a reader on The Divine Inexistence

“If I hadn’t read After Finitude and wasn’t already convinced of Meillassoux’s sincerity, the conclusions of The Divine Inexistence might almost seem like an elaborate philosophical hoax of some sort.”

He’s sincere about it all right. (And this reader admires The Divine Existence, by the way.)

My response to any dismissive critics of Meillassoux’s virtual God would be as follows…

The dismissiveness makes sense only if you believe in the principle of sufficient reason and the application of the laws of probability to the structure of the cosmos. (And I do, by the way.)

But Meillassoux attacks those assumptions, so that’s the ground where you need to confront him: not just with sarcastic waves of the hand about God possibly being born in the future for no reason at all. You need to argue for the principle of sufficient reason and against Meillassoux’s Cantorian argument against measuring probabilities at the level of the laws of nature as a whole.

If you do accept his views on these issues, then the doctrine of the virtual God makes a surprising amount of sense. With all probabilities removed from the picture, we have little choice but to focus on the most important possibilities rather than the “likely” ones, and he has a point (as stated in the interview in my book) that the appearance of a unicorn or a spaghetti monster simply wouldn’t change very much, ontologically speaking. It could indeed happen, but who cares? All that matters is the emergence of the fourth world, the World of Justice, and the salvation of the dead.

It’s one of the most audacious arguments to appear in philosophy in a good long time. And though I can’t accept it (I’m a Principle of Sufficient Reason man, myself) I really warmed to it during the course of writing that book. And it’s an argument that takes a lot of courage to make in the basically atheist-materialist environment in which he and the rest of us operate.