(Um, this started as a reply to your comment but quickly became its own “idea I’m not ready to post” on deconversions and how we could accomplish them quickly.)
Upvoted. It took me months of reading to finally decide I was wrong. If we could put that “aha” moment in one document… well, we could do a lot of good.
Deconversions are tricky though. Did anyone here ever read Kissing Hank’s Ass? It’s a scathing moral indictment of mainline Christianity. I read it when I was 15 and couldn’t sleep for most of a night.
And the next day, I pretty much decided to ignore it. I deconverted seven years later.
I believe the truth matters, and I believe you do a person a favor by deconverting them. But if you’ve been in for a while, if you’ve grown dependent on, for example, believing in an eternal life… there’s a lot of pain in deconversion, and your mind’s going to work hard to avoid it. We need to be prepared for that.
If I were to distill the reason I became an atheist into a few words, it would look something like:
Ontologically fundamental mental things don’t make sense, but the human mind is wired to expect them. Fish swim in a sea of water, humans swim in a sea of minds. But mental things are complicated. In order to understand them you have to break them down into parts, something we’re still working hard to do. If you say “the universe exists because someone created it,” it feels like you’ve explained something, because agents are part of the most fundamental building blocks from which you build your world. But agency, intelligence, desire, and all the rest, are complicated properties which have a specific history here on earth. Sort of like cheesecake. Or the foxtrot. Or socialism.
If somebody started talking about the earth starting because of cheesecake, you’d wonder where the cheesecake came from. You’d look in a history book or a cook book and discover that the cheesecake has its origins in the roman empire, as a result of, well, people being hungry, and as a result of cows existing, and on and on, and you’d wonder how all those complex causes could produce a cheesecake predating the universe, and what sense it would make cut off from the rich causal net in which we find cheesecakes embedded today. Intelligence should not be any different. Agency trips up Occam’s rasor, because humans are wired to expect there to always be agents about. But an explanation of the universe which contains an agent is an incredibly complicated theory, which only presents itself to us for consideration because of our biases.
A complicated theory that you never would have thought of in the first place had you been less biased is not a theory that might still be right—it’s just plain wrong. In the same sense that, if you’re looking for a murderer in New York city, and you bring a suspect in on the advice of one of your lieutenants, and then it turns out the lieutenant picked the suspect by reading a horoscope, you have the wrong guy. You don’t keep him there because he might be the murderer after all, and you may as well make sure. With all of New York to canvas, you let him go, and you start over. So too with agency-based explanations of the universe’s beginning.
I’ve rambled terribly, and were that a top-level post, or a “master argument” it would have to be cleaned up considerably, but what I have just said is why I am an atheist, and not a clever argument I invented to support it.
Ontologically fundamental mental things don’t make sense, but the human mind is wired to expect them. Fish swim in a sea of water, humans swim in a sea of minds.
These two sentences, particularly the second, just explained for me why humans expect minds to be ontologically fundamental. Thank you!
If somebody started talking about the earth starting because of cheesecake, you’d wonder where the cheesecake came from. You’d look in a history book or a cook book and discover that the cheesecake has its origins in the roman empire, as a result of, well, people being hungry, and as a result of cows existing, and on and on, and you’d wonder how all those complex causes could produce a cheesecake predating the universe, and what sense it would make cut off from the rich causal net in which we find cheesecakes embedded today. Intelligence should not be any different. Agency trips up Occam’s rasor, because humans are wired to expect there to always be agents about. But an explanation of the universe which contains an agent is an incredibly complicated theory, which only presents itself to us for consideration because of our biases.
You’re right; yet no one ever sees it this way. Before Darwin, no one said, “This idea that an intelligent creator existed first doesn’t simplify things.”
Here is something I think would be useful: A careful information-theoretic explanation of why God must be complicated. When you explain, to Christians, that it doesn’t make sense to say complexity originated because God created it and God must be complicated, Christians reply (and I’m generalizing here because I’ve heard these replies so many times) one of 2 things:
God is outside of space and time, so causality doesn’t apply. (I don’t know how to respond to this.)
God is not complicated. God is simple. God is the pure essence of being, the First Cause. Think of a perfect circle. That’s what God is like.
