Lewis is saying that if you’ve disproved faith, your reason is flawed. After all, faith must be right!
This is ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’, but in unfamiliar garb. We’re not used to seeing it used the other way. (If a study reports ESP, then we ought to suspect problems in how it was conducted or analyzed rather than accept its conclusion—to use a recent example.)
I’m sure there are a number of relevant LW posts on the topic like “Einstein’s Arrogance”.
My take: “Because our cognition is unreliable, we can easily lose sight of truths we started out knowing as we walk along tempting-but-wrong garden paths, especially when strong emotions are involved.”
In other contexts this is sometimes known as “being so sharp you cut yourself.”
That’s a good moral, but to me Lewis’s quote seems to be more simply interpreted as an exhortation against successful doubt. Our thinking is certainly unreliable, but compensating for that with a fixed intention to keep believing whatever we’re currently obsessed with seems like exactly the wrong thing to do; it essentially enshrines motivated cognition as a virtue.
Having a “settled intention of continuing to believe” X shares with having a “high prior probability for” X the property that quite a lot of counterevidence can pile up before I actually start considering X unlikely.
This is not a bad thing, in and of itself.
Of course, if X happens to be false, it’s an unfortunate condition to find myself in. But if X is true, it’s a fortunate one. That just shows that it’s better to believe true things than false ones, no matter how high or low your priors or settled or indecisive your intentions.
Of course, if I start refusing to update on counterevidence at all, that’s a problem. And I agree, it’s easy to read Lewis as endorsing refusing to update on counterevidence, if only by pattern-matching to religious arguments in general.
Point taken, but Lewis wasn’t operating within a Bayesian framework. I haven’t read a lot of his apologetics, but what I remember seemed to be working through the lens of informal philosophy, where a concept is accepted or rejected as a unit based on whether or not you can think of sufficiently clever responses to all the challenges you’re aware of.
From this perspective, a “settled intention of continuing to believe” implies putting a lot more mental effort into finding clever defenses of your beliefs, and Lewis’s professed acceptance of reason implies nothing more than admitting challenges in principle. Since it’s possible to rationalize pretty much anything, this strikes me as functionally equivalent to refusing to update.
And, of course, enshrining the state of holding high priors as virtuous in itself carries its own problems.
Within the context of Lewis’ Christianity, it could be the valid form of the argument from authority: don’t believe appealing falsehoods with a little evidence over unappealing truths with a lot of evidence you don’t know. To give an example: you tell kids to believe evolution or special relativity without explaining the evidence in detail, but it would still be right for them to have “faith” instead of changing to believe creationism the first time they read a (bogus, but they wouldn’t be able to tell) creationist argument on the internet.
Except that Lewis’ Christianity was not based on any authority deemed infallible. He reasoned himself into it, while recognising the fallibility of reason. His writings set out his arguments; they do not tout any source of authority whose reliability he has not already argued.
But how can one rightly reason, while recognising one’s fallibility? That is an issue for rationalists as well.
Let me fix the original quote for you:
When we exhort people to Faith as a virtue, to the settled intention of continuing to believe certain things, we are not exhorting them to fight against reason. The intention of continuing to believe is required because, though Reason is perfect, human reasoners are not. When once passion takes part in the game, the human reason, unassisted, has about as much chance of retaining its hold on truths already gained as a snowflake has of retaining its consistency in the mouth of a blast furnace.
When a long argument produces a conclusion that strikes one as absurd, one sometimes just has to say, “This is bullshit. I don’t know what’s wrong with the argument, but I’m not going along with it.”
I think the flaw in the syllogism is “the human reason, unassisted, has a low chance of retaining its hold on truths.” We certainly forget a great deal of procedural and propositional knowledge if we don’t use it on a regular basis, but that’s different from letting go of a belief because you are passionate about how inconvenient the belief is. Once a belief takes root—i.e., after you announce it to your friends and take some actions based on it—it is usually very difficult to let go of that belief.
Anyone want to try and tease a rationality message out of this?
Lewis is saying that if you’ve disproved faith, your reason is flawed. After all, faith must be right!
This is ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’, but in unfamiliar garb. We’re not used to seeing it used the other way. (If a study reports ESP, then we ought to suspect problems in how it was conducted or analyzed rather than accept its conclusion—to use a recent example.)
I’m sure there are a number of relevant LW posts on the topic like “Einstein’s Arrogance”.
The one that immediately comes to mind for me is making your explicit reasoning trustworthy. Lewis was exhorting Christians not to trust their explicit reasoning.
My take: “Because our cognition is unreliable, we can easily lose sight of truths we started out knowing as we walk along tempting-but-wrong garden paths, especially when strong emotions are involved.”
In other contexts this is sometimes known as “being so sharp you cut yourself.”
That’s a good moral, but to me Lewis’s quote seems to be more simply interpreted as an exhortation against successful doubt. Our thinking is certainly unreliable, but compensating for that with a fixed intention to keep believing whatever we’re currently obsessed with seems like exactly the wrong thing to do; it essentially enshrines motivated cognition as a virtue.
Having a “settled intention of continuing to believe” X shares with having a “high prior probability for” X the property that quite a lot of counterevidence can pile up before I actually start considering X unlikely.
This is not a bad thing, in and of itself.
Of course, if X happens to be false, it’s an unfortunate condition to find myself in. But if X is true, it’s a fortunate one. That just shows that it’s better to believe true things than false ones, no matter how high or low your priors or settled or indecisive your intentions.
Of course, if I start refusing to update on counterevidence at all, that’s a problem. And I agree, it’s easy to read Lewis as endorsing refusing to update on counterevidence, if only by pattern-matching to religious arguments in general.
Point taken, but Lewis wasn’t operating within a Bayesian framework. I haven’t read a lot of his apologetics, but what I remember seemed to be working through the lens of informal philosophy, where a concept is accepted or rejected as a unit based on whether or not you can think of sufficiently clever responses to all the challenges you’re aware of.
From this perspective, a “settled intention of continuing to believe” implies putting a lot more mental effort into finding clever defenses of your beliefs, and Lewis’s professed acceptance of reason implies nothing more than admitting challenges in principle. Since it’s possible to rationalize pretty much anything, this strikes me as functionally equivalent to refusing to update.
And, of course, enshrining the state of holding high priors as virtuous in itself carries its own problems.
(nods) Mostly agreed.
You get it.
Within the context of Lewis’ Christianity, it could be the valid form of the argument from authority: don’t believe appealing falsehoods with a little evidence over unappealing truths with a lot of evidence you don’t know. To give an example: you tell kids to believe evolution or special relativity without explaining the evidence in detail, but it would still be right for them to have “faith” instead of changing to believe creationism the first time they read a (bogus, but they wouldn’t be able to tell) creationist argument on the internet.
Except that Lewis’ Christianity was not based on any authority deemed infallible. He reasoned himself into it, while recognising the fallibility of reason. His writings set out his arguments; they do not tout any source of authority whose reliability he has not already argued.
But how can one rightly reason, while recognising one’s fallibility? That is an issue for rationalists as well.
Let me fix the original quote for you:
When a long argument produces a conclusion that strikes one as absurd, one sometimes just has to say, “This is bullshit. I don’t know what’s wrong with the argument, but I’m not going along with it.”
I think the flaw in the syllogism is “the human reason, unassisted, has a low chance of retaining its hold on truths.” We certainly forget a great deal of procedural and propositional knowledge if we don’t use it on a regular basis, but that’s different from letting go of a belief because you are passionate about how inconvenient the belief is. Once a belief takes root—i.e., after you announce it to your friends and take some actions based on it—it is usually very difficult to let go of that belief.