This isn’t to say that there aren’t situations where it will disadvantage me to be a rationalist
Indeed. My entire point was that it might be possible to recognize these situations and then act in an appropriate manner. (Or would that be being meta-rationalist?)
Whatever misconceptions I may have about Christianity are gained from growing up with a religious family and attending services “religiously” for the first two decades of my life.
Anecdotal evidence shouldn’t be a cause to say something is horrible. If that were the case I could point to the secular schools I went to growing up where I was the only Christian in my class, and watched as the other kids fought, did hard drugs, had sex, and generally messed up their life and beat me up. On the other hand the Church was friendly, focused on working together and planning for the future. It focused on tolerance and accepting people who were hostile without hating them. If I was to go just from my childhood I would despise atheists with a passion.
Religious instruction is targeted predominantly towards children.
Depends on the church. The church that I go to most of the time has only 2 or three children in it and is mostly made up of members over 60. Besides, if you look at it from a Christian point of view, is it wrong to teach children when they are young? Would you advocate waiting till a person is 20 to start teaching them how to read, write and do math?
The claims of the religious are false.
I respectfully disagree. I would appreciate it if you could be respectful in turn.
Threatening a child with eternal damnation is bad.
Is it as bad as telling a child that if they play in traffic they could cease to exist? Or that if they are not careful around a lawnmower they could end up with pain and disabilities for the rest of their lives? Define ‘Bad’ for me so that we can discuss this point.
A consequence of being a Christian is giving 10% of your money to the church.
Not true for all churches. In fact I have yet to be in a single one that even suggests it. Usually it is more along the lines of “If you believe the work we are doing is good than please donate so that we may continue doing it.” You know, kind of like what Eliezer is doing right now with the workshops he is setting up.
I respectfully disagree. I would appreciate it if you could be respectful in turn.
Claims with a low Occamian prior are false (to within reasonable tolerances) by default to a rationalist. Deities in general tend to have extremely long minimum message lengths, since they don’t play nice with the rest of our model of the universe, and require significant additional infra-structure. I suspect you would not be overly put out by the assertion that Rama or Odin isn’t real. So, what makes your God different? I ask you honestly. If you can show strong, convincing evidence for why the existence of your God is special, I will be very, very interested. If you can demonstrate enough Bayesian evidence to bump the probability of Yahweh over 50%, you’ve got yourself a convert. Probably quite a few. But, the burden of evidence is on your shoulders.
If you can show strong, convincing evidence for why the existence of your God is special, I will be very, very interested.
Ah, now that is a funny thing isn’t it. Once upon a time I played a joke on a friend. I told him something that he would have never have believed unless it came from my own mouth, and then when he tried to tell others I just looked confused and denied it. He ended up looking like a fool. (For the record I asked him to tell nobody else).
Why is this relevant? Because if for example (and no, I’m not saying this is what happened), God came out of the sky, pointed at me, and said “I exist.” I would know that either he existed, or something else did that was trying to fool me into thinking he did. Either way I would have belief that something supernatural (outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts) had happened. Let’s say I came onto this board and told everyone that. How would I ‘prove’ it? I could say it happened, but I doubt anyone here would believe me. I could try a few tests, but I’d be hard pressed with how to prove that a something of a godlike intelligence exists if it didn’t want anyone else to find out. However I might not be smart enough, so I’ll pose the question to you:
How do you prove that a godlike entity exists if it doesn’t want to be proven? Assume that it has complete freedom to move through time so that tricking it doesn’t work because it can just go back in time (that’s what omnipotent means after all). And that you don’t know the reasons why it’s staying hidden so no argument to try to get it to show itself will work.
I look forward to suggestions. But unless there is something that works for that, I am just someone who believes because of experience, but knows of no way to prove it to others (though honestly I am making an assumption by saying god wants to stay hidden, it’s the only reason I can think of).
Why is this relevant? Because if for example (and no, I’m not saying this is what happened), God came out of the sky, pointed at me, and said “I exist.” I would know that either he existed, or something else did that was trying to fool me into thinking he did. Either way I would have belief that something supernatural (outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts) had happened.
Actually, my default response for this sort of thing is to immediately go to a hospital, and get a head CT and a chat with a certified psychiatrist. I mean, sure, it could be the supernatural, but we KNOW mental illness happens. The priors for me being crazy (especially given some unique family history) are not very low. Much, much higher than the odds of a deity actually existing, given the aforementioned Occamian priors.
How do you prove that a godlike entity exists if it doesn’t want to be proven? Assume that it has complete freedom to move through time so that tricking it doesn’t work because it can just go back in time (that’s what omnipotent means after all). And that you don’t know the reasons why it’s staying hidden so no argument to try to get it to show itself will work.
You don’t. Rationalism only works if God isn’t fucking with you. That said, there’s a huge space of possible constructs like that one (entities that conveniently eliminate all evidence for themselves). It’s not infinite, but it’s arbitrarily large. From a rationalist’s perspective, if any of them were real, we wouldn’t know, but the odds of them actually being real in the first place are… not high. Again with the Occamian prior. So, I’m not much moved by your analysis.
That said, I am curious what your personal experience was.
How do you prove that a godlike entity exists if it doesn’t want to be proven?
Proof is not typically necessary. People make claims about their experience all the time that they have no way of proving, as well as claims that they probably could prove but don’t in fact do so, and I believe many of those claims.
For example, I believe my officemate is married, although they have offered me no proof of this beyond their unsupported claim.
I would say a more useful question is, “how do I provide another person with sufficient evidence that such an entity exists that the person should consider it likely?” And of course the answer depends on the person, and what they previously considered likely. (The jargon around here would be “it depends on their priors.”)
Mostly I don’t think I can, unless their priors are such that they pretty much already believe that such an entity exists.
Another question worth asking is “how do I provide myself sufficient evidence that such an entity exists that I should consider it likely?”
I don’t think I can do that either.
Unrelatedly: Is “god exists, has the properties I believe it to have, and wants to stay hidden” really the only reason you can think of for the observable universe being as we observe it to be? I understand it’s the reason you believe, I’m asking whether it’s the only reason you can think of, or whether that was just hyperbole.
