For what it’s worth, I’ve recently started reading this site and am an Orthodox Jew. I have no particular plans to stop reading the site for the time being, because it’s often rather interesting.
It may be worth considering that while rationalists may feel they don’t need religion, almost all religious people would acknowledge the need for rationality of some kind. If rationality is about achieving your goals as effectively as possible (as some here think), then does it suddenly not work if your goals are “obey the Bible”? No—your actions will be different from someone with different goals (utilitarianism, etc.), but most of the thought-process is the same.
Suppose you have an extremely high prior probability for God sending doubters to Hell, for whatever reason. Presumably the utility of going to Hell is very, very low. Then, as a rational Bayesian, you should avoid any evidence that would tend to cause you to doubt God, shouldn’t you? I certainly don’t know much of Bayesian probability, but I can’t see any flaw in that logic.
The question seems rather similar to that of Omega. The winners are those who can convince themselves, by any means, that a particular belief is right. In that sense, God could be said to reward irrationality, just like Omega. The only real difference is that in Omega’s case, nobody doubts the fact that Omega exists and is doing the judging in the first place. I don’t think that’s essential to the nature of the problem, although it makes it harder for most rationalists to dismiss.
Of course, “rationalism” as used on this site often implies acceptance of empiricism, Occam’s razor, falsifiability, and things like that, not just pure Bayesian logic with arbitrary priors. But of course, I almost completely accept all those things, and am tolerant of those who accept them more thoroughly than I. It should therefore not be very surprising that I’d see value in this site, along with other religious people with similar attitudes (however few there may be).
I do think that at least being polite toward religion (which doesn’t always happen here) is more likely to advance the goals of this site than otherwise. It doesn’t help anyone’s goals to drive people away before you can deconvert them; and even if you can’t deconvert them, you still gain by helping them think more logically (by your definitions) in other areas.
Suppose you have an extremely high prior probability for God sending doubters to Hell, for whatever reason. Presumably the utility of going to Hell is very, very low. Then, as a rational Bayesian, you should avoid any evidence that would tend to cause you to doubt God, shouldn’t you?
This is a preference over rituals of cognition, choosing not just decisions, but the algorithms with which you arrive at those decisions. It is usually assumed that only the decisions matter, not the thought process. If you did live in such a world, I agree, you should avoid getting into a doubt-state, although it might be the case that you’d benefit from building an external reasoning device that would resolve the problem for you, not being hindered by limitations on the allowed cognitive algorithms.
Also, I guess that an altruistic person should still undergo a conversion to rationality, on the chance that the evidence points out that the inborn priors are incorrect, thus sparing his fellow people living under such limitations on thought.
Well, if you’re altruistic in the sense you describe, you don’t have the utility function I gave in my scenario, so your result will vary. If you don’t really mind going to hell too much, comparatively, then the argument doesn’t work well.
Suppose you have an extremely high prior probability for God sending doubters to Hell, for whatever reason. Presumably the utility of going to Hell is very, very low. Then, as a rational Bayesian, you should avoid any evidence that would tend to cause you to doubt God, shouldn’t you? I certainly don’t know much of Bayesian probability, but I can’t see any flaw in that logic.
This is a deep and important topic—if I lived in the middle ages then if there exists any rationality principle that in practice would have allowed me to deconvert from medieval christianity despite hell threats, I’m not sure what exactly that principle is, though it seems like there should be one.
In the Middle Ages, I’m not sure atheism would be too much more rational than theism, in any sense. To the average European in the year 1000, being an atheist would probably be about as rational as being a heliocentrist, i.e., not at all. We know all the arguments in favor of atheism and heliocentrism, but they didn’t. No amount of rationalism is going to let you judge things based on evidence you don’t know about.
The average person back then could probably have given you plenty of evidence for God’s existence. The evidence would be weak by modern standards, but not by medieval standards. No one was conducting scientific studies then: almost any assertion not directly checkable was supported by pretty weak evidence. Theism might make few predictions and test them rarely, but the same was true of all the alternatives. On the other hand, theism at least had coherent and consistent answers to a slew of basic questions like “How did life arise?”, which atheism did not.
So I think the answer is that the only rational principle that would have allowed you to deconvert in medieval times would be “single-handedly reconstructing modern science”.
