I have looked through this thread, bravely started by ibidem, and I have noticed what seems like a failure mode by all sides. A religious person does not just believe in God, s/he alieves in God, too, and logical arguments are rarely the best way to get through to the relevant alieving circuit in the brain. Oh, they work eventually, given enough persistence and cooperation, but only indirectly. If the alief remains unacknowledged, we tend to come up with logical counterarguments which are not “true rejections”. As long as the alief is there, the logic will bounce off with marginal damage, if any. I wonder if there is a more effective level of discourse.
Just to refresh, here is the definition:
alief is associative, action-generating, affect-laden, arational, automatic, agnostic with respect to its content, shared with animals, and developmentally and conceptually antecedent to other cognitive attitudes
So, for example, subjects are reluctant to drink from a glass of juice in which a completely sterilized dead cockroach has been stirred, hesitant to wear a laundered shirt that has been previously worn by someone they dislike, and loath to eat soup from a brand-new bedpan. They are disinclined to put their mouths on a piece of newly-purchased vomit-shaped rubber (though perfectly willing to do so with sink stopper of similar size and material), averse to eating fudge that has been formed into the shape of dog feces, and far less accurate in throwing darts at pictures of faces of people they like than at neutral faces
I am guessing that part of any religious belief is the alief in a just universe.
A religious person does not just believe in God, s/he alieves in God, too, and logical arguments are rarely the best way to get through to the relevant alieving circuit in the brain.
If I were talking to a religious person elsewhere, that would make sense. But, this is LessWrong, and the respectful way to have this discussion here is to depend upon logic and rationalism. Anything else, and in my opinion we’d be talking down to him.
Sorry, we don’t live in a should-universe, either. If your goal is to influence a religious person’s perception of his/her faith, you do what it takes to get through, not complain that the other party is not playing by some real or imaginary rules. But hey, feel free to keep talking about logic, rationalism and respect. That’s what two-boxers do.
Interesting. I’d never heard of alief but it’s a good way of explaining things. This is partly why I said (somewhere) that I don’t think science will ever be able to fully prove this issue one way or the other—religion or lack thereof is necessarily a matter of alief as well as belief, and it’s impossible in practice to look at this issue entirely rationally.
(I’m sure it’s much too late now to claim I never intended to start a debate about religion. Now that there are about fifteen people all arguing against me I don’t think I can keep it up, but I sure was asking for it.)
Remember, your post has (at the time of this comment at least) a score of 4. Subjects that are “taboo” on LessWrong are taboo because people tend to discuss them badly. You asked some legitimate questions, and some people provided you with good responses.
If you’re willing to consider changing your mind, the next step would be to read the sequences. A lot of what you mention is answered there, such as:
I’ve read several of the sequences, and I’m fairly familiar with this community’s way of thinking.
Everyone is referring me to Absence of Evidence; I think that it’s a weak argument in the first place, but it also seems to be the only one a lot of people have.
Everyone is referring me to Absence of Evidence; I think that it’s a weak argument in the first place
Do you think it’s a weak argument in general, or just a weak argument with respect to religion in particular?
If the former, it would certainly help if you could explain that. If the latter, do you think that religion is a special case with respect to need for evidence, or are you simply arguing that there is evidence available to us? And if the last one, why not discuss that evidence?
Hardly anyone treats it as the only argument against religion, but for many people here it is a fully sufficient argument.
You just need to apply the principle of parsimony (Occam’s razor) correctly.
Now a very weak way of applying it is as follows “In the absence of evidence of a deity, a hypothesis of no god is simpler/more parsimonious than the hypothesis that there is a god. So there is no god”. If that’s what you think we’re arguing, I can understand why you think it weak.
However, a much stronger formulation looks like this. “If there were a deity, we would reasonably expect the world to look very different from the way we find it. True, it is possible to hypothesize a deity who intervenes—and fails to intervene—in exactly the right way to create the world that we see, including the various religious beliefs within it. But such a hypothetical being involves so many ad hoc auxiliary hypotheses and wild excuses that it is highly unparsimonious. So we should not believe in such a being”.
