I don’t make a habit of claiming UUism to be non-disprovable, but now that I think about it…
The seven principles affirmed by the UU association are statements of values, not empirical claims. I have a hard time thinking of anything UUs generally hold to in terms of doctrine at all… So, what’s to disprove?
We don’t even have ethics in common. Only values, and the most controversial subject of those values is “the interdependent web of all existence”, which we agree to “respect”. Even there, I doubt many of us would argue against evidence that there are bits of existence that are not interdependent.
I have a lot of other quibbles with the article. Somehow this one slipped past my radar for a long time. On the principle that the rationalist fixes their opponents arguments for them, it doesn’t seem to come to a high standard. It almost seems to treat arguments as soldiers. (I mean rabbits chewing cud? It’s not just easy to see that this type of language conveys imagery: if you’ve ever seen a, rabbit, you know exactly what imagery it is conveying)…
On other boards, I’ve seen arguments treated very much like soldiers. It’s one reason I don’t visit Jerry Coyne’s site any longer. Science cannot disprove historical miracles, for instance. Yes, science can prove dead people cannot rise again… but it cannot prove that an agent with the power to suspend or violate the laws of nature could not perform the trick.
So, I argue against the claim that acceptance of such a belief, of itself, is a rejection of science. For very narrow cases, there really is a separation between the “magesteria”. One of the things I enjoy about less-wrong is that the focus is moved away from whether belief is “scientific” or not and onto the question of whether it is “true” or not. While the resurrection almost certainly isn’t true, it is almost as certainly true, on Bayesian grounds, that belief in resurrection as a function of the power of a super-natural God is not a rejection of science. On Coyne’s board (and some other “anti-accommodationist” boards), the first truth is embraced, and the second is an enemy soldier.
I have a hard time thinking of anything UUs generally hold to in terms of doctrine at all
Well, UU is definitely on the “accommodationist” side, which means that, when asked “Are there supernatural things?”, it answers “Shut up, debate is intolerance”. But Unitarians’ behavior does reveal a probability estimate—for example, someone praying for a disease to be cured is certainly putting a non-negligible probability mass on “There are things that listen to me pray and can cure disease”. There are no Official Unitarian Beliefs, but there are beliefs of individual Unitarians and they can be stupid but protected by “Don’t tell me this is stupid or you are evil and intolerant”-type memes. In particular, “Belief in the supernatural is not laughably wrong” is a claim made by many Unitarians.
rabbits chewing cud
Okay, chewing pellets could plausibly be lumped in with chewing one’s cud, though I am Not Happy about things becoming “imagery” the second they’re literally false.
Yes, science can prove dead people cannot rise again… but it cannot prove that an agent with the power to suspend or violate the laws of nature could not perform the trick.
Well, obviously such an agent could. But science can and does prove that such agents just don’t happen. We’ve spent the last three thousand years looking at increasingly robust laws of the universe, and we found out that the universe loves locality and referential-independence and hates special exceptions. We’ve spent the last thousand years looking at accounts of miracles and never found one that held water. At some point you just reach probabilities lower than “There is a pony behind my sofa, but it teleports away whenever you try to look at it, by sheer coincidence”.
To accept most scientific claims (“Schrödinger’s equation predicts...”) and also accept a claim that contradicts their generalization (“And lo, Jesus did violate conservation of energy”) requires rejecting the claim “Induction works”, which is sort of the very core of science.
someone praying for a disease to be cured is certainly putting a non-negligible probability mass on “There are things that listen to me pray and can cure disease”.
Note that P(the effectiveness of prayer is greater than zero | there is no god) > P(the effectiveness of prayer is greater than that of a placebo | there is no god).
Sorry—I still haven’t figured out why standard html doesn’t work here, or how to do blockquotes…
“Well, UU is definitely on the ‘accommodationist’ side,”
Generally, yes
-”which means that, when asked ‘Are there supernatural things?‘, it answers ‘Shut up, debate is intolerance’.”
I’m pretty sure it doesn’t mean that. I fall closer to the accommodationist side, and I gladly answer, “no, probably not” to that question.
-”Okay, chewing pellets could plausibly be lumped in with chewing one’s cud, though I am Not Happy about things becoming “imagery” the second they’re literally false.”
I’m not a big fan of Christian apologetics—especially of the sort that like to claim that there are no errors in the Bible, but to hold that “rabbits chew their cud” is an example of a falsehood in the Bible requires you assume that the phrase so translated literally means rumination of partially digested material in exactly the way that ruminant species do. This is a terrible assumption, since the language belonged to people who did not understand rumination: why would they have a term term in their vocabulary that literally describes a process they didn’t understand?