Is “god exists, has the properties I believe it to have, and wants to stay hidden” really the only reason you can think of for the observable universe being as we observe it to be?
My own belief is closer to: “Something very powerful and supernatural exists, doesn’t seem to be hostile, and doesn’t mind that I call it the Christian God.” And while I would answer ‘no’ to that question, the amount of evidence that there is something supernatural if far greater than the amount of evidence that there are millions of people lying about their experiences.
For instance, every culture has a belief in the supernatural. Now I would expect that social evolution would trend away from such beliefs. If you say, I can dance and make it rain, and then you fail, you would get laughed at. If you don’t believe me gather a bunch of your closest friends and try it. The reason for people to believe someone else is if they had proof to back it up, or they already had reason to believe. Humans aren’t stupid, and I don’t think we’ve become radically more intelligent in the last couple thousand years. Why then is belief in the supernatural* everywhere? Is it something in our makeup, how we think? I have heard such a thing discounted by both sides. So there must be some cause, some reason for people to have started believing.
And that’s without even getting into my experiences, or those close to me. As was suggested, misremembering, and group hallucination are possible, but if that is the case than I should probably check myself and some people I know into a medical clinic because I would be forced to consider myself insane. Seeing things that aren’t there wold be a sign of something being very wrong with me, but I do not any any other symptoms of insanity so I strongly doubt this is the case.
I suppose when I get right down to it, either I and some others are insane with an unknown form of insanity, or there is something out there.
*(outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts)
“Something very powerful and supernatural* exists, doesn’t seem to be hostile, and doesn’t mind that I call it the Christian God.”
For what it’s worth, I’m .9+ confident of the following claims: 1) there exist phenomena in the universe that “human science” (1) doesn’t commonly accept. 2) for any such phenomenon X, X doesn’t mind that you call it the Christian God 3) for any such phenomenon X, X doesn’t mind that you call it a figment of your imagination 4) for any such phenomenon X, X is not “hostile” (2) to humans
So it seems we agree on that much. Indeed, I find it likely that most people on this site would agree on that much.
the amount of evidence that there is something supernatural* if far greater than the amount of evidence that there are millions of people lying about their experiences.
As above, I think the evidence supporting the idea that there exist phenomena in the universe that “human science” (1) doesn’t commonly accept is pretty strong. The evidence supporting the idea that people lie about their experiences, confabulate their experiences, and have experiences that don’t map to events outside their own brains despite seeming to, is also pretty strong. These aren’t at all conflicting ideas; I am confident of them both.
Do you mean to suggest that, because there exist such phenomena, human reports are therefore credible? I don’t see how you get from one to the other.
Seeing things that aren’t there wold be a sign of something being very wrong with me
Not really, no. It happens to people all the time. I had the experience once of being visited by Prophetic Beings from Outside Time who had a Very Significant Message for me to impart to the masses. That doesn’t mean I’m crazy. It also doesn’t mean that Prophetic Beings from Outside Time have a Very Significant Message for me to impart to the masses.
either I and some others are insane with an unknown form of insanity, or there is something out there.
Again: there are almost certainly many things out there. That doesn’t mean that every experience you have is an accurate report of the state of the universe. And if the particular experience you had turns out not to be an accurate report of the state of the universe, that doesn’t mean you’re insane.
==========
(1) Given what I think you mean by that phrase. For example, nuclear physics was outside the realm of what human science commonly accepted in the year 1750, so was supernatural then by this definition, although it is not now.
(2) Given what I think you mean by that phrase. For example, I assume the empty void of interstellar space is not considered hostile, even though it will immediately kill an unprotected human exposed to it.
As already pointed out, would it change either my beliefs or your beliefs? I’ve already recounted a medical mystery with my foot and blood loss. It comes down in the end to my word, and that of people I know. We could all be lying. There is no long term proof, so I don’t see any need to explain it. That was my point. What is strong proof to me, is weak proof to others because I know that I am not lying. I have no way to prove I am not lying however so what would be the point?
I have no way to prove I am not lying however so what would be the point?
If you have evidence that could overcome the low prior for God’s existence were you not lying, then that would be worth hearing even if we would believe you’re lying. I’m not aware of such evidence for particular deities.
Honestly mine really isn’t any different than what you hear on the internet all the time. If you want to hear it go ahead. When my grandfather died all the people in the room said that they saw a light enter the room. It didn’t say anything but they all agreed that they felt peace come over them. My grandfather was a Christian, as were the people in the room. I wasn’t in the room, however I did check their stories individually and they matched. Also these were people who haven’t lied to me before or since (well, other than stuff like april fools… though one of them never even does that). That, along with my foot, and my Mothers ability to know when her friends are in trouble and make phone calls that I have related in other posts give me reasonably strong belief in the supernatural* world
*(Supernatural yada yada, not understood by science yada yada. Do I need to keep making these disclaimers?)
And while I would answer ‘no’ to that question, the amount of evidence that there is something supernatural* if far greater than the amount of evidence that there are millions of people lying about their experiences.
Surprisingly, no. That said, religious people aren’t lying. They’re not even a lot crazier than baseline. I’ve had experiences which I recognize from my reading to be neurological that I might otherwise attribute to some kind of religious intervention. And those are coming from an atheist’s brain not primed to see angels or gods or anything of that kind.
As for why belief in the supernatural is everywhere, a lot of it has to do with how bad our brains are at finding satisfactory explanations, and at doing rudimentary probability theory. We existed as a species for a hundred thousand years before we got around to figuring out why there was thunder. Before then, the explanation that sounded the simplest was ‘there’s a big ape in the sky who does it.’ And, even when we knew the real reason, we were so invested in those explanations that they didn’t go away. Add in a whole bunch of glitches native to the human brain, and boom, you’ve a thousand generations of spooky campfire stories.
As was suggested, misremembering, and group hallucination are possible, but if that is the case than I should probably check myself and some people I know into a medical clinic because I would be forced to consider myself insane.
If I were you, I would be terrified of that possibility. I would at least go to a psychiatrist and try to rule it out. It is a real possibility, and potentially the most likely one. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
The reason for people to believe someone else is if they had proof to back it up, or they already had reason to believe. Humans aren’t stupid, and I don’t think we’ve become radically more intelligent in the last couple thousand years. Why then is belief in the supernatural* everywhere? Is it something in our makeup, how we think? I have heard such a thing discounted by both sides.
