I have already read the Mormonism essay and mostly agreed with it.
However, I disagree that you would be using the same standard of evidence in this case. For example, all of the witnesses for Mormonism had readily understandable motives such as not breaking up the group or offending their leader. Something similar may be true about the boy and his parents, but it isn’t true e.g. of the doctors who testified to amputating the boy’s leg. They were from a different town, were not there when the supposed restoration happened, and had nothing to gain by agreeing with a made up story. Calanda could become famous by such a story, but the doctors would get nothing out of it.
That is only one out of a number of substantial differences.
In my experience, people who are not involved in alleged miraculous events will often throw support behind their veracity, because any dramatic miracle is like a point scored for the cultural group they identify with. While arguably this might have been less the case hundreds of years ago when the cultural hegemony of Christianity meant that there was less value in dramatic evidence for it, I think that the far greater prevalence of dramatic miracle claims from that period suggests that this is not the case. Plus, in those times, the site of any dramatic alleged miracle would often gain a reputation as a holy place, greatly increasing the standing of the location and increasing business through pilgrimage.
More cultural hegemony means more status accruing to people that can credibly claim to have witnessed (or, better yet, been beneficiary of) a miracle, and therefore more coattails to ride. It also means fewer skeptics hanging around to poke holes in your testimony.
More speculatively, it might also mean a greater cultural acceptance of magical thinking, which could make supernatural explanations more salient whenever people are faced with the sort of freakish coincidences that happen a few times in every life by the laws of statistics.
Of course you can speculate on reasons why people would have been likely to make up stories like that, but Christians could also speculate that since the Bible says miracles are worked by faith (“your faith has healed you” etc), one would expect that in places where there is more faith, there will be more miracles. But those times had more faith, so one would expect that they would have more miracles. So theoretically that could be an alternate explanation for why those times had more dramatic miracle claims, however unappealing that explanation might be to you.
This is certainly an argument one could take. However, while the average levels of faith then were certainly much higher, the population now is also much higher, so even if our per-capita rate of dramatic miracles is lower, we have a much larger pool to draw on, and much better documentation.
Also, if we’re comparing hypothetical worlds where Christianity is true or false, I think a scenario where the populace becomes dramatically less faithful over time, to the point that the absolute population with sufficient faith to perform miracles goes down while the total population more than dectuples, is significantly less likely to occur in the world where Christianity is true.
Jesus is said to have said, “Will the Son of Man find faith left on the earth when he returns?” In context this looks like a rhetorical question, with the answer being “no”, at least more or less, even if he did not mean that no one at all would believe. So I don’t see how your second thing is right, since someone seems to have predicted that scenario. It’s true that that is likely to happen if Christianity is false; but apparently it is also likely to happen if it is true.
Regarding the first, Mark 6:4-6 says, “Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and among his own relatives and in his own household.” And He could do no miracle there except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them. And He wondered at their unbelief. ” So it seems that just as faith works miracles, unbelief impedes them, even when there are a few believers around. So even if the population is greater, miracles will not necessarily increase, because of the greater population of unbelievers.
As for better documentation, Thomas Aquinas at least asserts that the reason faith should work miracles is that a person who has faith “merits” in a certain way to prove that faith to himself and others. This means that equal faith should earn equal proofs. But an equal miracle will be more capable of proving things, not equally capable, when you have better documentation; so as documentation improves, the faith you need to work the same miracle will increase, and so the frequency of miracles of a given type will decrease. This also explains why most miracles are not directly visible in a moment; because a miracle like this has too much of a capacity to prove something, in comparison to people’s level of faith.
As I said, such explanations may be unappealing, especially since apparently the consequences are exactly the same whether Christianity is true or false. However, I did not invent those explanations, but they were already presented long ago by the Bible and by Christians (such as Thomas Aquinas).
Jesus is said to have said, “Will the Son of Man find faith left on the earth when he returns?” In context this looks like a rhetorical question, with the answer being “no”, at least more or less, even if he did not mean that no one at all would believe. So I don’t see how your second thing is right, since someone seems to have predicted that scenario. It’s true that that is likely to happen if Christianity is false; but apparently it is also likely to happen if it is true.
