I am a young person who recently discovered Less Wrong, HP:MOR, Yudkowsky, and all of that. My whole life I’ve been taught reason and science but I’d never encountered people so dedicated to rationality.
I quite like much of what I’ve found. I’m delighted to have been exposed to this new way of thinking, but I’m not entirely sure how much to embrace it. I don’t love everything I’ve read although some of it is indeed brilliant. I’ve always been taught to be skeptical, but as I discovered this site my elders warned me to be skeptical of skepticism as well.
My problem is that I’d like an alternate viewpoint. New ideas are always refreshing, and it’s certainly not healthy to constantly hear a single viewpoint, no matter how right your colleagues think they are. (It becomes even worse if you start thinking about a cult.)
Clearly, the Less Wrong community generally (unanimously?) agrees about a lot of major things. For example, religion. The vast majority of “rationalists” (in the [avoid unnecessary Yudkowsky jab] LW-based sense of the term) and all of the “top” contributors, as far as I can tell, are atheists.
Here I need to be careful to stay on topic. I was raised religious, and still am, and I’m not planning to quit anytime soon. I don’t want to get into defending religion or even defending those who defend religion. My point in posting this is simply to ask you—what, in your opinion, are the most legitimate criticisms of your own way of thinking? If you say there aren’t any, I won’t believe you. I sincerely hope that you aren’t afraid to expose your young ones to alternate viewpoints, as some parents and religions are. The optimal situation for you is that you’ve heard intelligent, thoughtful, rational criticism but your position remains strong.
In other words, one way to demonstrate an argument’s strength is by successfully defending it against able criticism. I sometimes see refutations of pro-religious arguments on this site, but no refutations of good arguments.
Can you help? I don’t necessarily expect you to go to all this trouble to help along one young soul, but most religious leaders are more than happy to. In any case, I think that an honest summary of your own weak points would go a long way toward convincing me that you guys are any better than my ministers.
Sincerely, and hoping not to be bitten,
a thoughtful but impressionable youth
I have been vocally anti-atheist here and elsewhere, though I was brought up as a “kitchen atheist” (“Obviously there is no God, the idea is just silly. But watch for that black cat crossing the road, it’s bad luck”). My current view is Laplacian agnosticism (“I had no need of that hypothesis”). Going through the simulation arguments further convinced me that atheism is privileging one number (zero) out of infinitely many possible choices. It’s not quite as silly as picking any particular anthropomorphization of the matrix lords, be it a talking bush, a man on a stick, a dude with a hammer, a universal spirit, or what have you, but still an unnecessarily strong belief.
If you are interested in anti-atheist arguments based on moral realism made by a current LWer, consider Unequally Yoked. It’s as close to “intelligent, thoughtful, rational criticism” as I can think of.
There is an occasional thread here about how Mormonism or Islam is the one true religion, but the arguments for either are rarely rational.
That’s a really good way of looking at things, thanks. From now on I’m an “anti-atheist” if nothing else...and I’ll take a look at that blog.
Could you bring yourself to believe in one particular anthropomorphization, if you had good reason to (a vision? or something lesser? how much lesser?)
Could you bring yourself to believe in one particular anthropomorphization, if you had good reason to (a vision? or something lesser? how much lesser?)
I find it unlikely, as I would probably attribute it to a brain glitch. I highly recommend looking at this rational approach to hypnosis by another LW contributor. It made me painfully aware how buggy the wetware our minds run on is, and how easy it is to make it fail if you know what you are doing. Thus my prior when seeing something apparently supernatural is to attribute it to known bugs, not to anything external.
The brain glitch is always available as a backup explanation, and they certainly do happen (especially in schizophrenics etc.) But if I had an angel come down to talk to me, I would probably believe it.
Personally, I think this one is more relevant. The biggest problem with the argument from visions and miracles, barring some much more complicated discussions of neurology than are really necessary, is that it proves too much, namely multiple contradictory religions.
It’s a good post, but overly logical and technically involved for a non-LWer. Even if you agree with the logic, I can hardly imagine a religious person alieving that their favorite doctrine proves too much.
It’s a very interesting post. You’re right that we can’t accept all visions, because they will contradict each other, but in fact I think that many don’t. It’s entirely plausible in my mind that God really did appear to Mohammed as well as Joseph Smith, for instance, and they don’t have to invalidate each other. But of course if you take every single claim that’s ever been made, it becomes ridiculous.
Does it prove too much, then, to say that some visions are real and some are mental glitches? I’m not suggesting any way of actually telling the difference.
Well, it’s certainly not a very parsimonious explanation. This conversation has branched in a lot of places, so I’m not sure where that comment is right now, but as someone else has already pointed out, what about the explanation that most lightning bolts are merely electromagnetic events, but some are thrown by Thor?
Proposing a second mechanism which accounts for some cases of a phenomenon, when the first mechanism accounts for others, is more complex (and thus in the absence of evidence less likely to be correct) than the supposition that the first mechanism accounts for all cases of the phenomenon. If there’s no way to tell them apart, then observations of miracles and visions don’t count as evidence favoring the explanation of visions-plus-brain-glitches over the explanation of brain glitches alone.
It’s possible, but that doesn’t mean we have any reason to suppose it’s true. And when we have no reason to suppose something is true, it generally isn’t.
FWIW, I’ve had the experience of a Presence manifesting itself to talk to me. The most likely explanation of that experience is a brain glitch. I’m not sure why I ought to consider that a “backup” explanation.
Right, obviously it’s a problem. There are lots of people who think they’ve been manifested to, and some of them are schizophrenic, and some of them are not, and it’s a whole lot easier to just assume they’re all deluded (even if not lying). But even Richard Dawkins has admitted that he could believe in God if he had no other choice. (I have a source if you want.)
Certainly, if you’re completely determined not to believe no matter what—if you would refuse God even if He appeared to you himself—then you never will. But if there is absolutely nothing that would convince you, then you’re giving it a chance of 0.
Since you are rationalists, you can’t have it actually be 0. So what is that 0.0001 that would convince you?
There’s a big difference between “no matter what” and “if He appeared to you himself,” especially if by the latter you mean appearing to my senses. I mean, the immediate anecdotal evidence of my senses is far from being the most convincing form of evidence in my world; there are many things I’m confident exist without having directly perceived them, and some things I’ve directly perceived I’m confident don’t exist.
For example, a being possessing the powers attributed to YHWH in the Old Testament, or to Jesus in the New Testament, could simply grant me faith directly—that is, directly raising my confidence in that being’s existence. If YHWH or Jesus (or some other powerful entity) appeared to me that way, I would believe in them.
I’m assuming you’re not counting that as convincing me, though I’m not sure why not.
But if there is absolutely nothing that would convince you, then you’re giving it a chance of 0.
Actually, that isn’t true. It might well be that I assign a positive probability to X, but that I still can’t rationally reach a state of >50% confidence in X, because the kind of evidence that would motivate such a confidence-shift simply isn’t available to me. I am a limited mortal being with bounded cognition, not all truths are available to me just because they’re true.
But it may be that with respect to the specific belief you’re asking about, the situation isn’t even that bad. I don’t know, because I’m not really sure what specific belief you’re asking about. What is it, exactly, that you want to know how to convince me of?
That is… are you asking what would convince me in the existence of YHWH, Creator of the Universe, the God of my fathers and my forefathers, who lifted them up from bondage in Egypt with a mighty hand an an outstretched arm, and through his prophet Moses led them to Sinai where he bequeathed to them his Law?
Or what would convince me of the existence of Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, who was born a man and died for our sins, that those who believe in Him would not die but have eternal life?
Or what would convince me of the existence of Loki, son of the All-Father Odin who dwells in highest Asgard, and will one day bring about Ragnarok and the death of the Gods?
Or… well, what, exactly?
With respect to those in particular, I can’t think of any experience off-hand which would raise my confidence in any of them high enough to be worth considering (EDIT: that’s hyperbole; I really mean “to convince me”; see below), though that’s not to say that such experiences don’t exist or aren’t possible… I just don’t know what they are.
With respect to those in particular, I can’t think of any experience off-hand which would raise my confidence in any of them high enough to be worth considering, though that’s not to say that such experiences don’t exist or aren’t possible… I just don’t know what they are.
Huh. That’s interesting. For at least the first two I can think of a few that would convince me, and for the third I suspect that a lack of being easily able to be convinced is connected more to my lack of knowledge about the religion in question. In the most obvious way for YHVH, if everyone everywhere started hearing a loud shofar blowing and then the dead rose, and then an extremely educated fellow claiming to be Elijah showed up and started answering every halachic question in ways that resolve all the apparent problems, I think I’d be paying close attention to the hypothesis.
Similar remarks apply for Jesus. They do seem to depend strongly on making much more blatant interventions in the world then the deities generally seem to (outside their holy texts).
Technically the shofar blowing thing should not be enough sensory evidence to convince you of the prior improbability of this being the God—probability of alien teenagers, etcetera—but since you weren’t expecting that to happen and other people were, good rationalist procedure would be to listen very carefully what they had to say about how your priors might’ve been mistaken. It could still be alien teenagers but you really ought to give somebody a chance to explain to you about how it’s not. On the other hand, we can’t execute this sort of super-update until we actually see the evidence, so meanwhile the prior probability remains astronomically low.
and then an extremely educated fellow claiming to be Elijah showed up
In this context I think it makes sense to ask “showed up where?” but if the answer were “everywhere on earth at once,” I’d call that pretty damn compelling.
Yeah, you’re right, “to be worth considering” is hyperbole. On balance I’d still lean towards “powerful entity whom I have no reason to believe created the universe, probably didn’t lift my forefathers up from bondage in Egypt, might have bequeathed them his Law, and for reasons of its own is adopting the trappings of YHWH” but I would, as you say, be paying close attention to alternative hypotheses.
You’re right, I’m assuming that God doesn’t just tweak anyone’s mind to force them to believe, because the God of the Abrahamic religions won’t ever do that—our ultimate agency to believe or not is very important to Him. What would be the point of seven billion mindless minions? (OK, it might be fun for a while, but I bet sentient children would be more interesting over the course of, say, eternity.)
As I said at the time, it hadn’t been clear when I wrote the comment that you meant, specifically, the God of the Abrahamic religions when you talked about God.
I’ve since read your comments elsewhere about Mormonism, which made it clearer that there’s a specific denomination’s traditional beliefs about the universe you’re looking to defend, and not just beliefs in the existence of a God more generally.
And, sure, given that you’re looking for compelling arguments that defend your pre-existing beliefs, including specific claims about God’s values as well as God’s existence, history, powers, personality, relationships to particular human beings, and so forth, then it makes sense to reject ideas that seem inconsistent with those epistemic pre-commitments.
If you do assume that God can (and does) just reach in and tweak our minds directly, then being “convinced” takes on a sort of strange meaning. Unless we’re assuming that you remain in normal control of your own mind, the concepts of “choice,” “opinion,” and “me” sort of start to disappear.
I’m trying to talk about a deity in general, but you’re right, it often turns into the God we’re all familiar with. A radically different deity could uproot every part of the way we think about things, even logic and reason itself.
So in order to stay within our own universe, I think it’s OK to assume that any God only intervenes to the extent that we usually hear about, like Old Testament miracles.
A radically different deity could uproot every part of the way we think about things, even logic and reason itself. So in order to stay within our own universe, I think it’s OK to assume that any God only intervenes to the extent that we usually hear about, like Old Testament miracles.
Wait… you endorse rejecting the lived experience of millions of people whose conception of deity is radically different from yours, on the grounds that to do otherwise could uproot logic, reason, and every part of the way we think about things?
Wow. Um… I genuinely don’t mean to be offensive, but I don’t know a polite way to say this: if I understood that correctly, I just lost all interest in discussing this subject with you.
You seemed to be arguing a while back that our precommitments to “the way we think about things” were not sufficient grounds to reject uncomfortable or difficult ideas, which is a position I can respect, though I think it’s importantly though subtly false.
But now you just seem to be saying that we should not respect such precommitments when they interfere with accepting some beliefs, such as one popular conception of deity, while considering them sufficient grounds to reject others, such as different popular conceptions of deity.
Which seems to bring us all the way back around to the idea that an “atheist” is merely someone who treats my God the way I treat everyone else’s God, which is boring.
So it seems like what we were actually talking about here was how thoroughly God could convince a human of His existence, and you suggested he could just raise your faith level directly.
Here’s the problem I have with that: I don’t know about Odin, but the YHWH we were raised with doesn’t (could, but doesn’t) ever do that. I wouldn’t really call it faith if you have no choice in the matter.
But I recognize that free agency is a very important tenet of my religion and important to my understanding of the universe given that my religion is correct. (I still don’t quite understand free choice, which I’ll have to figure out sometime in the next few years, but that’s my own issue.)
Thus, a radically different deity is at odds with my view of the universe. This probably means that I ought to go looking for radically different deities which will challenge my universe, but for now I don’t know of any (except maybe simulation hypotheses, which I like a lot).
But for the purposes of this discussion—which, remember, was only about how spectacular a manifestation it would take to make you believe—I said it would be easier to stick to a God that doesn’t intervene to the point of directly tampering with our neurons. You had a problem with this. OK, sorry—let’s also think about a fundamentally different God.
I think that an effectively all-powerful being could easily just reach in and rearrange our circuits such that we know it exists. Sure it could happen. As I think I told someone, I don’t see why—having seven billion mindless minions would get old after a while—but I have no right to go questioning the motives of a deity, especially one that’s radically different from the one I’m told I’m modeled after.
I’m sorry, I never meant to dismiss the possibility of radically different religions. You’re right, that would be awfully silly coming from me.
Now then.
You seemed to be arguing a while back that our precommitments to “the way we think about things” were not sufficient grounds to reject uncomfortable or difficult ideas, which is a position I can respect, though I think it’s importantly though subtly false.
I recommend you prioritize clarifying your confusions surrounding “free choice” higher than you seem to be doing.
In particular, I observe that our circuits have demonstrably been arranged such that we find certain propositions, sources of value, and courses of action (call them C1) significantly (and in some cases overwhelmingly) more compelling than other propositions, sources of value, and courses of action (C2). For example (and trivially), C1 includes “I have a physical body” and C2 includes “I don’t have a physical body”.
If we were designed by a deity, it follows that this deity in fact designed us to be predisposed to accept C1 and not accept C2.
A concept of free agency that allows for stacking the deck so overwhelmingly in support of C1 over C2, but does not allow for including in C1 “YHWH as portrayed in the Book of Mormon, other texts included by reference in the Book of Mormon, and subsequent revelations granted to the line of Mormon Prophets by YHWH”, seems like an important concept to clarify, if only because it sounds so very contrived on the face of it.
This sounds very interesting, what do you mean?
Well, for example, consider the proposition (Pj) that YHWH as conceived of and worshiped by 20th-century Orthodox Jews of my family’s tradition exists.
As a child, I was taught Pj and believed it (which incidentally entailed other things, for example, such as Jesus Christ not being the Messiah). As a teenager re-evaluated the evidence I had for and against Pj and concluded that my confidence in NOT(Pj) was higher than my confidence in Pj.
Had someone said to me at that time “Dave, I realize that your evaluation of the evidence presented by your experience of the world leads you to high confidence in certain propositions which you consider logically inconsistent with Pj, but I caution you not to become so thoroughly precommitted to the methods by which you perform those evaluations that you cannot seriously consider alternative ways of evaluating evidence,” that would intuitively feel like a sensible, rational, balanced position.
The difficulty with it is that in practice, refusing to commit to any epistemic method means giving up on reaching any conclusions at all, however tentative. And since in practice making any choices about what to do next requires arriving at some conclusion, however implicit or unexamined, it similarly precludes an explicit examination of the conclusions underlying my choices. (Which typically entails an unexamined adoption of the epistemic methods my social group implicitly endorses, rather than the adoption of no epistemic methods at all, but that’s a whole different conversation.)
I ultimately decided I valued such explicit examinations, and that entailed a willingness to making a commitment to an epistemic methodology, and that the epistemic methodology that seemed most compelling to me at that time did in fact lead me to reject Pj, so absent discovering inconsistencies in that methodology that led me to reject it at some later time I was committed to rejecting Pj, which I did.
(Of course, I wasn’t thinking in quite these terms as a 13-year-old Yeshiva student, and it took some years to get fully consistent about that position. Actually, I’m not yet fully consistent about it, and don’t anticipate becoming so in my lifetime.)
Interesting. I’ll keep thinking about it. But just to clarify, what exactly was it I said that was subtly but importantly wrong?
This is what EY says about “uncomfortable or difficult ideas:”
“When you’re doubting one of your most cherished beliefs, close your eyes, empty your mind, grit your teeth, and deliberately think about whatever hurts the most. Don’t rehearse standard objections whose standard counters would make you feel better. Ask yourself what smart people who disagree would say to your first reply, and your second reply. Whenever you catch yourself flinching away from an objection you fleetingly thought of, drag it out into the forefront of your mind.”
But just to clarify, what exactly was it I said that was subtly but importantly wrong?
Like I said, I thought you were arguing a while back that our precommitments to “the way we think about things” were not sufficient grounds to reject uncomfortable or difficult ideas, which is an idea I respect (for reasons similar to those articulated in the post you quote) but consider subtly but importantly wrong (for reasons similar to those I articulate in the comment you reply to).
I’ll note, also, that an epistemic methodology (a way of thinking about things) isn’t the same thing as a belief.
And if it were a demon? A ghost? A fairy? A Greek deity? If these are different, why are they different? What about an angel that ’s from another religion?
The optimal situation for you is that you’ve heard intelligent, thoughtful, rational criticism but your position remains strong.
The optimal situation could also be hearing intelligent, thoughtful, rational criticism, learn from it and having a new ‘strong position’ incorporating the new information. (See: lightness).
I sometimes see refutations of pro-religious arguments on this site, but no refutations of good arguments.
What good arguments do you think LW hasn’t talked about?
My point in posting this is simply to ask you—what, in your opinion, are the most legitimate criticisms of your own way of thinking?
Religion holds an important social and cultural role that the various attempts at rationalist ritual or culture haven’t fully succeeded at filling yet.
Clearly, the Less Wrong community generally (unanimously?) agrees about a lot of major things. For example, religion.
The 2012 survey showed something around 10% non-atheist, non-agnostic.
My point in posting this is simply to ask you—what, in your opinion, are the most legitimate criticisms of your own way of thinking?
From most plausible to least plausible:
It’s possible to formulate something like an argument that religious practice is good for neurotypical humans, in terms of increasing life expectancy, reducing stress, and so on.
Monocultures tend to do better than populations with mixed cultural heritage, and one could argue that some religions do very well at creating monocultures where none previously existed, e.g., the mormons, or perhaps the Catholic Church circa 1800 in the states.
I’ve heard some reports that religious affiliation is good for one’s dating pool.
See, but these are only arguments that religion is useful. Rationalists on this site say that religion is most definitely false, even if it’s useful; are there any rational thinkers out there who actually think that religion could realistically be true? I think that’s a much harder question that whether or not it’s good for us.
This is great, thanks. I know there must be people out there, but I’m not entirely convinced most atheists ever bother to actually consider a real possibility of God.
For instance, I spent about six years seriously studying up on religions and theology, because I figured that if there were any sort of supreme being concerned with the actions of humankind, that would be one of the most important facts I could possibly know. So in that sense, I take religion very seriously. But in the sense of believing that any religion has a non-negligible chance of accurately describing reality, I don’t take it seriously at all, because I feel that the weight of evidence is overwhelmingly against that being the case.
What sense of “taking religion seriously” are you looking for examples of?
That’s what I mean—a non-negligible chance. If your estimation of the likelihood of God is negligible, then it may as well be zero. I don’t think that there is an overwhelming weight of evidence toward either case, and I don’t think this is something that science can resolve.
If your estimation of the likelihood of God is negligible, then it may as well be zero.
This doesn’t follow. For example, if you recite to me a 17 million digit number, my estimate that it is a prime is about 1 in a million by the prime number theorem. But, if I then find out that the number was in fact 2^57,885,161 −1, my estimate for it being prime goes up by a lot. So one can assign very small probabilities to things and still update strongly on evidence.
So, you’re saying that in your view no atheist could possibly take the question of the truth of religion seriously? Or, alternately, that one could be an atheist but still give a large probability of God’s existence? Both of these seem a bit bizarre...
See my first comment in this thread. There’s a 10% minority that takes religion seriously. Presumably some of them consider themselves rationalists, or else they wouldn’t bother responding to the survey.
This is interesting. It shouldn’t be surprising coming from philosophers, but it can be instructional anyway. There are as many atheists who have never heard a decent defense of religion as there are religious fundamentalists who have never bothered to think rationally.
There are as many atheists who have never heard a decent defense of religion as there are religious fundamentalists who have never bothered to think rationally.
This seems improbable, considering that there are vastly more religious people than atheists.
Even in the non-technical sense, he’s still making a relevant counterpoint, because it’s much, much harder for atheists to go without exposure to religious culture and arguments than for a religious person to go without exposure to atheist arguments or culture (insofar as such a thing can be said to exist.)
I don’t just mean being exposed to religious culture and arguments, I mean good arguments. I know, practically everyone here was raised religious and given really bad reasons to believe. But I think those may become a straw dummy—what I’m skeptical of is how many people here have heard a religious argument that actually made them think, one that has a chance in a real debate.
I’m going to second JoshuaZ here. There’s a lot of disagreement among theists about what the best arguments for theism are. I’d rather not try to represent any particular argument as the best one available for theism, because I can’t think of anything that theists would universally agree on as a good argument, and I don’t endorse any of the arguments myself.
I would say that most atheists are at least exposed to arguments that apologists of some standing, such as C.S. Lewis or William Lane Craig, actually use.
...[W]hat I’m skeptical of is how many people here have heard a religious argument that actually made them think, one that has a chance in a real debate.
A-causal blackmail, once I thought deeply about why it might be scary. Took about an hour to refute it (to my satisfaction) - whether it would have a chance in a ‘real debate’: debate length, forum, allotted quiet thinking time and other confounds make me uncertain of your intended meaning.
I’m much closer to “below average” than to the “top” as far as LW users go, but I’ll give it a shot anyway.
My point in posting this is simply to ask you—what, in your opinion, are the most legitimate criticisms of your own way of thinking ?
I assume that by “way of thinking” you mean “atheism”, specifically (if not, what did you mean ?).
I don’t know how you judge which criticisms are “legitimate”, so I can’t answer the question directly. Instead, I can say that the most persuasive arguments against atheism that I’d personally seen come in form of studies demonstrating the efficacy of prayer. If prayer does work consistently with the claims of some religion, this is a good indication that at least some claims made by the religion are true.
Note, though, that I said “most persuasive”; another way to put it would be “least unpersuasive”. Unfortunately, all such studies that I know of have either found no correlation between prayer and the desired effect whatsoever; or were constructed so poorly that their results are meaningless. Still, at least they tried.
In general, it is more difficult to argue against atheism (of the weak kind) than against theism, since (weak) atheism is simply the null hypothesis. This means that theists must provide positive evidence for the existence of their god(s) in order to convince an atheist, and this is very difficult to do when one’s god is undetectable, or works in mysterious ways, or is absent, etc., as most gods tend to be.
Many people would disagree that atheism is the null hypothesis. “All things testify of Christ,” as some say, and in those circles people honestly believe they’ve been personally contacted by God. (I’m talking about Mormons, whose God, from what I’ve heard, is not remotely undetectable.)
Have most atheists honestly put thought into what if there actually was a God? Many won’t even accept that there is a possibility, and I think this is just as dangerous as blind faith.
Have most atheists honestly put thought into what if there actually was a God?
Don’t know. Most probably have something better to do. I have thought about what would happen if there was a God. If it turned out the the god of the religion I was brought up in was real then I would be destined to burn in hell for eternity. If version 1 of the same god (Yahweh) existed I’d probably also burn in hell for eternity but I’m a bit less certain about that because the first half of my Bible talked more about punishing people while alive (well, at the start of the stoning they are alive at least) than the threat of torment after death. If Alah is real… well, I’m guessing there is going to be more eternal pain involved since that is just another fork of the same counterfactual omnipotent psychopath. Maybe I’d have more luck with the religions from ancient India—so long as I can convince the gods that lesswrong Karma counts.
So yes, I’ve given some thought to what happens if God exists: I’d be screwed and God would still be a total dick of no moral worth.
Many won’t even accept that there is a possibility, and I think this is just as dangerous as blind faith.
Assigning probability 0 or 1 to a hypothesis is an error, but rounding off 0.0001 to 0 is less likely to be systematically destructive to an entire epistemological framework than rounding 0.0001 off to 1.
So, with no evidence either way, would you honestly rate the probability of the existence of God as 0.0001%?
That probability is off by a factor of 100 from the one I mentioned.
(And with ‘no evidence either way’ the probability assigned would be far, far lower than that. It takes rather a lot of evidence to even find your God in hypothesis space.)
Ah, sorry. I misread your statement as talking about a prior rather than with the evidence at hand and didn’t notice the percentage mark. Your edited comment is more clear.
You’re right, I’m sorry. It was 0.0001. That’s still pretty small, though. Is that really what you think it is?
It takes rather a lot of evidence to even find your God in hypothesis space
Don’t think of my God, then. Any deity at all.
Do we want to be Bayesian about it? Of course we do. Let’s imagine two universes. One formed spontaneously, one was created. Which is more likely to occur?
Personally I think that the created one seems more likely. Apparently you think that the spontaneity is more believable. But as for the probability that any given universe is created rather than accidental, 0.0001 seems unrealistically low. And if that’s not the number you actually believe—it was just an example—what is?
Do we want to be Bayesian about it? Of course we do. Let’s imagine two universes. One formed spontaneously, one was created. Which is more likely to occur?
It isn’t obvious that this is at all meaningful, and gets quickly into deep issues of anthropics and observer effects. But aside from that, there’s some intuition here that you seem to be using that may not be shared. Moreover, it also has the weird issue that most forms of theism have a deity that is omnipotent and so should exist over all universes.
Note also that the difference isn’t just spontaneity v. created. What does it mean for a universe to be created? And what does it mean to call that creating aspect a deity? One of the major problems with first cause arguments and similar notions is that even when one buys into them it is extremely difficult to jump from their to theism. Relevant SMBC.
Certainly this is a tough issue, and words get confusing really quickly. What intuition am I not sharing? Sorry if by “universe” I meant scenario or existence or something that contains God when there is one.
What I mean by “deity” and “created” is that either there is a conscious, intelligent mind (I think we all agree what that means) organizing our world/universe/reality, or there isn’t. And of course I’m not trying to sell you on my particular religion. I’m just trying to point out that I think there’s not any more inherent reason to believe there is no deity than to believe there is one.
What I mean by “deity” and “created” is that either there is a conscious, intelligent mind (I think we all agree what that means) organizing our world/universe/reality, or there isn’t.
Ok. So in this context, why do you think that one universe is more likely than the other? It may help to state where “conscious” and “intelligent” and “mind” come into this argument.
And of course I’m not trying to sell you on my particular religion.
On the contrary, that shouldn’t be an “of course”. If you sincerely believe and think you have the evidence for a particular religion, you should present it. If you don’t have that evidence, then you should adjust your beliefs.
Even if one thinks one is in a constructed universe, it in no way follows that the constructor is divine or has any other aspects one normally associates with a deity. For example, this universe could be the equivalent of a project for a 12 dimensional grad student in a wildly different universe (ok, that might be a bit much- it might just be by an 11 -dimensional bright undergrad).
I’m just trying to point out that I think there’s not any more inherent reason to believe there is no deity than to believe there is one.
What do you mean as an “inherent” reason? Are you solely making a claim here about priors, or are you making a claim about what evidence there actually is when we look out at the world? Incidentally, you should be surprised if this is true- for the vast majority of hypotheses, the evidence we have should assign them probabilities far from 50%. Anytime one encounters a hypothesis which is controversial in a specific culture, and one concludes that it has a probability close to 1⁄2, one should be concerned that one is reaching such a conclusion not out of rational inquiry but more out of an attempt to balance competing social and emotional pressures.
Even if one thinks one is in a constructed universe, it in no way follows that the constructor is divine or has any other aspects one normally associates with a deity. For example, this universe could be the equivalent of a project for a 12 dimensional grad student in a wildly different universe (ok, that might be a bit much- it might just be by an 11 -dimensional bright undergrad).
I’d actually consider that deity in the sense of a conscious, intelligent being who created the universe intentionally. As opposed to it happening by cosmic hazard. (That is, no conscious creator.)
Would you assign that being any of the traits normally connected to being a deity? For example, if the 11 dimensional undergrad say not to eat shellfish, or to wear special undergarments, would you listen?
Yes, I would listen if was confident that was where it was coming from. This 11-dimensional undergrad is much more powerful and almost certainly smarter than me, and knowingly rebelling would not be a good idea. If this undergrad just has a really sick sense of humor, then, well, we’re all screwed in any case.
Clearly, then I need to make awfully sure it’s actually God and not a hallucination. I would probably not do it because in that case I know that the undergrad does have a sick sense of humor and I shouldn’t listen to him because we’re all screwed anyway.
Now, if you’re going to bring up Abraham and Isaac or something like that, remember that in this case Abraham was pretty darn sure it was actually God talking.
So this sort of response indicates that you are distinguishing between “God” and the 11-dimensional undergrad as distinct ideas. In that case, a generic creator argument isn’t very strong evidence since there are a lot of options for entities that created the universe that aren’t God.
This is confusing because we’re simultaneously talking about a deity in general and my God, the one we’re all familiar with.
Of course there are lots of options other than my specific God; the 11-dimensional undergrad is one of those. I’m not using a generic creator argument to convince you of my God, I’m using the generic creator argument to suggest that you take into account the possibility of a generic creator, whether or not it’s my God. I’m keeping my God mostly out of this—I think an atheist ought to be able to argue my position while keeping his/her own conclusions.
And of course I’m not trying to sell you on my particular religion.
As JoshuaZ says, there’s no “of course” about it. If some particular religion is right and I am wrong, then I absolutely want to know about it ! So if you have some evidence to present, please do so.
I think that my religion is right and you are misguided. I really do, for reasons of my own. But I don’t have any “evidence” to share with you, especially if you are committed to explaining it away as you may not be but many people here are.
Remember that my original question was just to see where this community stood. I don’t have all that many grand answers myself. I suppose I could actually say that if you honestly absolutely want to know and are willing to open your mind, then you should try reading this book—I’m serious, but I’m aware how silly that would sound in such a context as this. Really, I don’t want to become that guy.
I’m young, and I myself am trying to find good, rational arguments in favor of God. I’m trying to reconcile rationality and religion in my mind, and if I can’t find anyone online, I’ll figure it out myself and write a blog post about it in twenty years.
But what it seems I’ve found is that no, most of the people on this site (based on my representative sample of about a dozen, I know) have never been presented with solid arguments in favor of religion. Maybe I’ll manage to find some or write them myself, and maybe I’ll decide that the population of Less Wrong is as closed-minded as I feared. In any case, thank you for being more open than certain others.
But I don’t have any “evidence” to share with you, especially if you are committed to explaining it away as you may not be but many people here are.
So this is a problem. In general, there are types of claims that don’t easily have shared evidence (e.g. last night I had a dream that was really cool, but I forgot it almost as soon as I woke up, I love my girlfriend, when I was about 6 years old I got the idea of aliens who could only see invisible things but not visible things, etc.) But most claims, especially claims about what we expect of reality around us should depend on evidence that can be shared.
I’m young, and I myself am trying to find good, rational arguments in favor of God.
So this is already a serious mistake. One shouldn’t try to find rational arguments in favor of one thing or another. One should find the best evidence for and against a claim, and then judge the claim based on that.
have never been presented with solid arguments in favor of religion. Maybe I’ll manage to find some or write them myself, and maybe I’ll decide that the population of Less Wrong is as closed-minded as I feared.
You may want to seriously consider that the arguments you are looking for don’t exist. In the meantime, may I recommend reddit’s Debate Religion forum. They are dedicated to discussing a lot of these issues and may be a better forum for some of the things you are interested. Of course, the vast majority of things related to rationality has very little to do with whether or not there are any deities, and so you are more than welcome to stick around here. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here.
Note that my expressed intention in this post was not to start a religious debate, though I have enjoyed that too. I have considered that the arguments I’m looking for don’t exist; what I’ve found is that at least you guys don’t have any, which means that from your position this case is entirely one-sided. So generally, your belief that religion is inherently ridiculous from a rationalist standpoint has never actually been challenged at all.
If you really want rationalist (more properly, post-rationalist) arguments in favor of God, I recommend looking through Will Newsome’s comments from a few years ago; also through his twitter accounts @willnewsome and @willdoingthings.
If you follow my advice, though, may God have mercy on your soul; because Will Newsome will have none on your psychological health.
I’m young, and I myself am trying to find good, rational arguments in favor of God. I’m trying to reconcile rationality and religion in my mind, and if I can’t find anyone online, I’ll figure it out myself and write a blog post about it in twenty years.
