So is LW for people who think highly rationally, or for atheists who think highly rationally? Are those necessarily the same? If not, where are the rational theists?
A rationalist should strive to have a given belief if and only if that belief is true. I want to be a theist if and only if theism is correct.
You’re assuming that “no God” is the null hypothesis. Is there a good, rational reason for this? One could just as easily argue that you should be an atheist if and only if it’s clear that atheism is correct. Without any empirical evidence either way, is it more likely that there is some sort of Deity or that there isn’t?
You’re assuming that “no God” is the null hypothesis. Is there a good, rational reason for this? One could just as easily argue that you should be an atheist if and only if it’s clear that atheism is correct. Without any empirical evidence either way, is it more likely that there is some sort of Deity or that there isn’t?
IMO there’s no such thing as a null hypothesis; epistemology doesn’t work like that. The more coherent approach is bayesian inference, where we have a prior distribution and update that distribution on seeing evidence in a particular way.
If there were no empirical evidence either way, I’d lean towards there being an anthropomorphic god (I say this as a descriptive statement about the human prior, not normative).
The trouble is that once you start actually looking at evidence, nearly all anthropomorphic gods get eliminated very quickly, and in fact the whole anthropomorphism thing starts to look really questionable. The universe simply doesn’t look like it’s been touched by intelligence, and where it does, we can see that it was either us, or a stupid natural process that happens to optimize quite strongly (evolution).
So while “some sort of god” was initially quite likely, most particular gods get eliminated, and the remaining gods are just as specific and unlikely as they were at first. So while the “gods” subdistribution is getting smashed, naturalistic occamian induction is not getting smashed nearly as hard, and comes to dominate.
The only gods remaining compatible with the evidence are things like “someone ran all possible computer programs”, which is functionally equivalent to metaphysical “naturalism”, and gods of very specific forms with lots of complexity in the hypothesis that explains why they constructed the world to look exactly natural, and then aren’t intervening yet.
Those complex specific gods only got a tiny slice of the god-exists pie at the beginning and cannot collect more evidence than the corresponding naturalistic explanation (because they predict the same), so they are pretty unlikely.
And then when you go to make predictions, what these gods might do gets sliced up even further such that the only useful predictive framework is the occamian naturalism thing.
There is of course the chance that there exists things “outside” the universe, and the major implication from that is that we might some day be able to break out and take over the metauniverse as well.
So is LW for people who think highly rationally, or for atheists who think highly rationally?
Neither, really. It’s for people who are interested in epistemic and instrumental rationality. There are a number of such folks here who identify as theists, though the majority don’t.
Without any empirical evidence either way, is it more likely that there is some sort of Deity or that there isn’t?
Can you clarify what you mean by “some sort of Deity”? It’s difficult to have a coherent conversation about evidence for X without a shared understanding of what X is.
You’re assuming that “no God” is the null hypothesis. Is there a good, rational reason for this?
In general, it’s not rational to posit that anything exists without evidence. Out of the set of all things that could be posited, most do not exist.
“Evidence” need not be direct observation. If you have a model which has shown good predictive power, which predicts a phenomenon you haven’t observed yet, the model provides evidence for that phenomenon. But in general, people here would agree that if there isn’t any evidence for a proposition, it probably isn’t true.
Because nearly all things that could exist, don’t. When you’re in a state where you have no evidence for an entity’s existence, then odds are that it doesn’t exist.
Suppose that instead of asking about God, we ask “does the planet Hoth, as portrayed in the Star Wars movies, exist?” Absent any evidence that there really is such a planet, the answer is “almost certainly not.”
If we reverse this, and ask “Does the planet Hoth, as portrayed in the Star Wars movies, not exist?” the answer is “almost certainly.”
It doesn’t matter how you specify the question, the informational content of the default answer stays the same.
I don’t think that the Hoth argument applies here, because what we’re looking for is not just some teapot in some random corner of the univers—it’s a God actively involved in our universe. In other words, in God does exist, He’s a very big part of our existence, unlike your teapot or Hoth.
That’s a salient difference if his involvement is providing us with evidence, but not if it isn’t.
