Well, mass hysteria is a real thing, but if a large group of people who have no prior reason to cooperate all claim the same unusual observations, it’s certainly much stronger evidence that something unusual was going on than one individual making such claims.
Many, possibly even all religions though, make claims of supernatural events being witnessed by large numbers of people, and religions make enough mutually exclusive claims that they cannot all be true, so we know that claims of large scale supernatural observations are something that must at least sometimes arise in religions that are false.
In terms of the falsifiability of religion, it’s important to remember that we’re essentially working with a stacked deck. In a world with one globally accepted religion, with a god that made frequent physical appearances, answered prayers for unlikely things with sufficient regularity that we had no more need to question whether prayer works than whether cars work, gave verifiable answers to things that humans could not be expected to know without its help, and gave an account of the provenance of the world which was corroborated by the physical record, then obviously the prior for any claims of miraculous events being the result of genuine supernatural intervention would be completely different than in our own.
If a pilgrim child in America in 1623 claimed to have spoken to a person from China when nobody else was around, the adults in their community would probably conclude that they were lying, confused or deluded in some way, unless presented with a huge preponderance of evidence that the child would be highly unlikely to be able to produce, and it’s completely reasonable that they would behave this way, whereas today, an American child claiming to have spoken to a person from China demands a very low burden of evidence.
In a world where the primary evidence offered in favor of religion is subjective experiences which have a pronounced tendency to be at odds with each other (people of different religions have experiences with mutually incompatible implications,) if a person who claims highly compelling religious experiences is unable to persuade other people, it does not indicate a failing in the other people’s rationality.
Many, possibly even all religions though, make claims of supernatural events being witnessed by large numbers of people, and religions make enough mutually exclusive claims that they cannot all be true, so we know that claims of large scale supernatural observations are something that must at least sometimes arise in religions that are false.
That may be the case, and I won’t disagree that some claims are fabricated. However for the rest imagine the following:
A parent has two children, and he gives a present (say a chocolate that they eat) to each child without the other child knowing. Each child takes this to mean that they are the parents favorite. After all they have proof in the gift. They get into an argument over it. However because their beliefs about why the gifts were given are wrong, the fact that the gifts were given remains.
In the same way it is possible that a supernatural* being is out there, and people are just misinterpreting what the gifts it bestows mean. As far as I can tell it doesn’t mind when someone calls themselves a Christian, and follows the Christian faith, so I identify as Christian.
...if a person who claims highly compelling religious experiences is unable to persuade other people, it does not indicate a failing in the other people’s rationality.
I would never dream to claim otherwise. I wouldn’t even try to convince people that have not had their own experiences. It would prove that you were rather inferior rationalists if I could. Unless you have proof, you should not believe. I am not here to try to convince anyone otherwise. The only reason that I talk about it is that you seem interested in how I could believe, and I suspect that I can point out why I believe to you in such a way that you will understand.
Why does everyone think that I want to convert them to Christianity? Even the churches I go, though they are not super rationalist agree that such a thing is pointless unless the person has some experience in their life that would lead them to believe. Do you often get Christians here trying to convert you?
*(outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts)
That may be the case, and I won’t disagree that some claims are fabricated. However for the rest imagine the following: A parent has two children, and he gives a present (say a chocolate that they eat) to each child without the other child knowing. Each child takes this to mean that they are the parents favorite. After all they have proof in the gift. They get into an argument over it. However because their beliefs about why the gifts were given are wrong, the fact that the gifts were given remains.
In the same way it is possible that a supernatural* being is out there, and people are just misinterpreting what the gifts it bestows mean. As far as I can tell it doesn’t mind when someone calls themselves a Christian, and follows the Christian faith, so I identify as Christian.
It’s possible, but there is no necessity that any of them be true. If natural human cognitive function can explain claims of religious experiences (both willfully deceptive and otherwise,) in the absence of real supernatural events, then positing real supernatural events creates a large complexity burden (something that needs a lot of evidence to raise to the point where we can consider it probable,) without doing any explanatory work.