Here are some examples of the ad hoc hypotheses and excuses needed:
A god creates complex livings beings, but chooses to create them in precisely the one way (evolution by natural selection) that would also work without an intelligent designer/creator. This happens to be a woefully inefficient form of design and creation; about the least efficient means possible.
In case that method might lead to some doubt about its existence and powers, the god then carefully hides all evidence of the method it used, by burying them in ancient rocks and deep inside the creatures’ DNA. Further, the god ensures that the creatures cannot even imagine the correct explanation for their existence until all the evidence is eventually dug-up and pieced together. Further, that they will fiercely resist the correct explanation when it is finally discovered. Instead they will infer creation by other, directly supernatural means, and hence come to believe in the god by erroneous reasoning.
The god is capable of inducing belief directly in its creatures, but doesn’t do so because it regards that as a violation of their free will. However it is happy to use other forceful means of inducing belief, such as early childhood indoctrination, constant repetition and ritual, strong cultural expectation and moral pressure, ostracism for disbelief, or even state persecution/coercion for disbelief. These are presumably NOT considered violations of free will.
Notwithstanding point 3, the god chooses to reveal itself directly to some of its creatures, but then chooses methods of revelation which are highly inconsistent between subjects, and indistinguishable from various forms of sensory illusion and mental illness. Evidences of these revelations are then arranged to be preserved imperfectly in oral accounts and eventually written up in unprofessionally-authored documents, rather than being preserved via more reliable recording methods.
Is all of that story impossible? No it isn’t.
Is it at all plausible? No it isn’t.
Does the principle of parsimony make us reject such a story? Yes, it does.
I’ll point out here that even in America, many theists accept evolution, but most believe in guided evolution, where the deity set the process in motion and then directed the course of evolution to the desired result. This doesn’t offer predictions that deviate nearly as much from our observations as the predictions of creationism, but our observations still contain a suspicious number of evolutionary dead ends, do-overs, and failures to use the best available evolutionary mechanisms (why couldn’t our evolutionary guide have given us eyes more like squid eyes?)
I have looked through a bunch of your recent replies, and they exhibit a number of standard cognitive biases worth addressing before you can profitably carry any religion-related discussion. Or any rational discussion for that matter. Learning about the biases and learning to identify them in yourself is an important part of instrumental rationality. After you are at a reasonable discourse level, and have critically examined your epistemology, as most regulars here have done and still do on occasion, you might or might not choose to be a Mormon for religious and/or possibly social reasons. Or you may decide to not open that particular Pandora’s box, who knows. But you are not there yet. Your religion-related arguments are of the level of a physics newbie arguing against relativity with the race car-on-a-train idea, or Draco arguing for blood purity in HPMOR. You cannot even understand the arguments presented to you, and so you reject them out of hand.
Um, I’d be happy to hear all about them. Like, specific biases and examples. It’s not much help for me just to be told I’m completely clueless.
Your religion-related arguments are of the level of a physics newbie arguing against relativity with the race car-on-a-train idea
Keep in mind that I never intended to challenge atheism. I’m not trying to convert anybody, because I know how that would appear.
You cannot even understand the arguments presented to you, and so you reject them out of hand.
Obviously I have to disagree. I’ve heard many arguments here that educated me and expanded my understanding, and a few people have said that they agree with points I have made. But if you insist on fixating upon my newness—what specifically would you recommend I read to improve? I’ve read most of the sequences, and I’ve been keeping up with general discussion for a few weeks now.
Also, keep in mind that you’ve deliberately been keeping the discussion away from any actual religion, and focused simply on the question of theism. I think nearly everyone here would have more arguments against all existing religions.
Absence of Evidence is directly tied to having a probabilistic model of reality. There might be an inferential gap when people refer you to it, because on its own the argument doesn’t seem strong. But it’s a direct consequence of Bayesian reasoning, which IS a strong argument.
(Just to clarify: I didn’t mean to accuse you of ignorance, and I sympathize with having everyone spam you with links to the same material, which must be aggravating.)
Bayesian probabilistic reasoning is the unique (up to isomorphism) generalization of Aristotelian (two-valued) logic to reasoning about uncertainty. You can’t throw it out without inconsistency.
