If I’m right and they’re just cynically going through the motions, do you think they’re going to tell you that? Do you think they’re even going to give evidence consistent with that? Of course not! They’ll just keep up the charade. They’d only admit it if you were a close friend, and they were drunk at the time, like in my example.
The social benefits break down when you make your genuine beliefs become public knowledge.
Beware of generalising across people you haven’t spent much time around, however tempting the hypothesis. Drawing a map of the city from your living room etc.
My first 18 years were spent attending a Catholic church once a week. To the extent that we can ever know what other people actually believe (whatever that means), most of them have genuinely internalised the bits they understand. Like, really.
We can call into question what we mean by ‘believe’, but I can’t agree that a majority of the world population is just cynically going with the flow. Finally, my parish priest is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, and he believed in his god harder/faster/whatever than I currently believe anything. Scary thought, right?
If I’m right and they’re just cynically going through the motions, do you think they’re going to tell you that? Do you think they’re even going to give evidence consistent with that? Of course not! They’ll just keep up the charade.
If it’s as hard to gather evidence as you claim, then you should be all the more skeptical of your own conclusions.
ETA: And if it’s so crucial to avoid letting the slightest hint of doubt creep out, then we should expect evolution to find the simplest way to keep that from happening: Make a mind with the capacity to genuinely believe this stuff.
When anthropologists study religion, they focus mostly on the rituals, the social cohesion, the punishment of defectors (in the PD sense), and formation of authority structures, and not so much on the factual content of the adherents’ purported beliefs.
When anthropologists study religion, they focus mostly on the rituals, the social >cohesion, the punishment of defectors (in the PD sense), and formation of authority >structures, and not so much on the factual content of the adherents’ purported beliefs.
My position is just: do that.
I’m not suggesting that you rely only on their portrayal of their own beliefs. On the contrary, I’m suggesting long and careful observation of their behavior (including professions of belief) before you reach any confident conclusion.
And even after you’ve gathered many such observations, you will still be misled if you use the wrong approach in incorporating those observations into a model. Many natural-born atheists use the following fallacious approach to understanding the religious: They think to themselves, “What would it take to make me act like that and say those things? Well, for that to happen, I’d need to have the following things going on inside my mind: <...>. Therefore, those things must also be going on in the minds of theists (or at least of the intelligent ones).”
The flaw with this approach is that you’re modeling the mind of a theists using the mind of a natural-born atheist, a mind which almost certainly works differently from a theist’s mind when it comes to theological issues, almost by definition. That is why you should be skeptical that your mind contains an accurate model of a theist’s mind.
I’m not suggesting that you rely only on their portrayal of their own beliefs. On the contrary, I’m suggesting long and careful observation of their behavior (including professions of belief) before you reach any confident conclusion.
...And even after you’ve gathered many such observations, you will still be misled if you use the wrong approach in incorporating those observations into a model. Many natural-born atheists use the following fallacious approach to understanding the religious: They think to themselves, “What would it take to make me act like that and say those things? …
Well, I’m already relying on a large data set, and I was born into a Catholic family. My theory still makes more sense. Here are some more data points:
-The parallels between religion and politics: how they force people into teams, say whatever it takes to defend the team, look for cues about whether you’re on their team when they ask about your beliefs,
-The history of religious warfare. It makes no sense to view these people as going out to die for inscrutable theological doctrines, but complete sense to view their motives the same as they would be if you replaced the religion with some other memetic group.
My theory still makes more sense. Here are some more data points:
-The parallels between religion and politics: how they force people into teams, say whatever it takes to defend the team, look for cues about whether you’re on their team when they ask about your beliefs,
I’d say that this data point supports my position. Get an extreme left-winger or right-winger drunk and you’re not going to hear them say, “yeah, those extreme political positions I espouse, I don’t really think they’re true. I just pretend to because of the social benefits I reap.” On the contrary, you’re going to hear them spout even more extreme views, views that they’d realize they ought to keep to themselves had they been sober.