Let’s say you have a large number of folk rituals which are used for treating illnesses, which appear to demand supernatural intervention to work. You test a large number of these against placebo rituals, where elements of the rituals are changed in ways that ought to invalidate them according to the traditional beliefs, in ways that the patients won’t notice, and you find that all of the rituals you test perform no better than placebo. However, you can’t test the remaining rituals, because there’s nothing about them you can change that would invalidate them according to traditional beliefs that the patients wouldn’t notice. You could conclude that some of the rituals have real supernatural power, but only the ones you weren’t able to test, but you could explain your observations more simply by concluding that all the rituals worked by placebo.
Why does everyone think that I want to convert them to Christianity? Even the churches I go, though they are not super rationalist agree that such a thing is pointless unless the person has some experience in their life that would lead them to believe. Do you often get Christians here trying to convert you?
Occasionally, but not that often. But the fact that members here are trying to change your mind doesn’t necessarily mean they think you’re trying to change theirs. This is a community blog dedicated to refining human rationality. When we have disagreements here, we generally try to hammer them out, as long as it looks like we have a chance of making headway. On this site, we generally don’t operate on a group norm that people shouldn’t confront others’ beliefs without explicit invitation.
You test a large number of these against placebo rituals, where elements of the rituals are changed in ways that ought to invalidate them according to the traditional beliefs, in ways that the patients won’t notice, and you find that all of the rituals you test perform no better than placebo.
But but what if you get inconsistent result? Let’s say you try the ritual 5 times and the placebo 5 times and it works 2 times for the the ritual and twice for the ritual. Furthermore consider that nothing changed in any of these tests that you could measure. You said the ritual was spiritual, and there for asking for divine intervention. It could be that the ritual was unnecessary and that the divine being decides when it intervenes. If you can’t figure out why it sometimes works, or sometimes doesn’t than maybe it’s because you are asking a sentient being to make a choice and you don’t understand their reasoning.
You could say that there was no divine intervention at all, but then you are left trying to come up with more and more complex theories about why it sometimes works and sometimes does not. This might not be a bad thing, but one shouldn’t discount the easy solution just because it doesn’t match their expectations, nor should they stop looking for another solution just because any easy one that is hard to test is present.
On this site, we generally don’t operate on a group norm that people shouldn’t confront others’ beliefs without explicit invitation.
Oooh! I like it! Yeah sure, I can get behind that. The reason that i am not trying to convince people here of Christianity is because I don’t have proof that I feel should convince other people. If I did convince anyone here, with the proof that I have, then I would feel that I had made you inferior rationalists. On the other hand I cannot just ignore my own observations and tests and agree with you when I perceive that you are mistaken. I hope that one day I might find some way of proving that god exists to people without needing them to experience something supernatural themselves. But unfortunately as I believe that I am dealing with a sentient intelligence I feel that is unlikely.
But but what if you get inconsistent result? Let’s say you try the ritual 5 times and the placebo 5 times and it works 2 times for the the ritual and twice for the ritual.
Any test with such a small sample size is barely worth the bother of conducting. You’d want to try many times more than that at least before you start to have enough information to draw reliable inferences from, unless the effect size is really large and obvious, say, all five people on the real ritual get better the next day and none of the five on the placebo recover within a week.
You said the ritual was spiritual, and there for asking for divine intervention. It could be that the ritual was unnecessary and that the divine being decides when it intervenes. If you can’t figure out why it sometimes works, or sometimes doesn’t than maybe it’s because you are asking a sentient being to make a choice and you don’t understand their reasoning.
People recover from most ailments on their own for perfectly natural reasons. Some people fail to recover from ailments that other people recover from, but it’s not as if this is an incomprehensible phenomenon that flies in the face of our naturalistic models.
If no proposed supernatural intervention changes a person’s likelihood of recovery relative to placebo, then it could be that there’s no way of isolating supernatural intervention between groups, but a much simpler explanation to account for the observations is that no supernatural interventions are actually happening.
People used to see the appearance of supernatural intervention everywhere, but the more we’ve learned about nature, the less room there’s been for supernatural causes to explain anything, and the more they’ve become a burden on any model that contains them. It’s possible that some phenomena which are unexplained today can only be explained in the future with recourse to supernatural causes, but given the past performance of supernatural explanations, and the large amount of informational complexity they entail, this is almost certainly an unwise thing to bet on.
