Hm… this doesn’t seem right. Let me take a stab at this.
What you’re saying assumes that rationality—or such specific tools of it as Occam’s Razor—get applied equally to everything. Theists are making this big salient mistake, and so we assume they make this mistake everywhere. Which is not how people work. Like you have overall successful people who happen to also be, say, creationists.
To say that everything in theism is equally worthless is the outside view: we can see the whole field is based on an undeservedly priviledged hypothesis, so to us everything in that volume of theory space is not worth distinguishing between. Like distinguishing between two conditional probabilities where the condition itself is extremely unlikely; not practically useful. But from the inside, where the condition is already granted—there’s still bound to be some things that make considerably more sense than others. To deny that is to just say that you’re not interested in the distinction (which is reasonable), not that it couldn’t be made for good reasons.
The irrational can’t be trusted to do the reasoning correctly
I haven’t studied it, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that theology, past the fact that it takes its theistic assumptions as a given, contained quite a lot of good thinking and that historically it contributed to our understanding of logic and valid reasoning. The reason I think so is that for long periods of time in history, becoming a clergyman was the main way of getting an education and getting to work on anything science-like, so at least some of the greatest minds in history were clergymen. Like Thomas Bayes. ;)
So I see a warning sign whenever aspiring rationalists dismiss theists as idiots.
(I’m probably failing to signal my allegiance to the tribe here ;) )
Taken out of context, my statement is too general, yes, and does look like the dismissing-theists-as-idiots thing, yes.
What I was saying was intended to be understood as “Those who accept theism can’t be trusted to have correctly reasoned about the specific nature of the theos, because the very same influences that caused them to be theists are going to be inducing them to defend a specific theos whether it makes more or less sense than the alternative.”
Given the tendency of people to put things in domains, I will, in fact, (reasonably) trust what a Vatican astronomer says about the Andromeda Galaxy, or a Creationist nuclear engineer says about Three Mile Island, et cetera. But the existence of a theistic deity and the nature of a theistic deity seem closely-enough related, domain-wise, that I won’t trust a theist to tell me he’s rationally evaluated whether God is One or Three, rather than rationalized it.
And, from my outsider perspective, I’m just not going to guess whether trinitarianism is more complicated, or if it just seems more complicated when you don’t know what problems it solves. In physics, I trust that if the more-complicated-seeming answer of relativity didn’t give better answers than the simpler-seeming Newton, physicists wouldn’t use relativity. In theistic theology, I can’t trust either proponents or opponents of trinitarianism to be giving me a rational evaluation as to whether the Trinity is an overcomplication or, overall, simplifies things.
Wouldn’t having three deities instead of one be more complex by their interactions with one another? Even if they existed on separate planes of existence, they would have to all be exerting some kind of influence for them to be gods, no? And in their shared application of influence, would they not be interacting?
The interactions of three people is more complex than the interactions of one person with himself. But the theory that my house contains three different residents still explains observations of my house much more simply than if you start with the assumption there’s only one resident. You accordingly cannot actually use Occam’s Razor to disfavor the theory that my house has three residents simply because the interactions of three people with each other are more complex than the interactions of one person with himself. Similarly, adding a cat to the three persons hypothesis actually improves the explanatory power of the model, even though you now have three sets of human-cat interactions added to the model; rejecting the cat on the basis of Occam’s Razor is also a failure.
Is a trinity more complex than a unitary godhead? In itself, sure. But if you’re trying to do something as notoriously convoluted as, say, theodicy, the question is, does the trinity provide extra explanatory power that reduces the overall complications?
And I strongly doubt anyone is both knowledgeable enough about theodicy and sufficiently rational and unbiased on the unity/trinity question to give a trustworthy answer on the question of which is the actual lesser hypothesis there. Especially since the obvious least hypothesis in theodicy is that there is no God at all and thus nothing to explain.
If you’re going to claim that a unitary godhead is favored by Occam’s Razor over a trinity, you actually need, among other things, a whole unitary-godhead theodicy. But if you actually worked one out, in order to have a rational opinion on the relative viability of the unitary and trinity theories, I’m going to wonder about your underlying rationality, given you wasted so much time on theodicy.
As defined in some places—for example, the Occam’s Razor essay that Eliezer linked for you many comments ago—simplicity is not the same as fitting the evidence.