First, I don’t think it’s at all clear from the context that the answer is intended to be “no.” Second, Jesus also indicated that some people who knew him in person would still be alive as of the time he returned to earth, so this might be better interpreted as skepticism that his followers can maintain their standards of devotion rather than doubt in the persistence of a long term tradition.
As for better documentation, Thomas Aquinas at least asserts that the reason faith should work miracles is that a person who has faith “merits” in a certain way to prove that faith to himself and others. This means that equal faith should earn equal proofs. But an equal miracle will be more capable of proving things, not equally capable, when you have better documentation; so as documentation improves, the faith you need to work the same miracle will increase, and so the frequency of miracles of a given type will decrease. This also explains why most miracles are not directly visible in a moment; because a miracle like this has too much of a capacity to prove something, in comparison to people’s level of faith.
On the other hand, Jesus himself seems to suggest a simpler model in Luke 11, according to which God answers prayers simply to satisfy those who ask, because he is good.
If unbelief inhibits miracles, then one should be able to create miracles by separating out enclaves of the faithful (and indeed, more religious communities certainly tend to segregate themselves from less religious ones.) But if you go too far down the road of expecting no miracles to occur, then this also means that you can’t update your confidence upwards based on reports of miracles either.
As C.S. Lewis would say-are they lying, are they mad, or are they telling the truth? People do lie sometimes, and perhaps my difficulty in letting go of Christianity despite a mountain of evidence against it is that my prior on people making up stories is too low. It would take an awful lot of psychosis to make someone believe that a leg had regrown, but again, people do go insane. But is there a way to get a sense of how likely/unlikely this is? With Pascal’s Wager on the table, it’s not enough to say there’s ~40% chance Christianity is true, that’s less than half, it’s probably wrong. Rejecting it without constant fear would take near certainty that accounts like this one are fraudulant or deceived.
C.S. Lewis, I think, failed to adequately account for the likelihood of stories propagating by exaggeration. Jesus need not have been a liar, a lunatic, or the lord, he could have been an honest, sane person to whom people ascribed claims of being divine after the fact (although as a religious leader setting up a splinter movement that strongly deviated from existing doctrine, I think the odds favor the historical Jesus having been at least somewhat crazy.)
I would say that the body of evidence posed by other religions suggests that, in the absence of a true religion, people will still make up stories of a religious nature (also, the degree of theological uniformity that exists among most existing strains of Christianity comes, not from the fact that early sects were at all unified, but that modern sects are almost all descended from the strain that killed the other ones off.) But my position is probably shaped to a significant extent by personal experiences with other people elaborating on outlandish lies that I came up with when I was young, with practically nothing to gain from it.
One of the interesting things about Christianity is that it’s not using a probabilistic uncertainty framework at all. “Belief” in Christ is not just some confidence >30% in the godhood of Jesus- in Christianity, one simply believes or does not believe. This is part of why Lewis’ logical dialectic has an appeal in that culture; it’s basically Aristotelian, accepting propositions as True or False (this is also one of the reasons Thomas Aquinas is so revered for integrating the two in the first place, if I had to guess).
But, while this is the accepted inside-view way to approach the question of Jesus’ divinity, it is probably a flawed way to interpret material experiences such as miracles. Note that even the Catholic church uses a formal system involving evidence and testimony, and thus in practice has a kind of rough ‘confidence interval’ for the truth of a miracle. Basically, you’re stuck with the standard of actionable confidence.
Try to think of a precise answer to the question, just as an exercise. When miracles are the load-bearing component of your religious belief, it’s going to come down to the degree of confidence that you need. If 40% is too high, what about 10%? 2%? For that matter, try to think about your current probability estimates in concrete terms as best you can, and notice when a given piece of information lowers that or raises it.
One major problem with Pascal’s Wager (among others) is that it doesn’t specify which god. It applies equally to worshiping Yahweh, Kali, and Huitzilopochtli—and offers no guidance on how to choose between them.