Ah, no, haven’t you read the How to Actually Change Your Mind sequence? Or at least the Against Rationalization subsequence and The Bottom Line? You can’t just decide “I want to prove the existence of God” and then write a rational argument. You can’t start with the bottom line. Really, read the sequence, or at least the subsequence I pointed out.
you should try reading this book
I wasn’t under the impression that the Book of Mormon was substantially more convincing than any other religious holy book. I have, however, heard that the Mormon church does exceptionally well at building a community. If you’d like to talk about that, I’d be extremely interested.
But what it seems I’ve found is that no, most of the people on this site (based on my representative sample of about a dozen, I know) have never been presented with solid arguments in favor of religion.
How sure are you that more solid arguments exist? We don’t know about them. You apparently don’t know about them. If you’ve got any that you’re hiding, remember that if God actually exists we would really like to know about it; we don’t want to explain anything away that isn’t wrong.
Yes, I have read the sequence. I think that not being one-sided sometimes requires a conscious effort, and is a worthwhile cause.
Of course you won’t read the Book of Mormon. I wouldn’t expect you to. But if you want “evidence” which has firmly convinced millions of people—here it is. I personally have found it more powerful than the Bible or Qur’an.
You’re right, I don’t have any solid arguments in favor of religion. My original question of this post was actually just to ask if you had any—and I’ve gotten an answer. No, you believe there are none.
if God actually exists we would really like to know about it
I’ve shown you one source that convinces a lot of people; consider yourself to know about it. I would recommend reading it, too, if you’re really interesting in finding the truth.
Of course you won’t read the Book of Mormon. I wouldn’t expect you to. But if you want “evidence” which has firmly convinced millions of people—here it is. I personally have found it more powerful than the Bible or Qur’an.
Have you read the Quran in the original Arabic? It’s pretty famously considered to lose a lot in translation.
I haven’t, of course, but the only ex-muslim I’ve spoken to about it agrees that even in the absence of his religious belief, it’s a much more powerful and poetic work in Arabic.
I personally have found [the Book of Mormon] more powerful than the Bible or Qur’an.
Can you expand on that? What is this perception of “power” you get in varying degrees from such books, and what is the relation between that sensation and deciding whether anything in those books is true?
I’ve read the Bible and the Qur’an, and while I haven’t read the Book of Mormon, I have a copy (souvenir of a visit to Salt Lake City). I’ll have a look at it if you like, but I’m not expecting much, because of the sort of thing that books like these are. Neither the Bible nor the Qur’an convince me that any of the events recounted in them ever happened, or that any of the supernatural entities they talk about ever existed, or that their various moral prescriptions should be followed simply because they appear there. How could they?
A large part of the Bible is purported history, and to do history right you can’t rely on a single collection of old and multiply-translated documents which don’t amount to a primary source for much beyond their own existence, especially when archaeology (so I understand) doesn’t turn up all that much to substantiate it. And things like the Genesis mythology are just mythology. The world was not created in six days. Proverbs, Wisdom, the “whatsoever things...” passage, and so on, fine: but I read them in the same spirit as reading the rationality quote threads here. Where there be any virtue, indeed.
The Qur’an consists primarily of injunctions to believe and imprecations against unbelievers. I’m not going to swallow that just because of its aggressive manner.
So, that is my approach to religious documents. This “power” that leads many people to convert to a religion, that gives successful missionaries thousands of converts in a single day: I have to admit that I have no idea what experience people are talking about. Why would reading a book or tract open my eyes to the truth? Especially if I have reason to think that the authors were not engaged in any sort of rational inquiry?
That is, BTW, also my approach to non-religious documents, and I find it really odd when I see people saying of things like, say, Richard Dawkins’ latest, “this book changed the way I see things!” It’s a frequent jibe of religious people against atheists that “atheism is just another religion”, but when people within atheism convert so readily from one idea to another just by reading a book, I have to wonder whether “religion” might be just the word for that mental process.
That is, BTW, also my approach to non-religious documents, and I find it really odd when I see people saying of things like, say, Richard Dawkins’ latest, “this book changed the way I see things!” It’s a frequent jibe of religious people against atheists that “atheism is just another religion”, but when people within atheism convert so readily from one idea to another just by reading a book, I have to wonder whether “religion” might be just the word for that mental process.
What’s strange about converting from one idea to another by reading a book? A book can contain a lot of information. Sometimes it doesn’t even take very much to change one’s mind. Suppose a person believes that the continents can’t be shifting, because there’s no room for them to move around on a solid sphere. Then they read about subduction zones and mid-ocean ridges, and see a diagram of plate movement around the world, and think “Oh, I guess it can happen that way, how silly of me not to have thought of that.”
I haven’t found any religious text convincing, because they tend to be heavy on constructing a thematic message and providing social motivation to believe, light on evidence, but for a lot of people that’s a normal way to become convinced of things (indeed, I recently finished reading a book where the author discussed how, among the tribe he studied, convincing people of a proposition was almost entirely a matter of how powerful a claim you were prepared to make and what authority you could muster, rather than what evidence you could present or how probable your claim was.)
among the tribe he studied, convincing people of a proposition was almost entirely a matter of how powerful a claim you were prepared to make and what authority you could muster, rather than what evidence you could present
I suspect this was also true of the tribe I went to high-school with.
a single collection of old and multiply-translated documents which don’t amount to a primary source for much beyond their own existence
I know how most atheists feel about the Bible. Really, I do. But if you don’t understand what’s so powerful about a book, and you want to know, then you really should give it a try—I might say that the last chapter of Moroni especially addresses this.
(I promise I’m not trying to convert you. I don’t remotely expect you to have a spiritual experience because of this one chapter.)
I have to wonder whether “religion” might be just the word for that mental process.
Yes, it’s easy to compare religion and atheism to each other as well as professional sports and a lot of other human behaviors. I’m all for free thought and not being persuaded by powerful words alone. However, just as I try to be able to enjoy ridiculous sports games, I’m glad to understand why people believe what they do.
But if you don’t understand what’s so powerful about a book, and you want to know, then you really should give it a try—I might say that the last chapter of Moroni especially addresses this.
Well, I’ve now read the last chapter of Moroni, which is the last book of the Book of Mormon. The prophet takes his leave of his people, promises that God, the Son, and the Holy Ghost will reveal the truth of these things to those who sincerely pray, enjoins them to practice faith, hope, and charity and avoid despair, and promises to see them in the hereafter.
I don’t feel any urge to read this as other than fiction.
I know how most atheists feel about the Bible. Really, I do. But if you don’t understand what’s so powerful about a book, and you want to know, then you really should give it a try—I might say that the last chapter of Moroni especially addresses this.
I grew up on the Bible. I studied the Bible for over a decade. I have read the Old Testament in Hebrew.
It’s the most boring thing I’ve ever laid eyes on.
I’ve always marveled at peoples’ assertions that, even if they don’t believe the bible is the word of God, they still respect it as a great work of literature. I suspect that they really do believe it, humans can invest a whole lot of positive associations with things simply through expectation and social conditioning. But my opinion of it as a literary work is low enough that I have a hard time coming up with any sort of of comparison which doesn’t make it sound like I’m making a deliberate effort to mock religious people.
But I don’t have any “evidence” to share with you, especially if you are committed to explaining it away … I’m young, and I myself am trying to find good, rational arguments in favor of God. … But what it seems I’ve found is that no, most of the people on this site (based on my representative sample of about a dozen, I know) have never been presented with solid arguments in favor of religion.
I was honest when I said that I’d love to see some convincing evidence for the existence of any god. If you have some, then by all means, please present it. However, if I look at your evidence and find that it is insufficient to convince me, this does not necessarily mean that I’m closed-minded (though I still could be, of course). It could also mean that your reasoning is flawed, or that your observations can be more parsimoniously explained by a cause other than a god.
A big part of being rational is learning to work around your own biases. Consider this: if you can’t find any solid arguments for the existence of your particular version of God… is it possible that there simply aren’t any ?
Yes, it’s possible that there aren’t any. That makes your beliefs much, much simpler. But I think that it’s much safer and healthier to assume that you just haven’t been exposed to any yet. I can’t call you closed-minded for not having been exposed, and I’m sure that if some good arguments did pop up you at least would be willing to hear them. I’m sorry that I don’t myself have any; I’m going to keep looking for a few years, if you don’t mind.
I do mind. If you look for a few years for “rational” arguments for Mormonism you will be wasting your life duplicating the effort of thousands of people before you. Please don’t. Even if you remain Mormon, there are far better things you can do than theology.
What should I spend my next few years of rationalism doing then?
It seems that according to you, my options are
a) leave my religion in favor of rationalism. (feel free to tell me this, but if my parents find out about it they’ll be worried and start telling me you’re a satanic cult. I can handle it.)
b) leave rationalism in favor of religion. (not likely. I could leave Less Wrong if it’s not open-minded enough, but I won’t renounce rational thinking.)
In descending order of my preference: a, c, then b.
I think c is the path chosen by most people who are reasonable but want to remain religious.
C is much more feasible if you can happily devote your time to causes other than religion/rationality. math, science, writing, art, I think all are better for you and society than theology
C seems likely as a long-term solution, because I don’t see a or b as very realistic right now. And even if I don’t make it a focused pursuit, I’ll still be on the lookout for option d.
(I’m not seriously interested in theology, don’t worry. I’m quite into math and such things.)
These are not “options”, but possible outcomes. You shouldn’t decide to work on reaching a particular conclusion, that would filter the arguments you encounter. Ignore these whole “religion” and “rationality” abstractions, work on figuring out more specific questions that you can understand reliably.
That’s not either/or. Plenty of participants here are quietly religious (I don’t recall what the last survey said), yet they like the site for what it has to offer. It may well happen some day that some of the sequence posts will click in a way that would make you want to decide to distance yourself from your fellow saints. Or it might not. If you find some discussion topics which interest you more, then just enjoy those. As I mentioned originally, pure logical discourse is rarely the way to change deep-seated opinions and preferences. Those evolve as your subconscious mind integrates new ideas and experiences.
Yes, that’s what I think I’ll do. But many people here seem to be telling me that’s impossible without some sort of cognitive dissonance. I don’t think so.
many people here seem to be telling me that’s impossible without some sort of cognitive dissonance
“People here” are not perfectly rational and prone to other-optimizing. Including yours truly. Even the fearless leader has a few gaping holes in his rationality, and he’s done pretty well. I don’t know which of his and others’ ideas speak to you the most, but apparently some do, so why not enjoy them. If anything, the spirit of altruism and care for others, so prominent on this forum, seems to fit well with Mormon practice, as far as I know.
I honestly haven’t gotten much of a sense of altruism or care for others. (You were serious, right?) I mean, yes, there’s the whole optimizing charity thing, but that’s often (not always) for personal gratification as much as sincere altruism. I suppose people here think that their own cryonic freezing is actually doing the world a huge favor.
And care for others...that’s something Mormons definitely have on you guys.
But I like this environment anyways. Because people here are smart and educated, and some of them are even honest. :)
By signing up for cryonics you help make cryonics more normal and less expensive, encouraging others to save their own lives. I believe there was a post where someone said they signed up for cryonics so that they wouldn’t have to answer the “why aren’t you signed up then?” crowd when trying to convince other people to do so.
I’m sure that many folks who have signed up for cryonics are happy that their behavior normalizes it for others. But I’m doubtful that any significant number would have made a different decision if normalizing cryonics was not an effect of their actions.
I suppose people here think that their own cryonic freezing is actually doing the world a huge favor.
I don’t believe you really think that. Probably your frustration is talking. But you can probably relate to the standard analogy with a religious approach: if you believe that you have a chance for a happy immortality, it’s a lot easier to justify spending some of your mortal toil on helping others to be happy. Even if there is no correlation between how much good you do in this life and how happy you will be in the next, if any.
Hmm. Is it really better to assume they’re entirely selfish? I could do that. But I know that Harry James P-E-V at least actually believes he’s going to save the world. (Maybe not specifically with cryonics.)
(But yes, my tendency for sarcasm is something I need to work on. When I’m on Less Wrong, at least.)
there’s the whole optimizing charity thing, but that’s often (not always) for personal gratification as much as sincere altruism.
There’s two issue here: (1) the difference between donating because it is useful and donating because it makes one feel good, and (2) many donations that make one feel good are really social status games.
I really do think many people here are sincere altruists (re the second issue).
I suppose people here think that their own cryonic freezing is actually doing the world a huge favor.
I hope they don’t. It’s an awfully stupid position. I’m not aware of anyone who is signed up for cryonics for anything other than self-oriented (selfish?) desire to live forever.
My recommendation is that you commit to/remain committed to basing your confidence in propositions on evaluations of evidence for and against those propositions. If that leads you to conclude that LessWrong is a bad place to spend time, don’t spend time here. If that leads you to conclude that your religious instruction has included some falsehoods, stop believing those falsehoods. If it leads you to conclude that your religious instruction was on the whole reliable and accurate, continue believing it. If it leads you to conclude that LessWrong is a good place to spend time, keep spending time here.
But I think that it’s much safer and healthier to assume that you just haven’t been exposed to any yet.
At what point do I stop looking, though ? For example, a few days ago I lost my favorite flashlight (true story). I searched my entire apartment for about an hour, but finally gave up; my guess is that I left it somewhere while I was hiking. I am pretty sure that the flashlight is not, in fact, inside my apartment… but should I keep looking until I’d turned over every atom ?
As for the Book of Mormon… try to think of it this way.
Imagine that, tomorrow, you meet aliens from a faraway star system. The aliens look like giant jellyfish, and are in fact aquatic; needless to say, they grew up in a culture radically different from ours. While this alien species does possess science and technology (or else they wouldn’t make it all the way to Earth !), they have no concept of “religion”. They do, however, have a concept of fiction (as well as non-fiction, of course, or else they wouldn’t have developed science).
The aliens have studied our radio transmissions, translated our language, and downloaded a copy of the entire Web; this was easy for them since their computers are much more powerful than ours. So, the aliens have access to all of our literature, movies, and other media; but they have a tough time making sense of some of it. For example, they are pretty sure that the Oracle SQL Manual is non-fiction (they pirated a copy of Oracle, and it worked). They are also pretty sure that Little Red Riding Hood is fiction (they checked, and they’re pretty sure that wolves can’t talk). But what about a film like Lawrence of Arabia ? Is that fiction ? The aliens aren’t sure.
One of the aliens comes to you, waving a copy of The Book of Mormon (or whichever scripture you believe in) in its tentacles (but in a friendly kind of way). It asks you to clarify: is this book fiction, or non-fiction ? If it contains both fictional and non-fictional passages, which are which ? Right now, the alien is leaning toward “fiction” (it checked, and snakes can’t talk), but, with us humans, one can never be sure.
a) I would tell them it’s non-fiction. Are Yudkowsky’s posts fiction or non-fiction? What about the ones where he tells clearly made-up instructional stories?
b) No need to bash the Book of Mormon. I’m fully aware how you people feel about it. But—
It was not my intent to bash the Book of Mormon specifically; I just used it as a convenient stand-in for “whichever holy scripture you believe in”. Speaking of which:
The alien spreads its tentacles in confusion, then pulls out a stack of books from the storage compartment of its exo-suit. “What about all these other ones ?”, it asks. You recognize the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, Enuma Elish, the King James Bible, and the Nordic Eddas; you can tell by the way the alien’s suit is bulging that it’s got a bunch more books in there. The alien says (or rather, its translation software says for it),
“We can usually tell the difference between fiction and non-fiction. For example, your fellow human Yudkowsky wrote a lot of non-fictional articles about things like ethics and epistemology, but he also wrote fictional stories such as Three Worlds Collide. In that, he is similar to [unpronounceable], the author on our own world who wrote about imaginary worlds in order to raise awareness his ideas concerning [untranslateable] and [untranslateable], which is now the basis of our FTL drive. Sort of like your own Aesop, in fact.
But these books”, -- the alien waves some of its tentacles at the huge stack—“are confusing our software. Their structure and content contains many elements that are usually found only in fiction; for example, talking animals, magical powers, birds bigger than mountains, some sort of humanoids beings that are said to live in the skies or at the top of tall mountains or perhaps in orbit, shapeshifters, and so on. We checked, and none of those things exist in real life.
But then, we talked to other humans such as yourself, and they told us that some of these books are true in a literal sense. Oddly enough, each human seems to think that one particular book is true, and all the others are fictional or allegorical, but groups of humans passionately disagree about which book is true, as well as about the meaning of individual passages.
Thus, we [unpronounceable]”—you recognize the word for the alien’s own species—“are thoroughly confused. Are these books fiction, or aren’t they ? For example”, the alien says as it flips open the Book of Mormon, “do you really believe that snakes can talk ? Or that your Iron Age ancestors could build wooden submarines ? Or that a mustard seed is the smallest thing there is ? Or that there’s an invisible person in the sky who watches your every move ?”
The alien takes a pause to breathe (or whatever it is they do), then flips open some of the other books.
“What about these ? Do you believe in a super-powered being called Thor, who creates lightning bolts with his hammer, Mjolnir ? Do you think that some humans can cast magic spells that actually work ? And what about Garuda the mega-bird, is he real ?
If you believe some of these books are truth and others fiction, how do you tell the difference ? Our software can’t tell the difference, and neither can we...”
I’m young, and I myself am trying to find good, rational arguments in favor of God. I’m trying to reconcile rationality and religion in my mind, and if I can’t find anyone online, I’ll figure it out myself and write a blog post about it in twenty years.
You are privileging the hypothesis of (presumably one specific strain of) monotheism. That is not actually a rational approach. The kind of question a rationalist would ask is not “does God exist?” but “what should I think about cosmology” or “what should I think about ethics?” First you examine the universe around you, and then you come up with hypotheses to see how well they match that. If you don’t start from the incorrectly narrow hypothesis space of [your strain of monotheism, secular cosmology acccording to the best guesses of early 21st century science], you end up with a much lower probability for your religion being true, even if science turns out to be mistaken about the particulars of the cosmology.
Put another way: What probability do you assign to Norse mythology being correct? And how well would you respond if someone told you you were being closed-minded because you’d never heard a solid argument for Thor?
I’m sorry if you feel that I’ve called you closed-minded, no personal offense was intended. But it’s a bit worrisome when a community as a whole has only ever heard one viewpoint.
The universe looks very undesigned—the fine-tuned constants and the like only allow conscious observers and so can be discounted on the basis of the anthropic principle (in a set of near-infinite universes, even undesigned ones, conscious observers would only inhabit universes with constants such that would allow their existence—there’s no observer who’d observe constants that didn’t permit their existence)
So pretty much all the evidence seems to speak of a lack of any conscious mind directing or designing the universe, neither malicious nor benevolent.
I know many, many people who think that the universe looks designed.
There are 7 billion people in the world. One can find “many, many” people to believe all sorts of things, especially if one’s going to places devoted to gathering such people together.
But the stuff that are really created by conscious minds, there’s rarely a need to argue about them. When the remnants of Mycenae were discovered nobody (AFAIK) had to argue whether they were a natural geological formation or if someone built them. Nobody had to debate whether the Easter Island statues were designed or not.
The universe is either undesigned and undirected, or it’s very cleverly designed so as to look undesigned and undirected. And frankly, if the latter is the case, it’d be beyond our ability to manage to outwit such clever designers; in that hypothetical case to believe it was designed would be to coincidentally reach the right conclusion by making all the wrong turns just because a prankster decided to switch all the roadsigns around.
I can refer you to Ivy League scientists if you want.
There are many, many Ivy League scientists. Again beware confirmation bias, the selection of evidence towards a predetermined conclusion. Do you have statistics for the percentage of Ivy League scientists that say “the universe looks designed” vs the ones that say “the universe doesn’t look designed” ? That’d be more useful.
As an addendum to my above comment—if you personally feel that the universe looks designed, can you tell me how would it look in the counterfactual where you were observing a blatantly UNdesigned universe?
Here’s for example elements of a hypothetical blatantly designed world: Continents in the shape of animals or flowers. Mountains that are huge statues. Laws of conservation that don’t easily reduce to math (e.g. conservation of energy, momentum, etc) but rather to human concepts (conservation of hope, conservation of dramatic irony). Clouds that reshape themselves to amuse and entertain the people watching them.
I don’t have any evidence. I know, downvote me now. But I suspect some sort of Bayesian analysis might support this, because if there is a deity, it is likely to create universes, whereas if there is no deity, universes have to form spontaneously, which requires a lot of things to fall into place perfectly.
But I suspect some sort of Bayesian analysis might support this, because if there is a deity, it is likely to create universes,
Okay, so what makes you think this is true? I’m wondering how on earth we would even figure out how to answer this question, let alone be sure of the answer.
whereas if there is no deity, universes have to form spontaneously, which requires a lot of things to fall into place perfectly.
What has to fall into place for this to occur? Exactly how unlikely is it?
It’s not a well-defined enough hypothesis to assign a number to: but the the main thing is that it’s going to be very low. In particular, it is going to be lower than a reasonable prior for a universe coming into existence without a creator. The reason existence seems like evidence of a creator, to us, is that we’re used to attributing functioning complexity to an agent-like designer. This is the famous Watchmaker analogy that I am sure you are familiar with. But everything we know about agents designing things tells us that the agents doing the designing are always far more complex than the objects they’ve created. The most complicated manufactured items in the world require armies of designers and factory workers and they’re usually based on centuries of previous design work. Even then, they are probably no manufactured objects in the world that are more complex than human beings.
So if the universe were designed, the designer is almost certainly far more complex than the universe. And as I’m sure you know, complex hypotheses get low initial priors. In other words: a spontaneous Watchmaker is far more unlikely than a spontaneous watch. Now: an apologist might argue that God is different. That God is in fact simple. Actually, they have argued this and such attempts constitute what I would call the best arguments for the existence of God. But there are two problems with these attempts. First, the way they argue that God is simple is based on imprecise, anthropocentric vocabulary that hides complexity. An “omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and omnibenevolent creator” sounds pretty simple. But if you actually break down each component into what it would actually have to be computationally it would be incredibly complex. The only way it’s simple is with hand-waving magic.
Second, A simple agent is totally contrary to our actual experience with agents and their designs. But that experience is the only thing leading us to conclude that existence is evidence for a designer in the first place. We don’t have any evidence that a complex design can come from a simple creator.
This a more complex and (I think) theoretically sophisticated way of making the same point the rhetorical question “Who created the creator?” makes. The long and short of it is that while existence perhaps is very good evidence for a creator, the creator hypothesis involves so much complexity that the prior for His spontaneous existence is necessarily lower than the prior for the universe’s spontaneous existence.
An “omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and omnibenevolent creator” sounds pretty simple. But if you actually break down each component into what it would actually have to be computationally it would be incredibly complex.
I agree that the “omnibenevolent” part would be incredibly complex (FAI-complete).
But “omnipotent”, “omnipresent” and “omniscient” seem much easier. For example, it could be a computer which simulates this world—it has all the data, all the data are on its hard disk, and it could change any of these data.
I actually think this illustrates my point quite nicely: the lower limit for the complexity of God (the God you describe) is by definition slightly more complicated than the world itself (the universe is included in your description!).
The problem is that “quite a bit” is far, far too little. Though religious people often make claims of religious experience, these claims tend to be quite flimsy and better explained by myriad other mechanisms, including random chance, mental illness, and confirmation bias. Scientists have studied these claims, and thus far well-constructed studies have found them to be baseless.
There’s also quite a bit of evidence for, if you bother to listen to sincere believers. Which I do.
You may be forgetting here that a lot of people here (including myself) grew up in pretty religious circumstances. I’m familiar with all sorts of claims, ranging from teleological arguments, to ontological arguments, to claims of revelation, to claims of mass tradition, etc. etc. So what do you think is “quite a bit of evidence” in this sort of context? Is there anything remotely resembling the Old Testament miracles for example that happens now?
Yes. They don’t casually share them with every skeptic who asks, because miracles are personal, but there is an amazing number of modern miracle stories (among Mormons if not others.) And not just lucky coincidences with easy explanations—real miracles that leave people quite convinced that God is there.
And don’t be too hasty to dismiss millions of personal experiences as mental illness.
I suspect that you and JoshuaZ are unpacking the phrase “Old Testament miracles” differently. Specifically, I suspect they are thinking of events on the order of dividing the Red Sea to allow refugees to pass and then drowning their pursuers behind them.
Such events, when they occur, are not personal experiences that must be shared, but rather world-shaking events that by their nature are shared.
And don’t be too hasty to dismiss millions of personal experiences as mental illness.
First of all, Joshua didn’t bring up mental illness here. But since you do: how hasty is “too” hasty? To say that differently: in a community of a billion people, roughly how many hallucinations ought I expect that community to experience in a year?
Yes. They don’t casually share them with every skeptic who asks, because miracles are personal, but there is an amazing number of modern miracle stories (among Mormons if not others.) And not just lucky coincidences with easy explanations—real miracles that leave people quite convinced that God is there.
Curiously, nearly identical claims are made by other religions also. For example, you see similar statements in the chassidic branches of Judaism.
But it isn’t at all clear why in this sort of context miracles should be at all “personal” and even then, it doesn’t really work. The scale of claimed miracles is tiny compared to those of the Bible. One has things like the splitting of the Red Sea, the collapse of the walls of Jericho, the sun standing still for Joshua, the fires on Mount Carmel, etc. That’s the scale of classical miracles, and even the most extreme claims of personal miracles don’t match up to that.
And don’t be too hasty to dismiss millions of personal experiences as mental illness.
They aren’t all mental illness. Some of them are seeing coincidences as signs when they aren’t, and remembering things happening in a more extreme way than they have. Eye witnesses are extremely unreliable. And moreover, should I then take all the claims by devout members of other faiths also as evidence? If so, this seems like a deity that is oddly willing to confuse people. What’s the simplest explanation?
I would venture a guess that atheists who haven’t put thought into the possibility of there being a god are significantly in the minority. Although there are some who dismiss the notion as an impossibility, or such a severe improbability as to be functionally the same thing, in my experience this is usually a conclusion rather than a premise, and it’s not necessarily an indictment of a belief system that a conclusion be strongly held.
Some Christians say that “all things testify of Christ.” Similarly, Avicenna was charged with heresy for espousing a philosophy which failed to affirm the self-evidence of Muslim doctrine. But cultures have not been known to adopt Christianity, Islam, or any other particular religion which has been developed elsewhere, independent of contact with carriers of that religion.
If cultures around the world adopted the same religion, independently of each other, that would be a very strong argument in favor of that religion, but this does not appear to occur.
Although there are some who dismiss the notion as an impossibility, or such a severe improbability as to be functionally the same thing, in my experience this is usually a conclusion rather than a premise
OK, that works. But what evidence do we have that unambiguously determines that there is no deity? I’d love to hear it. Not just evidence against one particular religion. Active evidence that there is no God, which, rationally taken into account, gives a chance of ~0 that some deity exists.
What evidence of no deity could you possibly expect to see? If there were no God, I wouldn’t expect there to be any evidence of the fact. In fact, if I were to find the words “There is no God, stop looking” engraved on an atom, my conclusion would not be “There is no God,” but rather (ignoring the possibility of hallucination) “There is a God or some entity of similar power, and he’s a really terrible liar.” Eliezer covers this sort of thing in his sequence entry You’re Entitled to Arguments But Not That Particular Proof.
If you really want to make this argument, describe a piece of evidence that you would affirmatively expect to see if there were no God.
Right, I don’t see how there could be any evidence to convince a person to the point of a 0.0001 chance of God. And so when all of these people say that they’ve concluded that the chance of God is negligible, I think that they’re subject to a strong cognitive bias worsened by the fact that they’re supposed to be immune to those.
Two things that your perpsective appears to be missing here:
1) Lots of people here were raised in religious families; they didn’t start out privileging atheism. (Or they aren’t atheists per se; I’m agnostic between atheism and deism; it’s just the anthropomorphic interventionist deity I reject.)
2) You aren’t the first believer to come here and present the case you are trying to make. See, for example, the rather epic conversation with Aspiringknitter here. You aren’t even the first Mormon to make the case here. Calcsam has been quite explicit about it.
Note that both of those examples are people who’ve accumulated quite a bit of karma on LessWrong. People give them a fair hearing. They just don’t agree that their arguments are compelling.
Thank you for pointing out perceived fundamental flaws. It’s so much more helpful than disputing technical details.
1) I know that. However, I would guess that most people here have fully privileged atheism since the time they started considering themselves rationalists, and this is a big difference.
2) I was aware of that too; however, thanks for the specific links. I certainly got on here loudly proclaiming that I was religious; however, my original stated purpose was not to start an argument. That said, I really was asking for it, and when people argued, I argued back. Where I live it’s so hard to find people willing to have an intellectual debate about this sort of thing. So if I did something “taboo,” I apologize. But the reaction I’ve gotten suggests that people are interested in what I’ve said, and so my thoughts were worth something at least.
I suppose that when this thread resolves itself I’ll make a grand post on the welcome page just like AspiringKnitter did.
Let me see if I can explain my objection to (1) a different way. Rationalists do not privilege atheism. They privilege parsimony. This is basically a tautology. The only way to subscribe to both rationality and theistic religion is compartmentalization. Saying you want to be rational and a theist is equivalent to saying you want to make a special exception to the principles you follow in every other situation when the subject of God comes up. That’s going to take a particular kind of strong argument.
You’re telling me that it’s essentially impossible to be theist and fully rational. You’re saying that not only do rationalists privilege atheism, but if fact they have to follow it by definition, unless they manage to deceive themselves.
I disagree with your objection and I believe that it is possible to reconcile rationality and religion.
That is not the case. Observing something for which one can provide no natural explanation is going to cause a rationalist to increase their probability estimate for the supernatural. It’s not going to increase it to near certainty, because the mysteriousness of the universe is a fact about the limits of our own understanding, not about the universe, so it’s still possible that something we can’t explain has natural causes we don’t yet have the ability to measure or explain. But it will cause the estimate to rise. And if inexplicable things keep happening, their estimate will keep rising.
The question, though, is whether there is anything that could ever cause you to lower your estimate of the probability that your religion is correct. If the answer is no, then you’re not being rational right off the bat, and your quest is doomed.
The only way to subscribe to both rationality and theistic religion is compartmentalization
What do you mean by compartmentalization, then, if it’s not a bad thing? Sounds to me like it’s sacrificing internal consistency.
The question, though, is whether there is anything that could ever cause you to lower your estimate of the probability that your religion is correct. If the answer is no, then you’re not being rational right off the bat, and your quest is doomed.
That’s true. I actively go looking for things that might challenge my faith, and come out stronger because of it. That’s partly why I’m here.
compartmentalization IS a bad thing if you care about internal consistency and absolute truth. It’s a great thing if you want to hold multiple useful beliefs that contradict each other. You might be happier and more productive, as I’m sure many are, believing that we should expect the world to work based on evidence except insofar as it conflicts with your religion, where it should work on faith.
Also premature decompartmentalizing can be dangerous. There are many sets of (at least mostly) true ideas where it’s a lot harder to reconcile them then to understand either individually.
The problem is that you’re not being consistent in your handling of unfalsifiable theories. A lot of what’s been brought to the table are Russell’s Teapot-type problems and other gods, but I think I can find one that’s a bit more directly comparable. I’ll present a theory that’s entirely unfalsifiable, and has a fair amount of evidence supporting it. This theory is that your friends, family, and everyone you know are government agents sent to trick you for some unclear reason. It’s a theory that would touch every aspect of your life, unlike a Russell’s Teapot. There’s no way to falsify this theory, yet I assume you’re assigning it a negligible probability, likely .0001 or even less. To remain consistent with your position on religion, you must either accept that there’s a significant chance you’re trapped in some kind of evil simulation run by shadowy G-Men, or accept that the impossibility of counterevidence isn’t actually a good argument in favor of something. (Which still wouldn’t mean that you’d have to turn atheist—as you’ve mentioned, there is some evidence for religion, even if the rest of us think it’s really terrible evidence.)
First of all, in an intellectual debate, you don’t go around telling someone that they’re cornered. That ought to raise all sorts of red flags as to your logic, but in fact I’m perfectly happy to accept both of those propositions.
I would quite agree that there’s a chance worth considering that I’m the center of a government conspiracy. (It’s got a name.) I don’t have any idea how that chance actually ranks in my mind, and any figure I did give would be a Potemkin (a complete guess). But it’s entirely possible.
the impossibility of counterevidence isn’t actually a good argument in favor of something
The impossibility (according to some) of counterevidence against atheism (i.e. evidence for God) does not provide any evidence whatsoever in favor of atheism. Even though I keep being told that absence of evidence is evidence of absence implies absence of evidence.
The impossibility of counterevidence against God (evidence for atheism) does not mean that God exists. Granted. I’ve never tried to use that argument, even if some theists do.
However, the fact that it isn’t an argument in favor of religion surely doesn’t mean that it’s an argument in favor of atheism. Jeez.
And thank you for admitting that there is at least a tiny bit of evidence for religion. It would be really silly not to.
First of all, in an intellectual debate, you don’t go around telling someone that they’re cornered.
No, my understanding is that it’s a fairly typical tactic.