I don’t think you’ll find such a thing readily discounted here. There are plenty of well established cognitive biases that come to play in assessment of supernatural claims. The sequences discuss this to some degree, but you might also be interested in reading this book which discusses some of the mechanisms which contribute to supernatural belief which are not commonly discussed here.
We don’t even need to raise the issue of the supernatural to examine whether people are likely to pass down beliefs and rituals when they don’t really work. We can look at folk medicine, and see if there are examples of cures which have been passed down through cultures which perform no better than placebo in double blind tests. In fact, there is an abundance of such.
We can look at folk medicine, and see if there are examples of cures which have been passed down through cultures which perform no better than placebo in double blind tests.
Point.
though I would point out that not all of them are wrong either. Just the good majority. That’s neither here nor there though.
Out of curiosity how does science explain people feeling knowing that people they care about are in trouble? My mother has made 4 phone calls, and I have witnessed 2 where she felt that someone was in trouble and called them. One of those calls was to me and it helped me greatly. While she has missed calling people that were in trouble, she has never once called someone with that intent and been wrong.She told me that it feels like someone is telling her to call them because they are in trouble. I can’t know if that is true or not, but I can’t think of her ever lying to me. This is even more interesting because one time she told me that she felt she needed to make the call just before she did, thereby predicting it.
I know that she isn’t the only person that does this, because I have read many accounts of people who believed a loved one had died when they were across the ocean during WWII.
Personally I would go with psyonics if not god, but that might be because I played to many role-playing games.
Sorry if this seems odd, it was just something that came to mind as I was thinking about supernatural* things.
*(outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts)
Out of curiosity how does science explain people feeling knowing that people they care about are in trouble?
I don’t know if this is something that has been explained, or even if it’s something that needs to be explained. It could be that you’re operating under an unrepresentative dataset. Keep in mind that if you hadn’t experienced a number of phone calls where the caller’s intuition that something was wrong was correct, you wouldn’t treat it as a phenomenon in need of explanation, but if you had experienced some other set of improbable occurrences, simply by chance, then that would look like a phenomenon in need of explanation. I personally have no experiences with acquaintances making phone calls on an intuition that something is wrong and being right, although I have experience with acquaintances getting worried and making phone calls and finding out there was really nothing to worry about. There’s a significant danger of selection bias in dealing with claims like this, because people who experience, say, a sudden premonition that something has happened to their loved on across the sea at war, and then find out a couple weeks later that they’re still alive and well, are probably not going to record the experience for posterity.
I’ve encountered plenty of claims of improbable events before which were attributed to supernatural causes. If I consistently encountered ones that took the form of people correctly intuiting that a distant loved one was in trouble and calling them, I would definitely start to suspect that this was a real phenomenon in need of explanation, although I would also be interested in seeing how often people intuited that a distant loved one was in trouble, called them, found out they were wrong, and didn’t think it was worth remembering. Maybe some of the improbable events I’ve heard about really are the result of more than chance, and have some underlying explanation that I’m not aware of, but I don’t have the evidence to strongly suspect this.
If you multiply a day times the population experiencing it, that’s about 82,000 years of human experience in America alone. That’s a lot of time for improbable stuff to happen in, and people tend to remember the improbable stuff and forget the ordinary, and draw patterns erroneously. So I don’t treat seeming patterns of unusual events as needing explanation unless I have reliable reason to conclude that they’re actually going on.
My mother has made 4 phone calls, and I have witnessed 2 where she felt that someone was in trouble and called them.
Has your mother ever called anyone when she felt they were in trouble, only to find out that they weren’t, in fact, in trouble ? Confirmation bias is pretty strong in most humans.
This is even more interesting because one time she told me that she felt she needed to make the call just before she did, thereby predicting it.
Wait… she predicted that she would call someone, and then went ahead and called someone ? This doesn’t sound like much of a prediction; I don’t think I’m parsing your sentence correctly.
because I have read many accounts of people who believed a loved one had died when they were across the ocean during WWII.
If your loved one is fighting in WWII, it’s very likely that he or she would die, sadly...
Personally I would go with psyonics if not god...
Why did you end up picking “god” over “psionics”, then ?
Has your mother ever called anyone when she felt they were in trouble, only to find out that they weren’t, in fact, in trouble ? Confirmation bias is pretty strong in most humans.
Not that I remember. My memory could be faulty, but thinking long and hard about it I don’t remember it happening.
Wait… she predicted that she would call someone, and then went ahead and called someone ? This doesn’t sound like much of a prediction; I don’t think I’m parsing your sentence correctly.
She predicted they were in trouble. I think the phrase she used was “I think XXXX is in trouble and needs help.” I could be misremembering though.
Why did you end up picking “god” over “psionics”, then ?
It’s a close call honestly, but if god exists, which I believe he does from other evidence listed in this over-sized thread, then adding psionics on top would be added complexity for no gain. If you already know that the earth goes around the sun because of gravity, why bother coming up with an alternate explanation for why Saturn goes around the sun? It might have another reason, but the simplest explanation is more likely to be right.
Oh yeah, that makes more sense than what I was thinking.
Anyway, as the others on this thread have pointed out, there could be many explanations for why you remember events the way you do. Among them, are things like “my mother has supernatural powers”, “a god exists and he is using his powers on my mother”, “aliens exist and are using their power on my mother”, etc. The most probable explanation, though, is “my memory is faulty due to a cognitive bias that is well understood by modern psychologists”.
That said, I must acknowledge that if you have already determined, for some other unrelated reason, that the probability of psionic powers / gods / aliens existing is quite high; then it would be perfectly rational of you to assign a much higher probability to one of these other explanations.
My mother has made 4 phone calls, and I have witnessed 2 where she felt that someone was in trouble and called them.
Even if that were true, and not a misremembrance or a post-hoc rationalization, you must take note of the many other people who have those feelings and no one was in trouble. You should expect in advance to hear more anecdotes about the times that someone really was in trouble, than anecdotes about the times they were not, so having heard them is very little evidence.
Even if that were true, and not a misremembrance or a post-hoc rationalization
I did state that she predicted one in advance to me. Also when my mother called me the first thing she asked was “are you alright?”
