Perhaps it’s not fair of me to ask for your evidence without providing any of my own. However I really don’t want to just become the irrational believer hopelessly trying to convince everyone else.
Honestly, I think you’d be coming across as much more reasonable if you were actually willing to discuss the evidence than you do by skirting around it. There are people here who wouldn’t positively receive comments standing behind evidence that they think is weak, but at least some people would respect your willingness to engage in a potentially productive conversation. I don’t think anyone here is going to react positively to “There’s some really strong evidence, and I’m not going to talk about it, but you really ought to have come up with it already yourself.”
Will Newsome gets like that sometimes, and when he does, his karma tends to plummet even faster than yours has, and he’s built up a lot of it to begin with.
If you want to judge whether our inability to provide “good” arguments really is due to our lack of familiarity with the position we’re rejecting, then there isn’t really a better way than to expose us to the arguments you think we ought to be aware of and see if we’re actually familiar with them.
Says who? That’s the sort of thing that a lot of people tend to disagree about, and there is absolute right answer to such a question. In fact, I’ll quote Wikipedia’s lead sentence: “The martial arts are codified systems and traditions of combat practices, which are practiced for a variety of reasons: self-defense, competition, physical health and fitness, entertainment, as well as mental, physical, and spiritual development.”
Well, if you want to learn techniques for historical value, to show off your gymnastic ability, etc. learning Jeet Kune Do doesn’t preclude that, but it’s important to be aware of what the techniques are useful for and what they’re not.
Similarly, being a rationalist by no means precludes appreciating tradition, participating in a tight knit community, appreciating the power of a thematic message, etc. But it’s important to be aware of what information increases the likelihood that a belief is actually true, and what doesn’t.
Honestly, I think you’d be coming across as much more reasonable if you were actually willing to discuss the evidence than you do by skirting around it.
I second this recommendation.
Ibidem, it seems that you don’t want to be put in the position of defending your beliefs among people who might consider them weird, or stupid, or even harmful. I empathize a lot with that; I’ve been in the same situation enough times to know how nasty and unfun it can get.
But unfortunately, I don’t think there’s another way the conversation can continue. You’ve said a few times that you expected us to know of some good arguments for theism, and that you’re disappointed that we don’t have any. Well, what can anyone say in response to that but “Okay, please show us what we’re missing”?
I think you can at least trust the community here to take what you say seriously, and not just dismiss you out of hand or use it as an opportunity to score tribal points and virtual high-fives. We’re at least self-aware enough to avoid those discussion traps most of the time.
I don’t think there’s another way the conversation can continue.
I’d be happy to end the conversation here, as you’re right that it’s no longer getting anywhere, but I realize that that would be lame and unsportsmanlike of me. Everyone here is expecting me to provide good arguments. I said from the start that I didn’t have any, and hoped you would, but when you guys couldn’t help meI said “but there must be some out there.” I acknowledge now that I have little choice but to come up with some, and I’ll do my best.
I will try to explain my position, and since everyone is asking I’ll include formal debate-style arguments in favor of religion.
Please, though, give me a few days. I’m still unsure where I stand in many ways, but in the last week has my views have evolved on a lot of issues.
So I’m going to write about a) my arguments in favor or religion, though I don’t feel they are sufficient and I want to improve them, and b) why I don’t fully accept the LW way of thinking.
I’m still thinking about it, and will be until I post to the Discussion thread in a few days or, perhaps (but not likely), weeks.
And then on a topic that seems to be mostly unrelated, I want to know what everyone thinks of my response to EY concerning the appropriateness of religious discussion on this website.
(I’m assuming that everyone interested in my other threads will see this here through “recent comments.”)
EDIT: I on second thought, my arguments and my thoughts probably ought to be in two separate posts.
So I’m going to write about a) my arguments in favor or religion, though I don’t feel they are sufficient and I want to improve them, and b) why I don’t fully accept the LW way of thinking.
I’m still thinking about it, and will be until I post to the Discussion...
I expect this is a bad idea. The post will probably get downvoted, and might additionally provoke another spurt of useless discussion. Lurk for a few more months instead, seeking occasional clarification without actively debating anything.
I’ve now had an overwhelming request to hear my supposed strong arguments. It would be awfully lame of me to drop out now.
Just say “Oops” and move on. My point is that you almost certainly don’t have good arguments, which is why your post won’t be well-received. If it is so, it’s better to notice that it is so in advance and act accordingly.
I don’t feel [my arguments in favor of religion] are sufficient and I want to improve them
I know you’ve heard this from several other people in this thread, but I feel it’s important to reiterate: this seems to be a really obvious case of putting the cart before the horse. It just doesn’t make sense to us that you are interested only in finding arguments that bolster a particular belief, rather than looking for the best arguments available in general, for all the beliefs you might choose among.
I’m not asking you to respond to this right now, but please keep it firmly in mind for your Discussion post, as it’s probably going to be the #1 source of disagreement.
I said from the start that I didn’t have any, and hoped you would, but when you guys couldn’t help meI said “but there must be some out there.”
This is a very odd epistemic position to be in.
If you expect there to be strong evidence for something, that means you should already strongly believe it. Whether or not you will find such evidence or what it is, is not the interesting question. The interesting question is why do you have that strong belief now? What strong evidence do you already posses that leads you to believe this thing?
