Maybe God created the world. But what kind of god?

It seems reasonable to have doubts about God's moral character. Some religions claim that if God exists, he/she/it is morally perfect. Other religions, especially polytheistic religions, make no such claims. Even the Old Testament, if read at face value, does not appear to portray a morally perfect God.

And of course there's the "problem of evil": The fact that the world is -- or appears to be -- full of needless suffering and wickedness that one might hope a morally good God would work to prevent. God could, it seems, have given Hitler a heart attack. God could, it seems, prevent people from dying young of painful diseases. One possible explanation for God's failure to prevent evil and suffering is that evil and suffering really don't bother God so much. Maybe God even enjoys watching us suffer. That would be one reason to create a world -- as a kind of LiveLeak on human misery.

Similarly, it seems reasonable to have doubts about the extent of God's power. Maybe God really wanted to stop the Holocaust, but just couldn't get there in time, or was constrained by non-interference regulations enforced by the Council of Worldbuilders, or was so busy stopping other bad things that this one slipped through the net. Maybe God would have liked to create human teeth sufficiently robust that they did not decay, but had to compromise given the resources at hand.

Here's one way gods might work: by creating simulated worlds inside their computers, populated by conscious AIs who experience those simulated worlds as real. (Imagine the computer game "The Sims", but with conscious people inside.) I've argued that any manager of such a world would literally be a god to the beings inside that world. But of course those sorts of gods might be highly limited in their abilities.maybe we too are in a Sim.  (Personally, this strikes me as a more plausible version of theism than orthodox Catholic theology.) There's no guarantee that if some god launched our world, that god is all-powerful.

So maybe God (if there is a god) is all-powerful and morally perfect, and maybe not. I think it's reasonable to have an open mind about that question. But now radically skeptical doubts seem to arise.

An imperfect god might, for example, create millions of brief universes, one after the next, as trial runs -- beta versions, or quick practice sketches. An imperfect God might require multiple attempts to get things right. If so, then maybe we're in one of the betas or sketches, without much past or future, rather than in the final product.

An imperfect god, once it/she/he has the knack of things, might just create favorite moments, or interesting moments, in multiple copies -- might create you, or your city, or your planet with a fake past, then suddenly introduce a change of laws, or a disaster, or a highly unlikely stroke of good fortune, just to see what happens. Why not? If you're going to create a world, you might as well play around with it.

An imperfect god might create a universe as a project that runs for a while, but which will be shut down the moment God gets bored or receives a passing grade from the other gods or fails to pay the utility bill.

It was crucial to Descartes' famous (and famously unsuccessful) argument against skepticism that he establish that God is perfect and, specifically, not a deceiver. Descartes was right to emphasize this for his anti-skeptical aims. If you admit that God might have created the world but then don't put substantial constraints on God's behavior, then you are imagining a being with the power and motive to create worlds who really kind of might do anything -- and who (if we use human psychology as our best-guess model) seems reasonably likely to do something other than create a boring, stable, predictable, one-shot universe of the sort we normally think we inhabit.

Eric Schwitzgebel

http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2016/03/from-god-to-skepticism.html