-The history of religious warfare. It makes no sense to view these people as going out to die for inscrutable theological doctrines, but complete sense to view their motives the same as they would be if you replaced the religion with some other memetic group.
I agree. I’m not saying that every action ostensibly justified by religious beliefs is really done because of those beliefs. But that says nothing about whether those beliefs are sincerely held.
I’d say that this data point supports my position. Get an extreme left-winger or right-winger drunk and you’re not going to hear them say, “yeah, those extreme political positions I espouse, I don’t really think they’re true. I just pretend to because of the social benefits I reap.”
It’s not necessary for my claim that they think about it in those terms. But they:
a) enjoy the bonding with people “on their team” (yeah, aren’t those Republican’s so greedy, heh heh, not like us nosiree)
b) would take back more extreme things they said to “support their team”, e.g., “Yeah, I don’t really think Obama’s health plan is the best thing in the world, I just want policy to move in sorta that direction and this is best I can hope for—of course there are flaws”. Now, if you steer the conversation into a duel from the beginning, I’m sure you can get one.
I agree. I’m not saying that every action ostensibly justified by religious beliefs is really done because of those beliefs. But that says nothing about whether those beliefs are sincerely held.
No, that would be evidence that the belief in belief is sincerely held, not the belief itself. An actual belief (zeroth level) that “God’s divine essense is embedded in children even before baptism” would correspond to some noticeable activity other than “let’s kill the people who think God’s divine essense isn’t embedded in people until baptism”. Yet in the history of religious wars, you saw exactly that.
An actual belief (zeroth level) that “God’s divine essense is embedded in children even before baptism” would correspond to some noticeable activity other than “let’s kill the people who think God’s divine essense isn’t embedded in people until baptism”.
Why would you think that? I see little reason to think so. I suspect that you think so because you reason, “Were I to believe that God’s divine essence is embedded in children even before baptism, I would never kill people for thinking that God’s divine essence isn’t embedded in people until baptism. Therefore, anyone who holds that belief wouldn’t kill people for that reason.”
I’ve already tried to explain why I think that this reasoning is invalid. You’re modeling how your own mind would behave under certain circumstances, and you’re then extrapolating to how other minds behave under those circumstances. The problem is that the other minds are theistic, so, by definition, they differ from your mind in a way that’s obviously highly relevant to how they will behave in the circumstances under consideration.
You’re still blurring the distinction between belief and belief-in-belief, or, at least, incorrectly considering them to be similar.
I’m not saying, “If I believed X, this is what I would do.” I’m saying the belief X has implications for your actions, at least in some counterfactual sense, or it’s not really a belief, but better called a belief-in-belief.
Imagine: I tell you I think monsters live under my bed. I tell you I think that the monsters kill whoever sleeps in the bed. I tell you I don’t want to die.
I sleep in my bed.
Tomorrow, I’m going to go a “BedMonster Study Group”, a type of meeting at which many of my male friends have met their future wives.
Do you think I believe there’s a monster under my bed, in the normal sense of the terms? Or do I just believe that I do?
You should argue your case using the actual pertinent facts (i.e., the actual actions and professed beliefs of the religious), not hypothetical ones.
But, even granting your hypothetical--
If I heard you say “there’s a monster under my bed” with the same earnestness and insistence that I hear when the religious profess their beliefs,
then I would strongly suspect that your mind draws conclusions from evidence in a manner very different from that in which mine does. In particular, I would expect that you reason from your beliefs to your actions very differently from how I do. I would therefore be very cautious about inferring from your actions to your actual beliefs.
You should argue your case using the actual pertinent facts (i.e., the actual actions and professed beliefs of the religious), not hypothetical ones.
There’s nothing wrong with presenting (what I consider) the same, relevant dynamic in a hypothetical context in order to make a point about the conclusions you should draw in a different one.