The official doctrine of the Trinity has probability zero because the Catholic Church has systematically ruled out any self-consistent interpretation (though if you ask, they’ll probably tell you one or more of the heresies is right after all). So discussing its complexity does seem like a waste of time to me as well. But that’s not true for all details of Catholicism or Christianity (if for some reason you want to talk religion). Perhaps some intelligent Christians could see that we reject the details of their beliefs for the same reason they reject the lyrics of “I Believe” from The Book of Mormon.
Of course simplicity is not the same thing as fitting the evidence. You only even start comparing simplicity after you have multiple hypotheses that actually fit the evidence. Then, and only then, can you properly apply Occam’s Razor. The hypotheses “Always comes up heads” and “always comes up tails” and “always lands on the edge” are all already on the reject pile when you’re trying to figure out the best theory for the existence of the “HTTHHT” sequence, and thus none of them get any points at all for being simple.
Indeed, if you’ve only got one hypothesis that fits, it’s still too soon to apply Occam’s Razor, except informally as a heuristic to encourage you to invent another hypothesis because your existing one looks excessively complicated. Only after you’ve got more than one hypothesis that fits the “HTTHHT” sequence can you actually use any formalization of Occam’s Razor to judge between those hypotheses.
It occurs to me that Trinitarianism and similar are likely best explained as the theological equivalent of wave-particle duality.
Does light really sometimes behave like a particle and sometimes behave like a wave? Probably not. More likely there is some underlying, unified behaviour that we simply haven’t figured out yet due to limited data and limited processing power.
Similarly, when trying to comprehend and describe an infinite… something-that-has-intent, with a finite human mind and viewpoint as your only tool, there are likely going to be some similar bits of weirdness. God in three persons? More likely you have a “blind men and the elephant” situation. Only this elephant is too big to ever see more than a tiny piece of it at a time, and too mobile to know for certain that you’ve found the same part of it to look at twice in a row.
So you could easily have a case where the Unitarians are technically more correct about the overall nature, but the Trinitarians have a better working description.
This says nothing about whether Theism as a whole is the most correct explanation for the observed phenomenon. Just note that the “practical explanation that mistakenly comes to be thought of as the way things really are” is hardly limited to Theology, and I highly doubt theologians are measurably more likely to commit this error than anyone else. The very reason that you have to use placeholder tokens for thinking about concepts that can’t fit in your brain all at once leaves you susceptible to occasionally forgetting that they’re just placeholders.
Hm… this doesn’t seem right. Let me take a stab at this.
What you’re saying assumes that rationality—or such specific tools of it as Occam’s Razor—get applied equally to everything. Theists are making this big salient mistake, and so we assume they make this mistake everywhere. Which is not how people work. Like you have overall successful people who happen to also be, say, creationists.
To say that everything in theism is equally worthless is the outside view: we can see the whole field is based on an undeservedly priviledged hypothesis, so to us everything in that volume of theory space is not worth distinguishing between. Like distinguishing between two conditional probabilities where the condition itself is extremely unlikely; not practically useful. But from the inside, where the condition is already granted—there’s still bound to be some things that make considerably more sense than others. To deny that is to just say that you’re not interested in the distinction (which is reasonable), not that it couldn’t be made for good reasons.
I haven’t studied it, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that theology, past the fact that it takes its theistic assumptions as a given, contained quite a lot of good thinking and that historically it contributed to our understanding of logic and valid reasoning. The reason I think so is that for long periods of time in history, becoming a clergyman was the main way of getting an education and getting to work on anything science-like, so at least some of the greatest minds in history were clergymen. Like Thomas Bayes. ;)
So I see a warning sign whenever aspiring rationalists dismiss theists as idiots.
(I’m probably failing to signal my allegiance to the tribe here ;) )
Taken out of context, my statement is too general, yes, and does look like the dismissing-theists-as-idiots thing, yes.
What I was saying was intended to be understood as “Those who accept theism can’t be trusted to have correctly reasoned about the specific nature of the theos, because the very same influences that caused them to be theists are going to be inducing them to defend a specific theos whether it makes more or less sense than the alternative.”
Given the tendency of people to put things in domains, I will, in fact, (reasonably) trust what a Vatican astronomer says about the Andromeda Galaxy, or a Creationist nuclear engineer says about Three Mile Island, et cetera. But the existence of a theistic deity and the nature of a theistic deity seem closely-enough related, domain-wise, that I won’t trust a theist to tell me he’s rationally evaluated whether God is One or Three, rather than rationalized it.
