Again, I like your characters but I think you’re missing one. The person who thinks that belief in [a] God is the result of rational and reasonable thought.
That’s what Barbara says, but only if you press her. Mostly she just doesn’t talk about it.
If she spontaneously announces this to the group and challenges them to a debate, believing that the truth ought to be obvious enough that anyone should be able to see it, I shall endeavor to turn her into Caroline in 15 minutes and Donna a day later.
I shall endeavor to turn her into Caroline in 15 minutes and Donna a day later.
With what probability will you anticipate success?
The most likely outcome is that she will conclude, “I guess I was wrong to think that anyone would be able to see the truth of theism.” She will justify this with either “I didn’t imagine that atheists would hold on to their delusions so tenaciously” or “Although the rationality of theism is still plain to me, I didn’t realize how great the inferential distances could be. It takes more work than I anticipated to spell out all the details to a skeptical audience.”
With what probability will you anticipate success?
Higher probability than people who’ve despaired of theists believe is possible, still less than 50%. Keep in mind that we’re starting with someone who hasn’t sunk too far into belief in self-deception.
Barbara might describe herself this way. We would of course say that she’s “refusing to apply rationality” to the religious domain, but that’s not necessarily what she would say.
A religious person who admits that their belief is irrational is probably already in Caroline territory.
A religious person who admits that their belief is irrational is probably already in Caroline territory.
Not in my experience—they seem to maintain non-overlapping magisteria in their heads. You can do all sorts of things with compartmentalisation!
This is particularly difficult to alleviate if there’s money involved, whether coming to them or going from them. (New Age in a phrase: “dolphins and money, dolphins and money.”)
A religious person who admits that their belief is irrational is probably already in Caroline territory
Saying the words does not imply understanding them. Someone who admits to ‘irrationality’ might not see it as a complete surrender to random unreasonableness, but as something that is ‘non-nerdy’. Remember those ‘rationality go to hell’ posters? They imply the writer is stupid, but that is not how those writing it see them.
Likewise I had many a person label them self as rational or too rational. Or tried to explain the false dichotomy of rationality vs. emotions.
It is just words after all. And quite often after a heated debate it turns out that everyone has a different definition for the term debated. Not that pointing this out helps.
I did not manage to find them again yet. I saw big road signs with writings such as ‘reason go to hell’ on pictures of a certain region in the middle of the US. Maybe someone else has them on file.
“Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has”—This is an actual photo, not the output of a church sign generator, taken by PZ Myers.
The quote is, in fact, from Martin Luther:
Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but—more frequently than not—struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.
Keep in mind that there are many ways on the internet to make fake church signs or similar. See e.g. the church sign generator so one needs to be careful about that sort of evidence. That said, there are examples that almost resemble this. One is reminded of Pastor Ray Mummert’s “We’ve been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture” when talking about the Dover trial. But even that’s not against rationality itself.
Again, I like your characters but I think you’re missing one. The person who thinks that belief in [a] God is the result of rational and reasonable thought.
Or in any case necessary. That even if theism isn’t the result of rational and reasonable thought, it is arational rather than irrational. Some religious people are aware that rational thought will drive towards atheism (for example) and will describe faith as a “choice”, not unlike a moral preference.
Moral preferences are arational; rooted in biology and our social interactions, perhaps like theism where it is practiced.
A common variation on this is to assert that they can essentially elevate a mild probability hypothesis and treat it as a high probability hypothesis. Certainly when I was a theist I sometimes thought that way.
Currently trendy is the Bayesian argument, which frequently starts with asserting that the only acceptable proper and right-thinking prior probability of God is 0.5 AAAAAARGH
(The problem here being the assumption that we start knowing nothing at all rather than that we know really quite a lot—that being the bit in the argument where a negligible probability is turned into a non-negligible one.)
(Sorry, I just had lunch with some relatively sensible theists and I’m still going AAAAAARGH)
I’ve never heard anyone seriously say that, but I don’t doubt that they exist.
I’m curious what they have to say about the different beliefs of different theist traditions… that is, is the prior for each of them supposed to be .5?
I need to find a written example. I believe a debate Christopher Hitchens lost against a theist involved him being waylaid by an unexpected Bayesian attack. In any case, I have an anecdotal datum that the word is out there.