My hypothetical simply takes the problematic elements of the situation at hand and amplifies them. In religions, it’s hard to see the disconnect between the professed beliefs and the adherent’s actual internal predictive model of reality. My example made the disconnect obvious, and also showed the surrounding motives that give evidence as to what they really believe.
In such a scenario, I would conclude that the person is using the term “believe” differently than the term is normally used. You would conclude that the person knowingly puts himself in a situation where he expects to die, despite not wanting to die.
There’s nothing wrong with presenting (what I consider) the same, relevant dynamic in a hypothetical context in order to make a point about the conclusions you should draw in a different one.
If the relevant dynamic in the actual situation is really the same, then why not just refer to the actual situation? If you have to “amplify” the problematic elements, then you are giving yourself the burden of proving that you haven’t amplified them to the point that they yield a different conclusion than the original setting would.
In religions, it’s hard to see the disconnect between the professed beliefs and the adherent’s actual internal predictive model of reality. My example made the disconnect obvious, and also showed the surrounding motives that give evidence as to what they really believe.
If the disconnect is “hard to see” in the case of religion, then you ipso facto need strong evidence to establish that the disconnect exists. By moving to a situation where the disconnect is easier to see, so that less evidence is necessary, you are moving to a situation where your burden of proof is less. Therefore, establishing your claim in your hypothetical does not suffice to establish your claim in the original situation.
In such a scenario, I would conclude that the person is using the term “believe” differently than the term is normally used. You would conclude that the person knowingly puts himself in a situation where he expects to die, despite not wanting to die.
Your conclusion would be one real possibility. Another possibility is that, although he doesn’t want to die, he prefers it to sleeping somewhere other than his bed. Perhaps sleeping elsewhere seems, to him, a fate worse than death. Since I’m manifestly dealing with a crazy person, that remains a real possibility, at least until I learn more about how he thinks.
The more someone professes different beliefs from yours, the more evidence there is that their mind works differently from yours in some crucial respect, and so the less credit you should give to your mental model of them.
In approximate order of your objections to the hypothetical:
Tyrrell, it’s not my fault if you can’t handle reasoning from hypotheticals, but it certainly doesn’t make that form of reasoning—used in the rest of the civilized world—off-limits. If you think the analogy I’m making doesn’t hold, you can politely show where it breaks down. I had already attempted to speak to the specific situation in dispute—about religion—but in that case it’s less obvious how one’s actions aren’t following from one’s beliefs if the professed beliefs are the real ones.
I actually think it’s obvious enough why actual beliefs in (certain religions’) doctrine of eternal hellfire would logically imply a direct transition to an ascetic lifestyle or other drastic choices, and we can go that route if it keeps things in your comfort zone.
But the point is pretty simple: in the hypothetical, we can quite easily draw conclusions: either a) the person doesn’t actual have an internal predictive model of reality including a deadly bed monster, or b) he has some kind of weird psychology.
In short, you go with b) and I go with a). Which is why I think this kvetching about hypotheticals suddenly being off-limit is moot: even when I make the situation “more favorable” to my theory, you just bite a bigger bullet, cutting off whatever implication I would have claimed follows back to the original topic of religion.
So, let’s review that position:
Another possibility is that, although he doesn’t want to die, he prefers it to sleeping somewhere other than his bed. Perhaps sleeping elsewhere seems, to him, a fate worse than death. Since I’m manifestly dealing with a crazy person, that remains a real possibility, at least until I learn more about how he thinks.
The more someone professes different beliefs from yours, the more evidence there is that their mind works differently from yours in some crucial respect, and so the less credit you should give to your mental model of them.
