'Summa Atheologica: Why I Am An Atheist' toc: "true"

I will first begin by tackling the presuppositionalist argument, since that is the form of apologetic that I started out believing. The presuppositional argument comes in many different forms, from the one that started with Van Til and Bonson and was most recently defended by Sye Ten Bruggencate, to the version defended by Matt Slick, to the version proposed by Gordon H. Clark, to that defended by Jordan Peterson. Fundamentally, however presuppositionalist arguments generally take the following very similar form:

1. God is needed to justify X (meaning, morality, epistemology).
2. X is practical/necessary/important.
3. Therefore, we need to accept god even without evidence for it.

The fundamental problem with arguments of this form is that if positing a god is ultimately unjustified, then how can it provide good justification for the further proposition we wish to justify? If the justification of something relies ultimately on a baseless assertion, then in what way is that a good justification? If committing myself to believing something requires, as a prerequisite, that I accept something that I have no reason to believe, then it would be better, and more accurate, to simply reject that which relies on that baseless assertion! Of course, this is where the second premise in the argument kicks in: the presuppositionalist will retort that I simply cannot reject proposition X, since that would make my worldview completely incoherent and unlivable, so that move is simply not open to me in this exchange. The counter to that, however, is to point out a subtle trick that's being pulled here: when the presuppositionalist introduces premise 2, they are essentially making the necessity or practicality of the idea do the work of justifying it, not god. It is the incoherence of thought or impossibility of life without that proposition that forces me to accept it. God is just being “"brought along for the ride," so to speak, through the association of the two in the first premise. Therefore, the correct response to the presuppositionalist is to point this out and say: if we are going to rest the justification of X on its practicality or necessity, simply let that be so. Admit that it is not justified in the argumentative or logical sense, but only in the practical or transcendental sense, and cut out the middle-man entirely. So it is that in itself is a reason to accept logic, no god needed! Ultimately, it is the proposition, X, that is doing the justifying of god, but since god and X are not conceptually related a priori, but only correlated in the mind of the presuppositionalist, X does not strictly entail god, and the two can be decoupled.

Of course, an obvious response to this is to refer me back to the first premise: god is necessary to justify X. So if we want X, we can't simply presuppose it, we have to presuppose god. Unfortunately for the presuppositionalist, this is simply special pleading. They are already trying to use the idea that presupposing things is valid in order to presuppose their god, but suddenly they want to stop anyone else from doing the same thing, because when other people try to do the same rhetorical move, suddenly it becomes inconvenient for them. Problematically for them, however, there is nothing inherent to the nature of god, or X, that means that only god can be presupposed and nothing else can be, or that X can't be presupposed, it can only be justified in terms of a presupposed god. Anything, I repeat, anything can be presupposed. That's inherent to the nature of presuppositions. It's just that some presuppositions are worse than others, and we probably want to keep our list of presuppositions down to the smallest and least ontologically heavy (full of rules and implications) list possible.

An example of reasoning this argument out might be in order. Let's start with epistemology: suppose the presuppositionalist says that in order to know anything, we have to trust that god beams the knowledge that our senses are trustworthy into our heads in a trustworthy manner. This is how Descartes solved solipsism, after all, although he did not on this basis turn it into a transcendental argument. Without believing in god, therefore, the presuppositionalist insists, we cannot trust any knowledge that we have of anything outside our own heads, because we do not have a trustworthy source of information. In response, I might simply reply: why not simply believe, as a matter of practical necessity, that our senses are typically trustworthy? If you are justified in merely asserting that fact with an extra step, why am I not justified in asserting that fact directly? In fact, I don't see why I'm more justified in asserting that fact directly due to its direct practicality than you are in asserting that fact with extra assumptions and indirection!

This is not to mention the fact that presuppositionalists typically try to loop their scriptures into this argument at some point, thereby undermining their entire point; after all, if in order to know that god was telling them (trust-worthily in its omniscience and omnibenevolence) that their senses were reliable, they had to read scripture first, then of course prior to that (both temporally and logically), they had to trust that their senses were accurate enough to be competent to read an evil demon could be manipulating scripture to make it seem like it said one thing, when it really said another.