I would quite agree that there’s a chance worth considering that I’m the center of a government conspiracy. (It’s got a name.) I don’t have any idea how that chance actually ranks in my mind, and any figure I did give would be a Potemkin (a complete guess). But it’s entirely possible.
Yes, I was indeed thinking of the Truman Show Delusion. My point, though, is that it shouldn’t be any less credible than religion to you, meaning that you should be acting on that theory to a similar degree to religion.
The impossibility (according to some) of counterevidence against atheism (i.e. evidence for God) does not provide any evidence whatsoever in favor of atheism
Counterevidence for atheism is not impossible at all, as people have been saying up and down the thread. If the skies were to open up, and angels were to pour down out of the breach as the voice of God boomed over the landscape… that would most certainly be counterevidence for atheism. (Not conclusive counterevidence, mind. I might be insane, or it could be the work of hyperintelligent alien teenagers. But it would be more than enough evidence for me to convert.) And, in less dramatic terms, a simple well-designed and peer-reviewed study demonstrating the efficacy of prayer would be extremely helpful. There are even those miracles you’ve been talking about, although (again) most of us consider it poor evidence.
No, my understanding is that it’s a fairly typical tactic.
Sure, cornering your opponent in her arguments is a very common tactic, but it seems a bit silly to go telling me you’ve succeeded in it. In any case, I sure don’t feel cornered. :)
you should be acting on the theory to a similar degree as you act on religion.
See, I’ve got evidence for religion. What’s my evidence for the Truman Show?
Counterevidence for atheism is not impossible
Not conclusive counterevidence, mind.
most of us consider it poor evidence.
QED. Counterevidence, yes, but not any conclusive or good or rational counterevidence.
If you actually believed in the Truman Show hypothesis? Confirmation bias would provide a whole pile of evidence. Every time someone you know stutters, or someone stares at you from across the lunchroom, or the whole room goes quiet as you enter. Whenever there’s been a car following you for more than three blocks, especially if it’s a black SUV. Certain small things will happen by chance to support any theory. We’d argue that the same bias is likely responsible for most reports of miracles, by the way.
QED. Counterevidence, yes, but not any conclusive or good or rational counterevidence.
By “conclusive,” I mean “assigning it probability of 1, not rounded or anything, just 1, there must be a god, case closed.” But, rationalists don’t believe that about any evidence, about anything. And we shouldn’t, as you’ve been saying all this time about probability 0. The evidence I posited would, on the other hand, be extremely good rational evidence and I don’t want to diminish that at all.
Downvoted for paraphrasing Intrism in a way that does not reflect what he actually said in your third quote.
See, I’ve got evidence for religion. What’s my evidence for the Truman Show?
What’s your evidence for religion? It’s one thing for you to claim that that your own estimate for the truth of your religion is high based on supposedly strong evidence that you refuse to share. It’s quite another to expect anyone else to move their estimate.
What’s your evidence for religion? It’s one thing for you to claim that that your own estimate for the truth of your religion is high based on supposedly strong evidence that you refuse to share. It’s quite another to expect anyone else to move their estimate.
I’m not expecting to convince you to move your estimate using my evidence—some of it is personal, and the rest would likely be rejected out of hand. No, that’s just why I believe in religion rather than the Truman Show.
As for you, I think it’s totally fine for you to rank the Truman Show as high as religion, given your rejection of practically all the evidence in favor of either. As long as you keep a real possibility for both.
I hope you do not feel bad because of some overzealous atheists here ganging up on you. This specific faucet of epistemic rationality is only a small part of the site. And kudos for being instrumentally rational and not letting yourself being bullied into discussing your specific evidence. This would certainly not be useful to anyone. Most people are good at compartmentalizing, and we don’t have to be uniformly rational to benefit from bits and pieces here and there.
No, don’t worry about my feelings. I wouldn’t have “come out” immediately, or probably posted anything in the first place, if I wasn’t sure I could survive it. I mean, yes, of course I feel like everyone’s ganging up on me, but I could hardly expect them to do otherwise given the way I’ve been acting.
Thanks...I’m trying to be rational, I certainly am. And I’m delighted to find other people who are willing to think this way. You could never have this discussion where I’m from, except with someone who either is on this site or ought to be.
Well, as I linked previously, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. If God were a proposition which did not have low probability in the absence of evidence, then it would be unique in that respect.
I’m prepared to argue in favor of the propositions that we do not have evidence favoring God over no God, and that we have no reason to believe that god has uniquely high probability in absence of evidence. Would that satisfy you?
This “in the absence of evidence” theme is popping up all over but doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere new or useful. I’m going to let it be.
And I’m not momentarily interested in a full-blown argument about the nature of the evidence for and against God. I believe there is evidence of God; you believe there is none, which is practically as good as evidence that there is no God. We can talk over each other about that for hours with no one the wiser. I shouldn’t be surprised that any debate about this boils down to the evidence—but the nature of the evidence (remember, we’ve been over this) means that it’s really impossible to firmly establish one side or the other.
And I’m not momentarily interested in a full-blown argument about the nature of the evidence for and against God. I believe there is evidence of God; you believe there is none, which is practically as good as evidence that there is no God. We can talk over each other about that for hours with no one the wiser. I shouldn’t be surprised that any debate about this boils down to the evidence—but the nature of the evidence (remember, we’ve been over this) means that it’s really impossible to firmly establish one side or the other.
Why is that?
If god were really communicating and otherwise acting upon people, as you suggest, there’s no reason to suppose this should be indistinguishable from brain glitches, misunderstandings, and exaggerations. I think that the world looks much more like we should anticipate if these things are going on in the absence of any real god than we should expect it to look like if there were a real god. You could ask why I think that. A difference of anticipation is a meaningful disagreement to follow up on.
You might want to check out this post. The idea that we can’t acquire evidence that would promote the probability of religious claims is certainly not one we can take for granted.
But cultures have not been known to adopt Christianity, Islam, or any other particular religion which has been developed elsewhere, independent of contact with carriers of that religion.
if you define “science” as carrying on in the tradition of Bacon, sure. But that didn’t stop the greeks from making the antikythera device long before he existed. Astronomy has been independently discovered by druids, mesoamerican cultures, the far east, and countless others where “independent” is more vague. If you consider “science” as a process of invention as well as research and discovery there are also tons of examples in eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology_in_China#Magnetism_and_metallurgy and so on of inventions that were achieved in vastly different places seemingly independently at different times. Moveable type is still movable type whether invented in China or by Gutenberg. On the other hand, Loki is not Coyote.
A lot of actual pagans may disagree with you. True, there are some differences between the cults involved, there are also differences between Babylonian and Chinese mathematics. (As for your example of Greek science, much of it is on the same causal path that led to Bacon.)
Have most atheists honestly put thought into what if there actually was a God?
Many people here are grew up in religious settings. Eliezer for example comes from an Orthodox Jewish family. So yes, a fair number have given thought to this.
people honestly believe they’ve been personally contacted by God.
Curiously many different people believe that they’ve been contacted by God, but they disagree radically on what this contact means. Moreover, when they claim to have been contacted by God but have something that doesn’t fit a standard paradigm, or when they claim to have been contacted by something other than God, we frequently diagnose them as schizophrenic. What’s the simplest explanation for what is going on here?
Simple explanations are good, but not necessarily correct. It’s awfully easy to say they’re all nutcases, but it’s still easy and a bit more fair to say that they’re mostly nutcases but maybe some of them are correct. Maybe. I think it’s best to give it a chance at least.
It’s awfully easy to say they’re all nutcases, but it’s still easy and a bit more fair to say that they’re mostly nutcases but maybe some of them are correct. Maybe. I think it’s best to give it a chance at least.
Openmindedness in these respects has always seemed to me highly selective—how openminded are you to the concept that most thunderbolts may be mere electromagnetic phenomena but maybe some thunderbolts are thrown down by Thor? Do you give that possibility a chance? Should we?
Or is it only the words that current society treats seriously e.g. “God” and “Jesus”, that we should keep an open mind about, and not the names that past societies treated seriously?
how openminded are you to the concept that most thunderbolts may be mere electromagnetic phenomena but maybe some thunderbolts are thrown down by Thor? Do you give that possibility a chance? Should we?
If billions of people think so, then yes, we should.
It’s not just that our society treats Jesus seriously, it’s that millions of people have overwhelming personal evidence of Him. And most of them are not rationalists, but they’re not mentally insane either.
I mean, there are over a billion people in the world who identify as believers of Islam, many of whom report personal experiences which they consider overwhelming evidence that there is no God but Allah, and Mahomet is His Prophet. But I don’t accept that there is no God but Allah. (And, I’m guessing, neither do you, so it seems likely that we agree that the beliefs of a billion people at least sometimes not sufficient evidence to compel confidence in an assertion.)
Going the other way, there was a time when only a million people reported personal evidence of Jesus Christ as Lord. There was a time when only a hundred thousand people had. There was a time when only a thousand people had. Etc. And yet, if Jesus Christ really is Lord, a rationalist wants to believe that even in 13 A.D., when very few people claim to. And if he is not, a rationalist wants to believe that even in 2013 A.D. when billions of people claim to.
I conclude that the number of people just isn’t that relevant.
I think that if in 13 A.D. you had asked a rationalist whether some random Nazarene kid was our savior, “almost certainly not” would have been the correct response given the evidence. But twenty years later, after a whole lot of strong evidence came out, that rationalist would have adjusted his probabilities significantly. The number of people who were brought up in something doesn’t matter, but given that there are millions if not billions of personal witnesses, I think God is a proposition to which we ought to give a fair chance.
given that there are millions if not billions of personal witnesses, I think God is a proposition to which we ought to give a fair chance.
And by “God” here you specifically mean God as presented in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints’ traditional understanding of the Book of Mormon, and our collective traditional understandings of the New Testament insofar as they don’t contradict each other or that understanding of the Book of Mormon, and our traditional understandings of the Old Testament insofar as they don’t contradict each other or any of the above.
Yes?
But you don’t mean God as presented in, for example, the Sufis’ traditional understanding of the Koran, and our collective traditional understandings of the New Testament insofar as they don’t contradict each other or that understanding of the Koran, and our traditional understandings of the Old Testament insofar as they don’t contradict each other or any of the above.
Yes?
Is this because there are insufficient numbers of personal witnesses to the latter to justify such a fair chance?
I mean deity or God in general. Because although they don’t agree on the details, these billions of people agree that there is some sort of conscious higher Power. And they don’t have to contradict each other in that.
Well… hm. Is there sufficient evidence, on your account, to conclude (or at least take very seriously the hypothesis) that Thomas Monson communicates directly with a conscious higher Power in a way that you do not? Is there sufficient evidence, on your account, to conclude (or at least take very seriously the hypothesis) that Sun Myung Moon communicated directly with a conscious higher Power in a way that you do not?
I think it’s too difficult to take this reasoning into specific cases. That is, with the general reasoning I’ve been talking about, I’m going to conclude that I think it’s best to take the general possibility of deity seriously.
Given that, and given my upbringing and personal experience and everything else, I think that it’s best to take Thomas Monson very seriously. I hardly know anything about Sun Myung Moon so I can’t say anything about him.
I can’t possibly ask you to do that second part, but I think that the possibility of deity in general is a cause I will fight for.
(edit: clarified)
So on your account, if I’ve understood it, I have sufficient evidence to justify a high confidence in a conscious higher Power consistent with the accounts of all believers in Abrahamic religions, though not necessarily identical to that described in any of those accounts, and the fact that I lack such confidence is merely because I haven’t properly evaluated the evidence available to me. Yes?
Just to avoid confusion, I’m going to label that evidence—the evidence I have access to on this account—E1.
Going further: on your account, you have more evidence than E1, given your upbringing and personal experience and everything else, and your evidence (which I’ll label E2) is sufficient to further justify a high confidence in additional claims, such as Thomas Monson’s exceptional ability to communicate with that Power. Yes?
And since you lack personal experiences relating to Sun Myung Moon that justify a high confidence in similar claims about him, you lack that confidence, but you don’t rule it out either… someone else might have evidence E3 that justifies a high confidence in Sun Myung Moon’s exceptional ability to communicate with that Power, and you don’t claim otherwise, you simply don’t know one way or the other. . Yes?
OK, so far so good.
Now, moving forward, it’s worth remembering that personal experience of an event V is not our only, or even our primary, source of evidence with which to calculate our confidence in V. As I said early on in our exchange, there are many events I’m confident occurred which I’ve never experienced observing, and some events which I’ve experienced observing which I’m confident never occurred, and I expect this is true of most people.
So, how is that possible? Well, for example, because other people’s accounts of an event are evidence that the event occurred, as you suggest with your emphasis on the mystical experiences of millions (or billions) of people as part of E1. Not necessarily compelling evidence, because people do sometimes give accounts of events that didn’t occur, but evidence worth evaluating. Yes?
Of course, not all such accounts are equally useful as evidence. You probably don’t know Thomas Monson personally, but you still take seriously the proposition that he is a Prophet of YHWH, primarily on the basis of the accounts of a relatively small number of people whom you trust (due to E2) to be sufficiently reliable evaluators of evidence. Yes?
(A digression on terminology: around here, we use “rational” as a shorthand which entails reliably evaluating evidence, so we might semi-equivalently say that you trust this group to be rational. I’m avoiding that jargon in this discussion because you’re new to the community and “rational” in the broader world has lots of other connotations that might prove distracting. OTOH, “sufficiently reliable evaluator of evidence” is really tedious to type over and over, which is why we don’t usually say that, so I’m going to adopt “SREoE” as shorthand for it here.)
Moving on: you don’t know Sun Myung Moon personally, but you don’t take seriously the proposition that he is a Prophet of the higher Power, despite the similar accounts of a relatively small number of people, presumably because you don’t trust them to be SREoEs. Yes?
And similarly, you don’t expect me to take seriously the proposition that Thomas Monson is a Prophet of the higher Power, not only because I lack access to E2, but also because you don’t expect me to trust you as a SREoE. If I did (for whatever reason, justified or not) trust you to be a SREoE, I would take that proposition seriously. Yes?
Pausing here to make sure I haven’t gone off the rails.
So, summarizing your account as I understand it and continuing from there:
Consider five propositions G1-G5 roughly articulable as follows: G1: “there exists a conscious higher Power consistent with the accounts A1 of all believers in Abrahamic religions, though not necessarily identical to that described in any particular account in A1” G2: “there exists a conscious higher Power consistent with the accounts A2 of Thomas Monson, where A2 is a subset of A1; any account Antm which is logically inconsistent with A2 is false.” G3: “there exists a conscious higher Power consistent with the accounts A3 of Sun Myung Moon, where A3 may or may not be a subset of A1; any account Ansmm which is logically inconsistent with A3 is false.” G4: “there exists a conscious higher Power consistent with the accounts A4 of all believers in any existing religion, Abrahamic or otherwise, though not necessarily identical to that described in any particular account in A4″ G5: “there exists a conscious higher Power consistent with the accounts A5 of some particular religious tradition R, where A5 is logically inconsistent with A1 and A2.”
2: On your account there exists evidence, E1, such that a SREoE would, upon evaluating E1, arrive at high confidence in G1. Further, I have access to E1, so if I were an SREoE I would be confident in G1, and if I lack confidence in G1 I am not an SREoE.
3: On your account there exists evidence E2 that similarly justifies high confidence in G2, and you have access to E2, though I lack such access.
4: If there are two agents X and Y, such that X has confidence that Y is an SREoE and that Y has arrived at high confidence of a proposition based on some evidence, X should also have high confidence in that proposition even without access to that evidence.
Yes? (I’m not trying to pull a fast one here; if the above is significantly mis-stating any of what you meant to agree to, pull the brake cord now.)
And you approached this community seeking evidence that we were SREoEs—specifically, seeking evidence that we had engaged with E1 in a sufficiently open-minded way, which an SREoE would—and you have concluded that no, we haven’t, and we aren’t. Yes?
And because of that conclusion, you don’t reduce your confidence in G1 based on our interactions, because the fact that we haven’t concluded G1 from E1 is not compelling evidence that #2 above is false, which it would be if we were SREoEs. Yes?
So, given all of that, and accepting for the sake of argument that I wish to become an SREoEs, how would you recommend I proceed?
And is that procedure one you would endorse following if, instead of engaging with you, I were instead engaging with someone who claimed (2b) “There exists evidence, E5, such that a SREoE would, upon evaluating E5, arrive at high confidence in G5. Further, Dave has access to E5, so if Dave were an SREoE he would be confident in G5, and if Dave lacks confidence in G5 he is not an SREoE.”?
I don’t think I can claim that your rejection of E1 means you are not a SREoE—this community is by far more SR in EE, the way we’re talking about it at least, than those who believe G1. I’m not going to go around calling anyone irrational as long as their conclusions do come from a proper evaluation of the evidence.
I can’t really claim E2 is that much stronger than E1—many people have access to E2 but don’t believe G2.
What I’m trying to figure out is if this community thinks that any SREoE must necessarily reject G1 (based largely on the inconsistency of E1). I’m not claiming that a SREoE must accept G1 upon being exposed to E1.
But assuming I did claim that I was a SREoE and you all weren’t...no, I don’t know. Because being a SREoE equates almost completely in my mind with being a rationalist in the ideal sense that this community strives for. That doesn’t mean everyone here is a SREoE, but most of them appear to be doing their best.
I’m curious, though, where else could this logic lead?
What I’m trying to figure out is if this community thinks that any SREoE must necessarily reject G1 (based largely on the inconsistency of E1). I’m not claiming that a SREoE must accept G1 upon being exposed to E1.
I get that you’re trying to be polite and all, and that’s nice of you.
Politeness is important, and the social constraints of politeness are a big reason I steered this discussion away from emotionally loaded terms like “rational,” “irrational,” “God,” “faith,” etc.in the first place; it’s a lot easier to discuss what confidence a SREoE resides in G1 given E1 without getting offended or apologetic or defensive than to discuss whether belief in God is rational or irrational, because the latter formulation carries so much additional cultural and psychological weight.
But politeness aside, I don’t see how what you’re saying can possibly be the case given what you’ve already agreed to. If E1 entails high confidence in G1, then an SREoE given E1 concludes that G1 is much more likely than NOT(G1), and an agent that does not conclude this is not an SREoE. That’s just what it means for evidence to entail a given level of confidence in a conclusion, be it a low level or a high level.
Which means that if you’re right that I have evidence that entails reasonably high confidence in the existence of God, then my vanishingly low confidence in the existence of God means I’m not being rational on the subject. Maybe that’s rude to say, but rude or not that’s just what it means for me to have evidence that entails reasonably high confidence in the existence of God.
And I get that you’re looking for the same kind of politeness in return… that we can believe or not believe whatever we want, but as long as we don’t insist it’s irrational to conclude from available evidence that God exists, we can all get along.
And in general, we’re willing to be polite in that way… most of us have stuff in our lives we don’t choose to be SREoEs about, and going around harassing each other about it is a silly way to spend our time. There are theists of various stripes on LW, but we don’t spend much time arguing about it.
But if you insist on framing the discussion in terms of epistemic rationality then, again, politeness aside, that doesn’t really work. If E1 entails low confidence in G1, then an SREoE given E1 concludes that G1 is much less likely than NOT(G1), and an agent that does not conclude this is not an SREoE. That’s just what it means for evidence to entail a given level of confidence in a conclusion, be it a low level or a high level.
Or, expressed in the more weighted way: either we have shared evidence that entails high confidence in the existence of God and I’m not evaluating that evidence as reliably as you are, or we have shared evidence that entails low confidence in the existence of God and you’re not evaluating that evidence as reliably as I am.
All the politeness in the world doesn’t change that.
All of that said, there’s no obligation here to be an SREoE in any particular domain, which is why I started this whole conversation by talking about pragmatic reasons to continue practicing your religion in the first place. If you insist on placing the discussion in the sphere of epistemic rationality, I don’t see how you avoid the conclusion, but there’s no obligation to do that.
I’m not trying to be nice. Do not interpret the fact that I’m won’t admit to attacking you to mean that I’m trying to be nice—perhaps I’m really not attacking you. I honestly believe that your position is fully self-justified, and I respect it.
Neither am I asking for politeness. I didn’t get come on here expecting you to be nice, only rational and reasonable, which most people have been. I’d be happy for you all to tell me that it’s irrational to conclude that God exists. One of my biggest questions was whether you all thought this was the case. Some of you don’t, but you all did, and undiplomatically told me so, I wouldn’t be offended. I might come away disappointed that this community wasn’t as open-minded as I had hoped (no accusations intended), but I wouldn’t be offended. If you think it’s the case, please tell me so, and I will respectfully disagree.
If E1 entails high confidence in G1, then an SREoE given E1 concludes that G1 is much more likely than NOT(G1), and an agent that does not conclude this is not an SREoE. That’s just what it means for evidence to entail a given level of confidence in a conclusion, be it a low level or a high level.
I think the biggest problem here is that, as I wrote in the other post, I don’t believe there’s only one conclusion a rational person (SREoE) can draw from the evidence. I don’t believe that there is only one correct “methodology,” and so I don’t believe that evidence necessarily entails one thing or the other.
I don’t believe that there is only one correct “methodology,” and so I don’t believe that evidence necessarily entails one thing or the other.
I see. I apologize; I missed this the first time you said it.
So, on your view, what does it mean to evaluate evidence reliably, if not that sufficiently reliable evaluations of given evidence will converge on the same confidence in given propositions? What does it mean for a methodology to be correct, if not that it leads a system that implements it to a given confidence in given propositions given evidence?
Or, to put it differently… well, let’s back up a step. Why should anyone care about evaluating evidence reliably? Why not evaluate it unreliably instead, or not bother evaluating it at all?
Yeah, I don’t really know. It just depends on your paradigm—according to rationalists like yourself, it seems, a cold rational analysis is most “correct” and reliable. For some others, the process involves fasting and prayer. I’m not going to say either is infallible. Certainly logic is a wonderful thing which has its place in our lives. But taken too far it’s not always helpful or accurate, especially in us subjective humans.
Well, I certainly agree about fallibility. Humans don’t have access to infallible epistemologies.
That said, if fasting and prayer reliably gets me the most useful confidence levels in propositions for achieving my goals, then I should engage in fasting and prayer because that’s part of the most reliable process for evaluating evidence.
If it doesn’t, then that’s not a reason for me to engage in fasting and prayer, though I may choose to do so for other reasons.
Either one of those things is true, or the other is. And I may not know enough about the world to decide with confidence which it is (though I sure do seem to), but even if I don’t my ignorance doesn’t somehow make it the case that they are both true.
These words seem subjective or at the very least unmeasurable. There is no way of determining absolutely whether something is “reliable” or “useful” without ridiculously technical definitions, which ruin the point anyway.
(sorry if I don’t respond right away. I’ve been retributively downvoted to −15 and so LW is giving me a hassle about commenting. The forum programming meant well...)
sorry if I don’t respond right away. I’ve been [...] downvoted to −15
That’s OK. If we no longer have any way of agreeing on whether propositions are useful, reliable, or true, or agreeing on what it means for propositions to be any of these things, then I don’t anticipate the discussion going anywhere from here that’s worth my time. We can let it drop here.
(sorry if I don’t respond right away. I’ve been retributively downvoted to −15 and so LW is giving me a hassle about commenting. The forum programming meant well...)
Working as intended. Evangelism of terrible thinking is not welcome here. For most intents and purposes you are a troll. It’s time for you to go and time for me to start downvoting anyone who feeds you. Farewell Ibidem (if you the user behind the handle ever happen to gain an actual sincere interest in rationality I recommend creating a new account and making a fresh start.)
I don’t believe there’s only one conclusion a rational person (SREoE) can draw from the evidence.
There is one direction a SREoE updates on evidence—towards the evidence.
If I have strong reasons (high prior probability) of thinking that a coin has heads on both sides, I’m making a mistake by becoming more confident after I flip the coin and it comes up tails.
Likewise, if I have strong reasons of thinking that another coin is biased towards heads, so it turns up heads 60% instead of 50%, I’m committing the same error if I become more confident after seeing the coinflip turn up tails.
So learning E1 should make any SREoE become more confident of G1 unless that person’s priors are already very heavily weighed towards G1. In the real world, there just aren’t that many SREoE’s with high priors on G1 before being exposed to E1.
In the real world, there just aren’t that many SREoE’s with high priors on G1 before being exposed to E1.
First of all, note that you effectively just said that nearly all religious people are irrational. I won’t hold it against you, just realize that that’s the position you’re expressing.
If I have strong reasons (high prior probability) of thinking that a coin has heads on both sides, I’m making a mistake by becoming more confident after I flip the coin and it comes up tails.
Obviously. If there is clear evidence against your beliefs, you should decrease your confidence in your beliefs. But the problem is that this situation is not so simple as heads and tails.
What I’m trying to say is that two SREoEs can properly examine E1 and come up with different conclusions. I’m sorry if I agreed too fully to Dave’s first set of propositions—the devil’s in the details, as we irrational people who believe in a Devil say sometimes.
So on your account, if I’ve understood it, I have sufficient evidence to justify a high confidence in a conscious higher Power consistent with the accounts of all believers in Abrahamic religions, though not necessarily identical to that described in any of those accounts, and the fact that I lack such confidence is merely because I haven’t properly evaluated the evidence available to me.
Yes?
The key is “if I haven’t properly evaluated the evidence.” I took “properly” to mean “in a certain way,” while Dave intended it as “in the one correct way.” When this became clear, I tried to clarify my position.
I’m going to reiterate it again, because you don’t seem to be getting it: I believe that it’s possible for two equally R Es oE to evaluate the same evidence and come up with different conclusions. Thus exposure to E1 does not necessarily entail any confidence-shifting at all, even in a SREoE.
First of all, note that you effectively just said that nearly all religious people are irrational. I won’t hold it against you, just realize that that’s the position you’re expressing.
I’ll pop in here and note that the general point of view here is that everyone is irrational, and even the best of us frequently err. That’s why we tend to use the term “aspiring rationalist,” since nobody has reached the point of being able to claim to be an ideal rationalist.
The highest standard we can realistically hold people to is to make a genuine effort to be rational, to the best of their abilities, using the information available to them.
That’s true. It’s not actually “rational” vs. “irrational,” even if that would make the situation so much easier to understand.
I hope you’d agree, though, that there are many people in this world (think: evangelicals) who don’t make any sort of effort to be rational in the sense you mean it, and even some who honestly think logical inference is a tool of the devil. How sad...but probably no need to worry about them in this thread.
I believe that it’s possible for two [SREoEs] to evaluate the same evidence and come up with different conclusions.
That is possible if and only if the two SREoEs started with different beliefs (priors) before receiving the same evidence. Aumann’s Agreement Theorem says that SREoEs who start with the same beliefs and see the same evidence cannot disagree without doing something wrong.
In the real world, there just aren’t that many SREoE’s with high priors on G1 before being exposed to E1.
I didn’t write this clearly. I meant that most human SREoEs who haven’t been exposed to E1 don’t assign high probability to G1. Theoretically, an SREoE who hadn’t been exposed to E1 could have such high confidence in G1 that expose to E1 should reduce confidence in G1. In practice, I’m not sure any adult human hasn’t been exposed to E1 already, and I’m doubtful that most children are SREoEs—thus, I’m not sure whether the set (human&non-E1&SREoE) has any elements in existence.
First of all, note that you effectively just said that nearly all religious people are irrational. I won’t hold it against you, just realize that that’s the position you’re expressing.
I’m saying that people who assign high probability to G1 after exposure to E1 either (a) had very different priors about G1 than I before exposure to E1, or (b) are not SREoEs. Alternatively, I either (a) am not an SREoE, or (b) have not been exposed to the evidence we have referred to as E1.
To put it slightly differently, I can identify evidence that would make me increase the probability I assign to G1. Can you identify evidence that would make you decrease the probability you assign G1?
Aumann’s Agreement Theorem says that SREoEs who start with the same beliefs and see the same evidence cannot disagree without doing something wrong.
Perhaps, then, I don’t fully agree with Aumann’s Agreement Theorem. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that means I’m not a “genuine” Bayesian. I wouldn’t have a problem with being unable to fully adopt a single method of thinking about the universe.
In practice, I’m not sure any adult human hasn’t been exposed to E1 already, and I’m doubtful that most children are SREoEs
Is it fair to say that most current SREoEs became that way during a sort of rationalist awakening? (I know it’s not as simple as being a SREoE or not, and so this process actually takes years. but let’s pretend for a moment.) Imagine a child who grows up being fed very high priors about G1. This child (not a SREoE) is exposed to E1 and has a high confidence in G1. When he (/she) grows up and eventually becomes a SREoE, he first of all consciously throws out all his priors (rebellion against parents), then re-evaluates E1 (re-exposure?) and decides that in fact it entails ~G1.
Whether or not this describes you, does it make sense?
I’m saying that people who assign high probability to G1 after exposure to E1 either (a) had very different priors about G1 than I before exposure to E1, or (b) are not SREoEs. Alternatively, I either (a) am not an SREoE, or (b) have not been exposed to the evidence we have referred to as E1.
How about this: since both of you have been exposed to the same evidence and don’t agree, then either (a) you had very different priors (which is likely), or (b) you evaluate evidence differently. I’m going to avoid saying either of you is “better” or “more rational” at evaluating evidence.
Perhaps, then, I don’t fully agree with Aumann’s Agreement Theorem.
Whoa there. Aumann’s agreement theorem is a theorem. It is true, full stop. Whatever that term “SREoE” means (I keep going up and keep not seeing an explanation), either it doesn’t map onto the hypotheses of Aumann’s agreement theorem or you are attempting to disagree with a mathematical fact.
I believe it was “Sufficiently reasonable evaluator of evidence”—which I was using roughly equivalently to Bayesian empiricist. I’m beginning to doubt that is what ibidem means by it.
TheOtherDave defined it way back in the thread to try to taboo “rationalist,” since that word has such a multitude of denotations and connotations (including the LW intended meanings). Edit: terminology mostly defined here and here.
Sufficiently reliable, but otherwise yes. That said, we’ve since established that ibidem and I don’t have a shared understanding of “reliable” or “evidence,” either, so I’d have to call it a failed/incomplete attempt at tabooing.
For it to be a mathematical fact, it needs a mathematical proof. Go ahead...!
Like it or not, rationality is not mathematics—it is full of estimations, assumptions, objective decisions, and wishful thinking. Thus, a “theorem” in evidence evaluation is not a mathematical theorem, obtained using unambiguous formal logic.
If what you mean to say is that Aumann’s Agreement “Theorem” is a fundamental building block of your particular flavor of rational thinking, then what this means is simply that I don’t fully subscribe to your particular flavor of rational thinking. Nothing (mathematics nearly excepted) is “true, full stop.” Remember? 1 is not a probability. That one’s even more “true, full stop” than Aumann’s ideas about rational disagreement.
When did I claim that rationality was mathematics?
Right here:
you are attempting to disagree with a mathematical fact.
it needs a mathematical proof.
Here you go.
Maybe not “rationality” exactly but Aumann’s work, whatever it is you call what we’re doing here. Rational decision-making.
So yes, Aumann’s theorem can be proven using a certain system of formalization, taking a certain set of definitions and assumptions. What I’m saying is not that I disagree with the derivation I gave, but that I don’t fully agree with its premises.
If what you mean to say is that Aumann’s Agreement “Theorem” is a fundamental building block of your particular flavor of rational thinking
When did I say this?
You didn’t yet, I didn’t say you did. I’m guessing that that’s what you actually mean though, because very, very few things if any are “true, full stop.” Something like this theorem can be fully true according to Bayesian statistics or some other system of thought, full stop. If this is the case, then in means I don’t fully accept that system of thought. Is disagreement not allowed?
Maybe not “rationality” exactly but Aumann’s work, whatever it is you call what we’re doing here. Rational decision-making.
How does what I said there mean “rationality is mathematics”? All I’m saying is that Aumann’s agreement theorem is mathematics, and if you’re attempting to disagree with it, then you’re attempting to disagree with mathematics.
What I’m saying is not that I disagree with the derivation I gave, but that I don’t fully agree with its premises.
I agree that this is what you should’ve said, but that isn’t what you said. Disagreeing with an implication “if P, then Q” doesn’t mean disagreeing with P.
I’m guessing that that’s what you actually mean though
No, it’s not. I just mean that mathematical facts are mathematical facts and questioning their relevance to real life is not the same as questioning their truth.
Now this just depends on what we mean by “disagree.” Of course I can’t dispute a formal logical derivation. The math, of course, is sound.
Disagreeing with an implication “if P, then Q” doesn’t mean disagreeing with P.
All I disagree with X, which means either that I don’t agree that Q implies X, or I don’t accept P.
I’m not questioning mathematical truth. All I’m questioning is what TimS said.
But if we agree it was just a misunderstanding, can we move on? Or not. This also doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, especially if we’ve decided we fundamentally disagree. (Which in and of itself is not grounds for a downvote, may I remind you all.)
I didn’t downvote you because we disagree, I downvoted you because you conflated disagreeing with the applicability of a mathematical fact to a situation with disagreeing with a mathematical fact. Previously I downvoted you because you tried to argue against two positions I never claimed to hold.
