I’m passing on hard-core utilitarianism, basically. Specifically, I’m passing on on simple functions to be maxmised with everything else considered an acceptable sacrifice if it leads to an uptick in the One True Goal. Even more specifically, I’m passing on using guilt to manipulate people into doing things you want them to do, all in the service of One True Goal.
The parallel should be obvious: if you believe in eternal (!) salvation and torment, absolutely anything on Earth can be sacrificed for a minute increase in the chance of salvation.
The parallel should be obvious: if you believe in eternal (!) salvation and torment, absolutely anything on Earth can be sacrificed for a minute increase in the chance of salvation.
… yes? What’s wrong with that? Are you saying that, if you came across strong evidence that the Christian Heaven and Hell are real, you wouldn’t do absolutely anything necessary to get yourself and the people you care about to Heaven?
The medieval Christians you describe didn’t fail morally because they were hard-core utilitarians, they failed because they believed Christianity was true!
Are you saying that, if you came across strong evidence that the Christian Heaven and Hell are real, you wouldn’t do absolutely anything necessary to get yourself and the people you care about to Heaven?
Yes, I’m saying that.
I’m not sure you’re realizing all the consequences of taking that position VERY seriously. For example, you would want to kidnap children to baptize them. That’s just as an intermediate step, of course—you would want to convert or kill all non-Christians, as soon as possible, because even if their souls are already lost, they are leading their children astray, children whose souls could possibly be saved if they are removed from their heathen/Muslim/Jewish/etc. parents.
Well, my point is that stating all the horrible things that Christians should do to (hypothetically) save people from eternal torment is not a good argument against ‘hard-core’ utilitarianism. These acts are only horrible because Christianity isn’t true. Therefore the antidote for these horrors is not, “don’t swallow the bullet”, it’s “don’t believe stuff without good evidence”.
These acts are only horrible because Christianity isn’t true.
Is that so?
Would real-life Christians who sincerely and wholeheartedly believe that Christianity is true agree that such acts are not horrible at all and, in fact, desirable and highly moral?
Therefore the antidote for these horrors is not, “don’t swallow the bullet”, it’s “don’t believe stuff without good evidence”.
So once you think you have good evidence, all the horrors stop being horrors and become justified?
So once you think you have good evidence, all the horrors stop being horrors and become justified?
If your evidence is good enough, then one must choose the lesser horror. “Better they burn in this life than in the next.”
Various arguments have been made that it’s impossible to be sure to the degree required. I don’t accept them, but I don’t think you’re advancing one of them either.
but I don’t think you’re advancing one of them either
I haven’t been advancing anything so far. I was just marveling at the readiness, nay, enthusiasm with which people declare themselves to be hard-headed fanatics ready and willing to do anything in the pursuit of the One True Goal.
If your evidence is good enough, then one must choose the lesser horror.
There are… complications here. First let me mention in passing two side issues. One is capability: even if you believe the “lesser horror” is the right way, you may find yourself unable to actually do that horror. The other one is change: you are not immutable. What you do changes you, the abyss gazes back, and after committing enough lesser horrors you may find that your ethics have shifted.
Getting back to the central point, there are also two strands here. First, you are basically saying that evil can become good through the virtue of being the lesser evil. Everything is comparable and relative, there are no absolute baselines. This is a major fork where consequentialists and deontologists part ways, right?
Second is the utilitarian insistence that everything must be boiled down to a single, basically, number which determines everything. One function to rule them all.
I find pure utilitarianism to be very fragile.
Consider a memetic plague (major examples: communism and fascism in the first half of the XX century; minor example: ISIS now). Imagine a utilitarian infected by such a memetic virus which hijacks his One True Goal. Is there something which would stop him from committing all sorts of horrors in the service of his new, somewhat modified “utility”? Nope. He has no failsafes, there is no risk management, once he falls he falls to the very bottom. If he’s unlucky enough to survive till the fever passes and the virus retreats, he will look at his hands and find them covered with blood.
I prefer more resilient systems, less susceptible to corruption, ones which fail more gracefully. Even at the price of inefficiency and occasional inconsistency.
I was just marveling at the readiness, nay, enthusiasm with which people declare themselves to be hard-headed fanatics ready and willing to do anything in the pursuit of the One True Goal.
Conditional on being sufficiently convinced such a goal is true, which I am not and assign negligible probability to ever being.
First let me mention in passing two side issues. One is capability: even if you believe the “lesser horror” is the right way, you may find yourself unable to actually do that horror. The other one is change: you are not immutable. What you do changes you, the abyss gazes back, and after committing enough lesser horrors you may find that your ethics have shifted.
Both are issues that must be addressed, but they don’t imply one should abandon the attempt. Also, they aren’t exclusive to doing extremely horrible instrumental things in pursuit of even-more-extremely good outcomes.
Getting back to the central point, there are also two strands here. First, you are basically saying that evil can become good through the virtue of being the lesser evil. Everything is comparable and relative, there are no absolute baselines. This is a major fork where consequentialists and deontologists part ways, right?
I’m saying that whether or not you embrace a notion of the absolute magnitude of good and evil—that is, of a moral true zero—an evil can be the least evil of all available options.
More importantly, deontology is completely compatible with theology. Many people believe(d) in the truth of a religion, and also that that religion commands them to either convert or kill non-believers. This is where the example used in this thread comes from: “burn their bodies—save their souls”. So I’m not sure if you’re proposing deontology as a solution, and if so, how.
I find pure utilitarianism to be very fragile.
I’m not a utilitarian, for a better reason than that: utilitarianism doesn’t describe my actual moral feelings (or those of almost all other people, as far as I can tell), so I see no reason to wish to be more utilitarian. In particular, I assign very different weights to the wellbeing of different people.
Imagine a utilitarian infected by such a memetic virus which hijacks his One True Goal.
That is not very different from imagining a meme that infects any other kind of consequentialist and hijacks the moral weight of a particular outcome. Or which infects deontologists with new rules (like religions sometimes do).
Conditional on being sufficiently convinced such a goal is true
Kinda? The interesting thing about utilitarians is that their One True Goal is whatever scores the highest on the utility-meter. Whatever it is.
an evil can be the least evil of all available options
This is conditional on two evils being comparable (think about generic sorting functions in programming). Not every moral system accepts that all evils can be compared and ranked.
deontology is completely compatible with theology
Again, kinda? It depends. Even in Christianity true love for Christ overrides any rules. Formulated in a different way, if you have sufficient amount of grace, deontological rules don’t apply to you any more, they are just a crutch.
I assign very different weights to the wellbeing of different people
That’s perfectly compatible with utilitarianism.
My understanding of utilitarianism is that it’s a variety of consequentialism where you arrange all the consequences on a single axis called “utility” and rank them. There are subspecies which specify particular ways of aggregating utility (e.g. by saying that the weights of utility of all individuals are all the same), but utilitarianism in general does not require that.
Kinda? The interesting thing about utilitarians is that their One True Goal is whatever scores the highest on the utility-meter. Whatever it is.
But they still need to take into account the probabilities of their factual beliefs. Getting everyone into Heaven may be the One True Goal, but they need to also be certain that Heaven really exists and that they’re right about how to get there.
This is conditional on two evils being comparable (think about generic sorting functions in programming). Not every moral system accepts that all evils can be compared and ranked.
Yes. That’s why I said “an evil can be” and not “some evil must be”. But usually, given a concrete choice, one outcome will be judged best. It’s unlikely, to put it mildly, that someone would believe they can determine whether another person goes to Heaven or Hell, and be morally indifferent between the choices.
Even in Christianity true love for Christ overrides any rules. Formulated in a different way, if you have sufficient amount of grace, deontological rules don’t apply to you any more, they are just a crutch.
That appears to be true for many Protestant denominations. In the Catholic and Orthodox churches, though, salvation is only possible through the church and its ministers and sacraments. And even most Protestants would agree that some (deontological) sins are incompatible with a state of grace unless repented, so at most a past sinner can be in a state of grace, not an ongoing one.
My understanding of utilitarianism is that it’s a variety of consequentialism where you arrange all the consequences on a single axis called “utility” and rank them. There are subspecies which specify particular ways of aggregating utility (e.g. by saying that the weights of utility of all individuals are all the same), but utilitarianism in general does not require that.
It’s good to be precise about the meaning of words. I’ve talked to some people (here on LW) who didn’t accept the label “utilitarianism” for philosophies that assign near-zero value to large groups of people.
True, but there are no absolute thresholds. Whatever gets ranked first is it.
What’s wrong with that? Other than Pascal’s mugging, which everyone needs to avoid.
There are moral philosophies which would refuse to kill an innocent even if this act saves a hundred lives.
True, but very few people actually follow them, especially if you replace ‘a hundred’ with a much larger arbitrary constant. The ‘everyone knows it’s wrong’ metric that was mentioned at the start of this thread doesn’t hold here.
Other than Pascal’s mugging, which everyone needs to avoid.
Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? :-)
What’s wrong with that is, for example, the existence of the single point of failure and lack of failsafes.
very few people actually follow them
I don’t know about that. Very few people find themselves in a situation where they have to make this choice, to start with.
if you replace ‘a hundred’ with a much larger arbitrary constant
We’re back in Pascal’s Mugging territory, aren’t we? So what is it, is utilitarianism OK as long as it avoids Pascal’s Mugging, or is “all evil is evil” position untenable because it falls prey to Pascal’s Mugging?
What’s wrong with that is, for example, the existence of the single point of failure and lack of failsafes.
Why do you think other moral systems are more resilient?
You gave communism, fascism and ISIS (Islamism) as examples of “a utilitarian infected by such a memetic virus which hijacks his One True Goal”. Islamism, unlike the first two, seems to be deontological, like Christianity. Isn’t it?
Deontological Christianity has also been ‘hijacked’ several times by millenialist movements that sparked e.g. several crusades. Nationalism and tribe solidarity have started and maintained many wars where consequentialists would make peace because they kept losing.
Very few people find themselves in a situation where they have to make this choice, to start with.
That’s true. But do many people endorse such actions in a hypothetical scenario? I think not, but I’m not very sure about this.
We’re back in Pascal’s Mugging territory, aren’t we? So what is it, is utilitarianism OK as long as it avoids Pascal’s Mugging, or is “all evil is evil” position untenable because it falls prey to Pascal’s Mugging?
