Well, of course, but is your relative trying to please atheists or to please God? What if he can only please God by disbelieving in Him?
After all, if an all-powerful God wanted to be believed in, he could easily make his existence self-evident. We could ask the heavens “Are you there, God?” and a booming voice from the skies could reply “Yes, I AM”.
But if there exists a God that wants to be disbelieved in, the reply to “Are you there, God?” is silence—and that’s indeed confirmed by testing. This God’s existence seems therefore, going by the rational evidence, more probable than the existence of a God that wants to be believed in.
Your relative is pissing off God by believing in him, despite all of God’s best efforts to promote atheism in the universe.
Probably something parallel to the reason that, if there is a god who does want to be believed in, he apparently created people who feel inclined to write things like “The God Delusion”.
(One possibility: Satan planted the Bible, the Qur’an, etc. in rebellion against God’s desire to not be believed in. Ever since then, God’s been doing desperate damage control by watching over torture, rape, and genocide, and not doing anything, but to little avail — people go right on believing in him, because Satan’s memes are just too infectious and powerful.)
If someone removes all the fingerprints from a commonly used room that normally should have had fingerprints, that’s by itself evidence that someone was there who wanted to remove the fingerprints.
Likewise if God didn’t permit the existence of Bible-writers, as such conmen and fools normally should exist, that would itself be evidence that there’s an entity out there with the power to so disallow them.
Wait, really? If there was no evidence of God (in the form of Bibles or fingerprints), that would be evidence that there’s a God out there hiding?
Yes. If the nature of humans is such that if physics operates in a natural way then they do a certain thing with high probability and said thing is not done then it raises the probability that physics is not operating as thought.
The absence of expected evidence is evidence of interference.
You wouldn’t have enough evidence to even find the hypothesis “God exists” much less “God exists and is hiding”—even people who have no concept of privileging the hypothesis would be able to point that out to you. A person in that world would look like someone in our world telling us that there’s no evidence of mind-controlling reptilian shapeshifters, and there really should be.
You wouldn’t have enough evidence to even find the hypothesis “God exists” much less “God exists and is hiding”—even people who have no concept of privileging the hypothesis would be able to point that out to you.
The original point of this scenario was as a rebuttal to Pascal’s Wager, specifically that the hypothesis “god exists and will send you to hell for atheism” isn’t significantly more likely than “god exists and will send you to hell for believing.” Even if this scenario is unlikely, it’s plausible enough to illustrate that the massive utility difference implied by the believer’s scenario has no logical reason to dominate over other unlikely massive utility differences.
Allowing a general concept of God (‘creator’ rather than the details of a religion’s particular deity), I don’t think the hypothesis is privileged. We see cause and effect relationships everywhere, and it is natural to wonder about the first cause. God-beliefs can be very complex and explain a lot more than that, but all God-beliefs seem to serve at least that purpose.
I would wonder about an intelligent species with no curiosity or speculations about their origins (and fate), especially if in other contexts they tended to have a spattering of not-fully-empirically-justified-beliefs if such were useful to explain things.
The question of first cause is probably a natural one for a species to ask. However, our concept of causality seems closely connected to our ability to intervene on the world and as you start talking about variables farther and farther away from plausible human intervention the concept gets strained. For example, I’m not sure it makes sense to say things like “The fine structure constant caused complex life.” Causality may be a rather parochial concept in the scheme of things and therefore we get rather confused about it when trying to extend it’s application away from the domain of potential human intervention. Hell, this might be a reason why humans have a tendency to invoke such and anthropomorphic conception of a first cause: causality may not make a lot of sense without the human-like mind element to it!
Your comment is interesting, and I agree with you that our concept of causality gets strained as we push it away from agency, and as humans we have difficulty not projecting agency onto causes. Would you mind summarizing whether your comment is a reply to something I said in particular or a general comment?
I’ve been triangulating around two problems while discussing ‘God’ concepts on Less Wrong: one of language (needing to clarify what I mean by ‘cause’, ‘God’, etc) and one of concept (can ‘God’ mean something without agency?). I’m beginning to lose confidence that these words have the abstract meanings I’m assigning them, in which case I would be happy to use different words.
I was trying to make a neutral, insightful reply to what I thought was your real point and not get distracted by the semantics of the whole ‘God’ thing.
Though I suppose I was also trying to indicate a plausible reason for why typical humans might end up ascribing agency to a first cause: a reason to avoid words with connotations of agency in discussions of first cause. If agency is somehow entangled in our concept of causation thats a limitation of the concept. It is not evidence there is an actual agent with causal control over the universe or even that such an agent is possible. And even if it was evidence for that, the complexity penalty associated with invoking agency is so great we’d have to conclude by modus tollens that there was no first cause.
“God” has enough baggage that it’s probably a good idea to avoid—at least in premises of arguments. If you conclude that some entity or event exists that you want to label “God” for personal ritual I don’t think there is necessarily anything wrong with that.
I actually intended to comment in a manipulationist/Pearlian spirit so I’m not sure what we disagree about. You may have to be more particular than linking to his entire book. To be clear, I’m not saying causality requires a human intervention or advocating any kind of agency theory of causality. I’m saying, like Pearl, that causal explanations tell us what would happen given intervention on a variable. Anthropologically, our conception of causality likely arose as we learned to make things happen, i.e. intervene. But it’s difficult to know what ‘intervention’ means in domains far from human manipulation. Inventing a human-like mind that can do that kind of intervention feels like a kind of invention that would let people feel more comfortable talking about first causes.