Glad we’ve got that cleared up, then. I wasn’t only talking to you; there are a few people who have taken it upon themselves to make my views feel unwelcome here. Sorry if we’ve had some misunderstandings.
Imagine a child who grows up being fed very high priors about G1. This child (not a SREoE) is exposed to E1 and has a high confidence in G1. When he (/she) grows up and eventually becomes a SREoE, he first of all consciously throws out all his priors (rebellion against parents), then re-evaluates E1 (re-exposure?) and decides that in fact it entails ~G1.
This was not my experience. I was raised in a practicing religious family, and the existence of the holy texts, the well-being of the members of the religious community, and the existence of the religious community were all strong evidence for G1.
I reduced the probability I assigned to G1 because I realized I was underweighing other evidence. Things I would expect to be true if G1 were true turned out to be false. I think I knew those facts were false, but did not consider the implications, and so didn’t adjust my belief in G1.
Once I considered the implications, it became clear to me that E1 was outweighed by the falsification of other implications of G1. Given that balance, I assign G1 very very low probability of being accurate. But I still don’t deny that E1 is evidence of G1. If I didn’t know E1, learning it would adjust upward my belief in G1.
In practice, what people seem to mean is best described technically as changing what sorts of things count as evidence. I changed my beliefs about G1 because I started taking the state of the world and the prevalence of human suffering as a fact about G1
Also, if we are going to talk coherently about priors, we can’t really describe anything humans do as “throwing out their priors.” If we really assign probability zero to any proposition, we have no way of changing our minds again.. And if we assign some other probability, justifying that is weird.
Certainly you can’t simply will your aliefs to change, but it does seem to be a conscious and deliberate effort around here. The belief in G1 usually happens without any knowledge about Bayesian statistics, technical rationality, or priors, so this “awakening” may be the first time a person ever thought of E1 as “evidence” in this technical sense.
the prevalence of human suffering
By the way, I think the best response to this argument is that yes, there is evil, but God allows it because it is better for us in the long run—in other words, if there is an afterlife which is partly defined by our existence here, than our temporary comfort isn’t the only thing to consider. If we all lived in the Garden of Eden, we would never learn or progress. But I don’t want a whole new argument on my hands.
Maybe. I think it’s best to give it a chance at least.
I agree. As soon as a theist can demonstrate some evidence for his deity’s existence… well, I may not convert on the spot, given the plethora of simpler explanations (human hoaxers, super-powered alien teenagers, stuff like that), but at least I’d take his religion much more seriously. This is why I mentioned the prayer studies in my original comment.
Unfortunately, so far, no one managed to provide this level of evidence. For example, a Mormon friend of mine claimed that their Prophet can see the future. I told him that if the Prophet could predict the next 1000 rolls of a fair six-sided die, he could launch a hitherto unprecedented wave of atheist conversions to Mormonism. I know that I personally would probably hop on board (once alien teenagers and whatnot were taken out of the equation somehow). That’s all it would take—roll a die 1000 times, save a million souls in one fell swoop.
I’m still waiting for the Prophet to get back to me...
This one is a classic Sunday School answer. The God I was raised with doesn’t do that sort of thing very often because it defeats the purpose of faith, and knowledge of God is not the one simple requirement for many versions of heaven. It is necessary, they say, to learn to believe on your own. Those who are convinced by a manifestation alone will not remain faithful very long. There’s always another explanation. So yes, you’re right, God (assuming Mormonism is true for a moment, as your friend does) could do that, but it wouldn’t do the world much good in the end.
The God I was raised with doesn’t do that sort of thing very often because it defeats the purpose of faith...
Right, but hopefully this explains one of the reasons why I’m still an atheist. From my perspective, gods are no more real than 18th-level Wizards or Orcs or unicorns; I don’t say this to be insulting, but merely to bring things into perspective. There’s nothing special in my mind that separates a god (of any kind) from any other type of a fictional character, and, so far, theists have not supplied me with any reason to think otherwise.
In general, any god who a priori precludes any possibility of evidence for its existence is a very hard (in fact, nearly impossible) sell for me. If I were magically transported from our current world, where such a god exists, into a parallel world where the god does not exist, how would I tell the difference ? And if I can’t tell the difference, why should I care ?
And if I can’t tell the difference, why should I care ?
Well, if in one world, your disbelief results in you going to hell and being tormented eternally, I think that would be pretty relevant. Although I suppose you could say in that case you can tell the difference, but not until it’s too late.
Simple explanations are good, but not necessarily correct.
Right, simpler explanations start with a higher probability of being correct. And if two explanations for the same data exist, you should assign a high chance to the one that is simpler.
It’s awfully easy to say they’re all nutcases, but it’s still easy and a bit more fair to say that they’re mostly nutcases but maybe some of them are correct. Maybe. I think it’s best to give it a chance at least.
Why should one give “it a chance” and what does that mean? Note also that “nutcase” is an overly strong conclusion. Human reasoning and senses are deeply flawed, and very easy to have problems. That doesn’t require nutcases. For example, I personally get sleep paralysis. When that occurs, I get to encounter all sorts of terrible things, demons, ghosts, aliens, the Borg, and occasionally strange tentacled things that would make Lovecraft’s monsters look tame. None of those things exist- I have a minor sensory problem. The point of using something like schizophrenia is an example is that it is one of the most well-known explanations for the more extreme experiences or belief sets. But the general hypothesis that’s relevant here isn’t “nutcase” so much as “brain had a sensory or reasoning error, as they are wont to do.”
Many people would disagree that atheism is the null hypothesis… and in those circles people honestly believe they’ve been personally contacted by God.
In this case, “there are no gods” is still the null hypothesis, but (from the perspective of those people) it has been falsified by overwhelming evidence. Some kind of overwhelming evidence coming directly from a deity would convince me, as well; but, so far, I haven’t see any (which is why I haven’t mentioned it in my post, above).
Many won’t even accept that there is a possibility, and I think this is just as dangerous as blind faith.
I can’t speak for other atheists, but I personally think that it is entirely possible that certain gods exist. For example, I see no reason why the Trimurti (Brahma/Vishnu/Shiva) could not exist in some way. Of course, the probability of their existence is so vanishingly small that it’s not worth thinking about, but still, it’s possible.
I appreciate that you try to keep the possibility open, but I think it’s kind of silly to say that there is a possibility, just a vanishingly small one. Mathematically, there’s no sense in saying that an infinitesmal is actually any greater than 0 expect for technical reasons—so perhaps you technically believe that the Trimurti could exist, but for all intents and purposes the probability is 0.
A chance of 0 or effectively 0 is not conducive to a rational analysis of the situation. And I don’t think there’s enough evidence out there for a probability that small.
If I really thought about it, I would have to say that there’s quite a good chance that somewhere through all the universes there’s some creature resembling a Keebler elf.
All right, so does this mean that living your life as though Keebler Elves did not exist at all would be irrational ? After all, there’s a small probability that they do exist...
I never called anyone irrational for not believing in elves. I only said that a perfectly rational person would keep the possibility open.
Please stop exaggerating my arguments (and those of, for instance, the Book of Mormon) in order to make them easier to dismiss. It’s an elementary logical fallacy which I’m finding quite a lot of here.
I never called anyone irrational for not believing in elves.
You kinda did:
A chance of 0 or effectively 0 is not conducive to a rational analysis of the situation.
In my own personal assessment, the probability of Keebler Elves existing is about the same as the probability of any major deities existing—which is why I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it. My assessment is not dogmatic, though; if I met a Keebler Elf in person, or saw some reputable photographic evidence of one, or something like that, then I’d adjust the probability upward.
I think it depends on the deity; for example, Thor doesn’t have issues with theodicy, either. But, IMO, at this point we’re pretty much down to discussing which epsilon is smaller; and in practice, the difference is negligible.
What probability do you actually think I should assign? More or less than to me winning the lottery if I buy a ticket? Is winning the lottery an infinitesimally small chance or should I actually consider it?
My point in posting this is simply to ask you—what, in your opinion, are the most legitimate criticisms of your own way of thinking? If you say there aren’t any, I won’t believe you. I sincerely hope that you aren’t afraid to expose your young ones to alternate viewpoints, as some parents and religions are. The optimal situation for you is that you’ve heard intelligent, thoughtful, rational criticism but your position remains strong.
Do you mean to ask this about specifically the religion issue or things in general? Keep in mind, that while policy debates should not be one sided, that’s because reality is complicated and doesn’t make any effort to make things easy for us. But, hypotheses don’t function that way- the correct hypotheses really should look extremely one-sided, because they reflect what a correct description of reality is.
So the best arguments for an incorrect hypothesis are by nature going to be weak. But if I were to put on my contrarian arguer hat for a few minutes and give my own personal response, I’d say that first cause arguments are possibly the strongest argument for some sort of deity.
It’s a good point. Of course, hundreds of years ago, the argument was also pretty one-sided, but that doesn’t mean anyone was correct. I also don’t think that the argument really is one-sided today, I just think that the two sides manage to ignore each other quite thoroughly. I
’m not expecting this site to house a debate on the possibility of God’s existence. Clearly this site is for atheists. I’m asking, is that actually necessary? I suppose you’re saying that yes, it is impossible for rationality and religion to coexist, and that’s why there are very few theistic rationalists. I’m still not convinced of that.
First cause arguments are a strange existential puzzle, depending on the nature of your God. Any thought system that portrays God as a sort of person will run into the same problem of how God came into existence.
I’m asking, is that actually necessary? I suppose you’re saying that yes, it is impossible for rationality and religion to coexist, and that’s why there are very few theistic rationalists.
A rationalist should strive to have a given belief if and only if that belief is true. I want to be a theist if and only if theism is correct.
Note also that getting the right answers to these sorts of questions matters far more than some would estimate. If Jack Chick is correct, then most people here (and most of the world) is going to burn in hell unless they are saved. And this sort of remark applies to a great deal of religious positions (less so for some Muslims, most Jews and some Christians but the basic point is true for a great many faiths). In the other direction, if there isn’t any protective, intervening deity, then we need to take serious threats to humanity’s existence, like epidemics, asteroids, gamma ray bursts, nuclear war, bad AI, nanotech, etc. a lot more seriously, because no one is going to pick up the pieces if we mess up.
To a large extent, most LWians see the basics of these questions as well-established. Theism isn’t the only thing we take that attitude about. You also won’t see here almost any discussion of continental philosophy for example.
So is LW for people who think highly rationally, or for atheists who think highly rationally? Are those necessarily the same? If not, where are the rational theists?
A rationalist should strive to have a given belief if and only if that belief is true. I want to be a theist if and only if theism is correct.
You’re assuming that “no God” is the null hypothesis. Is there a good, rational reason for this? One could just as easily argue that you should be an atheist if and only if it’s clear that atheism is correct. Without any empirical evidence either way, is it more likely that there is some sort of Deity or that there isn’t?
You’re assuming that “no God” is the null hypothesis. Is there a good, rational reason for this? One could just as easily argue that you should be an atheist if and only if it’s clear that atheism is correct. Without any empirical evidence either way, is it more likely that there is some sort of Deity or that there isn’t?
IMO there’s no such thing as a null hypothesis; epistemology doesn’t work like that. The more coherent approach is bayesian inference, where we have a prior distribution and update that distribution on seeing evidence in a particular way.
If there were no empirical evidence either way, I’d lean towards there being an anthropomorphic god (I say this as a descriptive statement about the human prior, not normative).
The trouble is that once you start actually looking at evidence, nearly all anthropomorphic gods get eliminated very quickly, and in fact the whole anthropomorphism thing starts to look really questionable. The universe simply doesn’t look like it’s been touched by intelligence, and where it does, we can see that it was either us, or a stupid natural process that happens to optimize quite strongly (evolution).
So while “some sort of god” was initially quite likely, most particular gods get eliminated, and the remaining gods are just as specific and unlikely as they were at first. So while the “gods” subdistribution is getting smashed, naturalistic occamian induction is not getting smashed nearly as hard, and comes to dominate.
The only gods remaining compatible with the evidence are things like “someone ran all possible computer programs”, which is functionally equivalent to metaphysical “naturalism”, and gods of very specific forms with lots of complexity in the hypothesis that explains why they constructed the world to look exactly natural, and then aren’t intervening yet.
Those complex specific gods only got a tiny slice of the god-exists pie at the beginning and cannot collect more evidence than the corresponding naturalistic explanation (because they predict the same), so they are pretty unlikely.
And then when you go to make predictions, what these gods might do gets sliced up even further such that the only useful predictive framework is the occamian naturalism thing.
There is of course the chance that there exists things “outside” the universe, and the major implication from that is that we might some day be able to break out and take over the metauniverse as well.
So is LW for people who think highly rationally, or for atheists who think highly rationally?
Neither, really. It’s for people who are interested in epistemic and instrumental rationality. There are a number of such folks here who identify as theists, though the majority don’t.
Without any empirical evidence either way, is it more likely that there is some sort of Deity or that there isn’t?
Can you clarify what you mean by “some sort of Deity”? It’s difficult to have a coherent conversation about evidence for X without a shared understanding of what X is.
You’re assuming that “no God” is the null hypothesis. Is there a good, rational reason for this?
In general, it’s not rational to posit that anything exists without evidence. Out of the set of all things that could be posited, most do not exist.
“Evidence” need not be direct observation. If you have a model which has shown good predictive power, which predicts a phenomenon you haven’t observed yet, the model provides evidence for that phenomenon. But in general, people here would agree that if there isn’t any evidence for a proposition, it probably isn’t true.
Because nearly all things that could exist, don’t. When you’re in a state where you have no evidence for an entity’s existence, then odds are that it doesn’t exist.
Suppose that instead of asking about God, we ask “does the planet Hoth, as portrayed in the Star Wars movies, exist?” Absent any evidence that there really is such a planet, the answer is “almost certainly not.”
If we reverse this, and ask “Does the planet Hoth, as portrayed in the Star Wars movies, not exist?” the answer is “almost certainly.”
It doesn’t matter how you specify the question, the informational content of the default answer stays the same.
I don’t think that the Hoth argument applies here, because what we’re looking for is not just some teapot in some random corner of the univers—it’s a God actively involved in our universe. In other words, in God does exist, He’s a very big part of our existence, unlike your teapot or Hoth.
That’s a salient difference if his involvement is providing us with evidence, but not if it isn’t.
Suppose we posit that gravitational attraction is caused by invisible gravity elves, which pull masses towards each other. They’d be inextricably tied up in every part of our existence. But absent any evidence favoring the hypothesis, why should we suspect they’re causing the phenomenon we observe as gravity? In order for it to make sense for us to suspect gravity elves, we need evidence to favor gravity elves over everything else that could be causing gravity.
That’s a salient difference if his involvement is providing us with evidence, but not if it isn’t.
I suppose it’s fair to say that if our universe was created by a clockmaker God who didn’t interfere with our world, then it wouldn’t matter to us whether or not He existed. But since there’s a lot of reason to think that God does interact with us humans (like, transcripts of His conversations with them), then it does matter.
Well, I’m willing to discuss the evidence for and against that proposition. Naturally, I would not be an atheist if I thought the weight of evidence was in favor of an interventionist god existing.
Some of them have certainly convinced people. I’ve convinced a number of people myself, and I’ve known plenty of other people who were convinced by debates with other people (or even more often, by observing debates between other people, since it’s easier to change your mind when you’re not locked in an adversarial debate mindset. This is why it’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking of your debate partner as an opponent.)
A lot of religious debates are not productive, people tend to go into them very attached to their conclusions, but they’re by no means uniformly fruitless.
I like debates a lot, and I’ve very much enjoyed whatever you call this here. But I’m not interested in a full-blown debate here and now, especially since there are about five of you.
We don’t actually have any idea what causes gravity. Your elves may well be Higgs Bosons or something like that. (God Particles...)
So no, we don’t have any evidence that “elves” of some kind cause gravity, or that anything at all does. And so the question is open—we don’t suspect anything, but we don’t particularly suspect nothing either.
It’s rather disingenuous to speak of the Higgs Boson as gravity elves though.
With gravity, we’re not really in a state of no evidence, because as I said before, if you have an effective predictive model, then you have evidence for the things the model predicts. So we have evidence favoring things that could plausibly fit into our existing models over things that couldn’t.
If we’re discussing, for instance, what caused the universe to come into existence, and it turns out that there is a first cause, but it has nothing that could be described as thoughts or intentions, then it doesn’t save the god hypothesis to say that something was there, because what was there doesn’t resemble anything that it’s useful to conceive of as god.
A rationalist should strive to have a given belief if and only if that belief is true. I want to be a theist if and only if theism is correct.
You’re assuming that “no God” is the null hypothesis.
Not really. Bayesian reasoning doesn’t have any notion of a null hypothesis. I could just as well have said “I want to be an atheist if and only if atheism is correct”.
Without any empirical evidence either way, is it more likely that there is some sort of Deity or that there isn’t?
One can talk about the prior probability of a given hypothesis, and that’s a distinct issue which quickly gets very messy. In particular, it is extremely difficult to both a) establish what priors should look like and b) not get confused about whether one is taken for granted very basic evidence about the world around us (e.g. its existence). One argument, popular at least here, is that from an Occam’s razor standpoint, most deity hypotheses are complicated and only appear simple due to psychological and linguistic issues. I’m not sure how much I buy that sort of argument. But again, it is worth emphasizing that one doesn’t need control of the priors except at a very rough level.
It may help if you read more on the difference between Bayesian and frequentist approaches. The general approach of LW is primarily Bayesian, whereas notions like a “null hypothesis” are essentially frequentist.
You’re right that prior probability gets very, very messy. It’s a bit too abstract to actually be helpful to us.
So, then, all we can do is look at the evidence we do have. You’re saying that the argument is one-sided; there is no evidence in favor of theism, at least no good evidence. I agree that there is a lot of bad evidence, and I’m still looking for good evidence. You’ve said you don’t know of any. Thank you. That’s what I wanted to know. In general I don’t think it’s healthy to believe the opposing viewpoint literally has no case.
In general I don’t think it’s healthy to believe the opposing viewpoint literally has no case.
Do you think that young earth creationists have no substantial case? What about 9/11 truthers? Belief in astrology? Belief that cancer is a fungus(no I’m not making that one up)? What about anything you’ll find here?
The problem is that some hypotheses are wrong, and will be wrong. There are always going to be a lot more wrong hypothesis than right ones. And in many of these cases, there are known cognitive biases which lead to the hypothesis type in question. It may help to again think about the difference between policy issues (shouldn’t be one-sided), and factual questions (which once one understands most details, should be).
You’re right that prior probability gets very, very messy. It’s a bit too abstract to actually be helpful to us.
You cannot escape the necessity of dealing with priors, however messy they are.
So, then, all we can do is look at the evidence we do have.
The available evidence supports an infinite number of hypotheses. How do you decide which ones to consider? That is your prior, and however messy it may be, you have to live with it.
My point in posting this is simply to ask you—what, in your opinion, are the most legitimate criticisms of your own way of thinking? If you say there aren’t any, I won’t believe you.
How legitimate does “most legitimate” have to be? If I thought there were any criticisms sufficiently legitimate to seriously reconsider my viewpoints, I would have changed them already. To the extent that my religious beliefs are different than they were, say, fifteen years ago, it’s because I spent a long time seeking out arguments, and if I found any persuasive, I modified my beliefs accordingly. But I reached a point where I stopped finding novel arguments for theism long before I stopped looking, so if there are any arguments for theism that I would find compelling, they see extremely little circulation.
The arguments for “theism” which I see the least reason to reject are ones which don’t account for anything resembling what we conventionally recognize as theism, let alone religion, so I’m not sure those would count according to the criteria you have in mind.
I’d be happy to hear what you’ve got. I can’t just ask you to share all of your life-changing experiences, obviously. Having looked for new arguments and not found any good ones is a great position, I think, because then you can be pretty sure you’re right. I don’t know if I could ever convince myself there are no new arguments, though.
I’m certainly not convinced that there are no new arguments, but if there were any good arguments, I would expect them to have more currency.
If you want to explain what good arguments you think there are, I’d certainly be willing to listen. I don’t want to foist all the work here onto you, but honestly, having you just cover what you think are the good arguments would be simpler than me covering all the arguments I can think of, none of which I actually endorse, without knowing which if any you ascribe to.
I’m sorry, I can’t help you with that. I’m sure that you’ve done much more research on this than I have. I’m looking for decent arguments because I don’t believe all these people who say there aren’t any.
Well, what do you mean by decent? Things I accept as having a significant weight of evidence, or things I can understand how people would see them as convincing, even if I see reasons to reject them myself?
In the latter sense, it makes sense to assume that there must be good arguments, because if there weren’t arguments that people found convincing, then so much of the world would most likely not be convinced. But in the former sense, it doesn’t make sense to assume that there must be good arguments in general, because for practical purposes it means you’d be assuming the conclusion that a god is real, and it makes even less sense to assume that I specifically would have any, because if I did, I wouldn’t disbelieve in the proposition that there is a god.
One of the things that those of us who’re seriously trying to be rational share is that we try to conduct ourselves so that when the weight of evidence favors a particular conclusion, we don’t just say “well, that’s a good point, and I acknowledge it,” we adopt that conclusion. Our positions should represent, not defy, the evidence available to us.
This is largely a problem of the nature of each side’s evidence. MOst of the evidence in favor of God is quickly dismissed by those who think they’re more rational than the rest of humanity, and the biggest piece of evidence I’m being given against God is that there is no evidence for Him (at least none that you guys accept). Absence of evidence is at best a passive, weak argument (which common wisdom would generally reject).
And no, I’m not assuming that God is real, I’m simply assuming that there’s a non-negligible chance of it. Is that too much to ask?
And the same question arises that has been raised several times: how ought I address the evidence from which many Orthodox Jews conclude that Moses was the last true Prophet of YHWH? From which many Muslims conclude that Mahomet was the last true Prophet of YHWH? From which many Christians conclude that Jesus was the last true Prophet of YHWH? From which millions of followers of non-Abrahamic religions conclude that YHWH is not the most important God out there in the first place?
Is it not reasonable to address the evidence from which Mormons conclude that Lehi, or Kumenohni, or Smith, or Monson, were/are Prophets of YHWH the same way, regardless of what tradition I was raised in?
If skepticism about religious claims is not justified, then it seems to follow naturally that skepticism about religious claims is not justified.
It’s important to note that in fact, most Muslims and many Christians (I don’t know Judaism as well) believe that Moses, Mohammed, and Jesus were all true prophets. They differ in a few details, but the general message is the same.
I think it is definitely reasonable to address all of this evidence. One of Thomas Monson’s predecessors expressly stated that he believed God truly did appear to Mohammed.
I never said I was necessarily skeptical of claims by Jews or Muslims. Some of them must have been brain glitches, just as some claims by Mormons probably are too. But I have no problem accepting that Jews, Muslims, and Christians (maybe even atheists) can all receive divine revelation.
As I said before, it’s impractical to try to stretch this logic to argue in favor of any one religion. I’m talking about the existence of God in general.
FWIW, the form of Judaism I was raised in entails the assertion that Jesus Christ was not the Messiah, so is logically incompatible with most forms of Christianity.
That aside, though, I’m content to restrict our discussion to non-sectarian claims; thanks for clarifying that. I’ve tried to formalize this a little more in a different thread; probably best to let this thread drop here.
You’re right, silly me, I honestly should have remembered that. Judaism seems less...open...in that way. But I still think that details of the nature of God aside, the general message of each of these religions, namely “la ilaha ila allah,” is the same. (“There is no God but God,” that is. It’s much more elegant in Arabic.)
This whole mess is certainly in need of some threads being dropped or relocated. Good idea—where is it?
Well, if we’re mistaken in dismissing the evidence theists raise in support of the existence of gods, then of course, with the weight of evidence in favor of it, it’s reasonable to assign a non-negligible probability to it.
The important question here is whether the people dismissing the purported evidence in favor are actually correct.
Suppose we’re discussing the question of how old the earth is. One camp claims the weight of evidence favors the world being about 4.5 billion years old, another claims the weight of evidence favors it being less than 12,000 years old. Each camp has arguments they raise in favor of this point, and the other camp has reasons for rejecting the other camp’s claims.
At least one of these camps must be wrong about the weight of evidence favoring their position. There’s nothing wrong with rejecting purported evidence which doesn’t support what its advocates claim it supports. Scientists do this amongst each other all the time, picking apart whether the evidence of their experiments really supports the authors’ conclusions or not. You have to do that sort of thing effectively to get science done.
As far as I’ve seen, you haven’t yet asked why we reject what you consider to be evidence in favor of an interventionist deity. Why not do that? Either we’re right in rejecting it or we’re not. You can try to find out which.
As long as we’re not sure of the truth (you may be, but our society in general is not), it’s silly to go around saying who’s “correct” in accepting or rejecting a particular piece of evidence.
I believe I understand why you reject all evidence in favor of God. I know a lot of atheists, and I’ve read a lot of rationalism. To simplify: the books are all made up and the modern revelation is all brain glitches. And you believe that according to your rationalist way of thinking, this is the only “correct” conclusion to draw.
I think that you’re fully justified in rejecting this evidence based on the way you look at the situation. I look at things differently, and I accept some of the evidence. And thus we disagree. What I’m wondering now is whether you think it’s necessarily “wrong” to accept such evidence.
As long as we’re not sure of the truth (you may be, but our society in general is not), it’s silly to go around saying who’s “correct” in accepting or rejecting a particular piece of evidence.
Suppose a researcher performs an experiment, and from its results, concludes that lemons cure cancer. Another scientist analyzes their procedure, and points out “Your methodology contains several flaws, and when I perform experiments with those same flaws, I can show with the same level of significance that ham, beeswax, sugarpill, and anything else I’ve tested, also cures cancer. But if I correct those flaws in the methodology, I stop getting results that indicate that any of these things cure cancer.”
Do you continue to accept the experiment as evidence that lemons cure cancer?
I think that you’re fully justified in rejecting this evidence based on the way you look at the situation. I look at things differently, and I accept some of the evidence. And thus we disagree. What I’m wondering now is whether you think it’s necessarily “wrong” to accept such evidence.
It’s hard to get around this without seeming arrogant or condescending, but yes, I do.
It’s a major oversimplification to say that my position is simply “the books are all made up and the modern revelation is all brain glitches,” but I do believe that every standard of evidence I’ve encountered in support of any religion (and I’ve encountered a lot) can be re-applied in other situations where the results are easier to check, and be shown to be ineffective in producing right answers.
If a person does science poorly, then the poorness of their research isn’t a matter of opinion, it’s a fact about how effectively their experiments allow them to draw true conclusions about reality.
Do you continue to accept the experiment as evidence that lemons cure cancer?
No, I don’t, and here’s why: in the context of clinical trials, there are established agreements about right and wrong methodology.
But if I correct those flaws in the methodology, I stop getting results that indicate that any of these things cure cancer.
What does this correspond to in your analogy? What this part does is show that the scientist questioning the methodology is correct, and the original experimenter is wrong. However I don’t see any objective evidence that your “methodology” is better than a methodology that allows for God.
However, if you’re trying to mean that your “correct” methodology is science in general, and that accepting evidence of God is inherently unscientific...
yes, I do.
yes, that’s what you’re saying. OK. That’s largely what I was wondering—in your mind, there’s no possible way to reconcile religion and rationality. Because the only evidence for God was found using a bad methodology, namely, personal experience.
What does this correspond to in your analogy? What this part does is show that the scientist questioning the methodology is correct, and the original experimenter is wrong. However I don’t see any objective evidence that your “methodology” is better than a methodology that allows for God.
However, if you’re trying to mean that your “correct” methodology is science in general, and that accepting evidence of God is inherently unscientific...
If you want to raise specific points of evidence for god, I can explain how the analogy relates, unless you have better evidence which I haven’t heard before.
yes, that’s what you’re saying. OK. That’s largely what I was wondering—in your mind, there’s no possible way to reconcile religion and rationality. Because the only evidence for God was found using a bad methodology, namely, personal experience.
“Personal experience” as a general term does not describe a set of methodologies which are universally bad. In my experience, the set of methodologies which have been used to produce evidence for god are all bad, but it’s not because they’re personal experiences. Besides which, not all proposed evidence for god comes in the form of personal experience. I didn’t spend years studying religion just so I could brush it all away by shoving it all into a single category I could dismiss out of hand, or so that I could argue persuasively that it wasn’t true.
Does the available evidence support the conclusion that the earth is 4.5 billion years old? It either does or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t, then the conclusion probably isn’t true. Does the available evidence support invisible gravity elves? A link between HIV and AIDS? In each of these cases, the answer is simply yes or no.
Sometimes we make mistakes in our judgment of evidence. We don’t expect any human to be perfect at it. We have disagreements here about factual matters, and we acknowledge that this occurs because some or all of us are making mistakes as fallible human beings. But most of us agree on the matter of religion because we think the evidence is clear-cut enough to lead us to the same conclusion.
most of us agree on the matter of religion because we think the evidence is clear-cut enough to lead us to the same conclusion.
Right, OK.
But one thing:
In each of these cases, the answer is simply yes or no.
Science is not nearly so black-and-white. If it were simply a matter of running an experiment with “good methodology,” it would be easy. But I know how academia works. It’s messy.
For instance, does the available evidence support the conclusion that this new thing causes cancer? Yes or no, please. Because the scientists don’t agree, and it’s not a simple matter of figuring out which side is being irrational.
For instance, does the available evidence support the conclusion that this new thing causes cancer? Yes or no, please.
Which new thing?
As I said, humans are fallible, we have disagreements about factual matters. If we were all perfect judges of evidence, then all scientists with access to the same information would agree on how likely it is that some thing causes cancer. Sometimes making judgments of evidence is hard, sometimes it’s easier. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a right answer in each case.
Right. It’s not that there isn’t always a yes or no answer, it’s just that it’s sometimes difficult for us to work out what the correct judgment is.
It’s possible that religion is such a case, but most of us here agree that the state of the evidence there is easier to judge than, for instance, the latest carcinogen suspect.
My point in posting this is simply to ask you—what, in your opinion, are the most legitimate criticisms of your own way of thinking?
That’s a complicated question in general, because “our own way of thinking” is not a unary thing. We spend a lot of time disagreeing with each other, and we talk about a lot of different things.
But if you specifically mean atheism in its “it is best to reason and behave as though there are no gods, because the alternative hypotheses don’t have enough evidence to justify their consideration” formulation, I think the most legitimate objection is that it may turn out to be true that, for some religious traditions—maybe even for most religious traditions—being socially and psychologically invested in that tradition gets me more of what I want than not being invested in it, even if the traditions themselves include epistemically unjustifiable states (such as the belief that an entity exists that both created the universe and prefers that I not eat pork) or false claims about the world (as they most likely do, especially if this turns out to be true for religious traditions that disagree with one another about those claims).
I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s plausible, and if it is true it’s important. (Not least of which because it demonstrates that those of us who are committed to a non-religious tradition need to do more work at improving the pragmatic value of our social structures.)
As for atheism, I don’t mean those that think religion is good for us and we ought to believe it whether or not it’s true. I meant rational thinkers who actually believe God realistically could exist. It’s definitely interesting to think about trying to convince yourself to believe in God, or just act that way, but is it possible to actually believe with a straight face?
Well, you asked for the most legitimate criticisms of rejecting religious faith.
Religious faith is not a rational epistemology; we don’t arrive at faith by analyzing evidence in an unbiased way.
I can make a pragmatic argument for embracing faith anyway, because rational epistemology isn’t the only important thing in the world nor necessarily the most important (although it’s what this community is about).
But if you further constrain the request to seeking legitimate arguments for treating religious faith (either in general, or that of one particular denomination) as a rational epistemology, then I can’t help you. Analyzing observed evidence in an unbiased way simply doesn’t support faith in YHWH as worshiped by 20th-century Jews (which is the religious faith I rejected in my youth), and I know of no legitimate epistemological criticism that would conclude that it does, nor of any other denomination that doesn’t have the same difficulty.
Now, if you want to broaden your search to include not only counterarguments against rejecting religious faith of specific denominations, but also counterarguments against rejecting some more amorphous proto-religious belief like “there exist mega-powerful entities in the universe capable of feats I can barely conceive of” (without any specific further claims like “and the greatest one of them all divided the Red Sea to free our ancestors from slavery in Egypt” or “and the greatest one of them all wrote this book so humanity would know how to behave” or even “and they pay attention to and direct human activity”) then I’d say the most legitimate counterargument is Copernican: I start out with low confidence that my species is the most powerful entity in the universe, and while the lack of observed evidence of such mega-powerful entities necessarily raises that confidence, it might not legitimately raise it enough to accept.
But we’ve now wandered pretty far afield from “my way of thinking,” as I’m perfectly comfortable positing the existence of mega-powerful entities in the universe capable of feats I can barely conceive of.
if you further constrain the request to seeking legitimate arguments for treating religious faith (either in general, or that of one particular denomination) as a rational epistemology, then I can’t help you.