Good point :-)
It’s clear that one’s decision theory (and by extension, one’s morals) would benefit from being able to solve PM. But I don’t know how to do it. You have a good point elsewhere that consequentialism has a single failure point, so it would be more vulnerable to PM and fail more catastrophically, although deontology isn’t totally invulnerable to PM either. It may just be harder to construct a PM attack on deontology without knowing the particular set of deontological rules being used, whereas we can reason about the consequentialist utility function without actually knowing what it is.
I’m not sure if this should count as a reason not to be a consequentialist (as far as one can), because one can’t derive an ought from an is, so we can’t just choose our moral system on the basis of unlikely thought experiments. But it is a reason for consequentialists to be more careful and more uncertain.
Why do you think other moral systems are more resilient?
I think a mix of moral systems is more resilient. Some consequentialism, some deontology, some gut feeling.
Islamism, unlike the first two, seems to be deontological, like Christianity. Isn’t it?
No, I don’t think so. Mainstream Islam is deontological, but fundamentalist movements, just like in Christianity, shift to less deontology and more utilitarianism (of course, with a very particular notion of “utility”).
although deontology isn’t totally invulnerable to PM either
Yes, deontology is corruptible as well, but one of the reasons it’s more robust is that it’s simpler. To be a consequentialist you first need the ability to figure out the consequences and that’s a complicated and error-prone process, vulnerable to attack. To be a deontologist you don’t need to figure out anything except which rule to apply.
To corrupt a consequentialist it might be sufficient to mess with his estimation of probabilities. To corrupt a deontologist you need to replace at least some of his rules. Maybe if you find a pair of contradictory rules you could get somewhere by changing which to apply when, but in practice this doesn’t seem to be a promising attack vector.
And yes, I’m not arguing that this is a sufficient reason to avoid being a consequentialist. But, as you say, it’s a good reason to be more wary.
I think a mix of moral systems is more resilient. Some consequentialism, some deontology, some gut feeling.
I completely agree. Also because this describes how humans (including myself) actually act: according to different moral systems, depending on which is more convenient, some heuristics, and on gut feeling.
Would real-life Christians who sincerely and wholeheartedly believe that Christianity is true agree that such acts are not horrible at all and, in fact, desirable and highly moral?
Yes? Of course? With the caveats that the concept of ‘Christianity’ is the medieval one you mentioned above, that these Christians really have no doubts about their beliefs, and that they swallow the bullet.
So once you think you have good evidence, all the horrors stop being horrors and become justified?
Are you trolling? Is the notion that the morality of actions is dependent on reality really that surprising to you?
With the caveats that the concept of ‘Christianity’ is the medieval one you mentioned above
Huh? The “concept” of Christianity hasn’t changed since the Middle Ages. The relevant part is that you either get saved and achieve eternal life or you are doomed to eternal torment. Of course I don’t mean people like Unitarian Universalists, but rather “standard” Christians who believe in heaven and hell.
Is the notion that the morality of actions is dependent on reality really that surprising to you?
Morality certainly depends on the perception of reality, but the point here is different. We are talking here about what you can, should, or must sacrifice to get closer to the One True Goal (which in Christianity is salvation). Your answer is “everything”. Why? Because the One True Goal justifies everything including things people call “horrors”. Am I reading you wrong?
I mentioned three crucial caveats. I think it would be difficult to find Christians in 2016 who have no doubts and swallow the bullet about the implications of Christianity. It would be a lot easier a few hundred years ago.
Huh? The “concept” of Christianity hasn’t changed since the Middle Ages
What I mean is that the religious beliefs of the majority of people who call themselves Christians have changed a lot since medieval times.
We are talking here about what you can, should, or must sacrifice to get closer to the One True Goal (which in Christianity is salvation). Your answer is “everything”. Why? Because the One True Goal justifies everything including things people call “horrors”. Am I reading you wrong?
I don’t see the relevance of what you call a “One True Goal”. I mean, One True Goal as opposed to what? Several Sorta True Goals? Ultimately, no matter what your goals are, you will necessarily be willing to sacrifice things that are less important to you in order to achieve them. Actions are justified as they relate to the accomplishment of a goal, or a set of goals.
If I were convinced that Roger is going to detonate a nuclear bomb in New York, I would feel justified (and obliged) to murder him, because like most of the people I know, I have the goal to prevent millions of innocents from dying. And yet, if I believed that Roger is going to do this on bad or non-existent evidence, the odds are that I would be killing an innocent man for no good reason. There would be nothing wrong with my goal (One True or not), only with my rationality. I don’t see any fundamental difference between this scenario and the one we’ve been discussing.
One True Goal as opposed to what? Several Sorta True Goals?
Yes. Multiple systems, somewhat inconsistent but serving as a check and a constraint on each other, not letting a single one dominate.
Ultimately, no matter what your goals are, you will necessarily be willing to sacrifice things that are less important to you in order to achieve them.
Not in all ethical systems.
Actions are justified as they relate to the accomplishment of a goal, or a set of goals.
In consequentialism yes, but not all ethics are consequentialist.
There would be nothing wrong with my goal
How do you know that? Not in this specific example, but in general—how do you know there is nothing wrong with your One True Goal?
ETA: If you doubt what I said about beliefs regarding those “doomed to eternal torment,” see “Many religions can lead to eternal life,” in this sizeable PDF.
The real danger, of course, is being utterly convinced Christianity is true when it is not.
The actions described by Lumifer are horrific precisely because they are balanced against a hypothetical benefit, not a certain one. If there is only an epsilon chance of Christianity being true, but the utility loss of eternal torment is infinite, should you take radical steps anyway?
In a nutshell, Lumifer’s position is just hedging against Pascal’s mugging, and IMHO any moral system that doesn’t do so is not appropriate for use out here in the real world.
You’re describing a situation where some people hold factually incorrect beliefs (i.e. objectively wrong religions). And there’s an infinitely powerful entity—a simulator, an Omega, a God—who will torture them for an unbounded time unless they change their minds and belive before they die. The only way to help them is by making them believe the truth; you completely believe this fact.
Do you think that not overriding other people’s will, or not intervening forcefully in their lives, is a more important principle than saving them from eternal torture? What exactly is the rule according to which you (would) act?
You’re describing a situation where some people hold factually incorrect beliefs (i.e. objectively wrong religions).
Given your certainty, it seems that it would be easy for you to demonstrate and even to prove that these beliefs are “factually incorrect”. Would you mind doing that? It would settle a lot of issues that humanity struggled with for many centuries:-/
I think you are misunderstanding what DanArmak wrote. The “situation” in question—which it would be more accurate to say you were describing other people’s belief in—was that Christianity is right and unbelievers are going to hell; neither you nor Dan were endorsing that situation as an accurate account of the world, only as what some people have believed the world to be like.
Like gjm says, you seem to have missed that I was describing a counterfactual. I don’t personally hold such a (religious) belief, so I can’t do what you ask.
But more relevantly, people have failed for many centuries to convince most others of many true facts I do believe in—such as atheism, or (more relevantly) the falsehood of all existing religions.
This isn’t because the beliefs aren’t true or the proofs are hard to verify; it’s because people are hard to convince of anything contrary to something they already believe which is of great personal or social importance to them. People, in short, are not truth seekers, and also lack by default a good epistemological framework to seek truth with.
people have failed for many centuries to convince most others of many true facts I do believe in… This isn’t because the beliefs aren’t true or the proofs are hard to verify
You’re very… cavalier about putting an equals sign between things you believe in and things which are true. Yes, of course you believe they are true, but there is Cromwell’s beseechment to keep in mind. Especially in a situation where you hold a certain belief and other people hold clearly different beliefs.
This isn’t because the beliefs aren’t true or the proofs are hard to verify
Oh really? You can prove that all religions are false? Let me go back to my comment, then, where it seems I wasn’t quite clear. If you can provide proofs of atheism being true, please do so.
Of course, proving a negative is notoriously hard to do.
You’re very… cavalier about putting an equals sign between things you believe in and things which are true. Yes, of course you believe they are true, but there is Cromwell’s beseechment to keep in mind. Especially in a situation where you hold a certain belief and other people hold clearly different beliefs.
I try to keep in mind a probabilistic degree of belief for different beliefs. But I do endorse my previous statement for some beliefs, which I hold strongly enough to simply refer to them as true, even after taking all the meta-arguments against certainty into account.
You can prove that all religions are false? Let me go back to my comment, then, where it seems I wasn’t quite clear. If you can provide proofs of atheism being true, please do so.
Those are two different things. It’s hard to prove that atheism is true in the sense that all possible religions are false. But it’s quite easy to prove that every actually existing theistic* religion (that I and whoever I’m talking to have ever heard of) is false.
(*) (Excluding some philosophies which are called ‘religions’ but don’t make any concrete claims, either natural or supernatural, limiting themselves to moral rules and so on; obviously those can’t be true or false, proven or disproven.)
But it’s quite easy to prove that every actually existing theistic* religion (that I and whoever I’m talking to have ever heard of) is false.
I don’t believe this is true. Can you demonstrate? Let’s take Christianity as the most familiar theistic religion. Here is the Nicene Creed, prove that it is false.
The Creed is a part of a larger whole, not meant to form a religion on its own. It doesn’t include the great majority of the usual reasons for believing in Christianity, which I would need to address to convince people that it is wrong; it states (some of) the conclusions Christians believe in but not their premises. A Christian wouldn’t try to convert someone just by telling them the Nicene Creed, without even any evidence for believing in the Creed.
However, on further reflection: I must partially retract what I said. The ‘quite easy’ proof I had in mind is not universal: like any proof, its form and existence depend on who that proof is supposed to convince. It’s famously hard to convince a Christian of a disproof of Christianity; it’s also very easy to convince someone who is already an atheist, or an Orthodox Jew, that the the same disproof is valid.
Every human alive has heard of the concept of religion, and of some concrete religions (if not necessarily of Christianity), and usually either believes in one or explicitly does not believe in any. So it could be said there’s no perfectly impartial judge of the validity of a proof. I believe that a neutral, rational, unbiased reasoner would be convinced by my simple proofs; but even apart from not being to test this, a Christian could argue that I’m sneaking assumptions into my definition of a neutral reasoner. (After all, every reasoner must start out with some facts, and if Christianity is true, why not start out believing in it?)
I retract my previous claim. I don’t have a “quite easy” proof any given religion is false, if by proof we mean “some words that would quite easily convince a believer in that religion to stop believing in it.”
it’s also very easy to convince someone who is already an atheist, or an Orthodox Jew, that the the same disproof is valid.