Ah, okay, thanks for the clarification. I did in fact interpret you as proposing an agency theory of causality; I think the following helped to mislead me in that direction:
I’m not sure it makes sense to say things like “The fine structure constant caused complex life.” Causality may be a rather parochial concept in the scheme of things and therefore we get rather confused about it when trying to extend it’s application away from the domain of potential human intervention
I think I actually wanted to refer to the preface of Pearl’s book, in particular this part:
In the last decade, owing partly to advances in graphical models, causality has undergone a major transformation: from a concept shrouded in mystery into a mathematical object with well-defined semantics and well-founded logic...Put simply, causality has been mathematized.
My implication would have been that causality is not a merely human folk-concept that makes sense only in the context of “agents”; but if you weren’t saying otherwise, this is of course moot.
So I should clarify a bit more. We can understand causality as the following: A causes B iff an intervention on A alters the value of B. The concept of ‘intervention’ is doing the work here. Agency theories reduce ‘intervention’ to possible actions of free agents. I prefer Pearl’s approach which fails to reduce the concept of intervention to non-causal concepts but a) doesn’t obviously fail to actually describe our concept of cause the way the agency approach does and b) is a lot more illuminating. However, that doesn’t mean our concept of intervention doesn’t have any element of agency to it or that the two are entirely distinct. At the least, it seems plausible our evolved understanding of causality is interconnected with our evolved concept of agency, even if causality can be discussed mathematically in isolation.
An intervention on the fine structure constant is more mysterious to me than an intervention on the velocity of a pool ball- and it isn’t necessarily just one being within my current capabilities and the other not. And for obvious reasons understanding a first cause under a manipulationist approach is really sketchy.
We see cause and effect relationships everywhere, and it is natural to wonder about the first cause.
It is. It’s not natural to wonder if the first cause is a complex structured intelligent being, because such complicated and internally correlated structures demand simpler preceding causes of which to be the effects, for if we try to model the structure as uncaused we have unexplained internal correlations, which is a no-no in causal graphs.
If you then start making special pleading excuses about an intelligence that you predict using a complex structured internally correlated model but which you claim to have no structure so that you can pretend it’s simple even though you can’t exhibit any simple computer program that does the same thing, it’s really unnatural—not just physically unnatural, but epistemically unnatural.
We see cause and effect relationships everywhere, and it is natural to wonder about the first cause.
It is. It’s not natural to wonder if the first cause is a complex structured intelligent being,
I’d like to taboo the word “natural” here. Do you guys mean ‘good and reasonable’? Or do we mean ‘typically occuring in human societies’? Or something else entirely?
A “natural” hypothesis is one with high probability. A “natural” question is a query regarding the cause(s) of a low-probability observation.
So, in this exchange, byrnema pointed to a particular low-probability observation (the abundance of causal structure in the world around us), and Eliezer responded by noting that the proposed explanation (a complex first cause) has low probability, even conditioning on the observation.
To put it in even simpler terms: Bayes’s theorem says P(H|E) = P(E|H)P(H)/P(E); byrnema said: “P(E) is small!”; and Eliezer said “Oh yeah, well P(H) is tiny!”
I realize that I’ve been confused about distinguishing what may be natural for humans to believe about God verses what is ‘natural’ (probable and reasonable) to believe about God. If I go back and reconsider different things I’ve read about privileging-the-hypothesis-brand-arguments, they may sound different now. What mislead me from the beginning was an argument you made that if there was no theism, humans wouldn’t reinvent it (agreed now, as long as the science paradigm handles the edges of knowledge well enough) and a perception that atheists believe that the main motivation for religion is authoritarian control rather than explanation.
As I replied to shockwave below, I agree that particular religious hypotheses are privileged due to human psychology, and this may be angling different than my position at the beginning where I was ambiguously trying to defend them as natural for humans to have.
“God as first cause” is just the latest god of the gaps. If the concept of first cause / creator is general enough to be legitimately supported by not knowing enough about the beginnings of existence then it’s isomorphic to ignorance.
If it’s specific enough to include concepts of believers and non-believers and the punishments and rewards due to them—as the grandparent does—then it is privileging the hypothesis to consider it.
The God of the gaps idea is that since there could be no possible natural explanation, God must have done it. God-as-first-cause is a different argument, because God is the first cause whatever it is, even a natural one.
The fallacy is more one of anthropomorphism: when we think of creation of the universe, we think of a creator deciding to do so (mind), being invested in his creation (loving) and setting up the outcome. It seems clear we have projected our ideas of a parent (our notion of a creator) onto God. Different religions (especially early ones) are the hypotheses that came up in the absence of science, and reflect human biases. In this sense the hypotheses are certainly skewed (I agree the hypotheses are privileged) but not the God-concept itself.
If it’s specific enough to include concepts of believers and non-believers and the punishments and rewards due to them
This is why I had added the words (‘and fate’) up above. It is very, very easy to see design in random events over a lifetime. Over the weekend, a friend told me about how they decided to name their child after a saint whose ‘saint day’ was a couple weeks before her scheduled C-section. I shared the warm flush of surprise and happiness that her water broke and her son was born on that day after all. (Imagine, God had overseen the naming and birth of that child. What a blessing.) I understand that this fact is the one treasured from hundreds of mundane occurrences—statistically, this is going to happen sometimes.