Right, but given a large body of Christian miracle accounts, the only two hypotheses that seem plausible are 1. Christianity is true or 2. Christianity is false, and nevertheless generates an extremely impressive body of miracle claims. Given 1. Pascal’s Wager is obviously worth taking, and given 2. I can’t see any reason to believe in any God. The Wager only works if there’s some other reason to consider the belief to be reasonable, otherwise we’d all end up praying to the Tooth Fairy.
generates an extremely impressive body of miracle claims
Keep in mind that Christianity was the dominant religion of the West for a very long time and it certainly had enough incentives to assert, promote, and otherwise, um, sanctify a large number of miracle claims. All strange and unexplained events (as long as they are beneficial) would be classified as miracles in a deeply Christian society.
And let’s not forget the hypothetical Trickster God, omnipotent ruler of the universe that sends all people that believe in Him to hell, and everyone else goes to heaven. In other words, Pascal’s wager coexists with its exact inverse.
But even without the wager on the table, I think we can safely agree that the question of God’s existence is high-stakes.
Regarding your priors, I think this case is actually just like the other cases where you said you disagreed with Less Wrong; it is always a question of priors. The prior regarding people making things up is one of them. Similarly, I think your prior on the actual occurrence of extraordinary events is much higher than for the typical Less Wronger, and closer to the prior that ordinary human beings have.
So you could just assume that since Less Wrong is made up mostly of smart rational people who have thought carefully about their epistemology, it is more likely their prior is right, and so conclude that Christianity is false.
However, personally I think it is not that simple. When Eliezer said that he would prefer a machine that would destroy the world if God existed than one which would destroy the world at odds of a billion to one (I think it was a billion, not a trillion), I think that is extremely strong evidence that he is overconfident. So likewise I think it is clearly true that Less Wrong in general is overconfident that Christianity is false. Basically Less Wrong cannot avoid the standard pressures of a political community; just as Republicans are generally overconfident that it’s ok to let people have guns, Less Wrongers are overconfident that God does not exist and that religion is false.
Generally speaking, in fact, Less Wrongers appear to have a prior regarding the occurrence of extraordinary events that is much like the prior scientists usually hold regarding such things. But that prior is in fact too low; this is why scientists took so long to admit the reality of meteorites and giant waves at sea, even after such things were sufficiently established by eyewitness testimony.
Of course, that does not mean that your prior is right; it just means the question is more difficult than simply accepting Less Wrong’s priors.
In this case the problem with it just being made up is that the witnesses seem too numerous and there seems to be too much extrinsic evidence, e.g. the records of his entrance into the hospital where the leg was amputated etc. However, it is still possible that it is simply an outlier—a case of fraud even when fraud seems very unlikely.
I have already read the Mormonism essay and mostly agreed with it.
However, I disagree that you would be using the same standard of evidence in this case. For example, all of the witnesses for Mormonism had readily understandable motives such as not breaking up the group or offending their leader. Something similar may be true about the boy and his parents, but it isn’t true e.g. of the doctors who testified to amputating the boy’s leg. They were from a different town, were not there when the supposed restoration happened, and had nothing to gain by agreeing with a made up story. Calanda could become famous by such a story, but the doctors would get nothing out of it.
That is only one out of a number of substantial differences.
In my experience, people who are not involved in alleged miraculous events will often throw support behind their veracity, because any dramatic miracle is like a point scored for the cultural group they identify with. While arguably this might have been less the case hundreds of years ago when the cultural hegemony of Christianity meant that there was less value in dramatic evidence for it, I think that the far greater prevalence of dramatic miracle claims from that period suggests that this is not the case. Plus, in those times, the site of any dramatic alleged miracle would often gain a reputation as a holy place, greatly increasing the standing of the location and increasing business through pilgrimage.
More cultural hegemony means more status accruing to people that can credibly claim to have witnessed (or, better yet, been beneficiary of) a miracle, and therefore more coattails to ride. It also means fewer skeptics hanging around to poke holes in your testimony.
More speculatively, it might also mean a greater cultural acceptance of magical thinking, which could make supernatural explanations more salient whenever people are faced with the sort of freakish coincidences that happen a few times in every life by the laws of statistics.