Thank you for answering my question. If I read it right you’re saying “No, it’s not possible to reconcile religion and rationality, or at least I can’t refer you to any sane person who tried.”
If I understand what you’re using “religion” and “rationality” to mean, then I would agree with the first part. (In particular, I understand you to be referring exclusively to epistemic rationality.)
As for the second part, there are no doubt millions of sane people who tried. Hell, I’ve tried it myself. The difficulty is not in finding one, but rather in finding one who provides you with what you’re looking for.
Any of these, really. It takes incredible strength to recognize flaws in your entire way of thinking, but if anyone can do it, the Rationalists ought to be able to.
What I’d really love is a link to someone smart saying “This is why I think the Less Wrong people are all misled, and here are good reasons why.” But that’s probably too much to expect, even around here.
Okay. This may not be the kind of thing you had in mind, but the way I personally think about things:
is probably not focused enough on emotions. I’m not very good at dealing with emotions, either myself or other people’s, and I imagine that someone who was better would have very different thoughts about how to deal with people both on the small scale (e.g. interpersonal relationships) and on the large scale (e.g. politics).
may overestimate the value of individuals (e.g. in their capacity to affect the world) relative to organizations.
The way this community thinks about things:
is biased too strongly in directions that Eliezer finds interesting, which I suppose is somewhat unavoidable but unfortunate in a few respects. For example, Eliezer doesn’t seem to think that computational complexity is relevant to friendly AI and I think this is a strong claim.
is biased towards epistemic rationality when I think it should be more focused on instrumental rationality. This is a corollary of the first bullet point: most of the Sequences are about epistemic rationality.
is biased towards what I’ll call “cool ideas,” e.g. cryonics or the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. I’ve been meaning to write a post about this.
is hampered by a lack of demographic diversity that is probably bad for cognitive diversity (my impression is that LW is overwhelmingly male, white, 18-24 years old, etc.).
Atheism and skepticism in general:
is likely to be another form of belief as attire in practice. As in, I think many people who identify very strongly as atheists or skeptics are doing it to signal tribal affiliation more than anything else.
It takes incredible strength to recognize flaws in your entire way of thinking
Eh, does it? I think it just requires a cultural meme about criticism being a good thing. LW has this, maybe too much of this, and my impression is that so does Judaism (based on e.g. avoiding your belief’s real weak points). This is some evidence that you are thinking reasonably but it isn’t extremely strong evidence.
I think it just requires a cultural meme about criticism being a good thing.
That usually gets you a culture of inconsequential criticism, where you can be as loudly contrarian as you want as long as you don’t challenge any of the central shibboleths. This is basically what Eliezer was describing in “Real Weak Points”, but it shows up in a lot of places; many branches of the modern social sciences work that way, for example. It gets particularly toxic when you mix it up with a cult of personality and the criticism starts being all about how you or others are failing to live up to the Great Founder’s sacrosanct ideals.
I’m starting to think it might not be possible to advocate for a coherent culture that’s open to changing identity-level facts about itself; you can do it by throwing out self-consistency, but that’s a cure that’s arguably worse than the proverbial disease. I don’t think strength of will is what’s missing, though, if anything is.
Yes. And that’s what I’m unrealistically looking for—not just disagreement, but fundamental disagreement. And by fundamental I don’t mean the nature of the Singularity, as central as that is to some. I mean things like “rational thought is better than irrational thought” or “religion is not consistent with rational thought.” Even if they’re not spoken, they’re important and they’re there, which means they ought to be up for debate. I mean “ought to” in the sense that the very best, most intellectually open society imaginable would have already debated these and come to a clear conclusion, but would be willing to debate them again at any time if there was reason to do so.
What, on your view, constitutes a reason to debate issues about which a community has come to a conclusion? Relatedly, on your view, can the question of whether a reason to debate an issue actually exists or not ever actually be settled? That is, shouldn’t the very best, most intellectually open society imaginable on your account continue to debate everything, no matter how settled it seems, because just because none of its members can currently think of a reason to do so is insufficient grounds not to?
I think it’s safe to end a debate when it’s clear to outside observers (these are important) that it’s not going anywhere new. An optimal society listens to outsiders as well.
About epistemic vs. instrumental rationality, though: I had never heard those terms but it seems like a pretty simple difference of what rationality is to be used for. The way I understand it, Less Wrong is quite instrumentally focused. There are many posts as well as sequences (and all of HPMOR) about how to apply rationality to your everyday life, in addition to those dealing only with technical probabilities (like Pascal’s Mugging—not realistic).
Personally I’m more interested in the epistemic side of things and not a fan of assurances that these sequences will substantially improve your relationships or anything like that. But that’s just me.
What I’d really love is a link to someone smart saying “This is why I think the Less Wrong people are all misled, and here are good reasons why.” But that’s probably too much to expect, even around here.
There are people here who say that kind of thing all the time… whether they are smart and the reasons are actually good is somewhat less certain.
Right, that’s the problem. There are plenty of sites saying why LW is a cult, just as there are plenty of ignorant religion-bashers. I’ve found many intelligent atheists, and I’m sure that there are rational intellectuals out there who disagree with LW. But where are they?
I’ve found many intelligent atheists, and I’m sure that there are rational intellectuals out there who disagree with LW. But where are they?
If you mean rational intellectuals who are theists and disagree with LW I cannot help you. Finding those who disagree with LW on core issues is less difficult. Robin Hanson for example. For an intelligent individual well informed of LW culture who advocates theism you could perhaps consider Will Newsome. Although he has, shall we say, ‘become more eccentric than he once was’ so I’m not sure if that’ll satisfy your interest.
I’ve found many intelligent atheists, and I’m sure that there are rational intellectuals out there who disagree with LW. But where are they?
As far as I know, most criticism of LW focuses on its taking certain strange problems seriously, not on atheism. LW has an unusual focus on Pascal-like problems, on artificial intelligence, on acausal trade, on cryonics and death in general, and on Newcomb’s Problem. Many of these focuses result in beliefs that other rationalist communities consider “strange.” There is also some criticism of Eliezer’s position on quantum mechanics, but I’m not familiar enough with that issue to comment on it.
Hello,
I am a young person who recently discovered Less Wrong, HP:MOR, Yudkowsky, and all of that. My whole life I’ve been taught reason and science but I’d never encountered people so dedicated to rationality.
I quite like much of what I’ve found. I’m delighted to have been exposed to this new way of thinking, but I’m not entirely sure how much to embrace it. I don’t love everything I’ve read although some of it is indeed brilliant. I’ve always been taught to be skeptical, but as I discovered this site my elders warned me to be skeptical of skepticism as well.
My problem is that I’d like an alternate viewpoint. New ideas are always refreshing, and it’s certainly not healthy to constantly hear a single viewpoint, no matter how right your colleagues think they are. (It becomes even worse if you start thinking about a cult.)
Clearly, the Less Wrong community generally (unanimously?) agrees about a lot of major things. For example, religion. The vast majority of “rationalists” (in the [avoid unnecessary Yudkowsky jab] LW-based sense of the term) and all of the “top” contributors, as far as I can tell, are atheists.
Here I need to be careful to stay on topic. I was raised religious, and still am, and I’m not planning to quit anytime soon. I don’t want to get into defending religion or even defending those who defend religion. My point in posting this is simply to ask you—what, in your opinion, are the most legitimate criticisms of your own way of thinking? If you say there aren’t any, I won’t believe you. I sincerely hope that you aren’t afraid to expose your young ones to alternate viewpoints, as some parents and religions are. The optimal situation for you is that you’ve heard intelligent, thoughtful, rational criticism but your position remains strong.
In other words, one way to demonstrate an argument’s strength is by successfully defending it against able criticism. I sometimes see refutations of pro-religious arguments on this site, but no refutations of good arguments.
Can you help? I don’t necessarily expect you to go to all this trouble to help along one young soul, but most religious leaders are more than happy to. In any case, I think that an honest summary of your own weak points would go a long way toward convincing me that you guys are any better than my ministers.
Sincerely, and hoping not to be bitten, a thoughtful but impressionable youth
I have been vocally anti-atheist here and elsewhere, though I was brought up as a “kitchen atheist” (“Obviously there is no God, the idea is just silly. But watch for that black cat crossing the road, it’s bad luck”). My current view is Laplacian agnosticism (“I had no need of that hypothesis”). Going through the simulation arguments further convinced me that atheism is privileging one number (zero) out of infinitely many possible choices. It’s not quite as silly as picking any particular anthropomorphization of the matrix lords, be it a talking bush, a man on a stick, a dude with a hammer, a universal spirit, or what have you, but still an unnecessarily strong belief.
If you are interested in anti-atheist arguments based on moral realism made by a current LWer, consider Unequally Yoked. It’s as close to “intelligent, thoughtful, rational criticism” as I can think of.
There is an occasional thread here about how Mormonism or Islam is the one true religion, but the arguments for either are rarely rational.
That’s a really good way of looking at things, thanks. From now on I’m an “anti-atheist” if nothing else...and I’ll take a look at that blog.
Could you bring yourself to believe in one particular anthropomorphization, if you had good reason to (a vision? or something lesser? how much lesser?)
I find it unlikely, as I would probably attribute it to a brain glitch. I highly recommend looking at this rational approach to hypnosis by another LW contributor. It made me painfully aware how buggy the wetware our minds run on is, and how easy it is to make it fail if you know what you are doing. Thus my prior when seeing something apparently supernatural is to attribute it to known bugs, not to anything external.
The brain glitch is always available as a backup explanation, and they certainly do happen (especially in schizophrenics etc.) But if I had an angel come down to talk to me, I would probably believe it.
How would you tell the difference? Also see this classic by another LWer.
Personally, I think this one is more relevant. The biggest problem with the argument from visions and miracles, barring some much more complicated discussions of neurology than are really necessary, is that it proves too much, namely multiple contradictory religions.
It’s a good post, but overly logical and technically involved for a non-LWer. Even if you agree with the logic, I can hardly imagine a religious person alieving that their favorite doctrine proves too much.
It’s a very interesting post. You’re right that we can’t accept all visions, because they will contradict each other, but in fact I think that many don’t. It’s entirely plausible in my mind that God really did appear to Mohammed as well as Joseph Smith, for instance, and they don’t have to invalidate each other. But of course if you take every single claim that’s ever been made, it becomes ridiculous.
Does it prove too much, then, to say that some visions are real and some are mental glitches? I’m not suggesting any way of actually telling the difference.
Well, it’s certainly not a very parsimonious explanation. This conversation has branched in a lot of places, so I’m not sure where that comment is right now, but as someone else has already pointed out, what about the explanation that most lightning bolts are merely electromagnetic events, but some are thrown by Thor?
Proposing a second mechanism which accounts for some cases of a phenomenon, when the first mechanism accounts for others, is more complex (and thus in the absence of evidence less likely to be correct) than the supposition that the first mechanism accounts for all cases of the phenomenon. If there’s no way to tell them apart, then observations of miracles and visions don’t count as evidence favoring the explanation of visions-plus-brain-glitches over the explanation of brain glitches alone.
It’s possible, but that doesn’t mean we have any reason to suppose it’s true. And when we have no reason to suppose something is true, it generally isn’t.
FWIW, I’ve had the experience of a Presence manifesting itself to talk to me. The most likely explanation of that experience is a brain glitch. I’m not sure why I ought to consider that a “backup” explanation.
Right, obviously it’s a problem. There are lots of people who think they’ve been manifested to, and some of them are schizophrenic, and some of them are not, and it’s a whole lot easier to just assume they’re all deluded (even if not lying). But even Richard Dawkins has admitted that he could believe in God if he had no other choice. (I have a source if you want.)
Certainly, if you’re completely determined not to believe no matter what—if you would refuse God even if He appeared to you himself—then you never will. But if there is absolutely nothing that would convince you, then you’re giving it a chance of 0.
Since you are rationalists, you can’t have it actually be 0. So what is that 0.0001 that would convince you?
There’s a big difference between “no matter what” and “if He appeared to you himself,” especially if by the latter you mean appearing to my senses. I mean, the immediate anecdotal evidence of my senses is far from being the most convincing form of evidence in my world; there are many things I’m confident exist without having directly perceived them, and some things I’ve directly perceived I’m confident don’t exist.
For example, a being possessing the powers attributed to YHWH in the Old Testament, or to Jesus in the New Testament, could simply grant me faith directly—that is, directly raising my confidence in that being’s existence. If YHWH or Jesus (or some other powerful entity) appeared to me that way, I would believe in them.
I’m assuming you’re not counting that as convincing me, though I’m not sure why not.
Actually, that isn’t true. It might well be that I assign a positive probability to X, but that I still can’t rationally reach a state of >50% confidence in X, because the kind of evidence that would motivate such a confidence-shift simply isn’t available to me. I am a limited mortal being with bounded cognition, not all truths are available to me just because they’re true.
But it may be that with respect to the specific belief you’re asking about, the situation isn’t even that bad. I don’t know, because I’m not really sure what specific belief you’re asking about. What is it, exactly, that you want to know how to convince me of?
That is… are you asking what would convince me in the existence of YHWH, Creator of the Universe, the God of my fathers and my forefathers, who lifted them up from bondage in Egypt with a mighty hand an an outstretched arm, and through his prophet Moses led them to Sinai where he bequeathed to them his Law?
Or what would convince me of the existence of Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, who was born a man and died for our sins, that those who believe in Him would not die but have eternal life?
Or what would convince me of the existence of Loki, son of the All-Father Odin who dwells in highest Asgard, and will one day bring about Ragnarok and the death of the Gods?
Or… well, what, exactly?
With respect to those in particular, I can’t think of any experience off-hand which would raise my confidence in any of them high enough to be worth considering (EDIT: that’s hyperbole; I really mean “to convince me”; see below), though that’s not to say that such experiences don’t exist or aren’t possible… I just don’t know what they are.
With respect to other things, I might be able to.
Huh. That’s interesting. For at least the first two I can think of a few that would convince me, and for the third I suspect that a lack of being easily able to be convinced is connected more to my lack of knowledge about the religion in question. In the most obvious way for YHVH, if everyone everywhere started hearing a loud shofar blowing and then the dead rose, and then an extremely educated fellow claiming to be Elijah showed up and started answering every halachic question in ways that resolve all the apparent problems, I think I’d be paying close attention to the hypothesis.
Similar remarks apply for Jesus. They do seem to depend strongly on making much more blatant interventions in the world then the deities generally seem to (outside their holy texts).
Technically the shofar blowing thing should not be enough sensory evidence to convince you of the prior improbability of this being the God—probability of alien teenagers, etcetera—but since you weren’t expecting that to happen and other people were, good rationalist procedure would be to listen very carefully what they had to say about how your priors might’ve been mistaken. It could still be alien teenagers but you really ought to give somebody a chance to explain to you about how it’s not. On the other hand, we can’t execute this sort of super-update until we actually see the evidence, so meanwhile the prior probability remains astronomically low.
In this context I think it makes sense to ask “showed up where?” but if the answer were “everywhere on earth at once,” I’d call that pretty damn compelling.
Not to mention crowded.
Yeah, you’re right, “to be worth considering” is hyperbole. On balance I’d still lean towards “powerful entity whom I have no reason to believe created the universe, probably didn’t lift my forefathers up from bondage in Egypt, might have bequeathed them his Law, and for reasons of its own is adopting the trappings of YHWH” but I would, as you say, be paying close attention to alternative hypotheses.
Fixed.
You’re right, I’m assuming that God doesn’t just tweak anyone’s mind to force them to believe, because the God of the Abrahamic religions won’t ever do that—our ultimate agency to believe or not is very important to Him. What would be the point of seven billion mindless minions? (OK, it might be fun for a while, but I bet sentient children would be more interesting over the course of, say, eternity.)
As I said at the time, it hadn’t been clear when I wrote the comment that you meant, specifically, the God of the Abrahamic religions when you talked about God.
I’ve since read your comments elsewhere about Mormonism, which made it clearer that there’s a specific denomination’s traditional beliefs about the universe you’re looking to defend, and not just beliefs in the existence of a God more generally.
And, sure, given that you’re looking for compelling arguments that defend your pre-existing beliefs, including specific claims about God’s values as well as God’s existence, history, powers, personality, relationships to particular human beings, and so forth, then it makes sense to reject ideas that seem inconsistent with those epistemic pre-commitments.
That’s quite a given, though.
If you do assume that God can (and does) just reach in and tweak our minds directly, then being “convinced” takes on a sort of strange meaning. Unless we’re assuming that you remain in normal control of your own mind, the concepts of “choice,” “opinion,” and “me” sort of start to disappear.
I’m trying to talk about a deity in general, but you’re right, it often turns into the God we’re all familiar with. A radically different deity could uproot every part of the way we think about things, even logic and reason itself.
So in order to stay within our own universe, I think it’s OK to assume that any God only intervenes to the extent that we usually hear about, like Old Testament miracles.
Wait… you endorse rejecting the lived experience of millions of people whose conception of deity is radically different from yours, on the grounds that to do otherwise could uproot logic, reason, and every part of the way we think about things?
Wow. Um… I genuinely don’t mean to be offensive, but I don’t know a polite way to say this: if I understood that correctly, I just lost all interest in discussing this subject with you.
You seemed to be arguing a while back that our precommitments to “the way we think about things” were not sufficient grounds to reject uncomfortable or difficult ideas, which is a position I can respect, though I think it’s importantly though subtly false.
But now you just seem to be saying that we should not respect such precommitments when they interfere with accepting some beliefs, such as one popular conception of deity, while considering them sufficient grounds to reject others, such as different popular conceptions of deity.
Which seems to bring us all the way back around to the idea that an “atheist” is merely someone who treats my God the way I treat everyone else’s God, which is boring.
Have I misunderstood you?
Probably you have, unfortunately. Give me a few minutes to figure it out...this is getting confusing.
OK. No worries; no hurries… I’ll consider this branch paused pending re-evaluation. Take your time.
So it seems like what we were actually talking about here was how thoroughly God could convince a human of His existence, and you suggested he could just raise your faith level directly.
Here’s the problem I have with that: I don’t know about Odin, but the YHWH we were raised with doesn’t (could, but doesn’t) ever do that. I wouldn’t really call it faith if you have no choice in the matter.
But I recognize that free agency is a very important tenet of my religion and important to my understanding of the universe given that my religion is correct. (I still don’t quite understand free choice, which I’ll have to figure out sometime in the next few years, but that’s my own issue.) Thus, a radically different deity is at odds with my view of the universe. This probably means that I ought to go looking for radically different deities which will challenge my universe, but for now I don’t know of any (except maybe simulation hypotheses, which I like a lot).
But for the purposes of this discussion—which, remember, was only about how spectacular a manifestation it would take to make you believe—I said it would be easier to stick to a God that doesn’t intervene to the point of directly tampering with our neurons. You had a problem with this. OK, sorry—let’s also think about a fundamentally different God.
I think that an effectively all-powerful being could easily just reach in and rearrange our circuits such that we know it exists. Sure it could happen. As I think I told someone, I don’t see why—having seven billion mindless minions would get old after a while—but I have no right to go questioning the motives of a deity, especially one that’s radically different from the one I’m told I’m modeled after.
I’m sorry, I never meant to dismiss the possibility of radically different religions. You’re right, that would be awfully silly coming from me.
Now then.
This sounds very interesting, what do you mean?
I recommend you prioritize clarifying your confusions surrounding “free choice” higher than you seem to be doing.
In particular, I observe that our circuits have demonstrably been arranged such that we find certain propositions, sources of value, and courses of action (call them C1) significantly (and in some cases overwhelmingly) more compelling than other propositions, sources of value, and courses of action (C2). For example (and trivially), C1 includes “I have a physical body” and C2 includes “I don’t have a physical body”.
If we were designed by a deity, it follows that this deity in fact designed us to be predisposed to accept C1 and not accept C2.
A concept of free agency that allows for stacking the deck so overwhelmingly in support of C1 over C2, but does not allow for including in C1 “YHWH as portrayed in the Book of Mormon, other texts included by reference in the Book of Mormon, and subsequent revelations granted to the line of Mormon Prophets by YHWH”, seems like an important concept to clarify, if only because it sounds so very contrived on the face of it.
Well, for example, consider the proposition (Pj) that YHWH as conceived of and worshiped by 20th-century Orthodox Jews of my family’s tradition exists.
As a child, I was taught Pj and believed it (which incidentally entailed other things, for example, such as Jesus Christ not being the Messiah). As a teenager re-evaluated the evidence I had for and against Pj and concluded that my confidence in NOT(Pj) was higher than my confidence in Pj.
Had someone said to me at that time “Dave, I realize that your evaluation of the evidence presented by your experience of the world leads you to high confidence in certain propositions which you consider logically inconsistent with Pj, but I caution you not to become so thoroughly precommitted to the methods by which you perform those evaluations that you cannot seriously consider alternative ways of evaluating evidence,” that would intuitively feel like a sensible, rational, balanced position.
The difficulty with it is that in practice, refusing to commit to any epistemic method means giving up on reaching any conclusions at all, however tentative. And since in practice making any choices about what to do next requires arriving at some conclusion, however implicit or unexamined, it similarly precludes an explicit examination of the conclusions underlying my choices. (Which typically entails an unexamined adoption of the epistemic methods my social group implicitly endorses, rather than the adoption of no epistemic methods at all, but that’s a whole different conversation.)
I ultimately decided I valued such explicit examinations, and that entailed a willingness to making a commitment to an epistemic methodology, and that the epistemic methodology that seemed most compelling to me at that time did in fact lead me to reject Pj, so absent discovering inconsistencies in that methodology that led me to reject it at some later time I was committed to rejecting Pj, which I did.
(Of course, I wasn’t thinking in quite these terms as a 13-year-old Yeshiva student, and it took some years to get fully consistent about that position. Actually, I’m not yet fully consistent about it, and don’t anticipate becoming so in my lifetime.)
Interesting. I’ll keep thinking about it. But just to clarify, what exactly was it I said that was subtly but importantly wrong?
This is what EY says about “uncomfortable or difficult ideas:”
“When you’re doubting one of your most cherished beliefs, close your eyes, empty your mind, grit your teeth, and deliberately think about whatever hurts the most. Don’t rehearse standard objections whose standard counters would make you feel better. Ask yourself what smart people who disagree would say to your first reply, and your second reply. Whenever you catch yourself flinching away from an objection you fleetingly thought of, drag it out into the forefront of your mind.”
Like I said, I thought you were arguing a while back that our precommitments to “the way we think about things” were not sufficient grounds to reject uncomfortable or difficult ideas, which is an idea I respect (for reasons similar to those articulated in the post you quote) but consider subtly but importantly wrong (for reasons similar to those I articulate in the comment you reply to).
I’ll note, also, that an epistemic methodology (a way of thinking about things) isn’t the same thing as a belief.
And if it were a demon? A ghost? A fairy? A Greek deity? If these are different, why are they different? What about an angel that ’s from another religion?
The optimal situation could also be hearing intelligent, thoughtful, rational criticism, learn from it and having a new ‘strong position’ incorporating the new information. (See: lightness).
What good arguments do you think LW hasn’t talked about?
Religion holds an important social and cultural role that the various attempts at rationalist ritual or culture haven’t fully succeeded at filling yet.
The 2012 survey showed something around 10% non-atheist, non-agnostic.
From most plausible to least plausible:
It’s possible to formulate something like an argument that religious practice is good for neurotypical humans, in terms of increasing life expectancy, reducing stress, and so on.
Monocultures tend to do better than populations with mixed cultural heritage, and one could argue that some religions do very well at creating monocultures where none previously existed, e.g., the mormons, or perhaps the Catholic Church circa 1800 in the states.
I’ve heard some reports that religious affiliation is good for one’s dating pool.
See, but these are only arguments that religion is useful. Rationalists on this site say that religion is most definitely false, even if it’s useful; are there any rational thinkers out there who actually think that religion could realistically be true? I think that’s a much harder question that whether or not it’s good for us.
Yes.
This is great, thanks. I know there must be people out there, but I’m not entirely convinced most atheists ever bother to actually consider a real possibility of God.
I no longer have any idea what evidence would convince you otherwise.
Rationalists who take religion seriously, for instance.
Take seriously in what sense?
For instance, I spent about six years seriously studying up on religions and theology, because I figured that if there were any sort of supreme being concerned with the actions of humankind, that would be one of the most important facts I could possibly know. So in that sense, I take religion very seriously. But in the sense of believing that any religion has a non-negligible chance of accurately describing reality, I don’t take it seriously at all, because I feel that the weight of evidence is overwhelmingly against that being the case.
What sense of “taking religion seriously” are you looking for examples of?
That’s what I mean—a non-negligible chance. If your estimation of the likelihood of God is negligible, then it may as well be zero. I don’t think that there is an overwhelming weight of evidence toward either case, and I don’t think this is something that science can resolve.
This doesn’t follow. For example, if you recite to me a 17 million digit number, my estimate that it is a prime is about 1 in a million by the prime number theorem. But, if I then find out that the number was in fact 2^57,885,161 −1, my estimate for it being prime goes up by a lot. So one can assign very small probabilities to things and still update strongly on evidence.
Why not?
So, you’re saying that in your view no atheist could possibly take the question of the truth of religion seriously? Or, alternately, that one could be an atheist but still give a large probability of God’s existence? Both of these seem a bit bizarre...
See my first comment in this thread. There’s a 10% minority that takes religion seriously. Presumably some of them consider themselves rationalists, or else they wouldn’t bother responding to the survey.
You may find this helpful: http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/archives/2012/02/results-of-the-.html
This is interesting. It shouldn’t be surprising coming from philosophers, but it can be instructional anyway. There are as many atheists who have never heard a decent defense of religion as there are religious fundamentalists who have never bothered to think rationally.
This seems improbable, considering that there are vastly more religious people than atheists.
Props for being technical. You know what I meant.
Even in the non-technical sense, he’s still making a relevant counterpoint, because it’s much, much harder for atheists to go without exposure to religious culture and arguments than for a religious person to go without exposure to atheist arguments or culture (insofar as such a thing can be said to exist.)
I don’t just mean being exposed to religious culture and arguments, I mean good arguments. I know, practically everyone here was raised religious and given really bad reasons to believe. But I think those may become a straw dummy—what I’m skeptical of is how many people here have heard a religious argument that actually made them think, one that has a chance in a real debate.
good arguments don’t in general have a chance in a real debate, because debates are not about reasoning. But that’s a nitpick.
I’ve seen a lot of religious people claiming to have access to strong arguments for theism, but have never seen one myself.
As JoshuaZ asks, you must have a strong argument or you wouldn’t think this line of discussion was worth anything. What is it?
I’m going to second JoshuaZ here. There’s a lot of disagreement among theists about what the best arguments for theism are. I’d rather not try to represent any particular argument as the best one available for theism, because I can’t think of anything that theists would universally agree on as a good argument, and I don’t endorse any of the arguments myself.
I would say that most atheists are at least exposed to arguments that apologists of some standing, such as C.S. Lewis or William Lane Craig, actually use.
So why not present what you think these good arguments are?
A-causal blackmail, once I thought deeply about why it might be scary. Took about an hour to refute it (to my satisfaction) - whether it would have a chance in a ‘real debate’: debate length, forum, allotted quiet thinking time and other confounds make me uncertain of your intended meaning.
I’m much closer to “below average” than to the “top” as far as LW users go, but I’ll give it a shot anyway.
I assume that by “way of thinking” you mean “atheism”, specifically (if not, what did you mean ?).
I don’t know how you judge which criticisms are “legitimate”, so I can’t answer the question directly. Instead, I can say that the most persuasive arguments against atheism that I’d personally seen come in form of studies demonstrating the efficacy of prayer. If prayer does work consistently with the claims of some religion, this is a good indication that at least some claims made by the religion are true.
Note, though, that I said “most persuasive”; another way to put it would be “least unpersuasive”. Unfortunately, all such studies that I know of have either found no correlation between prayer and the desired effect whatsoever; or were constructed so poorly that their results are meaningless. Still, at least they tried.
In general, it is more difficult to argue against atheism (of the weak kind) than against theism, since (weak) atheism is simply the null hypothesis. This means that theists must provide positive evidence for the existence of their god(s) in order to convince an atheist, and this is very difficult to do when one’s god is undetectable, or works in mysterious ways, or is absent, etc., as most gods tend to be.
Many people would disagree that atheism is the null hypothesis. “All things testify of Christ,” as some say, and in those circles people honestly believe they’ve been personally contacted by God. (I’m talking about Mormons, whose God, from what I’ve heard, is not remotely undetectable.)
Have most atheists honestly put thought into what if there actually was a God? Many won’t even accept that there is a possibility, and I think this is just as dangerous as blind faith.
Don’t know. Most probably have something better to do. I have thought about what would happen if there was a God. If it turned out the the god of the religion I was brought up in was real then I would be destined to burn in hell for eternity. If version 1 of the same god (Yahweh) existed I’d probably also burn in hell for eternity but I’m a bit less certain about that because the first half of my Bible talked more about punishing people while alive (well, at the start of the stoning they are alive at least) than the threat of torment after death. If Alah is real… well, I’m guessing there is going to be more eternal pain involved since that is just another fork of the same counterfactual omnipotent psychopath. Maybe I’d have more luck with the religions from ancient India—so long as I can convince the gods that lesswrong Karma counts.
So yes, I’ve given some thought to what happens if God exists: I’d be screwed and God would still be a total dick of no moral worth.
Assigning probability 0 or 1 to a hypothesis is an error, but rounding off 0.0001 to 0 is less likely to be systematically destructive to an entire epistemological framework than rounding 0.0001 off to 1.
So, with no evidence either way, would you honestly rate the probability of the existence of God as 0.0001%?
That probability is off by a factor of 100 from the one I mentioned.
(And with ‘no evidence either way’ the probability assigned would be far, far lower than that. It takes rather a lot of evidence to even find your God in hypothesis space.)
In which direction?
I mentioned 0, 1 and 0.0001. Ibidem asked about 0.0001%. That’s 100 times lower.
Ah, sorry. I misread your statement as talking about a prior rather than with the evidence at hand and didn’t notice the percentage mark. Your edited comment is more clear.
You’re right, I’m sorry. It was 0.0001. That’s still pretty small, though. Is that really what you think it is?
Don’t think of my God, then. Any deity at all.
Do we want to be Bayesian about it? Of course we do. Let’s imagine two universes. One formed spontaneously, one was created. Which is more likely to occur?
Personally I think that the created one seems more likely. Apparently you think that the spontaneity is more believable. But as for the probability that any given universe is created rather than accidental, 0.0001 seems unrealistically low. And if that’s not the number you actually believe—it was just an example—what is?
It isn’t obvious that this is at all meaningful, and gets quickly into deep issues of anthropics and observer effects. But aside from that, there’s some intuition here that you seem to be using that may not be shared. Moreover, it also has the weird issue that most forms of theism have a deity that is omnipotent and so should exist over all universes.
Note also that the difference isn’t just spontaneity v. created. What does it mean for a universe to be created? And what does it mean to call that creating aspect a deity? One of the major problems with first cause arguments and similar notions is that even when one buys into them it is extremely difficult to jump from their to theism. Relevant SMBC.
Certainly this is a tough issue, and words get confusing really quickly. What intuition am I not sharing? Sorry if by “universe” I meant scenario or existence or something that contains God when there is one.
What I mean by “deity” and “created” is that either there is a conscious, intelligent mind (I think we all agree what that means) organizing our world/universe/reality, or there isn’t. And of course I’m not trying to sell you on my particular religion. I’m just trying to point out that I think there’s not any more inherent reason to believe there is no deity than to believe there is one.
Ok. So in this context, why do you think that one universe is more likely than the other? It may help to state where “conscious” and “intelligent” and “mind” come into this argument.
On the contrary, that shouldn’t be an “of course”. If you sincerely believe and think you have the evidence for a particular religion, you should present it. If you don’t have that evidence, then you should adjust your beliefs.
Even if one thinks one is in a constructed universe, it in no way follows that the constructor is divine or has any other aspects one normally associates with a deity. For example, this universe could be the equivalent of a project for a 12 dimensional grad student in a wildly different universe (ok, that might be a bit much- it might just be by an 11 -dimensional bright undergrad).
What do you mean as an “inherent” reason? Are you solely making a claim here about priors, or are you making a claim about what evidence there actually is when we look out at the world? Incidentally, you should be surprised if this is true- for the vast majority of hypotheses, the evidence we have should assign them probabilities far from 50%. Anytime one encounters a hypothesis which is controversial in a specific culture, and one concludes that it has a probability close to 1⁄2, one should be concerned that one is reaching such a conclusion not out of rational inquiry but more out of an attempt to balance competing social and emotional pressures.
How about this, from Mormon user calcsam:
Seems legit to me.
I’d actually consider that deity in the sense of a conscious, intelligent being who created the universe intentionally. As opposed to it happening by cosmic hazard. (That is, no conscious creator.)
Would you assign that being any of the traits normally connected to being a deity? For example, if the 11 dimensional undergrad say not to eat shellfish, or to wear special undergarments, would you listen?