It shouldn’t be hard to explain that, if God knows at least what is in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, God has at least enough complexity to store that information.
Of course, putting this explanation on LW might do no good to anybody.
It shouldn’t be hard to explain that, if God knows at least what is in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, God has at least enough complexity to store that information.
Keep in mind that if this complexity was derived from looking at external phenomena, or at the output of some simple computation, it doesn’t reduce the prior probability.
It shouldn’t be hard to explain that, if God knows at least what is in the Encyclopedia >Brittanica, God has at least enough complexity to store that information.
Except that the library of all possible books includes the Encyclopedia Brittanica but is far simpler.
Except that the library of all possible books includes the Encyclopedia Brittanica but is far simpler.
Presumably, God can also distinguish between “the set of books with useful information” and “the set of books containing only nonsense”. That is quite complex indeed.
I’m afraid I wasn’t clear. I am not arguing that “god” is simple or that it explains anything. I’m just saying that god’s knowledge is compressible into an intelligent generator (AI).
The source code isn’t likely to be 10 lines, but then again, it doesn’t have to include the Encyclopedia of Brittanica to tell you everything that the encyclopedia can once it grows up and learns.
F=m*a is enough to let you draw out all physically possible trajectories from the set of all trajectories, and it is still rather simple.
You say: You’re right; yet no one ever sees it this way. Before Darwin, no one said, “This idea that an intelligent creator existed first doesn’t simplify things.”
I may have to look up where before Darwin it gets argued, but I am pretty sure people challenged that before Darwin.
It might be why you’re an atheist, but do you think it would have swayed your christian self much? I highly doubt that your post would come near to deconverting anyone. Many religious people believe that souls are essential for creativity and intelligence, and they won’t accept the “you’re wired to see intelligence” argument if they disbelieve in evolution (not uncommon.)
To deconvert people to atheism quickly, I think you need a sledgehammer. I still haven’t found a really good one. Here are some areas that might be promising:
Ask them why God won’t drop a grapefruit from the sky to show he exists. “He loves me more than I can imagine, right? And more than anything he wants me to know him right? And he’s all powerful, right?” To their response: “Why does God consider blindly believing in him in the absence of evidence virtuous? Isn’t that sort of think a made-up religion would say about their god to keep people faithful?”
The Problem of Evil: why do innocent babies suffer and die from disease?
I’ve heard there are lots of contradictions in the bible. Maybe someone who is really dedicated could find some that are really compelling. Personally, I’m not interested enough in this topic to spend time reading religious texts, but more power to those who are.
A few moderately promising ones: Why does God heal cancer patients but not amputees? Why do different religious denominations disagree, when they could just ask God for the answer? Why would a benevolent God send people who happened to be unlucky enough not to hear about him to enternal damnation?
2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles are supposed to be parallels, telling the same story. Yet one of them probably lost or gained a zero along the way. Many christians that see this are foreced to retreat to a more ‘soft’ interpretation of the bible that allows for errors in transactiption etc. It’s the closest to a quick ‘n’ dirty sledgehammer I have ever had. And a folow-up: Why hasn’t this been discussed in your church? Surely, a group of truthseekers wouldn’t shy away from such fundamental criticisms, even to diffuse them.
Problem is, theists of reasonable intelligence spend a good deal of time honing and rehearsing their replies to these. They might be slightly uneasy with their replies, but if the alternative is letting go of all they hold dear, then they’ll hold to their guns. Catching them off guard is a slightly better tactic.
Or, to put it another way: if there were such a sledgehammer lying around, Richard Dawkins (or some other New Atheist) would be using it right now. Dawkins uses all the points you listed, and more; and the majority of people don’t budge.
do you think it would have swayed your christian self much?
Well...it did sway my Christian self. My Christian self generated those arguments and they, with help from Eliezer’s writings against self-deception, annihilated that self.
(x) : x is a possible entity. the more complicated x is the less likely it is to exist controlling for other evidence.
(x): x is a possible entity. the more intelligent x the more complicated x is, controlling for other properties.
God is maximally intelligent.
:. God’s existence is maximally unlikely unless there is other evidence or unless it has other properties that make its existence maximally more likely.