The God of the gaps idea is that since there could be no possible natural explanation, God must have done it. God-as-first-cause is a different argument, because God is the first cause whatever it is, even a natural one.
I will reserve judgement, but I don’t expect many people accept whatever explanation scientists eventually produce for the beginning of existence. What I expect is that when scientists explain first cause, the “God-as-first-cause” argument will fade away, and, say, “God-as-abiogenesis” will become more popular. Supporters of that will attempt to distinguish it from a typical god-of-the-gaps argument by claiming that whatever process caused life to spring into existence is God.
The relative in question already only considers the issues of belief vs disbelief, existence vs non-existence, as motivated by reward and punishment.
If God doesn’t exist, the issue is moot (for the relative)
If belief doesn’t matter either way, obviously the issue is moot (for the relative).
If reward and punishment isn’t related to it, obviously the issue is moot (for the relative).
What I asked was therefore contingent to the following givens:
1) God exists
2) Belief in god matters
3) Reward and punishment is connected to belief.
And I mentioned the hypothesis that seemed to be missing from the whole above reasoning: “Why does the relative assume that belief will be rewarded and disbelief punished? Why can’t it be the other way around?”
I think you might find that the reason that hypothesis is missing is because “belief is rewarded, disbelief punished” is taken as given #4. This relative appears to simply take whatever they want as a given, if we are starting at “1) God exists 2) Belief in god matters 3) Reward and punishment is connected to belief.”
Have I been voted down on these comments because a concept of God is a privileged hypothesis?
I would like to verify that this was the reason for the downvotes, rather than something else, and see if I couldn’t persuade, or find my error.
First, all that I am packing into this concept of God is “creator”. We don’t know how (or if) the universe was ‘caused’—if the universe was caused by anything, wouldn’t that thing be our creator? For example, theists would be disappointed if it turned out that the universe and everything created was the result of ‘possibility’, but wouldn’t they agree, semantically, that ‘possibility’ was God? An impersonal, mindless God, but the source of our existence.
I didn’t downvote, but I think it’s because you’re calling something “God” which has no resemblance to a god, and thus trying to sneak in with all the connotations of that word.
I think that’s exactly it. Even after people have given up all belief in agents resembling what a majority of people in the world call gods, they often remain attached to the word “God” and the associated connotations. What good does it do to refer to a postulated first cause (particularly an impersonal, non-intentional, amoral, non-agent-like one) as “God” rather than “the first cause”? As far as I can tell, none; it just confuses things. (A general rule is that if you replace the word “God” with some made-up word and you can no longer say what you’d normally say about “God” and have it make as much sense, then something is amiss. If Yahweh really existed, and strong evidence of his existence and properties were available, then it wouldn’t matter what word people used — they could call him “God” or “Yahweh” or “Spruckel” but still describe him just fine. But attempts at secular spirituality always seem to depend on redefining the word God to refer to something other than an actual god, like “love” or “the universe” or “the first cause”, but then saying things about “God” that wouldn’t make any sense if you just said it about the thing you claim to be defining “God” as. It’s even sillier than worshipping an actual alleged god — it’s worshipping a word.)
I don’t much care for discussions about points, but I think using the “God” label to refer to whatever it was that caused (assuming, as you say, that there actually was any causal factor) there to be something rather than nothing unavoidably introduces, via implicit associations, certain assumptions and constraints to the ensuing discussion.
If this is unintended, it’s a sloppy use of language; if it’s intended, it’s a sneaky one. This might account for people thinking poorly of your comment.
==
Many theists of my acquaintance, if somehow convinced of the existence of an impersonal mindless process that caused everything to come into being, would not conclude “Ah! God is this particular impersonal mindless process. Now we know,” and continue more or less as before, but would instead either stop identifying as theists, or continue to believe that “God” refers to some mindful entity that is in some as-yet-not-understood way really responsible.
Similarly, of the many theists who identified “God” as the entity responsible for the origin of life before an impersonal mindless process was shown to be responsible for that, some rejected the evidence, some gave up theism, and some concluded that “God” properly refers to some other entity. (And, yes, some generalized their understanding of God to include that process, and some had an understanding of God that was already sufficiently general to include that process. My point is merely that they are the minority.)
I don’t think I was being sloppy or sneaky, since the specific assumptions going into the word God were mainly what my comment was about.
On the one hand, you can package a lot of very specific/extreme things into “God” and have a straw man that is easy to knock down. What should be packed into belief in “God’?? I think it should be some combination of what is generally meant and what is most charitable for the argument (that is, if something is asserted about God in general, it should be true for the narrowest meaning, or qualifiers should be added).
Consider the statement in question of whether the concept of God is a privileged hypothesis. In evaluating that, you wouldn’t consider a specific God—someone doesn’t sit down and hypothesize all the details of the trinity. Rather, they begin with something basic (like there seems to be a first cause, or agency in events) and then they proceed from there (these latter things would be deductions, faulty or not).
My image is that of a primitive man wondering why it rains when it does and then deciding that the rain-maker must like bugs because they swarm after the rains. There’s definitely a distinction to be made between God-in-the-abstract and a specific God with all details sketched in. The answer to his question is naturalistic (clouds, weather patterns) but with a little philosophy the man can decide that what he still doesn’t know why there is rain at all, and that this deeper question was some component of his original question.
