How can I have morality?? Do I just have to rely on intuition? If the whole world relied on reason alone to make decisions, couldn’t we rationalize a LOT of things that we intuit as wrong?
Does atheism necessarily lead to nihilism? (I think so, in the grand scheme of things? But the world/our species means something to us, and that’s enough, right?)
If these are the questions weighing heavily on your mind, then you would probably enjoy Gary Drescher’s Good and Real. I suggest reading the first Amazon review to get a good idea of the topics it covers. It is very similar to some of the content in the Sequences. (By the way, if you purchase the book through that link, 5% goes to Slate Star Codex.)
Also, the Sequences have recently been released as an ebook entitled Rationality: From AI to Zombies. (You can download the book for free in MOBI, EPUB, and PDF format if you follow the ‘Buy Now’ link at the bottom of that page and enter a price of $0.00. If you do this, it won’t request any payment information. If you pay more than that, the money will go to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.) I have found that Rationality is much, much easier to read than the Sequences.
Are rationalists just as guilty of circular reasoning as Christians are? (Why do I trust human reason? My human reason tells me it’s great. Why do Christians trust God? The Bible tells them he’s great.)
You may not yet have the background knowledge necessary to understand it, and if that’s the case then you can always return to it later, but I think that the most relevant post on this topic is Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom. It’s chapter 264 in Rationality. (That’s a daunting number but the chapters are very short. Rationality is Bible-length but you can hack away at it one chapter at a time, or more at a time, if you please.) To be frank, you’re asking the Big Questions and you might have to read a bit before you can answer them.
What about all the really smart people I know and respect, like my sister and Grandma, who have had their share of doubts but ultimately credit their faith to having experienced extraordinary, miraculous answers to prayer? Like obviously, their experiences don’t convince ME to believe, but I hate to dismiss them as delusional and call it a wild coincidence...
When I read that, I’m reminded of something that Luke Muehlhauser, a prominent LessWrong user and former devout Christian, once wrote:
I went to church and Bible study every week. I prayed often and earnestly. For 12 years I attended a Christian school that taught Bible classes and creationism. I played in worship bands. As a teenager I made trips to China and England to tell the godless heathens there about Jesus. I witnessed miraculous healings unexplained by medical science. And I felt the presence of God. Sometimes I would tingle and sweat with the Holy Spirit. Other times I felt led by God to give money to a certain cause, or to pay someone a specific compliment, or to walk to the cross at the front of my church and bow before it during a worship service.
As you said yourself, “Yay tolerance of ambiguity!” Although their beliefs are false, their experiences can certainly be real. Even if there exists no God, that doesn’t mean that the Presence-of-God Quale isn’t represented by the patterns of neural impulses of some human brains. It’s easy, nay, the default action, to view others with false beliefs in a negative light, but if rationalism were always intuitively obvious, then the world would be a very different place. I try not to make myself feel bad by overestimating my ability to convince others of the value of rationalism. That doesn’t mean that I keep my mouth shut all of the time, but I do take it a day at a time, and it seems to work; sometimes I talk about something and it doesn’t seem to go anywhere, and then a friend will bring it up days or weeks later and say something like, “You know, I was thinking about that, and I realized it made a lot of sense.” And then I privately jump up and down. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but for me, there’s definitely a middle ground between falling in line and abandoning All I Have Ever Known. I also often see Paul Graham’s essay What You Can’t Say linked here when new atheists ask about how to maintain ties with religious family members.
Thanks for the welcome!! Good and Real does seem like a good read. I’m going to read Rationality first, which I’m guessing will help me work through some of my questions, but I’ll definitely keep that one in mind for later.
Where Recursive Justification Hits Rock Bottom was really relevant, thanks for the link. I’m still digesting Occam’s Razor, I think that was the only concept completely new to me.
Thanks for the link to Luke’s story. It seems like we went through the same difficult process of desperately wanting to believe, but ultimately just not being able to. I find it super encouraging that his doubts stemmed from researching the Historical Jesus, since that’s one thing that my old high school track coach/religion teacher insists I have to look into. He claims no atheist has ever been able to answer any of his questions. The atheists I know all credit a conflict with science as the reason they left Christianity, and I credit...I don’t even know, my personal thoughts, I guess… but it’s great to know that researching history will also lead there. I’ll have to go through the same resources he used so I can better explain myself to Christian friends.
