I was raised in a religious household and took it very seriously. At the same time, I always enjoyed skepticism and debunking, because I was always entertained by such things. But when it came to philosophy I was completely full of it. I got away with it by living in an area where I only encountered other Christians, not many atheists. When I did actually encounter some atheists, I would do some hand-waving about how there was something Deep and Intellectual about Christian apologetics that they were missing.
I dated someone who was extremely, well, hippie. Completely non-judgemental about even the most absurd hypotheses. I really hated that kind of attitude—where was her intellectual curiosity? So I got more into specific skeptic arguments. I fell in love with James Randi and watched almost every video of him that existed on Youtube at the time. But I waited to apply any of the lessons to the Big Question. Christianity was a huge part of my life; my entire family is still very seriously Christian, and a huge chunk of my social network used to be.
I started reading Overcoming Bias because, hey, Mason econ student, why wouldn’t I read another great blog? There are several lessons on that site that I still summon all the time in arguments, but it took some internal realization to understand what applied where.
First, if I hadn’t been trained in orthodox statistics—if I didn’t know specifically what methods science used—I never would have gotten many of the arguments. I would have been happy to get this training much earlier in life. That’s a basis by which “science can’t know anything” arguments immediately fall apart.
From there, these are the posts that most helped me and why.
First, being raised in a presuppositionalist church, I had to be convinced that it really did come down to evidence and not assumptions. For this, “How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3” was a good starting point, and it even helped me address some false claims in Austrian Economics. “Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable” also helped, but it took a while for me to get to the point that I was willing to look at this argument head-on with the idea that I should consider it with my best judgement rather than dismiss it as missing-the-point.
To get there, I needed the point made in “The Bottom Line”: it is illegitimate in epistemology to start from the bottom line. That is rationalization, which can take more than one form. I thought back to my education in geology, where I was presented with indisputable evidence that the earth was several billion years old. Back when I was taking that class, I researched creationist arguments on the internet and found that all of them had been soundly refuted. But instead of immediately questioning my religion, I put all of that away in a box, to be dealt with later. When I brought some of it up to my mom, she said, “Tim, you’re creative enough to come up with some kind of explanation that can fit.” I accepted this back then: indeed I was, though I never seriously tried. But to even have such a thought is to outright admit that you’re wrong beforehand, that the only way to reconcile your opposing beliefs is to come up with a fancy lie.
Then I was more receptive to “Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable.” Eliezer presents the best defense against presuppositionalism I’ve ever seen: presuppositionalism is to be found nowhere in the Bible. It is evidentialist through and through. Miracles are presented as evidence of God, are cited constantly throughout as proof of the One True God above all the others. Paul’s entire defense against the Roman government in Acts is simply, “The claims I’m making about miracles are true and here are the witnesses.”
So I decided I finally had to see if I could reconcile the fact of the discovery of natural sciences with the Bible. I never found Intelligent Design convincing, quite frankly because I had begun to respect the biologists who dismissed it more than the religious leaders who touted it. But of course as I researched it individually anyway, well. I needed a better theory of evidence, which I got from “A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation” and “The Conservation of Expected Evidence.” Bayes + my traditional probability training started working their way into my mind, so I could evaluate different evidential claims much better than before.
Also important was “Occam’s Razor.” I had never seen a technical definition of Occam’s Razor provided, and I was suddenly floored by the outright wrongness of arguments like, “God is the simplest explanation for the universe.”
There’s more to the story than that. After all, changes like this never have one true cause. I began to see the disconnect between my thoughts about morality (“I have to admit that homosexuality is wrong”) and my feelings about it (“But I can’t feel like my gay friends are really bad people”). I started getting kind of disgusted by the sheer number of bad Christian arguments parroted about like it was nothing. The entire time I was studying economics, which I put a lot of stock in, and theories about interest rates being evil, the necessity of Christian governance, and so on, all started to look less and less like God’s wisdom and more like the same old ignorance that every society has.
It was this feeling of disgust that forced me to finally admit I didn’t consider myself a “Christian” anymore, and the arguments I had gathered in my mind in the mean time that led me to fill the gap with “atheist.”
This is all relatively recent, so it is in much better detail than the other influences. Surely there must have been something in my brain that led me to be able to reject Creationism long before I ever considered myself a “rationalist.”
