is that no one has yet made that case. Concerning the issue of what exactly counts as a legitimate or religiously adequate concept of God, various approaches might be taken. See, for example, Le Poidevin 52; and Leftow 66— In some religions, especially but not only certain Western monotheistic ones, worship involves total devotion and unconditional commitment.
To be worthy of that sort of worship if that is even possible when the pool of potential worshipers are autonomous agents like most adult humans requires an especially impressive God, though it is controversial whether or not it requires a perfect one. For example, even if the ancient Egyptians worshipped the Sun and regarded it as worthy of such worship, the global atheist need not deny the existence of the Sun. Instead, the global atheist can claim that the ancient Egyptians were mistaken in thinking that the Sun is worthy of religious worship.
If we examine, without prejudice, the ancient heathen mythology, as contained in the poets, we shall not discover in it any such monstrous absurdity, as we may at first be apt to apprehend. Where is the difficulty in conceiving, that the same powers or principles, whatever they were, which formed this visible world, men and animals, produced also a species of intelligent creatures, of more refined substance and greater authority than the rest?
That these creatures may be capricious, revengeful, passionate, voluptuous, is easily conceived; nor is any circumstance more apt, among ourselves, to engender such vices, than the license of absolute authority. And in short, the whole mythological system is so natural, that, in the vast variety of planets and world[s], contained in this universe, it seems more than probable, that, somewhere or other, it is really carried into execution. Hume [] 53, emphasis added. There is much debate about whether Hume was an atheist or a deist or neither, but no one uses this passage to support the view that he was actually a polytheist.
Perhaps this is because, even if there are natural alien beings that, much like the ancient Greek and Roman gods, are far superior in power to humans but quite similar in their moral and other psychological qualities, presumably no one, at least nowadays, would be tempted to regard them as worthy of religious worship.
One possible flaw in the proposed account of global atheism is that it seems to imply overlap between deism and atheism. Of course, not all deists would count as atheists on the proposed account, but some would.
For example, consider a deist who believes that, while a supernatural person intentionally designed the universe, that deity did not specifically intend for intelligent life to evolve and has no interest whatsoever in the condition or fate of such life.
According to one relatively modest form of agnosticism, neither versatile theism nor its denial, global atheism, is known to be true. Robin Le Poidevin 76 argues for this position as follows:.
This probability depends solely on a priori considerations like the intrinsic features of the content of the proposition in question e.
Le Poidevin defends the first premise of this argument by stating that, while intrinsic probability plausibly depends inversely on the specificity of a claim the less specific the claim, the more ways there are for it to be true and so the more probable it is that it is true , it is impossible to show that versatile theism is more specific or less specific than its denial.
This defense appears to be incomplete, for Le Poidevin never shows that the intrinsic probability of a proposition depends only on its specificity, and there are good reasons to believe that this is not the case see, for example, Swinburne 80— Le Poidevin could respond, however, that specificity is the only uncontroversial criterion of intrinsic probability, and this lack of consensus on other criteria is all that is needed to adequately defend premise 1.
One way to defend the second premise is to review the relevant evidence and argue that it is ambiguous Le Poidevin chapter 4; and Draper Another way is to point out that atheism, which is just the proposition that theism is false, is compatible with a variety of very different hypotheses, and these hypotheses vary widely in how well they account for the total evidence. Thus, to assess how well atheism accounts for the total evidence, one would have to calculate a weighted average of how well these different atheistic hypotheses account for the total evidence, where the weights would be the different intrinsic probabilities of each of these atheistic hypotheses.
This task seems prohibitively difficult Draper and in any case has not been attempted, which supports the claim that there is no firm basis upon which to judge whether the total evidence supports theism or atheism. The agnostic, however, might reply that this sense of the divine, unlike memory, operates at most sporadically and far from universally.
Also, unlike other basic cognitive faculties, it can easily be resisted, and the existence of the beliefs it is supposed to produce can easily be explained without supposing that the faculty exists at all. Thus, the analogy to memory is weak. For the argument also contains two inferences from steps 1 and 2 to step 3 and from step 3 to step 4 , neither of which is obviously correct.
Almost all well-known arguments for atheism are arguments for a particular version of local atheism. One possible exception to this rule is an argument recently made popular by some New Atheists, although it was not invented by them.
Notice the obvious relevance of this argument to agnosticism. According to one prominent member of the agnosticism family, we have no good reason to believe that God exists and no good reason to believe that God does not exist. Clearly, if the first premise of this argument is true, then this version of agnosticism must be false.
Can the no arguments argument be construed as an argument for global atheism? One might object that it is not, strictly speaking, an argument for any sort of atheism since its conclusion is not that atheism is true but instead that there is good reason to believe that atheism is true. But that is just a quibble.
