I was a Christian for many years, but repeatedly found that the best arguments I heard against Christianity seemed stronger than either the best refutations of those arguments or the best arguments for Christianity, and was uncomfortably aware that I didn’t have much in the way of actual evidence for the factual claims of the religion I followed.
Bear in mind that this was several years ago, so my memory may be faulty. But I think mostly the arguments I called #1 and #2 above, together with (applicable only to more-traditional versions of Christianity) objections to specific Christian doctrines as morally monstrous (hell), probably internally incoherent (Trinity, dual nature of Christ), factually incorrect (recent origin of life), etc. Factual claims: pretty much any of them aside from some (mostly unimportant theologically) historical details. A couple of central examples: The existence of God, the resurrection of Jesus.
Looking at the discussion that’s followed from this, one thing seems worth emphasizing: the monstrous/incoherent/incorrect Christian doctrines constitute strong evidence that Christianity is wrong collectively, not individually. A body of ideas can be excellent on the whole while still having occasional errors in it; but if you look at Christian doctrines as a whole, and divide them into (1) uncontroversial ones, (2) controversial ones whose rightness or wrongness we have little hope of evaluating, (3) controversial ones that on further investigation seem to be right, and (4) controversial ones that on further investigation seem to be wrong … it looks to me as if there are a lot more in category 4 than in category 3. And that seems to me like good evidence that Christianity is not, in fact, the product of revelation from a benevolent superbeing.
The claim of a recent origin of life is not very central to Christianity. In fact, I believe this is a minority position among Christians world-wide. Did you intend it as a factually incorrect claim of Christianity, or as a factually incorrect claim of a particular flavor of Christianity (e.g. fundamentalist)?
I intended it as a factually incorrect claim of some versions of Christianity. It is true that most present-day Christians, especially those in wealthy industrialized well-educated nations, no longer make such a claim. (And also that the possibility of taking the Biblical account as something other than straightforward factual narrative has eminent representatives a long way back into the Christian tradition. But I’m pretty sure that until, say, 250 years ago at least 90% of the world’s Christians, and a sizeable majority even of the world’s best-informed Christians, believed that the origin of life is very recent. How much that matters when trying to decide whether Christianity is right is an interesting question I don’t propose to go into here.)
[EDITED to add a word I noticed I’d accidentally omitted.]
I’m pretty sure that until, say, 250 years ago at least 90% of the world’s Christians, and a sizeable majority even of the world’s best-informed Christians, believed that the origin of life is very recent.
I don’t know if that is true or not, but it sounds plausible. However, 250 years ago no one had a justified, accurate estimate of how long ago life originated—the science behind that had not been done yet. So, I do not see how the fact (if fact it be) that most Christians had an inaccurate idea about how old life is has any relevance to whether or not Christianity is true.
As I said, the relationship of this to the truth or untruth of Christianity’s claims is complicated. But one reason why it might be relevant is that there is a difference between not knowing something and confidently believing something that is false, or still worse holding that that false thing is a revelation from God. If for many centuries the Christian tradition confidently proclaimed a belief that was actually wrong, then that doesn’t make the Christians involved particularly bad or stupid (since, as you say, no one else knew the answer either) but it does mean that the Christian tradition was capable of prolonged serious error. Which in turn means e.g. that arguments of the form “X is more likely to be true, because look at this lengthy tradition of people who believed it”—which is actually an argument with some strength; people believe true things more often than otherwise similar false things—are weaker than they would be without such mistakes in the history of that tradition.
it does mean that the Christian tradition was capable of prolonged serious error.
I don’t know that I would classify the error as serious; a belief in a recent origin of life it is not central to Christian doctrine. None of the core tenants of Christianity are dependent on a recent origin of life. Nor is correctness regarding the age of life instrumentally important in the typical person’s day-to-day non-religious activities. And, it is not the case that the Christian community as a whole (obviously there are some exceptions) hung on to this belief once strong contrary evidence became available.
there is a difference between not knowing something and confidently believing something that is false
This is true. But, I suspect that rather than confidently believing in a recent origin of life, a lot of pre-modern Christians simply did not give the topic much thought one way or the other. And, it seems to me that holding an incorrect belief in the absence of evidence against the belief is a relatively minor failing, particularly if that belief is a non-central one.
arguments of the form “X is more likely to be true, because look at this lengthy tradition of people who believed it”—which is actually an argument with some strength; people believe true things more often than otherwise similar false things—are weaker than they would be without such mistakes in the history of that tradition
But, we already have lots of evidence that a lengthy tradition of belief in something does not imply that the thing is true. So, premodern Christian belief in a recent origin of life does little to weaken the argument that X is probably true if there is a lengthy tradition of people believing X (since the argument was IMO already quite weak to begin with).
a belief in a recent origin of life is not central to Christian doctrine.