There are many examples of real errors in the Bible… it just looks dumb to cite something as an error based solely on an assumption that ancient languages will somehow embed modern classification systems.
-”But science can and does prove that such agents just don’t happen.”
To fix your argument: science proves that such agents don’t arise under ordinary physical law.
Any number of elements of rational thought make the existence of such an agent improbable, but that doesn’t make it specifically anti-scientific to believe in such an agent.
-”requires rejecting the claim ‘Induction works’,”
Nonsense—it merely requires asserting that induction can fail outside the boundaries for which it should apply (in the case of science, outside the boundaries of natural law).
Sorry—I still haven’t figured out why standard html doesn’t work here, or how to do blockquotes...
When you write a comment, at the bottom right of the text box there is a “Help” button that tells you how to to blockquotes, italics, bold, links, and bullet points.
-”But science can and does prove that such agents just don’t happen.” To fix your argument: science proves that such agents don’t arise under ordinary physical law. Any number of elements of rational thought make the existence of such an agent improbable, but that doesn’t make it specifically anti-scientific to believe in such an agent.
If you step outside ordinary physical law, you lose your firm objective ground to stand on. What’s the point of considering the question when the answer is “You can’t disprove me because God is magical and can do anything.” ? Unless there’s firm evidence towards those events happening (which consistently have been disproven historically), then why waste your time?
Personally, it isn’t something I waste my time on… as I mentioned earlier—it is still a mistake, in terms of strict probability, to believe that there have been miracles from God. It just isn’t a specifically anti-scientific mistake. The act of making it is not evidence that a person is unscientific—merely that they are not reasoning well.
...it is almost as certainly true, on Bayesian grounds, that belief in resurrection as a function of the power of a super-natural God is not a rejection of science.
I believe that it is. Either an incredibly powerful agent such as the one described in the Bible exists and acts upon the world, or he doesn’t. If he exists, and if he pops in from time to time to perform miracles, then we should see some evidence of him doing that. If we did, then science as we know it would not work, because we’d have no predictable natural laws against which to run our tests. Science does appear to work, however, which means that either gods do not exist, or they do exist but aren’t actually doing anything, which is no better than not existing at all.
Right. As the miracle events become more and more rare, our probability estimate of their existence becomes lower and lower—in the absence of some direct evidence, that is. This is why we believe in meteorite impacts, but not in resurrections.
Either an incredibly powerful agent such as the one described in the Bible exists and acts upon the world, or he doesn’t. If he exists, and if he pops in from time to time to perform miracles,
Not “time to time”—I was addressing the specific claim of one resurrection event in history. We might not expect to have any evidence of such an event preserved at all, and certainly none better than the type of documentary evidence adduced to it.
then we should see some evidence of him doing that.
Agreed—however, there is a correllation between the frequency and mode of such interventions and the amount and quality of evidence we should expect. It doesn’t make sense to think this is happening at all, but it isn’t anti-scientific to believe that it has and maybe does happen in subtle ways and/or at rare times.
Not “time to time”—I was addressing the specific claim of one resurrection event in history.
Sure, it’s possible that the Resurrection did occur; believing in its mere possibility is not, in itself, unscientific. But I would argue that if science works, then you’d be forced to conclude that the Resurrection most likely did not occur, based on the evidence available to you. Similarly, you would be forced to conclude that intelligent aliens most likely never visited the Earth—not even that one time—while still acknowledging that it’s entirely possible that they did.
It doesn’t make sense to think this is happening at all, but it isn’t anti-scientific to believe that it has and maybe does happen in subtle ways and/or at rare times.
Once again, it’s a matter of probabilities. If these effects are so subtle and/or rare as to be undetectable, then we’d conclude that such effects most probably do not occur. This is different from saying that they definitely do not occur, or that they cannot occur in principle, etc.
I think it’s worth relating the argument about the Resurrection and the argument about rabbits chewing their cud. We now have a reasonably good definition of “dead”. We know that classical civilisation in 33AD didn’t.
Assuming that there was a person called Jesus and that he was crucified, we have no means of knowing whether he was, in fact, dead or not. It’s necessarily impossible to apply the modern definition since the ECG hadn’t been invented then.
There are scientific phenomena that would result in the observations that are reported in the gospels as the Resurrection (most obviously, a coma caused by brain anoxia, and a recovery over a few days).