But that is precisely the part that I’m objecting to. I agree that trying to convince a believer would likely lead to some form of “Whatever, dude, you just need to let Jesus into your heart”.
I’m not a Christian. I don’t think Christianity is true, but that’s a probabilistic belief that potentially could change. Prove to me that Christianity is false.
All beliefs are probabilistic and can change. The evidence that would convince us that Christianity is true would have to be commensurate with the prior telling us today that it is false. The existence of that low prior is the proof that it’s very likely false (factoring in our uncertainty about some things).
(By the word ‘prove’, I obviously didn’t mean a logical proof that sets the probability to zero; just one that makes the probability so low that theory would never rise to the level of conscious consideration.)
Why do I think our prior for Christianity should be very low?
First, because it makes supernatural claims; that is, claims which are by definition counter to all previous observations which we had used to determine the natural laws.
Second, because its core claims (and future predictions) are similar to many sets of (mutually contradictory) claims made by many other religions, which implies that generating such claims and eyewitness testimony (as opposed to lasting miraculous artifacts or states of nature) is a natural human behavior which doesn’t need further explanation.
Third, because we know that Christianity and its dogmas have changed a lot during its history, and many sects have risen and fallen which have violently disagreed over every possible point of theology. Even if we assign a high probability to some variant of Christianity being true and ignore all other world religions (actual and possible), the average probability of any specific branch of Christianity would still be low, although not nearly as astronomically low as due to the other reasons given. And since we can trace clear human causes for the beliefs of many sects—like Luther postulating that since Catholic clergy was corrupt, their theology must also be wrong, or like many sects that were declared heretical for political reasons—it’s likely that all sects’ beliefs had human causes, and evolved in large part from previous, non-Christian beliefs.
Fourth, and generalizing the previous point, the reason we’re even talking about Christianity isn’t its claims. It’s not because some Christian prophecies or supernatural beliefs unexpectedly came true. Rather, it’s because many people are Christians and we grew up in or near Christian culture. But a great many religions that once flourished are now diminished or lost to history. And even Christians themselves (unlike some other religions) don’t usually argue that the spread of their religion is a sign that it must be right; on the contrary, they venerate those who believed when Christians were few and persecuted.
The existence of that low prior is the proof that it’s very likely false
I think you’re trying to double-dip :-) The prior itself is a probability (or a set of probabilities). A “low prior” means that something is unlikely—directly. It does not offer proof that it’s unlikely, it just straight out states it is unlikely.
And there doesn’t seem to be any reason to talk about priors, anyway. It’s not like at any moment we expect a new chunk of information and will have to update our beliefs. I think it’s simpler to just talk about available evidence.
As a preface let me say that I basically agree with the thrust of your arguments. I am not a Christian, afer all. However I don’t consider them as anything close to a “proof”—they look weaker to me than to you.
makes supernatural claims; that is, claims which are by definition counter to all previous observations
That is not so. Supernatural claims do not run “counter” to previous observations, they just say that certain beings/things/actions are not constrainted by laws of nature. Wright brothers’ airplane was not “counter” to all previous observations of transportation devices with an engine. Recall Clarke’s Third Law.
Not to mention that “all previous observations” include a lot of claims of miracles :-)
its core claims (and future predictions) are similar to many sets of (mutually contradictory) claims made by many other religions
Yep. But there is a conventional explanation for that (I do not imply that I believe it): different traditions take different views of the same underlying divinity, but find themselves in the position of the nine blind men and the elephant.
This point will also need to explain why large civilizations (e.g. China) did NOT develop anything which looks like monotheism.
the average probability of any specific branch of Christianity would still be low
That’s a wrong way to look at it. Imagine that you have an underlying phenomenon which you cannot observe directly. You can only take indirect, noisy measurements. Different people take different sets of measurements, they are not the same and none of them are “true”. However this does not mean that the underlying phenomenon does not exist. It only means that information available to you is indirect and noisy.
it’s likely that all sects’ beliefs had human causes
See above—different people might well have human reasons to prefer this particular set of measurements or that particular set of measurements. Still does NOT mean there’s nothing underlying them.
it’s because many people are Christians
Well, and why is that? Why is Christianity a huge world religion? It started with a small band of persecuted Jews, why did it spread so?
This point will also need to explain why large civilizations (e.g. China) did NOT develop anything which looks like monotheism.
Who says that they didn’t? Chinese folk religion acknowledged Shang-di (also called Tian, ‘Heaven’) as the primordial, universal deity, which is essentially a kind of henotheism and quite close historically to monotheism. This is especially true since other deities, while worthy of veneration and sacrifice, were largely conflated with “spirits”. Of course, the later ideology of Confucianism tended to supplant these ancestral beliefs as a genuine foundation for ethics and philosophy/general worldview, although it did encourage the practice of rituals as a way of maintaining social harmony and a tightly-knit community.
I do. If you squint hard enough you can detect monotheism in any religious system at which point the term “monotheism” loses any meaning.
I’m using the conventional approach where religions like Judaism and Christianity (in spite of the Trinity!) are monotheistic and religions like Hinduism and Shinto are not.
I’m using the conventional approach where religions like Judaism and Christianity (in spite of the Trinity!) are monotheistic and religions like Hinduism and Shinto are not.
But the point is, the ancestral version of what would later evolve into Judaism was far from monotheistic; much like Chinese folk religion. As with almost anything else in history, monotheism was a gradual development.
Christianity not only has the trinity but also a bunch of saints towards whom you can pray and who then supposedly intervene. Additionally there are a bunch of angels. There’s the devil and demons.
I think you’re trying to double-dip :-) The prior itself is a probability (or a set of probabilities). A “low prior” means that something is unlikely—directly. It does not offer proof that it’s unlikely, it just straight out states it is unlikely.
I meant that in response to your framing: “I don’t think Christianity is true, but that’s a probabilistic belief that potentially could change.”
If your belief changes in the future, it’ll be in response to evidence. I can’t know what evidence you’ll receive in the future, so I can’t refute it ahead of time. So all I can do is lower the probability for Christianity now, which will serve as a sufficiently low prior in the future so that any new evidence still doesn’t convince you.
Yeah, I didn’t phrase it well.
That is not so. Supernatural claims do not run “counter” to previous observations, they just say that certain beings/things/actions are not constrainted by laws of nature. Wright brothers’ airplane was not “counter” to all previous observations of transportation devices with an engine. Recall Clarke’s Third Law.
The Wright brothers’ plane wasn’t claimed to be, or perceived as, supernatural.
The reason miracles are advanced as proof of a religion—the reason they are in the discussion in the first place (and in the Nicene Creed) - is because they are very surprising events. If a prophet goes around performing miracles like curing sick people, and a second prophet goes around saying that whatever we already expect to happen is in itself a miracle (“the miracle of nature”) and lets the sick people die, then we have a reason to believe the first prophet’s other claims (“God is granting me this power”) but not the second one’s.
One meaning of “supernatural” is “unnatural”: that is, an event that cannot happen according to normal natural law. Since we deduce natural law from observation only (and not from revelation or from first principles), this just means unique, unforeseeable events contrary to what we believe are the laws of nature.
This is why many try to refute religious miraculous claims, not by denying the story of the claims, but by giving natural law explanations for the events.
Not to mention that “all previous observations” include a lot of claims of miracles :-)
Claims are cheap, proofs are hard. Christians deny the claims of miracles by non-Christians, at least ones made explicitly in the name of another religion (other than pre-Christian Judaism). They don’t deny the supernatural explanation, they just deny the claim that the miracle occurred. Similarly, if I really believed all the Christian miracles occurred as stated, I would probably believe in Christianity.
You could adopt the position that various miracles are in fact easy to produce, we don’t know how; and different people have discovered how and used those powers to advance their various religions. But that conflicts with the observation that more miracles are always reported of ancient times than of modern, and of highly religious and undeveloped regions than of secular and technologically modern ones. If there was a ‘trick’ to doing miracles without supernatural intervention, we would expect the correlation to go the other way.
Yep. But there is a conventional explanation for that (I do not imply that I believe it): different traditions take different views of the same underlying divinity, but find themselves in the position of the nine blind men and the elephant.
If that is true, then all the specific claims made by Christianity, as well as any other religion, are false, because they all contradict one another (even between the branches of Christianity). If we take only the common denominator of all religions as true, I’m not sure there’s anything left at all, certainly nothing about e.g. supernatural commands or moral law.
This point will also need to explain why large civilizations (e.g. China) did NOT develop anything which looks like monotheism.
If a single deity appears to some as monotheistic, and to some as an unbounded number of local and thematic spirits, and both sides claim to have received direct revelations (in human language) of this truth, what can you predict of the elephant?
That’s a wrong way to look at it. Imagine that you have an underlying phenomenon which you cannot observe directly. You can only take indirect, noisy measurements. Different people take different sets of measurements, they are not the same and none of them are “true”. However this does not mean that the underlying phenomenon does not exist. It only means that information available to you is indirect and noisy.
As above, if you are forced to discard any concrete result with which the majority of measurements disagree, you are left with nothing. There is no common set of core beliefs to all religions. There isn’t even one common to all branches of Christianity, except for the idea that “a man named Christ lived around 5BC-35AD in Judea, had disciples and was executed by the Romans”. After all, some people who call themselves Christians believe that Jesus was an ordinary man who performed no miracles.
See above—different people might well have human reasons to prefer this particular set of measurements or that particular set of measurements. Still does NOT mean there’s nothing underlying them.
If they end up disagreeing over all experimental results, and over all procedures to measure those results, then I think we have no evidence for there being anything underlying them, any more than there is for e.g. astrology.
Well, and why is that? Why is Christianity a huge world religion? It started with a small band of persecuted Jews, why did it spread so?
Survivor/selection bias. You’re only asking the question because it’s a huge religion. Many more religions vanished or remained small than survived. There are documented historical reasons for this, but the only way they could be related to the truth of Christian claims is if God was indirectly helping them spread. Which every other successful, large religion claims as well. Anyway, ‘we won the war so our epistemology is true and Arianism is a heresy’ is not a very convincing argument.
I think we might be starting to rehash the standard atheist/Christian debate. Of course there are counter-counter-arguments for my counter-arguments to your arguments. And there are counter-counter-counter-arguments to those, too. Unless you really like turtles, I am not sure there is much need to go there.