The question “Where did people come from?” is one that you’d expect to be answerable, and therefore a reasonable question to ask. We might, in principle, be able to do research in the physical world to figure out where we came from, since physical events (such as the appearance of a new species) leave traces in the physical world that we might be able to detect long after the fact. Likewise, intuition suggests that everything in the physical world comes from somewhere, and so an answer of “We were always here” seems intuitively unlikely.
On the other hand, if you ask “Where did God come from?”, you’re talking about an entity that (in the case of a Jewish-style God) predated all physical existence. There’s no reason to expect us to be able to figure out where God came from, if a God exists. And since God doesn’t have to play by the rules of the physical world, “God always existed” sounds much more palatable than “humans always existed”: God isn’t something we expect to obey our intuition. God is supposed to be inherently perfect and unchanging, so “God always existed” fits in nicely with our picture of God.
Now, you can fairly say that this is all completely unverifiable and can be matched up to any facts you feel like by altering details. You’d be totally right. But there are real reasons for why many people ask “Where did humans come from?” and don’t ask “Where did God come from?” It’s not just because they’re “not allowed” to ask those questions—the people who came up with the answers sure were allowed to ask them! It’s because the idea of an eternal God is intuitively more satisfactory than the idea of eternal humans, even if this breaks down upon closer inspection.
No, it’s still just a curiosity-stopper. Deferring a philosophical question to God is no more than shoving it underneath His great philosophical carpet of confusion.
A theoretical person using scientific techniques to investigate with Stone Age knowledge would have no reason to rule out a nature spirit, god etc or to assume that the universe was explainable.
If (in the actual or a hypothetical world) the evidence did appear to point to a conscious entity, the rational thing to do would be to try and investigate it’s properties. However, it would be possible that after effort he still couldn’t comprehend it for some reason.
Theism has never provided answers to these questions, only curiosity-stoppers.
You can only see this because you are not confused. All wrong answers act as curiosity stoppers to a degree, but you can accuse an answer of ruining curiosity only to the extent you know that it’s accepted more than it deserves. Every mistake is inherently wrong, but not every mistake is apparent.
The idea that God did something is not a logically impossible answer- some hypothetically possible sets of evidence would lead to the rational conclusion a God was likely. In such a world, however, genuine rational investigation in the nature of such. (And of course, one shouldn’t leap to the conclusion of it being a god just because it’s a conscious entity at work)
For what it’s worth, I’ve recently started reading this site and am an Orthodox Jew. I have no particular plans to stop reading the site for the time being, because it’s often rather interesting.
It may be worth considering that while rationalists may feel they don’t need religion, almost all religious people would acknowledge the need for rationality of some kind. If rationality is about achieving your goals as effectively as possible (as some here think), then does it suddenly not work if your goals are “obey the Bible”? No—your actions will be different from someone with different goals (utilitarianism, etc.), but most of the thought-process is the same.
Suppose you have an extremely high prior probability for God sending doubters to Hell, for whatever reason. Presumably the utility of going to Hell is very, very low. Then, as a rational Bayesian, you should avoid any evidence that would tend to cause you to doubt God, shouldn’t you? I certainly don’t know much of Bayesian probability, but I can’t see any flaw in that logic.
The question seems rather similar to that of Omega. The winners are those who can convince themselves, by any means, that a particular belief is right. In that sense, God could be said to reward irrationality, just like Omega. The only real difference is that in Omega’s case, nobody doubts the fact that Omega exists and is doing the judging in the first place. I don’t think that’s essential to the nature of the problem, although it makes it harder for most rationalists to dismiss.
Of course, “rationalism” as used on this site often implies acceptance of empiricism, Occam’s razor, falsifiability, and things like that, not just pure Bayesian logic with arbitrary priors. But of course, I almost completely accept all those things, and am tolerant of those who accept them more thoroughly than I. It should therefore not be very surprising that I’d see value in this site, along with other religious people with similar attitudes (however few there may be).
I do think that at least being polite toward religion (which doesn’t always happen here) is more likely to advance the goals of this site than otherwise. It doesn’t help anyone’s goals to drive people away before you can deconvert them; and even if you can’t deconvert them, you still gain by helping them think more logically (by your definitions) in other areas.
