I found plenty of places where you spoke disrespectfully about religion, and quite a few places where you cast theists as the villains in your negative examples of rationality (a few arguably straw-men, but mostly fair). But I was surprised that I found very few places where you were actually arguing against religion.
Thx. But I don’t read that as arguing against religion. Instead it seems to be an argument against one feature of modern religion—its claim to unfalsifiability (since it deals with a Non-Overlapping MAgisterium, ‘NOMA’ using the common acronym). Eliezer thinks this is pretty wimpy. He seems to have more respect for old-time religion, like those priests of Baal who stuck their necks out, so to speak, and submitted their claims to empirical testing.
Can this attitude of critical rationalism be redeployed against simulationist claims? Or at least against the claims of those modern simulationists who keep their simulations unfalsifiable and don’t permit interaction between levels of reality? Against people like Bostrom who stipulate that the simulations that they multiply (without necessity) should all be indistinguishable from the real thing—at least to any simulated observer? I will leave that question to the reader. But I don’t think that it qualifies as a posting in which Eliezer argues against religion in toto. He is only arguing against one feature of modern apologetics.
The other part of the argument in that post is that existing religions are not only falsifiable, but have already been falsified by empirical evidence.
The post you are looking for is Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable
Thx. But I don’t read that as arguing against religion. Instead it seems to be an argument against one feature of modern religion—its claim to unfalsifiability (since it deals with a Non-Overlapping MAgisterium, ‘NOMA’ using the common acronym). Eliezer thinks this is pretty wimpy. He seems to have more respect for old-time religion, like those priests of Baal who stuck their necks out, so to speak, and submitted their claims to empirical testing.
Can this attitude of critical rationalism be redeployed against simulationist claims? Or at least against the claims of those modern simulationists who keep their simulations unfalsifiable and don’t permit interaction between levels of reality? Against people like Bostrom who stipulate that the simulations that they multiply (without necessity) should all be indistinguishable from the real thing—at least to any simulated observer? I will leave that question to the reader. But I don’t think that it qualifies as a posting in which Eliezer argues against religion in toto. He is only arguing against one feature of modern apologetics.
The other part of the argument in that post is that existing religions are not only falsifiable, but have already been falsified by empirical evidence.