Something like that—I need to find a written example of the Bayesian probability argument for God. The idea is that when you have no idea, and no basis for an idea, you have no reason to have the probability of A greater or lesser than the probability of not-A.
Note that a large part of the thrust of Dawkins’ The God Delusion is to show the improbability of the God hypothesis (as stated by Dawkins) given what we know already.
The assumption that we know nothing about a question, when we actually know quite a lot, is a common way to turn a negligible probability into a non-negligible one, e.g. as I have noted before about parapsychology.
(slaps self upside of head) And, of course, there’s an entire section of The God Delusion dealing with the Bayesian argument, as first popularised by Stephen Unwin in his 2003 book The Probability Of God, who—ta-dah! - started with 0.5.
Ah, here we are! And another! Not silly enough to actually use 0.5 as the prior, but then these are the sophisticated versions—or at least lengthy.
Another anecdote of the currency of “Bayes, P(God)=0.5”: Armondikov at RationalWiki also ranted recently on his FB (else I’d link it) about theists who’ve discovered the word “Bayes” and start at 0.5.
The important phenomenon to note here is the word “Bayes” achieving currency amongst the not joined-up of thinking, as an excuse for stupidity. Good thing or bad thing?
Most likely a bad thing, given similar past examples. E.g. I’ve talked to atheists who won’t touch Bostrom/Anthropic Bias because they associate “the anthropic principle” with theological fine-tuning arguments. And the general problem of audiences’ first impression of Bayes being that it’s just another clever way to argue for whatever you want to believe or want others to believe.
On the other hand, it would be interesting to have more debates between theists and atheists who are both familiar with Bayes and use it explicitly, if the atheist is good enough at noticing and explaining flawed uses of it, so audiences can become familiar with fallacious uses of it and see that it can be used wisely.
Again, I like your characters but I think you’re missing one. The person who thinks that belief in [a] God is the result of rational and reasonable thought.
That’s what Barbara says, but only if you press her. Mostly she just doesn’t talk about it.
If she spontaneously announces this to the group and challenges them to a debate, believing that the truth ought to be obvious enough that anyone should be able to see it, I shall endeavor to turn her into Caroline in 15 minutes and Donna a day later.
With what probability will you anticipate success?
The most likely outcome is that she will conclude, “I guess I was wrong to think that anyone would be able to see the truth of theism.” She will justify this with either “I didn’t imagine that atheists would hold on to their delusions so tenaciously” or “Although the rationality of theism is still plain to me, I didn’t realize how great the inferential distances could be. It takes more work than I anticipated to spell out all the details to a skeptical audience.”
Higher probability than people who’ve despaired of theists believe is possible, still less than 50%. Keep in mind that we’re starting with someone who hasn’t sunk too far into belief in self-deception.
Your short time-frame made me wonder whether you might despair of her if you did not see rapid success.
Were you unable to change her from Barbara in a day, how much would that change your probability of seeing success in
a week?
a month?
a year?
Then there are those who label what they do as ‘rational’ regardless of if it is. Surprisingly common.
Most folk tell themselves they are being rational, Miss Granger. They do not thereby rise above the ordinary.
(Not literally true, but true within certain subcommunities.)
Barbara might describe herself this way. We would of course say that she’s “refusing to apply rationality” to the religious domain, but that’s not necessarily what she would say.
A religious person who admits that their belief is irrational is probably already in Caroline territory.
Not in my experience—they seem to maintain non-overlapping magisteria in their heads. You can do all sorts of things with compartmentalisation!
This is particularly difficult to alleviate if there’s money involved, whether coming to them or going from them. (New Age in a phrase: “dolphins and money, dolphins and money.”)
Saying the words does not imply understanding them. Someone who admits to ‘irrationality’ might not see it as a complete surrender to random unreasonableness, but as something that is ‘non-nerdy’. Remember those ‘rationality go to hell’ posters? They imply the writer is stupid, but that is not how those writing it see them.
Likewise I had many a person label them self as rational or too rational. Or tried to explain the false dichotomy of rationality vs. emotions.
It is just words after all. And quite often after a heated debate it turns out that everyone has a different definition for the term debated. Not that pointing this out helps.
I’m not sure what you are talking about here. Can you expand or cite examples?