(Assume intelligent to refer to the possession of general intelligence)
I think most theists will consent to (1), especially given that its implicit in some of their favorite arguments. (3) They consent to, unless they mean “God” as merely a cosmological constant, or first cause. In which case we’re having a completely different debate. So the issue is (2). I’m sure some of the cognitive science types can give evidence for why intelligence is necessarily complicated. There is however, definitive evidence for the correlation of intelligence and complexity. Human brains are vastly more complex than the brains of other animals. Computers get more complicated the more information they hold, etc. It might actually be worth making the distinction, between intelligence and the holding of data. It is a lot easier to see how the more information something contains the more complicated something is since one can just compare two sets of data, one bigger than the other, and see that one is more complicated. Presumably, God needs to contain information on everyone’s behavior, the the events that happen at any point in time, prayer requests etc.
Btw, is there a way for me to us symbolic logic notation in xml?
Click that link, and you’ll get a rendered png of the LaTeX expression I’ve placed after the ?. Replace that expression with another and, well, you’ll get that too. If you’re writing a top-level post, you can use this to pretty quickly embed equations. Not sure how to make it useful in a comment though.
I think you are looking at this from an evolutionary point of view? Then it makes sense to make statements like “more and more complex states are less likely” (i.e., they take more time) and “intelligence increases with the complexity” (of organisms).
Outside this context, though, I have trouble understanding what is meant by “complicated” or why “more intelligent” should be more complex. In fact, you could skip right from (1) to (3) -- most theists would be comfortable asserting that God is maximally complex. However, is response to (1) they might counter with—if something does exist, you can’t use its improbability to negate that it exists.
It is true that if something does exist you can’t use its improbability to negate its existence. But this option is allowed for in the argument; “unless there is other evidence or it has other properties that make its existence maximally more likely”. So if God is, say, necessary, then he is going to exist no matter his likelihood. What this argument does is set a really low prior for the probability that God exists. There is never going to be one argument that proves atheism because no argument is going to rule out the existence of evidence the other way. The best we can do is give a really low initial probability and wait to hear arguments that swing us the other way AND show that some conceptions of God are contradictory or impossible.
Edit- You’re right though, if you mean that there is a problem with the phrasing “maximally unlikely” if there is still a chance for its existence. Certainly “maximally unlikely” cannot mean “0”.
(Um, this started as a reply to your comment but quickly became its own “idea I’m not ready to post” on deconversions and how we could accomplish them quickly.)
Upvoted. It took me months of reading to finally decide I was wrong. If we could put that “aha” moment in one document… well, we could do a lot of good.
Deconversions are tricky though. Did anyone here ever read Kissing Hank’s Ass? It’s a scathing moral indictment of mainline Christianity. I read it when I was 15 and couldn’t sleep for most of a night.
And the next day, I pretty much decided to ignore it. I deconverted seven years later.
I believe the truth matters, and I believe you do a person a favor by deconverting them. But if you’ve been in for a while, if you’ve grown dependent on, for example, believing in an eternal life… there’s a lot of pain in deconversion, and your mind’s going to work hard to avoid it. We need to be prepared for that.
If I were to distill the reason I became an atheist into a few words, it would look something like:
Ontologically fundamental mental things don’t make sense, but the human mind is wired to expect them. Fish swim in a sea of water, humans swim in a sea of minds. But mental things are complicated. In order to understand them you have to break them down into parts, something we’re still working hard to do. If you say “the universe exists because someone created it,” it feels like you’ve explained something, because agents are part of the most fundamental building blocks from which you build your world. But agency, intelligence, desire, and all the rest, are complicated properties which have a specific history here on earth. Sort of like cheesecake. Or the foxtrot. Or socialism.
If somebody started talking about the earth starting because of cheesecake, you’d wonder where the cheesecake came from. You’d look in a history book or a cook book and discover that the cheesecake has its origins in the roman empire, as a result of, well, people being hungry, and as a result of cows existing, and on and on, and you’d wonder how all those complex causes could produce a cheesecake predating the universe, and what sense it would make cut off from the rich causal net in which we find cheesecakes embedded today. Intelligence should not be any different. Agency trips up Occam’s rasor, because humans are wired to expect there to always be agents about. But an explanation of the universe which contains an agent is an incredibly complicated theory, which only presents itself to us for consideration because of our biases.
