# The most current philosophical arguments for the existence of God?

**URL:** <https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551>\
**Category:** Conversation\
**Tags:** Atheism, Philosophy, Theology, History\
**Created:** [November 16, 2022, 8:47pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551 "2022-11-16T20:47:26Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 20\
**Page:** 5

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**Author:** ![Faizal\_Ali](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.peacefulscience.org/faizal_ali/32/12416_2.png) [@Faizal\_Ali](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Faizal_Ali)\
**Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 2:41pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551/87 "2022-11-22T14:41:29Z")

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> [@structureoftruth](#):
>
> The predominant conception of God as timeless - at least in the Western tradition - originated from philosophical arguments, not religious dogma, nor because believers decided they felt like timelessness was a good fit for divinity.

Exactly my point. And then when that attribute conflicts with other things people want to believe about their god, or with a particular argument they want to make for his existence, they jettison that attribute, even though the very philosophical arguments that led to inclusion of that attribute still exist.

> [@structureoftruth](#):
>
> No one that I can see is disputing that here. I was responding to your exaggerated assertion that postulating temporality rather than timelessness diminishes one’s conception of God. I take it you concede that it actually doesn’t.

I don’t see why you would believe I have conceded that. It is almost universal among theists, at least in the tradition with which I am familiar, that he is conceived as a being who transcends time and space. Which is not to say these same theists will then embrace ideas that are incompatible with this. One thing of which I am _not_ accusing theists is intellectual consistency.

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**Author:** ![structureoftruth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/4bbf92/32.png) [@structureoftruth](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/structureoftruth)\
**Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 6:06pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551/88 "2022-11-22T18:06:42Z")

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> [@Faizal\_Ali](#):
>
> And then when that attribute conflicts with other things people want to believe about their god

Hard to dialog with someone who continually caricatures your belief structure and accuses you of just believing things because you want to believe them, rather than because of the reasons that you see for them. This would be like me saying “atheists just reject arguments for God’s existence because they don’t want God to exist”.

> [@Faizal\_Ali](#):
>
> even though the very philosophical arguments that led to inclusion of that attribute still exist.

Theists who hold to divine temporality are _well aware_ of the arguments for divine timelessness. _We just don’t think they work._

> [@Faizal\_Ali](#):
>
> I don’t see why you would believe I have conceded that.

Your original objection to the theist taking the view that God is not strictly immutable was that it raises theological problems; namely, that divine temporality _diminishes_ one’s conception of God. I pointed out that such a conception of God is really not all that diminished. Your response was…

> [@Faizal\_Ali](#):
>
> Sure, if we already knew a being existed with all those properties.

But your “if we already knew” condition is irrelevant to your objection, which wasn’t about the reasons we have for believing in various attributes of God, but about whether temporality diminishes God or not.

Again, I totally agree that theists need to have good arguments for positing various divine attributes. This isn’t a game of “what do I want God to be like?” I’m sure you and I disagree about whether we _have_ those arguments. But that isn’t what I was discussing; this all started with _your_ argument:

> [@Faizal\_Ali](#):
>
> The cause cannot be God, because God is unchanging. Causation, however, requires change in the causative entity.

And I pointed out that theists can deny either of those premises without much difficulty.

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**Author:** ![Puck\_Mendelssohn](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.peacefulscience.org/puck_mendelssohn/32/11849_2.png) [@Puck\_Mendelssohn](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Puck_Mendelssohn)\
**Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 6:07pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551/89 "2022-11-22T18:07:07Z")

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Don’t these philosophical exercises always, in the end, come to nothing? I am constantly impressed by the thinness and uselessness of them. When we try to argue from first principles, without the input of meaningful and relevant doses of evidence, two things happen. First, we are bound to spin off in silly directions, without the corrective of empirical disconfirmation to put us back on course. Second, we inevitably have to deal not with real characteristics of real entities, which are independent of but may be described by language, and instead deal with putative logical characteristics of abstract or hypothetical entities. We decide that there is something meaningful in terms like “necessary” and “contingent,” but forget that these are concepts we ourselves have constructed to describe abstractions, not real and demonstrable attributes of real things, and we freight new implications in to those terms which may not follow from the reasons we had for applying these terms to these abstract and hypothetical entities in the first place.

I just don’t think language is a mill that can do much work, without some grist on which to do it. And the notion that one can extract real insights into reality from purely verbal exercises, without the input of data, may seem to someone like a lovely, hopeful notion, but there’s very little reason to think it is ever true.