When people consider whether God is a privileged hypothesis, I think they really ask this for a very minimalist concept of God. Because if a specific God is meant, with all the particulars that different religions argue over, then it would not be a very interesting statement.
Any definition of God that’s remotely connected to what people throughout history have meant by the concept must include (I believe) some characteristics that we would recognize as personhood, intelligence, purpose. Also atleast one of the following : superior power, superior wisdom, superior level of existence (to be superior to humans in atleast some way*).
“first cause” however is far, far, from being a universal characteristic of imagined Gods—many ancient pantheons had their various Gods (even their supreme Gods) being born, growing up, occasionally overthrowing previous gods, etc.
So a minimalist concept of God wouldn’t be limited to “first cause”, and I don’t think it should even include it as one of its elements.
If you want to describe a non-necessarily intelligent, non-necessarily purposeful “first cause”, I would very strongly advise you not to use the word “God”.
OK … there’s been sufficient unanimity in responses, I will update my understanding of the question ‘is the concept of God a privileged hypothesis?’ to mean a God that is again personal and mindful. A God that is like a human being (but superior) is clearly a privileged hypothesis, reflecting the limitations of human psychology and imagination, and I have no reason to challenge that.
There really appears to be nothing to argue about regarding atheism/theism. I’ll keep on the lookout though.
I hope people do realize that I was just comparing the probabilities of “God exists and wants to be believed in” and “God exists and doesn’t want to be believed in”—obviously God’s silence is even better evidence in favour of God not existing at all, it’s just I wasn’t comparing that possibility with anything.
In the interests of deconverting someone, right? Convincing someone to be an atheist because God wants them to … that gives me bad logic feelings in my gut.
“In the interests of deconverting someone, right?”
Not really. I’m not particularly interested in deconverting people, same way that I don’t tend to go to little children and tell them there’s no Santa.
But if a person wants to argue his faith is logical, then he’s trespassing on my turf—so it was more in the interests of defending logical thinking that I pointed out an obvious unwarranted assumption in the logical argument.
What do you think of the argument “If God wanted me to believe in him, he would have made it easier to do so”? If this circumvents the bad logic feeling, it might be quite effective. Especially if you buttress it with the argument that a loving God would want us to embrance a scientific worldview that provides us with medical advances and a way to solve our problems.
While it may be based on a false counterfactual, which seems dodgy, I think it is quite useful to displace a paradigm by finding footholds from within it, and this argument also provides a safe line of retreat (if God wants me to believe in him, he can find a way to convince me).
(Off-topic: Why is it you don’t have a user page?)
I don’t actually know what to think. I can’t see any problems with it extrapolating out to real life actions, but I spent some time in classes on logic, so the danger of “*if [false premise] then [anything]” is well-known to me. (From falsehood, anything is permitted and so on). I think as long as you presented the argument to someone who held their beliefs truly it would be effective and safe, but if you presented it to a believer-in-belief it probably would fail. Still safe, though.
(I actually don’t know how to make one. Is the user page at all related to overviews of my comments? I have been wondering for a while why everyone seems to have overviews, but I don’t.)
The absence of expected evidence is evidence of interference.
Ah, but it’s stronger evidence that your expectation is wrong; and self-reflective priors would have ‘expectation is wrong’ starting more likely than ‘interference from an outside agency’.
Ah, but it’s stronger evidence that your expectation is wrong
Keywordstronger. The claim you were questioning was whether there was evidence at all. I do nothing more than support the claim that it is evidence.
and self-reflective priors would have ‘expectation is wrong’ starting more likely than ‘interference from an outside agency’.
Probably, given roughly human-like intelligence with information roughly like what we have now. The counterfactual wasn’t specific in that regard but did suggest an assumption of a particularly strong understanding of human nature.
New Testament is evidence in favour of the Christian God, but at the same time it’s also evidence against Vishnu or Zeus—indeed it may be stronger evidence against Zeus that it’s good evidence for the Christian God.
I’m not therefore sure at all if it would have a positive correlation with (be evidence for) the existence of a God in general.
I’m not therefore sure at all if it would have a positive correlation with (be evidence for) the existence of a God in general.
I’m pretty sure it’s completely uncorrelated. My previous comments were to point out the flaws in your rhetoric. Deconverting people is a noble goal, but
“What if God only saves atheists, and sends believers to hell?”
Sorry, but I still don’t see any flaws in my logic. As a point of fact, some people atleast can conceive superior beings as pieces of fiction; and indeed they constantly seem to do so, every culture ever imagining some being more powerful than they currently are, from Zeus to Superman.
Also, as a point of fact, some people try to pass off fictions as truths (conmen and fools, as i said).
Therefore if, given the above, and without knowing why, nobody ever in the history of civilization considered combining the above two (passing the idea of a superior being as truth) -- this is evidence in favour of something, an unknown law of nature or biology or an unknown agent, stopping this from happening.
Where is the logical flaw here? If you tried to simulate the whole of human history, using the most accurate biology possible, and religion (alone of all human charactestics) arose nowhere in your simulation, wouldn’t you consider it evidence in favour of some programmer tinkering with the program in order to purposefully eliminate it?
Yeah, really, but only if it’s possible to ascertain that humans are naturally religious independently of, well, watching us be naturally religious. Which seems difficult—we can look at fingerprints in other rooms, but we can’t look at humans in other universes. This problem may relegate the idea to interesting-but-unprovable-land.