And, from my outsider perspective, I’m just not going to guess whether trinitarianism is more complicated, or if it just seems more complicated when you don’t know what problems it solves. In physics, I trust that if the more-complicated-seeming answer of relativity didn’t give better answers than the simpler-seeming Newton, physicists wouldn’t use relativity. In theistic theology, I can’t trust either proponents or opponents of trinitarianism to be giving me a rational evaluation as to whether the Trinity is an overcomplication or, overall, simplifies things.
Wouldn’t having three deities instead of one be more complex by their interactions with one another? Even if they existed on separate planes of existence, they would have to all be exerting some kind of influence for them to be gods, no? And in their shared application of influence, would they not be interacting?
The interactions of three people is more complex than the interactions of one person with himself. But the theory that my house contains three different residents still explains observations of my house much more simply than if you start with the assumption there’s only one resident. You accordingly cannot actually use Occam’s Razor to disfavor the theory that my house has three residents simply because the interactions of three people with each other are more complex than the interactions of one person with himself. Similarly, adding a cat to the three persons hypothesis actually improves the explanatory power of the model, even though you now have three sets of human-cat interactions added to the model; rejecting the cat on the basis of Occam’s Razor is also a failure.
Is a trinity more complex than a unitary godhead? In itself, sure. But if you’re trying to do something as notoriously convoluted as, say, theodicy, the question is, does the trinity provide extra explanatory power that reduces the overall complications?
And I strongly doubt anyone is both knowledgeable enough about theodicy and sufficiently rational and unbiased on the unity/trinity question to give a trustworthy answer on the question of which is the actual lesser hypothesis there. Especially since the obvious least hypothesis in theodicy is that there is no God at all and thus nothing to explain.
If you’re going to claim that a unitary godhead is favored by Occam’s Razor over a trinity, you actually need, among other things, a whole unitary-godhead theodicy. But if you actually worked one out, in order to have a rational opinion on the relative viability of the unitary and trinity theories, I’m going to wonder about your underlying rationality, given you wasted so much time on theodicy.
As defined in some places—for example, the Occam’s Razor essay that Eliezer linked for you many comments ago—simplicity is not the same as fitting the evidence.
The official doctrine of the Trinity has probability zero because the Catholic Church has systematically ruled out any self-consistent interpretation (though if you ask, they’ll probably tell you one or more of the heresies is right after all). So discussing its complexity does seem like a waste of time to me as well. But that’s not true for all details of Catholicism or Christianity (if for some reason you want to talk religion). Perhaps some intelligent Christians could see that we reject the details of their beliefs for the same reason they reject the lyrics of “I Believe” from The Book of Mormon.
Of course simplicity is not the same thing as fitting the evidence. You only even start comparing simplicity after you have multiple hypotheses that actually fit the evidence. Then, and only then, can you properly apply Occam’s Razor. The hypotheses “Always comes up heads” and “always comes up tails” and “always lands on the edge” are all already on the reject pile when you’re trying to figure out the best theory for the existence of the “HTTHHT” sequence, and thus none of them get any points at all for being simple.
Indeed, if you’ve only got one hypothesis that fits, it’s still too soon to apply Occam’s Razor, except informally as a heuristic to encourage you to invent another hypothesis because your existing one looks excessively complicated. Only after you’ve got more than one hypothesis that fits the “HTTHHT” sequence can you actually use any formalization of Occam’s Razor to judge between those hypotheses.
It occurs to me that Trinitarianism and similar are likely best explained as the theological equivalent of wave-particle duality.
Does light really sometimes behave like a particle and sometimes behave like a wave? Probably not. More likely there is some underlying, unified behaviour that we simply haven’t figured out yet due to limited data and limited processing power.
Similarly, when trying to comprehend and describe an infinite… something-that-has-intent, with a finite human mind and viewpoint as your only tool, there are likely going to be some similar bits of weirdness. God in three persons? More likely you have a “blind men and the elephant” situation. Only this elephant is too big to ever see more than a tiny piece of it at a time, and too mobile to know for certain that you’ve found the same part of it to look at twice in a row.
So you could easily have a case where the Unitarians are technically more correct about the overall nature, but the Trinitarians have a better working description.
This says nothing about whether Theism as a whole is the most correct explanation for the observed phenomenon. Just note that the “practical explanation that mistakenly comes to be thought of as the way things really are” is hardly limited to Theology, and I highly doubt theologians are measurably more likely to commit this error than anyone else. The very reason that you have to use placeholder tokens for thinking about concepts that can’t fit in your brain all at once leaves you susceptible to occasionally forgetting that they’re just placeholders.