A scientist may come up with a hypothetical notion. He may employ abstractions in thinking about it. And so he, like the philosopher, may use reasoning which is akin to this. But he knows that this is only the mental work of hypothesizing; it is the conceptual stage of inquiry, where the question is formed, but it is not inquiry itself. That comes when rubber meets road and observations of real entities are made to see whether this hypothesis can or cannot be supported or disconfirmed.

We have centuries of history to tell us: which of these methods leads us more effectively out of the muck? Which of them gives us answers on which we can reliably depend? And while it may be true that science cannot do without philosophy, it has become very clear that science can do without MUCH philosophy.

There are fields – ethics, for example – where there is nothing to do but make verbal arguments, and where the tie to the real world is more a matter of human experience than of objectively measurable fact. In such fields philosophy might do important work. But in whether real things exist, or do not? Not so much.

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**Author:** ![Dan\_Eastwood](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.peacefulscience.org/dan_eastwood/32/2368_2.png) [@Dan\_Eastwood](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Dan_Eastwood)\
**Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 6:35pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551/90 "2022-11-22T18:35:35Z")

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Thank you for the links on the Principle of Sufficient Reason (hence PSR). I’m trying to work through them, but it’s a bit like coming to a discussion where everyone else has already defined all the terms and I don’t know any of them. One source discussed abuses of the PSR, which was helpful. Not done reading yet. 🙂

PSR strikes me as problematic, so the very first thing I did was to Google to see how PSR conflicts with Gödel’s Theorem. The answer I found (maybe not a good one) dodged the question by noting that PSR deals with “Cause” and Gödel with provable propositions. I don’t see how this helps, because the moment someone makes a logical statement based on PSR, then Gödel should apply. I’m not really expecting you to have an answer to this, just letting you know my thinking here.

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**Author:** ![Paul\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/5f8ce5/32.png) [@Paul\_King](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Paul_King)\
**Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 8:39pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551/91 "2022-11-22T20:39:08Z")

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> [@structureoftruth](#):
>
> Against these conclusions and the arguments that have been given for them here, I will point you towards some of Ed Feser’s writings: [here](http://www.newdualism.org/papers/E.Feser/Feser-acpq_2013.pdf), [here](https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2008/10/some-brief-arguments-for-dualism-part_29.html), and [here](https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2017/01/revisiting-ross-on-immateriality-of.html). Afraid I don’t have time to elaborate on them, though.

It seems to me that Feser’s arguments would rule out digital computers - even something as simple as a pocket calculator. The whole point of digital technology is to represent definite and precise quantities using physical properties.

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**Author:** ![structureoftruth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/4bbf92/32.png) [@structureoftruth](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/structureoftruth)\
**Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 8:43pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551/92 "2022-11-22T20:43:23Z")

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> [@Dan\_Eastwood](#):
>
> Thank you for the links on the Principle of Sufficient Reason (hence PSR). I’m trying to work through them, but it’s a bit like coming to a discussion where everyone else has already defined all the terms and I don’t know any of them.

Unfortunately, when a philosophical discussion has centuries upon centuries of history, this is hard to avoid. 🙂

> [@Dan\_Eastwood](#):
>
> PSR strikes me as problematic, so the very first thing I did was to Google to see how PSR conflicts with Gödel’s Theorem.

I find it curious that you thought there might be a conflict there, though I suppose I can see the connection. The thing is, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are not quite as significant as they are sometimes made out to be. They are about what can and can’t be proven with formalized systems of logic. Provability is not the same thing as logical entailment or truth, so Gödel’s theorems don’t have anything to say directly about what may or may not be true outside of that fairly specific domain.

The PSR, and similar principles, are about metaphysics, not logic. Supposing we tried to formalize a metaphysical theory by choosing some primitive terms and axioms about those primitive terms, the PSR could be a consequence of those axioms, or its negation could be a consequence of the axioms, or both it and its negation could be consistent with the axioms. Gödel’s theorems could then tell us that there might be truths (assuming our axioms are true) of metaphysics that we could never prove from the axioms using our system of logic. But it would not itself conflict with the PSR - neither provability nor logical entailment are the same thing as explanation.

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**Author:** ![Dan\_Eastwood](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.peacefulscience.org/dan_eastwood/32/2368_2.png) [@Dan\_Eastwood](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Dan_Eastwood)\
**Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 9:01pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551/93 "2022-11-22T21:01:01Z")

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> [@structureoftruth](#):
>
> I find it curious that you thought there might be a conflict there, though I suppose I can see the connection.