I read Bibles as a synecdoche for Holy Books in all their mutually contradictory multiplicity. The way that the Holy Books of competing traditions deny each other pushes many people to atheism. If He has made people who feel inclined to write Bibles and New Testaments and Korans and Books of Mormon etcetera, that is good evidence that God wants to be disbelieved in.
They would probably reply “Thats not what athiests say”.
Well, of course, but is your relative trying to please atheists or to please God? What if he can only please God by disbelieving in Him?
After all, if an all-powerful God wanted to be believed in, he could easily make his existence self-evident. We could ask the heavens “Are you there, God?” and a booming voice from the skies could reply “Yes, I AM”.
But if there exists a God that wants to be disbelieved in, the reply to “Are you there, God?” is silence—and that’s indeed confirmed by testing. This God’s existence seems therefore, going by the rational evidence, more probable than the existence of a God that wants to be believed in.
Your relative is pissing off God by believing in him, despite all of God’s best efforts to promote atheism in the universe.
Somehow, this discussion is beginning to remind me of this fascinating book.
That book looks like an intro to Vernor Vinge’s “Applied Theology”.
Then why would He make people who feel inclined to write Bibles?
Probably something parallel to the reason that, if there is a god who does want to be believed in, he apparently created people who feel inclined to write things like “The God Delusion”.
(One possibility: Satan planted the Bible, the Qur’an, etc. in rebellion against God’s desire to not be believed in. Ever since then, God’s been doing desperate damage control by watching over torture, rape, and genocide, and not doing anything, but to little avail — people go right on believing in him, because Satan’s memes are just too infectious and powerful.)
If someone removes all the fingerprints from a commonly used room that normally should have had fingerprints, that’s by itself evidence that someone was there who wanted to remove the fingerprints.
Likewise if God didn’t permit the existence of Bible-writers, as such conmen and fools normally should exist, that would itself be evidence that there’s an entity out there with the power to so disallow them.
Wait, really? If there was no evidence of God (in the form of Bibles or fingerprints), that would be evidence that there’s a God out there hiding?
Yes. If the nature of humans is such that if physics operates in a natural way then they do a certain thing with high probability and said thing is not done then it raises the probability that physics is not operating as thought.
The absence of expected evidence is evidence of interference.
You wouldn’t have enough evidence to even find the hypothesis “God exists” much less “God exists and is hiding”—even people who have no concept of privileging the hypothesis would be able to point that out to you. A person in that world would look like someone in our world telling us that there’s no evidence of mind-controlling reptilian shapeshifters, and there really should be.
The original point of this scenario was as a rebuttal to Pascal’s Wager, specifically that the hypothesis “god exists and will send you to hell for atheism” isn’t significantly more likely than “god exists and will send you to hell for believing.” Even if this scenario is unlikely, it’s plausible enough to illustrate that the massive utility difference implied by the believer’s scenario has no logical reason to dominate over other unlikely massive utility differences.
Allowing a general concept of God (‘creator’ rather than the details of a religion’s particular deity), I don’t think the hypothesis is privileged. We see cause and effect relationships everywhere, and it is natural to wonder about the first cause. God-beliefs can be very complex and explain a lot more than that, but all God-beliefs seem to serve at least that purpose.
I would wonder about an intelligent species with no curiosity or speculations about their origins (and fate), especially if in other contexts they tended to have a spattering of not-fully-empirically-justified-beliefs if such were useful to explain things.
The question of first cause is probably a natural one for a species to ask. However, our concept of causality seems closely connected to our ability to intervene on the world and as you start talking about variables farther and farther away from plausible human intervention the concept gets strained. For example, I’m not sure it makes sense to say things like “The fine structure constant caused complex life.” Causality may be a rather parochial concept in the scheme of things and therefore we get rather confused about it when trying to extend it’s application away from the domain of potential human intervention. Hell, this might be a reason why humans have a tendency to invoke such and anthropomorphic conception of a first cause: causality may not make a lot of sense without the human-like mind element to it!
That may be true for final cause and formal cause, but efficient causality is obvious even when there is no evidence of rational minds.
Loved how the paint was explained at the end.
Your comment is interesting, and I agree with you that our concept of causality gets strained as we push it away from agency, and as humans we have difficulty not projecting agency onto causes. Would you mind summarizing whether your comment is a reply to something I said in particular or a general comment?
I’ve been triangulating around two problems while discussing ‘God’ concepts on Less Wrong: one of language (needing to clarify what I mean by ‘cause’, ‘God’, etc) and one of concept (can ‘God’ mean something without agency?). I’m beginning to lose confidence that these words have the abstract meanings I’m assigning them, in which case I would be happy to use different words.
I was trying to make a neutral, insightful reply to what I thought was your real point and not get distracted by the semantics of the whole ‘God’ thing.
Though I suppose I was also trying to indicate a plausible reason for why typical humans might end up ascribing agency to a first cause: a reason to avoid words with connotations of agency in discussions of first cause. If agency is somehow entangled in our concept of causation thats a limitation of the concept. It is not evidence there is an actual agent with causal control over the universe or even that such an agent is possible. And even if it was evidence for that, the complexity penalty associated with invoking agency is so great we’d have to conclude by modus tollens that there was no first cause.
“God” has enough baggage that it’s probably a good idea to avoid—at least in premises of arguments. If you conclude that some entity or event exists that you want to label “God” for personal ritual I don’t think there is necessarily anything wrong with that.