I have looked through this thread, bravely started by ibidem, and I have noticed what seems like a failure mode by all sides. A religious person does not just believe in God, s/he alieves in God, too, and logical arguments are rarely the best way to get through to the relevant alieving circuit in the brain. Oh, they work eventually, given enough persistence and cooperation, but only indirectly. If the alief remains unacknowledged, we tend to come up with logical counterarguments which are not “true rejections”. As long as the alief is there, the logic will bounce off with marginal damage, if any. I wonder if there is a more effective level of discourse.
Just to refresh, here is the definition:
from the original paper, and some examples:
I am guessing that part of any religious belief is the alief in a just universe.
If I were talking to a religious person elsewhere, that would make sense. But, this is LessWrong, and the respectful way to have this discussion here is to depend upon logic and rationalism. Anything else, and in my opinion we’d be talking down to him.
Sorry, we don’t live in a should-universe, either. If your goal is to influence a religious person’s perception of his/her faith, you do what it takes to get through, not complain that the other party is not playing by some real or imaginary rules. But hey, feel free to keep talking about logic, rationalism and respect. That’s what two-boxers do.
Two boxers don’t only do wrong things, and it’s not obvious this is actually related to two-boxing.
Two-boxers live in a should-universe, given how they insist on following “logic” over evidence.
Interesting. I’d never heard of alief but it’s a good way of explaining things. This is partly why I said (somewhere) that I don’t think science will ever be able to fully prove this issue one way or the other—religion or lack thereof is necessarily a matter of alief as well as belief, and it’s impossible in practice to look at this issue entirely rationally.
(I’m sure it’s much too late now to claim I never intended to start a debate about religion. Now that there are about fifteen people all arguing against me I don’t think I can keep it up, but I sure was asking for it.)
Remember, your post has (at the time of this comment at least) a score of 4. Subjects that are “taboo” on LessWrong are taboo because people tend to discuss them badly. You asked some legitimate questions, and some people provided you with good responses.
If you’re willing to consider changing your mind, the next step would be to read the sequences. A lot of what you mention is answered there, such as:
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence The Fallacy of Grey (specifically, when you mention that because we don’t know the whole truth, we can’t objectively evaluate evidence) 0 and 1 are not probabilities This one actually supports what you were saying, where you were entirely right that you can’t assign a probability of 0 to the existence of God. But you still don’t know if this probability is 0.9, 0.1, 0.01 or 0.0000001. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/ml/but_theres_still_a_chance_right/
I’ve read several of the sequences, and I’m fairly familiar with this community’s way of thinking.
Everyone is referring me to Absence of Evidence; I think that it’s a weak argument in the first place, but it also seems to be the only one a lot of people have.
Do you think it’s a weak argument in general, or just a weak argument with respect to religion in particular?
If the former, it would certainly help if you could explain that. If the latter, do you think that religion is a special case with respect to need for evidence, or are you simply arguing that there is evidence available to us? And if the last one, why not discuss that evidence?
I think it’s weak when it’s essentially the only argument a person has against religion.
Hardly anyone treats it as the only argument against religion, but for many people here it is a fully sufficient argument. You just need to apply the principle of parsimony (Occam’s razor) correctly.
Now a very weak way of applying it is as follows “In the absence of evidence of a deity, a hypothesis of no god is simpler/more parsimonious than the hypothesis that there is a god. So there is no god”. If that’s what you think we’re arguing, I can understand why you think it weak.
However, a much stronger formulation looks like this. “If there were a deity, we would reasonably expect the world to look very different from the way we find it. True, it is possible to hypothesize a deity who intervenes—and fails to intervene—in exactly the right way to create the world that we see, including the various religious beliefs within it. But such a hypothetical being involves so many ad hoc auxiliary hypotheses and wild excuses that it is highly unparsimonious. So we should not believe in such a being”.
Here are some examples of the ad hoc hypotheses and excuses needed:
A god creates complex livings beings, but chooses to create them in precisely the one way (evolution by natural selection) that would also work without an intelligent designer/creator. This happens to be a woefully inefficient form of design and creation; about the least efficient means possible.