Curious that a mathematician might see things mathematically? Welcome to my life! 😄

> [@structureoftruth](#):
>
> The PSR, and similar principles, are about metaphysics, not logic. Supposing we tried to formalize a metaphysical theory by choosing some primitive terms and axioms about those primitive terms, the PSR could be a consequence of those axioms, or its negation could be a consequence of the axioms, or both it and its negation could be consistent with the axioms.

~~I don’t think we are in _set theory land_ any more. Zermelo-Fraenkel and the Axiom of Choice left town on the last bus. 😉~~ OK, so the next article you linked was Godel axiomizing about God! I will try reading more and see if I can make any sense of it.

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**Author:** ![Mercer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e274bd/32.png) [@Mercer](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Mercer)\
**Post date:** [November 23, 2022, 1:45pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551/94 "2022-11-23T13:45:25Z")

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> [@Puck\_Mendelssohn](#):
>
> A scientist may come up with a hypothetical notion. He may employ abstractions in thinking about it. And so he, like the philosopher, may use reasoning which is akin to this. But he knows that this is only the mental work of hypothesizing; it is the conceptual stage of inquiry, where the question is formed, but it is not inquiry itself. That comes when rubber meets road and observations of real entities are made to see whether this hypothesis can or cannot be supported or disconfirmed.

To add some reality to this, it’s not a one-off process. It’s infinitely recursive. We use the scientific method to answer many more little (as in technical) hypotheses than big ones, but the former is done in service of the latter.

It’s a big reason why I tend to cite auto mechanics as people who do real science every day.

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**Author:** ![Faizal\_Ali](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.peacefulscience.org/faizal_ali/32/12416_2.png) [@Faizal\_Ali](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Faizal_Ali)\
**Post date:** [November 23, 2022, 1:46pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551/95 "2022-11-23T13:46:25Z")

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> [@structureoftruth](#):
>
> Your original objection to the theist taking the view that God is not strictly immutable was that it raises theological problems; namely, that divine temporality _diminishes_ one’s conception of God.

Yes, and I still believe that. Of course, that we can argue about really just draws attention to the problem that @Puck_Mendelssohn has raised, which is that theological arguments tend to hinge on the use of words whose meanings are insufficiently rigorous to lead to any solid conclusions. God is said to be maximally great, but that could mean he is beyond time, or is simply bound to time like the rest of us. If sufficiently motivated, I’m sure a theologian could argue that God is 5 foot 7 and lives in a trailer outside Tulsa, but is nonetheless still maximally great, immaterial and beyond human comprehension.

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**Author:** ![Dan\_Eastwood](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.peacefulscience.org/dan_eastwood/32/2368_2.png) [@Dan\_Eastwood](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Dan_Eastwood)\
**Post date:** [November 23, 2022, 1:55pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551/96 "2022-11-23T13:55:48Z")

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> [@Faizal\_Ali](#):
>
> the problem that @Puck_Mendelssohn has raised, which is that theological arguments tend to hinge on the use of words whose meanings are insufficiently rigorous to lead to any solid conclusions.

Well of course. A lot of argeists (an ironic typo that must be preserved) take theological arguments to meanings very different from what they were originally meant to convey. Of course, some theists take theological arguments to some pretty strange conclusions too.

The point is, we end up with a lot of long pointless arguments when we really ought to be learning to ask better questions.

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**Author:** ![Giltil](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/5f8ce5/32.png) [@Giltil](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Giltil)\
**Post date:** [November 23, 2022, 1:56pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551/97 "2022-11-23T13:56:31Z")

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> [@RonSewell](#):
>
> If an immaterial mind controls your thoughts, do you have any more reason to trust them?
> 
> In recent years I have been witness to severe mental decline due to physical disease of the brain. Their thoughts are far from trustworthy. If the mind is not emergent from the brain, I see no reason that the mind should deteriorate just because atoms in the brain are not arranged normally.

A damaged radio will produce faulty music. This does not mean that the radio produces the music. The music pre-exists the radio, which is only a receiver. In the same way, we can imagine that the brain is like a radio, i.e. it functions as a receiver of the mind. And as a damaged radio will produce faulty music, a damaged brain will cause mental decline.

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**Author:** ![misterme987](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.peacefulscience.org/misterme987/32/15207_2.png) [@misterme987](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/misterme987)\
**Post date:** [November 23, 2022, 1:57pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551/98 "2022-11-23T13:57:10Z")

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> [@Dan\_Eastwood](#):
>
> OK, so the next article you linked was Godel axiomizing about God! I will try reading more and see if I can make any sense of it.