The same sort of reasoning works for meaning or purpose as epistemology: if meaning and purpose in life are really so necessary that asserting them baselessly is acceptable, then doing so with less indirection is both more honest, and more justified, than asserting them with more indirection. Additionally, if you are choosing for yourself whether to assert a god, and which god, in order to get to a certain purpose in life, you are essentially, at least in the vaguest outlines, choosing so why not choose it for yourself directly? I guarantee that having control over your own life-narrative, your own meaning, will, once you have discarded the religious brain-worms of “"true meaning" needing to come from outside yourself, make you far more fulfilled and happy, since you will be able to choose something that is truly the most meaningful to you.

This is also, incidentally, my response to the semi-presuppositionalist arguments that I often see from "spiritual" people. They object to what when it is really my warm blooded and excited love for experience and the world and by saying that they find meaning and purpose in believing in the spiritual world, and that it doesn't really hurt anyone. To this I reply threefold: first, if you have the kind of epistemology that lets you believe such things merely because you want to believe, then you will be ripe to be taken in by all sorts of nonsense; second, if you are accepting something purely for the meaning it gives you, why not just construct and assert your own meaning directly; and third, I am sure that believing in those spiritual things makes some practical difference to how you act, so that the falsity risk of being spiritual remains non-zero. Nevertheless, typically people who are pantheists, spiritualists, pagans, etc, tend to be very accepting people with beliefs that are not particularly normative at all beyond conclusions that you would come to anyway, so I find it best not to bother them; the falsity risk of their belief systems is typically very small, and they are typically great people, so there's no need to harass them unnecessarily.

The fine-tuning argument is a much more scientific argument then the presuppositionalist one, and actually follows the form of a proper argument, instead of an appeal-to-consequences fallacy mixed in with two special-pleading fallacies and a massive violation of Occham's Razor. In this case, we have an abductive argument:

1. The universe is fine-tuned for life: there are many physical constants and laws which could have been otherwise, that have been set just right for life to exist.
2. The probability of this happening randomly is very small, since the range of possible constants and laws is large and they would have to be identical in value to the ones we currently have.
3. Meanwhile, the probability of the physical constants and laws being guaranteed.
4. Therefore, a god is the best explanation for the current state of affairs.

The fundamental problem with this argument is that it hides all of the complexity of having a deity that would create the universe in just this way behind the seemingly-simple word "god." You see, the reason that we would choose the god hypothesis to explain this over simply saying that the physical constants and laws that we observe are brute facts, is because that seems like positing a lot of brute facts, whereas if you posit a god, that's only "one" brute fact.

The problem with this is that the god that you need to posit for this to work is actually an incredibly complex network of incredibly complex brute facts. While the physicalist is positing nineteen numbers and two rules (the standard model and general relativity, lets say), all of which we actually observe, the theist is positing that:

• disembodied minds are possible and the spiritual world exists
• the god is omniscient
• the god is omnipotent
• the god wants life for some reason
• the god chose to create a universe for the purpose of creating life, instead of just making more disembodied minds
• the god chose to create a universe mostly uninhabitable for life, despite creating it for the purpose of holding life
• the god decided to create the universe with these laws of physics instead of other ones
• the god decided to create a universe that would need to have its constants and laws finely balanced against each other to produce life, instead of just creating life by fiat

That's a lot of brute facts, and the more theologically interesting you and its not just about the number of brute facts either. Not only are these brute facts not things that we know exist and observe, and are very useful for explaining other experiences, but these are complex brute facts that carry with them a lot of implications, possibilities for contradiction, and more.

Note also that in order to explain why that god created the universe in this way and not some other way, we basically needed to import all of the brute facts that the atheist would have to assume anyway? That basically defeats the entire point of this argument, showing that once again, in apologetics god is usually something smuggled in, an extra middle-man between us and the actual solution to the problem.