But note the difficult position you’ve forced yourself into. You have to believe he is obviously crazy despite:
not being obviously crazy in any other area of his life
the psychological unity of mankind somehow breaking for a huge class of people that have been interbreeding with the rest of humankind and whom no one seriously suggests mandatory psychotherapy
his mental model of other phenomena (let’s reasonably suppose) being superior to yours in several areas
his actions associated with these “beliefs” greatly helping him achieve many non-crazy personal goals: having a social network, meeting a compatible spouse, greater assurance of spousal fidelity, the feeling of belonging.
the similarity (discussed before) between him and the uncountable historical instances of people supposedly going to great lengths for inscrutable theological doctrines, but actually protecting a meme they benefit from.
Do you see why this is an implausible chain to follow? Especially when the alternative is the majestically simple “Belief means something different in this context that is not an internal predictive model of reality”?
Tyrrell, it’s not my fault if you can’t handle reasoning from hypotheticals, but it certainly doesn’t make that form of reasoning—used in the rest of the civilized world—off-limits.
Hypotheticals have their uses, but they are easy to abuse. Hypotheticals are usually fine for
making the meaning of a claim clear by putting it in a simpler context (e.g., explaining the physics of a pendulum by imagining that it has an inelastic and frictionless rod), and
constructing counter-examples to absolute claims (e.g., “Stealing is always wrong!” “Really? What about if you washed up on shore after a shipwreck, and you had to steal food immediately or else die of starvation?”
Neither of these apply to your argument. Your claim was already clear, and I’m making no absolute claim. I’m the one claiming that there is inadequate evidence to justify your confidence in your conclusion.
Despite their uses, hypotheticals are usually useless for resolving disagreement. As I’ve explained, by passing to a new hypothetical situation, you only increase your burden of proof. In addition to proving the original claim, you must now show that the hypothetical doesn’t differ significantly from the actual situation. Moreover, in practice, when both participants are intelligent and thoughtful, the hypothetical will almost always fail to capture the heart of the disagreement.
For example, you’ve said that your claim is “hard to see” and “less obvious” in the case of religion. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that the elements making it hard to see and less obvious are why I doubt your claim. Thus, by moving to a hypothetical where those elements are absent, you fail to address the source of my doubt.
I actually think it’s obvious enough why actual beliefs in (certain religions’) doctrine of eternal hellfire would logically imply a direct transition to an ascetic lifestyle or other drastic choices, and we can go that route if it keeps things in your comfort zone.
This is a strong claim. I’m skeptical that religious claims are precise and unambiguous enough to logically imply such things. You should be able to give a logically rigorous demonstration of this implication if it is so obvious. I will concede your point if you can do this.
But the point is pretty simple: in the hypothetical, we can quite easily draw conclusions: either a) the person doesn’t actual have an internal predictive model of reality including a deadly bed monster, or b) he has some kind of weird psychology.
In short, you go with b) and I go with a). Which is why I think this kvetching about hypotheticals suddenly being off-limit is moot: even when I make the situation “more favorable” to my theory, you just bite a bigger bullet, cutting off whatever implication I would have claimed follows back to the original topic of religion.
You make a fair point, but one to which I have a response. Why did I object to your hypothetical if I reached the same conclusion within it anyway?
Naturally, if you keep adding conditions to your hypothetical, I will eventually agree that, given those conditions, your conclusion follows. But the more conditions you add, the further you take us from the actual situation, and so the less bearing the hypothetical has on the actual situation.
You had not yet added so many conditions to your hypothetical that I agreed with you, but I could already foresee that you eventually would, though it would be pointless for the reason above. Indeed, you added several such conditions below, conditions that were not present in your original formulation.
In particular you added that the person is “not … obviously crazy in any other area of his life” and you add that “his mental model of other phenomena … [is] superior to yours in several areas.” That is new information. It is certainly not what I would expect of the actual typical person who claims that there is a killer monster under his bed. Suppose you really did learn of some adult that he earnestly insisted that there was a killer monster under his bed. Prior to further information, wouldn’t you expect that this person suffers from numerous other severe delusions?
You’ve now ruled that out, but only by changing the hypothetical. I’ll save you work by repeating that, if you add enough such conditions, I will agree that this individual is probably lying about his beliefs. But that concession will have no bearing on what I think about actual theists.