Gödel’s ontological argument is very interesting, but unfortunately, it seems to be flawed. Along with other issues, the axioms of his argument seem to imply modal collapse (that our world is the only possible world) if true. See here: [Gödel's ontological proof - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_ontological_proof#Criticism)

However, other ontological arguments might work. A number of them are presented in the chapter on The Ontological Argument in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (not that you should buy that book). I personally don’t find them convincing, but maybe as a mathematician you’ll be able to better appreciate the logic.

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**Author:** ![structureoftruth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/4bbf92/32.png) [@structureoftruth](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/structureoftruth)\
**Post date:** [November 23, 2022, 1:57pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551/99 "2022-11-23T13:57:42Z")

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> [@Dan\_Eastwood](#):
>
> OK, so the next article you linked was Godel axiomizing about God! I will try reading more and see if I can make any sense of it.

To be more precise - you might call it a descendant of an argument from Gödel that has gone through a couple rounds of improvement. As far as I know, Gödel’s original argument was more of an exercise in higher-order modal logic than a serious attempt to prove God’s existence, and it had some philosophical problems (if you accepted Gödel’s premises, it led to modal collapse, meaning all truths are necessarily true and there is no room for contingency or mere possibility).

I wrote a [blog post](https://structureoftruth.wordpress.com/2018/06/30/the-ontological-argument-ii/) about that argument, if you’re interested - maybe it will help make sense of the article, maybe it will just leave you more confused. 😃

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**Author:** ![structureoftruth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/4bbf92/32.png) [@structureoftruth](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/structureoftruth)\
**Post date:** [November 23, 2022, 1:57pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551/100 "2022-11-23T13:57:57Z")

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> [@Paul\_King](#):
>
> It seems to me that Feser’s arguments would rule out digital computers - even something as simple as a pocket calculator. The whole point of digital technology is to represent definite and precise quantities using physical properties.

Then I’m afraid you are not correctly understanding the arguments. The kind of definite quantities that you are thinking of in digital computers is not what the argument is referring to.

Certainly, digital computers let you work with discrete sets of symbols, 0s and 1s. The point is more along the lines of the fact that no string of 0s and 1s has any kind of meaning in and of itself; its meaning has to be derived from elsewhere, and it ultimately cannot be found outside of something that has meaning (or “intentionality”, in philosophical speak) intrinsically.

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**Author:** ![Paul\_King](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/5f8ce5/32.png) [@Paul\_King](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Paul_King)\
**Post date:** [November 23, 2022, 3:34pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551/101 "2022-11-23T15:34:01Z")

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> [@structureoftruth](#):
>
> Then I’m afraid you are not correctly understanding the arguments.

That is possible, but your response doesn’t seem to address the argument I am referring to.

> So, there is no coherent sense to be made of the suggestion that all of our thoughts are indeterminate. But if at least some of them are determinate, and no physical process or set of physical facts is ever determinate, it follows that at least some of our thoughts are not physical.

Now, a digital computer quite definitely deals with determinate values through physical processes. If meaning were a part of it, determinancy would not seem to be an issue - meaning itself would be sufficient.

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**Author:** ![Faizal\_Ali](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.peacefulscience.org/faizal_ali/32/12416_2.png) [@Faizal\_Ali](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Faizal_Ali)\
**Post date:** [November 23, 2022, 3:35pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551/102 "2022-11-23T15:35:07Z")

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> [@Dan\_Eastwood](#):
>
> Well of course. A lot of argeists (an ironic typo that must be preserved) take theological arguments to meanings very different from what they were originally meant to convey.

I am not convinced that I am guilty of that here. When most of them describe God as transcending time, I believe they are positing this as part of his greatness. It is not some irrelevant attribute like describing someone eye colour. It’s part and parcel with him being omnipotent, omniscient and all the rest. But then it turns out that he could also be bound by time without diminishing his greatness. Well, OK. I am not denying that there are theists who believe this and who might even be able to come up with rationalizations for their position. But I can be forgiven, I hope, if I see this as nothing more than word play.

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**Author:** ![RonSewell](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.peacefulscience.org/ronsewell/32/6194_2.png) [@RonSewell](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/RonSewell)\
**Post date:** [November 23, 2022, 3:35pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551/103 "2022-11-23T15:35:16Z")

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> [@Giltil](#):
>
> And as a damaged radio will produce faulty music, a damaged brain will cause mental decline.