An understandable point of view, but see here.
I actually intended to comment in a manipulationist/Pearlian spirit so I’m not sure what we disagree about. You may have to be more particular than linking to his entire book. To be clear, I’m not saying causality requires a human intervention or advocating any kind of agency theory of causality. I’m saying, like Pearl, that causal explanations tell us what would happen given intervention on a variable. Anthropologically, our conception of causality likely arose as we learned to make things happen, i.e. intervene. But it’s difficult to know what ‘intervention’ means in domains far from human manipulation. Inventing a human-like mind that can do that kind of intervention feels like a kind of invention that would let people feel more comfortable talking about first causes.
Ah, okay, thanks for the clarification. I did in fact interpret you as proposing an agency theory of causality; I think the following helped to mislead me in that direction:
I think I actually wanted to refer to the preface of Pearl’s book, in particular this part:
My implication would have been that causality is not a merely human folk-concept that makes sense only in the context of “agents”; but if you weren’t saying otherwise, this is of course moot.
So I should clarify a bit more. We can understand causality as the following: A causes B iff an intervention on A alters the value of B. The concept of ‘intervention’ is doing the work here. Agency theories reduce ‘intervention’ to possible actions of free agents. I prefer Pearl’s approach which fails to reduce the concept of intervention to non-causal concepts but a) doesn’t obviously fail to actually describe our concept of cause the way the agency approach does and b) is a lot more illuminating. However, that doesn’t mean our concept of intervention doesn’t have any element of agency to it or that the two are entirely distinct. At the least, it seems plausible our evolved understanding of causality is interconnected with our evolved concept of agency, even if causality can be discussed mathematically in isolation.
An intervention on the fine structure constant is more mysterious to me than an intervention on the velocity of a pool ball- and it isn’t necessarily just one being within my current capabilities and the other not. And for obvious reasons understanding a first cause under a manipulationist approach is really sketchy.
It is. It’s not natural to wonder if the first cause is a complex structured intelligent being, because such complicated and internally correlated structures demand simpler preceding causes of which to be the effects, for if we try to model the structure as uncaused we have unexplained internal correlations, which is a no-no in causal graphs.
If you then start making special pleading excuses about an intelligence that you predict using a complex structured internally correlated model but which you claim to have no structure so that you can pretend it’s simple even though you can’t exhibit any simple computer program that does the same thing, it’s really unnatural—not just physically unnatural, but epistemically unnatural.
I’d like to taboo the word “natural” here. Do you guys mean ‘good and reasonable’? Or do we mean ‘typically occuring in human societies’? Or something else entirely?
My reduction-proposal:
A “natural” hypothesis is one with high probability. A “natural” question is a query regarding the cause(s) of a low-probability observation.
So, in this exchange, byrnema pointed to a particular low-probability observation (the abundance of causal structure in the world around us), and Eliezer responded by noting that the proposed explanation (a complex first cause) has low probability, even conditioning on the observation.
To put it in even simpler terms: Bayes’s theorem says P(H|E) = P(E|H)P(H)/P(E); byrnema said: “P(E) is small!”; and Eliezer said “Oh yeah, well P(H) is tiny!”
I agree.
I realize that I’ve been confused about distinguishing what may be natural for humans to believe about God verses what is ‘natural’ (probable and reasonable) to believe about God. If I go back and reconsider different things I’ve read about privileging-the-hypothesis-brand-arguments, they may sound different now. What mislead me from the beginning was an argument you made that if there was no theism, humans wouldn’t reinvent it (agreed now, as long as the science paradigm handles the edges of knowledge well enough) and a perception that atheists believe that the main motivation for religion is authoritarian control rather than explanation.
As I replied to shockwave below, I agree that particular religious hypotheses are privileged due to human psychology, and this may be angling different than my position at the beginning where I was ambiguously trying to defend them as natural for humans to have.
“God as first cause” is just the latest god of the gaps. If the concept of first cause / creator is general enough to be legitimately supported by not knowing enough about the beginnings of existence then it’s isomorphic to ignorance.
If it’s specific enough to include concepts of believers and non-believers and the punishments and rewards due to them—as the grandparent does—then it is privileging the hypothesis to consider it.
The God of the gaps idea is that since there could be no possible natural explanation, God must have done it. God-as-first-cause is a different argument, because God is the first cause whatever it is, even a natural one.
The fallacy is more one of anthropomorphism: when we think of creation of the universe, we think of a creator deciding to do so (mind), being invested in his creation (loving) and setting up the outcome. It seems clear we have projected our ideas of a parent (our notion of a creator) onto God. Different religions (especially early ones) are the hypotheses that came up in the absence of science, and reflect human biases. In this sense the hypotheses are certainly skewed (I agree the hypotheses are privileged) but not the God-concept itself.
This is why I had added the words (‘and fate’) up above. It is very, very easy to see design in random events over a lifetime. Over the weekend, a friend told me about how they decided to name their child after a saint whose ‘saint day’ was a couple weeks before her scheduled C-section. I shared the warm flush of surprise and happiness that her water broke and her son was born on that day after all. (Imagine, God had overseen the naming and birth of that child. What a blessing.) I understand that this fact is the one treasured from hundreds of mundane occurrences—statistically, this is going to happen sometimes.