You should expect in advance to hear more anecdotes about the times that someone really was in trouble, than anecdotes about the times they were not, so having heard them is very little evidence.
As far as my mother goes I have never once seen her mistake a prediction. Now 2 predictions (and 2 more that she told me about) sounds small, but consider the amount of times that she didn’t mistakenly call the probability that something is going on is quite high. For example if you have a deck with 996 blue cards in it, and 4 red cards in it, and you call a red card before it flips once, but never call it before a blue card flips, the chances of you succeeding on are… Um… Do you guys want me to do the math? It’s pretty small.
And just because some people think that they can do it and can’t, doesn’t mean that a person can’t do it. Look at all the people who think they are wonderful singers.
Of course I could be misremembering. I could go ask my mother, and my father and see what they say if you like. (Yes I am close to my parents. We have a tight nit family even though I am 24). Of course we could all be misremembering, or lying. Again, you have no way to know, and you really shouldn’t even consider taking my word for this.
For instance, every culture has a belief in the supernatural.
Every culture has some different things they believe in, and call supernatural. That doesn’t prove there really is a category of things that actually are supernatural. By analogy, belief by Himalayan people that the Yeti is real is not evidence that Bigfoot (in the northwestern United States) is real. Likewise, a Hindu’s fervent belief is not evidence of the resurrection of Jesus.
In short, the shortfalls in human understanding completely explain why primitive cultures believed “supernatural” was a real and useful label, even though that belief is false.
I’m not sure whether it is the case that primitive cultures have a category of things they think of as “supernatural”—pagan religions were certainly quite literal: they lived on Olympus, they mated with humans, they were birthed. I wonder whether the distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” only comes about when it becomes clear that gods don’t belong in the former category.
I had a paragraph about that, citing Explain/Worship/Ignore, but I decided that it detracted from the point I was trying to make.
If you already think that primitives did not use the label “supernatural,” then you already think there isn’t much evidence of supernatural phenomena—at least compared to the post I was responding to.
If you say, I can dance and make it rain, and then you fail, you would get laughed at.
I don’t believe you’ve read much of the content on this site. There are a host of human cognitive biases that would lead to belief in the supernatural. Perhaps most notably, we attribute agency to non-agents. It’s easy to see how that would be adaptive in the ancestral environment; just look at the truth table for “That sound was an animal and I believe that sound was an animal” and the outcomes of each possibility.
Because if for example (and no, I’m not saying this is what happened), God came out of the sky, pointed at me, and said “I exist.” I would know that either he existed, or something else did that was trying to fool me into thinking he did. Either way I would have belief that something supernatural (outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts) had happened.
Not really. There are plenty of plausible explanations for that description that don’t require positing something supernatural.
And now if all you have is one event in your faulty human memory to go on, it counts for practically nothing. Given the low prior for the existence of most particular deities, updating on that piece of evidence should still give you a ridiculously low posterior. “I’m hallucinating” would probably be my winning hypothesis at the time it’s happening, and “I’m misremembering” afterwards.
So what I’m getting from you is that you would ignore your own observations to conform to what others expect? That your belief in a universe without god is so strong that even if I did show you something like this you would refuse to believe it because it didn’t fit with your expectations? Then I fail to see how I could ever convince you.
Addendum: Have group hallucinations been proven or disproven?
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.
I can’t speak for thomblake, but there are experiences that could convince me that there was a powerful entity that intervened on behalf of humanity. They just haven’t happened. And I have reasons to believe that they will never happen, including the fact that they haven’t happened before—absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
A single experience of that kind would be terrible evidence for Christianity, and merely poor evidence for the supernatural. A coherent set of experiences indicative of a consistent, ongoing supernatural world (or specifically a Christian world) would be much more convincing.
My entire point was that it might be possible to recognize these situations and then act in an appropriate manner.
I think this is called “behaving rationally”. I understand “rationality” as using reason to my benefit. If there comes a time when it would be beneficial for me to do something, and I arrive at that conclusion through reason, then I’d consider that a triumph of rationality. I think if you are able to anticipate an advantage that could be gained by a behavior then refusing to perform that behavior would be irrational.
Anecdotal evidence shouldn’t be a cause to say something is horrible.
You misunderstand me. It isn’t my anecdotal evidence that makes me think the church is horrible. I just pointed out that I had spent a lot of time in churches to show that I have more than the passing familiarity with them that you attributed to me. I think the church is horrible because it threatens children, promotes inaccurate material and takes money from the gullible.
The church that I go to most of the time has only 2 or three children in it and is mostly made up of members over 60
While this is good that your church isn’t abusing more children, it is still terrible to consign “2 or three children” to such mistreatment. Telling children that there is a hell and that they will go to it if they don’t believe in something which is obviously flawed is a terrible thing to do. It is psychological child abuse and I don’t think it says very much in your church’s favor that it only abuses two or three kids.
Besides, if you look at it from a Christian point of view, is it wrong to teach children when they are young?
A child lacks the intellectual maturity to understand or evaluate complex ideas. A child is more trusting than an adult. If your parents tell you something is true, or that you should believe this minister when he talks about heaven, you are more likely to believe it. If your parents came to you now and told you about how they had just found out about Krishna and you should read the Bhagavad Gita you probably wouldn’t be very receptive. And yet, your parents managed to convince you that the Bible was true. Why was that? Was it because through random chance you were born into a family that already believed in the one true religion? Or was it just that you adopted the religion you were exposed to. Because, when you were young your mind wasn’t discriminating enough to realize that, wait a second, this isn’t making sense!
Would you advocate waiting till a person is 20 to start teaching them how to read, write and do math?
No, but the usefulness of reading is well established. Mathematics is axiomatic. Religion is, as the most polite thing I could say about it, highly suspect. I don’t think its right for adults to have sex with children, because children aren’t mature enough to make informed decisions about consent. Similarly, I don’t think its okay for people to teach religion to children because children aren’t mature enough to make informed decisions about ontology.
I respectfully disagree. I would appreciate it if you could be respectful in turn.