A complicated theory that you never would have thought of in the first place had you been less biased is not a theory that might still be right—it’s just plain wrong. In the same sense that, if you’re looking for a murderer in New York city, and you bring a suspect in on the advice of one of your lieutenants, and then it turns out the lieutenant picked the suspect by reading a horoscope, you have the wrong guy. You don’t keep him there because he might be the murderer after all, and you may as well make sure. With all of New York to canvas, you let him go, and you start over. So too with agency-based explanations of the universe’s beginning.
I’ve rambled terribly, and were that a top-level post, or a “master argument” it would have to be cleaned up considerably, but what I have just said is why I am an atheist, and not a clever argument I invented to support it.
These two sentences, particularly the second, just explained for me why humans expect minds to be ontologically fundamental. Thank you!
Thank you for bringing this post to my attention! I’m going to use those lines.
You’re right; yet no one ever sees it this way. Before Darwin, no one said, “This idea that an intelligent creator existed first doesn’t simplify things.”
Here is something I think would be useful: A careful information-theoretic explanation of why God must be complicated. When you explain, to Christians, that it doesn’t make sense to say complexity originated because God created it and God must be complicated, Christians reply (and I’m generalizing here because I’ve heard these replies so many times) one of 2 things:
God is outside of space and time, so causality doesn’t apply. (I don’t know how to respond to this.)
God is not complicated. God is simple. God is the pure essence of being, the First Cause. Think of a perfect circle. That’s what God is like.
It shouldn’t be hard to explain that, if God knows at least what is in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, God has at least enough complexity to store that information.
Of course, putting this explanation on LW might do no good to anybody.
Keep in mind that if this complexity was derived from looking at external phenomena, or at the output of some simple computation, it doesn’t reduce the prior probability.
Except that the library of all possible books includes the Encyclopedia Brittanica but is far simpler.
Presumably, God can also distinguish between “the set of books with useful information” and “the set of books containing only nonsense”. That is quite complex indeed.
I’m afraid I wasn’t clear. I am not arguing that “god” is simple or that it explains anything. I’m just saying that god’s knowledge is compressible into an intelligent generator (AI).
The source code isn’t likely to be 10 lines, but then again, it doesn’t have to include the Encyclopedia of Brittanica to tell you everything that the encyclopedia can once it grows up and learns.
F=m*a is enough to let you draw out all physically possible trajectories from the set of all trajectories, and it is still rather simple.
You say: You’re right; yet no one ever sees it this way. Before Darwin, no one said, “This idea that an intelligent creator existed first doesn’t simplify things.”
I may have to look up where before Darwin it gets argued, but I am pretty sure people challenged that before Darwin.
It might be why you’re an atheist, but do you think it would have swayed your christian self much? I highly doubt that your post would come near to deconverting anyone. Many religious people believe that souls are essential for creativity and intelligence, and they won’t accept the “you’re wired to see intelligence” argument if they disbelieve in evolution (not uncommon.)
To deconvert people to atheism quickly, I think you need a sledgehammer. I still haven’t found a really good one. Here are some areas that might be promising:
Ask them why God won’t drop a grapefruit from the sky to show he exists. “He loves me more than I can imagine, right? And more than anything he wants me to know him right? And he’s all powerful, right?” To their response: “Why does God consider blindly believing in him in the absence of evidence virtuous? Isn’t that sort of think a made-up religion would say about their god to keep people faithful?”
The Problem of Evil: why do innocent babies suffer and die from disease?
I’ve heard there are lots of contradictions in the bible. Maybe someone who is really dedicated could find some that are really compelling. Personally, I’m not interested enough in this topic to spend time reading religious texts, but more power to those who are.
A few moderately promising ones: Why does God heal cancer patients but not amputees? Why do different religious denominations disagree, when they could just ask God for the answer? Why would a benevolent God send people who happened to be unlucky enough not to hear about him to enternal damnation?