This is not to mention the fact that we don't actually know how many of these physical laws and constants would need to be brute facts, and how many actually can be derived from each other or from further, more fundamental physics that we haven't discovered yet. Already in history the number of fundamental physical constants has been reduced, as new science has shown how to derive previously thought to be fundamental constants from other ones, and we haven't even gotten to quantum gravity yet! It could be the case that there is only one law, or one constant, that we need to posit as a brute fact, whereas the theist has already reached the limit of their exploration by positing a god.

In this case, a god is just simply a worse hypothesis than positing the physical constants as brute facts.

The Kalam Cosmological argument is conceptually very simple, but it, too, has complications. Here is the basic format of the argument in all its iconic glory:

1. Everything that begins to exist as a cause for its beginning
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore the universe had a cause.
4. That cause is god.
5. Therefore, god exists.

This has the form of a more traditional deductive argument, and as such, we can analyze it premise by premise, unlike the previous two arguments.

Before I do that, however, I think an abductive analysis of this argument, like the one given in the previous section, might be helpful as a high-level overview. This argument works by extending rules that we are familiar with in everyday life (or at least, so it claims) to another event in the set of all events, thereby seeking to establish that a god exists by showing that a god is actually implied by are already-existing understanding of how the world works. Thus, god is being used to explain a new phenomenon, but by way of explanations, patterns, and rules that we already adhere to. This is the rhetorical power of the Kalam: it attempts to naturally integrate god into the totality of our scientific worldviews, treating it as an endogenous consequence instead of an exogenous extra hypothesis. Of course, the failure condition for this argument, then, is to show that either the event that is supposed to require god as an explanation by our existing rules didn't happen, or, alternatively, that the existing rule it is relying on does not actually naturally extend in the direction the Kalam claims it does, meaning that new things would have to be posited, after while point it should become clear that positing a self-existing block universe is far more ontologically frugal than positing a universe plus a self-existing god.

Premise 1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause for its beginning.

Even granting all of the other premises of the argument for the moment, for simplicity's sake so that we can tackle them one at a time, this premise has several serious, pretty much fatal, problems.

The first problem is that extending this causal rule to the universe itself (and therefore to a state of affairs "outside" the universe, whatever that means) is actually extending it far beyond what everyday empirical experience and scientific investigation would suggest. We know that when an object "begins to exist" it requires a cause inside the universe, where space and time and laws of physics hold sway, but we do not have any way of knowing that the same rule is true of a completely and utterly different situation. That's stretching induction much too and this is actually the that causation is a fundamentally spaciotemporal affair: a cause must come before its effect, and be related to it in some spacial, physical way. That gives us strong prima facie reason to doubt that the principle of causation applies outside the universe.

This fundamental distinction between what happens inside the universe, where even the vacuum of space, which is colloquially called "nothing," is actually filled with a manifold with all sorts of energy and activity going on, and known laws, and what happens "outside" the universe, where truly nothing that we can really comprehend exists, defeats the naive intuitionistic argument that if it were possible for something to come into existence without a cause, and from nothing, then we would expect to see it happen all the time in the real world. Not to mention the fact that even if this distinction did not rebut that argument already, we could simply say that things springing into existence is cosmically rare so rare in fact that we would not expect it to happen within the time that human has to exist. This is in fact what quantum physics leads us to believe: even in a vacuum, virtual particles pop in and out of existence causelessly all the time, and these particles have a certain probability of not mutually annihilating each other, in which case, it is possible, just astonishingly unlikely, that anything could pop into existence at any time. Thus, rejecting this rule, whether totally, or only in its application to the universe, does not require us to accept absurdities at all.

The second problem with this premise is that it equivocates on the definition of "cause." Both in the sense that, as explored in the foregoing paragraphs, whatever kind of cause would work outside the universe would have to be a very different kind of cause than the ones we are familiar with, but also in the sense that, when we are within the universe, every cause we have ever observed has both a material and efficient component, whereas if something were to "cause" the universe, it would of course have to be immaterial in nature, which is something that we have never seen before. In fact, we don't even know if it is possible, or have any reason to think that it is! Thus, again, the process of induction that the Kalam is trying to leverage breaks down just precisely when we get to the very boundary that it is trying to stretch to.