Yes, I would listen if was confident that was where it was coming from. This 11-dimensional undergrad is much more powerful and almost certainly smarter than me, and knowingly rebelling would not be a good idea. If this undergrad just has a really sick sense of humor, then, well, we’re all screwed in any case.
And if the 11-dimensional undergrad says you should torture a baby?
Clearly, then I need to make awfully sure it’s actually God and not a hallucination. I would probably not do it because in that case I know that the undergrad does have a sick sense of humor and I shouldn’t listen to him because we’re all screwed anyway.
Now, if you’re going to bring up Abraham and Isaac or something like that, remember that in this case Abraham was pretty darn sure it was actually God talking.
So this sort of response indicates that you are distinguishing between “God” and the 11-dimensional undergrad as distinct ideas. In that case, a generic creator argument isn’t very strong evidence since there are a lot of options for entities that created the universe that aren’t God.
This is confusing because we’re simultaneously talking about a deity in general and my God, the one we’re all familiar with.
Of course there are lots of options other than my specific God; the 11-dimensional undergrad is one of those. I’m not using a generic creator argument to convince you of my God, I’m using the generic creator argument to suggest that you take into account the possibility of a generic creator, whether or not it’s my God. I’m keeping my God mostly out of this—I think an atheist ought to be able to argue my position while keeping his/her own conclusions.
As JoshuaZ says, there’s no “of course” about it. If some particular religion is right and I am wrong, then I absolutely want to know about it ! So if you have some evidence to present, please do so.
I think that my religion is right and you are misguided. I really do, for reasons of my own. But I don’t have any “evidence” to share with you, especially if you are committed to explaining it away as you may not be but many people here are.
Remember that my original question was just to see where this community stood. I don’t have all that many grand answers myself. I suppose I could actually say that if you honestly absolutely want to know and are willing to open your mind, then you should try reading this book—I’m serious, but I’m aware how silly that would sound in such a context as this. Really, I don’t want to become that guy.
I’m young, and I myself am trying to find good, rational arguments in favor of God. I’m trying to reconcile rationality and religion in my mind, and if I can’t find anyone online, I’ll figure it out myself and write a blog post about it in twenty years.
But what it seems I’ve found is that no, most of the people on this site (based on my representative sample of about a dozen, I know) have never been presented with solid arguments in favor of religion. Maybe I’ll manage to find some or write them myself, and maybe I’ll decide that the population of Less Wrong is as closed-minded as I feared. In any case, thank you for being more open than certain others.
So this is a problem. In general, there are types of claims that don’t easily have shared evidence (e.g. last night I had a dream that was really cool, but I forgot it almost as soon as I woke up, I love my girlfriend, when I was about 6 years old I got the idea of aliens who could only see invisible things but not visible things, etc.) But most claims, especially claims about what we expect of reality around us should depend on evidence that can be shared.
So this is already a serious mistake. One shouldn’t try to find rational arguments in favor of one thing or another. One should find the best evidence for and against a claim, and then judge the claim based on that.
You may want to seriously consider that the arguments you are looking for don’t exist. In the meantime, may I recommend reddit’s Debate Religion forum. They are dedicated to discussing a lot of these issues and may be a better forum for some of the things you are interested. Of course, the vast majority of things related to rationality has very little to do with whether or not there are any deities, and so you are more than welcome to stick around here. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here.
Yea!
Note that my expressed intention in this post was not to start a religious debate, though I have enjoyed that too. I have considered that the arguments I’m looking for don’t exist; what I’ve found is that at least you guys don’t have any, which means that from your position this case is entirely one-sided. So generally, your belief that religion is inherently ridiculous from a rationalist standpoint has never actually been challenged at all.
Definitely it’s been interesting. Thanks.
If you really want rationalist (more properly, post-rationalist) arguments in favor of God, I recommend looking through Will Newsome’s comments from a few years ago; also through his twitter accounts @willnewsome and @willdoingthings.
If you follow my advice, though, may God have mercy on your soul; because Will Newsome will have none on your psychological health.
Thanks for the reference; someone else mentioned him and I’ve enjoyed the blog it led me to, but I didn’t think to look through his comments.
Ah, no, haven’t you read the How to Actually Change Your Mind sequence? Or at least the Against Rationalization subsequence and The Bottom Line? You can’t just decide “I want to prove the existence of God” and then write a rational argument. You can’t start with the bottom line. Really, read the sequence, or at least the subsequence I pointed out.
I wasn’t under the impression that the Book of Mormon was substantially more convincing than any other religious holy book. I have, however, heard that the Mormon church does exceptionally well at building a community. If you’d like to talk about that, I’d be extremely interested.
How sure are you that more solid arguments exist? We don’t know about them. You apparently don’t know about them. If you’ve got any that you’re hiding, remember that if God actually exists we would really like to know about it; we don’t want to explain anything away that isn’t wrong.
Yes, I have read the sequence. I think that not being one-sided sometimes requires a conscious effort, and is a worthwhile cause.
Of course you won’t read the Book of Mormon. I wouldn’t expect you to. But if you want “evidence” which has firmly convinced millions of people—here it is. I personally have found it more powerful than the Bible or Qur’an.
You’re right, I don’t have any solid arguments in favor of religion. My original question of this post was actually just to ask if you had any—and I’ve gotten an answer. No, you believe there are none.
I’ve shown you one source that convinces a lot of people; consider yourself to know about it. I would recommend reading it, too, if you’re really interesting in finding the truth.
Have you read the Quran in the original Arabic? It’s pretty famously considered to lose a lot in translation.
I haven’t, of course, but the only ex-muslim I’ve spoken to about it agrees that even in the absence of his religious belief, it’s a much more powerful and poetic work in Arabic.
Working on it :)
I can sometimes actually understand entire verses but it is in fact a goal of mine. I’d think it must lose a lot in translation.
Can you expand on that? What is this perception of “power” you get in varying degrees from such books, and what is the relation between that sensation and deciding whether anything in those books is true?
I’ve read the Bible and the Qur’an, and while I haven’t read the Book of Mormon, I have a copy (souvenir of a visit to Salt Lake City). I’ll have a look at it if you like, but I’m not expecting much, because of the sort of thing that books like these are. Neither the Bible nor the Qur’an convince me that any of the events recounted in them ever happened, or that any of the supernatural entities they talk about ever existed, or that their various moral prescriptions should be followed simply because they appear there. How could they?
A large part of the Bible is purported history, and to do history right you can’t rely on a single collection of old and multiply-translated documents which don’t amount to a primary source for much beyond their own existence, especially when archaeology (so I understand) doesn’t turn up all that much to substantiate it. And things like the Genesis mythology are just mythology. The world was not created in six days. Proverbs, Wisdom, the “whatsoever things...” passage, and so on, fine: but I read them in the same spirit as reading the rationality quote threads here. Where there be any virtue, indeed.
The Qur’an consists primarily of injunctions to believe and imprecations against unbelievers. I’m not going to swallow that just because of its aggressive manner.
So, that is my approach to religious documents. This “power” that leads many people to convert to a religion, that gives successful missionaries thousands of converts in a single day: I have to admit that I have no idea what experience people are talking about. Why would reading a book or tract open my eyes to the truth? Especially if I have reason to think that the authors were not engaged in any sort of rational inquiry?
That is, BTW, also my approach to non-religious documents, and I find it really odd when I see people saying of things like, say, Richard Dawkins’ latest, “this book changed the way I see things!” It’s a frequent jibe of religious people against atheists that “atheism is just another religion”, but when people within atheism convert so readily from one idea to another just by reading a book, I have to wonder whether “religion” might be just the word for that mental process.
What’s strange about converting from one idea to another by reading a book? A book can contain a lot of information. Sometimes it doesn’t even take very much to change one’s mind. Suppose a person believes that the continents can’t be shifting, because there’s no room for them to move around on a solid sphere. Then they read about subduction zones and mid-ocean ridges, and see a diagram of plate movement around the world, and think “Oh, I guess it can happen that way, how silly of me not to have thought of that.”
I haven’t found any religious text convincing, because they tend to be heavy on constructing a thematic message and providing social motivation to believe, light on evidence, but for a lot of people that’s a normal way to become convinced of things (indeed, I recently finished reading a book where the author discussed how, among the tribe he studied, convincing people of a proposition was almost entirely a matter of how powerful a claim you were prepared to make and what authority you could muster, rather than what evidence you could present or how probable your claim was.)
I suspect this was also true of the tribe I went to high-school with.
I know how most atheists feel about the Bible. Really, I do. But if you don’t understand what’s so powerful about a book, and you want to know, then you really should give it a try—I might say that the last chapter of Moroni especially addresses this.
(I promise I’m not trying to convert you. I don’t remotely expect you to have a spiritual experience because of this one chapter.)
Yes, it’s easy to compare religion and atheism to each other as well as professional sports and a lot of other human behaviors. I’m all for free thought and not being persuaded by powerful words alone. However, just as I try to be able to enjoy ridiculous sports games, I’m glad to understand why people believe what they do.
Well, I’ve now read the last chapter of Moroni, which is the last book of the Book of Mormon. The prophet takes his leave of his people, promises that God, the Son, and the Holy Ghost will reveal the truth of these things to those who sincerely pray, enjoins them to practice faith, hope, and charity and avoid despair, and promises to see them in the hereafter.
I don’t feel any urge to read this as other than fiction.
Great. No pressure on you, but now you’ve read the promise that inspires so many people. Feel free to think of it as fiction if you choose to.
I grew up on the Bible. I studied the Bible for over a decade. I have read the Old Testament in Hebrew.
It’s the most boring thing I’ve ever laid eyes on.
I’ll agree with that, some parts of it are incredibly boring. (Though some parts could make an awesome action flick.)
I’ve always marveled at peoples’ assertions that, even if they don’t believe the bible is the word of God, they still respect it as a great work of literature. I suspect that they really do believe it, humans can invest a whole lot of positive associations with things simply through expectation and social conditioning. But my opinion of it as a literary work is low enough that I have a hard time coming up with any sort of of comparison which doesn’t make it sound like I’m making a deliberate effort to mock religious people.
I was honest when I said that I’d love to see some convincing evidence for the existence of any god. If you have some, then by all means, please present it. However, if I look at your evidence and find that it is insufficient to convince me, this does not necessarily mean that I’m closed-minded (though I still could be, of course). It could also mean that your reasoning is flawed, or that your observations can be more parsimoniously explained by a cause other than a god.
A big part of being rational is learning to work around your own biases. Consider this: if you can’t find any solid arguments for the existence of your particular version of God… is it possible that there simply aren’t any ?
Yes, it’s possible that there aren’t any. That makes your beliefs much, much simpler. But I think that it’s much safer and healthier to assume that you just haven’t been exposed to any yet. I can’t call you closed-minded for not having been exposed, and I’m sure that if some good arguments did pop up you at least would be willing to hear them. I’m sorry that I don’t myself have any; I’m going to keep looking for a few years, if you don’t mind.
I do mind. If you look for a few years for “rational” arguments for Mormonism you will be wasting your life duplicating the effort of thousands of people before you. Please don’t. Even if you remain Mormon, there are far better things you can do than theology.
What should I spend my next few years of rationalism doing then?
It seems that according to you, my options are
a) leave my religion in favor of rationalism. (feel free to tell me this, but if my parents find out about it they’ll be worried and start telling me you’re a satanic cult. I can handle it.)
b) leave rationalism in favor of religion. (not likely. I could leave Less Wrong if it’s not open-minded enough, but I won’t renounce rational thinking.)
c) learn to live with the conflict in my mind.
Suggestions?
In descending order of my preference: a, c, then b.
I think c is the path chosen by most people who are reasonable but want to remain religious.
C is much more feasible if you can happily devote your time to causes other than religion/rationality. math, science, writing, art, I think all are better for you and society than theology
C seems likely as a long-term solution, because I don’t see a or b as very realistic right now. And even if I don’t make it a focused pursuit, I’ll still be on the lookout for option d. (I’m not seriously interested in theology, don’t worry. I’m quite into math and such things.)
These are not “options”, but possible outcomes. You shouldn’t decide to work on reaching a particular conclusion, that would filter the arguments you encounter. Ignore these whole “religion” and “rationality” abstractions, work on figuring out more specific questions that you can understand reliably.
That’s not either/or. Plenty of participants here are quietly religious (I don’t recall what the last survey said), yet they like the site for what it has to offer. It may well happen some day that some of the sequence posts will click in a way that would make you want to decide to distance yourself from your fellow saints. Or it might not. If you find some discussion topics which interest you more, then just enjoy those. As I mentioned originally, pure logical discourse is rarely the way to change deep-seated opinions and preferences. Those evolve as your subconscious mind integrates new ideas and experiences.
Yes, that’s what I think I’ll do. But many people here seem to be telling me that’s impossible without some sort of cognitive dissonance. I don’t think so.
“People here” are not perfectly rational and prone to other-optimizing. Including yours truly. Even the fearless leader has a few gaping holes in his rationality, and he’s done pretty well. I don’t know which of his and others’ ideas speak to you the most, but apparently some do, so why not enjoy them. If anything, the spirit of altruism and care for others, so prominent on this forum, seems to fit well with Mormon practice, as far as I know.
I honestly haven’t gotten much of a sense of altruism or care for others. (You were serious, right?) I mean, yes, there’s the whole optimizing charity thing, but that’s often (not always) for personal gratification as much as sincere altruism. I suppose people here think that their own cryonic freezing is actually doing the world a huge favor.
And care for others...that’s something Mormons definitely have on you guys.
But I like this environment anyways. Because people here are smart and educated, and some of them are even honest. :)
By signing up for cryonics you help make cryonics more normal and less expensive, encouraging others to save their own lives. I believe there was a post where someone said they signed up for cryonics so that they wouldn’t have to answer the “why aren’t you signed up then?” crowd when trying to convince other people to do so.
I’m sure that many folks who have signed up for cryonics are happy that their behavior normalizes it for others. But I’m doubtful that any significant number would have made a different decision if normalizing cryonics was not an effect of their actions.
I don’t believe you really think that. Probably your frustration is talking. But you can probably relate to the standard analogy with a religious approach: if you believe that you have a chance for a happy immortality, it’s a lot easier to justify spending some of your mortal toil on helping others to be happy. Even if there is no correlation between how much good you do in this life and how happy you will be in the next, if any.
Hmm. Is it really better to assume they’re entirely selfish? I could do that. But I know that Harry James P-E-V at least actually believes he’s going to save the world. (Maybe not specifically with cryonics.)
(But yes, my tendency for sarcasm is something I need to work on. When I’m on Less Wrong, at least.)
There’s two issue here: (1) the difference between donating because it is useful and donating because it makes one feel good, and (2) many donations that make one feel good are really social status games.
I really do think many people here are sincere altruists (re the second issue).
I hope they don’t. It’s an awfully stupid position. I’m not aware of anyone who is signed up for cryonics for anything other than self-oriented (selfish?) desire to live forever.
My recommendation is that you commit to/remain committed to basing your confidence in propositions on evaluations of evidence for and against those propositions. If that leads you to conclude that LessWrong is a bad place to spend time, don’t spend time here. If that leads you to conclude that your religious instruction has included some falsehoods, stop believing those falsehoods. If it leads you to conclude that your religious instruction was on the whole reliable and accurate, continue believing it. If it leads you to conclude that LessWrong is a good place to spend time, keep spending time here.
At what point do I stop looking, though ? For example, a few days ago I lost my favorite flashlight (true story). I searched my entire apartment for about an hour, but finally gave up; my guess is that I left it somewhere while I was hiking. I am pretty sure that the flashlight is not, in fact, inside my apartment… but should I keep looking until I’d turned over every atom ?
You stop looking when you decide it’s no longer helpful, obviously. You’ve stopped looking, and I’m not blaming you for that. I am still looking.
Fair enough; I wish you luck in your search.
As for the Book of Mormon… try to think of it this way.
Imagine that, tomorrow, you meet aliens from a faraway star system. The aliens look like giant jellyfish, and are in fact aquatic; needless to say, they grew up in a culture radically different from ours. While this alien species does possess science and technology (or else they wouldn’t make it all the way to Earth !), they have no concept of “religion”. They do, however, have a concept of fiction (as well as non-fiction, of course, or else they wouldn’t have developed science).
The aliens have studied our radio transmissions, translated our language, and downloaded a copy of the entire Web; this was easy for them since their computers are much more powerful than ours. So, the aliens have access to all of our literature, movies, and other media; but they have a tough time making sense of some of it. For example, they are pretty sure that the Oracle SQL Manual is non-fiction (they pirated a copy of Oracle, and it worked). They are also pretty sure that Little Red Riding Hood is fiction (they checked, and they’re pretty sure that wolves can’t talk). But what about a film like Lawrence of Arabia ? Is that fiction ? The aliens aren’t sure.
One of the aliens comes to you, waving a copy of The Book of Mormon (or whichever scripture you believe in) in its tentacles (but in a friendly kind of way). It asks you to clarify: is this book fiction, or non-fiction ? If it contains both fictional and non-fictional passages, which are which ? Right now, the alien is leaning toward “fiction” (it checked, and snakes can’t talk), but, with us humans, one can never be sure.
What do you tell the alien ?
a) I would tell them it’s non-fiction. Are Yudkowsky’s posts fiction or non-fiction? What about the ones where he tells clearly made-up instructional stories?
b) No need to bash the Book of Mormon. I’m fully aware how you people feel about it. But—
you did in fact ask.
It was not my intent to bash the Book of Mormon specifically; I just used it as a convenient stand-in for “whichever holy scripture you believe in”. Speaking of which:
The alien spreads its tentacles in confusion, then pulls out a stack of books from the storage compartment of its exo-suit. “What about all these other ones ?”, it asks. You recognize the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, Enuma Elish, the King James Bible, and the Nordic Eddas; you can tell by the way the alien’s suit is bulging that it’s got a bunch more books in there. The alien says (or rather, its translation software says for it),
“We can usually tell the difference between fiction and non-fiction. For example, your fellow human Yudkowsky wrote a lot of non-fictional articles about things like ethics and epistemology, but he also wrote fictional stories such as Three Worlds Collide. In that, he is similar to [unpronounceable], the author on our own world who wrote about imaginary worlds in order to raise awareness his ideas concerning [untranslateable] and [untranslateable], which is now the basis of our FTL drive. Sort of like your own Aesop, in fact.
But these books”, -- the alien waves some of its tentacles at the huge stack—“are confusing our software. Their structure and content contains many elements that are usually found only in fiction; for example, talking animals, magical powers, birds bigger than mountains, some sort of humanoids beings that are said to live in the skies or at the top of tall mountains or perhaps in orbit, shapeshifters, and so on. We checked, and none of those things exist in real life.
But then, we talked to other humans such as yourself, and they told us that some of these books are true in a literal sense. Oddly enough, each human seems to think that one particular book is true, and all the others are fictional or allegorical, but groups of humans passionately disagree about which book is true, as well as about the meaning of individual passages.
Thus, we [unpronounceable]”—you recognize the word for the alien’s own species—“are thoroughly confused. Are these books fiction, or aren’t they ? For example”, the alien says as it flips open the Book of Mormon, “do you really believe that snakes can talk ? Or that your Iron Age ancestors could build wooden submarines ? Or that a mustard seed is the smallest thing there is ? Or that there’s an invisible person in the sky who watches your every move ?”
The alien takes a pause to breathe (or whatever it is they do), then flips open some of the other books.
“What about these ? Do you believe in a super-powered being called Thor, who creates lightning bolts with his hammer, Mjolnir ? Do you think that some humans can cast magic spells that actually work ? And what about Garuda the mega-bird, is he real ?
If you believe some of these books are truth and others fiction, how do you tell the difference ? Our software can’t tell the difference, and neither can we...”
Funny, I could swear someone already asked me that, and I gave them an answer. I’ll see if I can find the specific thread...
You are privileging the hypothesis of (presumably one specific strain of) monotheism. That is not actually a rational approach. The kind of question a rationalist would ask is not “does God exist?” but “what should I think about cosmology” or “what should I think about ethics?” First you examine the universe around you, and then you come up with hypotheses to see how well they match that. If you don’t start from the incorrectly narrow hypothesis space of [your strain of monotheism, secular cosmology acccording to the best guesses of early 21st century science], you end up with a much lower probability for your religion being true, even if science turns out to be mistaken about the particulars of the cosmology.
Put another way: What probability do you assign to Norse mythology being correct? And how well would you respond if someone told you you were being closed-minded because you’d never heard a solid argument for Thor?
I’m sorry if you feel that I’ve called you closed-minded, no personal offense was intended. But it’s a bit worrisome when a community as a whole has only ever heard one viewpoint.
The universe looks very undesigned—the fine-tuned constants and the like only allow conscious observers and so can be discounted on the basis of the anthropic principle (in a set of near-infinite universes, even undesigned ones, conscious observers would only inhabit universes with constants such that would allow their existence—there’s no observer who’d observe constants that didn’t permit their existence)
So pretty much all the evidence seems to speak of a lack of any conscious mind directing or designing the universe, neither malicious nor benevolent.
I know many, many people who think that the universe looks designed. I can refer you to Ivy League scientists if you want.
There are 7 billion people in the world. One can find “many, many” people to believe all sorts of things, especially if one’s going to places devoted to gathering such people together.
But the stuff that are really created by conscious minds, there’s rarely a need to argue about them. When the remnants of Mycenae were discovered nobody (AFAIK) had to argue whether they were a natural geological formation or if someone built them. Nobody had to debate whether the Easter Island statues were designed or not.
The universe is either undesigned and undirected, or it’s very cleverly designed so as to look undesigned and undirected. And frankly, if the latter is the case, it’d be beyond our ability to manage to outwit such clever designers; in that hypothetical case to believe it was designed would be to coincidentally reach the right conclusion by making all the wrong turns just because a prankster decided to switch all the roadsigns around.
There are many, many Ivy League scientists. Again beware confirmation bias, the selection of evidence towards a predetermined conclusion. Do you have statistics for the percentage of Ivy League scientists that say “the universe looks designed” vs the ones that say “the universe doesn’t look designed” ? That’d be more useful.
Aaaand unfortunately we’re getting into personal opinion. It’s easy enough to find statistics about belief among top scientists, though.
As an addendum to my above comment—if you personally feel that the universe looks designed, can you tell me how would it look in the counterfactual where you were observing a blatantly UNdesigned universe?
Here’s for example elements of a hypothetical blatantly designed world: Continents in the shape of animals or flowers. Mountains that are huge statues. Laws of conservation that don’t easily reduce to math (e.g. conservation of energy, momentum, etc) but rather to human concepts (conservation of hope, conservation of dramatic irony). Clouds that reshape themselves to amuse and entertain the people watching them.
The intuition you’re not sharing is that presence is inherently less likely than absence. I’m not entirely sure how to convey that.
What evidence makes you think this?
I don’t have any evidence. I know, downvote me now. But I suspect some sort of Bayesian analysis might support this, because if there is a deity, it is likely to create universes, whereas if there is no deity, universes have to form spontaneously, which requires a lot of things to fall into place perfectly.
Okay, so what makes you think this is true? I’m wondering how on earth we would even figure out how to answer this question, let alone be sure of the answer.
What has to fall into place for this to occur? Exactly how unlikely is it?
Look, let’s just admit that this line of reasoning is entirely speculative anyway...
Um, why cut off the conversation at this point rather than your original one, in that case?
All I’m saying is that if you need numbers and evidence to continue, we’re not going to get any further.
...
Excuse me?
What would be your prior probability for God existing before updating on your own existence?
I have absolutely no idea. Good question. What would be yours?
It’s not a well-defined enough hypothesis to assign a number to: but the the main thing is that it’s going to be very low. In particular, it is going to be lower than a reasonable prior for a universe coming into existence without a creator. The reason existence seems like evidence of a creator, to us, is that we’re used to attributing functioning complexity to an agent-like designer. This is the famous Watchmaker analogy that I am sure you are familiar with. But everything we know about agents designing things tells us that the agents doing the designing are always far more complex than the objects they’ve created. The most complicated manufactured items in the world require armies of designers and factory workers and they’re usually based on centuries of previous design work. Even then, they are probably no manufactured objects in the world that are more complex than human beings.
So if the universe were designed, the designer is almost certainly far more complex than the universe. And as I’m sure you know, complex hypotheses get low initial priors. In other words: a spontaneous Watchmaker is far more unlikely than a spontaneous watch. Now: an apologist might argue that God is different. That God is in fact simple. Actually, they have argued this and such attempts constitute what I would call the best arguments for the existence of God. But there are two problems with these attempts. First, the way they argue that God is simple is based on imprecise, anthropocentric vocabulary that hides complexity. An “omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and omnibenevolent creator” sounds pretty simple. But if you actually break down each component into what it would actually have to be computationally it would be incredibly complex. The only way it’s simple is with hand-waving magic.
Second, A simple agent is totally contrary to our actual experience with agents and their designs. But that experience is the only thing leading us to conclude that existence is evidence for a designer in the first place. We don’t have any evidence that a complex design can come from a simple creator.
This a more complex and (I think) theoretically sophisticated way of making the same point the rhetorical question “Who created the creator?” makes. The long and short of it is that while existence perhaps is very good evidence for a creator, the creator hypothesis involves so much complexity that the prior for His spontaneous existence is necessarily lower than the prior for the universe’s spontaneous existence.
I agree that the “omnibenevolent” part would be incredibly complex (FAI-complete).
But “omnipotent”, “omnipresent” and “omniscient” seem much easier. For example, it could be a computer which simulates this world—it has all the data, all the data are on its hard disk, and it could change any of these data.
I actually think this illustrates my point quite nicely: the lower limit for the complexity of God (the God you describe) is by definition slightly more complicated than the world itself (the universe is included in your description!).
There’s quite a bit of evidence against. Absense of expected evidence is evidence of absence.
There’s also quite a bit of evidence for, if you bother to listen to sincere believers. Which I do.
The problem is that “quite a bit” is far, far too little. Though religious people often make claims of religious experience, these claims tend to be quite flimsy and better explained by myriad other mechanisms, including random chance, mental illness, and confirmation bias. Scientists have studied these claims, and thus far well-constructed studies have found them to be baseless.
You may be forgetting here that a lot of people here (including myself) grew up in pretty religious circumstances. I’m familiar with all sorts of claims, ranging from teleological arguments, to ontological arguments, to claims of revelation, to claims of mass tradition, etc. etc. So what do you think is “quite a bit of evidence” in this sort of context? Is there anything remotely resembling the Old Testament miracles for example that happens now?
Yes. They don’t casually share them with every skeptic who asks, because miracles are personal, but there is an amazing number of modern miracle stories (among Mormons if not others.) And not just lucky coincidences with easy explanations—real miracles that leave people quite convinced that God is there.
And don’t be too hasty to dismiss millions of personal experiences as mental illness.
I suspect that you and JoshuaZ are unpacking the phrase “Old Testament miracles” differently. Specifically, I suspect they are thinking of events on the order of dividing the Red Sea to allow refugees to pass and then drowning their pursuers behind them.
Such events, when they occur, are not personal experiences that must be shared, but rather world-shaking events that by their nature are shared.
First of all, Joshua didn’t bring up mental illness here. But since you do: how hasty is “too” hasty? To say that differently: in a community of a billion people, roughly how many hallucinations ought I expect that community to experience in a year?
Curiously, nearly identical claims are made by other religions also. For example, you see similar statements in the chassidic branches of Judaism.
But it isn’t at all clear why in this sort of context miracles should be at all “personal” and even then, it doesn’t really work. The scale of claimed miracles is tiny compared to those of the Bible. One has things like the splitting of the Red Sea, the collapse of the walls of Jericho, the sun standing still for Joshua, the fires on Mount Carmel, etc. That’s the scale of classical miracles, and even the most extreme claims of personal miracles don’t match up to that.
They aren’t all mental illness. Some of them are seeing coincidences as signs when they aren’t, and remembering things happening in a more extreme way than they have. Eye witnesses are extremely unreliable. And moreover, should I then take all the claims by devout members of other faiths also as evidence? If so, this seems like a deity that is oddly willing to confuse people. What’s the simplest explanation?
I would venture a guess that atheists who haven’t put thought into the possibility of there being a god are significantly in the minority. Although there are some who dismiss the notion as an impossibility, or such a severe improbability as to be functionally the same thing, in my experience this is usually a conclusion rather than a premise, and it’s not necessarily an indictment of a belief system that a conclusion be strongly held.
Some Christians say that “all things testify of Christ.” Similarly, Avicenna was charged with heresy for espousing a philosophy which failed to affirm the self-evidence of Muslim doctrine. But cultures have not been known to adopt Christianity, Islam, or any other particular religion which has been developed elsewhere, independent of contact with carriers of that religion.
If cultures around the world adopted the same religion, independently of each other, that would be a very strong argument in favor of that religion, but this does not appear to occur.
OK, that works. But what evidence do we have that unambiguously determines that there is no deity? I’d love to hear it. Not just evidence against one particular religion. Active evidence that there is no God, which, rationally taken into account, gives a chance of ~0 that some deity exists.
What evidence of no deity could you possibly expect to see? If there were no God, I wouldn’t expect there to be any evidence of the fact. In fact, if I were to find the words “There is no God, stop looking” engraved on an atom, my conclusion would not be “There is no God,” but rather (ignoring the possibility of hallucination) “There is a God or some entity of similar power, and he’s a really terrible liar.” Eliezer covers this sort of thing in his sequence entry You’re Entitled to Arguments But Not That Particular Proof.
If you really want to make this argument, describe a piece of evidence that you would affirmatively expect to see if there were no God.
Right, I don’t see how there could be any evidence to convince a person to the point of a 0.0001 chance of God. And so when all of these people say that they’ve concluded that the chance of God is negligible, I think that they’re subject to a strong cognitive bias worsened by the fact that they’re supposed to be immune to those.
Two things that your perpsective appears to be missing here:
1) Lots of people here were raised in religious families; they didn’t start out privileging atheism. (Or they aren’t atheists per se; I’m agnostic between atheism and deism; it’s just the anthropomorphic interventionist deity I reject.)
2) You aren’t the first believer to come here and present the case you are trying to make. See, for example, the rather epic conversation with Aspiringknitter here. You aren’t even the first Mormon to make the case here. Calcsam has been quite explicit about it.
Note that both of those examples are people who’ve accumulated quite a bit of karma on LessWrong. People give them a fair hearing. They just don’t agree that their arguments are compelling.
Thank you for pointing out perceived fundamental flaws. It’s so much more helpful than disputing technical details.
1) I know that. However, I would guess that most people here have fully privileged atheism since the time they started considering themselves rationalists, and this is a big difference.
2) I was aware of that too; however, thanks for the specific links. I certainly got on here loudly proclaiming that I was religious; however, my original stated purpose was not to start an argument. That said, I really was asking for it, and when people argued, I argued back. Where I live it’s so hard to find people willing to have an intellectual debate about this sort of thing. So if I did something “taboo,” I apologize. But the reaction I’ve gotten suggests that people are interested in what I’ve said, and so my thoughts were worth something at least.
I suppose that when this thread resolves itself I’ll make a grand post on the welcome page just like AspiringKnitter did.
Let me see if I can explain my objection to (1) a different way. Rationalists do not privilege atheism. They privilege parsimony. This is basically a tautology. The only way to subscribe to both rationality and theistic religion is compartmentalization. Saying you want to be rational and a theist is equivalent to saying you want to make a special exception to the principles you follow in every other situation when the subject of God comes up. That’s going to take a particular kind of strong argument.
You’re telling me that it’s essentially impossible to be theist and fully rational. You’re saying that not only do rationalists privilege atheism, but if fact they have to follow it by definition, unless they manage to deceive themselves.
I disagree with your objection and I believe that it is possible to reconcile rationality and religion.
That is not the case. Observing something for which one can provide no natural explanation is going to cause a rationalist to increase their probability estimate for the supernatural. It’s not going to increase it to near certainty, because the mysteriousness of the universe is a fact about the limits of our own understanding, not about the universe, so it’s still possible that something we can’t explain has natural causes we don’t yet have the ability to measure or explain. But it will cause the estimate to rise. And if inexplicable things keep happening, their estimate will keep rising.
The question, though, is whether there is anything that could ever cause you to lower your estimate of the probability that your religion is correct. If the answer is no, then you’re not being rational right off the bat, and your quest is doomed.
What do you mean by compartmentalization, then, if it’s not a bad thing? Sounds to me like it’s sacrificing internal consistency.
That’s true. I actively go looking for things that might challenge my faith, and come out stronger because of it. That’s partly why I’m here.
compartmentalization IS a bad thing if you care about internal consistency and absolute truth. It’s a great thing if you want to hold multiple useful beliefs that contradict each other. You might be happier and more productive, as I’m sure many are, believing that we should expect the world to work based on evidence except insofar as it conflicts with your religion, where it should work on faith.
Also premature decompartmentalizing can be dangerous. There are many sets of (at least mostly) true ideas where it’s a lot harder to reconcile them then to understand either individually.