I think a very straightforward contradiction is here: http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/horsemen.html
2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles are supposed to be parallels, telling the same story. Yet one of them probably lost or gained a zero along the way. Many christians that see this are foreced to retreat to a more ‘soft’ interpretation of the bible that allows for errors in transactiption etc. It’s the closest to a quick ‘n’ dirty sledgehammer I have ever had. And a folow-up: Why hasn’t this been discussed in your church? Surely, a group of truthseekers wouldn’t shy away from such fundamental criticisms, even to diffuse them.
Problem is, theists of reasonable intelligence spend a good deal of time honing and rehearsing their replies to these. They might be slightly uneasy with their replies, but if the alternative is letting go of all they hold dear, then they’ll hold to their guns. Catching them off guard is a slightly better tactic.
Or, to put it another way: if there were such a sledgehammer lying around, Richard Dawkins (or some other New Atheist) would be using it right now. Dawkins uses all the points you listed, and more; and the majority of people don’t budge.
Well...it did sway my Christian self. My Christian self generated those arguments and they, with help from Eliezer’s writings against self-deception, annihilated that self.
That’s as good of an exposition of this point as any I’ve seen. It deserves to be cleaned up and posted visibly, here on LW or somewhere else.
thanks =)
So
(x) : x is a possible entity. the more complicated x is the less likely it is to exist controlling for other evidence.
(x): x is a possible entity. the more intelligent x the more complicated x is, controlling for other properties.
God is maximally intelligent.
:. God’s existence is maximally unlikely unless there is other evidence or unless it has other properties that make its existence maximally more likely.
(Assume intelligent to refer to the possession of general intelligence)
I think most theists will consent to (1), especially given that its implicit in some of their favorite arguments. (3) They consent to, unless they mean “God” as merely a cosmological constant, or first cause. In which case we’re having a completely different debate. So the issue is (2). I’m sure some of the cognitive science types can give evidence for why intelligence is necessarily complicated. There is however, definitive evidence for the correlation of intelligence and complexity. Human brains are vastly more complex than the brains of other animals. Computers get more complicated the more information they hold, etc. It might actually be worth making the distinction, between intelligence and the holding of data. It is a lot easier to see how the more information something contains the more complicated something is since one can just compare two sets of data, one bigger than the other, and see that one is more complicated. Presumably, God needs to contain information on everyone’s behavior, the the events that happen at any point in time, prayer requests etc.
Btw, is there a way for me to us symbolic logic notation in xml?
hmm...if we can get embedded images to work, we’re set.
http://www.codecogs.com/png.latex?\int_a^b\frac{1}{\sqrt{x}}dx
Click that link, and you’ll get a rendered png of the LaTeX expression I’ve placed after the ?. Replace that expression with another and, well, you’ll get that too. If you’re writing a top-level post, you can use this to pretty quickly embed equations. Not sure how to make it useful in a comment though.
Here it is: ∫ba1√xdx
Source code:
(It was mentioned before.)
awesome =)
I think you are looking at this from an evolutionary point of view? Then it makes sense to make statements like “more and more complex states are less likely” (i.e., they take more time) and “intelligence increases with the complexity” (of organisms).
Outside this context, though, I have trouble understanding what is meant by “complicated” or why “more intelligent” should be more complex. In fact, you could skip right from (1) to (3) -- most theists would be comfortable asserting that God is maximally complex. However, is response to (1) they might counter with—if something does exist, you can’t use its improbability to negate that it exists.
I’m not sure most theists would be comfortable asserting that God is maximally complex.
The wikipedia article Complexity looks helpful.
It is true that if something does exist you can’t use its improbability to negate its existence. But this option is allowed for in the argument; “unless there is other evidence or it has other properties that make its existence maximally more likely”. So if God is, say, necessary, then he is going to exist no matter his likelihood. What this argument does is set a really low prior for the probability that God exists. There is never going to be one argument that proves atheism because no argument is going to rule out the existence of evidence the other way. The best we can do is give a really low initial probability and wait to hear arguments that swing us the other way AND show that some conceptions of God are contradictory or impossible.
Edit- You’re right though, if you mean that there is a problem with the phrasing “maximally unlikely” if there is still a chance for its existence. Certainly “maximally unlikely” cannot mean “0”.