Now to consider your list of conditions as they pertain to theists:
But note the difficult position you’ve forced yourself into. You have to believe he is obviously crazy despite:
not being obviously crazy in any other area of his life
Religious beliefs appear to me to spread to other areas of the believer’s life in a way consistent with what I’d expect. But I don’t expect them to spread as far as you do because I don’t see the “obvious” logical implications that you claim above.
the psychological unity of mankind somehow breaking for a huge class of people that have been interbreeding with the rest of humankind and whom no one seriously suggests mandatory psychotherapy
The psychological unity of humankind presents no problem for my hypothesis, because the overwhelming majority of people seem inclined to believe religious claims. It is you and I, natural-born atheists, who are the freaks :). We seem very rare.
his mental model of other phenomena (let’s reasonably suppose) being superior to yours in several areas
As I argued above, I would expect evolution to make minds capable of partitioning their beliefs in this way.
his actions associated with these “beliefs” greatly helping him achieve many non-crazy personal goals: having a social network, meeting a compatible spouse, greater assurance of spousal fidelity, the feeling of belonging.
It seems to me that the easiest way to reap all these benefits of belief is to make a mind that can sincerely believe without interfering with important day-to-day conveniences. This would be harder if religion really logically implied asceticism, as you claimed. But I think that the religions we’re talking about are designed (by natural memetic selection) to avoid doing that kind of thing.
the similarity (discussed before) between him and the uncountable historical instances of people supposedly going to great lengths for inscrutable theological doctrines, but actually protecting a meme they benefit from.
This presents no particular problem. People often sincerely love their children, but they also often falsely invoke that love as their reason for doing other things, such as going to war, etc.
Well, I am doing that in the sense of judging religions by the factors anthropologists study rather than focusing on how I can well I can disprove the claim that the earth is 6000 years old.
Yes. Confucianism is the prototypical example of a “religion” which has no cosmological beliefs per se, but still provides for community cohesion (i.e. protection from perceived threats), an ethical code (the analects of Confucius are often quoted as proverbs/dogmas), a focus on authority figures and so forth.
If I’m right and they’re just cynically going through the motions, do you think they’re going to tell you that? Do you think they’re even going to give evidence consistent with that? Of course not! They’ll just keep up the charade. They’d only admit it if you were a close friend, and they were drunk at the time, like in my example.
The social benefits break down when you make your genuine beliefs become public knowledge.
Beware of generalising across people you haven’t spent much time around, however tempting the hypothesis. Drawing a map of the city from your living room etc.
My first 18 years were spent attending a Catholic church once a week. To the extent that we can ever know what other people actually believe (whatever that means), most of them have genuinely internalised the bits they understand. Like, really.
We can call into question what we mean by ‘believe’, but I can’t agree that a majority of the world population is just cynically going with the flow. Finally, my parish priest is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, and he believed in his god harder/faster/whatever than I currently believe anything. Scary thought, right?
If it’s as hard to gather evidence as you claim, then you should be all the more skeptical of your own conclusions.
ETA: And if it’s so crucial to avoid letting the slightest hint of doubt creep out, then we should expect evolution to find the simplest way to keep that from happening: Make a mind with the capacity to genuinely believe this stuff.
When anthropologists study religion, they focus mostly on the rituals, the social cohesion, the punishment of defectors (in the PD sense), and formation of authority structures, and not so much on the factual content of the adherents’ purported beliefs.
My position is just: do that.
I’m not suggesting that you rely only on their portrayal of their own beliefs. On the contrary, I’m suggesting long and careful observation of their behavior (including professions of belief) before you reach any confident conclusion.
And even after you’ve gathered many such observations, you will still be misled if you use the wrong approach in incorporating those observations into a model. Many natural-born atheists use the following fallacious approach to understanding the religious: They think to themselves, “What would it take to make me act like that and say those things? Well, for that to happen, I’d need to have the following things going on inside my mind: <...>. Therefore, those things must also be going on in the minds of theists (or at least of the intelligent ones).”