I apologize if you have found me disrespectful so far. It isn’t my intention to be disrespectful to you. That said, I have no intention of being respectful to a set of beliefs which I consider first to be wrong and second to be pernicious. If you have an argument which you think is compelling as to the truth of Christianity, please tell me. I promise that if I am swayed by your argument I will begin to show Christianity due deference.
Is it as bad as telling a child that if they play in traffic they could cease to exist?
This is a true statement that is designed to protect a child. Saying something like “You’ll writhe in agony for all time if you don’t believe in the truth of this thousands of years old document compiled over hundreds of years by an unknown but large number of authors” isn’t the same kind of statement. Even if you don’t explicitly say that to a child, convincing them to believe in Christianity is implicitly making that statement.
As far as “bad” goes, I don’t have a ready definition. I have to fall back on Justice Potter Stewart “I know it when I see it”. Threatening children and teaching them things that are at best highly suspect as if they were true is bad.
Not true for all churches. In fact I have yet to be in a single one that even suggests it
Tithing (giving a tenth) is explicitly recommended in the Bible. If the churches you are going to endorse the Bible then they are at least implicitly asking for 10%.
You know, kind of like what Eliezer is doing right now with the workshops he is setting up.
I don’t think Eliezer has a school for children where he teaches them that unless they grow up to believe in his set of rules that an Unfriendly AI will punish them for all time. I have less against evangelism to adults. If Eliezer asks for money like this, that is fair, because the people he is asking can evaluate whether or not they believe in the cause and donate accordingly. There is nothing wrong with that. There is something wrong with compelling donations through threats of damnation.
I think this is called “behaving rationally”. I understand “rationality” as using reason to my benefit.
Thus my point that sometimes you should not question one of your own beliefs is preserved. You agree that it would be the rational thing to do in some situations.
As far as “bad” goes, I don’t have a ready definition.
If you can’t explain what bad is, then I am unable to discuss this with you. You might have a good definition, or you might be just saying that whatever makes you mad is automatically bad. I can’t know, so I can’t form any arguments about it.
If you can’t explain what bad is, then I am unable to discuss this with you
Bad is causing harm to people who don’t deserve it. Convincing someone in the existence of hell is harmful—you are theatening them with the worst thing possible, convincing someone of a lie to compel them to serve the chruch through donations of time or money is harmful, convincing someone that they are innately sinful is harmful psychologically, convincing someone that morality is tied to religious institution is harmful. Children are least deserving of harm and so harming them is bad.
Indeed. My entire point was that it might be possible to recognize these situations and then act in an appropriate manner. (Or would that be being meta-rationalist?)
Anecdotal evidence shouldn’t be a cause to say something is horrible. If that were the case I could point to the secular schools I went to growing up where I was the only Christian in my class, and watched as the other kids fought, did hard drugs, had sex, and generally messed up their life and beat me up. On the other hand the Church was friendly, focused on working together and planning for the future. It focused on tolerance and accepting people who were hostile without hating them. If I was to go just from my childhood I would despise atheists with a passion.
Depends on the church. The church that I go to most of the time has only 2 or three children in it and is mostly made up of members over 60. Besides, if you look at it from a Christian point of view, is it wrong to teach children when they are young? Would you advocate waiting till a person is 20 to start teaching them how to read, write and do math?
I respectfully disagree. I would appreciate it if you could be respectful in turn.
Is it as bad as telling a child that if they play in traffic they could cease to exist? Or that if they are not careful around a lawnmower they could end up with pain and disabilities for the rest of their lives? Define ‘Bad’ for me so that we can discuss this point.
Not true for all churches. In fact I have yet to be in a single one that even suggests it. Usually it is more along the lines of “If you believe the work we are doing is good than please donate so that we may continue doing it.” You know, kind of like what Eliezer is doing right now with the workshops he is setting up.
Claims with a low Occamian prior are false (to within reasonable tolerances) by default to a rationalist. Deities in general tend to have extremely long minimum message lengths, since they don’t play nice with the rest of our model of the universe, and require significant additional infra-structure. I suspect you would not be overly put out by the assertion that Rama or Odin isn’t real. So, what makes your God different? I ask you honestly. If you can show strong, convincing evidence for why the existence of your God is special, I will be very, very interested. If you can demonstrate enough Bayesian evidence to bump the probability of Yahweh over 50%, you’ve got yourself a convert. Probably quite a few. But, the burden of evidence is on your shoulders.
Ah, now that is a funny thing isn’t it. Once upon a time I played a joke on a friend. I told him something that he would have never have believed unless it came from my own mouth, and then when he tried to tell others I just looked confused and denied it. He ended up looking like a fool. (For the record I asked him to tell nobody else).
Why is this relevant? Because if for example (and no, I’m not saying this is what happened), God came out of the sky, pointed at me, and said “I exist.” I would know that either he existed, or something else did that was trying to fool me into thinking he did. Either way I would have belief that something supernatural (outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts) had happened. Let’s say I came onto this board and told everyone that. How would I ‘prove’ it? I could say it happened, but I doubt anyone here would believe me. I could try a few tests, but I’d be hard pressed with how to prove that a something of a godlike intelligence exists if it didn’t want anyone else to find out. However I might not be smart enough, so I’ll pose the question to you:
How do you prove that a godlike entity exists if it doesn’t want to be proven? Assume that it has complete freedom to move through time so that tricking it doesn’t work because it can just go back in time (that’s what omnipotent means after all). And that you don’t know the reasons why it’s staying hidden so no argument to try to get it to show itself will work.
I look forward to suggestions. But unless there is something that works for that, I am just someone who believes because of experience, but knows of no way to prove it to others (though honestly I am making an assumption by saying god wants to stay hidden, it’s the only reason I can think of).
Actually, my default response for this sort of thing is to immediately go to a hospital, and get a head CT and a chat with a certified psychiatrist. I mean, sure, it could be the supernatural, but we KNOW mental illness happens. The priors for me being crazy (especially given some unique family history) are not very low. Much, much higher than the odds of a deity actually existing, given the aforementioned Occamian priors.
You don’t. Rationalism only works if God isn’t fucking with you. That said, there’s a huge space of possible constructs like that one (entities that conveniently eliminate all evidence for themselves). It’s not infinite, but it’s arbitrarily large. From a rationalist’s perspective, if any of them were real, we wouldn’t know, but the odds of them actually being real in the first place are… not high. Again with the Occamian prior. So, I’m not much moved by your analysis.