There are plenty of Christians who would disagree (or, more precisely, would say that a belief in a recent origin of human life along the lines of the story in Genesis is central, on the grounds that the New Testament draws analogies between Adam and Christ that don’t work if there was not a historical Adam with the right characteristics).
More to the point—since in fact I agree with you that a recent origin of life is not central to Christian doctrine—I think an error can be serious without being central to Christian doctrine.
we already have lots of evidence that a lengthy tradition of belief in something does not imply that the thing is true.
We do. None the less, many Christians have trouble applying that evidence to their own religion :-).
There are plenty of Christians who would disagree (or, more precisely, would say that a belief in a recent origin of human life along the lines of the story in Genesis is central, on the grounds that the New Testament draws analogies between Adam and Christ that don’t work if there was not a historical Adam with the right characteristics).
Regarding Adam—yes I think that Catholics in particular are committed to a belief that there was an actual Adam and an actual Eve. However, as far as I know, they are not committed to any particular time-line as to when the actual Adam and the actual Eve lived (nor are they committed to all of Genesis being literal). So, I don’t think that this counts as modern Christians necessarily believing in a recent origin of human life, much less in a recent origin of life in general.
I think an error can be serious without being central to Christian doctrine
Fair enough—we can agree to disagree about that. I just don’t see how pre-modern Christians having an incorrect belief regarding a non-central (to Christianity) scientific fact in the absence of any significant evidence that their belief is wrong is particularly problematic.
many Christians have trouble applying that evidence to their own religion
I think that we have an area of agreement here—I think that the argument that we should believe in Christianity because there is a long tradition of people who believe in Christianity is, by itself, quite weak.
Meta-note 1: I am not much interested in turning this into a lengthy argument about whether the available evidence actually does or doesn’t support Christianity. When I did that for myself my notes ended up being about 80k words long, and that was fairly terse and didn’t waste space on mutual misunderstandings etc. as any discussion between different people is liable to do. I don’t think LW is a good venue for tens of thousands of words of religious argument. I was addressing your statement about ex-Christians having “the stupidest reasons”; if you want to argue, not that my reasons were stupid, but that after lengthy consideration they will turn out to be wrong, then that’s a change of subject.
Meta-note 2: I realise that in the grandparent of this comment I didn’t give a complete answer to your question (though it’s possible that the smaller question I answered was the one you actually intended) because I didn’t say anything about the arguments for Christianity that, in my opinion, were weaker than the best arguments against. I forget what arguments for Christianity (or, more weakly, for theism) I thought most convincing at the time, but here are some of the ones I looked into: arguments “from design” based on some variety of alleged excellence in the universe; inferences from particular apparent miracles or religious experiences to a divine agent behind them; arguments for Christianity in particular on the basis that the available historical evidence overwhelmingly favours belief in the resurrection of Jesus; allegedly-impressively-fulfilled prophecies in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures; “cosmological fine-tuning”; the alleged dependence of morality on God.
Punishing bad people may or may not be morally monstrous. Punishing finite badness with eternal torture is morally monstrous.
The scientific doctrine of light and matter does not really say that light and matter are “both particle and wave”; that is a simplification for popular presentation. What it actually does say is difficult for human brains, but even the appearance of contradiction between “particle” and “wave” goes away completely once it is understood.
[An earlier draft of this comment went into more detail and compared-and-contrasted with Christian thinking about the Trinity, but in keeping with my remark above that I am not interested in turning this into a lengthy argument about whether Christianity is right or wrong I’ve removed all that. My apologies if you’d have found it interesting.]
I am not much interested in turning this into a lengthy argument about whether the available evidence actually does or doesn’t support Christianity.