That analogy does not hold, because you cannot demonstrate that the mind is independent of the brain, while a transmitter can be received by any radio. You can replace a radio and play the same station, but cannot receive a brain transplant and still be you.  
 ![image](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/uploads/peacefulscience/original/2X/1/1a4e9c9c7457cc9a4632d28de279bebbc108c07c.jpeg)

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**Author:** ![Dan\_Eastwood](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.peacefulscience.org/dan_eastwood/32/2368_2.png) [@Dan\_Eastwood](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Dan_Eastwood)\
**Post date:** [November 23, 2022, 3:58pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551/104 "2022-11-23T15:58:58Z")

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> [@Faizal\_Ali](#):
>
> > [@Dan\_Eastwood](#):
> >
> > Well of course. A lot of argeists (an ironic typo that must be preserved) take theological arguments to meanings very different from what they were originally meant to convey.
> 
> I am not convinced that I am guilty of that here.

And I am not convinced I am innocent. 😉

> [@Faizal\_Ali](#):
>
> When most of them describe God as transcending time, I believe they are positing this as part of his greatness. It is not some irrelevant attribute like describing someone eye colour.

At least with eye colour we have a good understanding of what that means. When it comes to transcending time and space that doesn’t seem to mean anything at all. It’s like the ultimate moving of the goal posts to … outside of time and space. I can accept this theological concept developed over the ages to try to describe indescribable things, but it doesn’t seem be mean anything outside of philosophy.

Maybe we should ask Broomfondle and Magicthighs? 😉

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**Author:** ![Rumraket](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.peacefulscience.org/rumraket/32/9328_2.png) [@Rumraket](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Rumraket)\
**Post date:** [November 23, 2022, 4:01pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551/105 "2022-11-23T16:01:16Z")

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> [@Giltil](#):
>
> A damaged radio will produce faulty music. This does not mean that the radio produces the music. The music pre-exists the radio, which is only a receiver. In the same way, we can imagine that the brain is like a radio, i.e. it functions as a receiver of the mind. And as a damaged radio will produce faulty music, a damaged brain will cause mental decline.

One has to wonder why that would produce the sorts of behavior we see from people with damaged brains. I mean there’s only so far you can stretch that analogy, as a damaged radio will usually just make the signal very noisy so it stops sounding like music, or it will stutter or something.  
But people with various forms of brain damage aren’t behaving like there’s noise in the signal. They’re behaving as if areas of the brain associated with controlling different aspects of behavior have become damaged. Famously people with frontal lobe neurodegenerative diseases are behaving with less social inhibitions. People with damage to the motor cortex have problems moving. People who suffer damage to the visual cortex have various forms of problems with sight. Etc.

Even more weirdly, some medications or drugs have mind-altering side-effects. Some medications against high blood pressure give their users nightmares. Literal bad dreams at night when they go to sleep. Why on Earth would a chemical compound alter the mind-signal entering the brain such that people start having bad dreams? Is there a sort of “bad dreams” wave being broadcast everywhere, that the brain normally just doesn’t recieve?

More importantly, any radio can interact with the same radio waves. But only specific brains seem to be able to pick up a particular mind-signal. My brain isn’t receiving the signal from your mind, it’s apparently only receiving “mine”. How does the signal know which brain to interact with? Why are the atoms in my brain and my brain alone able to pick up this signal, and no other atoms are able to do this? How does the signal know that this carbon or nitrogen atom is from _my_ brain, and not a carbon atom in a pencil, or a piece of paper, or a piece of my skin? At what level or degree of cellular differentiation do cells that become neurons start to become able to pick up this signal?

We can literally grow brain tissue in petri dishes. Do they receive this mysterious mind-signal too? Is a unique mind assigned to every such piece of growing tissue?

Then there’s split brain patients.

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**Author:** ![structureoftruth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/4bbf92/32.png) [@structureoftruth](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/structureoftruth)\
**Post date:** [November 23, 2022, 4:01pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/the-most-current-philosophical-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god/15551/106 "2022-11-23T16:01:40Z")

</div>

> [@Paul\_King](#):
>
> Now, a digital computer quite definitely deals with determinate values through physical processes.

Except Feser clearly explains that he is referring to _semantic_ determinacy or indeterminacy - not just any kind of determinate value (which digital computers do possess), but determinate _meaning_ (which they lack intrinsically).

> [@Paul\_King](#):
>
> If meaning were a part of it, determinancy would not seem to be an issue - meaning itself would be sufficient.

Whether the meaning encoded in a physical representation is determinate or not - i.e., whether the meaning is uniquely fixed by the physical facts - is precisely what is in question (and argued against). Maybe try a closer read.

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