Following on with this problem, another problem arises immediately: from our experience within the universe, we know that matter cannot be created or destroyed, only rearranged. When new things “"come into existence," they are really the materials of other things being arranged into a new pattern that we recognize as a new entity. Therefore, if inductively extrapolating rules of things inside the universe to the universe itself and beyond is valid, then why not extrapolate that rule, and conclude that the universe must have always existed, since we know from experience inside the universe that matter and energy are constants that cannot ever either come into existence or go out of existence? This actually meshes well with our understanding of the Big Bang, since as far as we know the matter and energy that expanded into the universe as we know it today has always existed, and the current universe is only a different state and organization of all that matter and energy, nothing more.

Now, one argument that can be made in response to what I'm saying is that we know that everything in the universe needs a cause to begin to exist, and since the universe is just the set of all those things, surely whatever applies to every member of the set, also applies to the set itself. The problem with this argument is that it commits a parts-to-whole fallacy. If I say that each brick in a wall can't function as a wall, therefore the whole set of bricks cannot function as a wall, well, that is obviously mistaken. How do we know this is not the case with the universe itself? It could be possible that the most fundamental metaphysical law is that "Nature abhors a vacuum," and some set of things must exist, it is just that any particular thing doesn't need to exist; so particular things need causes, but some/thing will always exist no matter what, without the need for a particular cause. It should also be pointed out that the universe is actually not merely the set of all things; it is actually a separate and unique thing itself which /contains everything else. The universe is the spaciotemporal substrate that everything else exists embedded in, and that substrate is very decidedly some/thing/.

Premise 2: The universe began to exist.

Here, yet again, we come across severe difficulties. The first major problem is that we don't actually know that the universe began to exist at all. We know that it is not past-infinite, but because of how we believe time works during and around the time of the Big Bang, we have reason to believe that time itself only began to exist along with the universe's expansion. That would mean that although the universe is finitely extended in the earlier-than direction, there was no time at which the universe did not exist, because there is no infinite "container of time" for it to be embedded in that would allow for a state of affairs when it did not exist. It never "began to exist," it it just changed state at the beginning of visible cosmic history. This is not overturned by the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem, either, whatever William Lane Craig might tell you: all that theorem proves is that a universe which is expanding cannot have done so forever. It does not prove that there ever was any point in time when that universe did not exist.

The reason this is important is that if something has always existed, at all points in time, then there really isn't any coherent way in which we can say that it "began to exist." To say that the universe began to exist, when there was no point in time at which it did not exist, is simply to redefine words. So to try to apply a causal principle, which has to do with "beginning to exist" in the sense that we mean when we see things in this universe not exist and then come into existence, to something which can be said to begin to exist only in an extremely different and distinct manner, is to equivocate.

A second issue with this premise is that it assumes a tensed theory of time, where things in the future and past do not actually exist, only the present infinitesimally small "moment" exists. Thus, when something that did not exist in the past begins to exist in the present, there has a new entity has entered the picture. If this were not the case, if all moments in time were equally existent and real, than anything could be said to "come into existence" only in the sense that a ruler "begins to exist" at the first that is, the appearance of starting to be present is not an ontological fact, but a product of a reference frame that is limited in scope and accelerated through the time dimension in a certain direction. The problem with assuming a tensed theory of time (A-theory), however intuitive it might seem, is that the B-theory of time, or block theory, is pretty much universally considered to be the only theory of time reconcilable with the physics of relativity by modern scholars in both scientific and philosophical disciplines. All attempts to reconcile relativity with an "objective" reference frame in order to allow time to be tensed, such as the Neo-Lorentzian relativity theory, have failed, so we are left with strong reason to think that the very concept of anything "beginning to exist" at all, except in a sort of relative sense based on our own reference frames, is just irreconcilable with science.