Oooh! I like it! Yeah sure, I can get behind that. The reason that i am not trying to convince people here of Christianity is because I don’t have proof that I feel should convince other people. If I did convince anyone here, with the proof that I have, then I would feel that I had made you inferior rationalists. On the other hand I cannot just ignore my own observations and tests and agree with you when I perceive that you are mistaken. I hope that one day I might find some way of proving that god exists to people without needing them to experience something supernatural themselves. But unfortunately as I believe that I am dealing with a sentient intelligence I feel that is unlikely.
I’m glad you’re comfortable with this sort of environment. If you’re going to make judgments on the basis of your own experience though, it’s good to try to incorporate the evidence of others’ experience as well.
Personally, from around the age of ten to twelve or so, I experimented a lot with the possibility of god(s). I tried to open myself up to communication with higher intelligences, perform experiments with prayer and requests for signs, and so on. I never received anything that could be interpreted as a positive result, even by generous standards. I certainly don’t dismiss other people’s claims of experiences associated with the supernatural, I think for the most part people who report such experiences are telling the truth about their own recollection of such events. Indeed, given what I’ve since learned about the workings of the human brain, it would be surprising to me if people didn’t report supernatural experiences. But given that people reporting supernatural experiences can be accounted for without recourse to actual supernatural events, as a consequence of human psychology, the question I’m inclined to ask is “does the world look more like what I ought to expect if reports of supernatural events are at least partly due to an actual supernatural reality, or like I ought to expect if the supernatural doesn’t really exist?”
There are some things in the world that I can’t explain, which could, theoretically, have supernatural causes. But there are no things in the world I have encountered which I would have firmly predicted in advance to be true if supernatural claims were real, and false if they were not. For instance, if some maladies, such as amputation, only recovered when people called for divine intervention, and never when they did not, I would think that the prospect of an underlying supernatural cause was worth taking very seriously. Or if people all over the world had religious experiences, which all pointed them in the direction of one particular religion, even if they had no cultural exposure to it, that would be indicative of an underlying supernatural cause. But when viewed together, I think that the totality of humans’ religious experiences suggest that what’s going on is a matter of human psychology, not an underlying supernatural reality.
But but what if you get inconsistent result? Let’s say you try the ritual 5 times and the placebo 5 times and …
Any test with such a small sample size is barely worth the bother of conducting.
Well, it’s standard in medicine to have large RCTs because of various reasons(*), but I’d hardly say “barely worth the bother of conducting”. Every bit of randomized data gives you evidence about cause and effect that, while sometimes weak, does let you update your posterior (a little or a lot) without worrying about the myriad issues of confounding that plague any observational data. Randomization is very useful even in small doses. [though getting consent of the participants is usually hard, even when the preliminary evidence is still very shaky.]
(*) the reasons include the clear ulterior motives of drug companies, the need to consent individuals to randomization combined with delicate arguments around the ethics of “equipoise”, the difficulties of “meta-analysis”, a long history of frequentist statistics, the standards of journals vs. the possibilities of free and open science (based hypothetically on privacy-secure but comprehensively integrated health records), safety issues, etc… But another large reason is that doctors really really like “certainty” and would rather let “best practice” to tell them what to do rather than collect evidence, condition, and decide what’s best for the patient themselves. [some of this seems to be training, but also that they must defend themselves against malpractice. In the end, maybe this isn’t so bad. Thinking is hard and probably all in all it’s better not to trust them to do it most of the time, so I’m not rallying for change in clinical practice here, except to have as much randomization as possible.]
It’s true that you could get evidence from such an experiment which would allow you to update your posterior (although if you’re using significance testing like most experiments, you’re very unlikely to achieve statistical significance, and your experiment almost certainly won’t get published.) But even if you’re doing it purely for your own evidence, the amount of evidence you’d collect is likely to be so small that it hardly justifies the effort of conducting the experiment.
You could say that there was no divine intervention at all, but then you are left trying to come up with more and more complex theories about why it sometimes works and sometimes does not.
Positing a divine being is a more complex explanation than any physical explanation I can conceive of. Don’t be fooled by what your brain labels “easy”.