Suppose we posit that gravitational attraction is caused by invisible gravity elves, which pull masses towards each other. They’d be inextricably tied up in every part of our existence. But absent any evidence favoring the hypothesis, why should we suspect they’re causing the phenomenon we observe as gravity? In order for it to make sense for us to suspect gravity elves, we need evidence to favor gravity elves over everything else that could be causing gravity.
That’s a salient difference if his involvement is providing us with evidence, but not if it isn’t.
I suppose it’s fair to say that if our universe was created by a clockmaker God who didn’t interfere with our world, then it wouldn’t matter to us whether or not He existed. But since there’s a lot of reason to think that God does interact with us humans (like, transcripts of His conversations with them), then it does matter.
Well, I’m willing to discuss the evidence for and against that proposition. Naturally, I would not be an atheist if I thought the weight of evidence was in favor of an interventionist god existing.
Some of them have certainly convinced people. I’ve convinced a number of people myself, and I’ve known plenty of other people who were convinced by debates with other people (or even more often, by observing debates between other people, since it’s easier to change your mind when you’re not locked in an adversarial debate mindset. This is why it’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking of your debate partner as an opponent.)
A lot of religious debates are not productive, people tend to go into them very attached to their conclusions, but they’re by no means uniformly fruitless.
I like debates a lot, and I’ve very much enjoyed whatever you call this here. But I’m not interested in a full-blown debate here and now, especially since there are about five of you.
We don’t actually have any idea what causes gravity. Your elves may well be Higgs Bosons or something like that. (God Particles...)
So no, we don’t have any evidence that “elves” of some kind cause gravity, or that anything at all does. And so the question is open—we don’t suspect anything, but we don’t particularly suspect nothing either.
It’s rather disingenuous to speak of the Higgs Boson as gravity elves though.
With gravity, we’re not really in a state of no evidence, because as I said before, if you have an effective predictive model, then you have evidence for the things the model predicts. So we have evidence favoring things that could plausibly fit into our existing models over things that couldn’t.
If we’re discussing, for instance, what caused the universe to come into existence, and it turns out that there is a first cause, but it has nothing that could be described as thoughts or intentions, then it doesn’t save the god hypothesis to say that something was there, because what was there doesn’t resemble anything that it’s useful to conceive of as god.
A rationalist should strive to have a given belief if and only if that belief is true. I want to be a theist if and only if theism is correct.
You’re assuming that “no God” is the null hypothesis.
Not really. Bayesian reasoning doesn’t have any notion of a null hypothesis. I could just as well have said “I want to be an atheist if and only if atheism is correct”.
Without any empirical evidence either way, is it more likely that there is some sort of Deity or that there isn’t?
One can talk about the prior probability of a given hypothesis, and that’s a distinct issue which quickly gets very messy. In particular, it is extremely difficult to both a) establish what priors should look like and b) not get confused about whether one is taken for granted very basic evidence about the world around us (e.g. its existence). One argument, popular at least here, is that from an Occam’s razor standpoint, most deity hypotheses are complicated and only appear simple due to psychological and linguistic issues. I’m not sure how much I buy that sort of argument. But again, it is worth emphasizing that one doesn’t need control of the priors except at a very rough level.
It may help if you read more on the difference between Bayesian and frequentist approaches. The general approach of LW is primarily Bayesian, whereas notions like a “null hypothesis” are essentially frequentist.
You’re right that prior probability gets very, very messy. It’s a bit too abstract to actually be helpful to us.
So, then, all we can do is look at the evidence we do have. You’re saying that the argument is one-sided; there is no evidence in favor of theism, at least no good evidence. I agree that there is a lot of bad evidence, and I’m still looking for good evidence. You’ve said you don’t know of any. Thank you. That’s what I wanted to know. In general I don’t think it’s healthy to believe the opposing viewpoint literally has no case.
In general I don’t think it’s healthy to believe the opposing viewpoint literally has no case.
Do you think that young earth creationists have no substantial case? What about 9/11 truthers? Belief in astrology? Belief that cancer is a fungus(no I’m not making that one up)? What about anything you’ll find here?
The problem is that some hypotheses are wrong, and will be wrong. There are always going to be a lot more wrong hypothesis than right ones. And in many of these cases, there are known cognitive biases which lead to the hypothesis type in question. It may help to again think about the difference between policy issues (shouldn’t be one-sided), and factual questions (which once one understands most details, should be).