This is, interestingly, the Qu’ran’s position on the Resurrection. I’m not especially tied to it, but it does allow one to hold that the gospel writers were not deliberately lying (which raises the value of the gospels as evidence in general) without having to hold that the Resurrection was, in fact, a miracle.
I can see that a UU, someone who thinks that there is ethical value in (say) the Sermon on the Mount, being inclined to this position in that it strengthens the Bayesian evidence for the gospels which are our only available reports of the Sermon on the Mount.
That sort of argument implies some unpleasant things about the agent in question’s willingness to render assistance to those who claim to serve it, and further claim to receive various favors in return for such service.
I am a Unitarian Universalist, and I am confused.
I don’t make a habit of claiming UUism to be non-disprovable, but now that I think about it… The seven principles affirmed by the UU association are statements of values, not empirical claims. I have a hard time thinking of anything UUs generally hold to in terms of doctrine at all… So, what’s to disprove?
We don’t even have ethics in common. Only values, and the most controversial subject of those values is “the interdependent web of all existence”, which we agree to “respect”. Even there, I doubt many of us would argue against evidence that there are bits of existence that are not interdependent.
I have a lot of other quibbles with the article. Somehow this one slipped past my radar for a long time. On the principle that the rationalist fixes their opponents arguments for them, it doesn’t seem to come to a high standard. It almost seems to treat arguments as soldiers. (I mean rabbits chewing cud? It’s not just easy to see that this type of language conveys imagery: if you’ve ever seen a, rabbit, you know exactly what imagery it is conveying)…
On other boards, I’ve seen arguments treated very much like soldiers. It’s one reason I don’t visit Jerry Coyne’s site any longer. Science cannot disprove historical miracles, for instance. Yes, science can prove dead people cannot rise again… but it cannot prove that an agent with the power to suspend or violate the laws of nature could not perform the trick.
So, I argue against the claim that acceptance of such a belief, of itself, is a rejection of science. For very narrow cases, there really is a separation between the “magesteria”. One of the things I enjoy about less-wrong is that the focus is moved away from whether belief is “scientific” or not and onto the question of whether it is “true” or not. While the resurrection almost certainly isn’t true, it is almost as certainly true, on Bayesian grounds, that belief in resurrection as a function of the power of a super-natural God is not a rejection of science. On Coyne’s board (and some other “anti-accommodationist” boards), the first truth is embraced, and the second is an enemy soldier.
Well, UU is definitely on the “accommodationist” side, which means that, when asked “Are there supernatural things?”, it answers “Shut up, debate is intolerance”. But Unitarians’ behavior does reveal a probability estimate—for example, someone praying for a disease to be cured is certainly putting a non-negligible probability mass on “There are things that listen to me pray and can cure disease”. There are no Official Unitarian Beliefs, but there are beliefs of individual Unitarians and they can be stupid but protected by “Don’t tell me this is stupid or you are evil and intolerant”-type memes. In particular, “Belief in the supernatural is not laughably wrong” is a claim made by many Unitarians.
Okay, chewing pellets could plausibly be lumped in with chewing one’s cud, though I am Not Happy about things becoming “imagery” the second they’re literally false.
Well, obviously such an agent could. But science can and does prove that such agents just don’t happen. We’ve spent the last three thousand years looking at increasingly robust laws of the universe, and we found out that the universe loves locality and referential-independence and hates special exceptions. We’ve spent the last thousand years looking at accounts of miracles and never found one that held water. At some point you just reach probabilities lower than “There is a pony behind my sofa, but it teleports away whenever you try to look at it, by sheer coincidence”.
To accept most scientific claims (“Schrödinger’s equation predicts...”) and also accept a claim that contradicts their generalization (“And lo, Jesus did violate conservation of energy”) requires rejecting the claim “Induction works”, which is sort of the very core of science.
Note that P(the effectiveness of prayer is greater than zero | there is no god) > P(the effectiveness of prayer is greater than that of a placebo | there is no god).
I did think of that, but praying for someone else’s disease to be cured, without telling them, certainly qualifies.
Sorry—I still haven’t figured out why standard html doesn’t work here, or how to do blockquotes…
“Well, UU is definitely on the ‘accommodationist’ side,” Generally, yes
-”which means that, when asked ‘Are there supernatural things?‘, it answers ‘Shut up, debate is intolerance’.” I’m pretty sure it doesn’t mean that. I fall closer to the accommodationist side, and I gladly answer, “no, probably not” to that question.