Positing a divine being is a more complex explanation than any physical explanation I can conceive of.
Really? Can you not, by way of conception, take the divine being scenario, hack around with it so that it can no longer be considered a divine being then tack on some arbitrary and silly complexity? (Simulations may be involved, for example.)
Conceiving of complex stuff seems to be a trivial task, so long as the complexity is not required to be at all insightful.
Why does everyone think that I want to convert them to Christianity?
You claim to have evidence that should convince you to be a Christian. We want to know that evidence. The Litany of Tarski applies: if God exists, I wish to believe that God exists. If God does not exist, I wish to believe that God does not exist.
You claim to have evidence that should convince you to be a Christian. We want to know that evidence.
Or I would, if I assigned non-negligible probability to the possibility that (strong forms of) such evidence actually existed—without such expectation it doesn’t feel correct to say that I ‘want it’.
In the same way it is possible that a supernatural* being is out there, and people are just misinterpreting what the gifts it bestows mean.
Sure, it’s possible, but lots of things are possible, even if we limit them to the things we humans can imagine. We can imagine quite a lot: Cthulhu, Harry Potter, the Trimurti, Gasaraki, werewolves of all kinds, etc. etc. The better question is: how likely is it that a supernatural being exists ?
I don’t agree that supernatural should be defined as “outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts.”
There are lots of phenomena that science can’t explain, or for which there is no commonly accepted explanation. That’s not particularly interesting. What would be interesting is a phenomena that science admits it will never be able to explain.
Well, mass hysteria is a real thing, but if a large group of people who have no prior reason to cooperate all claim the same unusual observations, it’s certainly much stronger evidence that something unusual was going on than one individual making such claims.
Many, possibly even all religions though, make claims of supernatural events being witnessed by large numbers of people, and religions make enough mutually exclusive claims that they cannot all be true, so we know that claims of large scale supernatural observations are something that must at least sometimes arise in religions that are false.
In terms of the falsifiability of religion, it’s important to remember that we’re essentially working with a stacked deck. In a world with one globally accepted religion, with a god that made frequent physical appearances, answered prayers for unlikely things with sufficient regularity that we had no more need to question whether prayer works than whether cars work, gave verifiable answers to things that humans could not be expected to know without its help, and gave an account of the provenance of the world which was corroborated by the physical record, then obviously the prior for any claims of miraculous events being the result of genuine supernatural intervention would be completely different than in our own.
If a pilgrim child in America in 1623 claimed to have spoken to a person from China when nobody else was around, the adults in their community would probably conclude that they were lying, confused or deluded in some way, unless presented with a huge preponderance of evidence that the child would be highly unlikely to be able to produce, and it’s completely reasonable that they would behave this way, whereas today, an American child claiming to have spoken to a person from China demands a very low burden of evidence.
In a world where the primary evidence offered in favor of religion is subjective experiences which have a pronounced tendency to be at odds with each other (people of different religions have experiences with mutually incompatible implications,) if a person who claims highly compelling religious experiences is unable to persuade other people, it does not indicate a failing in the other people’s rationality.
That may be the case, and I won’t disagree that some claims are fabricated. However for the rest imagine the following: A parent has two children, and he gives a present (say a chocolate that they eat) to each child without the other child knowing. Each child takes this to mean that they are the parents favorite. After all they have proof in the gift. They get into an argument over it. However because their beliefs about why the gifts were given are wrong, the fact that the gifts were given remains.
In the same way it is possible that a supernatural* being is out there, and people are just misinterpreting what the gifts it bestows mean. As far as I can tell it doesn’t mind when someone calls themselves a Christian, and follows the Christian faith, so I identify as Christian.
I would never dream to claim otherwise. I wouldn’t even try to convince people that have not had their own experiences. It would prove that you were rather inferior rationalists if I could. Unless you have proof, you should not believe. I am not here to try to convince anyone otherwise. The only reason that I talk about it is that you seem interested in how I could believe, and I suspect that I can point out why I believe to you in such a way that you will understand.
Why does everyone think that I want to convert them to Christianity? Even the churches I go, though they are not super rationalist agree that such a thing is pointless unless the person has some experience in their life that would lead them to believe. Do you often get Christians here trying to convert you?