I’m not necessarily ether. I’m not even a Christian. That’s what makes the number of laughably bad arguments people use to deconvert themselves so frustrating.
Punishing bad people may or may not be morally monstrous. Punishing finite badness with eternal torture is morally monstrous.
Why? I actually disagree with this point.
The scientific doctrine of light and matter does not really say that light and matter are “both particle and wave”; that is a simplification for popular presentation. What it actually does say is difficult for human brains, but even the appearance of contradiction between “particle” and “wave” goes away completely once it is understood.
One could make the same argument about the trinity. BTW, do you actually understand quantum physics well enough for that to happen?
Why [is punishing finite badness with eternal torture morally monstrous]?
Because it seems incredibly unlikely to maximize utility, neither does it accord with what seems to me a general principle that punishment should be at most proportionate to the crime being punished. Why isn’t it morally monstrous?
One could make the same argument about the trinity.
I really don’t think one could. What Christian theologians themselves (at least, the ones I’ve read) say about the Trinity is generally not anything like “this is counterintuitive but we understand it clearly now”. I don’t think they would claim that the appearance of contradiction goes away once the thing is understood; in fact I think they are more inclined to say that the more deeply you understand it the more (gloriously) mysterious it gets.
BTW, do you actually understand quantum mechanics well enough for that to happen?
I think so. There are many levels of understanding quantum mechanics and I by no means claim to have achieved them all, but the apparent contradiction goes away rather early in the process and from what I do understand of the deeper levels it does not look to me as if it ever comes back. (Other mysteries do appear, but that’s a different matter.)
Because it seems incredibly unlikely to maximize utility,
Avoiding for the moment the question whether utilitarianism is the right approach to these kinds of problems. There is in fact a decision theory argument in favor of this. Eliezer stumbled up on a version of it and didn’t react well, specifically banning all detailed discussion of it from LW in an extremely ham-handed manner.
neither does it accord with what seems to me a general principle that punishment should be at most proportionate to the crime being punished.
Where does this principal come from? Can you provide any utilitarian justification for it? It’s a useful mildly useful Schelling point in certain rather specific circumstances but that’s about it.
There is in fact a decision theory argument in favor of this. Eliezer stumbled upon a version of it [...]
I haven’t given a lot of thought to that particular argument, but it doesn’t look to me as if it can plausibly work here. In order for it to produce useful effects without unacceptable collateral damage, it seems to me that you want the threat known to a small number of people and to persuade them to work towards a highly specific goal that those people are particularly well-suited to achieving. Exactly how small, how specific, what goal, and how well-suited may vary together in kinda-obvious ways. These conditions don’t seem to me to be anywhere near to being met in the case of the Christian idea of hell.
Can you provide any utilitarian justification for it?
I’m not sure. If I’m thinking in utilitarian terms (which I generally am) I am mostly concerned with actions rather than principles (unless the question at issue is “would this be a good principle to have?”, which it isn’t here). I brought the deontological viewpoint in at all only because I know some people reject consequentialism and may be (or profess to be) wholly unmoved by the mere fact that something causes vast amounts of unnecessary suffering.
it seems to me that you want the threat known to a small number of people and to persuade them to work towards a highly specific goal that those people are particularly well-suited to achieving.
Not really. In fact one reason for universality is to discourage reactions like Eliezer’s.
The more people the threat is known to, the less likely that they all comply. Then, if the idea is to actually follow through on the threat (note that if that isn’t the idea then you don’t have here any sort of argument that hell is not morally monstrous) you’re stuck with torturing a bunch of people for ever, which is liable to outweigh the benefits.
The more people the threat is known to, the less likely that they all comply.
And someone who doesn’t know about it is even less likely to comply. If you’ve already concluded that threatening to torture someone is worth it for the increased chance of getting compliance, then the exact same calculation applies to everyone else.
Hmm, that’s true. So let’s see how that calculation works out in the two cases being considered.
The one that upset Eliezer: the goal is to get a sufficient number of people from a rather unusual population to do something extraordinary. Probably doesn’t actually work (see e.g. the actual responses to that LW post, which AFAIK didn’t in any case take the form “OK, I must start doing all I can to comply”) but the idea here is that a small number of people can make a huge difference. The goal, therefore, is a very large impact per expected person tortured.