That said, I am curious what your personal experience was.
Proof is not typically necessary. People make claims about their experience all the time that they have no way of proving, as well as claims that they probably could prove but don’t in fact do so, and I believe many of those claims.
For example, I believe my officemate is married, although they have offered me no proof of this beyond their unsupported claim.
I would say a more useful question is, “how do I provide another person with sufficient evidence that such an entity exists that the person should consider it likely?” And of course the answer depends on the person, and what they previously considered likely. (The jargon around here would be “it depends on their priors.”)
Mostly I don’t think I can, unless their priors are such that they pretty much already believe that such an entity exists.
Another question worth asking is “how do I provide myself sufficient evidence that such an entity exists that I should consider it likely?”
I don’t think I can do that either.
Unrelatedly: Is “god exists, has the properties I believe it to have, and wants to stay hidden” really the only reason you can think of for the observable universe being as we observe it to be? I understand it’s the reason you believe, I’m asking whether it’s the only reason you can think of, or whether that was just hyperbole.
My own belief is closer to: “Something very powerful and supernatural exists, doesn’t seem to be hostile, and doesn’t mind that I call it the Christian God.” And while I would answer ‘no’ to that question, the amount of evidence that there is something supernatural if far greater than the amount of evidence that there are millions of people lying about their experiences.
For instance, every culture has a belief in the supernatural. Now I would expect that social evolution would trend away from such beliefs. If you say, I can dance and make it rain, and then you fail, you would get laughed at. If you don’t believe me gather a bunch of your closest friends and try it. The reason for people to believe someone else is if they had proof to back it up, or they already had reason to believe. Humans aren’t stupid, and I don’t think we’ve become radically more intelligent in the last couple thousand years. Why then is belief in the supernatural* everywhere? Is it something in our makeup, how we think? I have heard such a thing discounted by both sides. So there must be some cause, some reason for people to have started believing.
And that’s without even getting into my experiences, or those close to me. As was suggested, misremembering, and group hallucination are possible, but if that is the case than I should probably check myself and some people I know into a medical clinic because I would be forced to consider myself insane. Seeing things that aren’t there wold be a sign of something being very wrong with me, but I do not any any other symptoms of insanity so I strongly doubt this is the case.
I suppose when I get right down to it, either I and some others are insane with an unknown form of insanity, or there is something out there.
*(outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts)
For what it’s worth, I’m .9+ confident of the following claims:
1) there exist phenomena in the universe that “human science” (1) doesn’t commonly accept.
2) for any such phenomenon X, X doesn’t mind that you call it the Christian God
3) for any such phenomenon X, X doesn’t mind that you call it a figment of your imagination
4) for any such phenomenon X, X is not “hostile” (2) to humans
So it seems we agree on that much.
Indeed, I find it likely that most people on this site would agree on that much.
As above, I think the evidence supporting the idea that there exist phenomena in the universe that “human science” (1) doesn’t commonly accept is pretty strong. The evidence supporting the idea that people lie about their experiences, confabulate their experiences, and have experiences that don’t map to events outside their own brains despite seeming to, is also pretty strong. These aren’t at all conflicting ideas; I am confident of them both.
Do you mean to suggest that, because there exist such phenomena, human reports are therefore credible? I don’t see how you get from one to the other.
Not really, no. It happens to people all the time. I had the experience once of being visited by Prophetic Beings from Outside Time who had a Very Significant Message for me to impart to the masses. That doesn’t mean I’m crazy. It also doesn’t mean that Prophetic Beings from Outside Time have a Very Significant Message for me to impart to the masses.
Again: there are almost certainly many things out there.
That doesn’t mean that every experience you have is an accurate report of the state of the universe.
And if the particular experience you had turns out not to be an accurate report of the state of the universe, that doesn’t mean you’re insane.
==========
(1) Given what I think you mean by that phrase. For example, nuclear physics was outside the realm of what human science commonly accepted in the year 1750, so was supernatural then by this definition, although it is not now.
(2) Given what I think you mean by that phrase. For example, I assume the empty void of interstellar space is not considered hostile, even though it will immediately kill an unprotected human exposed to it.
Well, don’t be coy. There’s no point in withholding your strongest piece of evidence. Please, get into it.
As already pointed out, would it change either my beliefs or your beliefs? I’ve already recounted a medical mystery with my foot and blood loss. It comes down in the end to my word, and that of people I know. We could all be lying. There is no long term proof, so I don’t see any need to explain it. That was my point. What is strong proof to me, is weak proof to others because I know that I am not lying. I have no way to prove I am not lying however so what would be the point?
If you have evidence that could overcome the low prior for God’s existence were you not lying, then that would be worth hearing even if we would believe you’re lying. I’m not aware of such evidence for particular deities.
Honestly mine really isn’t any different than what you hear on the internet all the time. If you want to hear it go ahead. When my grandfather died all the people in the room said that they saw a light enter the room. It didn’t say anything but they all agreed that they felt peace come over them. My grandfather was a Christian, as were the people in the room. I wasn’t in the room, however I did check their stories individually and they matched. Also these were people who haven’t lied to me before or since (well, other than stuff like april fools… though one of them never even does that). That, along with my foot, and my Mothers ability to know when her friends are in trouble and make phone calls that I have related in other posts give me reasonably strong belief in the supernatural* world
*(Supernatural yada yada, not understood by science yada yada. Do I need to keep making these disclaimers?)
Surprisingly, no. That said, religious people aren’t lying. They’re not even a lot crazier than baseline. I’ve had experiences which I recognize from my reading to be neurological that I might otherwise attribute to some kind of religious intervention. And those are coming from an atheist’s brain not primed to see angels or gods or anything of that kind.
As for why belief in the supernatural is everywhere, a lot of it has to do with how bad our brains are at finding satisfactory explanations, and at doing rudimentary probability theory. We existed as a species for a hundred thousand years before we got around to figuring out why there was thunder. Before then, the explanation that sounded the simplest was ‘there’s a big ape in the sky who does it.’ And, even when we knew the real reason, we were so invested in those explanations that they didn’t go away. Add in a whole bunch of glitches native to the human brain, and boom, you’ve a thousand generations of spooky campfire stories.