The flaw with this approach is that you’re modeling the mind of a theists using the mind of a natural-born atheist, a mind which almost certainly works differently from a theist’s mind when it comes to theological issues, almost by definition. That is why you should be skeptical that your mind contains an accurate model of a theist’s mind.
Well, I’m already relying on a large data set, and I was born into a Catholic family. My theory still makes more sense. Here are some more data points:
-The parallels between religion and politics: how they force people into teams, say whatever it takes to defend the team, look for cues about whether you’re on their team when they ask about your beliefs,
-The history of religious warfare. It makes no sense to view these people as going out to die for inscrutable theological doctrines, but complete sense to view their motives the same as they would be if you replaced the religion with some other memetic group.
I’d say that this data point supports my position. Get an extreme left-winger or right-winger drunk and you’re not going to hear them say, “yeah, those extreme political positions I espouse, I don’t really think they’re true. I just pretend to because of the social benefits I reap.” On the contrary, you’re going to hear them spout even more extreme views, views that they’d realize they ought to keep to themselves had they been sober.
I agree. I’m not saying that every action ostensibly justified by religious beliefs is really done because of those beliefs. But that says nothing about whether those beliefs are sincerely held.
It’s not necessary for my claim that they think about it in those terms. But they:
a) enjoy the bonding with people “on their team” (yeah, aren’t those Republican’s so greedy, heh heh, not like us nosiree)
b) would take back more extreme things they said to “support their team”, e.g., “Yeah, I don’t really think Obama’s health plan is the best thing in the world, I just want policy to move in sorta that direction and this is best I can hope for—of course there are flaws”. Now, if you steer the conversation into a duel from the beginning, I’m sure you can get one.
No, that would be evidence that the belief in belief is sincerely held, not the belief itself. An actual belief (zeroth level) that “God’s divine essense is embedded in children even before baptism” would correspond to some noticeable activity other than “let’s kill the people who think God’s divine essense isn’t embedded in people until baptism”. Yet in the history of religious wars, you saw exactly that.
Why would you think that? I see little reason to think so. I suspect that you think so because you reason, “Were I to believe that God’s divine essence is embedded in children even before baptism, I would never kill people for thinking that God’s divine essence isn’t embedded in people until baptism. Therefore, anyone who holds that belief wouldn’t kill people for that reason.”
I’ve already tried to explain why I think that this reasoning is invalid. You’re modeling how your own mind would behave under certain circumstances, and you’re then extrapolating to how other minds behave under those circumstances. The problem is that the other minds are theistic, so, by definition, they differ from your mind in a way that’s obviously highly relevant to how they will behave in the circumstances under consideration.
You’re still blurring the distinction between belief and belief-in-belief, or, at least, incorrectly considering them to be similar.
I’m not saying, “If I believed X, this is what I would do.” I’m saying the belief X has implications for your actions, at least in some counterfactual sense, or it’s not really a belief, but better called a belief-in-belief.
Imagine: I tell you I think monsters live under my bed. I tell you I think that the monsters kill whoever sleeps in the bed. I tell you I don’t want to die.
I sleep in my bed.
Tomorrow, I’m going to go a “BedMonster Study Group”, a type of meeting at which many of my male friends have met their future wives.
Do you think I believe there’s a monster under my bed, in the normal sense of the terms? Or do I just believe that I do?
You should argue your case using the actual pertinent facts (i.e., the actual actions and professed beliefs of the religious), not hypothetical ones.
But, even granting your hypothetical--
If I heard you say “there’s a monster under my bed” with the same earnestness and insistence that I hear when the religious profess their beliefs,
then I would strongly suspect that your mind draws conclusions from evidence in a manner very different from that in which mine does. In particular, I would expect that you reason from your beliefs to your actions very differently from how I do. I would therefore be very cautious about inferring from your actions to your actual beliefs.