*(outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts)
It’s possible, but there is no necessity that any of them be true. If natural human cognitive function can explain claims of religious experiences (both willfully deceptive and otherwise,) in the absence of real supernatural events, then positing real supernatural events creates a large complexity burden (something that needs a lot of evidence to raise to the point where we can consider it probable,) without doing any explanatory work.
Let’s say you have a large number of folk rituals which are used for treating illnesses, which appear to demand supernatural intervention to work. You test a large number of these against placebo rituals, where elements of the rituals are changed in ways that ought to invalidate them according to the traditional beliefs, in ways that the patients won’t notice, and you find that all of the rituals you test perform no better than placebo. However, you can’t test the remaining rituals, because there’s nothing about them you can change that would invalidate them according to traditional beliefs that the patients wouldn’t notice. You could conclude that some of the rituals have real supernatural power, but only the ones you weren’t able to test, but you could explain your observations more simply by concluding that all the rituals worked by placebo.
Occasionally, but not that often. But the fact that members here are trying to change your mind doesn’t necessarily mean they think you’re trying to change theirs. This is a community blog dedicated to refining human rationality. When we have disagreements here, we generally try to hammer them out, as long as it looks like we have a chance of making headway. On this site, we generally don’t operate on a group norm that people shouldn’t confront others’ beliefs without explicit invitation.
But but what if you get inconsistent result? Let’s say you try the ritual 5 times and the placebo 5 times and it works 2 times for the the ritual and twice for the ritual. Furthermore consider that nothing changed in any of these tests that you could measure. You said the ritual was spiritual, and there for asking for divine intervention. It could be that the ritual was unnecessary and that the divine being decides when it intervenes. If you can’t figure out why it sometimes works, or sometimes doesn’t than maybe it’s because you are asking a sentient being to make a choice and you don’t understand their reasoning.
You could say that there was no divine intervention at all, but then you are left trying to come up with more and more complex theories about why it sometimes works and sometimes does not. This might not be a bad thing, but one shouldn’t discount the easy solution just because it doesn’t match their expectations, nor should they stop looking for another solution just because any easy one that is hard to test is present.
Oooh! I like it! Yeah sure, I can get behind that. The reason that i am not trying to convince people here of Christianity is because I don’t have proof that I feel should convince other people. If I did convince anyone here, with the proof that I have, then I would feel that I had made you inferior rationalists. On the other hand I cannot just ignore my own observations and tests and agree with you when I perceive that you are mistaken. I hope that one day I might find some way of proving that god exists to people without needing them to experience something supernatural themselves. But unfortunately as I believe that I am dealing with a sentient intelligence I feel that is unlikely.
Any test with such a small sample size is barely worth the bother of conducting. You’d want to try many times more than that at least before you start to have enough information to draw reliable inferences from, unless the effect size is really large and obvious, say, all five people on the real ritual get better the next day and none of the five on the placebo recover within a week.
People recover from most ailments on their own for perfectly natural reasons. Some people fail to recover from ailments that other people recover from, but it’s not as if this is an incomprehensible phenomenon that flies in the face of our naturalistic models.
If no proposed supernatural intervention changes a person’s likelihood of recovery relative to placebo, then it could be that there’s no way of isolating supernatural intervention between groups, but a much simpler explanation to account for the observations is that no supernatural interventions are actually happening.
People used to see the appearance of supernatural intervention everywhere, but the more we’ve learned about nature, the less room there’s been for supernatural causes to explain anything, and the more they’ve become a burden on any model that contains them. It’s possible that some phenomena which are unexplained today can only be explained in the future with recourse to supernatural causes, but given the past performance of supernatural explanations, and the large amount of informational complexity they entail, this is almost certainly an unwise thing to bet on.
I’m glad you’re comfortable with this sort of environment. If you’re going to make judgments on the basis of your own experience though, it’s good to try to incorporate the evidence of others’ experience as well.