I know the arguments against religions. I find them sufficiently convincing to not be religious. I do not find them rising to the level of “proof”. YMMV, of course.
The two parts of your last paragraph oppose one another—given the difficulty people have in seeking the truth, all proofs of that kind are hard to verify. You cannot say “the proofs are easy to verify, but most people do not have the ability to do so.” Saying that something is easy just means that it does not take much ability.
You can say that it is easy for you, perhaps, but not that it is just easy.
Consider the following proposition: For each existing religion, one can easily set out evidence of its wrongness that would (1) be very convincing to the majority of people who are not already positively disposed towards that religion and (2) be good reasoning in the abstract; if we combine these, we get a strong argument that no existing religion is close to the truth, but this argument will not convince most people because most people are adherents of some religion or other, and it is extremely difficult for adherents of any religion to appreciate the strength of arguments against that religion.
It seems to me that that proposition may very well be true, and that if it is true then it’s correct (aside from the fact that “proofs” is too ambitious a word) to say both that it’s difficult to convince people that all existing religions are wrong, and that the proofs of that fact are not hard to verify.
For each existing religion, one can easily set out evidence of its wrongness that would (1) be very convincing to the majority of people who are not already positively disposed towards that religion and (2) be good reasoning in the abstract;
The same is true for atheism, and certainly for utilitarianism.
(I think Eugene is downvoting your comments on this thread.)
I’m not sure this is true, for a number of reasons.
By “one can easily set out evidence of its wrongness” I presume that you meant one particular set of evidence. In that case, I am not sure that you can in fact choose one particular set of evidence which would be very convincing to the majority of people. It’s true that if you take all the people who disagree with a religion, then take any individual among them, you can easily find something which is convincing to him. But that may not be the same thing which is convincing to someone else. And since people who are religious typically think there is some evidence for their religion, they will disagree with some arguments against other religions because they will see that those arguments could also refute their own. They will see them as “proving too much.” So it is not clear at all that you can take one particular set of evidence and convince the majority.
On the other hand, if you meant you can find a set of evidence that matches each individual, your argument is in fact too wide, because it would apply to nearly all philosophical views, including contrary ones, as time mentioned in his comment in regard to atheism and utilitarianism.
If you are avoiding that consequence by means of the “good reasoning in the abstract”, I have various issues with that. First, it is possible to argue for something with “good reasoning in the abstract” in a way which would be convincing to many or most people, but which would become unconvincing if they were aware of other evidence and arguments for the opposite position. If good reasoning is supposed to mean that you mention all of the evidence, then your argument is question begging—you are saying nothing more than that you have considered all of the relevant evidence that you can find, and you consider the most reasonable position to be that all religions are false. I agree both with this assessment of the evidence and the conclusion. But I am not going to assert that I am the only one who engages in good reasoning, and I realize that there are people who have considered basically all of the evidence that I have considered, and who are basically reasonable people, and nonetheless think that some religion is true.
Finally, I am not sure that it is true to say “if we combine these, we get a strong argument that no existing religion is close to the truth,” even given the other things, because we can make arguments that are convincing to most people that any particular person is not going to win the lottery, but this is not a strong argument that no one is going to win.
(I think Eugene is downvoting your comments on this thread.)
Eugine is downvoting my comments everywhere. My 30-day karma is currently at −44; if I am interpreting the percentages right then my “non-Eugine” 30-day karma is probably somewhere around +270. (But I suspect that may be inflated a bit, because some people may be applying “corrective” upvotes to some of my comments that have been Eugined.)
I am not sure that you can in fact choose one particular set of evidence which would be very convincing to the majority of people.
That’s a good observation. My feeling is that the “argument from evil” against religions that claim there’s a supremely good supremely powerful being is extremely convincing to almost everyone who doesn’t belong to such a religion—but of course lots of people who don’t belong to one such religion may belong to a different such religion and therefore be unfavourably disposed towards the AfE.
If good reasoning is supposed to mean that you mention all the evidence, then your argument is question begging
It is supposed to mean something along those lines, but if you think I’m begging the question then I think you are probably misunderstanding the nature of my argument. Let me recap, and try to make the connective tissue of the argument more visible; my apologies if this makes it laborious.
DanArmak said (roughly) that atheism is not only correct but in some sense obviously correct; in other words, that the answer to “why are so many people religious?” is less “because anti-religious arguments are subtle and hard to understand” and more “because religious people are unable to accept even easy clear arguments if they lead to irreligious conclusions”.
Various people disagreed.
I am agreeing (roughly and provisionally) with Dan, and suggesting a way to make his claim more precise: the idea is that (1) there are anti-religious arguments convincing to any given person (you just have to avoid arguments that they can see refuting their own religion) and (2) that isn’t because you can find crappy arguments tailored to any given person’s biases and errors—the arguments in question are actually good ones in some objective sense.
The people disagreeing with Dan mostly agree with him that in fact religions are probably wrong, and I think they agree with him that there are “good in the abstract” arguments leading to that conclusion. The point of their disagreement is that those arguments are unconvincing to many (otherwise) intelligent and reasonable people, and that if you want to claim an argument is easy to verify then the fact that it fails to convince many intelligent and reasonable people is a big obstacle.
The point of my comment, therefore, was to suggest a way to surmount that obstacle, by providing evidence that each person’s unconvincedness is an artefact of their own religious commitments rather than an indication that the arguments are weak or difficult.
And the reason why I stipulated that the arguments in question are “good reasoning in the abstract” is just to exclude the possibility that the individually-tailored arguments are cheaty ones that target individuals’ cognitive weaknesses, rather than anti-cheaty ones that avoid individuals’ cognitive weaknesses.
lottery
That’s a valid point in the abstract, but its validity depends on the actual numbers in question. If you have a million people and a million arguments each showing Pr(a given person wins) ⇐ 10^-6 then indeed that isn’t enough to be any sort of evidence that no one will win; but if you could show that each person’s winning probability was ⇐ 10^-9, it would be. In the case we’re dealing with here, I suggest that we can probably find (let’s say) no more than 100 varieties of theism (I know that some earlier comments said “religion” but I think “theism” is what’s actually under discussion here), and an argument for each showing Pr(that version of theism) ⇐ 10^-4, in which case it follows that Pr(any of them) ⇐ 1%.
I’m still not sure that your idea is true even in when it is limited to “everyone who doesn’t belong to such a religion.” It might be true about LWers but they are not a representative sample. Americans seem to be pretty consistently more likely to identify as agnostic as atheist, for example. Now of course that might be because American doesn’t like atheists and they want to avoid the social consequences. And it might be different (as far as I know) in other countries, since I just checked the statistics for the US according to various polls. But prima facie, it suggests that “most people who don’t believe in any god at all are not extremely convinced by any argument against the existence of a god.” I am not asserting that this is definitely the case, but it is plausible to me, and supported at least by this fact. It’s possible you could establish your claim with better data, but so far I’m not convinced.
There is still the problem that if you limit it to people who “don’t belong to such a religion,” then you appear to be saying “everyone who thinks that God doesn’t exist thinks that there is a convincing argument against the existence of God,” and even if that were one particular argument, it would be similar to saying, “everyone who accepts the error theory of morality finds such and such an argument convincing.” Even if there is one such argument in the case of error theory (which might not actually be the case), that hardly establishes that it is easy to prove that error theory is true, or that it is true at all, for that matter.
I personally think the argument from evil (and various similar arguments) is evidence against the existence of a personal God, but I don’t find it extremely convincing. A large part of the reason for that is when I did believe in Christianity, I had an answer to that argument which I found reasonable, and which still seems reasonable to me, not in the sense of “this is the case”, but in the sense of a reasonable possibility. Now you could say that this is an “artifact of religious commitments” in a historical sense, but I don’t think this is actually the case, given the fact that there are plenty of other issues where I never thought I had a good response in the first place. There is also Scott Alexander’s “Answer to Job.” Now I think that if you consider such responses carefully (my previous personal answer which I haven’t gone into here, or Scott’s answer, or almost any other reasonable response) they actually fit better with an impersonal principle than with a personal God, but they are not inconsistent with a personal one. So that prevents me from considering the argument extremely persuasive.
“Evidence that each person’s unconvincedness is an artefact of their own religious commitments.” You can certainly provide such evidence for many or most people. But theists can also provide evidence that atheistic convictions are often the result of non-evidential commitments as well. And in any case this is not going to apply to every single individual, and especially the case of converts to religion like Leah Libresco or Edward Feser. That doesn’t mean that all sorts of non-rational influences aren’t present in the case of converts. But it isn’t true that e.g. “they aren’t convinced by the argument from evil because they accept religion,” given the fact that the argument from evil did not prevent them from going from not accepting religion to accepting religion in the first place.
Of course, if I disagree with someone’s conclusion, I am almost certainly going to end up explaining how he went wrong. This isn’t Bulverism in a bad sense, given that I don’t assume he is wrong in the first place, but argue for it. And if I am right, it does mean there are better and more reasonable arguments for my position than for their position. But that isn’t the same as calling my conclusion something easily seen to be true.
I also would not say that just because some people disagree who are generally reasonable people, it follows that the matter cannot be an easy one. So for example I would say that young earth creationism is easily seen to be false, even though there are some people who both think it is true, and are generally reasonable people. But note that there are relatively few people like this, compared to the number of generally reasonable people who admit that evolution is true but still think some kind of religion is true.
One difference is this: it does not require anything like philosophical argument to establish that evolution is true. It just requires looking at actually existing plants, animals, and rocks and discussing how they could have got that way. In contrast, philosophy is actually hard for human beings. And I think you cannot prove or disprove something like theism without philosophical argument. This suggests that it is not easy to do so.
It’s true that a lot of people call themselves agnostics, which seems to indicate (1) not being completely convinced by any argument against theism while also (2) not having a commitment to any particular religion. However, I think the great majority of people who call themselves agnostics fall into one of these categories:
People who prefer to avoid too-committal terms like “atheist”, either because there’s a stigma attached to overt atheism where they are or because they think “atheist” implies absolute certainty.
People who haven’t really thought the matter through very much.
People who are agnostic about the existence of some sort of deity but strongly convinced that e.g. there is almost certainly no supremely good and powerful being who takes a personal interest in human affairs.
I would expect people in the first and third groups to share my opinion about arguments from evil, though the third lot would rightly observe that e.g. such arguments tell us nothing about superbeings who just don’t care about our affairs.