There’s nothing wrong with presenting (what I consider) the same, relevant dynamic in a hypothetical context in order to make a point about the conclusions you should draw in a different one.
My hypothetical simply takes the problematic elements of the situation at hand and amplifies them. In religions, it’s hard to see the disconnect between the professed beliefs and the adherent’s actual internal predictive model of reality. My example made the disconnect obvious, and also showed the surrounding motives that give evidence as to what they really believe.
In such a scenario, I would conclude that the person is using the term “believe” differently than the term is normally used. You would conclude that the person knowingly puts himself in a situation where he expects to die, despite not wanting to die.
I think my conclusion is more reasonable.
If the relevant dynamic in the actual situation is really the same, then why not just refer to the actual situation? If you have to “amplify” the problematic elements, then you are giving yourself the burden of proving that you haven’t amplified them to the point that they yield a different conclusion than the original setting would.
If the disconnect is “hard to see” in the case of religion, then you ipso facto need strong evidence to establish that the disconnect exists. By moving to a situation where the disconnect is easier to see, so that less evidence is necessary, you are moving to a situation where your burden of proof is less. Therefore, establishing your claim in your hypothetical does not suffice to establish your claim in the original situation.
Your conclusion would be one real possibility. Another possibility is that, although he doesn’t want to die, he prefers it to sleeping somewhere other than his bed. Perhaps sleeping elsewhere seems, to him, a fate worse than death. Since I’m manifestly dealing with a crazy person, that remains a real possibility, at least until I learn more about how he thinks.
The more someone professes different beliefs from yours, the more evidence there is that their mind works differently from yours in some crucial respect, and so the less credit you should give to your mental model of them.
In approximate order of your objections to the hypothetical:
Tyrrell, it’s not my fault if you can’t handle reasoning from hypotheticals, but it certainly doesn’t make that form of reasoning—used in the rest of the civilized world—off-limits. If you think the analogy I’m making doesn’t hold, you can politely show where it breaks down. I had already attempted to speak to the specific situation in dispute—about religion—but in that case it’s less obvious how one’s actions aren’t following from one’s beliefs if the professed beliefs are the real ones.
I actually think it’s obvious enough why actual beliefs in (certain religions’) doctrine of eternal hellfire would logically imply a direct transition to an ascetic lifestyle or other drastic choices, and we can go that route if it keeps things in your comfort zone.
But the point is pretty simple: in the hypothetical, we can quite easily draw conclusions: either a) the person doesn’t actual have an internal predictive model of reality including a deadly bed monster, or b) he has some kind of weird psychology.
In short, you go with b) and I go with a). Which is why I think this kvetching about hypotheticals suddenly being off-limit is moot: even when I make the situation “more favorable” to my theory, you just bite a bigger bullet, cutting off whatever implication I would have claimed follows back to the original topic of religion.
So, let’s review that position:
But note the difficult position you’ve forced yourself into. You have to believe he is obviously crazy despite:
not being obviously crazy in any other area of his life
the psychological unity of mankind somehow breaking for a huge class of people that have been interbreeding with the rest of humankind and whom no one seriously suggests mandatory psychotherapy
his mental model of other phenomena (let’s reasonably suppose) being superior to yours in several areas
his actions associated with these “beliefs” greatly helping him achieve many non-crazy personal goals: having a social network, meeting a compatible spouse, greater assurance of spousal fidelity, the feeling of belonging.
the similarity (discussed before) between him and the uncountable historical instances of people supposedly going to great lengths for inscrutable theological doctrines, but actually protecting a meme they benefit from.
Do you see why this is an implausible chain to follow? Especially when the alternative is the majestically simple “Belief means something different in this context that is not an internal predictive model of reality”?