In case that method might lead to some doubt about its existence and powers, the god then carefully hides all evidence of the method it used, by burying them in ancient rocks and deep inside the creatures’ DNA. Further, the god ensures that the creatures cannot even imagine the correct explanation for their existence until all the evidence is eventually dug-up and pieced together. Further, that they will fiercely resist the correct explanation when it is finally discovered. Instead they will infer creation by other, directly supernatural means, and hence come to believe in the god by erroneous reasoning.
The god is capable of inducing belief directly in its creatures, but doesn’t do so because it regards that as a violation of their free will. However it is happy to use other forceful means of inducing belief, such as early childhood indoctrination, constant repetition and ritual, strong cultural expectation and moral pressure, ostracism for disbelief, or even state persecution/coercion for disbelief. These are presumably NOT considered violations of free will.
Notwithstanding point 3, the god chooses to reveal itself directly to some of its creatures, but then chooses methods of revelation which are highly inconsistent between subjects, and indistinguishable from various forms of sensory illusion and mental illness. Evidences of these revelations are then arranged to be preserved imperfectly in oral accounts and eventually written up in unprofessionally-authored documents, rather than being preserved via more reliable recording methods.
Is all of that story impossible? No it isn’t.
Is it at all plausible? No it isn’t.
Does the principle of parsimony make us reject such a story? Yes, it does.
I’ll point out here that even in America, many theists accept evolution, but most believe in guided evolution, where the deity set the process in motion and then directed the course of evolution to the desired result. This doesn’t offer predictions that deviate nearly as much from our observations as the predictions of creationism, but our observations still contain a suspicious number of evolutionary dead ends, do-overs, and failures to use the best available evolutionary mechanisms (why couldn’t our evolutionary guide have given us eyes more like squid eyes?)
I have looked through a bunch of your recent replies, and they exhibit a number of standard cognitive biases worth addressing before you can profitably carry any religion-related discussion. Or any rational discussion for that matter. Learning about the biases and learning to identify them in yourself is an important part of instrumental rationality. After you are at a reasonable discourse level, and have critically examined your epistemology, as most regulars here have done and still do on occasion, you might or might not choose to be a Mormon for religious and/or possibly social reasons. Or you may decide to not open that particular Pandora’s box, who knows. But you are not there yet. Your religion-related arguments are of the level of a physics newbie arguing against relativity with the race car-on-a-train idea, or Draco arguing for blood purity in HPMOR. You cannot even understand the arguments presented to you, and so you reject them out of hand.
Um, I’d be happy to hear all about them. Like, specific biases and examples. It’s not much help for me just to be told I’m completely clueless.
Keep in mind that I never intended to challenge atheism. I’m not trying to convert anybody, because I know how that would appear.
Obviously I have to disagree. I’ve heard many arguments here that educated me and expanded my understanding, and a few people have said that they agree with points I have made. But if you insist on fixating upon my newness—what specifically would you recommend I read to improve? I’ve read most of the sequences, and I’ve been keeping up with general discussion for a few weeks now.
That doesn’t really answer my question.
Also, keep in mind that you’ve deliberately been keeping the discussion away from any actual religion, and focused simply on the question of theism. I think nearly everyone here would have more arguments against all existing religions.
Absence of Evidence is directly tied to having a probabilistic model of reality. There might be an inferential gap when people refer you to it, because on its own the argument doesn’t seem strong. But it’s a direct consequence of Bayesian reasoning, which IS a strong argument.
(Just to clarify: I didn’t mean to accuse you of ignorance, and I sympathize with having everyone spam you with links to the same material, which must be aggravating.)
It’s certainly an important point, but I think that atheists tend to overuse it. I can’t begin to criticize Bayesian reasoning, especially not here.
Bayesian probabilistic reasoning is the unique (up to isomorphism) generalization of Aristotelian (two-valued) logic to reasoning about uncertainty. You can’t throw it out without inconsistency.
I never tried to. I know exactly how Bayes’ Theorem is mathematically derived and I won’t try to contest that.