Of course you can speculate on reasons why people would have been likely to make up stories like that, but Christians could also speculate that since the Bible says miracles are worked by faith (“your faith has healed you” etc), one would expect that in places where there is more faith, there will be more miracles. But those times had more faith, so one would expect that they would have more miracles. So theoretically that could be an alternate explanation for why those times had more dramatic miracle claims, however unappealing that explanation might be to you.
This is certainly an argument one could take. However, while the average levels of faith then were certainly much higher, the population now is also much higher, so even if our per-capita rate of dramatic miracles is lower, we have a much larger pool to draw on, and much better documentation.
Also, if we’re comparing hypothetical worlds where Christianity is true or false, I think a scenario where the populace becomes dramatically less faithful over time, to the point that the absolute population with sufficient faith to perform miracles goes down while the total population more than dectuples, is significantly less likely to occur in the world where Christianity is true.
Jesus is said to have said, “Will the Son of Man find faith left on the earth when he returns?” In context this looks like a rhetorical question, with the answer being “no”, at least more or less, even if he did not mean that no one at all would believe. So I don’t see how your second thing is right, since someone seems to have predicted that scenario. It’s true that that is likely to happen if Christianity is false; but apparently it is also likely to happen if it is true.
Regarding the first, Mark 6:4-6 says, “Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and among his own relatives and in his own household.” And He could do no miracle there except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them. And He wondered at their unbelief. ” So it seems that just as faith works miracles, unbelief impedes them, even when there are a few believers around. So even if the population is greater, miracles will not necessarily increase, because of the greater population of unbelievers.
As for better documentation, Thomas Aquinas at least asserts that the reason faith should work miracles is that a person who has faith “merits” in a certain way to prove that faith to himself and others. This means that equal faith should earn equal proofs. But an equal miracle will be more capable of proving things, not equally capable, when you have better documentation; so as documentation improves, the faith you need to work the same miracle will increase, and so the frequency of miracles of a given type will decrease. This also explains why most miracles are not directly visible in a moment; because a miracle like this has too much of a capacity to prove something, in comparison to people’s level of faith.
As I said, such explanations may be unappealing, especially since apparently the consequences are exactly the same whether Christianity is true or false. However, I did not invent those explanations, but they were already presented long ago by the Bible and by Christians (such as Thomas Aquinas).
First, I don’t think it’s at all clear from the context that the answer is intended to be “no.” Second, Jesus also indicated that some people who knew him in person would still be alive as of the time he returned to earth, so this might be better interpreted as skepticism that his followers can maintain their standards of devotion rather than doubt in the persistence of a long term tradition.
On the other hand, Jesus himself seems to suggest a simpler model in Luke 11, according to which God answers prayers simply to satisfy those who ask, because he is good.
If unbelief inhibits miracles, then one should be able to create miracles by separating out enclaves of the faithful (and indeed, more religious communities certainly tend to segregate themselves from less religious ones.) But if you go too far down the road of expecting no miracles to occur, then this also means that you can’t update your confidence upwards based on reports of miracles either.
As C.S. Lewis would say-are they lying, are they mad, or are they telling the truth? People do lie sometimes, and perhaps my difficulty in letting go of Christianity despite a mountain of evidence against it is that my prior on people making up stories is too low. It would take an awful lot of psychosis to make someone believe that a leg had regrown, but again, people do go insane. But is there a way to get a sense of how likely/unlikely this is? With Pascal’s Wager on the table, it’s not enough to say there’s ~40% chance Christianity is true, that’s less than half, it’s probably wrong. Rejecting it without constant fear would take near certainty that accounts like this one are fraudulant or deceived.
C.S. Lewis, I think, failed to adequately account for the likelihood of stories propagating by exaggeration. Jesus need not have been a liar, a lunatic, or the lord, he could have been an honest, sane person to whom people ascribed claims of being divine after the fact (although as a religious leader setting up a splinter movement that strongly deviated from existing doctrine, I think the odds favor the historical Jesus having been at least somewhat crazy.)
I would say that the body of evidence posed by other religions suggests that, in the absence of a true religion, people will still make up stories of a religious nature (also, the degree of theological uniformity that exists among most existing strains of Christianity comes, not from the fact that early sects were at all unified, but that modern sects are almost all descended from the strain that killed the other ones off.) But my position is probably shaped to a significant extent by personal experiences with other people elaborating on outlandish lies that I came up with when I was young, with practically nothing to gain from it.