Hypotheticals have their uses, but they are easy to abuse. Hypotheticals are usually fine for
making the meaning of a claim clear by putting it in a simpler context (e.g., explaining the physics of a pendulum by imagining that it has an inelastic and frictionless rod), and
constructing counter-examples to absolute claims (e.g., “Stealing is always wrong!” “Really? What about if you washed up on shore after a shipwreck, and you had to steal food immediately or else die of starvation?”
Neither of these apply to your argument. Your claim was already clear, and I’m making no absolute claim. I’m the one claiming that there is inadequate evidence to justify your confidence in your conclusion.
Despite their uses, hypotheticals are usually useless for resolving disagreement. As I’ve explained, by passing to a new hypothetical situation, you only increase your burden of proof. In addition to proving the original claim, you must now show that the hypothetical doesn’t differ significantly from the actual situation. Moreover, in practice, when both participants are intelligent and thoughtful, the hypothetical will almost always fail to capture the heart of the disagreement.
For example, you’ve said that your claim is “hard to see” and “less obvious” in the case of religion. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that the elements making it hard to see and less obvious are why I doubt your claim. Thus, by moving to a hypothetical where those elements are absent, you fail to address the source of my doubt.
This is a strong claim. I’m skeptical that religious claims are precise and unambiguous enough to logically imply such things. You should be able to give a logically rigorous demonstration of this implication if it is so obvious. I will concede your point if you can do this.
You make a fair point, but one to which I have a response. Why did I object to your hypothetical if I reached the same conclusion within it anyway?
Naturally, if you keep adding conditions to your hypothetical, I will eventually agree that, given those conditions, your conclusion follows. But the more conditions you add, the further you take us from the actual situation, and so the less bearing the hypothetical has on the actual situation.
You had not yet added so many conditions to your hypothetical that I agreed with you, but I could already foresee that you eventually would, though it would be pointless for the reason above. Indeed, you added several such conditions below, conditions that were not present in your original formulation.
In particular you added that the person is “not … obviously crazy in any other area of his life” and you add that “his mental model of other phenomena … [is] superior to yours in several areas.” That is new information. It is certainly not what I would expect of the actual typical person who claims that there is a killer monster under his bed. Suppose you really did learn of some adult that he earnestly insisted that there was a killer monster under his bed. Prior to further information, wouldn’t you expect that this person suffers from numerous other severe delusions?
You’ve now ruled that out, but only by changing the hypothetical. I’ll save you work by repeating that, if you add enough such conditions, I will agree that this individual is probably lying about his beliefs. But that concession will have no bearing on what I think about actual theists.
Now to consider your list of conditions as they pertain to theists:
Religious beliefs appear to me to spread to other areas of the believer’s life in a way consistent with what I’d expect. But I don’t expect them to spread as far as you do because I don’t see the “obvious” logical implications that you claim above.
The psychological unity of humankind presents no problem for my hypothesis, because the overwhelming majority of people seem inclined to believe religious claims. It is you and I, natural-born atheists, who are the freaks :). We seem very rare.
As I argued above, I would expect evolution to make minds capable of partitioning their beliefs in this way.
It seems to me that the easiest way to reap all these benefits of belief is to make a mind that can sincerely believe without interfering with important day-to-day conveniences. This would be harder if religion really logically implied asceticism, as you claimed. But I think that the religions we’re talking about are designed (by natural memetic selection) to avoid doing that kind of thing.
This presents no particular problem. People often sincerely love their children, but they also often falsely invoke that love as their reason for doing other things, such as going to war, etc.
No; then you would have done that, rather than making an assertion about what they believed.
Perhaps you only believe that you believe that. :)
Well, I am doing that in the sense of judging religions by the factors anthropologists study rather than focusing on how I can well I can disprove the claim that the earth is 6000 years old.
Yes. Confucianism is the prototypical example of a “religion” which has no cosmological beliefs per se, but still provides for community cohesion (i.e. protection from perceived threats), an ethical code (the analects of Confucius are often quoted as proverbs/dogmas), a focus on authority figures and so forth.