People in the second group might well not be very convinced by arguments from evil, but I would expect that if they gave serious consideration to such arguments they would typically see them as very strong.
“Everyone thinks there is a convincing argument”
That’s not quite what I’m saying. I’m saying that there are, in fact, arguments that I would expect to be very convincing if looked at seriously by a sizable majority of people not committed to the religions in question. Of course those who haven’t seriously considered such arguments will not yet be convinced.
Your own epistemic situation
I find it very interesting that you aren’t very convinced by arguments from evil despite having rejected Christianity, but I don’t think there’s anything further I can say without having any idea why it is that you aren’t convinced. You say it’s because there’s a particular answer you find reasonable, but I’ve no idea what that answer is :-).
You do mention Scott’s “Answer to Job”, which is very ingenious. It’s a good answer to arguments-from-evil that end “and therefore it is absolutely impossible that there is a benevolent god”, but I would consider such arguments overreaching even without that particular answer. Is it any good as an answer to “evidential” arguments that take the quantity and distribution of Bad Stuff in our world merely as evidence? Well, I guess that depends on (1) how likely Scott’s scenario is a priori and (2) how credible it is that our world is, so to speak, a random pick from all possible worlds where good outweighs bad, weighted by number of intelligent agents or something of the kind. To #1, I say: not terribly likely, because I am not convinced that good outweighs bad in our world. (Which is not at all the same thing as saying that many people in our world would rather die than live.) To #2, I say: not credible at all; I would expect a random observer from a multiverse containing all possible more-good-than-bad worlds to see something very very very different from what I see. (I suspect the great majority of observers in such worlds are something like Boltzmann brains.)
“Atheistic convictions are often the result of non-evidential commitments”
Oh, absolutely. I wasn’t meaning to make any comment on the relative merits of theists and atheists. I was just addressing an obvious argument against any claim that there’s good evidence against theism, namely that lots of apparently sensible people are theists. (I firmly agree that you likewise can’t reject the claim that there’s good evidence against atheism just because lots of apparently sensible people are atheists.)
(Highly intelligent converts like Leah Libresco and Ed Feser would be evidence against any claim that the only reason for not being convinced by atheistic arguments is prior religious commitment. But I have not been making that claim, at least not deliberately.)
It’s true that the difficulty of understanding a proof is relative to the one doing the understanding. But what I meant was different.
People don’t (merely) “have difficulty in seeking the truth”, or find the proofs “hard to verify”. Rather, people are generally not interested in seeking truth on certain subjects, and not willing to accept truth that is contrary to their dearly held beliefs, regardless of the nature or difficulty of the proof that is presented to them. When I said that “people are not truth seekers”, I didn’t mean that they are bad at discovering the truth, but that on certain subjects they usually (act as if they) don’t want to discover it at all.
Yes, I basically agree with this, although I think it applies to the vast majority of non-religious people as much as to religious people, including in regard to religious topics. In other words it is mostly not for the sake of truth that someone holds religious beliefs, and it is mostly not for the sake of truth that someone else holds non-religious beliefs.
Also, it does mean that people are bad at discovering the truth on the topics where they do not want to discover it, just as people are generally bad at jobs they do not want to do.
I’m passing on hard-core utilitarianism, basically. Specifically, I’m passing on on simple functions to be maxmised with everything else considered an acceptable sacrifice if it leads to an uptick in the One True Goal. Even more specifically, I’m passing on using guilt to manipulate people into doing things you want them to do, all in the service of One True Goal.
The parallel should be obvious: if you believe in eternal (!) salvation and torment, absolutely anything on Earth can be sacrificed for a minute increase in the chance of salvation.
… yes? What’s wrong with that? Are you saying that, if you came across strong evidence that the Christian Heaven and Hell are real, you wouldn’t do absolutely anything necessary to get yourself and the people you care about to Heaven?
The medieval Christians you describe didn’t fail morally because they were hard-core utilitarians, they failed because they believed Christianity was true!
Yes, I’m saying that.
I’m not sure you’re realizing all the consequences of taking that position VERY seriously. For example, you would want to kidnap children to baptize them. That’s just as an intermediate step, of course—you would want to convert or kill all non-Christians, as soon as possible, because even if their souls are already lost, they are leading their children astray, children whose souls could possibly be saved if they are removed from their heathen/Muslim/Jewish/etc. parents.
Yes, I acknowledge all of that. Do you understand the consequence of not doing those things, if Christianity is true?
Eternal torment, for everyone you failed to convert.
Eternal. Torment.
Yes, I do. Well, since I’m not actually religious, my understanding is hypothetical. But yes, this is precisely the point I’m making.
Well, my point is that stating all the horrible things that Christians should do to (hypothetically) save people from eternal torment is not a good argument against ‘hard-core’ utilitarianism. These acts are only horrible because Christianity isn’t true. Therefore the antidote for these horrors is not, “don’t swallow the bullet”, it’s “don’t believe stuff without good evidence”.
Is that so?
Would real-life Christians who sincerely and wholeheartedly believe that Christianity is true agree that such acts are not horrible at all and, in fact, desirable and highly moral?
So once you think you have good evidence, all the horrors stop being horrors and become justified?
If your evidence is good enough, then one must choose the lesser horror. “Better they burn in this life than in the next.”
Various arguments have been made that it’s impossible to be sure to the degree required. I don’t accept them, but I don’t think you’re advancing one of them either.
I haven’t been advancing anything so far. I was just marveling at the readiness, nay, enthusiasm with which people declare themselves to be hard-headed fanatics ready and willing to do anything in the pursuit of the One True Goal.
There are… complications here. First let me mention in passing two side issues. One is capability: even if you believe the “lesser horror” is the right way, you may find yourself unable to actually do that horror. The other one is change: you are not immutable. What you do changes you, the abyss gazes back, and after committing enough lesser horrors you may find that your ethics have shifted.
Getting back to the central point, there are also two strands here. First, you are basically saying that evil can become good through the virtue of being the lesser evil. Everything is comparable and relative, there are no absolute baselines. This is a major fork where consequentialists and deontologists part ways, right?
Second is the utilitarian insistence that everything must be boiled down to a single, basically, number which determines everything. One function to rule them all.
I find pure utilitarianism to be very fragile.
Consider a memetic plague (major examples: communism and fascism in the first half of the XX century; minor example: ISIS now). Imagine a utilitarian infected by such a memetic virus which hijacks his One True Goal. Is there something which would stop him from committing all sorts of horrors in the service of his new, somewhat modified “utility”? Nope. He has no failsafes, there is no risk management, once he falls he falls to the very bottom. If he’s unlucky enough to survive till the fever passes and the virus retreats, he will look at his hands and find them covered with blood.
I prefer more resilient systems, less susceptible to corruption, ones which fail more gracefully. Even at the price of inefficiency and occasional inconsistency.
Conditional on being sufficiently convinced such a goal is true, which I am not and assign negligible probability to ever being.
Both are issues that must be addressed, but they don’t imply one should abandon the attempt. Also, they aren’t exclusive to doing extremely horrible instrumental things in pursuit of even-more-extremely good outcomes.
I’m saying that whether or not you embrace a notion of the absolute magnitude of good and evil—that is, of a moral true zero—an evil can be the least evil of all available options.
More importantly, deontology is completely compatible with theology. Many people believe(d) in the truth of a religion, and also that that religion commands them to either convert or kill non-believers. This is where the example used in this thread comes from: “burn their bodies—save their souls”. So I’m not sure if you’re proposing deontology as a solution, and if so, how.
I’m not a utilitarian, for a better reason than that: utilitarianism doesn’t describe my actual moral feelings (or those of almost all other people, as far as I can tell), so I see no reason to wish to be more utilitarian. In particular, I assign very different weights to the wellbeing of different people.
That is not very different from imagining a meme that infects any other kind of consequentialist and hijacks the moral weight of a particular outcome. Or which infects deontologists with new rules (like religions sometimes do).
Kinda? The interesting thing about utilitarians is that their One True Goal is whatever scores the highest on the utility-meter. Whatever it is.
This is conditional on two evils being comparable (think about generic sorting functions in programming). Not every moral system accepts that all evils can be compared and ranked.
Again, kinda? It depends. Even in Christianity true love for Christ overrides any rules. Formulated in a different way, if you have sufficient amount of grace, deontological rules don’t apply to you any more, they are just a crutch.
That’s perfectly compatible with utilitarianism.
My understanding of utilitarianism is that it’s a variety of consequentialism where you arrange all the consequences on a single axis called “utility” and rank them. There are subspecies which specify particular ways of aggregating utility (e.g. by saying that the weights of utility of all individuals are all the same), but utilitarianism in general does not require that.
But they still need to take into account the probabilities of their factual beliefs. Getting everyone into Heaven may be the One True Goal, but they need to also be certain that Heaven really exists and that they’re right about how to get there.
Yes. That’s why I said “an evil can be” and not “some evil must be”. But usually, given a concrete choice, one outcome will be judged best. It’s unlikely, to put it mildly, that someone would believe they can determine whether another person goes to Heaven or Hell, and be morally indifferent between the choices.
That appears to be true for many Protestant denominations. In the Catholic and Orthodox churches, though, salvation is only possible through the church and its ministers and sacraments. And even most Protestants would agree that some (deontological) sins are incompatible with a state of grace unless repented, so at most a past sinner can be in a state of grace, not an ongoing one.
It’s good to be precise about the meaning of words. I’ve talked to some people (here on LW) who didn’t accept the label “utilitarianism” for philosophies that assign near-zero value to large groups of people.
True, but there are no absolute thresholds. Whatever gets ranked first is it.
There are moral philosophies which would refuse to kill an innocent even if this act saves a hundred lives.
What’s wrong with that? Other than Pascal’s mugging, which everyone needs to avoid.
True, but very few people actually follow them, especially if you replace ‘a hundred’ with a much larger arbitrary constant. The ‘everyone knows it’s wrong’ metric that was mentioned at the start of this thread doesn’t hold here.
Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? :-)
What’s wrong with that is, for example, the existence of the single point of failure and lack of failsafes.
I don’t know about that. Very few people find themselves in a situation where they have to make this choice, to start with.
We’re back in Pascal’s Mugging territory, aren’t we? So what is it, is utilitarianism OK as long as it avoids Pascal’s Mugging, or is “all evil is evil” position untenable because it falls prey to Pascal’s Mugging?