One of the interesting things about Christianity is that it’s not using a probabilistic uncertainty framework at all. “Belief” in Christ is not just some confidence >30% in the godhood of Jesus- in Christianity, one simply believes or does not believe. This is part of why Lewis’ logical dialectic has an appeal in that culture; it’s basically Aristotelian, accepting propositions as True or False (this is also one of the reasons Thomas Aquinas is so revered for integrating the two in the first place, if I had to guess).
But, while this is the accepted inside-view way to approach the question of Jesus’ divinity, it is probably a flawed way to interpret material experiences such as miracles. Note that even the Catholic church uses a formal system involving evidence and testimony, and thus in practice has a kind of rough ‘confidence interval’ for the truth of a miracle. Basically, you’re stuck with the standard of actionable confidence.
Try to think of a precise answer to the question, just as an exercise. When miracles are the load-bearing component of your religious belief, it’s going to come down to the degree of confidence that you need. If 40% is too high, what about 10%? 2%? For that matter, try to think about your current probability estimates in concrete terms as best you can, and notice when a given piece of information lowers that or raises it.
One major problem with Pascal’s Wager (among others) is that it doesn’t specify which god. It applies equally to worshiping Yahweh, Kali, and Huitzilopochtli—and offers no guidance on how to choose between them.
Right, but given a large body of Christian miracle accounts, the only two hypotheses that seem plausible are 1. Christianity is true or 2. Christianity is false, and nevertheless generates an extremely impressive body of miracle claims. Given 1. Pascal’s Wager is obviously worth taking, and given 2. I can’t see any reason to believe in any God. The Wager only works if there’s some other reason to consider the belief to be reasonable, otherwise we’d all end up praying to the Tooth Fairy.
Keep in mind that Christianity was the dominant religion of the West for a very long time and it certainly had enough incentives to assert, promote, and otherwise, um, sanctify a large number of miracle claims. All strange and unexplained events (as long as they are beneficial) would be classified as miracles in a deeply Christian society.
And let’s not forget the hypothetical Trickster God, omnipotent ruler of the universe that sends all people that believe in Him to hell, and everyone else goes to heaven. In other words, Pascal’s wager coexists with its exact inverse.
But even without the wager on the table, I think we can safely agree that the question of God’s existence is high-stakes.
Regarding your priors, I think this case is actually just like the other cases where you said you disagreed with Less Wrong; it is always a question of priors. The prior regarding people making things up is one of them. Similarly, I think your prior on the actual occurrence of extraordinary events is much higher than for the typical Less Wronger, and closer to the prior that ordinary human beings have.
So you could just assume that since Less Wrong is made up mostly of smart rational people who have thought carefully about their epistemology, it is more likely their prior is right, and so conclude that Christianity is false.
However, personally I think it is not that simple. When Eliezer said that he would prefer a machine that would destroy the world if God existed than one which would destroy the world at odds of a billion to one (I think it was a billion, not a trillion), I think that is extremely strong evidence that he is overconfident. So likewise I think it is clearly true that Less Wrong in general is overconfident that Christianity is false. Basically Less Wrong cannot avoid the standard pressures of a political community; just as Republicans are generally overconfident that it’s ok to let people have guns, Less Wrongers are overconfident that God does not exist and that religion is false.
Generally speaking, in fact, Less Wrongers appear to have a prior regarding the occurrence of extraordinary events that is much like the prior scientists usually hold regarding such things. But that prior is in fact too low; this is why scientists took so long to admit the reality of meteorites and giant waves at sea, even after such things were sufficiently established by eyewitness testimony.
Of course, that does not mean that your prior is right; it just means the question is more difficult than simply accepting Less Wrong’s priors.
In this case the problem with it just being made up is that the witnesses seem too numerous and there seems to be too much extrinsic evidence, e.g. the records of his entrance into the hospital where the leg was amputated etc. However, it is still possible that it is simply an outlier—a case of fraud even when fraud seems very unlikely.