I was raised in a religious household and took it very seriously. At the same time, I always enjoyed skepticism and debunking, because I was always entertained by such things. But when it came to philosophy I was completely full of it. I got away with it by living in an area where I only encountered other Christians, not many atheists. When I did actually encounter some atheists, I would do some hand-waving about how there was something Deep and Intellectual about Christian apologetics that they were missing.
I dated someone who was extremely, well, hippie. Completely non-judgemental about even the most absurd hypotheses. I really hated that kind of attitude—where was her intellectual curiosity? So I got more into specific skeptic arguments. I fell in love with James Randi and watched almost every video of him that existed on Youtube at the time. But I waited to apply any of the lessons to the Big Question. Christianity was a huge part of my life; my entire family is still very seriously Christian, and a huge chunk of my social network used to be.
I started reading Overcoming Bias because, hey, Mason econ student, why wouldn’t I read another great blog? There are several lessons on that site that I still summon all the time in arguments, but it took some internal realization to understand what applied where.
First, if I hadn’t been trained in orthodox statistics—if I didn’t know specifically what methods science used—I never would have gotten many of the arguments. I would have been happy to get this training much earlier in life. That’s a basis by which “science can’t know anything” arguments immediately fall apart.
From there, these are the posts that most helped me and why.
First, being raised in a presuppositionalist church, I had to be convinced that it really did come down to evidence and not assumptions. For this, “How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3” was a good starting point, and it even helped me address some false claims in Austrian Economics. “Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable” also helped, but it took a while for me to get to the point that I was willing to look at this argument head-on with the idea that I should consider it with my best judgement rather than dismiss it as missing-the-point.
To get there, I needed the point made in “The Bottom Line”: it is illegitimate in epistemology to start from the bottom line. That is rationalization, which can take more than one form. I thought back to my education in geology, where I was presented with indisputable evidence that the earth was several billion years old. Back when I was taking that class, I researched creationist arguments on the internet and found that all of them had been soundly refuted. But instead of immediately questioning my religion, I put all of that away in a box, to be dealt with later. When I brought some of it up to my mom, she said, “Tim, you’re creative enough to come up with some kind of explanation that can fit.” I accepted this back then: indeed I was, though I never seriously tried. But to even have such a thought is to outright admit that you’re wrong beforehand, that the only way to reconcile your opposing beliefs is to come up with a fancy lie.
Then I was more receptive to “Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable.” Eliezer presents the best defense against presuppositionalism I’ve ever seen: presuppositionalism is to be found nowhere in the Bible. It is evidentialist through and through. Miracles are presented as evidence of God, are cited constantly throughout as proof of the One True God above all the others. Paul’s entire defense against the Roman government in Acts is simply, “The claims I’m making about miracles are true and here are the witnesses.”
So I decided I finally had to see if I could reconcile the fact of the discovery of natural sciences with the Bible. I never found Intelligent Design convincing, quite frankly because I had begun to respect the biologists who dismissed it more than the religious leaders who touted it. But of course as I researched it individually anyway, well. I needed a better theory of evidence, which I got from “A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation” and “The Conservation of Expected Evidence.” Bayes + my traditional probability training started working their way into my mind, so I could evaluate different evidential claims much better than before.
Also important was “Occam’s Razor.” I had never seen a technical definition of Occam’s Razor provided, and I was suddenly floored by the outright wrongness of arguments like, “God is the simplest explanation for the universe.”
There’s more to the story than that. After all, changes like this never have one true cause. I began to see the disconnect between my thoughts about morality (“I have to admit that homosexuality is wrong”) and my feelings about it (“But I can’t feel like my gay friends are really bad people”). I started getting kind of disgusted by the sheer number of bad Christian arguments parroted about like it was nothing. The entire time I was studying economics, which I put a lot of stock in, and theories about interest rates being evil, the necessity of Christian governance, and so on, all started to look less and less like God’s wisdom and more like the same old ignorance that every society has.
It was this feeling of disgust that forced me to finally admit I didn’t consider myself a “Christian” anymore, and the arguments I had gathered in my mind in the mean time that led me to fill the gap with “atheist.”
This is all relatively recent, so it is in much better detail than the other influences. Surely there must have been something in my brain that led me to be able to reject Creationism long before I ever considered myself a “rationalist.”