“Although their beliefs are false, their experiences can certainly be real. Even if there exists no God, that doesn’t mean that the Presence-of-God Quale isn’t represented by the patterns of neural impulses of some human brains.” Thanks for that!! It does make me feel better.
Hahaha, wow, I haven’t even considered trying to convince others of the value of rationalism yet. Especially after my deconversion, I’ve been totally on the defensive, almost apologizing for my rationality. (“It’s not my fault; it’s the personality I was born with. If you guys really believe, you should feel lucky not just for having been born into Christian homes, but also, more importantly, for having been born with the right personalities for faith.” and “You think my prayers for a stronger faith weren’t answered because my faith wasn’t strong enough, but I was doing everything possible to strengthen my faith to no avail.” and “Believing isn’t a choice, no matter how much I wanted it, I couldn’t believe. So if any brand of Christianity is true, Calvinism is your best bet, and I wasn’t among the elect.”)
So far this strategy is doing remarkably, remarkably well in maintaining ties with friends and family. People understand where I’m coming from, and they feel just awful, sorry for me since they think I’m going to hell, but for the most part, not finding me at fault. Pity is slightly annoying when I’m so happy, but hopefully their pity will eventually lead them to find God unfair, which will lead them to dislike their beliefs, which will lead them to question why they bother believing something they don’t like...and then, they won’t find much reason at all aside from upbringing/community. Those were actually pretty much the steps of my deconversion process, only I didn’t need a personal connection with a particular unbeliever to get there. Anyway, if nothing else, the defensive strategy works wonders for relations. I helped a friend share her doubts with her family in this way, and she said it worked for her too.
I just thought to point out that there’s going to be a Rationality reading group; basically, it’s a planned series of posts about each Part in the book, where you have the opportunity to talk about it and ask questions. You clearly are very curious, (it’s the only way you could survive so many hyperlinks) so it seems like just the thing for you.
I credit...I don’t even know, my personal thoughts, I guess...
Just to give you words for this, and from what I read in the blog post that you linked to in your first comment (which I found very amusing), I think you’re trying to verbalize that Christianity was inconsistent. You don’t have to prefer consistency, but most people claim to prefer it, and apparently you do prefer it. (I know I do.) You didn’t like it as a system because it was a system that said that God was perfectly benevolent and ridiculously selfish (though the second statement was only implicit) at the same time. You can always look at other subjects like science and history and come to the conclusion that religion conflicts with those things when it shouldn’t; but you can also just look at religion and see how it conflicts with itself. I think that’s what you did.
I saw some of your other comments about meaning, and meaninglessness in the absence of God, and nihilism. Notice that when you ask “Does life have meaning in the absence of God?”, everyone says that it depends on what you mean, offers some possible interpretations, and shares their viewpoints and conclusions on what it means. The simplest way to give you a clue as to some of the problems with the question is something that you wrote yourself:
Oh! I like that definition of nihilism, thanks. Personally, I think I could actually tolerate accepting nihilism defined as meaninglessness (whatever that means), but since most people I know wouldn’t, your definition will come in handy.
Vagueness is part of the problem, but there are other parts as well. Even though I’ve never been religious and therefore don’t know what it’s like to lose faith, worrying about “meaninglessness” is something that I dealt with. I promise that atheists aren’t all secretly dead inside. (I actually used to wonder about that.) Rationality Parts N and P deal with questions like that.
I also want to say that I agree with Viliam_Bur’s comments on you doing research to defend your new beliefs: It’s a lot cheaper time- and resource-wise to act like a skeptic than it is to do research, and you never have to tolerate that awful feeling that you might be wrong. Even when you return with evidence contrary to their beliefs, their standards of evidence are too high for it to matter. I think it’s telling that your coach sat around waiting for unusually knowledgeable, atheistic passersby to tell him about the Historical Jesus instead of doing any research on his own.
Cool, thanks so much for mentioning the Rationality reading group!! I’m probably going to finish each section long before it’s discussed, but I’ll definitely go back to re-read and chat. I’ll bookmark it for sure! So exciting! I will try to bribe my sister and maybe a few other people to participate as well (self-anchoring again, maybe, but I’ll call it optimism, haha).