The one we’re talking about here: well, we can see roughly how this turns out. Empirically, people who believe in the Christian hell don’t behave dramatically better than people who do. Hence, a fairly small impact per expected person tortured.
(If I try to steelman your argument, I get things like this: “Ah, but you’re looking now, at a time when in fact scarcely anyone actually believes in hell. Historically, most of the hell-belief comes centuries ago when Christianity was stronger, and for that reason it was effective then, which was an essential element in making Western mostly-Christian civilization the effective, high-trust thing it is; so we may suppose that God gave people the idea of hell with that purpose, knowing that it would die out once it was no longer needed.” I don’t want to get into a lengthy response to an argument that I just made up and that you may think is no good, but here’s a sketchy one: 1. Plenty of people still believe in hell. 2. The doctrine of hell whose (de)merits we’re discussing doesn’t actually say that people are only eligible for hell if they have never stopped believing in it. 3. It’s not in fact at all clear that the doctrine of hell was ever very effective in improving behaviour. 4. Neither is it at all clear that any such improved behaviour had much to do with the evolution of Western society into what it is now. 5. It’s not hard to think of other ideas a benevolent superbeing could have given to its chosen people which would in fact have done more good.)
Empirically, people who believe in the Christian hell don’t behave dramatically better than people who do.
Hasn’t quite been my experience but, whatever.
The doctrine of hell whose (de)merits we’re discussing doesn’t actually say that people are only eligible for hell if they have never stopped believing in it.
Of course, otherwise it would be completely useless as it would simply motivate people to stop believing in it.
I agree that hell is a bad idea. That said, many Christians are tending more toward the position that very few people actually go to hell. It could be that only the very worst people go there, together with a few of the better people who could have done far more good than they actually did. If the numbers are small enough, there might be a significantly larger number of people who did a great amount of good, but would not have done it, if they had not believed in hell. In that case, there might be a large impact per person going to hell.
Obviously, there are still many problems with this, like whether that large impact can justify anything eternal.
Because it seems incredibly unlikely to maximize utility
It does maximize utility if it ends up being out-of-equilibrium for every agent. This is known as a grim trigger strategy. Making the “punishment proportionate to the crime” is definjtely worthwhile in imperfect information settings where you can’t ensure that the bad outcome will be fully out-of-equilibrium, but an agent with perfect information needs not concern hirself with this case!
I agree that that’s possible in principle but (1) it seems extremely unlikely to work out that way in practice, especially as (2) it is clear that the existence and terms of such punishment are very far from universal knowledge; and (3) those branches of the Christian tradition that embrace belief in eternal hell for the unsaved almost always also insist that we should not expect that hell to be empty.
(I should reiterate at this point that Christianity as such does not require belief in eternal torture for the unsaved; in particular, a pretty good argument can be made that its texts fit as well or better with mere annihilation for them, and if—as the more sophisticated Christians almost always are these days—you are willing to accept that much in those texts can be outright wrong, then all bets are off.)
those branches of the Christian tradition that embrace belief in eternal hell for the unsaved almost always also insist that we should not expect that hell to be empty.
There’s actually quite a bit of ambiguity about this—enough for a tradition of ‘universal reconciliation’ to exist, which expressly says that hell will eventually empty out. It seems rather clear that the position that we must take the possibility of eternal hell seriously and ‘make every effort to enter through the narrow door’ but that universal salvation is something that can meaningfully be hoped for, can in fact be held with some consistency.
I agree that there is some ambiguity, but I am not convinced that that position can be held so consistently as you suggest.
Let me first of all say that of course a Christian may make every effort to enter through the narrow door for reasons other than their personal welfare. I take it the question is whether they can be moved by the prospect of their own damnation while also thinking an empty hell likely.
Now, there are two different ways in which you could think an empty hell likely but not certain. (1) You could be uncertain between (a) lots of people in hell, with no realistic prospect of escape, and (b) some process that usually or always makes hell end up empty; or (2) you could be confident that the latter is the case, but think that in some cases the process might fail.
I don’t think branch 1 is actually relevant to this discussion—because if you think (1a) is a thing you think it’s plausible that God might do or allow, you’re right back in that “morally monstrous” box. So let’s consider branch 2.