You’re right that prior probability gets very, very messy. It’s a bit too abstract to actually be helpful to us.
You cannot escape the necessity of dealing with priors, however messy they are.
So, then, all we can do is look at the evidence we do have.
The available evidence supports an infinite number of hypotheses. How do you decide which ones to consider? That is your prior, and however messy it may be, you have to live with it.
So is LW for people who think highly rationally, or for atheists who think highly rationally? Are those necessarily the same? If not, where are the rational theists?
You’re assuming that “no God” is the null hypothesis. Is there a good, rational reason for this? One could just as easily argue that you should be an atheist if and only if it’s clear that atheism is correct. Without any empirical evidence either way, is it more likely that there is some sort of Deity or that there isn’t?
IMO there’s no such thing as a null hypothesis; epistemology doesn’t work like that. The more coherent approach is bayesian inference, where we have a prior distribution and update that distribution on seeing evidence in a particular way.
If there were no empirical evidence either way, I’d lean towards there being an anthropomorphic god (I say this as a descriptive statement about the human prior, not normative).
The trouble is that once you start actually looking at evidence, nearly all anthropomorphic gods get eliminated very quickly, and in fact the whole anthropomorphism thing starts to look really questionable. The universe simply doesn’t look like it’s been touched by intelligence, and where it does, we can see that it was either us, or a stupid natural process that happens to optimize quite strongly (evolution).
So while “some sort of god” was initially quite likely, most particular gods get eliminated, and the remaining gods are just as specific and unlikely as they were at first. So while the “gods” subdistribution is getting smashed, naturalistic occamian induction is not getting smashed nearly as hard, and comes to dominate.
The only gods remaining compatible with the evidence are things like “someone ran all possible computer programs”, which is functionally equivalent to metaphysical “naturalism”, and gods of very specific forms with lots of complexity in the hypothesis that explains why they constructed the world to look exactly natural, and then aren’t intervening yet.
Those complex specific gods only got a tiny slice of the god-exists pie at the beginning and cannot collect more evidence than the corresponding naturalistic explanation (because they predict the same), so they are pretty unlikely.
And then when you go to make predictions, what these gods might do gets sliced up even further such that the only useful predictive framework is the occamian naturalism thing.
There is of course the chance that there exists things “outside” the universe, and the major implication from that is that we might some day be able to break out and take over the metauniverse as well.
Neither, really. It’s for people who are interested in epistemic and instrumental rationality.
There are a number of such folks here who identify as theists, though the majority don’t.
Can you clarify what you mean by “some sort of Deity”? It’s difficult to have a coherent conversation about evidence for X without a shared understanding of what X is.
In general, it’s not rational to posit that anything exists without evidence. Out of the set of all things that could be posited, most do not exist.
“Evidence” need not be direct observation. If you have a model which has shown good predictive power, which predicts a phenomenon you haven’t observed yet, the model provides evidence for that phenomenon. But in general, people here would agree that if there isn’t any evidence for a proposition, it probably isn’t true.
ETA: see also Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Certainly. But why is “God” the proposition, and not “no God?”
Because nearly all things that could exist, don’t. When you’re in a state where you have no evidence for an entity’s existence, then odds are that it doesn’t exist.
Suppose that instead of asking about God, we ask “does the planet Hoth, as portrayed in the Star Wars movies, exist?” Absent any evidence that there really is such a planet, the answer is “almost certainly not.”
If we reverse this, and ask “Does the planet Hoth, as portrayed in the Star Wars movies, not exist?” the answer is “almost certainly.”
It doesn’t matter how you specify the question, the informational content of the default answer stays the same.
I don’t think that the Hoth argument applies here, because what we’re looking for is not just some teapot in some random corner of the univers—it’s a God actively involved in our universe. In other words, in God does exist, He’s a very big part of our existence, unlike your teapot or Hoth.
That’s a salient difference if his involvement is providing us with evidence, but not if it isn’t.