If I were you, I would be terrified of that possibility. I would at least go to a psychiatrist and try to rule it out. It is a real possibility, and potentially the most likely one. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
I don’t think you’ll find such a thing readily discounted here. There are plenty of well established cognitive biases that come to play in assessment of supernatural claims. The sequences discuss this to some degree, but you might also be interested in reading this book which discusses some of the mechanisms which contribute to supernatural belief which are not commonly discussed here.
We don’t even need to raise the issue of the supernatural to examine whether people are likely to pass down beliefs and rituals when they don’t really work. We can look at folk medicine, and see if there are examples of cures which have been passed down through cultures which perform no better than placebo in double blind tests. In fact, there is an abundance of such.
Point.
though I would point out that not all of them are wrong either. Just the good majority. That’s neither here nor there though.
Out of curiosity how does science explain people feeling knowing that people they care about are in trouble? My mother has made 4 phone calls, and I have witnessed 2 where she felt that someone was in trouble and called them. One of those calls was to me and it helped me greatly. While she has missed calling people that were in trouble, she has never once called someone with that intent and been wrong.She told me that it feels like someone is telling her to call them because they are in trouble. I can’t know if that is true or not, but I can’t think of her ever lying to me. This is even more interesting because one time she told me that she felt she needed to make the call just before she did, thereby predicting it.
I know that she isn’t the only person that does this, because I have read many accounts of people who believed a loved one had died when they were across the ocean during WWII.
Personally I would go with psyonics if not god, but that might be because I played to many role-playing games.
Sorry if this seems odd, it was just something that came to mind as I was thinking about supernatural* things.
*(outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts)
I don’t know if this is something that has been explained, or even if it’s something that needs to be explained. It could be that you’re operating under an unrepresentative dataset. Keep in mind that if you hadn’t experienced a number of phone calls where the caller’s intuition that something was wrong was correct, you wouldn’t treat it as a phenomenon in need of explanation, but if you had experienced some other set of improbable occurrences, simply by chance, then that would look like a phenomenon in need of explanation. I personally have no experiences with acquaintances making phone calls on an intuition that something is wrong and being right, although I have experience with acquaintances getting worried and making phone calls and finding out there was really nothing to worry about. There’s a significant danger of selection bias in dealing with claims like this, because people who experience, say, a sudden premonition that something has happened to their loved on across the sea at war, and then find out a couple weeks later that they’re still alive and well, are probably not going to record the experience for posterity.
I’ve encountered plenty of claims of improbable events before which were attributed to supernatural causes. If I consistently encountered ones that took the form of people correctly intuiting that a distant loved one was in trouble and calling them, I would definitely start to suspect that this was a real phenomenon in need of explanation, although I would also be interested in seeing how often people intuited that a distant loved one was in trouble, called them, found out they were wrong, and didn’t think it was worth remembering. Maybe some of the improbable events I’ve heard about really are the result of more than chance, and have some underlying explanation that I’m not aware of, but I don’t have the evidence to strongly suspect this.
If you multiply a day times the population experiencing it, that’s about 82,000 years of human experience in America alone. That’s a lot of time for improbable stuff to happen in, and people tend to remember the improbable stuff and forget the ordinary, and draw patterns erroneously. So I don’t treat seeming patterns of unusual events as needing explanation unless I have reliable reason to conclude that they’re actually going on.
Has your mother ever called anyone when she felt they were in trouble, only to find out that they weren’t, in fact, in trouble ? Confirmation bias is pretty strong in most humans.
Wait… she predicted that she would call someone, and then went ahead and called someone ? This doesn’t sound like much of a prediction; I don’t think I’m parsing your sentence correctly.
If your loved one is fighting in WWII, it’s very likely that he or she would die, sadly...
Why did you end up picking “god” over “psionics”, then ?
Not that I remember. My memory could be faulty, but thinking long and hard about it I don’t remember it happening.
She predicted they were in trouble. I think the phrase she used was “I think XXXX is in trouble and needs help.” I could be misremembering though.
It’s a close call honestly, but if god exists, which I believe he does from other evidence listed in this over-sized thread, then adding psionics on top would be added complexity for no gain. If you already know that the earth goes around the sun because of gravity, why bother coming up with an alternate explanation for why Saturn goes around the sun? It might have another reason, but the simplest explanation is more likely to be right.
Oh yeah, that makes more sense than what I was thinking.
Anyway, as the others on this thread have pointed out, there could be many explanations for why you remember events the way you do. Among them, are things like “my mother has supernatural powers”, “a god exists and he is using his powers on my mother”, “aliens exist and are using their power on my mother”, etc. The most probable explanation, though, is “my memory is faulty due to a cognitive bias that is well understood by modern psychologists”.
That said, I must acknowledge that if you have already determined, for some other unrelated reason, that the probability of psionic powers / gods / aliens existing is quite high; then it would be perfectly rational of you to assign a much higher probability to one of these other explanations.
Even if that were true, and not a misremembrance or a post-hoc rationalization, you must take note of the many other people who have those feelings and no one was in trouble. You should expect in advance to hear more anecdotes about the times that someone really was in trouble, than anecdotes about the times they were not, so having heard them is very little evidence.
I did state that she predicted one in advance to me. Also when my mother called me the first thing she asked was “are you alright?”
As far as my mother goes I have never once seen her mistake a prediction. Now 2 predictions (and 2 more that she told me about) sounds small, but consider the amount of times that she didn’t mistakenly call the probability that something is going on is quite high. For example if you have a deck with 996 blue cards in it, and 4 red cards in it, and you call a red card before it flips once, but never call it before a blue card flips, the chances of you succeeding on are… Um… Do you guys want me to do the math? It’s pretty small.
And just because some people think that they can do it and can’t, doesn’t mean that a person can’t do it. Look at all the people who think they are wonderful singers.
Of course I could be misremembering. I could go ask my mother, and my father and see what they say if you like. (Yes I am close to my parents. We have a tight nit family even though I am 24). Of course we could all be misremembering, or lying. Again, you have no way to know, and you really shouldn’t even consider taking my word for this.