This is a preference over rituals of cognition, choosing not just decisions, but the algorithms with which you arrive at those decisions. It is usually assumed that only the decisions matter, not the thought process. If you did live in such a world, I agree, you should avoid getting into a doubt-state, although it might be the case that you’d benefit from building an external reasoning device that would resolve the problem for you, not being hindered by limitations on the allowed cognitive algorithms.
Also, I guess that an altruistic person should still undergo a conversion to rationality, on the chance that the evidence points out that the inborn priors are incorrect, thus sparing his fellow people living under such limitations on thought.
Well, if you’re altruistic in the sense you describe, you don’t have the utility function I gave in my scenario, so your result will vary. If you don’t really mind going to hell too much, comparatively, then the argument doesn’t work well.
Of course.
This is a deep and important topic—if I lived in the middle ages then if there exists any rationality principle that in practice would have allowed me to deconvert from medieval christianity despite hell threats, I’m not sure what exactly that principle is, though it seems like there should be one.
In the Middle Ages, I’m not sure atheism would be too much more rational than theism, in any sense. To the average European in the year 1000, being an atheist would probably be about as rational as being a heliocentrist, i.e., not at all. We know all the arguments in favor of atheism and heliocentrism, but they didn’t. No amount of rationalism is going to let you judge things based on evidence you don’t know about.
The average person back then could probably have given you plenty of evidence for God’s existence. The evidence would be weak by modern standards, but not by medieval standards. No one was conducting scientific studies then: almost any assertion not directly checkable was supported by pretty weak evidence. Theism might make few predictions and test them rarely, but the same was true of all the alternatives. On the other hand, theism at least had coherent and consistent answers to a slew of basic questions like “How did life arise?”, which atheism did not.
So I think the answer is that the only rational principle that would have allowed you to deconvert in medieval times would be “single-handedly reconstructing modern science”.
Theism has never provided answers to these questions, only curiosity-stoppers.
The question “Where did people come from?” is one that you’d expect to be answerable, and therefore a reasonable question to ask. We might, in principle, be able to do research in the physical world to figure out where we came from, since physical events (such as the appearance of a new species) leave traces in the physical world that we might be able to detect long after the fact. Likewise, intuition suggests that everything in the physical world comes from somewhere, and so an answer of “We were always here” seems intuitively unlikely.
On the other hand, if you ask “Where did God come from?”, you’re talking about an entity that (in the case of a Jewish-style God) predated all physical existence. There’s no reason to expect us to be able to figure out where God came from, if a God exists. And since God doesn’t have to play by the rules of the physical world, “God always existed” sounds much more palatable than “humans always existed”: God isn’t something we expect to obey our intuition. God is supposed to be inherently perfect and unchanging, so “God always existed” fits in nicely with our picture of God.
Now, you can fairly say that this is all completely unverifiable and can be matched up to any facts you feel like by altering details. You’d be totally right. But there are real reasons for why many people ask “Where did humans come from?” and don’t ask “Where did God come from?” It’s not just because they’re “not allowed” to ask those questions—the people who came up with the answers sure were allowed to ask them! It’s because the idea of an eternal God is intuitively more satisfactory than the idea of eternal humans, even if this breaks down upon closer inspection.
No, it’s still just a curiosity-stopper. Deferring a philosophical question to God is no more than shoving it underneath His great philosophical carpet of confusion.
A theoretical person using scientific techniques to investigate with Stone Age knowledge would have no reason to rule out a nature spirit, god etc or to assume that the universe was explainable.
If (in the actual or a hypothetical world) the evidence did appear to point to a conscious entity, the rational thing to do would be to try and investigate it’s properties. However, it would be possible that after effort he still couldn’t comprehend it for some reason.
You can only see this because you are not confused. All wrong answers act as curiosity stoppers to a degree, but you can accuse an answer of ruining curiosity only to the extent you know that it’s accepted more than it deserves. Every mistake is inherently wrong, but not every mistake is apparent.
The idea that God did something is not a logically impossible answer- some hypothetically possible sets of evidence would lead to the rational conclusion a God was likely. In such a world, however, genuine rational investigation in the nature of such. (And of course, one shouldn’t leap to the conclusion of it being a god just because it’s a conscious entity at work)
Yes it did and does, though you’re left having to handwave away the question of “how did God arise?”
Yup, but those seem less troubling if anything than the questions atheism would be unable to answer at the time.