Suppose we posit that gravitational attraction is caused by invisible gravity elves, which pull masses towards each other. They’d be inextricably tied up in every part of our existence. But absent any evidence favoring the hypothesis, why should we suspect they’re causing the phenomenon we observe as gravity? In order for it to make sense for us to suspect gravity elves, we need evidence to favor gravity elves over everything else that could be causing gravity.
I suppose it’s fair to say that if our universe was created by a clockmaker God who didn’t interfere with our world, then it wouldn’t matter to us whether or not He existed. But since there’s a lot of reason to think that God does interact with us humans (like, transcripts of His conversations with them), then it does matter.
Well, I’m willing to discuss the evidence for and against that proposition. Naturally, I would not be an atheist if I thought the weight of evidence was in favor of an interventionist god existing.
Naturally. But there have been a lot of debates about which way the evidence points, and none of them seem to have convinced anyone.
Some of them have certainly convinced people. I’ve convinced a number of people myself, and I’ve known plenty of other people who were convinced by debates with other people (or even more often, by observing debates between other people, since it’s easier to change your mind when you’re not locked in an adversarial debate mindset. This is why it’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking of your debate partner as an opponent.)
A lot of religious debates are not productive, people tend to go into them very attached to their conclusions, but they’re by no means uniformly fruitless.
I like debates a lot, and I’ve very much enjoyed whatever you call this here. But I’m not interested in a full-blown debate here and now, especially since there are about five of you.
We don’t actually have any idea what causes gravity. Your elves may well be Higgs Bosons or something like that. (God Particles...)
So no, we don’t have any evidence that “elves” of some kind cause gravity, or that anything at all does. And so the question is open—we don’t suspect anything, but we don’t particularly suspect nothing either.
It’s rather disingenuous to speak of the Higgs Boson as gravity elves though.
With gravity, we’re not really in a state of no evidence, because as I said before, if you have an effective predictive model, then you have evidence for the things the model predicts. So we have evidence favoring things that could plausibly fit into our existing models over things that couldn’t.
If we’re discussing, for instance, what caused the universe to come into existence, and it turns out that there is a first cause, but it has nothing that could be described as thoughts or intentions, then it doesn’t save the god hypothesis to say that something was there, because what was there doesn’t resemble anything that it’s useful to conceive of as god.
Not really. Bayesian reasoning doesn’t have any notion of a null hypothesis. I could just as well have said “I want to be an atheist if and only if atheism is correct”.
One can talk about the prior probability of a given hypothesis, and that’s a distinct issue which quickly gets very messy. In particular, it is extremely difficult to both a) establish what priors should look like and b) not get confused about whether one is taken for granted very basic evidence about the world around us (e.g. its existence). One argument, popular at least here, is that from an Occam’s razor standpoint, most deity hypotheses are complicated and only appear simple due to psychological and linguistic issues. I’m not sure how much I buy that sort of argument. But again, it is worth emphasizing that one doesn’t need control of the priors except at a very rough level.
It may help if you read more on the difference between Bayesian and frequentist approaches. The general approach of LW is primarily Bayesian, whereas notions like a “null hypothesis” are essentially frequentist.
You’re right that prior probability gets very, very messy. It’s a bit too abstract to actually be helpful to us.
So, then, all we can do is look at the evidence we do have. You’re saying that the argument is one-sided; there is no evidence in favor of theism, at least no good evidence. I agree that there is a lot of bad evidence, and I’m still looking for good evidence. You’ve said you don’t know of any. Thank you. That’s what I wanted to know. In general I don’t think it’s healthy to believe the opposing viewpoint literally has no case.
Do you think that young earth creationists have no substantial case? What about 9/11 truthers? Belief in astrology? Belief that cancer is a fungus(no I’m not making that one up)? What about anything you’ll find here?
The problem is that some hypotheses are wrong, and will be wrong. There are always going to be a lot more wrong hypothesis than right ones. And in many of these cases, there are known cognitive biases which lead to the hypothesis type in question. It may help to again think about the difference between policy issues (shouldn’t be one-sided), and factual questions (which once one understands most details, should be).
You cannot escape the necessity of dealing with priors, however messy they are.
The available evidence supports an infinite number of hypotheses. How do you decide which ones to consider? That is your prior, and however messy it may be, you have to live with it.