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.
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.