Even if you change the argument so it isn't about the universe as a whole "beginning to exist," but instead is about the state transition of the universe starting to expand needing a cause, it really doesn't work. We already know that things can require state transitions, or various effects to happen, from their internal nature, without an external cause needed. A perfect example of this is radioactive decay: simply because of the nature of large, heavy atoms, they will begin to change their state, without any external cause needed. Why could it not be like that for the universe? Simply the existence of so much matter and energy compressed into an infinitely tiny space, required expansion to take and since, as far as we know, that matter and energy existed timelessly before it began to expand (if that even really makes sense), there isn't even a question of why it started to expand at one time or as soon as it existed it began to expand.

Sub-conclusion 3: Therefore, the universe has a cause.

To sum up then, based on the previous points: we have no reason to think that something coming into existence ex nihilo actually requires a cause,“³ and applying causal principles to the universe is fallacious; we also have no reason to think that the universe actually did come into existence out of nothing or begin in any other sense that might require a cause either, and we have no reason to think that the eternally (for all of time, even if time itself is finite) existing universe required an external cause to begin expanding either. These objections in themselves, completely annihilate this sub-conclusion, and therefore the rest of the argument.

There is more to say, perhaps not surprisingly at this point. It could be objected that whether the universe actually temporally came into existence or not is a moot point, because what the Kalam is really getting at is that we have to posit god as the ultimate sufficient reason or ontological substrate that contains and necessitates the a sort of contingency argument. The problem with this argument is that in any worldview, you're going to have to posit a brute fact, as the chain of reason or logical causation is going to have to end with something no matter what. The theist chooses to posit god as a brute fact, while the naturalist chooses to posit the universe as a which is a better approach? I believe that the answer is quite clear: positing the universe as a brute fact is by far the superior approach, because it elevates a reality that we all have to grapple with, the source of our experiences, to the highest position in our ontology, where it should be. Furthermore, it posits no more entities than those which we already have reason to believe exist, and posits a quite simple entity at that. Meanwhile, positing a god as a brute fact doesn't really have any extra explanatory power (see the previous section), elevates something that we don't have reason to believe exists independently to the top place in our ontology, and is quite complex. The only possible reason we could have to prefer a god over a universe as a brute fact is the ontological argument, but that argument basically says that god is a brute fact as part of building its definitions, so its not really lightening the load at all, and it also fails as an argument.”⁴

Premise 4: That cause is god.

I'll just cover this argument briefly, since, having destroyed phase one of the Kalam, phase two is pretty much irrelevant. The common argument given for the cause of the universe being god is that, as something which causes the universe, it must be atemporal and immaterial, as it must exist outside of the universe and prior to it. So far that's reasonable, but it doesn't rule out abstract laws of physics, quantum fields, etc. What comes next is where things really start diverging into absurdity: proponents of phase two of the argument insist that for something to cause something without being caused to make that choice itself, that thing must be a personal agent. This relies on the assumption of agent-causation, where conscious, personal agents are the sole cause of their decisions, with nothing prior to them causing their decisions ultimately. First of all, this is a highly contentions understanding of free will, and I think it should be pretty obvious that most ways we understand minds require context and prior causes in order to make decisions. Moreover, I would argue that minds are the operation of thoughts is a temporal affair, and something which simultaneously holds all mental states isn't really doing thinking. I also think minds are fundamentally material, or at least relational: consciousness requires something to be conscious of, so a mind cannot exist in the absence of something to exist in relation to. Furthermore, I simply don't think that agent-causation is the only way you could get uncaused causes. See my points about radioactive decay and the inherent nature of objects requiring new events without direct causation above. See also Richard Carrier's stuff on refuting the “"out of nothing nothing comes" argument. Finally, we arrive at the idea that whatever this cause is, it must be "sufficiently powerful to create the universe." This is tautologically true, since whatever caused the universe must have the causal power to create the universe; but the picture that proponents of this argument want to draw for us, of something having to be immensely, incomprehensibly powerful effects can be disproportionate in scope to the "size" or "power" (nebulous terms) of the causes that create them all the time, e.g. the Butterfly Effect. The reason it seems like we should assume that the cause is extremely powerful because it has the power to create the universe is that there is an equivocation here between causal power, the logical and metaphysical capability of causing something, and power in a broader, theistic-associated sense.