-”Okay, chewing pellets could plausibly be lumped in with chewing one’s cud, though I am Not Happy about things becoming “imagery” the second they’re literally false.” I’m not a big fan of Christian apologetics—especially of the sort that like to claim that there are no errors in the Bible, but to hold that “rabbits chew their cud” is an example of a falsehood in the Bible requires you assume that the phrase so translated literally means rumination of partially digested material in exactly the way that ruminant species do. This is a terrible assumption, since the language belonged to people who did not understand rumination: why would they have a term term in their vocabulary that literally describes a process they didn’t understand?
There are many examples of real errors in the Bible… it just looks dumb to cite something as an error based solely on an assumption that ancient languages will somehow embed modern classification systems.
-”But science can and does prove that such agents just don’t happen.” To fix your argument: science proves that such agents don’t arise under ordinary physical law. Any number of elements of rational thought make the existence of such an agent improbable, but that doesn’t make it specifically anti-scientific to believe in such an agent.
-”requires rejecting the claim ‘Induction works’,” Nonsense—it merely requires asserting that induction can fail outside the boundaries for which it should apply (in the case of science, outside the boundaries of natural law).
When you write a comment, at the bottom right of the text box there is a “Help” button that tells you how to to blockquotes, italics, bold, links, and bullet points.
Thank you.
If you step outside ordinary physical law, you lose your firm objective ground to stand on. What’s the point of considering the question when the answer is “You can’t disprove me because God is magical and can do anything.” ? Unless there’s firm evidence towards those events happening (which consistently have been disproven historically), then why waste your time?
Personally, it isn’t something I waste my time on… as I mentioned earlier—it is still a mistake, in terms of strict probability, to believe that there have been miracles from God. It just isn’t a specifically anti-scientific mistake. The act of making it is not evidence that a person is unscientific—merely that they are not reasoning well.
I believe that it is. Either an incredibly powerful agent such as the one described in the Bible exists and acts upon the world, or he doesn’t. If he exists, and if he pops in from time to time to perform miracles, then we should see some evidence of him doing that. If we did, then science as we know it would not work, because we’d have no predictable natural laws against which to run our tests. Science does appear to work, however, which means that either gods do not exist, or they do exist but aren’t actually doing anything, which is no better than not existing at all.
Well, unless from time to time means “once every couple of millennia”… (Though Occam’s razor says you should assign a very small prior to that.)
Right. As the miracle events become more and more rare, our probability estimate of their existence becomes lower and lower—in the absence of some direct evidence, that is. This is why we believe in meteorite impacts, but not in resurrections.
Not “time to time”—I was addressing the specific claim of one resurrection event in history. We might not expect to have any evidence of such an event preserved at all, and certainly none better than the type of documentary evidence adduced to it.
Agreed—however, there is a correllation between the frequency and mode of such interventions and the amount and quality of evidence we should expect. It doesn’t make sense to think this is happening at all, but it isn’t anti-scientific to believe that it has and maybe does happen in subtle ways and/or at rare times.
Sure, it’s possible that the Resurrection did occur; believing in its mere possibility is not, in itself, unscientific. But I would argue that if science works, then you’d be forced to conclude that the Resurrection most likely did not occur, based on the evidence available to you. Similarly, you would be forced to conclude that intelligent aliens most likely never visited the Earth—not even that one time—while still acknowledging that it’s entirely possible that they did.
Once again, it’s a matter of probabilities. If these effects are so subtle and/or rare as to be undetectable, then we’d conclude that such effects most probably do not occur. This is different from saying that they definitely do not occur, or that they cannot occur in principle, etc.
I think it’s worth relating the argument about the Resurrection and the argument about rabbits chewing their cud. We now have a reasonably good definition of “dead”. We know that classical civilisation in 33AD didn’t.
Assuming that there was a person called Jesus and that he was crucified, we have no means of knowing whether he was, in fact, dead or not. It’s necessarily impossible to apply the modern definition since the ECG hadn’t been invented then.
There are scientific phenomena that would result in the observations that are reported in the gospels as the Resurrection (most obviously, a coma caused by brain anoxia, and a recovery over a few days).
This is, interestingly, the Qu’ran’s position on the Resurrection. I’m not especially tied to it, but it does allow one to hold that the gospel writers were not deliberately lying (which raises the value of the gospels as evidence in general) without having to hold that the Resurrection was, in fact, a miracle.
I can see that a UU, someone who thinks that there is ethical value in (say) the Sermon on the Mount, being inclined to this position in that it strengthens the Bayesian evidence for the gospels which are our only available reports of the Sermon on the Mount.
That sort of argument implies some unpleasant things about the agent in question’s willingness to render assistance to those who claim to serve it, and further claim to receive various favors in return for such service.
Indeed it may.