I think Pascal’s Wager and the God-Shaped Hole should get more play.
To your Pascal’s Wager statement
Perhaps God values intellectual integrity so highly that He is prepared to reward honest atheists, but will punish anyone who practices a religion he does not truly believe simply for personal gain.
I don’t think what you say is incommensurable with the Catholic position that what is most important to the Omega is that we pursue the best thing we know i.e. intellectual integrity along with charity. But perhaps I am wrong. You might know more about this than I do.
If God is Truth, then wouldn’t it follow that rationality fills (or at least could fill) that God-shaped hole? This brings me to the second point you made.
I have never heard a Christian say there is a God-shaped whole inside me. But if there is it would be universe-sized! But I suppose I can be more generous with my interpretation. Christianity has a technical vocabulary too, but this isn’t it. The theological way to say it would be something like, “A good life for a human being includes worship of God who is personal and just.” That’s simply what I imagine a serious Christian would say, right?
You said:
Omega comes along and tells you that sorry, the hole is exactly God-shaped, and anyone without a religion will lead a less-than-optimally-happy life.
What do you mean by happy? What would Omega mean by a “less than happy life?” The truth or doing something that you must do by virtue of knowing the truth will not always make you happy. Perhaps you don’t feel like defending the truth today. A blissful life could be spent shopping in malls or donating to African countries or picking up litter. How are the types of happiness achieved in each act different? Or are they?
I think the GSH is largely that our whole way of thinking, our terminology, our philosophy, our science evolved in theistic societies. Taking god out of it leaves a lot of former linkages dangling in the air, probably we learn to link them up sooner or later but it requires revising a surprisingly large amount.
For example, a godless universe has no laws of nature, just models of nature that happen to be predictive.
For example, there isn’t really such a thing as progress because there cannot be a goal in history in the godless universe. There is social change, and it is up to you to judge if it is good.
For example, there are no implicit promises in the godless universe, we could do everything “right” and still get extinct. This is non-intuitive deep on the bones level, our whole cultural history teaches that if you we make a good enough effort some mysterious force will pat our backs, give a B+ for effort and will pick up the rest of the slack: because this is what our parents and teachers did to us. Just look at common action movies, they are about heroes trying hard, and almost failing, then getting almost miraculously lucky. Deus ex machina.
The GSH becomes very intense when you start raising children. For example it would mean not giving praise for effort, in fact, sometimes punishing good solutions to demonstrate how in the real world you can do things right and still fail. This would be really cruel and probably we don’t want to do it. Most education tends to imply what it teaches is certain truth, laws of nature etc. so things get hard from here.
When we create models, they are models of something other than your own mind’s processes. Or are you a coherence theorist/ epistemological anarchist? I think that some models (of progress, of biology, of morality) are more true aka, less wrong. Their predictive power comes from the near-miraculous fact that the symbols we use for math and science can be manipulated and after the manipulation still work in the world! I am always in awe at this natural wonder. Logic, Nature, Beautiful.
gjm:
Thanks for that link! It’s really good, as is the previous post on his blog. I underestimate how metaphysically-light most atheisms are. Since I still believe in a knockout-fundamental-goodness in the universe that we model with morality, I might be more in Scott’s camp.
I think Pascal’s Wager and the God-Shaped Hole should get more play.
To your Pascal’s Wager statement
I don’t think what you say is incommensurable with the Catholic position that what is most important to the Omega is that we pursue the best thing we know i.e. intellectual integrity along with charity. But perhaps I am wrong. You might know more about this than I do.
If God is Truth, then wouldn’t it follow that rationality fills (or at least could fill) that God-shaped hole? This brings me to the second point you made.
I have never heard a Christian say there is a God-shaped whole inside me. But if there is it would be universe-sized! But I suppose I can be more generous with my interpretation. Christianity has a technical vocabulary too, but this isn’t it. The theological way to say it would be something like, “A good life for a human being includes worship of God who is personal and just.” That’s simply what I imagine a serious Christian would say, right?
You said:
What do you mean by happy? What would Omega mean by a “less than happy life?” The truth or doing something that you must do by virtue of knowing the truth will not always make you happy. Perhaps you don’t feel like defending the truth today. A blissful life could be spent shopping in malls or donating to African countries or picking up litter. How are the types of happiness achieved in each act different? Or are they?
I think the GSH is largely that our whole way of thinking, our terminology, our philosophy, our science evolved in theistic societies. Taking god out of it leaves a lot of former linkages dangling in the air, probably we learn to link them up sooner or later but it requires revising a surprisingly large amount.
For example, a godless universe has no laws of nature, just models of nature that happen to be predictive.
For example, there isn’t really such a thing as progress because there cannot be a goal in history in the godless universe. There is social change, and it is up to you to judge if it is good.
For example, there are no implicit promises in the godless universe, we could do everything “right” and still get extinct. This is non-intuitive deep on the bones level, our whole cultural history teaches that if you we make a good enough effort some mysterious force will pat our backs, give a B+ for effort and will pick up the rest of the slack: because this is what our parents and teachers did to us. Just look at common action movies, they are about heroes trying hard, and almost failing, then getting almost miraculously lucky. Deus ex machina.
The GSH becomes very intense when you start raising children. For example it would mean not giving praise for effort, in fact, sometimes punishing good solutions to demonstrate how in the real world you can do things right and still fail. This would be really cruel and probably we don’t want to do it. Most education tends to imply what it teaches is certain truth, laws of nature etc. so things get hard from here.
There’s a nice exposition of roughly this idea over at Yvain’s / Scott Alexander’s blog.
To Hollander:
When we create models, they are models of something other than your own mind’s processes. Or are you a coherence theorist/ epistemological anarchist? I think that some models (of progress, of biology, of morality) are more true aka, less wrong. Their predictive power comes from the near-miraculous fact that the symbols we use for math and science can be manipulated and after the manipulation still work in the world! I am always in awe at this natural wonder. Logic, Nature, Beautiful.
gjm:
Thanks for that link! It’s really good, as is the previous post on his blog. I underestimate how metaphysically-light most atheisms are. Since I still believe in a knockout-fundamental-goodness in the universe that we model with morality, I might be more in Scott’s camp.