Personally, from around the age of ten to twelve or so, I experimented a lot with the possibility of god(s). I tried to open myself up to communication with higher intelligences, perform experiments with prayer and requests for signs, and so on. I never received anything that could be interpreted as a positive result, even by generous standards. I certainly don’t dismiss other people’s claims of experiences associated with the supernatural, I think for the most part people who report such experiences are telling the truth about their own recollection of such events. Indeed, given what I’ve since learned about the workings of the human brain, it would be surprising to me if people didn’t report supernatural experiences. But given that people reporting supernatural experiences can be accounted for without recourse to actual supernatural events, as a consequence of human psychology, the question I’m inclined to ask is “does the world look more like what I ought to expect if reports of supernatural events are at least partly due to an actual supernatural reality, or like I ought to expect if the supernatural doesn’t really exist?”
There are some things in the world that I can’t explain, which could, theoretically, have supernatural causes. But there are no things in the world I have encountered which I would have firmly predicted in advance to be true if supernatural claims were real, and false if they were not. For instance, if some maladies, such as amputation, only recovered when people called for divine intervention, and never when they did not, I would think that the prospect of an underlying supernatural cause was worth taking very seriously. Or if people all over the world had religious experiences, which all pointed them in the direction of one particular religion, even if they had no cultural exposure to it, that would be indicative of an underlying supernatural cause. But when viewed together, I think that the totality of humans’ religious experiences suggest that what’s going on is a matter of human psychology, not an underlying supernatural reality.
Well, it’s standard in medicine to have large RCTs because of various reasons(*), but I’d hardly say “barely worth the bother of conducting”. Every bit of randomized data gives you evidence about cause and effect that, while sometimes weak, does let you update your posterior (a little or a lot) without worrying about the myriad issues of confounding that plague any observational data. Randomization is very useful even in small doses. [though getting consent of the participants is usually hard, even when the preliminary evidence is still very shaky.]
(*) the reasons include the clear ulterior motives of drug companies, the need to consent individuals to randomization combined with delicate arguments around the ethics of “equipoise”, the difficulties of “meta-analysis”, a long history of frequentist statistics, the standards of journals vs. the possibilities of free and open science (based hypothetically on privacy-secure but comprehensively integrated health records), safety issues, etc… But another large reason is that doctors really really like “certainty” and would rather let “best practice” to tell them what to do rather than collect evidence, condition, and decide what’s best for the patient themselves. [some of this seems to be training, but also that they must defend themselves against malpractice. In the end, maybe this isn’t so bad. Thinking is hard and probably all in all it’s better not to trust them to do it most of the time, so I’m not rallying for change in clinical practice here, except to have as much randomization as possible.]
It’s true that you could get evidence from such an experiment which would allow you to update your posterior (although if you’re using significance testing like most experiments, you’re very unlikely to achieve statistical significance, and your experiment almost certainly won’t get published.) But even if you’re doing it purely for your own evidence, the amount of evidence you’d collect is likely to be so small that it hardly justifies the effort of conducting the experiment.
Positing a divine being is a more complex explanation than any physical explanation I can conceive of. Don’t be fooled by what your brain labels “easy”.
Really? Can you not, by way of conception, take the divine being scenario, hack around with it so that it can no longer be considered a divine being then tack on some arbitrary and silly complexity? (Simulations may be involved, for example.)
Conceiving of complex stuff seems to be a trivial task, so long as the complexity is not required to be at all insightful.
You claim to have evidence that should convince you to be a Christian. We want to know that evidence. The Litany of Tarski applies: if God exists, I wish to believe that God exists. If God does not exist, I wish to believe that God does not exist.
Or I would, if I assigned non-negligible probability to the possibility that (strong forms of) such evidence actually existed—without such expectation it doesn’t feel correct to say that I ‘want it’.
Sure, it’s possible, but lots of things are possible, even if we limit them to the things we humans can imagine. We can imagine quite a lot: Cthulhu, Harry Potter, the Trimurti, Gasaraki, werewolves of all kinds, etc. etc. The better question is: how likely is it that a supernatural being exists ?
I don’t agree that supernatural should be defined as “outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts.”
There are lots of phenomena that science can’t explain, or for which there is no commonly accepted explanation. That’s not particularly interesting. What would be interesting is a phenomena that science admits it will never be able to explain.