Theism is way more plausible than is sometimes thought.

Well, a problem which affects the materialist view is that you can't really explain the analyticity of necessarily true statements like 1 plus 1 equals 2. Because there's no fact in the physical world which makes it so that analytically true statements have the property of analyticity. So it makes more sense that the property of analyticity is not grounded in any physical fact and cannot be explained by any physical fact. This isn't merely a problem for materialism, but for any view which suggests that the ultimate ground of being is nonmental in nature. The atheist has to be able to give an account for the surprising harmony between the physical and the mental states, also known as the problem of psychophysical harmony. And they also have to explain how intentionality arises, which is a technical philosophical term referring to the fact that thoughts can be about objects. Correspondence seems like a plausible view on the nature of truth, but how do you explain the fact that it is true that my mental state corresponds with some state of affairs in the world without having to thereby appeal to a transcendental form of truth, which by its very nature cannot be explained at all under a purely materialistic paradigm? The correspondence between mental propositions and states of affairs in the actual world cannot even be explained in terms of mathematical or structural isomorphism because propositions are abstract entities. Remember, it is the aboutness of mental states, which is the thing that needs to be explained without a transcendental mind.

Energy itself is an informational construct, an abstract idea or property whose nature has to be recognized by a mind. Information cannot exist in a vacuum independent or free-floating from any underlying substrate. And it also seems that you cannot explain the existence of the physical world in terms of physical events, because those too are part of the physical world and require a deeper explanation. And so it seems that the physicalist runs into the problem where their view either entails bruteness or an infinite regress without an underlying terminus. Really, the question about whether or not God exists is actually a deep metaphysical question about the fundamental nature of existence itself. To say that the ground of being is non-intentional is to say that the universe really has no content, or at least no intentional content. But the very fact that we can have correspondence between mental propositions and facts about the world sort of suggests that intentional content is not just something in the mind, but is... A deep feature of reality.

I think the problem here is that you're framing these deep metaphilosophical questions in purely materialist terms, where one must provide a mechanism. But the central objection here is that in order for a theory to even be a plausible candidate for explaining some phenomenon that exists in the world, it has to at least in principle accommodate the data. So the real question at play here is whether an intentional metaphysics is sufficient for accommodating the facts that a non-intentional metaphysics is unable to account for. And I think that there is a clear and decisive winner in terms of that consideration. The underlying substrate of reality must be intentional, because if it is not intentional, then it does not seem that you can actually coherently construct a world. My earlier point about propositional content was to show that propositions often do not contain any mathematical content whatsoever, and so that you cannot explain the correspondence between a proposition and the state of affairs that it describes as a purely mathematical isomorphism-relation. Correspondence is something over and above what can be described within a relational ontology. So you must have a transcendent and intentional ground of being. And an ultimate explanation cannot be constrained to the mechanisms of the physical world, but should be able to explain those very mechanisms. And the ultimate bedrock is going to be something non-mechanic in nature.

Phil, what's your evidence that theism can't accommodate intentionality? I think that I've explained the problem that physicalism has with it, but I don't think that there is a parody argument to be made for the other side. In other words, I do think that there is a genuine explanatory advantage that the theistic explanation has in accounting for intentionality. Now, I'm not necessarily sure what kind of predictions you're expecting theists to make, or what kind of quote-unquote conservation laws it needs. But I do think that the approach that you're criticizing should be evaluated under a different, well, let's just say a different set of standards. But I think that the theistic model is intrinsically simpler in its formulation. And even if we disagree about that, then I'm only defending a form of theism which doesn't make any additional stipulated assumptions about the way that the world is or about the way that God is. All I'm saying is that the ground of being must be intentional and that the word God just refers to this intentional ground of being.

Well, the two most commonly invoked theoretical virtues are parsimony and explanatory power. And to the degree that a theory of everything has both, we would consider it to be a good model, all things considered. What my opponent should probably try to do instead is to show that the model that I'm advocating for is either incoherent, lacks the explanatory power that it claims, or that it's not parsimonious. I'm sure my opponent has a different conception of what constitutes explanatory power, simplicity, and coherence, but I don't think that the model that I've suggested is implausible or that there are really any good alternatives from a purely metaphysical perspective. And since I'm just arguing about the fundamental nature of reality, then you're sort of limited on options there. And so you have to decide which framework best accommodates the facts or properties that we actually observe in the real world. But yeah, obviously, whatever model you're going to advocate for needs to be sufficient, which really is another way of saying that it has the explanatory power to accommodate the facts and phenomena that we actually see. And I just don't feel like my opponent's objections were really hard-hitting enough to really make me reconsider whether the theistic model is at all plausible, which I think it is. I think that he does a good job at bringing up the physics side of it, but I don't really think that this debate is about physics at the end of the day. So he can have all the physics knowledge in the world, and I still don't think that he has a good counter-argument, because all of the facts that he wants to bring up are not really the ultimate explanatory bedrock, but are simply contingent features of the world, which can only really explain other contingent features. But are not themselves explanatorily or ontologically fundamental.

Assuming that intentionality is just an inexplicable feature of the world that no other set of properties could ever hope to explain, this isn't really going to be a huge problem for my view. And I think it's weird that you say that a view that accommodates every possible observation isn't plausible, because we would think that a view that explains everything is a much more likely candidate for the correct view than a view that doesn't explain everything. Simply in virtue of the fact that a theory that doesn't explain everything can't be the ultimate explanation for everything. If you're looking for an ultimate account of everything, then you need to look deeper than what can be explained in terms of physics or in terms of the contingent features of the world that we happen to live in. And because I haven't really bloated my theory beyond simply saying that the intentional ground of being exists, I don't really accrue so much explanatory debt after all. And the big issue my opponent faces in this debate is that they haven't really explained why alternative models would be a better fit for the data than the one that I'm proposing. And so on those grounds alone, I think that my theory is simply better. Obviously there's a lot more to go over, but if your theory can't even accommodate basic properties that we regularly observe, then I just don't necessarily feel like it's a very good model. You can say that my opponent hasn't really advocated for a particular model of everything, and fair enough. But because he hasn't articulated any alternative model, and he hasn't really shown where my proposal struggles, I'm not sure that his objections succeed. And this isn't really just about materialism, but really it's about the fundamental nature of reality. And I think that theists just have a better primitive conception about what that fundamental nature is. It can't be something non-mental because the non-mental simply can't explain how intentionality arises. Or even that it's coherent to suggest that it's something which could arise in this sort of emergent way. You can't reduce it to mathematical structures or relations because I've already shown that propositional content doesn't need to have any sort of mathematical structure in order to correspond. So you can't explain the correspondence in terms of mathematics or in terms of relational structure. You have to explain it in terms of something transcendental and intentional in nature. It has to be the kind of thing that is capable of grounding the very activity of rational deliberation and for securing the reliability of our cognitive faculties.