I will reserve judgement, but I don’t expect many people accept whatever explanation scientists eventually produce for the beginning of existence. What I expect is that when scientists explain first cause, the “God-as-first-cause” argument will fade away, and, say, “God-as-abiogenesis” will become more popular. Supporters of that will attempt to distinguish it from a typical god-of-the-gaps argument by claiming that whatever process caused life to spring into existence is God.
The relative in question already only considers the issues of belief vs disbelief, existence vs non-existence, as motivated by reward and punishment.
If God doesn’t exist, the issue is moot (for the relative) If belief doesn’t matter either way, obviously the issue is moot (for the relative). If reward and punishment isn’t related to it, obviously the issue is moot (for the relative).
What I asked was therefore contingent to the following givens: 1) God exists 2) Belief in god matters 3) Reward and punishment is connected to belief.
And I mentioned the hypothesis that seemed to be missing from the whole above reasoning: “Why does the relative assume that belief will be rewarded and disbelief punished? Why can’t it be the other way around?”
I think you might find that the reason that hypothesis is missing is because “belief is rewarded, disbelief punished” is taken as given #4. This relative appears to simply take whatever they want as a given, if we are starting at “1) God exists 2) Belief in god matters 3) Reward and punishment is connected to belief.”
Have I been voted down on these comments because a concept of God is a privileged hypothesis?
I would like to verify that this was the reason for the downvotes, rather than something else, and see if I couldn’t persuade, or find my error.
First, all that I am packing into this concept of God is “creator”. We don’t know how (or if) the universe was ‘caused’—if the universe was caused by anything, wouldn’t that thing be our creator? For example, theists would be disappointed if it turned out that the universe and everything created was the result of ‘possibility’, but wouldn’t they agree, semantically, that ‘possibility’ was God? An impersonal, mindless God, but the source of our existence.
I didn’t downvote, but I think it’s because you’re calling something “God” which has no resemblance to a god, and thus trying to sneak in with all the connotations of that word.
I think that’s exactly it. Even after people have given up all belief in agents resembling what a majority of people in the world call gods, they often remain attached to the word “God” and the associated connotations. What good does it do to refer to a postulated first cause (particularly an impersonal, non-intentional, amoral, non-agent-like one) as “God” rather than “the first cause”? As far as I can tell, none; it just confuses things. (A general rule is that if you replace the word “God” with some made-up word and you can no longer say what you’d normally say about “God” and have it make as much sense, then something is amiss. If Yahweh really existed, and strong evidence of his existence and properties were available, then it wouldn’t matter what word people used — they could call him “God” or “Yahweh” or “Spruckel” but still describe him just fine. But attempts at secular spirituality always seem to depend on redefining the word God to refer to something other than an actual god, like “love” or “the universe” or “the first cause”, but then saying things about “God” that wouldn’t make any sense if you just said it about the thing you claim to be defining “God” as. It’s even sillier than worshipping an actual alleged god — it’s worshipping a word.)
Two things.
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I don’t much care for discussions about points, but I think using the “God” label to refer to whatever it was that caused (assuming, as you say, that there actually was any causal factor) there to be something rather than nothing unavoidably introduces, via implicit associations, certain assumptions and constraints to the ensuing discussion.
If this is unintended, it’s a sloppy use of language; if it’s intended, it’s a sneaky one. This might account for people thinking poorly of your comment.
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Many theists of my acquaintance, if somehow convinced of the existence of an impersonal mindless process that caused everything to come into being, would not conclude “Ah! God is this particular impersonal mindless process. Now we know,” and continue more or less as before, but would instead either stop identifying as theists, or continue to believe that “God” refers to some mindful entity that is in some as-yet-not-understood way really responsible.
Similarly, of the many theists who identified “God” as the entity responsible for the origin of life before an impersonal mindless process was shown to be responsible for that, some rejected the evidence, some gave up theism, and some concluded that “God” properly refers to some other entity. (And, yes, some generalized their understanding of God to include that process, and some had an understanding of God that was already sufficiently general to include that process. My point is merely that they are the minority.)
Thanks for the reply.
I don’t think I was being sloppy or sneaky, since the specific assumptions going into the word God were mainly what my comment was about.
On the one hand, you can package a lot of very specific/extreme things into “God” and have a straw man that is easy to knock down. What should be packed into belief in “God’?? I think it should be some combination of what is generally meant and what is most charitable for the argument (that is, if something is asserted about God in general, it should be true for the narrowest meaning, or qualifiers should be added).
Consider the statement in question of whether the concept of God is a privileged hypothesis. In evaluating that, you wouldn’t consider a specific God—someone doesn’t sit down and hypothesize all the details of the trinity. Rather, they begin with something basic (like there seems to be a first cause, or agency in events) and then they proceed from there (these latter things would be deductions, faulty or not).
My image is that of a primitive man wondering why it rains when it does and then deciding that the rain-maker must like bugs because they swarm after the rains. There’s definitely a distinction to be made between God-in-the-abstract and a specific God with all details sketched in. The answer to his question is naturalistic (clouds, weather patterns) but with a little philosophy the man can decide that what he still doesn’t know why there is rain at all, and that this deeper question was some component of his original question.
When people consider whether God is a privileged hypothesis, I think they really ask this for a very minimalist concept of God. Because if a specific God is meant, with all the particulars that different religions argue over, then it would not be a very interesting statement.