What that means is that the danger of any given individual getting stuck in hell eternally is small enough that it’s likely that everyone gets out. Let’s suppose the total number of people ever to live is 100 billion = 10^11; then, crudely, that means that any individual’s risk of not getting out is no worse than about 1 chance in 10^-11.
And if the individual wondering about this is a Christian, making at least a typical-Christian effort to live a life pleasing to God, and thinks that the system in question was set up by that same God with the intention of incentivising God-pleasing behaviour … well, then surely they have to reckon their own chances considerably better than average.
So then the question is: how much actual incentive does, say, a 10^-12 probability of eternal damnation produce? Surely very little, not least because it’s kinda lost in the noise compared with other improbable ways of ending up eternally damned (some other nastier religion could be right, we could all end up in eternal-torture simulations by hostile AIs, etc.).
I think a Christian who seriously embraced the idea that an eternal hell exists but is likely to end up empty should not, and in most cases would not, be materially motivated by fear of ending up in hell.
Do you also find the scientific doctrine of light, and mater, being both particle and wave internally incoherent.
Depending on what exactly you mean by “particle” that’s either no less tautological than dogs being both mammals and animals or a possibly-only-approximate provisional model (complete with well-studied mathematical techniques to sweep the consequences of the incoherence under the rug) we’re using while we figure out how to extend quantum field theory down to the quantum gravity scale and beyond.
It’s already as long and detailed as it seemed to me reasonable to post here.
For example you wrote:
Which arguments and which factual claims?
Bear in mind that this was several years ago, so my memory may be faulty. But I think mostly the arguments I called #1 and #2 above, together with (applicable only to more-traditional versions of Christianity) objections to specific Christian doctrines as morally monstrous (hell), probably internally incoherent (Trinity, dual nature of Christ), factually incorrect (recent origin of life), etc. Factual claims: pretty much any of them aside from some (mostly unimportant theologically) historical details. A couple of central examples: The existence of God, the resurrection of Jesus.
Looking at the discussion that’s followed from this, one thing seems worth emphasizing: the monstrous/incoherent/incorrect Christian doctrines constitute strong evidence that Christianity is wrong collectively, not individually. A body of ideas can be excellent on the whole while still having occasional errors in it; but if you look at Christian doctrines as a whole, and divide them into (1) uncontroversial ones, (2) controversial ones whose rightness or wrongness we have little hope of evaluating, (3) controversial ones that on further investigation seem to be right, and (4) controversial ones that on further investigation seem to be wrong … it looks to me as if there are a lot more in category 4 than in category 3. And that seems to me like good evidence that Christianity is not, in fact, the product of revelation from a benevolent superbeing.
The claim of a recent origin of life is not very central to Christianity. In fact, I believe this is a minority position among Christians world-wide. Did you intend it as a factually incorrect claim of Christianity, or as a factually incorrect claim of a particular flavor of Christianity (e.g. fundamentalist)?
I intended it as a factually incorrect claim of some versions of Christianity. It is true that most present-day Christians, especially those in wealthy industrialized well-educated nations, no longer make such a claim. (And also that the possibility of taking the Biblical account as something other than straightforward factual narrative has eminent representatives a long way back into the Christian tradition. But I’m pretty sure that until, say, 250 years ago at least 90% of the world’s Christians, and a sizeable majority even of the world’s best-informed Christians, believed that the origin of life is very recent. How much that matters when trying to decide whether Christianity is right is an interesting question I don’t propose to go into here.)
[EDITED to add a word I noticed I’d accidentally omitted.]
I don’t know if that is true or not, but it sounds plausible. However, 250 years ago no one had a justified, accurate estimate of how long ago life originated—the science behind that had not been done yet. So, I do not see how the fact (if fact it be) that most Christians had an inaccurate idea about how old life is has any relevance to whether or not Christianity is true.
As I said, the relationship of this to the truth or untruth of Christianity’s claims is complicated. But one reason why it might be relevant is that there is a difference between not knowing something and confidently believing something that is false, or still worse holding that that false thing is a revelation from God. If for many centuries the Christian tradition confidently proclaimed a belief that was actually wrong, then that doesn’t make the Christians involved particularly bad or stupid (since, as you say, no one else knew the answer either) but it does mean that the Christian tradition was capable of prolonged serious error. Which in turn means e.g. that arguments of the form “X is more likely to be true, because look at this lengthy tradition of people who believed it”—which is actually an argument with some strength; people believe true things more often than otherwise similar false things—are weaker than they would be without such mistakes in the history of that tradition.