Why do you think other moral systems are more resilient?
You gave communism, fascism and ISIS (Islamism) as examples of “a utilitarian infected by such a memetic virus which hijacks his One True Goal”. Islamism, unlike the first two, seems to be deontological, like Christianity. Isn’t it?
Deontological Christianity has also been ‘hijacked’ several times by millenialist movements that sparked e.g. several crusades. Nationalism and tribe solidarity have started and maintained many wars where consequentialists would make peace because they kept losing.
That’s true. But do many people endorse such actions in a hypothetical scenario? I think not, but I’m not very sure about this.
Good point :-)
It’s clear that one’s decision theory (and by extension, one’s morals) would benefit from being able to solve PM. But I don’t know how to do it. You have a good point elsewhere that consequentialism has a single failure point, so it would be more vulnerable to PM and fail more catastrophically, although deontology isn’t totally invulnerable to PM either. It may just be harder to construct a PM attack on deontology without knowing the particular set of deontological rules being used, whereas we can reason about the consequentialist utility function without actually knowing what it is.
I’m not sure if this should count as a reason not to be a consequentialist (as far as one can), because one can’t derive an ought from an is, so we can’t just choose our moral system on the basis of unlikely thought experiments. But it is a reason for consequentialists to be more careful and more uncertain.
I think a mix of moral systems is more resilient. Some consequentialism, some deontology, some gut feeling.
No, I don’t think so. Mainstream Islam is deontological, but fundamentalist movements, just like in Christianity, shift to less deontology and more utilitarianism (of course, with a very particular notion of “utility”).
Yes, deontology is corruptible as well, but one of the reasons it’s more robust is that it’s simpler. To be a consequentialist you first need the ability to figure out the consequences and that’s a complicated and error-prone process, vulnerable to attack. To be a deontologist you don’t need to figure out anything except which rule to apply.
To corrupt a consequentialist it might be sufficient to mess with his estimation of probabilities. To corrupt a deontologist you need to replace at least some of his rules. Maybe if you find a pair of contradictory rules you could get somewhere by changing which to apply when, but in practice this doesn’t seem to be a promising attack vector.
And yes, I’m not arguing that this is a sufficient reason to avoid being a consequentialist. But, as you say, it’s a good reason to be more wary.
I completely agree. Also because this describes how humans (including myself) actually act: according to different moral systems, depending on which is more convenient, some heuristics, and on gut feeling.
Yes? Of course? With the caveats that the concept of ‘Christianity’ is the medieval one you mentioned above, that these Christians really have no doubts about their beliefs, and that they swallow the bullet.
Are you trolling? Is the notion that the morality of actions is dependent on reality really that surprising to you?
Why don’t you go ask some.
Huh? The “concept” of Christianity hasn’t changed since the Middle Ages. The relevant part is that you either get saved and achieve eternal life or you are doomed to eternal torment. Of course I don’t mean people like Unitarian Universalists, but rather “standard” Christians who believe in heaven and hell.
Morality certainly depends on the perception of reality, but the point here is different. We are talking here about what you can, should, or must sacrifice to get closer to the One True Goal (which in Christianity is salvation). Your answer is “everything”. Why? Because the One True Goal justifies everything including things people call “horrors”. Am I reading you wrong?
I mentioned three crucial caveats. I think it would be difficult to find Christians in 2016 who have no doubts and swallow the bullet about the implications of Christianity. It would be a lot easier a few hundred years ago.
What I mean is that the religious beliefs of the majority of people who call themselves Christians have changed a lot since medieval times.
I don’t see the relevance of what you call a “One True Goal”. I mean, One True Goal as opposed to what? Several Sorta True Goals? Ultimately, no matter what your goals are, you will necessarily be willing to sacrifice things that are less important to you in order to achieve them. Actions are justified as they relate to the accomplishment of a goal, or a set of goals.
If I were convinced that Roger is going to detonate a nuclear bomb in New York, I would feel justified (and obliged) to murder him, because like most of the people I know, I have the goal to prevent millions of innocents from dying. And yet, if I believed that Roger is going to do this on bad or non-existent evidence, the odds are that I would be killing an innocent man for no good reason. There would be nothing wrong with my goal (One True or not), only with my rationality. I don’t see any fundamental difference between this scenario and the one we’ve been discussing.
Yes. Multiple systems, somewhat inconsistent but serving as a check and a constraint on each other, not letting a single one dominate.
Not in all ethical systems.
In consequentialism yes, but not all ethics are consequentialist.
How do you know that? Not in this specific example, but in general—how do you know there is nothing wrong with your One True Goal?
Are you trying to be funny? Note that not all of the 70% would agree that belief or its lack sends people to Hell. See also.
ETA: If you doubt what I said about beliefs regarding those “doomed to eternal torment,” see “Many religions can lead to eternal life,” in this sizeable PDF.
The real danger, of course, is being utterly convinced Christianity is true when it is not.
The actions described by Lumifer are horrific precisely because they are balanced against a hypothetical benefit, not a certain one. If there is only an epsilon chance of Christianity being true, but the utility loss of eternal torment is infinite, should you take radical steps anyway?
In a nutshell, Lumifer’s position is just hedging against Pascal’s mugging, and IMHO any moral system that doesn’t do so is not appropriate for use out here in the real world.
You’re hand-waving a lot of problems. Or you added too many negatives to that last sentence.
You’re describing a situation where some people hold factually incorrect beliefs (i.e. objectively wrong religions). And there’s an infinitely powerful entity—a simulator, an Omega, a God—who will torture them for an unbounded time unless they change their minds and belive before they die. The only way to help them is by making them believe the truth; you completely believe this fact.
Do you think that not overriding other people’s will, or not intervening forcefully in their lives, is a more important principle than saving them from eternal torture? What exactly is the rule according to which you (would) act?
Given your certainty, it seems that it would be easy for you to demonstrate and even to prove that these beliefs are “factually incorrect”. Would you mind doing that? It would settle a lot of issues that humanity struggled with for many centuries:-/
I think you are misunderstanding what DanArmak wrote. The “situation” in question—which it would be more accurate to say you were describing other people’s belief in—was that Christianity is right and unbelievers are going to hell; neither you nor Dan were endorsing that situation as an accurate account of the world, only as what some people have believed the world to be like.
(Right, Dan?)
That’s right.
Like gjm says, you seem to have missed that I was describing a counterfactual. I don’t personally hold such a (religious) belief, so I can’t do what you ask.
But more relevantly, people have failed for many centuries to convince most others of many true facts I do believe in—such as atheism, or (more relevantly) the falsehood of all existing religions.
This isn’t because the beliefs aren’t true or the proofs are hard to verify; it’s because people are hard to convince of anything contrary to something they already believe which is of great personal or social importance to them. People, in short, are not truth seekers, and also lack by default a good epistemological framework to seek truth with.
You’re very… cavalier about putting an equals sign between things you believe in and things which are true. Yes, of course you believe they are true, but there is Cromwell’s beseechment to keep in mind. Especially in a situation where you hold a certain belief and other people hold clearly different beliefs.
Oh really? You can prove that all religions are false? Let me go back to my comment, then, where it seems I wasn’t quite clear. If you can provide proofs of atheism being true, please do so.
Of course, proving a negative is notoriously hard to do.
I try to keep in mind a probabilistic degree of belief for different beliefs. But I do endorse my previous statement for some beliefs, which I hold strongly enough to simply refer to them as true, even after taking all the meta-arguments against certainty into account.
Those are two different things. It’s hard to prove that atheism is true in the sense that all possible religions are false. But it’s quite easy to prove that every actually existing theistic* religion (that I and whoever I’m talking to have ever heard of) is false.
(*) (Excluding some philosophies which are called ‘religions’ but don’t make any concrete claims, either natural or supernatural, limiting themselves to moral rules and so on; obviously those can’t be true or false, proven or disproven.)
I don’t believe this is true. Can you demonstrate? Let’s take Christianity as the most familiar theistic religion. Here is the Nicene Creed, prove that it is false.
The Creed is a part of a larger whole, not meant to form a religion on its own. It doesn’t include the great majority of the usual reasons for believing in Christianity, which I would need to address to convince people that it is wrong; it states (some of) the conclusions Christians believe in but not their premises. A Christian wouldn’t try to convert someone just by telling them the Nicene Creed, without even any evidence for believing in the Creed.
However, on further reflection: I must partially retract what I said. The ‘quite easy’ proof I had in mind is not universal: like any proof, its form and existence depend on who that proof is supposed to convince. It’s famously hard to convince a Christian of a disproof of Christianity; it’s also very easy to convince someone who is already an atheist, or an Orthodox Jew, that the the same disproof is valid.
Every human alive has heard of the concept of religion, and of some concrete religions (if not necessarily of Christianity), and usually either believes in one or explicitly does not believe in any. So it could be said there’s no perfectly impartial judge of the validity of a proof. I believe that a neutral, rational, unbiased reasoner would be convinced by my simple proofs; but even apart from not being to test this, a Christian could argue that I’m sneaking assumptions into my definition of a neutral reasoner. (After all, every reasoner must start out with some facts, and if Christianity is true, why not start out believing in it?)
I retract my previous claim. I don’t have a “quite easy” proof any given religion is false, if by proof we mean “some words that would quite easily convince a believer in that religion to stop believing in it.”
But that is precisely the part that I’m objecting to. I agree that trying to convince a believer would likely lead to some form of “Whatever, dude, you just need to let Jesus into your heart”.
I’m not a Christian. I don’t think Christianity is true, but that’s a probabilistic belief that potentially could change. Prove to me that Christianity is false.
All beliefs are probabilistic and can change. The evidence that would convince us that Christianity is true would have to be commensurate with the prior telling us today that it is false. The existence of that low prior is the proof that it’s very likely false (factoring in our uncertainty about some things).
(By the word ‘prove’, I obviously didn’t mean a logical proof that sets the probability to zero; just one that makes the probability so low that theory would never rise to the level of conscious consideration.)
Why do I think our prior for Christianity should be very low?
First, because it makes supernatural claims; that is, claims which are by definition counter to all previous observations which we had used to determine the natural laws.
Second, because its core claims (and future predictions) are similar to many sets of (mutually contradictory) claims made by many other religions, which implies that generating such claims and eyewitness testimony (as opposed to lasting miraculous artifacts or states of nature) is a natural human behavior which doesn’t need further explanation.