The basic form of Pascal's Wager usually begins with a simple Bayesian table, like so:

-	Atheism	Theism
God	\[-\inf\]	\[+\inf\]
No God	\[+n\]	\[-n\]

To put it in words: if you choose to not believe in god, and it turns out that god exists, you will go to hell for all eternity; whereas if you choose to not believe in god and he doesn't exist, you only gain a finite amount. Meanwhile, if you choose theism, and god does exist, you gain an infinite amount, whereas if you choose theism and god doesn't exist, you only lose a finite amount. According to basic decision theory, the choice is obvious: on the one hand you have a finite reward with infinite risk, and on the other hand you have infinite reward and because of the infinities it doesn't matter what the relative probabilities of theism and atheism being true are, the infinity overcomes them. The logical choice is always to believe in god.

One common objection to this argument is to deny doxastic voluntarism, and insist that it is impossible to simply choose to believe something without sufficient evidence. This, of course, is true to a certain degree, but I actually think that at base level, belief at least might be volitional. We can choose our epistemologies, and thereby we can to believe in god, we simply have to change our epistemology to be a much weaker, more permissive one. Of course, that raises the question of whether the belief one has in one's own epistemic system is voluntary, and I'm really not sure that it is (probably isn't), but the point is that this point is highly contentious, and verges into highly nebulous psychological discussions that I'm simply not interested in having. Furthermore, Pascal himself has a response to it: he says that whether or not we can choose to believe, we should at least try, on the off-chance that it actually works, or that at least pretending to believe is enough to make god happy. Which seems like a solid enough response to me.

No, the more interesting response stems from a thought experiment, which highlights that there is a more fundamental problem with this argument, something extremely important missing from the naive decision theory that Pascal uses to make his point. Imagine you're walking alone in a dark ally one night, when a mysterious stranger in a dark suit strides up to you out of the gloom. In the striated lights and shadows of the car headlamps passing on the road behind you, its hard to see his face, but his eyes glisten wetly in the moving light as they stare at you. When he speaks, he speaks in a low baritone, telling you that you are in grave danger. There are spirits haunting you, he says, and they will soon strike, sending you to the pits of Tartarus to burn for all eternity. To prevent this, good spirits have appeared to him in a dream, and told him that you must pay him a thousand dollars, as well as wear this medallion. He holds the medallion out, a strange twisted shape of gleaming lacquered oak. Do you pay him and take it?

after all, if you don't and you turn out to be wrong, you will burn for all eternity, whereas if you do, and turn out to be wrong, all you've lost is a thousand bucks. Yet, I daresay many of us simply wouldn't take this man's offer seriously. Why not? The threat of eternal punishment should surely outweigh whatever inherent improbability there is in the conception of the universe he is presenting to us.

I think the reason why we wouldn't pay the strange man, or take Pascal's bet, is that decision theory needs to operate on the basis of possibility, not mere conceivability. This is because while there are an many of which are in fact not possible, and/or not compatible with the actual world that we we are beings with a finite amount of processing capacity, and we need to limit the range of what we have to consider when making decisions to the most salient, important, and relevant options. That process of determining what options are salient to our decision-making needs to be based on what we actually know about the thing with respect to which we are making decisions: the world of our experience. Thus, the options that are actually salient to our decision-making process are those options that have either been demonstrated to be possible by evidence, or can at least be inferred to be possible. We should therefore only enter outcomes into our decision matrix if they are demonstrated possibilities consistent with the actual universe in which we are making decisions. Spending all our lives considering every possible conceivable scenario with a large enough negative or positive payoff to overcome their inherent improbability (whether that payoff is infinite or not) is simply a waste of time, an exercise in needless worrying, especially since it is difficult to assess whether any of those scenarios are actually even possible given the actual universe we live in.