I don’t know that I would classify the error as serious; a belief in a recent origin of life it is not central to Christian doctrine. None of the core tenants of Christianity are dependent on a recent origin of life. Nor is correctness regarding the age of life instrumentally important in the typical person’s day-to-day non-religious activities. And, it is not the case that the Christian community as a whole (obviously there are some exceptions) hung on to this belief once strong contrary evidence became available.
This is true. But, I suspect that rather than confidently believing in a recent origin of life, a lot of pre-modern Christians simply did not give the topic much thought one way or the other. And, it seems to me that holding an incorrect belief in the absence of evidence against the belief is a relatively minor failing, particularly if that belief is a non-central one.
But, we already have lots of evidence that a lengthy tradition of belief in something does not imply that the thing is true. So, premodern Christian belief in a recent origin of life does little to weaken the argument that X is probably true if there is a lengthy tradition of people believing X (since the argument was IMO already quite weak to begin with).
There are plenty of Christians who would disagree (or, more precisely, would say that a belief in a recent origin of human life along the lines of the story in Genesis is central, on the grounds that the New Testament draws analogies between Adam and Christ that don’t work if there was not a historical Adam with the right characteristics).
More to the point—since in fact I agree with you that a recent origin of life is not central to Christian doctrine—I think an error can be serious without being central to Christian doctrine.
We do. None the less, many Christians have trouble applying that evidence to their own religion :-).
Regarding Adam—yes I think that Catholics in particular are committed to a belief that there was an actual Adam and an actual Eve. However, as far as I know, they are not committed to any particular time-line as to when the actual Adam and the actual Eve lived (nor are they committed to all of Genesis being literal). So, I don’t think that this counts as modern Christians necessarily believing in a recent origin of human life, much less in a recent origin of life in general.
Fair enough—we can agree to disagree about that. I just don’t see how pre-modern Christians having an incorrect belief regarding a non-central (to Christianity) scientific fact in the absence of any significant evidence that their belief is wrong is particularly problematic.
I think that we have an area of agreement here—I think that the argument that we should believe in Christianity because there is a long tradition of people who believe in Christianity is, by itself, quite weak.
Why is punishing bad people morally monstrous?
Do you also find the scientific doctrine of light, and mater, being both particle and wave internally incoherent.
Meta-note 1: I am not much interested in turning this into a lengthy argument about whether the available evidence actually does or doesn’t support Christianity. When I did that for myself my notes ended up being about 80k words long, and that was fairly terse and didn’t waste space on mutual misunderstandings etc. as any discussion between different people is liable to do. I don’t think LW is a good venue for tens of thousands of words of religious argument. I was addressing your statement about ex-Christians having “the stupidest reasons”; if you want to argue, not that my reasons were stupid, but that after lengthy consideration they will turn out to be wrong, then that’s a change of subject.
Meta-note 2: I realise that in the grandparent of this comment I didn’t give a complete answer to your question (though it’s possible that the smaller question I answered was the one you actually intended) because I didn’t say anything about the arguments for Christianity that, in my opinion, were weaker than the best arguments against. I forget what arguments for Christianity (or, more weakly, for theism) I thought most convincing at the time, but here are some of the ones I looked into: arguments “from design” based on some variety of alleged excellence in the universe; inferences from particular apparent miracles or religious experiences to a divine agent behind them; arguments for Christianity in particular on the basis that the available historical evidence overwhelmingly favours belief in the resurrection of Jesus; allegedly-impressively-fulfilled prophecies in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures; “cosmological fine-tuning”; the alleged dependence of morality on God.
Punishing bad people may or may not be morally monstrous. Punishing finite badness with eternal torture is morally monstrous.
The scientific doctrine of light and matter does not really say that light and matter are “both particle and wave”; that is a simplification for popular presentation. What it actually does say is difficult for human brains, but even the appearance of contradiction between “particle” and “wave” goes away completely once it is understood.
[An earlier draft of this comment went into more detail and compared-and-contrasted with Christian thinking about the Trinity, but in keeping with my remark above that I am not interested in turning this into a lengthy argument about whether Christianity is right or wrong I’ve removed all that. My apologies if you’d have found it interesting.]