I did not manage to find them again yet. I saw big road signs with writings such as ‘reason go to hell’ on pictures of a certain region in the middle of the US. Maybe someone else has them on file.
“Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has”—This is an actual photo, not the output of a church sign generator, taken by PZ Myers.
The quote is, in fact, from Martin Luther:
Keep in mind that there are many ways on the internet to make fake church signs or similar. See e.g. the church sign generator so one needs to be careful about that sort of evidence. That said, there are examples that almost resemble this. One is reminded of Pastor Ray Mummert’s “We’ve been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture” when talking about the Dover trial. But even that’s not against rationality itself.
Or in any case necessary. That even if theism isn’t the result of rational and reasonable thought, it is arational rather than irrational. Some religious people are aware that rational thought will drive towards atheism (for example) and will describe faith as a “choice”, not unlike a moral preference.
Moral preferences are arational; rooted in biology and our social interactions, perhaps like theism where it is practiced.
A common variation on this is to assert that they can essentially elevate a mild probability hypothesis and treat it as a high probability hypothesis. Certainly when I was a theist I sometimes thought that way.
Currently trendy is the Bayesian argument, which frequently starts with asserting that the only acceptable proper and right-thinking prior probability of God is 0.5 AAAAAARGH
(The problem here being the assumption that we start knowing nothing at all rather than that we know really quite a lot—that being the bit in the argument where a negligible probability is turned into a non-negligible one.)
(Sorry, I just had lunch with some relatively sensible theists and I’m still going AAAAAARGH)
I’ve never heard anyone seriously say that, but I don’t doubt that they exist.
I’m curious what they have to say about the different beliefs of different theist traditions… that is, is the prior for each of them supposed to be .5?
I need to find a written example. I believe a debate Christopher Hitchens lost against a theist involved him being waylaid by an unexpected Bayesian attack. In any case, I have an anecdotal datum that the word is out there.
That’d imply an interesting cosmology.
Is that because if you treat probabilities of (God or not God) as maximum entropy without prior information you’d get 50/50?
Something like that—I need to find a written example of the Bayesian probability argument for God. The idea is that when you have no idea, and no basis for an idea, you have no reason to have the probability of A greater or lesser than the probability of not-A.
Note that a large part of the thrust of Dawkins’ The God Delusion is to show the improbability of the God hypothesis (as stated by Dawkins) given what we know already.
The assumption that we know nothing about a question, when we actually know quite a lot, is a common way to turn a negligible probability into a non-negligible one, e.g. as I have noted before about parapsychology.
(slaps self upside of head) And, of course, there’s an entire section of The God Delusion dealing with the Bayesian argument, as first popularised by Stephen Unwin in his 2003 book The Probability Of God, who—ta-dah! - started with 0.5.
Lukeprog has posted one in the discussion section a while back.
*two
A Bayesian Argument for the Resurrection of Jesus
A Bayesian Argument for Theistic Fine-Tuning
Ah, here we are! And another! Not silly enough to actually use 0.5 as the prior, but then these are the sophisticated versions—or at least lengthy.
Another anecdote of the currency of “Bayes, P(God)=0.5”: Armondikov at RationalWiki also ranted recently on his FB (else I’d link it) about theists who’ve discovered the word “Bayes” and start at 0.5.
Rejoinder to them is at http://lesswrong.com/lw/jp/occams_razor/ and http://lesswrong.com/lw/19m/privileging_the_hypothesis/.
The important phenomenon to note here is the word “Bayes” achieving currency amongst the not joined-up of thinking, as an excuse for stupidity. Good thing or bad thing?
Most likely a bad thing, given similar past examples. E.g. I’ve talked to atheists who won’t touch Bostrom/Anthropic Bias because they associate “the anthropic principle” with theological fine-tuning arguments. And the general problem of audiences’ first impression of Bayes being that it’s just another clever way to argue for whatever you want to believe or want others to believe.
On the other hand, it would be interesting to have more debates between theists and atheists who are both familiar with Bayes and use it explicitly, if the atheist is good enough at noticing and explaining flawed uses of it, so audiences can become familiar with fallacious uses of it and see that it can be used wisely.
Here’s some non-LW links: Richard Swinburne, Stephen Unwin.