Third, because we know that Christianity and its dogmas have changed a lot during its history, and many sects have risen and fallen which have violently disagreed over every possible point of theology. Even if we assign a high probability to some variant of Christianity being true and ignore all other world religions (actual and possible), the average probability of any specific branch of Christianity would still be low, although not nearly as astronomically low as due to the other reasons given. And since we can trace clear human causes for the beliefs of many sects—like Luther postulating that since Catholic clergy was corrupt, their theology must also be wrong, or like many sects that were declared heretical for political reasons—it’s likely that all sects’ beliefs had human causes, and evolved in large part from previous, non-Christian beliefs.
Fourth, and generalizing the previous point, the reason we’re even talking about Christianity isn’t its claims. It’s not because some Christian prophecies or supernatural beliefs unexpectedly came true. Rather, it’s because many people are Christians and we grew up in or near Christian culture. But a great many religions that once flourished are now diminished or lost to history. And even Christians themselves (unlike some other religions) don’t usually argue that the spread of their religion is a sign that it must be right; on the contrary, they venerate those who believed when Christians were few and persecuted.
I think you’re trying to double-dip :-) The prior itself is a probability (or a set of probabilities). A “low prior” means that something is unlikely—directly. It does not offer proof that it’s unlikely, it just straight out states it is unlikely.
And there doesn’t seem to be any reason to talk about priors, anyway. It’s not like at any moment we expect a new chunk of information and will have to update our beliefs. I think it’s simpler to just talk about available evidence.
As a preface let me say that I basically agree with the thrust of your arguments. I am not a Christian, afer all. However I don’t consider them as anything close to a “proof”—they look weaker to me than to you.
That is not so. Supernatural claims do not run “counter” to previous observations, they just say that certain beings/things/actions are not constrainted by laws of nature. Wright brothers’ airplane was not “counter” to all previous observations of transportation devices with an engine. Recall Clarke’s Third Law.
Not to mention that “all previous observations” include a lot of claims of miracles :-)
Yep. But there is a conventional explanation for that (I do not imply that I believe it): different traditions take different views of the same underlying divinity, but find themselves in the position of the nine blind men and the elephant.
This point will also need to explain why large civilizations (e.g. China) did NOT develop anything which looks like monotheism.
That’s a wrong way to look at it. Imagine that you have an underlying phenomenon which you cannot observe directly. You can only take indirect, noisy measurements. Different people take different sets of measurements, they are not the same and none of them are “true”. However this does not mean that the underlying phenomenon does not exist. It only means that information available to you is indirect and noisy.
See above—different people might well have human reasons to prefer this particular set of measurements or that particular set of measurements. Still does NOT mean there’s nothing underlying them.
Well, and why is that? Why is Christianity a huge world religion? It started with a small band of persecuted Jews, why did it spread so?
Who says that they didn’t? Chinese folk religion acknowledged Shang-di (also called Tian, ‘Heaven’) as the primordial, universal deity, which is essentially a kind of henotheism and quite close historically to monotheism. This is especially true since other deities, while worthy of veneration and sacrifice, were largely conflated with “spirits”. Of course, the later ideology of Confucianism tended to supplant these ancestral beliefs as a genuine foundation for ethics and philosophy/general worldview, although it did encourage the practice of rituals as a way of maintaining social harmony and a tightly-knit community.
I do. If you squint hard enough you can detect monotheism in any religious system at which point the term “monotheism” loses any meaning.
I’m using the conventional approach where religions like Judaism and Christianity (in spite of the Trinity!) are monotheistic and religions like Hinduism and Shinto are not.
But the point is, the ancestral version of what would later evolve into Judaism was far from monotheistic; much like Chinese folk religion. As with almost anything else in history, monotheism was a gradual development.
Sure. But let’s go a bit upthread and look at my original sentence:
Note the word “develop”.
Christianity not only has the trinity but also a bunch of saints towards whom you can pray and who then supposedly intervene. Additionally there are a bunch of angels. There’s the devil and demons.
I meant that in response to your framing: “I don’t think Christianity is true, but that’s a probabilistic belief that potentially could change.”
If your belief changes in the future, it’ll be in response to evidence. I can’t know what evidence you’ll receive in the future, so I can’t refute it ahead of time. So all I can do is lower the probability for Christianity now, which will serve as a sufficiently low prior in the future so that any new evidence still doesn’t convince you.
Yeah, I didn’t phrase it well.
The Wright brothers’ plane wasn’t claimed to be, or perceived as, supernatural.
The reason miracles are advanced as proof of a religion—the reason they are in the discussion in the first place (and in the Nicene Creed) - is because they are very surprising events. If a prophet goes around performing miracles like curing sick people, and a second prophet goes around saying that whatever we already expect to happen is in itself a miracle (“the miracle of nature”) and lets the sick people die, then we have a reason to believe the first prophet’s other claims (“God is granting me this power”) but not the second one’s.
One meaning of “supernatural” is “unnatural”: that is, an event that cannot happen according to normal natural law. Since we deduce natural law from observation only (and not from revelation or from first principles), this just means unique, unforeseeable events contrary to what we believe are the laws of nature.
This is why many try to refute religious miraculous claims, not by denying the story of the claims, but by giving natural law explanations for the events.
Claims are cheap, proofs are hard. Christians deny the claims of miracles by non-Christians, at least ones made explicitly in the name of another religion (other than pre-Christian Judaism). They don’t deny the supernatural explanation, they just deny the claim that the miracle occurred. Similarly, if I really believed all the Christian miracles occurred as stated, I would probably believe in Christianity.
You could adopt the position that various miracles are in fact easy to produce, we don’t know how; and different people have discovered how and used those powers to advance their various religions. But that conflicts with the observation that more miracles are always reported of ancient times than of modern, and of highly religious and undeveloped regions than of secular and technologically modern ones. If there was a ‘trick’ to doing miracles without supernatural intervention, we would expect the correlation to go the other way.
If that is true, then all the specific claims made by Christianity, as well as any other religion, are false, because they all contradict one another (even between the branches of Christianity). If we take only the common denominator of all religions as true, I’m not sure there’s anything left at all, certainly nothing about e.g. supernatural commands or moral law.
If a single deity appears to some as monotheistic, and to some as an unbounded number of local and thematic spirits, and both sides claim to have received direct revelations (in human language) of this truth, what can you predict of the elephant?
As above, if you are forced to discard any concrete result with which the majority of measurements disagree, you are left with nothing. There is no common set of core beliefs to all religions. There isn’t even one common to all branches of Christianity, except for the idea that “a man named Christ lived around 5BC-35AD in Judea, had disciples and was executed by the Romans”. After all, some people who call themselves Christians believe that Jesus was an ordinary man who performed no miracles.
If they end up disagreeing over all experimental results, and over all procedures to measure those results, then I think we have no evidence for there being anything underlying them, any more than there is for e.g. astrology.
Survivor/selection bias. You’re only asking the question because it’s a huge religion. Many more religions vanished or remained small than survived. There are documented historical reasons for this, but the only way they could be related to the truth of Christian claims is if God was indirectly helping them spread. Which every other successful, large religion claims as well. Anyway, ‘we won the war so our epistemology is true and Arianism is a heresy’ is not a very convincing argument.
I think we might be starting to rehash the standard atheist/Christian debate. Of course there are counter-counter-arguments for my counter-arguments to your arguments. And there are counter-counter-counter-arguments to those, too. Unless you really like turtles, I am not sure there is much need to go there.
I know the arguments against religions. I find them sufficiently convincing to not be religious. I do not find them rising to the level of “proof”. YMMV, of course.
The two parts of your last paragraph oppose one another—given the difficulty people have in seeking the truth, all proofs of that kind are hard to verify. You cannot say “the proofs are easy to verify, but most people do not have the ability to do so.” Saying that something is easy just means that it does not take much ability.
You can say that it is easy for you, perhaps, but not that it is just easy.
Consider the following proposition: For each existing religion, one can easily set out evidence of its wrongness that would (1) be very convincing to the majority of people who are not already positively disposed towards that religion and (2) be good reasoning in the abstract; if we combine these, we get a strong argument that no existing religion is close to the truth, but this argument will not convince most people because most people are adherents of some religion or other, and it is extremely difficult for adherents of any religion to appreciate the strength of arguments against that religion.
It seems to me that that proposition may very well be true, and that if it is true then it’s correct (aside from the fact that “proofs” is too ambitious a word) to say both that it’s difficult to convince people that all existing religions are wrong, and that the proofs of that fact are not hard to verify.
The same is true for atheism, and certainly for utilitarianism.
Original thread here.
(I think Eugene is downvoting your comments on this thread.)
I’m not sure this is true, for a number of reasons.
By “one can easily set out evidence of its wrongness” I presume that you meant one particular set of evidence. In that case, I am not sure that you can in fact choose one particular set of evidence which would be very convincing to the majority of people. It’s true that if you take all the people who disagree with a religion, then take any individual among them, you can easily find something which is convincing to him. But that may not be the same thing which is convincing to someone else. And since people who are religious typically think there is some evidence for their religion, they will disagree with some arguments against other religions because they will see that those arguments could also refute their own. They will see them as “proving too much.” So it is not clear at all that you can take one particular set of evidence and convince the majority.
On the other hand, if you meant you can find a set of evidence that matches each individual, your argument is in fact too wide, because it would apply to nearly all philosophical views, including contrary ones, as time mentioned in his comment in regard to atheism and utilitarianism.
If you are avoiding that consequence by means of the “good reasoning in the abstract”, I have various issues with that. First, it is possible to argue for something with “good reasoning in the abstract” in a way which would be convincing to many or most people, but which would become unconvincing if they were aware of other evidence and arguments for the opposite position. If good reasoning is supposed to mean that you mention all of the evidence, then your argument is question begging—you are saying nothing more than that you have considered all of the relevant evidence that you can find, and you consider the most reasonable position to be that all religions are false. I agree both with this assessment of the evidence and the conclusion. But I am not going to assert that I am the only one who engages in good reasoning, and I realize that there are people who have considered basically all of the evidence that I have considered, and who are basically reasonable people, and nonetheless think that some religion is true.
Finally, I am not sure that it is true to say “if we combine these, we get a strong argument that no existing religion is close to the truth,” even given the other things, because we can make arguments that are convincing to most people that any particular person is not going to win the lottery, but this is not a strong argument that no one is going to win.