I’m not necessarily ether. I’m not even a Christian. That’s what makes the number of laughably bad arguments people use to deconvert themselves so frustrating.
Why? I actually disagree with this point.
One could make the same argument about the trinity. BTW, do you actually understand quantum physics well enough for that to happen?
Because it seems incredibly unlikely to maximize utility, neither does it accord with what seems to me a general principle that punishment should be at most proportionate to the crime being punished. Why isn’t it morally monstrous?
I really don’t think one could. What Christian theologians themselves (at least, the ones I’ve read) say about the Trinity is generally not anything like “this is counterintuitive but we understand it clearly now”. I don’t think they would claim that the appearance of contradiction goes away once the thing is understood; in fact I think they are more inclined to say that the more deeply you understand it the more (gloriously) mysterious it gets.
I think so. There are many levels of understanding quantum mechanics and I by no means claim to have achieved them all, but the apparent contradiction goes away rather early in the process and from what I do understand of the deeper levels it does not look to me as if it ever comes back. (Other mysteries do appear, but that’s a different matter.)
Avoiding for the moment the question whether utilitarianism is the right approach to these kinds of problems. There is in fact a decision theory argument in favor of this. Eliezer stumbled up on a version of it and didn’t react well, specifically banning all detailed discussion of it from LW in an extremely ham-handed manner.
Where does this principal come from? Can you provide any utilitarian justification for it? It’s a useful mildly useful Schelling point in certain rather specific circumstances but that’s about it.
I haven’t given a lot of thought to that particular argument, but it doesn’t look to me as if it can plausibly work here. In order for it to produce useful effects without unacceptable collateral damage, it seems to me that you want the threat known to a small number of people and to persuade them to work towards a highly specific goal that those people are particularly well-suited to achieving. Exactly how small, how specific, what goal, and how well-suited may vary together in kinda-obvious ways. These conditions don’t seem to me to be anywhere near to being met in the case of the Christian idea of hell.
I’m not sure. If I’m thinking in utilitarian terms (which I generally am) I am mostly concerned with actions rather than principles (unless the question at issue is “would this be a good principle to have?”, which it isn’t here). I brought the deontological viewpoint in at all only because I know some people reject consequentialism and may be (or profess to be) wholly unmoved by the mere fact that something causes vast amounts of unnecessary suffering.
Not really. In fact one reason for universality is to discourage reactions like Eliezer’s.
The more people the threat is known to, the less likely that they all comply. Then, if the idea is to actually follow through on the threat (note that if that isn’t the idea then you don’t have here any sort of argument that hell is not morally monstrous) you’re stuck with torturing a bunch of people for ever, which is liable to outweigh the benefits.
And someone who doesn’t know about it is even less likely to comply. If you’ve already concluded that threatening to torture someone is worth it for the increased chance of getting compliance, then the exact same calculation applies to everyone else.
Hmm, that’s true. So let’s see how that calculation works out in the two cases being considered.
The one that upset Eliezer: the goal is to get a sufficient number of people from a rather unusual population to do something extraordinary. Probably doesn’t actually work (see e.g. the actual responses to that LW post, which AFAIK didn’t in any case take the form “OK, I must start doing all I can to comply”) but the idea here is that a small number of people can make a huge difference. The goal, therefore, is a very large impact per expected person tortured.
The one we’re talking about here: well, we can see roughly how this turns out. Empirically, people who believe in the Christian hell don’t behave dramatically better than people who do. Hence, a fairly small impact per expected person tortured.
(If I try to steelman your argument, I get things like this: “Ah, but you’re looking now, at a time when in fact scarcely anyone actually believes in hell. Historically, most of the hell-belief comes centuries ago when Christianity was stronger, and for that reason it was effective then, which was an essential element in making Western mostly-Christian civilization the effective, high-trust thing it is; so we may suppose that God gave people the idea of hell with that purpose, knowing that it would die out once it was no longer needed.” I don’t want to get into a lengthy response to an argument that I just made up and that you may think is no good, but here’s a sketchy one: 1. Plenty of people still believe in hell. 2. The doctrine of hell whose (de)merits we’re discussing doesn’t actually say that people are only eligible for hell if they have never stopped believing in it. 3. It’s not in fact at all clear that the doctrine of hell was ever very effective in improving behaviour. 4. Neither is it at all clear that any such improved behaviour had much to do with the evolution of Western society into what it is now. 5. It’s not hard to think of other ideas a benevolent superbeing could have given to its chosen people which would in fact have done more good.)
