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?
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?