Best argument for the existence of God

The best argument for the existence of God -- from maximal creativity and ethical requiredness

suppose God is maximally great and creative, and supplanting POE and other counters as follows.

And suppose we have free will in sense of being able to cause things which god foresees but cannot stop – god must either create the universe which contains those things, or not create it, but once created, cannot interfere further.

Next, assume aggregative utilitarianism is true – the act is morally best which maximizes utility, where utility is understood as the balance of good over evil; more precisely, utility= total good minus total evil produced by the action

Then it follows that to be good Itself, God logically would choose to create all PWs in which good outweighs evil, to maximize net good in the multiverse.

So, God would create the BPW, but also many other PWs in which evil exists, down to those in which net good-evil is barely above zero. (Details of measure theory and how to determine smaller and smaller positive but non-zero measurements are interesting here, but don’t crucially affect the overall argument).

Accordingly, we could in fact choose differently, but in every case in which our actions did not tip the cosmic scale to net evil, another universe would have been foreseen and created by God – cf. the MWI of QM. So no surprise (re measure theory?) to find ourselves in a universe in which considerable evil exists – the majority of universes within the mutiverse are like that, and very few have little or no evil. It apparently remains meaningful to attempt to act so as to change things – that’s part of better universes which God will have created, and if we did not so act, it is possible the universe could have a negative utility and so not exist. (Problems with fatalism and choice may undermine this, but it has certainly seemed plausible to many theodicists).

So, we have a timeless or hypertime multiverse in which all our decisions are already foreseen but not directly caused, except for concurrent creative activity – i.e., those which led to net evil were never created and so are non-actual. This is the best attempt to account for free will, real evil, and rebut the problem of evil (POE) and still have a morally defensible and powerful, creative force as God.

Objections: this is not real free will/ morality, because of fatalism/ causal impotence; or a timeless god is unintelligible. Or there is no evidence for other universes, so belief in them is a gross violation of Occam’s razor.

But the most weighty objection to the argument in my mind is the assumption that utilitarianism is true – and in particular, the aggregative utilitarianism that presumes that it is better to make a multiverse with much evil contained therein, as long as the total good outweighs it, versus making a single universe with no evil whatsoever. The total good would be less, no doubt, than in the multiverse; but aggregative utilitarianism violates a rule that I think a truly omnibenevolent Creator must obey: first, do no harm.

More objections to aggregative utilitarianism as an ethical theory in a later post….