Any definition of God that’s remotely connected to what people throughout history have meant by the concept must include (I believe) some characteristics that we would recognize as personhood, intelligence, purpose. Also atleast one of the following : superior power, superior wisdom, superior level of existence (to be superior to humans in atleast some way*).
“first cause” however is far, far, from being a universal characteristic of imagined Gods—many ancient pantheons had their various Gods (even their supreme Gods) being born, growing up, occasionally overthrowing previous gods, etc.
So a minimalist concept of God wouldn’t be limited to “first cause”, and I don’t think it should even include it as one of its elements.
If you want to describe a non-necessarily intelligent, non-necessarily purposeful “first cause”, I would very strongly advise you not to use the word “God”.
OK … there’s been sufficient unanimity in responses, I will update my understanding of the question ‘is the concept of God a privileged hypothesis?’ to mean a God that is again personal and mindful. A God that is like a human being (but superior) is clearly a privileged hypothesis, reflecting the limitations of human psychology and imagination, and I have no reason to challenge that.
There really appears to be nothing to argue about regarding atheism/theism. I’ll keep on the lookout though.
The key word there is enough. ;)
I… I just realized… there’s no evidence whatsoever of the Glowing Purple Space Cannibals, nobody’s ever even postulated their existence...
I hope people do realize that I was just comparing the probabilities of “God exists and wants to be believed in” and “God exists and doesn’t want to be believed in”—obviously God’s silence is even better evidence in favour of God not existing at all, it’s just I wasn’t comparing that possibility with anything.
In the interests of deconverting someone, right? Convincing someone to be an atheist because God wants them to … that gives me bad logic feelings in my gut.
“In the interests of deconverting someone, right?”
Not really. I’m not particularly interested in deconverting people, same way that I don’t tend to go to little children and tell them there’s no Santa.
But if a person wants to argue his faith is logical, then he’s trespassing on my turf—so it was more in the interests of defending logical thinking that I pointed out an obvious unwarranted assumption in the logical argument.
What do you think of the argument “If God wanted me to believe in him, he would have made it easier to do so”? If this circumvents the bad logic feeling, it might be quite effective. Especially if you buttress it with the argument that a loving God would want us to embrance a scientific worldview that provides us with medical advances and a way to solve our problems.
While it may be based on a false counterfactual, which seems dodgy, I think it is quite useful to displace a paradigm by finding footholds from within it, and this argument also provides a safe line of retreat (if God wants me to believe in him, he can find a way to convince me).
(Off-topic: Why is it you don’t have a user page?)
I don’t actually know what to think. I can’t see any problems with it extrapolating out to real life actions, but I spent some time in classes on logic, so the danger of “*if [false premise] then [anything]” is well-known to me. (From falsehood, anything is permitted and so on). I think as long as you presented the argument to someone who held their beliefs truly it would be effective and safe, but if you presented it to a believer-in-belief it probably would fail. Still safe, though.
(I actually don’t know how to make one. Is the user page at all related to overviews of my comments? I have been wondering for a while why everyone seems to have overviews, but I don’t.)
You are considering a different counterfactual to the one Aris intended.
Ah, but it’s stronger evidence that your expectation is wrong; and self-reflective priors would have ‘expectation is wrong’ starting more likely than ‘interference from an outside agency’.
Keyword stronger. The claim you were questioning was whether there was evidence at all. I do nothing more than support the claim that it is evidence.
Probably, given roughly human-like intelligence with information roughly like what we have now. The counterfactual wasn’t specific in that regard but did suggest an assumption of a particularly strong understanding of human nature.
New Testament is evidence in favour of the Christian God, but at the same time it’s also evidence against Vishnu or Zeus—indeed it may be stronger evidence against Zeus that it’s good evidence for the Christian God.
I’m not therefore sure at all if it would have a positive correlation with (be evidence for) the existence of a God in general.
Does that answer the contradiction you perceived?
I’m pretty sure it’s completely uncorrelated. My previous comments were to point out the flaws in your rhetoric. Deconverting people is a noble goal, but
is not the way to go about it.
Sorry, but I still don’t see any flaws in my logic. As a point of fact, some people atleast can conceive superior beings as pieces of fiction; and indeed they constantly seem to do so, every culture ever imagining some being more powerful than they currently are, from Zeus to Superman.
Also, as a point of fact, some people try to pass off fictions as truths (conmen and fools, as i said).
Therefore if, given the above, and without knowing why, nobody ever in the history of civilization considered combining the above two (passing the idea of a superior being as truth) -- this is evidence in favour of something, an unknown law of nature or biology or an unknown agent, stopping this from happening.
Where is the logical flaw here? If you tried to simulate the whole of human history, using the most accurate biology possible, and religion (alone of all human charactestics) arose nowhere in your simulation, wouldn’t you consider it evidence in favour of some programmer tinkering with the program in order to purposefully eliminate it?
Yeah, really, but only if it’s possible to ascertain that humans are naturally religious independently of, well, watching us be naturally religious. Which seems difficult—we can look at fingerprints in other rooms, but we can’t look at humans in other universes. This problem may relegate the idea to interesting-but-unprovable-land.
I read Bibles as a synecdoche for Holy Books in all their mutually contradictory multiplicity. The way that the Holy Books of competing traditions deny each other pushes many people to atheism. If He has made people who feel inclined to write Bibles and New Testaments and Korans and Books of Mormon etcetera, that is good evidence that God wants to be disbelieved in.
That’s all Satan’s doing.