The problem is that you’re not being consistent in your handling of unfalsifiable theories. A lot of what’s been brought to the table are Russell’s Teapot-type problems and other gods, but I think I can find one that’s a bit more directly comparable. I’ll present a theory that’s entirely unfalsifiable, and has a fair amount of evidence supporting it. This theory is that your friends, family, and everyone you know are government agents sent to trick you for some unclear reason. It’s a theory that would touch every aspect of your life, unlike a Russell’s Teapot. There’s no way to falsify this theory, yet I assume you’re assigning it a negligible probability, likely .0001 or even less. To remain consistent with your position on religion, you must either accept that there’s a significant chance you’re trapped in some kind of evil simulation run by shadowy G-Men, or accept that the impossibility of counterevidence isn’t actually a good argument in favor of something. (Which still wouldn’t mean that you’d have to turn atheist—as you’ve mentioned, there is some evidence for religion, even if the rest of us think it’s really terrible evidence.)
First of all, in an intellectual debate, you don’t go around telling someone that they’re cornered. That ought to raise all sorts of red flags as to your logic, but in fact I’m perfectly happy to accept both of those propositions.
I would quite agree that there’s a chance worth considering that I’m the center of a government conspiracy. (It’s got a name.) I don’t have any idea how that chance actually ranks in my mind, and any figure I did give would be a Potemkin (a complete guess). But it’s entirely possible.
However, the fact that it isn’t an argument in favor of religion surely doesn’t mean that it’s an argument in favor of atheism. Jeez.
And thank you for admitting that there is at least a tiny bit of evidence for religion. It would be really silly not to.
No, my understanding is that it’s a fairly typical tactic.
Yes, I was indeed thinking of the Truman Show Delusion. My point, though, is that it shouldn’t be any less credible than religion to you, meaning that you should be acting on that theory to a similar degree to religion.
Counterevidence for atheism is not impossible at all, as people have been saying up and down the thread. If the skies were to open up, and angels were to pour down out of the breach as the voice of God boomed over the landscape… that would most certainly be counterevidence for atheism. (Not conclusive counterevidence, mind. I might be insane, or it could be the work of hyperintelligent alien teenagers. But it would be more than enough evidence for me to convert.) And, in less dramatic terms, a simple well-designed and peer-reviewed study demonstrating the efficacy of prayer would be extremely helpful. There are even those miracles you’ve been talking about, although (again) most of us consider it poor evidence.
Sure, cornering your opponent in her arguments is a very common tactic, but it seems a bit silly to go telling me you’ve succeeded in it. In any case, I sure don’t feel cornered. :)
See, I’ve got evidence for religion. What’s my evidence for the Truman Show?
QED. Counterevidence, yes, but not any conclusive or good or rational counterevidence.
If you actually believed in the Truman Show hypothesis? Confirmation bias would provide a whole pile of evidence. Every time someone you know stutters, or someone stares at you from across the lunchroom, or the whole room goes quiet as you enter. Whenever there’s been a car following you for more than three blocks, especially if it’s a black SUV. Certain small things will happen by chance to support any theory. We’d argue that the same bias is likely responsible for most reports of miracles, by the way.
By “conclusive,” I mean “assigning it probability of 1, not rounded or anything, just 1, there must be a god, case closed.” But, rationalists don’t believe that about any evidence, about anything. And we shouldn’t, as you’ve been saying all this time about probability 0. The evidence I posited would, on the other hand, be extremely good rational evidence and I don’t want to diminish that at all.
Downvoted for paraphrasing Intrism in a way that does not reflect what he actually said in your third quote.
What’s your evidence for religion? It’s one thing for you to claim that that your own estimate for the truth of your religion is high based on supposedly strong evidence that you refuse to share. It’s quite another to expect anyone else to move their estimate.
I’m not expecting to convince you to move your estimate using my evidence—some of it is personal, and the rest would likely be rejected out of hand. No, that’s just why I believe in religion rather than the Truman Show.
As for you, I think it’s totally fine for you to rank the Truman Show as high as religion, given your rejection of practically all the evidence in favor of either. As long as you keep a real possibility for both.
I hope you do not feel bad because of some overzealous atheists here ganging up on you. This specific faucet of epistemic rationality is only a small part of the site. And kudos for being instrumentally rational and not letting yourself being bullied into discussing your specific evidence. This would certainly not be useful to anyone. Most people are good at compartmentalizing, and we don’t have to be uniformly rational to benefit from bits and pieces here and there.
No, don’t worry about my feelings. I wouldn’t have “come out” immediately, or probably posted anything in the first place, if I wasn’t sure I could survive it. I mean, yes, of course I feel like everyone’s ganging up on me, but I could hardly expect them to do otherwise given the way I’ve been acting.
Thanks...I’m trying to be rational, I certainly am. And I’m delighted to find other people who are willing to think this way. You could never have this discussion where I’m from, except with someone who either is on this site or ought to be.
I’m sorry, it was a formatting error. Fixed it.
Well, as I linked previously, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. If God were a proposition which did not have low probability in the absence of evidence, then it would be unique in that respect.
I’m prepared to argue in favor of the propositions that we do not have evidence favoring God over no God, and that we have no reason to believe that god has uniquely high probability in absence of evidence. Would that satisfy you?
This “in the absence of evidence” theme is popping up all over but doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere new or useful. I’m going to let it be.
And I’m not momentarily interested in a full-blown argument about the nature of the evidence for and against God. I believe there is evidence of God; you believe there is none, which is practically as good as evidence that there is no God. We can talk over each other about that for hours with no one the wiser. I shouldn’t be surprised that any debate about this boils down to the evidence—but the nature of the evidence (remember, we’ve been over this) means that it’s really impossible to firmly establish one side or the other.
Why is that?
If god were really communicating and otherwise acting upon people, as you suggest, there’s no reason to suppose this should be indistinguishable from brain glitches, misunderstandings, and exaggerations. I think that the world looks much more like we should anticipate if these things are going on in the absence of any real god than we should expect it to look like if there were a real god. You could ask why I think that. A difference of anticipation is a meaningful disagreement to follow up on.
You might want to check out this post. The idea that we can’t acquire evidence that would promote the probability of religious claims is certainly not one we can take for granted.
No thanks, not today at least. I think we just disagree here.
The same is true of science.
if you define “science” as carrying on in the tradition of Bacon, sure. But that didn’t stop the greeks from making the antikythera device long before he existed. Astronomy has been independently discovered by druids, mesoamerican cultures, the far east, and countless others where “independent” is more vague. If you consider “science” as a process of invention as well as research and discovery there are also tons of examples in eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology_in_China#Magnetism_and_metallurgy and so on of inventions that were achieved in vastly different places seemingly independently at different times. Moveable type is still movable type whether invented in China or by Gutenberg. On the other hand, Loki is not Coyote.
A lot of actual pagans may disagree with you. True, there are some differences between the cults involved, there are also differences between Babylonian and Chinese mathematics. (As for your example of Greek science, much of it is on the same causal path that led to Bacon.)
Many people here are grew up in religious settings. Eliezer for example comes from an Orthodox Jewish family. So yes, a fair number have given thought to this.
Curiously many different people believe that they’ve been contacted by God, but they disagree radically on what this contact means. Moreover, when they claim to have been contacted by God but have something that doesn’t fit a standard paradigm, or when they claim to have been contacted by something other than God, we frequently diagnose them as schizophrenic. What’s the simplest explanation for what is going on here?
Simple explanations are good, but not necessarily correct. It’s awfully easy to say they’re all nutcases, but it’s still easy and a bit more fair to say that they’re mostly nutcases but maybe some of them are correct. Maybe. I think it’s best to give it a chance at least.
Openmindedness in these respects has always seemed to me highly selective—how openminded are you to the concept that most thunderbolts may be mere electromagnetic phenomena but maybe some thunderbolts are thrown down by Thor? Do you give that possibility a chance? Should we?
Or is it only the words that current society treats seriously e.g. “God” and “Jesus”, that we should keep an open mind about, and not the names that past societies treated seriously?
If billions of people think so, then yes, we should.
It’s not just that our society treats Jesus seriously, it’s that millions of people have overwhelming personal evidence of Him. And most of them are not rationalists, but they’re not mentally insane either.
Is the number of people really all that relevant?
I mean, there are over a billion people in the world who identify as believers of Islam, many of whom report personal experiences which they consider overwhelming evidence that there is no God but Allah, and Mahomet is His Prophet. But I don’t accept that there is no God but Allah. (And, I’m guessing, neither do you, so it seems likely that we agree that the beliefs of a billion people at least sometimes not sufficient evidence to compel confidence in an assertion.)
Going the other way, there was a time when only a million people reported personal evidence of Jesus Christ as Lord.
There was a time when only a hundred thousand people had.
There was a time when only a thousand people had.
Etc.
And yet, if Jesus Christ really is Lord, a rationalist wants to believe that even in 13 A.D., when very few people claim to. And if he is not, a rationalist wants to believe that even in 2013 A.D. when billions of people claim to.
I conclude that the number of people just isn’t that relevant.
I think that if in 13 A.D. you had asked a rationalist whether some random Nazarene kid was our savior, “almost certainly not” would have been the correct response given the evidence. But twenty years later, after a whole lot of strong evidence came out, that rationalist would have adjusted his probabilities significantly. The number of people who were brought up in something doesn’t matter, but given that there are millions if not billions of personal witnesses, I think God is a proposition to which we ought to give a fair chance.
And by “God” here you specifically mean God as presented in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints’ traditional understanding of the Book of Mormon, and our collective traditional understandings of the New Testament insofar as they don’t contradict each other or that understanding of the Book of Mormon, and our traditional understandings of the Old Testament insofar as they don’t contradict each other or any of the above.
Yes?
But you don’t mean God as presented in, for example, the Sufis’ traditional understanding of the Koran, and our collective traditional understandings of the New Testament insofar as they don’t contradict each other or that understanding of the Koran, and our traditional understandings of the Old Testament insofar as they don’t contradict each other or any of the above.
Yes?
Is this because there are insufficient numbers of personal witnesses to the latter to justify such a fair chance?
I mean deity or God in general. Because although they don’t agree on the details, these billions of people agree that there is some sort of conscious higher Power. And they don’t have to contradict each other in that.
Well… hm.
Is there sufficient evidence, on your account, to conclude (or at least take very seriously the hypothesis) that Thomas Monson communicates directly with a conscious higher Power in a way that you do not?
Is there sufficient evidence, on your account, to conclude (or at least take very seriously the hypothesis) that Sun Myung Moon communicated directly with a conscious higher Power in a way that you do not?
I think it’s too difficult to take this reasoning into specific cases. That is, with the general reasoning I’ve been talking about, I’m going to conclude that I think it’s best to take the general possibility of deity seriously.
Given that, and given my upbringing and personal experience and everything else, I think that it’s best to take Thomas Monson very seriously. I hardly know anything about Sun Myung Moon so I can’t say anything about him.
I can’t possibly ask you to do that second part, but I think that the possibility of deity in general is a cause I will fight for. (edit: clarified)
I see.
So on your account, if I’ve understood it, I have sufficient evidence to justify a high confidence in a conscious higher Power consistent with the accounts of all believers in Abrahamic religions, though not necessarily identical to that described in any of those accounts, and the fact that I lack such confidence is merely because I haven’t properly evaluated the evidence available to me.
Yes?
Just to avoid confusion, I’m going to label that evidence—the evidence I have access to on this account—E1.
Going further: on your account, you have more evidence than E1, given your upbringing and personal experience and everything else, and your evidence (which I’ll label E2) is sufficient to further justify a high confidence in additional claims, such as Thomas Monson’s exceptional ability to communicate with that Power.
Yes?
And since you lack personal experiences relating to Sun Myung Moon that justify a high confidence in similar claims about him, you lack that confidence, but you don’t rule it out either… someone else might have evidence E3 that justifies a high confidence in Sun Myung Moon’s exceptional ability to communicate with that Power, and you don’t claim otherwise, you simply don’t know one way or the other. .
Yes?
OK, so far so good.
Now, moving forward, it’s worth remembering that personal experience of an event V is not our only, or even our primary, source of evidence with which to calculate our confidence in V. As I said early on in our exchange, there are many events I’m confident occurred which I’ve never experienced observing, and some events which I’ve experienced observing which I’m confident never occurred, and I expect this is true of most people.
So, how is that possible? Well, for example, because other people’s accounts of an event are evidence that the event occurred, as you suggest with your emphasis on the mystical experiences of millions (or billions) of people as part of E1. Not necessarily compelling evidence, because people do sometimes give accounts of events that didn’t occur, but evidence worth evaluating.
Yes?
Of course, not all such accounts are equally useful as evidence. You probably don’t know Thomas Monson personally, but you still take seriously the proposition that he is a Prophet of YHWH, primarily on the basis of the accounts of a relatively small number of people whom you trust (due to E2) to be sufficiently reliable evaluators of evidence.
Yes?
(A digression on terminology: around here, we use “rational” as a shorthand which entails reliably evaluating evidence, so we might semi-equivalently say that you trust this group to be rational. I’m avoiding that jargon in this discussion because you’re new to the community and “rational” in the broader world has lots of other connotations that might prove distracting. OTOH, “sufficiently reliable evaluator of evidence” is really tedious to type over and over, which is why we don’t usually say that, so I’m going to adopt “SREoE” as shorthand for it here.)
Moving on: you don’t know Sun Myung Moon personally, but you don’t take seriously the proposition that he is a Prophet of the higher Power, despite the similar accounts of a relatively small number of people, presumably because you don’t trust them to be SREoEs.
Yes?
And similarly, you don’t expect me to take seriously the proposition that Thomas Monson is a Prophet of the higher Power, not only because I lack access to E2, but also because you don’t expect me to trust you as a SREoE. If I did (for whatever reason, justified or not) trust you to be a SREoE, I would take that proposition seriously.
Yes?
Pausing here to make sure I haven’t gone off the rails.
Yes, actually, that’s spot on. Good job and thank you for helping me to figure out my own reasoning. Please continue...
OK, good.
So, summarizing your account as I understand it and continuing from there:
Consider five propositions G1-G5 roughly articulable as follows:
G1: “there exists a conscious higher Power consistent with the accounts A1 of all believers in Abrahamic religions, though not necessarily identical to that described in any particular account in A1”
G2: “there exists a conscious higher Power consistent with the accounts A2 of Thomas Monson, where A2 is a subset of A1; any account Antm which is logically inconsistent with A2 is false.”
G3: “there exists a conscious higher Power consistent with the accounts A3 of Sun Myung Moon, where A3 may or may not be a subset of A1; any account Ansmm which is logically inconsistent with A3 is false.”
G4: “there exists a conscious higher Power consistent with the accounts A4 of all believers in any existing religion, Abrahamic or otherwise, though not necessarily identical to that described in any particular account in A4″
G5: “there exists a conscious higher Power consistent with the accounts A5 of some particular religious tradition R, where A5 is logically inconsistent with A1 and A2.”
2: On your account there exists evidence, E1, such that a SREoE would, upon evaluating E1, arrive at high confidence in G1. Further, I have access to E1, so if I were an SREoE I would be confident in G1, and if I lack confidence in G1 I am not an SREoE.
3: On your account there exists evidence E2 that similarly justifies high confidence in G2, and you have access to E2, though I lack such access.
4: If there are two agents X and Y, such that X has confidence that Y is an SREoE and that Y has arrived at high confidence of a proposition based on some evidence, X should also have high confidence in that proposition even without access to that evidence.
Yes? (I’m not trying to pull a fast one here; if the above is significantly mis-stating any of what you meant to agree to, pull the brake cord now.)
And you approached this community seeking evidence that we were SREoEs—specifically, seeking evidence that we had engaged with E1 in a sufficiently open-minded way, which an SREoE would—and you have concluded that no, we haven’t, and we aren’t.
Yes?
And because of that conclusion, you don’t reduce your confidence in G1 based on our interactions, because the fact that we haven’t concluded G1 from E1 is not compelling evidence that #2 above is false, which it would be if we were SREoEs.
Yes?
So, given all of that, and accepting for the sake of argument that I wish to become an SREoEs, how would you recommend I proceed?
And is that procedure one you would endorse following if, instead of engaging with you, I were instead engaging with someone who claimed (2b) “There exists evidence, E5, such that a SREoE would, upon evaluating E5, arrive at high confidence in G5. Further, Dave has access to E5, so if Dave were an SREoE he would be confident in G5, and if Dave lacks confidence in G5 he is not an SREoE.”?
I don’t think I can claim that your rejection of E1 means you are not a SREoE—this community is by far more SR in EE, the way we’re talking about it at least, than those who believe G1. I’m not going to go around calling anyone irrational as long as their conclusions do come from a proper evaluation of the evidence.
I can’t really claim E2 is that much stronger than E1—many people have access to E2 but don’t believe G2.
What I’m trying to figure out is if this community thinks that any SREoE must necessarily reject G1 (based largely on the inconsistency of E1). I’m not claiming that a SREoE must accept G1 upon being exposed to E1.
But assuming I did claim that I was a SREoE and you all weren’t...no, I don’t know. Because being a SREoE equates almost completely in my mind with being a rationalist in the ideal sense that this community strives for. That doesn’t mean everyone here is a SREoE, but most of them appear to be doing their best.
I’m curious, though, where else could this logic lead?
I get that you’re trying to be polite and all, and that’s nice of you.
Politeness is important, and the social constraints of politeness are a big reason I steered this discussion away from emotionally loaded terms like “rational,” “irrational,” “God,” “faith,” etc.in the first place; it’s a lot easier to discuss what confidence a SREoE resides in G1 given E1 without getting offended or apologetic or defensive than to discuss whether belief in God is rational or irrational, because the latter formulation carries so much additional cultural and psychological weight.
But politeness aside, I don’t see how what you’re saying can possibly be the case given what you’ve already agreed to. If E1 entails high confidence in G1, then an SREoE given E1 concludes that G1 is much more likely than NOT(G1), and an agent that does not conclude this is not an SREoE. That’s just what it means for evidence to entail a given level of confidence in a conclusion, be it a low level or a high level.
Which means that if you’re right that I have evidence that entails reasonably high confidence in the existence of God, then my vanishingly low confidence in the existence of God means I’m not being rational on the subject. Maybe that’s rude to say, but rude or not that’s just what it means for me to have evidence that entails reasonably high confidence in the existence of God.
And I get that you’re looking for the same kind of politeness in return… that we can believe or not believe whatever we want, but as long as we don’t insist it’s irrational to conclude from available evidence that God exists, we can all get along.
And in general, we’re willing to be polite in that way… most of us have stuff in our lives we don’t choose to be SREoEs about, and going around harassing each other about it is a silly way to spend our time. There are theists of various stripes on LW, but we don’t spend much time arguing about it.
But if you insist on framing the discussion in terms of epistemic rationality then, again, politeness aside, that doesn’t really work. If E1 entails low confidence in G1, then an SREoE given E1 concludes that G1 is much less likely than NOT(G1), and an agent that does not conclude this is not an SREoE. That’s just what it means for evidence to entail a given level of confidence in a conclusion, be it a low level or a high level.
Or, expressed in the more weighted way: either we have shared evidence that entails high confidence in the existence of God and I’m not evaluating that evidence as reliably as you are, or we have shared evidence that entails low confidence in the existence of God and you’re not evaluating that evidence as reliably as I am.
All the politeness in the world doesn’t change that.
All of that said, there’s no obligation here to be an SREoE in any particular domain, which is why I started this whole conversation by talking about pragmatic reasons to continue practicing your religion in the first place. If you insist on placing the discussion in the sphere of epistemic rationality, I don’t see how you avoid the conclusion, but there’s no obligation to do that.
I’m not trying to be nice. Do not interpret the fact that I’m won’t admit to attacking you to mean that I’m trying to be nice—perhaps I’m really not attacking you. I honestly believe that your position is fully self-justified, and I respect it.
Neither am I asking for politeness. I didn’t get come on here expecting you to be nice, only rational and reasonable, which most people have been. I’d be happy for you all to tell me that it’s irrational to conclude that God exists. One of my biggest questions was whether you all thought this was the case. Some of you don’t, but you all did, and undiplomatically told me so, I wouldn’t be offended. I might come away disappointed that this community wasn’t as open-minded as I had hoped (no accusations intended), but I wouldn’t be offended. If you think it’s the case, please tell me so, and I will respectfully disagree.
I think the biggest problem here is that, as I wrote in the other post, I don’t believe there’s only one conclusion a rational person (SREoE) can draw from the evidence. I don’t believe that there is only one correct “methodology,” and so I don’t believe that evidence necessarily entails one thing or the other.
I see. I apologize; I missed this the first time you said it.
So, on your view, what does it mean to evaluate evidence reliably, if not that sufficiently reliable evaluations of given evidence will converge on the same confidence in given propositions? What does it mean for a methodology to be correct, if not that it leads a system that implements it to a given confidence in given propositions given evidence?
Or, to put it differently… well, let’s back up a step. Why should anyone care about evaluating evidence reliably? Why not evaluate it unreliably instead, or not bother evaluating it at all?
Yeah, I don’t really know. It just depends on your paradigm—according to rationalists like yourself, it seems, a cold rational analysis is most “correct” and reliable. For some others, the process involves fasting and prayer. I’m not going to say either is infallible. Certainly logic is a wonderful thing which has its place in our lives. But taken too far it’s not always helpful or accurate, especially in us subjective humans.
Well, I certainly agree about fallibility. Humans don’t have access to infallible epistemologies.
That said, if fasting and prayer reliably gets me the most useful confidence levels in propositions for achieving my goals, then I should engage in fasting and prayer because that’s part of the most reliable process for evaluating evidence.
If it doesn’t, then that’s not a reason for me to engage in fasting and prayer, though I may choose to do so for other reasons.
Either one of those things is true, or the other is. And I may not know enough about the world to decide with confidence which it is (though I sure do seem to), but even if I don’t my ignorance doesn’t somehow make it the case that they are both true.
Is there no possibility of partly true?
These words seem subjective or at the very least unmeasurable. There is no way of determining absolutely whether something is “reliable” or “useful” without ridiculously technical definitions, which ruin the point anyway.
(sorry if I don’t respond right away. I’ve been retributively downvoted to −15 and so LW is giving me a hassle about commenting. The forum programming meant well...)
That’s OK. If we no longer have any way of agreeing on whether propositions are useful, reliable, or true, or agreeing on what it means for propositions to be any of these things, then I don’t anticipate the discussion going anywhere from here that’s worth my time. We can let it drop here.
Working as intended. Evangelism of terrible thinking is not welcome here. For most intents and purposes you are a troll. It’s time for you to go and time for me to start downvoting anyone who feeds you. Farewell Ibidem (if you the user behind the handle ever happen to gain an actual sincere interest in rationality I recommend creating a new account and making a fresh start.)
There is one direction a SREoE updates on evidence—towards the evidence.
If I have strong reasons (high prior probability) of thinking that a coin has heads on both sides, I’m making a mistake by becoming more confident after I flip the coin and it comes up tails.
Likewise, if I have strong reasons of thinking that another coin is biased towards heads, so it turns up heads 60% instead of 50%, I’m committing the same error if I become more confident after seeing the coinflip turn up tails.
So learning E1 should make any SREoE become more confident of G1 unless that person’s priors are already very heavily weighed towards G1. In the real world, there just aren’t that many SREoE’s with high priors on G1 before being exposed to E1.
First of all, note that you effectively just said that nearly all religious people are irrational. I won’t hold it against you, just realize that that’s the position you’re expressing.
Obviously. If there is clear evidence against your beliefs, you should decrease your confidence in your beliefs. But the problem is that this situation is not so simple as heads and tails.
What I’m trying to say is that two SREoEs can properly examine E1 and come up with different conclusions. I’m sorry if I agreed too fully to Dave’s first set of propositions—the devil’s in the details, as we irrational people who believe in a Devil say sometimes.
The key is “if I haven’t properly evaluated the evidence.” I took “properly” to mean “in a certain way,” while Dave intended it as “in the one correct way.” When this became clear, I tried to clarify my position.
I’m going to reiterate it again, because you don’t seem to be getting it: I believe that it’s possible for two equally R Es oE to evaluate the same evidence and come up with different conclusions. Thus exposure to E1 does not necessarily entail any confidence-shifting at all, even in a SREoE.
I’ll pop in here and note that the general point of view here is that everyone is irrational, and even the best of us frequently err. That’s why we tend to use the term “aspiring rationalist,” since nobody has reached the point of being able to claim to be an ideal rationalist.
The highest standard we can realistically hold people to is to make a genuine effort to be rational, to the best of their abilities, using the information available to them.
That’s true. It’s not actually “rational” vs. “irrational,” even if that would make the situation so much easier to understand.
I hope you’d agree, though, that there are many people in this world (think: evangelicals) who don’t make any sort of effort to be rational in the sense you mean it, and even some who honestly think logical inference is a tool of the devil. How sad...but probably no need to worry about them in this thread.
That is possible if and only if the two SREoEs started with different beliefs (priors) before receiving the same evidence. Aumann’s Agreement Theorem says that SREoEs who start with the same beliefs and see the same evidence cannot disagree without doing something wrong.
I didn’t write this clearly. I meant that most human SREoEs who haven’t been exposed to E1 don’t assign high probability to G1. Theoretically, an SREoE who hadn’t been exposed to E1 could have such high confidence in G1 that expose to E1 should reduce confidence in G1. In practice, I’m not sure any adult human hasn’t been exposed to E1 already, and I’m doubtful that most children are SREoEs—thus, I’m not sure whether the set (human&non-E1&SREoE) has any elements in existence.
I’m saying that people who assign high probability to G1 after exposure to E1 either (a) had very different priors about G1 than I before exposure to E1, or (b) are not SREoEs. Alternatively, I either (a) am not an SREoE, or (b) have not been exposed to the evidence we have referred to as E1.
To put it slightly differently, I can identify evidence that would make me increase the probability I assign to G1. Can you identify evidence that would make you decrease the probability you assign G1?
Perhaps, then, I don’t fully agree with Aumann’s Agreement Theorem. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that means I’m not a “genuine” Bayesian. I wouldn’t have a problem with being unable to fully adopt a single method of thinking about the universe.
Is it fair to say that most current SREoEs became that way during a sort of rationalist awakening? (I know it’s not as simple as being a SREoE or not, and so this process actually takes years. but let’s pretend for a moment.) Imagine a child who grows up being fed very high priors about G1. This child (not a SREoE) is exposed to E1 and has a high confidence in G1. When he (/she) grows up and eventually becomes a SREoE, he first of all consciously throws out all his priors (rebellion against parents), then re-evaluates E1 (re-exposure?) and decides that in fact it entails ~G1.
Whether or not this describes you, does it make sense?
How about this: since both of you have been exposed to the same evidence and don’t agree, then either (a) you had very different priors (which is likely), or (b) you evaluate evidence differently. I’m going to avoid saying either of you is “better” or “more rational” at evaluating evidence.
Whoa there. Aumann’s agreement theorem is a theorem. It is true, full stop. Whatever that term “SREoE” means (I keep going up and keep not seeing an explanation), either it doesn’t map onto the hypotheses of Aumann’s agreement theorem or you are attempting to disagree with a mathematical fact.
I believe it was “Sufficiently reasonable evaluator of evidence”—which I was using roughly equivalently to Bayesian empiricist. I’m beginning to doubt that is what ibidem means by it.
TheOtherDave defined it way back in the thread to try to taboo “rationalist,” since that word has such a multitude of denotations and connotations (including the LW intended meanings). Edit: terminology mostly defined here and here.
Sufficiently reliable, but otherwise yes.
That said, we’ve since established that ibidem and I don’t have a shared understanding of “reliable” or “evidence,” either, so I’d have to call it a failed/incomplete attempt at tabooing.
They’re using it to mean “sufficiently reliable evaluator of evidence”.
For it to be a mathematical fact, it needs a mathematical proof. Go ahead...!
Like it or not, rationality is not mathematics—it is full of estimations, assumptions, objective decisions, and wishful thinking. Thus, a “theorem” in evidence evaluation is not a mathematical theorem, obtained using unambiguous formal logic.
If what you mean to say is that Aumann’s Agreement “Theorem” is a fundamental building block of your particular flavor of rational thinking, then what this means is simply that I don’t fully subscribe to your particular flavor of rational thinking. Nothing (mathematics nearly excepted) is “true, full stop.” Remember? 1 is not a probability. That one’s even more “true, full stop” than Aumann’s ideas about rational disagreement.
Here you go.
When did I claim that rationality was mathematics?
When did I say this?
Right here:
Maybe not “rationality” exactly but Aumann’s work, whatever it is you call what we’re doing here. Rational decision-making.
So yes, Aumann’s theorem can be proven using a certain system of formalization, taking a certain set of definitions and assumptions. What I’m saying is not that I disagree with the derivation I gave, but that I don’t fully agree with its premises.
You didn’t yet, I didn’t say you did. I’m guessing that that’s what you actually mean though, because very, very few things if any are “true, full stop.” Something like this theorem can be fully true according to Bayesian statistics or some other system of thought, full stop. If this is the case, then in means I don’t fully accept that system of thought. Is disagreement not allowed?
How does what I said there mean “rationality is mathematics”? All I’m saying is that Aumann’s agreement theorem is mathematics, and if you’re attempting to disagree with it, then you’re attempting to disagree with mathematics.
I agree that this is what you should’ve said, but that isn’t what you said. Disagreeing with an implication “if P, then Q” doesn’t mean disagreeing with P.
No, it’s not. I just mean that mathematical facts are mathematical facts and questioning their relevance to real life is not the same as questioning their truth.
Now this just depends on what we mean by “disagree.” Of course I can’t dispute a formal logical derivation. The math, of course, is sound.
All I disagree with X, which means either that I don’t agree that Q implies X, or I don’t accept P.
I’m not questioning mathematical truth. All I’m questioning is what TimS said. But if we agree it was just a misunderstanding, can we move on? Or not. This also doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, especially if we’ve decided we fundamentally disagree. (Which in and of itself is not grounds for a downvote, may I remind you all.)
I didn’t downvote you because we disagree, I downvoted you because you conflated disagreeing with the applicability of a mathematical fact to a situation with disagreeing with a mathematical fact. Previously I downvoted you because you tried to argue against two positions I never claimed to hold.
Glad we’ve got that cleared up, then. I wasn’t only talking to you; there are a few people who have taken it upon themselves to make my views feel unwelcome here. Sorry if we’ve had some misunderstandings.
This was not my experience. I was raised in a practicing religious family, and the existence of the holy texts, the well-being of the members of the religious community, and the existence of the religious community were all strong evidence for G1.
I reduced the probability I assigned to G1 because I realized I was underweighing other evidence. Things I would expect to be true if G1 were true turned out to be false. I think I knew those facts were false, but did not consider the implications, and so didn’t adjust my belief in G1.
Once I considered the implications, it became clear to me that E1 was outweighed by the falsification of other implications of G1. Given that balance, I assign G1 very very low probability of being accurate. But I still don’t deny that E1 is evidence of G1. If I didn’t know E1, learning it would adjust upward my belief in G1.
Also, if we are going to talk coherently about priors, we can’t really describe anything humans do as “throwing out their priors.” If we really assign probability zero to any proposition, we have no way of changing our minds again.. And if we assign some other probability, justifying that is weird.
In practice, what people seem to mean is best described technically as changing what sorts of things count as evidence. I changed my beliefs about G1 because I started taking the state of the world and the prevalence of human suffering as a fact about G1
Certainly you can’t simply will your aliefs to change, but it does seem to be a conscious and deliberate effort around here. The belief in G1 usually happens without any knowledge about Bayesian statistics, technical rationality, or priors, so this “awakening” may be the first time a person ever thought of E1 as “evidence” in this technical sense.
By the way, I think the best response to this argument is that yes, there is evil, but God allows it because it is better for us in the long run—in other words, if there is an afterlife which is partly defined by our existence here, than our temporary comfort isn’t the only thing to consider. If we all lived in the Garden of Eden, we would never learn or progress. But I don’t want a whole new argument on my hands.
I agree. As soon as a theist can demonstrate some evidence for his deity’s existence… well, I may not convert on the spot, given the plethora of simpler explanations (human hoaxers, super-powered alien teenagers, stuff like that), but at least I’d take his religion much more seriously. This is why I mentioned the prayer studies in my original comment.
Unfortunately, so far, no one managed to provide this level of evidence. For example, a Mormon friend of mine claimed that their Prophet can see the future. I told him that if the Prophet could predict the next 1000 rolls of a fair six-sided die, he could launch a hitherto unprecedented wave of atheist conversions to Mormonism. I know that I personally would probably hop on board (once alien teenagers and whatnot were taken out of the equation somehow). That’s all it would take—roll a die 1000 times, save a million souls in one fell swoop.
I’m still waiting for the Prophet to get back to me...
This one is a classic Sunday School answer. The God I was raised with doesn’t do that sort of thing very often because it defeats the purpose of faith, and knowledge of God is not the one simple requirement for many versions of heaven. It is necessary, they say, to learn to believe on your own. Those who are convinced by a manifestation alone will not remain faithful very long. There’s always another explanation. So yes, you’re right, God (assuming Mormonism is true for a moment, as your friend does) could do that, but it wouldn’t do the world much good in the end.