Hasn’t quite been my experience but, whatever.
Of course, otherwise it would be completely useless as it would simply motivate people to stop believing in it.
I agree that hell is a bad idea. That said, many Christians are tending more toward the position that very few people actually go to hell. It could be that only the very worst people go there, together with a few of the better people who could have done far more good than they actually did. If the numbers are small enough, there might be a significantly larger number of people who did a great amount of good, but would not have done it, if they had not believed in hell. In that case, there might be a large impact per person going to hell.
Obviously, there are still many problems with this, like whether that large impact can justify anything eternal.
How so?
It does maximize utility if it ends up being out-of-equilibrium for every agent. This is known as a grim trigger strategy. Making the “punishment proportionate to the crime” is definjtely worthwhile in imperfect information settings where you can’t ensure that the bad outcome will be fully out-of-equilibrium, but an agent with perfect information needs not concern hirself with this case!
I agree that that’s possible in principle but (1) it seems extremely unlikely to work out that way in practice, especially as (2) it is clear that the existence and terms of such punishment are very far from universal knowledge; and (3) those branches of the Christian tradition that embrace belief in eternal hell for the unsaved almost always also insist that we should not expect that hell to be empty.
(I should reiterate at this point that Christianity as such does not require belief in eternal torture for the unsaved; in particular, a pretty good argument can be made that its texts fit as well or better with mere annihilation for them, and if—as the more sophisticated Christians almost always are these days—you are willing to accept that much in those texts can be outright wrong, then all bets are off.)
There’s actually quite a bit of ambiguity about this—enough for a tradition of ‘universal reconciliation’ to exist, which expressly says that hell will eventually empty out. It seems rather clear that the position that we must take the possibility of eternal hell seriously and ‘make every effort to enter through the narrow door’ but that universal salvation is something that can meaningfully be hoped for, can in fact be held with some consistency.
I agree that there is some ambiguity, but I am not convinced that that position can be held so consistently as you suggest.
Let me first of all say that of course a Christian may make every effort to enter through the narrow door for reasons other than their personal welfare. I take it the question is whether they can be moved by the prospect of their own damnation while also thinking an empty hell likely.
Now, there are two different ways in which you could think an empty hell likely but not certain. (1) You could be uncertain between (a) lots of people in hell, with no realistic prospect of escape, and (b) some process that usually or always makes hell end up empty; or (2) you could be confident that the latter is the case, but think that in some cases the process might fail.
I don’t think branch 1 is actually relevant to this discussion—because if you think (1a) is a thing you think it’s plausible that God might do or allow, you’re right back in that “morally monstrous” box. So let’s consider branch 2.
What that means is that the danger of any given individual getting stuck in hell eternally is small enough that it’s likely that everyone gets out. Let’s suppose the total number of people ever to live is 100 billion = 10^11; then, crudely, that means that any individual’s risk of not getting out is no worse than about 1 chance in 10^-11.
And if the individual wondering about this is a Christian, making at least a typical-Christian effort to live a life pleasing to God, and thinks that the system in question was set up by that same God with the intention of incentivising God-pleasing behaviour … well, then surely they have to reckon their own chances considerably better than average.
So then the question is: how much actual incentive does, say, a 10^-12 probability of eternal damnation produce? Surely very little, not least because it’s kinda lost in the noise compared with other improbable ways of ending up eternally damned (some other nastier religion could be right, we could all end up in eternal-torture simulations by hostile AIs, etc.).
I think a Christian who seriously embraced the idea that an eternal hell exists but is likely to end up empty should not, and in most cases would not, be materially motivated by fear of ending up in hell.
Depending on what exactly you mean by “particle” that’s either no less tautological than dogs being both mammals and animals or a possibly-only-approximate provisional model (complete with well-studied mathematical techniques to sweep the consequences of the incoherence under the rug) we’re using while we figure out how to extend quantum field theory down to the quantum gravity scale and beyond.