I’d consider myself a rationalist, and also a christian. I don’t expect to convince any of the former to join the later (or vice versa) but to give some explanation there are three main reasons.
I alieve in the christian god, probably as a result of being raised by a protestant pastor and in a small rural town where the overwhelming majority of people were some form of protestant. I spent half a decade calling myself an atheist after making the intellectual realization that the evidence wasn’t pointing that way, but I still consistently behaved as though it was. At this point, I feel like it’s more honest to report based on how I know I think ‘under the hood’ so to speak. To reverse the metaphor of the dragon in the garage; if the garage-owner keeps making predictions as though there is a dragon and keeps being surprised when those predictions turn out false, you can fault them for not properly updating but you can’t fault them for inconsistency.
Calling myself christian has advantages for me. I live in a small rural town that’s overwhelming protestant. My entire family sans two people are christian. My girlfriend’s entire family is christian. All of my childhood friends are christian. I like going to church, the food at the potluck is pretty good, and everyone I know around here tithes ten percent to the best charity we can find already. Calling myself an atheist would impose social costs, wouldn’t change much about my day to day life, and as mentioned in point 1 it wouldn’t exactly be the truth. There are absolutely times to defy the majority, but I don’t think my situation is one of those.
The statistics for believers having better life outcomes seem persistent, but intellectually I’m pretty sure they’re a combination of confounding and placebo. They also only seem to apply to people who sincerely hold those beliefs. That said, I’m in the right population to be affected by it, so fighting my alief probably means putting myself in a statistically worse population. Since five years of reading more atheist texts, attempting to let good arguments against my faith sink in, and trying to get my system 1 to update on failed predictions has failed to work, and since shouting my intellectual disagreement from the rooftops will mostly mean I don’t get delicious pot luck every weekend and won’t have the catharsis of prayer when I need it, I’m alright with accepting my faith as both an alief and a belief. I make my system 2 bets as separately as I can, and count on other parts of humanity to hopefully protect me from any black swans I’m missing.
(I’m less machiavellian about this than I come across here. This probably makes more sense if you accept that this alief is pretty firmly lodged in my head, but that everything else seems to update successfully as needed. )
you can fault them for not properly updating but you can’t fault them for inconsistency.
They’re still being inconsistent with respect to the reality they observe. Why is the self-consistency alone more important than a consistency with observation?
You are correct that both sorts of things could be called inconsistency, and as soon as I come up with a better way to phrase that difference I’ll edit.
I think being consistent with observations + priors is better than being consistently wrong. I also think being wrong in known ways is better than being wrong is unknown ways. Imagine driving a car with a speedometer that’s always ten miles an hour under what you’re actually going, or using a clock that’s twenty minutes fast. You know you’re getting wrong answers, but you can do an adjustment in your head to correct for it. If your speedometer is off by a random amount that changes at random times, it’s both inconsistent with observation and inconsistent with itself, and therefore useless. You can’t adjust or compensate, you just have to ignore it. (Or get used to getting pulled over :p)
I’d consider myself a rationalist, and also a christian. I don’t expect to convince any of the former to join the later (or vice versa) but to give some explanation there are three main reasons.
I alieve in the christian god, probably as a result of being raised by a protestant pastor and in a small rural town where the overwhelming majority of people were some form of protestant. I spent half a decade calling myself an atheist after making the intellectual realization that the evidence wasn’t pointing that way, but I still consistently behaved as though it was. At this point, I feel like it’s more honest to report based on how I know I think ‘under the hood’ so to speak. To reverse the metaphor of the dragon in the garage; if the garage-owner keeps making predictions as though there is a dragon and keeps being surprised when those predictions turn out false, you can fault them for not properly updating but you can’t fault them for inconsistency.
Calling myself christian has advantages for me. I live in a small rural town that’s overwhelming protestant. My entire family sans two people are christian. My girlfriend’s entire family is christian. All of my childhood friends are christian. I like going to church, the food at the potluck is pretty good, and everyone I know around here tithes ten percent to the best charity we can find already. Calling myself an atheist would impose social costs, wouldn’t change much about my day to day life, and as mentioned in point 1 it wouldn’t exactly be the truth. There are absolutely times to defy the majority, but I don’t think my situation is one of those.
The statistics for believers having better life outcomes seem persistent, but intellectually I’m pretty sure they’re a combination of confounding and placebo. They also only seem to apply to people who sincerely hold those beliefs. That said, I’m in the right population to be affected by it, so fighting my alief probably means putting myself in a statistically worse population. Since five years of reading more atheist texts, attempting to let good arguments against my faith sink in, and trying to get my system 1 to update on failed predictions has failed to work, and since shouting my intellectual disagreement from the rooftops will mostly mean I don’t get delicious pot luck every weekend and won’t have the catharsis of prayer when I need it, I’m alright with accepting my faith as both an alief and a belief. I make my system 2 bets as separately as I can, and count on other parts of humanity to hopefully protect me from any black swans I’m missing.
(I’m less machiavellian about this than I come across here. This probably makes more sense if you accept that this alief is pretty firmly lodged in my head, but that everything else seems to update successfully as needed. )
They’re still being inconsistent with respect to the reality they observe. Why is the self-consistency alone more important than a consistency with observation?
You are correct that both sorts of things could be called inconsistency, and as soon as I come up with a better way to phrase that difference I’ll edit.
I think being consistent with observations + priors is better than being consistently wrong. I also think being wrong in known ways is better than being wrong is unknown ways. Imagine driving a car with a speedometer that’s always ten miles an hour under what you’re actually going, or using a clock that’s twenty minutes fast. You know you’re getting wrong answers, but you can do an adjustment in your head to correct for it. If your speedometer is off by a random amount that changes at random times, it’s both inconsistent with observation and inconsistent with itself, and therefore useless. You can’t adjust or compensate, you just have to ignore it. (Or get used to getting pulled over :p)