Ultimately, whether this argument can be used to defend global atheism depends on how its first premise is defended. The usual way of defending it is to derive it from some general principle according to which lacking grounds for claims of a certain sort is good reason to reject those claims. One objection to this principle is that not every sort of thing is such that, if it existed, then we would likely have good reason to believe that it exists. Consider, for example, intelligent life in distant galaxies cf.
Morris Perhaps, however, an even more narrowly restricted principle would do the trick: whenever the assumption that a positive existential claim is true would lead one to expect to have grounds for its truth, the absence of such grounds is a good reason to believe that the claim is false. It might then be argued that i a God would be likely to provide us with convincing evidence of Her existence and so ii the absence of such evidence is a good reason to believe that God does not exist.
This transforms the no arguments argument into an argument from divine hiddenness. It also transforms it into at best an argument for local atheism, since even if the God of, say, classical theism would not hide, not all legitimate God-concepts are such that a being instantiating that concept would be likely to provide us with convincing evidence of its existence.
The sort of God in whose non-existence philosophers seem most interested is the eternal, non-physical, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent i.
One interesting question, then, is how best to argue for atheism understood locally as the proposition that omni-theism is false. It is often claimed that a good argument for atheism is impossible because, while it is at least possible to prove that something of a certain sort exists, it is impossible to prove that nothing of that sort exists.
One reason to reject this claim is that the descriptions of some kinds of objects are self-contradictory. For example, we can prove that no circular square exists because such an object would have to be both circular and non-circular, which is impossible. Many attempts have been made to construct such arguments. For example, it has been claimed that an omnibenevolent being would be impeccable and so incapable of wrongdoing, while an omnipotent being would be quite capable of doing things that would be wrong to do.
There are, however, sophisticated and plausible replies to arguments like these. Similar problems face attempts to show that omni-theism must be false because it is incompatible with certain known facts about the world. Such arguments typically depend on detailed and contested interpretations of divine attributes like omnibenevolence.
A very different approach is based on the idea that disproof need not be demonstrative. The goal of this approach is to show that the existence of an omni-God is so improbable that confident belief in the non-existence of such a God is justified.
Each of these arguments employs the same specific strategy, which is to argue that some alternative hypothesis to omni-theism is many times more probable than omni-theism. In the case of the second argument, the alternative hypothesis aesthetic deism is arguably a form of theism, and even in the case of the first argument it is arguable that the alternative hypothesis source physicalism is compatible with some forms of theism in particular ones in which God is an emergent entity.
This is not a problem for either argument, however, precisely because both are arguments for local atheism instead of global atheism. This is said to follow because theism starts out with a very low probability before taking into account any evidence. Since ambiguous or absent evidence has no effect on that prior or intrinsic probability, the posterior or all-things-considered probability of theism is also very low. If, however, theism is very probably false, then atheism must be very probably true and this implies according to the defender of the argument that atheistic belief is justified.
This last alleged implication is examined in section 7. The low priors argument implicitly addresses this important issue in a much more sophisticated and promising way. Unlike ontological physicalism, source physicalism is a claim about the source of mental entities, not about their nature. Source physicalists, whether they are ontological physicalists or ontological dualists, believe that the physical world existed before the mental world and caused the mental world to come into existence, which implies that all mental entities are causally dependent on physical entities.
Further, even if they are ontological dualists, source physicalists need not claim that mental entities never cause physical entities or other mental entities, but they must claim that there would be no mental entities were it not for the prior existence and causal powers of one or more physical entities.
The argument proceeds as follows:. The other steps in the argument all clearly follow from previous steps. A thorough examination of the arguments for and against premise 1 is obviously impossible here, but it is worth mentioning that a defense of this premise need not claim that the known facts typically thought by natural theologians to favor omni-theism over competing hypotheses like source physicalism have no force.
Instead, it could be claimed that whatever force they have is offset at least to some significant degree by more specific facts favoring source physicalism over omni-theism.
More precisely, the point is this. Even when natural theologians successfully identify some general fact about a topic that is more probable given omni-theism than given source physicalism, they ignore other more specific facts about that same topic, facts that, given the general fact , appear to be significantly more probable given source physicalism than given omni-theism.
For example, even if omni-theism is supported by the general fact that the universe is complex, one should not ignore the more specific fact, discovered by scientists, that underlying this complexity at the level at which we experience the universe, is a much simpler early universe from which this complexity arose, and also a much simpler contemporary universe at the micro-level, one consisting of a relatively small number of different kinds of particles all of which exist in one of a relatively small number of different states.
In short, it is important to take into account, not just the general fact that the universe that we directly experience with our senses is extremely complex, but also the more specific fact that two sorts of hidden simplicity within the universe can explain that complexity. Given that a complex universe exists, this more specific fact is exactly what one would expect on source physicalism, because, as the best natural theologians e.
There is, however, no reason at all to expect this more specific fact on omni-theism since, if those same natural theologians are correct, then a simple God provides a simple explanation for the observed complexity of the universe whether or not that complexity is also explained by any simpler mediate physical causes.
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