A summary of my proof of the existence of God
To summarize:
1. It seems to me that “it just is” is not a satisfactory response to the questioning why any World (universe, multiverse, whatever) exists, let alone one which includes conscious entities apparently capable of understanding it (or so much of it as we seem capable).
2. Science is not capable of providing a satisfactory response. (If you disagree, let’s hear it then. Because it certainly isn’t anything which starts by just taking quantum mechanics as a given because the laws of quantum mechanics are a part of the World giving rise to the question in the first place.)
3. Ideas (forms, in the Platonic sense) do not require any response of the type the existence of the World requires. They simply are, regardless of whether anything they refer to exists in any other-than-ideal manner. For instance, the idea that a square has four right angles can be said to exist in the way I am speaking, regardless of whether there exists anything which is not just an idea out of which to make a square. It is simply a logically consistent statement.
4. It seems to me that something like #3 could offer a satisfactory response to #1 and Max Tegmark’s concept of the World being an intricately detailed mathematical structure and that our particular universe is a substructure thereof. And further that we are yet lower level substructures which happen to be capable of processing information in a manner that is both sufficiently complex and yet still sufficiently unified as to have the subjective experience of consciousness.
5. To which I add that if our level of conscious substructures exist, then it would be sheer hubris to suppose, a priori, that no other such conscious substructures exist. I invoke the Copernican Principle in support of this conclusion.
6. #4 & #5 get us to the point where our minds should be open to the probability that consciousness greater than ours exists and as such (greater than ours I mean) we ought not expect it to be leaving evidence of itself where NASA can spot it. We should reasonably expect the evidence to be no more or less than what it would permit us to discern and I invoke all the usual theistic explanations for why that evidence would be subtle enough to preserve our moral agency and permit us the degree of autonomy that oppressively obvious evidence would not.
7. Thus, I conclude that a greater consciousness probably exists. I contend that such a conclusion offends no established scientific principle and is consistent with, even required by, the only plausible response to #1 above.
8. Having concluded, a priori, that this greater consciousness (“God”) exists, I would require a preponderance of evidence to the contrary to conclude that he does not exist. But on the contrary, although I do not see any reason why it must necessarily be so, I see evidence that there is a net positive degree of goodness and beauty in how we experience the World and this seems to me to be entirely consistent with, and best explained by, the existence of what to us at least would be an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent higher consciousness. The good life in a good World that most of us are able to enjoy, despite all the struggles and hardships it includes, or maybe even more because of how we are capable of overcoming them, is sufficient evidence to conclude, on the balance of probabilities, that God exists.