Eugine is downvoting my comments everywhere. My 30-day karma is currently at −44; if I am interpreting the percentages right then my “non-Eugine” 30-day karma is probably somewhere around +270. (But I suspect that may be inflated a bit, because some people may be applying “corrective” upvotes to some of my comments that have been Eugined.)
That’s a good observation. My feeling is that the “argument from evil” against religions that claim there’s a supremely good supremely powerful being is extremely convincing to almost everyone who doesn’t belong to such a religion—but of course lots of people who don’t belong to one such religion may belong to a different such religion and therefore be unfavourably disposed towards the AfE.
It is supposed to mean something along those lines, but if you think I’m begging the question then I think you are probably misunderstanding the nature of my argument. Let me recap, and try to make the connective tissue of the argument more visible; my apologies if this makes it laborious.
DanArmak said (roughly) that atheism is not only correct but in some sense obviously correct; in other words, that the answer to “why are so many people religious?” is less “because anti-religious arguments are subtle and hard to understand” and more “because religious people are unable to accept even easy clear arguments if they lead to irreligious conclusions”.
Various people disagreed.
I am agreeing (roughly and provisionally) with Dan, and suggesting a way to make his claim more precise: the idea is that (1) there are anti-religious arguments convincing to any given person (you just have to avoid arguments that they can see refuting their own religion) and (2) that isn’t because you can find crappy arguments tailored to any given person’s biases and errors—the arguments in question are actually good ones in some objective sense.
The people disagreeing with Dan mostly agree with him that in fact religions are probably wrong, and I think they agree with him that there are “good in the abstract” arguments leading to that conclusion. The point of their disagreement is that those arguments are unconvincing to many (otherwise) intelligent and reasonable people, and that if you want to claim an argument is easy to verify then the fact that it fails to convince many intelligent and reasonable people is a big obstacle.
The point of my comment, therefore, was to suggest a way to surmount that obstacle, by providing evidence that each person’s unconvincedness is an artefact of their own religious commitments rather than an indication that the arguments are weak or difficult.
And the reason why I stipulated that the arguments in question are “good reasoning in the abstract” is just to exclude the possibility that the individually-tailored arguments are cheaty ones that target individuals’ cognitive weaknesses, rather than anti-cheaty ones that avoid individuals’ cognitive weaknesses.
That’s a valid point in the abstract, but its validity depends on the actual numbers in question. If you have a million people and a million arguments each showing Pr(a given person wins) ⇐ 10^-6 then indeed that isn’t enough to be any sort of evidence that no one will win; but if you could show that each person’s winning probability was ⇐ 10^-9, it would be. In the case we’re dealing with here, I suggest that we can probably find (let’s say) no more than 100 varieties of theism (I know that some earlier comments said “religion” but I think “theism” is what’s actually under discussion here), and an argument for each showing Pr(that version of theism) ⇐ 10^-4, in which case it follows that Pr(any of them) ⇐ 1%.
Regarding the argument from evil:
I’m still not sure that your idea is true even in when it is limited to “everyone who doesn’t belong to such a religion.” It might be true about LWers but they are not a representative sample. Americans seem to be pretty consistently more likely to identify as agnostic as atheist, for example. Now of course that might be because American doesn’t like atheists and they want to avoid the social consequences. And it might be different (as far as I know) in other countries, since I just checked the statistics for the US according to various polls. But prima facie, it suggests that “most people who don’t believe in any god at all are not extremely convinced by any argument against the existence of a god.” I am not asserting that this is definitely the case, but it is plausible to me, and supported at least by this fact. It’s possible you could establish your claim with better data, but so far I’m not convinced.
There is still the problem that if you limit it to people who “don’t belong to such a religion,” then you appear to be saying “everyone who thinks that God doesn’t exist thinks that there is a convincing argument against the existence of God,” and even if that were one particular argument, it would be similar to saying, “everyone who accepts the error theory of morality finds such and such an argument convincing.” Even if there is one such argument in the case of error theory (which might not actually be the case), that hardly establishes that it is easy to prove that error theory is true, or that it is true at all, for that matter.
I personally think the argument from evil (and various similar arguments) is evidence against the existence of a personal God, but I don’t find it extremely convincing. A large part of the reason for that is when I did believe in Christianity, I had an answer to that argument which I found reasonable, and which still seems reasonable to me, not in the sense of “this is the case”, but in the sense of a reasonable possibility. Now you could say that this is an “artifact of religious commitments” in a historical sense, but I don’t think this is actually the case, given the fact that there are plenty of other issues where I never thought I had a good response in the first place. There is also Scott Alexander’s “Answer to Job.” Now I think that if you consider such responses carefully (my previous personal answer which I haven’t gone into here, or Scott’s answer, or almost any other reasonable response) they actually fit better with an impersonal principle than with a personal God, but they are not inconsistent with a personal one. So that prevents me from considering the argument extremely persuasive.
“Evidence that each person’s unconvincedness is an artefact of their own religious commitments.” You can certainly provide such evidence for many or most people. But theists can also provide evidence that atheistic convictions are often the result of non-evidential commitments as well. And in any case this is not going to apply to every single individual, and especially the case of converts to religion like Leah Libresco or Edward Feser. That doesn’t mean that all sorts of non-rational influences aren’t present in the case of converts. But it isn’t true that e.g. “they aren’t convinced by the argument from evil because they accept religion,” given the fact that the argument from evil did not prevent them from going from not accepting religion to accepting religion in the first place.
Of course, if I disagree with someone’s conclusion, I am almost certainly going to end up explaining how he went wrong. This isn’t Bulverism in a bad sense, given that I don’t assume he is wrong in the first place, but argue for it. And if I am right, it does mean there are better and more reasonable arguments for my position than for their position. But that isn’t the same as calling my conclusion something easily seen to be true.
I also would not say that just because some people disagree who are generally reasonable people, it follows that the matter cannot be an easy one. So for example I would say that young earth creationism is easily seen to be false, even though there are some people who both think it is true, and are generally reasonable people. But note that there are relatively few people like this, compared to the number of generally reasonable people who admit that evolution is true but still think some kind of religion is true.
One difference is this: it does not require anything like philosophical argument to establish that evolution is true. It just requires looking at actually existing plants, animals, and rocks and discussing how they could have got that way. In contrast, philosophy is actually hard for human beings. And I think you cannot prove or disprove something like theism without philosophical argument. This suggests that it is not easy to do so.
Agnostics
It’s true that a lot of people call themselves agnostics, which seems to indicate (1) not being completely convinced by any argument against theism while also (2) not having a commitment to any particular religion. However, I think the great majority of people who call themselves agnostics fall into one of these categories:
People who prefer to avoid too-committal terms like “atheist”, either because there’s a stigma attached to overt atheism where they are or because they think “atheist” implies absolute certainty.
People who haven’t really thought the matter through very much.
People who are agnostic about the existence of some sort of deity but strongly convinced that e.g. there is almost certainly no supremely good and powerful being who takes a personal interest in human affairs.
I would expect people in the first and third groups to share my opinion about arguments from evil, though the third lot would rightly observe that e.g. such arguments tell us nothing about superbeings who just don’t care about our affairs.
People in the second group might well not be very convinced by arguments from evil, but I would expect that if they gave serious consideration to such arguments they would typically see them as very strong.
“Everyone thinks there is a convincing argument”
That’s not quite what I’m saying. I’m saying that there are, in fact, arguments that I would expect to be very convincing if looked at seriously by a sizable majority of people not committed to the religions in question. Of course those who haven’t seriously considered such arguments will not yet be convinced.
Your own epistemic situation
I find it very interesting that you aren’t very convinced by arguments from evil despite having rejected Christianity, but I don’t think there’s anything further I can say without having any idea why it is that you aren’t convinced. You say it’s because there’s a particular answer you find reasonable, but I’ve no idea what that answer is :-).
You do mention Scott’s “Answer to Job”, which is very ingenious. It’s a good answer to arguments-from-evil that end “and therefore it is absolutely impossible that there is a benevolent god”, but I would consider such arguments overreaching even without that particular answer. Is it any good as an answer to “evidential” arguments that take the quantity and distribution of Bad Stuff in our world merely as evidence? Well, I guess that depends on (1) how likely Scott’s scenario is a priori and (2) how credible it is that our world is, so to speak, a random pick from all possible worlds where good outweighs bad, weighted by number of intelligent agents or something of the kind. To #1, I say: not terribly likely, because I am not convinced that good outweighs bad in our world. (Which is not at all the same thing as saying that many people in our world would rather die than live.) To #2, I say: not credible at all; I would expect a random observer from a multiverse containing all possible more-good-than-bad worlds to see something very very very different from what I see. (I suspect the great majority of observers in such worlds are something like Boltzmann brains.)
“Atheistic convictions are often the result of non-evidential commitments”
Oh, absolutely. I wasn’t meaning to make any comment on the relative merits of theists and atheists. I was just addressing an obvious argument against any claim that there’s good evidence against theism, namely that lots of apparently sensible people are theists. (I firmly agree that you likewise can’t reject the claim that there’s good evidence against atheism just because lots of apparently sensible people are atheists.)
(Highly intelligent converts like Leah Libresco and Ed Feser would be evidence against any claim that the only reason for not being convinced by atheistic arguments is prior religious commitment. But I have not been making that claim, at least not deliberately.)
It’s true that the difficulty of understanding a proof is relative to the one doing the understanding. But what I meant was different.
People don’t (merely) “have difficulty in seeking the truth”, or find the proofs “hard to verify”. Rather, people are generally not interested in seeking truth on certain subjects, and not willing to accept truth that is contrary to their dearly held beliefs, regardless of the nature or difficulty of the proof that is presented to them. When I said that “people are not truth seekers”, I didn’t mean that they are bad at discovering the truth, but that on certain subjects they usually (act as if they) don’t want to discover it at all.
Yes, I basically agree with this, although I think it applies to the vast majority of non-religious people as much as to religious people, including in regard to religious topics. In other words it is mostly not for the sake of truth that someone holds religious beliefs, and it is mostly not for the sake of truth that someone else holds non-religious beliefs.
Also, it does mean that people are bad at discovering the truth on the topics where they do not want to discover it, just as people are generally bad at jobs they do not want to do.
This is certainly true and not limited to religion, too.
What does this mean in this context?
Means “pay special attention to, this is a key expression”.