Ooh, I like consistency, and Christianity is inconsistent. Christianity conflicts with itself. A God can’t be both perfectly benevolent and ridiculously selfish. That’s why I rejected it. Yeah, that sounds nice, thanks for the words. :)
And yeah, good point about the standards of evidence being too high. Still, right now my only info about Historical Jesus is based off a few articles I’ve read on the internet, and I just feel like after 22 years learning one thing, I can’t just reject it and jump ahead to other things without being able to formulate basic, well-reasoned atheist answers to common Christian questions. I guess it’s not just about maintaining my friends’ respect, it’s also about my own self-respect. I can’t go around showing the improbability of every religion, but I want to be able to do so about the one I grew up in (maybe this is a cousin of the sunk-cost fallacy?). Luckily, all of the groundwork here has already been done by other atheists, it should just a matter of familiarizing myself with basic facts/common arguments.
If these are the questions weighing heavily on your mind, then you would probably enjoy Gary Drescher’s Good and Real. I suggest reading the first Amazon review to get a good idea of the topics it covers. It is very similar to some of the content in the Sequences. (By the way, if you purchase the book through that link, 5% goes to Slate Star Codex.)
Also, the Sequences have recently been released as an ebook entitled Rationality: From AI to Zombies. (You can download the book for free in MOBI, EPUB, and PDF format if you follow the ‘Buy Now’ link at the bottom of that page and enter a price of $0.00. If you do this, it won’t request any payment information. If you pay more than that, the money will go to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.) I have found that Rationality is much, much easier to read than the Sequences.
You may not yet have the background knowledge necessary to understand it, and if that’s the case then you can always return to it later, but I think that the most relevant post on this topic is Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom. It’s chapter 264 in Rationality. (That’s a daunting number but the chapters are very short. Rationality is Bible-length but you can hack away at it one chapter at a time, or more at a time, if you please.) To be frank, you’re asking the Big Questions and you might have to read a bit before you can answer them.
When I read that, I’m reminded of something that Luke Muehlhauser, a prominent LessWrong user and former devout Christian, once wrote:
As you said yourself, “Yay tolerance of ambiguity!” Although their beliefs are false, their experiences can certainly be real. Even if there exists no God, that doesn’t mean that the Presence-of-God Quale isn’t represented by the patterns of neural impulses of some human brains. It’s easy, nay, the default action, to view others with false beliefs in a negative light, but if rationalism were always intuitively obvious, then the world would be a very different place. I try not to make myself feel bad by overestimating my ability to convince others of the value of rationalism. That doesn’t mean that I keep my mouth shut all of the time, but I do take it a day at a time, and it seems to work; sometimes I talk about something and it doesn’t seem to go anywhere, and then a friend will bring it up days or weeks later and say something like, “You know, I was thinking about that, and I realized it made a lot of sense.” And then I privately jump up and down. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but for me, there’s definitely a middle ground between falling in line and abandoning All I Have Ever Known. I also often see Paul Graham’s essay What You Can’t Say linked here when new atheists ask about how to maintain ties with religious family members.
EDIT: Oh, and welcome to LessWrong!
Thanks for the welcome!! Good and Real does seem like a good read. I’m going to read Rationality first, which I’m guessing will help me work through some of my questions, but I’ll definitely keep that one in mind for later.
Where Recursive Justification Hits Rock Bottom was really relevant, thanks for the link. I’m still digesting Occam’s Razor, I think that was the only concept completely new to me.
Thanks for the link to Luke’s story. It seems like we went through the same difficult process of desperately wanting to believe, but ultimately just not being able to. I find it super encouraging that his doubts stemmed from researching the Historical Jesus, since that’s one thing that my old high school track coach/religion teacher insists I have to look into. He claims no atheist has ever been able to answer any of his questions. The atheists I know all credit a conflict with science as the reason they left Christianity, and I credit...I don’t even know, my personal thoughts, I guess… but it’s great to know that researching history will also lead there. I’ll have to go through the same resources he used so I can better explain myself to Christian friends.
“Although their beliefs are false, their experiences can certainly be real. Even if there exists no God, that doesn’t mean that the Presence-of-God Quale isn’t represented by the patterns of neural impulses of some human brains.” Thanks for that!! It does make me feel better.