For instance, since we have seen car crashes in the past, we should integrate that into our understanding of the risks of driving, but since we have never seen someone be abducted by aliens while driving, even though that is a conceivable occurrence, we don't really need to worry about it. This is actually how people deal with anxiety all the time: realizing that some outcomes are simply imaginative flights of fantasy that have no real basis in what actually happens in the real world. Likewise, until it is demonstrated that a god actually does exist, and therefore that it is an actual possibility that a god exists, one need not consider that part of the payoff matrix. Of course, if it turns out that a god does exist, then Pascal's Wager actually have something interesting to say: out of self-interest, we should try to get into heaven even if we don't like that god!

I can perhaps give a somewhat stronger illustration of why this limitation on decision theory is necessary by bringing up the "many gods" objection to Pascal's Wager. This objection merely points out that if infinity obliterates all consideration of relative probability, then we should not just consider the Christian god, but all conceivable gods and religions. Not merely all existing religions, but every god that is conceivable. Now, I think it is fair to say that there is an infinite amount of conceivable gods; even if we limit the properties of these gods that we vary to create the space of possibilities to the conditions for entering heaven or hell, since that is what is relevant to the Wager, we can still construct an infinite number of them, since for any god, we can create an anti-god that sends you to hell if you believe in that other god, and an anti-anti-god, and so on, essentially working like the Peano arithmetic "successor" function, which provably creates an infinite set. Once you have this infinite list of gods/religions, we can match each god up with an infinite list of other (mutually exclusive) gods that will send you to hell for believing in that god, meaning that you have a negative payoff of an infinity of infinities for choosing any god, matched against the single-order infinity of positive payoff for choosing that god. Therefore, the expected payoff of choosing any god in particular remains infinitely more negative than positive. Any choice we make, therefore, is the "wrong" choice, because we have to consider the conceivably infinite consequences of being wrong!

Atheism isn't the odd one out here, either. There are many belief systems that grant infinite reward (heaven) to those who stick to truth no matter what and follow their conscience, whether or not they believe a particular thing, and grant infinite punishment (hell) to those who are disingenuous about what they believe, or hurt those who believe differently from them (which most of the religions that most assiduously threaten eternal damnation encourage you to do). In fact, such belief systems are quite common among those that are generally spiritual or agnostic. That's not to mention the belief systems that grant you infinite reward (heaven) no matter what you believe, like (some forms of, if I understand it correctly) universalism, which means that any belief system you choose automatically has an extra infinity granted to it (and constant multiples of infinity are not differentiable, above adding one infinity where you had none before, so this still does not privilege theism over atheism).

Even if we were to take seriously the logic that, according to Pascal's Wager, it is rational to be anything but an atheist, there are other decision-theoretic paradoxes that crop up, further demonstrating that doing decision theory on conceivable outcomes is simply naive. For instance: if there is an infinite reward for believing, should you simply do the minimum necessary to be counted religious, since that has the same expected payoff (infinite) as doing any more? Or should you do the absolute maximum (become a monk perhaps), since you want to do everything in your power to avoid that infinite negative outcome? Should you choose the religion with the worst hell (in order to avoid it) or the worst heaven? These are all fundamentally and completely unsolvable decision-theoretic lacunae once you incorporate conceivability into your decision tree.

And this illustrates the fundamental point: once you admit conceivability into your decision tree, all hell (if you'll forgive the pun) breaks loose. Thus, we should only really worry about established possibilities for consequences when trying to decide our actions. Let us worry about living the one life we know we do have as best we can; we'll find out what lies beyond that, if anything, when we get to it. As Nietzsche said in Thus Spake Zarathustra:

I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.

This leads us directly to falsity risk: falsity risk, rather than being a reason to believe in something based on the possible consequences of not doing so, is instead a reason to investigate and try to form correct beliefs about something. It is essentially a barometer for deciding whether to investigate whether something which is conceivable is also possible. Additionally, like I discussed earlier, falsity risk only works as a reason to ensure that one has a sufficient reason to believe something, and does one's due diligence regarding it; it does not work in the negative direction, asking one to have sufficient reason to disbelieve something, because if we started on the prospect of believing absolutely everything in order to avoid that risk, we would have to believe an infinite number of contradictory things, which is impossible. Therefore, of the two poles, I choose the one that begins with the null hypothesis.