The primary problem with this sort of thing is that apparently God was willing to do full-scale massive miracles in ancient times. So why the change?
Right, but hopefully this explains one of the reasons why I’m still an atheist. From my perspective, gods are no more real than 18th-level Wizards or Orcs or unicorns; I don’t say this to be insulting, but merely to bring things into perspective. There’s nothing special in my mind that separates a god (of any kind) from any other type of a fictional character, and, so far, theists have not supplied me with any reason to think otherwise.
In general, any god who a priori precludes any possibility of evidence for its existence is a very hard (in fact, nearly impossible) sell for me. If I were magically transported from our current world, where such a god exists, into a parallel world where the god does not exist, how would I tell the difference ? And if I can’t tell the difference, why should I care ?
Well, if in one world, your disbelief results in you going to hell and being tormented eternally, I think that would be pretty relevant. Although I suppose you could say in that case you can tell the difference, but not until it’s too late.
Indeed. I have only one of me available, so I can’t afford to waste this single resource on figuring things out by irrevocably dying.
Right, simpler explanations start with a higher probability of being correct. And if two explanations for the same data exist, you should assign a high chance to the one that is simpler.
Why should one give “it a chance” and what does that mean? Note also that “nutcase” is an overly strong conclusion. Human reasoning and senses are deeply flawed, and very easy to have problems. That doesn’t require nutcases. For example, I personally get sleep paralysis. When that occurs, I get to encounter all sorts of terrible things, demons, ghosts, aliens, the Borg, and occasionally strange tentacled things that would make Lovecraft’s monsters look tame. None of those things exist- I have a minor sensory problem. The point of using something like schizophrenia is an example is that it is one of the most well-known explanations for the more extreme experiences or belief sets. But the general hypothesis that’s relevant here isn’t “nutcase” so much as “brain had a sensory or reasoning error, as they are wont to do.”
In this case, “there are no gods” is still the null hypothesis, but (from the perspective of those people) it has been falsified by overwhelming evidence. Some kind of overwhelming evidence coming directly from a deity would convince me, as well; but, so far, I haven’t see any (which is why I haven’t mentioned it in my post, above).
I can’t speak for other atheists, but I personally think that it is entirely possible that certain gods exist. For example, I see no reason why the Trimurti (Brahma/Vishnu/Shiva) could not exist in some way. Of course, the probability of their existence is so vanishingly small that it’s not worth thinking about, but still, it’s possible.
I appreciate that you try to keep the possibility open, but I think it’s kind of silly to say that there is a possibility, just a vanishingly small one. Mathematically, there’s no sense in saying that an infinitesmal is actually any greater than 0 expect for technical reasons—so perhaps you technically believe that the Trimurti could exist, but for all intents and purposes the probability is 0.
If you’re ruling out infinitesimals then yes, I don’t think there’s any chance any chance the gods worshipped by humans exist.
A chance of 0 or effectively 0 is not conducive to a rational analysis of the situation. And I don’t think there’s enough evidence out there for a probability that small.
Why not ? What probability would you put on the proposition that the following things exist ?
Tolkien-style Elves
Keebler Elves
Vishnu, the Preserver
Warhammer-style Orcs
Thor, the Thunderer
Chernobog/Bielobog, the Slavic gods of fortune (bad/good respectively)
Unicorns
I honestly do believe that all of these things could, potentially, exist.
If I really thought about it, I would have to say that there’s quite a good chance that somewhere through all the universes there’s some creature resembling a Keebler elf.
All right, so does this mean that living your life as though Keebler Elves did not exist at all would be irrational ? After all, there’s a small probability that they do exist...
I never called anyone irrational for not believing in elves. I only said that a perfectly rational person would keep the possibility open.
Please stop exaggerating my arguments (and those of, for instance, the Book of Mormon) in order to make them easier to dismiss. It’s an elementary logical fallacy which I’m finding quite a lot of here.
You kinda did:
In my own personal assessment, the probability of Keebler Elves existing is about the same as the probability of any major deities existing—which is why I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it. My assessment is not dogmatic, though; if I met a Keebler Elf in person, or saw some reputable photographic evidence of one, or something like that, then I’d adjust the probability upward.
I’d assign a higher probability to Keebler Elves than to an interventionist diety. Keebler Elves don’t have issues with theodicy.
I think it depends on the deity; for example, Thor doesn’t have issues with theodicy, either. But, IMO, at this point we’re pretty much down to discussing which epsilon is smaller; and in practice, the difference is negligible.
What probability do you actually think I should assign? More or less than to me winning the lottery if I buy a ticket? Is winning the lottery an infinitesimally small chance or should I actually consider it?
Do you mean to ask this about specifically the religion issue or things in general? Keep in mind, that while policy debates should not be one sided, that’s because reality is complicated and doesn’t make any effort to make things easy for us. But, hypotheses don’t function that way- the correct hypotheses really should look extremely one-sided, because they reflect what a correct description of reality is.
So the best arguments for an incorrect hypothesis are by nature going to be weak. But if I were to put on my contrarian arguer hat for a few minutes and give my own personal response, I’d say that first cause arguments are possibly the strongest argument for some sort of deity.
It’s a good point. Of course, hundreds of years ago, the argument was also pretty one-sided, but that doesn’t mean anyone was correct. I also don’t think that the argument really is one-sided today, I just think that the two sides manage to ignore each other quite thoroughly. I
’m not expecting this site to house a debate on the possibility of God’s existence. Clearly this site is for atheists. I’m asking, is that actually necessary? I suppose you’re saying that yes, it is impossible for rationality and religion to coexist, and that’s why there are very few theistic rationalists. I’m still not convinced of that.
First cause arguments are a strange existential puzzle, depending on the nature of your God. Any thought system that portrays God as a sort of person will run into the same problem of how God came into existence.
A rationalist should strive to have a given belief if and only if that belief is true. I want to be a theist if and only if theism is correct.
Note also that getting the right answers to these sorts of questions matters far more than some would estimate. If Jack Chick is correct, then most people here (and most of the world) is going to burn in hell unless they are saved. And this sort of remark applies to a great deal of religious positions (less so for some Muslims, most Jews and some Christians but the basic point is true for a great many faiths). In the other direction, if there isn’t any protective, intervening deity, then we need to take serious threats to humanity’s existence, like epidemics, asteroids, gamma ray bursts, nuclear war, bad AI, nanotech, etc. a lot more seriously, because no one is going to pick up the pieces if we mess up.
To a large extent, most LWians see the basics of these questions as well-established. Theism isn’t the only thing we take that attitude about. You also won’t see here almost any discussion of continental philosophy for example.
So is LW for people who think highly rationally, or for atheists who think highly rationally? Are those necessarily the same? If not, where are the rational theists?
You’re assuming that “no God” is the null hypothesis. Is there a good, rational reason for this? One could just as easily argue that you should be an atheist if and only if it’s clear that atheism is correct. Without any empirical evidence either way, is it more likely that there is some sort of Deity or that there isn’t?
IMO there’s no such thing as a null hypothesis; epistemology doesn’t work like that. The more coherent approach is bayesian inference, where we have a prior distribution and update that distribution on seeing evidence in a particular way.
If there were no empirical evidence either way, I’d lean towards there being an anthropomorphic god (I say this as a descriptive statement about the human prior, not normative).
The trouble is that once you start actually looking at evidence, nearly all anthropomorphic gods get eliminated very quickly, and in fact the whole anthropomorphism thing starts to look really questionable. The universe simply doesn’t look like it’s been touched by intelligence, and where it does, we can see that it was either us, or a stupid natural process that happens to optimize quite strongly (evolution).
So while “some sort of god” was initially quite likely, most particular gods get eliminated, and the remaining gods are just as specific and unlikely as they were at first. So while the “gods” subdistribution is getting smashed, naturalistic occamian induction is not getting smashed nearly as hard, and comes to dominate.
The only gods remaining compatible with the evidence are things like “someone ran all possible computer programs”, which is functionally equivalent to metaphysical “naturalism”, and gods of very specific forms with lots of complexity in the hypothesis that explains why they constructed the world to look exactly natural, and then aren’t intervening yet.
Those complex specific gods only got a tiny slice of the god-exists pie at the beginning and cannot collect more evidence than the corresponding naturalistic explanation (because they predict the same), so they are pretty unlikely.
And then when you go to make predictions, what these gods might do gets sliced up even further such that the only useful predictive framework is the occamian naturalism thing.
There is of course the chance that there exists things “outside” the universe, and the major implication from that is that we might some day be able to break out and take over the metauniverse as well.
Neither, really. It’s for people who are interested in epistemic and instrumental rationality.
There are a number of such folks here who identify as theists, though the majority don’t.
Can you clarify what you mean by “some sort of Deity”? It’s difficult to have a coherent conversation about evidence for X without a shared understanding of what X is.
In general, it’s not rational to posit that anything exists without evidence. Out of the set of all things that could be posited, most do not exist.
“Evidence” need not be direct observation. If you have a model which has shown good predictive power, which predicts a phenomenon you haven’t observed yet, the model provides evidence for that phenomenon. But in general, people here would agree that if there isn’t any evidence for a proposition, it probably isn’t true.
ETA: see also Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Certainly. But why is “God” the proposition, and not “no God?”
Because nearly all things that could exist, don’t. When you’re in a state where you have no evidence for an entity’s existence, then odds are that it doesn’t exist.
Suppose that instead of asking about God, we ask “does the planet Hoth, as portrayed in the Star Wars movies, exist?” Absent any evidence that there really is such a planet, the answer is “almost certainly not.”
If we reverse this, and ask “Does the planet Hoth, as portrayed in the Star Wars movies, not exist?” the answer is “almost certainly.”
It doesn’t matter how you specify the question, the informational content of the default answer stays the same.
I don’t think that the Hoth argument applies here, because what we’re looking for is not just some teapot in some random corner of the univers—it’s a God actively involved in our universe. In other words, in God does exist, He’s a very big part of our existence, unlike your teapot or Hoth.
That’s a salient difference if his involvement is providing us with evidence, but not if it isn’t.
Suppose we posit that gravitational attraction is caused by invisible gravity elves, which pull masses towards each other. They’d be inextricably tied up in every part of our existence. But absent any evidence favoring the hypothesis, why should we suspect they’re causing the phenomenon we observe as gravity? In order for it to make sense for us to suspect gravity elves, we need evidence to favor gravity elves over everything else that could be causing gravity.
I suppose it’s fair to say that if our universe was created by a clockmaker God who didn’t interfere with our world, then it wouldn’t matter to us whether or not He existed. But since there’s a lot of reason to think that God does interact with us humans (like, transcripts of His conversations with them), then it does matter.
Well, I’m willing to discuss the evidence for and against that proposition. Naturally, I would not be an atheist if I thought the weight of evidence was in favor of an interventionist god existing.
Naturally. But there have been a lot of debates about which way the evidence points, and none of them seem to have convinced anyone.
Some of them have certainly convinced people. I’ve convinced a number of people myself, and I’ve known plenty of other people who were convinced by debates with other people (or even more often, by observing debates between other people, since it’s easier to change your mind when you’re not locked in an adversarial debate mindset. This is why it’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking of your debate partner as an opponent.)
A lot of religious debates are not productive, people tend to go into them very attached to their conclusions, but they’re by no means uniformly fruitless.
I like debates a lot, and I’ve very much enjoyed whatever you call this here. But I’m not interested in a full-blown debate here and now, especially since there are about five of you.
We don’t actually have any idea what causes gravity. Your elves may well be Higgs Bosons or something like that. (God Particles...)
So no, we don’t have any evidence that “elves” of some kind cause gravity, or that anything at all does. And so the question is open—we don’t suspect anything, but we don’t particularly suspect nothing either.
It’s rather disingenuous to speak of the Higgs Boson as gravity elves though.
With gravity, we’re not really in a state of no evidence, because as I said before, if you have an effective predictive model, then you have evidence for the things the model predicts. So we have evidence favoring things that could plausibly fit into our existing models over things that couldn’t.
If we’re discussing, for instance, what caused the universe to come into existence, and it turns out that there is a first cause, but it has nothing that could be described as thoughts or intentions, then it doesn’t save the god hypothesis to say that something was there, because what was there doesn’t resemble anything that it’s useful to conceive of as god.
Not really. Bayesian reasoning doesn’t have any notion of a null hypothesis. I could just as well have said “I want to be an atheist if and only if atheism is correct”.
One can talk about the prior probability of a given hypothesis, and that’s a distinct issue which quickly gets very messy. In particular, it is extremely difficult to both a) establish what priors should look like and b) not get confused about whether one is taken for granted very basic evidence about the world around us (e.g. its existence). One argument, popular at least here, is that from an Occam’s razor standpoint, most deity hypotheses are complicated and only appear simple due to psychological and linguistic issues. I’m not sure how much I buy that sort of argument. But again, it is worth emphasizing that one doesn’t need control of the priors except at a very rough level.
It may help if you read more on the difference between Bayesian and frequentist approaches. The general approach of LW is primarily Bayesian, whereas notions like a “null hypothesis” are essentially frequentist.
You’re right that prior probability gets very, very messy. It’s a bit too abstract to actually be helpful to us.
So, then, all we can do is look at the evidence we do have. You’re saying that the argument is one-sided; there is no evidence in favor of theism, at least no good evidence. I agree that there is a lot of bad evidence, and I’m still looking for good evidence. You’ve said you don’t know of any. Thank you. That’s what I wanted to know. In general I don’t think it’s healthy to believe the opposing viewpoint literally has no case.
Do you think that young earth creationists have no substantial case? What about 9/11 truthers? Belief in astrology? Belief that cancer is a fungus(no I’m not making that one up)? What about anything you’ll find here?
The problem is that some hypotheses are wrong, and will be wrong. There are always going to be a lot more wrong hypothesis than right ones. And in many of these cases, there are known cognitive biases which lead to the hypothesis type in question. It may help to again think about the difference between policy issues (shouldn’t be one-sided), and factual questions (which once one understands most details, should be).
You cannot escape the necessity of dealing with priors, however messy they are.
The available evidence supports an infinite number of hypotheses. How do you decide which ones to consider? That is your prior, and however messy it may be, you have to live with it.
How legitimate does “most legitimate” have to be? If I thought there were any criticisms sufficiently legitimate to seriously reconsider my viewpoints, I would have changed them already. To the extent that my religious beliefs are different than they were, say, fifteen years ago, it’s because I spent a long time seeking out arguments, and if I found any persuasive, I modified my beliefs accordingly. But I reached a point where I stopped finding novel arguments for theism long before I stopped looking, so if there are any arguments for theism that I would find compelling, they see extremely little circulation.
The arguments for “theism” which I see the least reason to reject are ones which don’t account for anything resembling what we conventionally recognize as theism, let alone religion, so I’m not sure those would count according to the criteria you have in mind.
I’d be happy to hear what you’ve got. I can’t just ask you to share all of your life-changing experiences, obviously. Having looked for new arguments and not found any good ones is a great position, I think, because then you can be pretty sure you’re right. I don’t know if I could ever convince myself there are no new arguments, though.
I’m certainly not convinced that there are no new arguments, but if there were any good arguments, I would expect them to have more currency.
If you want to explain what good arguments you think there are, I’d certainly be willing to listen. I don’t want to foist all the work here onto you, but honestly, having you just cover what you think are the good arguments would be simpler than me covering all the arguments I can think of, none of which I actually endorse, without knowing which if any you ascribe to.
I’m sorry, I can’t help you with that. I’m sure that you’ve done much more research on this than I have. I’m looking for decent arguments because I don’t believe all these people who say there aren’t any.
Well, what do you mean by decent? Things I accept as having a significant weight of evidence, or things I can understand how people would see them as convincing, even if I see reasons to reject them myself?
In the latter sense, it makes sense to assume that there must be good arguments, because if there weren’t arguments that people found convincing, then so much of the world would most likely not be convinced. But in the former sense, it doesn’t make sense to assume that there must be good arguments in general, because for practical purposes it means you’d be assuming the conclusion that a god is real, and it makes even less sense to assume that I specifically would have any, because if I did, I wouldn’t disbelieve in the proposition that there is a god.
One of the things that those of us who’re seriously trying to be rational share is that we try to conduct ourselves so that when the weight of evidence favors a particular conclusion, we don’t just say “well, that’s a good point, and I acknowledge it,” we adopt that conclusion. Our positions should represent, not defy, the evidence available to us.
This is largely a problem of the nature of each side’s evidence. MOst of the evidence in favor of God is quickly dismissed by those who think they’re more rational than the rest of humanity, and the biggest piece of evidence I’m being given against God is that there is no evidence for Him (at least none that you guys accept). Absence of evidence is at best a passive, weak argument (which common wisdom would generally reject).
And no, I’m not assuming that God is real, I’m simply assuming that there’s a non-negligible chance of it. Is that too much to ask?
And the same question arises that has been raised several times: how ought I address the evidence from which many Orthodox Jews conclude that Moses was the last true Prophet of YHWH?
From which many Muslims conclude that Mahomet was the last true Prophet of YHWH?
From which many Christians conclude that Jesus was the last true Prophet of YHWH?
From which millions of followers of non-Abrahamic religions conclude that YHWH is not the most important God out there in the first place?
Is it not reasonable to address the evidence from which Mormons conclude that Lehi, or Kumenohni, or Smith, or Monson, were/are Prophets of YHWH the same way, regardless of what tradition I was raised in?
If skepticism about religious claims is not justified, then it seems to follow naturally that skepticism about religious claims is not justified.
It’s important to note that in fact, most Muslims and many Christians (I don’t know Judaism as well) believe that Moses, Mohammed, and Jesus were all true prophets. They differ in a few details, but the general message is the same.
I think it is definitely reasonable to address all of this evidence. One of Thomas Monson’s predecessors expressly stated that he believed God truly did appear to Mohammed.
I never said I was necessarily skeptical of claims by Jews or Muslims. Some of them must have been brain glitches, just as some claims by Mormons probably are too. But I have no problem accepting that Jews, Muslims, and Christians (maybe even atheists) can all receive divine revelation.
As I said before, it’s impractical to try to stretch this logic to argue in favor of any one religion. I’m talking about the existence of God in general.
FWIW, the form of Judaism I was raised in entails the assertion that Jesus Christ was not the Messiah, so is logically incompatible with most forms of Christianity.
That aside, though, I’m content to restrict our discussion to non-sectarian claims; thanks for clarifying that. I’ve tried to formalize this a little more in a different thread; probably best to let this thread drop here.
You’re right, silly me, I honestly should have remembered that. Judaism seems less...open...in that way. But I still think that details of the nature of God aside, the general message of each of these religions, namely “la ilaha ila allah,” is the same. (“There is no God but God,” that is. It’s much more elegant in Arabic.)
This whole mess is certainly in need of some threads being dropped or relocated. Good idea—where is it?
I refer to this thread.
Oh yes, it’s wonderful thank you.
Well, if we’re mistaken in dismissing the evidence theists raise in support of the existence of gods, then of course, with the weight of evidence in favor of it, it’s reasonable to assign a non-negligible probability to it.
The important question here is whether the people dismissing the purported evidence in favor are actually correct.
Suppose we’re discussing the question of how old the earth is. One camp claims the weight of evidence favors the world being about 4.5 billion years old, another claims the weight of evidence favors it being less than 12,000 years old. Each camp has arguments they raise in favor of this point, and the other camp has reasons for rejecting the other camp’s claims.
At least one of these camps must be wrong about the weight of evidence favoring their position. There’s nothing wrong with rejecting purported evidence which doesn’t support what its advocates claim it supports. Scientists do this amongst each other all the time, picking apart whether the evidence of their experiments really supports the authors’ conclusions or not. You have to do that sort of thing effectively to get science done.
As far as I’ve seen, you haven’t yet asked why we reject what you consider to be evidence in favor of an interventionist deity. Why not do that? Either we’re right in rejecting it or we’re not. You can try to find out which.
As long as we’re not sure of the truth (you may be, but our society in general is not), it’s silly to go around saying who’s “correct” in accepting or rejecting a particular piece of evidence.
I believe I understand why you reject all evidence in favor of God. I know a lot of atheists, and I’ve read a lot of rationalism. To simplify: the books are all made up and the modern revelation is all brain glitches. And you believe that according to your rationalist way of thinking, this is the only “correct” conclusion to draw.
I think that you’re fully justified in rejecting this evidence based on the way you look at the situation. I look at things differently, and I accept some of the evidence. And thus we disagree. What I’m wondering now is whether you think it’s necessarily “wrong” to accept such evidence.
Suppose a researcher performs an experiment, and from its results, concludes that lemons cure cancer. Another scientist analyzes their procedure, and points out “Your methodology contains several flaws, and when I perform experiments with those same flaws, I can show with the same level of significance that ham, beeswax, sugarpill, and anything else I’ve tested, also cures cancer. But if I correct those flaws in the methodology, I stop getting results that indicate that any of these things cure cancer.”
Do you continue to accept the experiment as evidence that lemons cure cancer?
It’s hard to get around this without seeming arrogant or condescending, but yes, I do.
It’s a major oversimplification to say that my position is simply “the books are all made up and the modern revelation is all brain glitches,” but I do believe that every standard of evidence I’ve encountered in support of any religion (and I’ve encountered a lot) can be re-applied in other situations where the results are easier to check, and be shown to be ineffective in producing right answers.
If a person does science poorly, then the poorness of their research isn’t a matter of opinion, it’s a fact about how effectively their experiments allow them to draw true conclusions about reality.
No, I don’t, and here’s why: in the context of clinical trials, there are established agreements about right and wrong methodology.
What does this correspond to in your analogy? What this part does is show that the scientist questioning the methodology is correct, and the original experimenter is wrong. However I don’t see any objective evidence that your “methodology” is better than a methodology that allows for God.
However, if you’re trying to mean that your “correct” methodology is science in general, and that accepting evidence of God is inherently unscientific...
yes, that’s what you’re saying. OK. That’s largely what I was wondering—in your mind, there’s no possible way to reconcile religion and rationality. Because the only evidence for God was found using a bad methodology, namely, personal experience.
If you want to raise specific points of evidence for god, I can explain how the analogy relates, unless you have better evidence which I haven’t heard before.
“Personal experience” as a general term does not describe a set of methodologies which are universally bad. In my experience, the set of methodologies which have been used to produce evidence for god are all bad, but it’s not because they’re personal experiences. Besides which, not all proposed evidence for god comes in the form of personal experience. I didn’t spend years studying religion just so I could brush it all away by shoving it all into a single category I could dismiss out of hand, or so that I could argue persuasively that it wasn’t true.
I think it’s a mistake of rationality to try to reconcile religion and rationality, in the way that it seems to me that you’re doing, because in general you don’t want to try to reconcile rationality with any specific conclusion. You just follow the evidence to find what conclusion it supports.
Does the available evidence support the conclusion that the earth is 4.5 billion years old? It either does or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t, then the conclusion probably isn’t true. Does the available evidence support invisible gravity elves? A link between HIV and AIDS? In each of these cases, the answer is simply yes or no.
Sometimes we make mistakes in our judgment of evidence. We don’t expect any human to be perfect at it. We have disagreements here about factual matters, and we acknowledge that this occurs because some or all of us are making mistakes as fallible human beings. But most of us agree on the matter of religion because we think the evidence is clear-cut enough to lead us to the same conclusion.
Right, OK.
But one thing:
Science is not nearly so black-and-white. If it were simply a matter of running an experiment with “good methodology,” it would be easy. But I know how academia works. It’s messy.
For instance, does the available evidence support the conclusion that this new thing causes cancer? Yes or no, please. Because the scientists don’t agree, and it’s not a simple matter of figuring out which side is being irrational.
Which new thing?
As I said, humans are fallible, we have disagreements about factual matters. If we were all perfect judges of evidence, then all scientists with access to the same information would agree on how likely it is that some thing causes cancer. Sometimes making judgments of evidence is hard, sometimes it’s easier. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a right answer in each case.
Any one of many things whose safety is disputed. The point is that it’s not so simple as right and wrong in science
That’s what I mean. Even with the same evidence available, scientists don’t all come to a the same conclusion.
And so I think that while in the case of the age of the earth it clearly does, but in many cases we just can’t tell.
Right. It’s not that there isn’t always a yes or no answer, it’s just that it’s sometimes difficult for us to work out what the correct judgment is.
It’s possible that religion is such a case, but most of us here agree that the state of the evidence there is easier to judge than, for instance, the latest carcinogen suspect.
That’s a complicated question in general, because “our own way of thinking” is not a unary thing. We spend a lot of time disagreeing with each other, and we talk about a lot of different things.
But if you specifically mean atheism in its “it is best to reason and behave as though there are no gods, because the alternative hypotheses don’t have enough evidence to justify their consideration” formulation, I think the most legitimate objection is that it may turn out to be true that, for some religious traditions—maybe even for most religious traditions—being socially and psychologically invested in that tradition gets me more of what I want than not being invested in it, even if the traditions themselves include epistemically unjustifiable states (such as the belief that an entity exists that both created the universe and prefers that I not eat pork) or false claims about the world (as they most likely do, especially if this turns out to be true for religious traditions that disagree with one another about those claims).
I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s plausible, and if it is true it’s important. (Not least of which because it demonstrates that those of us who are committed to a non-religious tradition need to do more work at improving the pragmatic value of our social structures.)
As for atheism, I don’t mean those that think religion is good for us and we ought to believe it whether or not it’s true. I meant rational thinkers who actually believe God realistically could exist. It’s definitely interesting to think about trying to convince yourself to believe in God, or just act that way, but is it possible to actually believe with a straight face?
Well, you asked for the most legitimate criticisms of rejecting religious faith.
Religious faith is not a rational epistemology; we don’t arrive at faith by analyzing evidence in an unbiased way.
I can make a pragmatic argument for embracing faith anyway, because rational epistemology isn’t the only important thing in the world nor necessarily the most important (although it’s what this community is about).
But if you further constrain the request to seeking legitimate arguments for treating religious faith (either in general, or that of one particular denomination) as a rational epistemology, then I can’t help you. Analyzing observed evidence in an unbiased way simply doesn’t support faith in YHWH as worshiped by 20th-century Jews (which is the religious faith I rejected in my youth), and I know of no legitimate epistemological criticism that would conclude that it does, nor of any other denomination that doesn’t have the same difficulty.
Now, if you want to broaden your search to include not only counterarguments against rejecting religious faith of specific denominations, but also counterarguments against rejecting some more amorphous proto-religious belief like “there exist mega-powerful entities in the universe capable of feats I can barely conceive of” (without any specific further claims like “and the greatest one of them all divided the Red Sea to free our ancestors from slavery in Egypt” or “and the greatest one of them all wrote this book so humanity would know how to behave” or even “and they pay attention to and direct human activity”) then I’d say the most legitimate counterargument is Copernican: I start out with low confidence that my species is the most powerful entity in the universe, and while the lack of observed evidence of such mega-powerful entities necessarily raises that confidence, it might not legitimately raise it enough to accept.
But we’ve now wandered pretty far afield from “my way of thinking,” as I’m perfectly comfortable positing the existence of mega-powerful entities in the universe capable of feats I can barely conceive of.
Thank you for answering my question. If I read it right you’re saying “No, it’s not possible to reconcile religion and rationality, or at least I can’t refer you to any sane person who tried.”
If I understand what you’re using “religion” and “rationality” to mean, then I would agree with the first part. (In particular, I understand you to be referring exclusively to epistemic rationality.)
As for the second part, there are no doubt millions of sane people who tried. Hell, I’ve tried it myself. The difficulty is not in finding one, but rather in finding one who provides you with what you’re looking for.
What do you mean by “your own way of thinking” here? I can think of the following possible interpretations:
The way I personally think about things
The way this community thinks about things
Atheism and skepticism in general
Any of these, really. It takes incredible strength to recognize flaws in your entire way of thinking, but if anyone can do it, the Rationalists ought to be able to.
What I’d really love is a link to someone smart saying “This is why I think the Less Wrong people are all misled, and here are good reasons why.” But that’s probably too much to expect, even around here.
Okay. This may not be the kind of thing you had in mind, but the way I personally think about things:
is probably not focused enough on emotions. I’m not very good at dealing with emotions, either myself or other people’s, and I imagine that someone who was better would have very different thoughts about how to deal with people both on the small scale (e.g. interpersonal relationships) and on the large scale (e.g. politics).
may overestimate the value of individuals (e.g. in their capacity to affect the world) relative to organizations.
The way this community thinks about things:
is biased too strongly in directions that Eliezer finds interesting, which I suppose is somewhat unavoidable but unfortunate in a few respects. For example, Eliezer doesn’t seem to think that computational complexity is relevant to friendly AI and I think this is a strong claim.
is biased towards epistemic rationality when I think it should be more focused on instrumental rationality. This is a corollary of the first bullet point: most of the Sequences are about epistemic rationality.
is biased towards what I’ll call “cool ideas,” e.g. cryonics or the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. I’ve been meaning to write a post about this.
is hampered by a lack of demographic diversity that is probably bad for cognitive diversity (my impression is that LW is overwhelmingly male, white, 18-24 years old, etc.).
Atheism and skepticism in general:
is likely to be another form of belief as attire in practice. As in, I think many people who identify very strongly as atheists or skeptics are doing it to signal tribal affiliation more than anything else.
Eh, does it? I think it just requires a cultural meme about criticism being a good thing. LW has this, maybe too much of this, and my impression is that so does Judaism (based on e.g. avoiding your belief’s real weak points). This is some evidence that you are thinking reasonably but it isn’t extremely strong evidence.
Could you elaborate?
On why Eliezer doesn’t seem to think that or why I think that this is a strong claim? We had a brief discussion about this here.
That usually gets you a culture of inconsequential criticism, where you can be as loudly contrarian as you want as long as you don’t challenge any of the central shibboleths. This is basically what Eliezer was describing in “Real Weak Points”, but it shows up in a lot of places; many branches of the modern social sciences work that way, for example. It gets particularly toxic when you mix it up with a cult of personality and the criticism starts being all about how you or others are failing to live up to the Great Founder’s sacrosanct ideals.
I’m starting to think it might not be possible to advocate for a coherent culture that’s open to changing identity-level facts about itself; you can do it by throwing out self-consistency, but that’s a cure that’s arguably worse than the proverbial disease. I don’t think strength of will is what’s missing, though, if anything is.
Yes. And that’s what I’m unrealistically looking for—not just disagreement, but fundamental disagreement. And by fundamental I don’t mean the nature of the Singularity, as central as that is to some. I mean things like “rational thought is better than irrational thought” or “religion is not consistent with rational thought.” Even if they’re not spoken, they’re important and they’re there, which means they ought to be up for debate. I mean “ought to” in the sense that the very best, most intellectually open society imaginable would have already debated these and come to a clear conclusion, but would be willing to debate them again at any time if there was reason to do so.
What, on your view, constitutes a reason to debate issues about which a community has come to a conclusion?
Relatedly, on your view, can the question of whether a reason to debate an issue actually exists or not ever actually be settled? That is, shouldn’t the very best, most intellectually open society imaginable on your account continue to debate everything, no matter how settled it seems, because just because none of its members can currently think of a reason to do so is insufficient grounds not to?
I think it’s safe to end a debate when it’s clear to outside observers (these are important) that it’s not going anywhere new. An optimal society listens to outsiders as well.
OK. Thanks for answering my question.
These are good, thank you.
About epistemic vs. instrumental rationality, though: I had never heard those terms but it seems like a pretty simple difference of what rationality is to be used for. The way I understand it, Less Wrong is quite instrumentally focused. There are many posts as well as sequences (and all of HPMOR) about how to apply rationality to your everyday life, in addition to those dealing only with technical probabilities (like Pascal’s Mugging—not realistic).
Personally I’m more interested in the epistemic side of things and not a fan of assurances that these sequences will substantially improve your relationships or anything like that. But that’s just me.
There are people here who say that kind of thing all the time… whether they are smart and the reasons are actually good is somewhat less certain.
Right, that’s the problem. There are plenty of sites saying why LW is a cult, just as there are plenty of ignorant religion-bashers. I’ve found many intelligent atheists, and I’m sure that there are rational intellectuals out there who disagree with LW. But where are they?
If you mean rational intellectuals who are theists and disagree with LW I cannot help you. Finding those who disagree with LW on core issues is less difficult. Robin Hanson for example. For an intelligent individual well informed of LW culture who advocates theism you could perhaps consider Will Newsome. Although he has, shall we say, ‘become more eccentric than he once was’ so I’m not sure if that’ll satisfy your interest.
Thanks, I’ll look them up.
As far as I know, most criticism of LW focuses on its taking certain strange problems seriously, not on atheism. LW has an unusual focus on Pascal-like problems, on artificial intelligence, on acausal trade, on cryonics and death in general, and on Newcomb’s Problem. Many of these focuses result in beliefs that other rationalist communities consider “strange.” There is also some criticism of Eliezer’s position on quantum mechanics, but I’m not familiar enough with that issue to comment on it.
I have no sense of what’s important, and respond to stimuli that I should just ignore.