Hahaha, wow, I haven’t even considered trying to convince others of the value of rationalism yet. Especially after my deconversion, I’ve been totally on the defensive, almost apologizing for my rationality. (“It’s not my fault; it’s the personality I was born with. If you guys really believe, you should feel lucky not just for having been born into Christian homes, but also, more importantly, for having been born with the right personalities for faith.” and “You think my prayers for a stronger faith weren’t answered because my faith wasn’t strong enough, but I was doing everything possible to strengthen my faith to no avail.” and “Believing isn’t a choice, no matter how much I wanted it, I couldn’t believe. So if any brand of Christianity is true, Calvinism is your best bet, and I wasn’t among the elect.”)
So far this strategy is doing remarkably, remarkably well in maintaining ties with friends and family. People understand where I’m coming from, and they feel just awful, sorry for me since they think I’m going to hell, but for the most part, not finding me at fault. Pity is slightly annoying when I’m so happy, but hopefully their pity will eventually lead them to find God unfair, which will lead them to dislike their beliefs, which will lead them to question why they bother believing something they don’t like...and then, they won’t find much reason at all aside from upbringing/community. Those were actually pretty much the steps of my deconversion process, only I didn’t need a personal connection with a particular unbeliever to get there. Anyway, if nothing else, the defensive strategy works wonders for relations. I helped a friend share her doubts with her family in this way, and she said it worked for her too.
I just thought to point out that there’s going to be a Rationality reading group; basically, it’s a planned series of posts about each Part in the book, where you have the opportunity to talk about it and ask questions. You clearly are very curious, (it’s the only way you could survive so many hyperlinks) so it seems like just the thing for you.
Just to give you words for this, and from what I read in the blog post that you linked to in your first comment (which I found very amusing), I think you’re trying to verbalize that Christianity was inconsistent. You don’t have to prefer consistency, but most people claim to prefer it, and apparently you do prefer it. (I know I do.) You didn’t like it as a system because it was a system that said that God was perfectly benevolent and ridiculously selfish (though the second statement was only implicit) at the same time. You can always look at other subjects like science and history and come to the conclusion that religion conflicts with those things when it shouldn’t; but you can also just look at religion and see how it conflicts with itself. I think that’s what you did.
I saw some of your other comments about meaning, and meaninglessness in the absence of God, and nihilism. Notice that when you ask “Does life have meaning in the absence of God?”, everyone says that it depends on what you mean, offers some possible interpretations, and shares their viewpoints and conclusions on what it means. The simplest way to give you a clue as to some of the problems with the question is something that you wrote yourself:
Vagueness is part of the problem, but there are other parts as well. Even though I’ve never been religious and therefore don’t know what it’s like to lose faith, worrying about “meaninglessness” is something that I dealt with. I promise that atheists aren’t all secretly dead inside. (I actually used to wonder about that.) Rationality Parts N and P deal with questions like that.
I also want to say that I agree with Viliam_Bur’s comments on you doing research to defend your new beliefs: It’s a lot cheaper time- and resource-wise to act like a skeptic than it is to do research, and you never have to tolerate that awful feeling that you might be wrong. Even when you return with evidence contrary to their beliefs, their standards of evidence are too high for it to matter. I think it’s telling that your coach sat around waiting for unusually knowledgeable, atheistic passersby to tell him about the Historical Jesus instead of doing any research on his own.
Cool, thanks so much for mentioning the Rationality reading group!! I’m probably going to finish each section long before it’s discussed, but I’ll definitely go back to re-read and chat. I’ll bookmark it for sure! So exciting! I will try to bribe my sister and maybe a few other people to participate as well (self-anchoring again, maybe, but I’ll call it optimism, haha).
Ooh, I like consistency, and Christianity is inconsistent. Christianity conflicts with itself. A God can’t be both perfectly benevolent and ridiculously selfish. That’s why I rejected it. Yeah, that sounds nice, thanks for the words. :)
Good point about vagueness. I like this slatestarcodex post” The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories Looking forward to parts N and P now too!
And yeah, good point about the standards of evidence being too high. Still, right now my only info about Historical Jesus is based off a few articles I’ve read on the internet, and I just feel like after 22 years learning one thing, I can’t just reject it and jump ahead to other things without being able to formulate basic, well-reasoned atheist answers to common Christian questions. I guess it’s not just about maintaining my friends’ respect, it’s also about my own self-respect. I can’t go around showing the improbability of every religion, but I want to be able to do so about the one I grew up in (maybe this is a cousin of the sunk-cost fallacy?). Luckily, all of the groundwork here has already been done by other atheists, it should just a matter of familiarizing myself with basic facts/common arguments.