Every culture has some different things they believe in, and call supernatural. That doesn’t prove there really is a category of things that actually are supernatural. By analogy, belief by Himalayan people that the Yeti is real is not evidence that Bigfoot (in the northwestern United States) is real. Likewise, a Hindu’s fervent belief is not evidence of the resurrection of Jesus.
In short, the shortfalls in human understanding completely explain why primitive cultures believed “supernatural” was a real and useful label, even though that belief is false.
I’m not sure whether it is the case that primitive cultures have a category of things they think of as “supernatural”—pagan religions were certainly quite literal: they lived on Olympus, they mated with humans, they were birthed. I wonder whether the distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” only comes about when it becomes clear that gods don’t belong in the former category.
I had a paragraph about that, citing Explain/Worship/Ignore, but I decided that it detracted from the point I was trying to make.
If you already think that primitives did not use the label “supernatural,” then you already think there isn’t much evidence of supernatural phenomena—at least compared to the post I was responding to.
I don’t believe you’ve read much of the content on this site. There are a host of human cognitive biases that would lead to belief in the supernatural. Perhaps most notably, we attribute agency to non-agents. It’s easy to see how that would be adaptive in the ancestral environment; just look at the truth table for “That sound was an animal and I believe that sound was an animal” and the outcomes of each possibility.
Not really. There are plenty of plausible explanations for that description that don’t require positing something supernatural.
And now if all you have is one event in your faulty human memory to go on, it counts for practically nothing. Given the low prior for the existence of most particular deities, updating on that piece of evidence should still give you a ridiculously low posterior. “I’m hallucinating” would probably be my winning hypothesis at the time it’s happening, and “I’m misremembering” afterwards.
So what I’m getting from you is that you would ignore your own observations to conform to what others expect? That your belief in a universe without god is so strong that even if I did show you something like this you would refuse to believe it because it didn’t fit with your expectations? Then I fail to see how I could ever convince you.
Addendum: Have group hallucinations been proven or disproven?
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.
I can’t speak for thomblake, but there are experiences that could convince me that there was a powerful entity that intervened on behalf of humanity. They just haven’t happened. And I have reasons to believe that they will never happen, including the fact that they haven’t happened before—absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
A single experience of that kind would be terrible evidence for Christianity, and merely poor evidence for the supernatural. A coherent set of experiences indicative of a consistent, ongoing supernatural world (or specifically a Christian world) would be much more convincing.
I think this is called “behaving rationally”. I understand “rationality” as using reason to my benefit. If there comes a time when it would be beneficial for me to do something, and I arrive at that conclusion through reason, then I’d consider that a triumph of rationality. I think if you are able to anticipate an advantage that could be gained by a behavior then refusing to perform that behavior would be irrational.
You misunderstand me. It isn’t my anecdotal evidence that makes me think the church is horrible. I just pointed out that I had spent a lot of time in churches to show that I have more than the passing familiarity with them that you attributed to me. I think the church is horrible because it threatens children, promotes inaccurate material and takes money from the gullible.
While this is good that your church isn’t abusing more children, it is still terrible to consign “2 or three children” to such mistreatment. Telling children that there is a hell and that they will go to it if they don’t believe in something which is obviously flawed is a terrible thing to do. It is psychological child abuse and I don’t think it says very much in your church’s favor that it only abuses two or three kids.
A child lacks the intellectual maturity to understand or evaluate complex ideas. A child is more trusting than an adult. If your parents tell you something is true, or that you should believe this minister when he talks about heaven, you are more likely to believe it. If your parents came to you now and told you about how they had just found out about Krishna and you should read the Bhagavad Gita you probably wouldn’t be very receptive. And yet, your parents managed to convince you that the Bible was true. Why was that? Was it because through random chance you were born into a family that already believed in the one true religion? Or was it just that you adopted the religion you were exposed to. Because, when you were young your mind wasn’t discriminating enough to realize that, wait a second, this isn’t making sense!
No, but the usefulness of reading is well established. Mathematics is axiomatic. Religion is, as the most polite thing I could say about it, highly suspect. I don’t think its right for adults to have sex with children, because children aren’t mature enough to make informed decisions about consent. Similarly, I don’t think its okay for people to teach religion to children because children aren’t mature enough to make informed decisions about ontology.
I apologize if you have found me disrespectful so far. It isn’t my intention to be disrespectful to you. That said, I have no intention of being respectful to a set of beliefs which I consider first to be wrong and second to be pernicious. If you have an argument which you think is compelling as to the truth of Christianity, please tell me. I promise that if I am swayed by your argument I will begin to show Christianity due deference.
This is a true statement that is designed to protect a child. Saying something like “You’ll writhe in agony for all time if you don’t believe in the truth of this thousands of years old document compiled over hundreds of years by an unknown but large number of authors” isn’t the same kind of statement. Even if you don’t explicitly say that to a child, convincing them to believe in Christianity is implicitly making that statement.
As far as “bad” goes, I don’t have a ready definition. I have to fall back on Justice Potter Stewart “I know it when I see it”. Threatening children and teaching them things that are at best highly suspect as if they were true is bad.
Tithing (giving a tenth) is explicitly recommended in the Bible. If the churches you are going to endorse the Bible then they are at least implicitly asking for 10%.
I don’t think Eliezer has a school for children where he teaches them that unless they grow up to believe in his set of rules that an Unfriendly AI will punish them for all time. I have less against evangelism to adults. If Eliezer asks for money like this, that is fair, because the people he is asking can evaluate whether or not they believe in the cause and donate accordingly. There is nothing wrong with that. There is something wrong with compelling donations through threats of damnation.
Thus my point that sometimes you should not question one of your own beliefs is preserved. You agree that it would be the rational thing to do in some situations.
If you can’t explain what bad is, then I am unable to discuss this with you. You might have a good definition, or you might be just saying that whatever makes you mad is automatically bad. I can’t know, so I can’t form any arguments about it.
Bad is causing harm to people who don’t deserve it. Convincing someone in the existence of hell is harmful—you are theatening them with the worst thing possible, convincing someone of a lie to compel them to serve the chruch through donations of time or money is harmful, convincing someone that they are innately sinful is harmful psychologically, convincing someone that morality is tied to religious institution is harmful. Children are least deserving of harm and so harming them is bad.