If you haven’t got any reason to believe a thing, then it’s just like all the other things you don’t have reason to believe, of which there are very many, and most of them are false. Why is this one different?.
The correct response, when you notice that a belief is unsupported, is to say oops and move on. The incorrect response is to go looking specifically for confirming evidence. That is writing the bottom line in the wrong place, and is not a reliable truth-finding procedure.
Also, “debate style” arguments are generally frowned upon around here. Epistemology is between you and God, so to speak. Do your thing, collect your evidence, come to your conclusions. This community is here to help you learn to find the truth, not to debate your beliefs.
Do your thing, collect your evidence, come to your conclusions. This community is here to help you learn to find the truth, not to debate your beliefs.
That’s a very good point. From what I’ve seen, most Christians who debate atheists end up using all kinds of convoluted philosophical arguments to support their position—whereas in reality, they don’t care about these arguments one way or another, since these are not the arguments that convinced them that their version of Christianity is true. Listening to such arguments would be a waste of my time, IMO.
From what I’ve seen, most Christians who debate atheists end up using all kinds of convoluted philosophical arguments to support their position
The same is the case for a lot of atheist arguments.
whereas in reality, they don’t care about these arguments one way or another, since these are not the arguments that convinced them that their version of Christianity is true. Listening to such arguments would be a waste of my time, IMO.
Yeah, you make a good point when you say that we need “Bayesian evidence”, not just the folk kind of “evidence”. However, most people don’t know what “Bayesian evidence” means, because this is a very specific term that’s common on Less Wrong but approximately nowhere else. I don’t know a better way to put it, though.
That said, my comment wasn’t about different kinds of evidence necessarily. What I would like to hear from a Christian debater is a statement like, “This thing right here ? This is what caused me to become a Reformed Presbilutheran in the first place.” If that thing turns out to be something like, “God spoke to me personally and I never questioned the experience” or “I was raised that way and never gave it a second thought”, that’s fine. What I don’t want to do is sit there listening to some new version of the Kalaam Cosmological Argument (or whatever) for no good reason, when even the person advancing the argument doesn’t put any stock in it.
What I would like to hear from a Christian debater is a statement like, “This thing right here ? This is what caused me to become a Reformed Presbilutheran in the first place.”
I was raised Roman Catholic. I did give it a second thought; I found, through my life, very little evidence against the existence of God, and some slight evidence for the existence of God. (It doesn’t communicate well; it’s all anecdotal).
I do find, on occasion, that the actions of God are completely mysterious to me. However, an omniscient being would have access to a whole lot of data that I do not have access to; in light of that, I tend to assume that He knows what He is doing.
The existence of God also implies that the universe has some purpose, for which it is optimised. I’m not quite sure what that purpose is; the major purpose of the universe may be something that won’t happen for the next ten billion years. However, trying to imagine what the purpose could be is an interesting occasional intellectual exercise.
That is entirely the right question to ask. And the answer is, I don’t have the faintest idea.
The question there is, what would a universe without God look like? And that question is one that I can’t answer. I’d guess that such a universe, if it were possible, would have more-or-less entirely arbitrary and random natural laws; I’d imagine that it would be unlikely to develop intelligent life; and it would be unlikely for said intelligent life, if it developed, to be able to gather any understanding of the random and arbitrary natural laws at all.
The trouble is, this line of reasoning promptly falls into the same trouble as any other anthropic argument. The fact that I’m here, thinking about it, means that there is intelligent life in this universe. So a universe without intelligent life is counterfactual, right from the start. I knew that when I started constructing the argument; I can’t be sure that I’m not constructing an argument that’s somehow flawed. It’s very easy, when I’m sure of the answer, to create an argument that’s more rationalising than rationality; and it can be hard to tell if I’m doing that.
Doesn’t this argument Prove Too Much by also showing that without a Metagod, God should be expected to have arbitrary and random governing principles? The universe is ordered, but trying to explain that by appealing to an ordered God begs the question of what sort of ordered Metagod constructed the first one.
I don’t think that necessarily follows. A sufficiently intelligent mind (and I think I can assume that if God exists, then He is sufficiently intelligent) can impose self-consistency and order on itself.
This also leads to the possible alternate hypothesis that the universe is, in fact, an intelligent mind in and of itself; that would be pantheism, I think.
Of course, this does not prevent the possibility of a Pebblesorter God, or a Paperclipper God. To find out whether these are the case, we can look at the universe; there certainly don’t seem to be enough paperclips around for a Paperclipper God. There might well be a Beetler God, of course; there’s plenty of beetles. Or a Planetsorter God, a large-scale variant on the Pebblesorter; as far as we know, all the planets are neatly sorted into groups around stars. Order, by itself, does not necessarily mean an order that we would have to agree with.
A sufficiently intelligent mind (and I think I can assume that if God exists, then He is sufficiently intelligent) can impose self-consistency and order on itself.
This begs Eliezer’s question, I think. Intelligence itself is highly non-arbitrary and rule-governed, so by positing that God is sufficiently intelligent (and the bar for sufficiency here is pretty high), you’re already sneaking in a bunch of unexplained orderliness. So in this particular case, no, I don’t think you can assume that if God exists, then He is sufficiently intelligent, just like I can’t respond to your original point by assuming that if the universe exists, then it is orderly.
Intelligence itself is highly non-arbitrary and rule-governed
I disagree. Intelligence makes its own rules once it is there; but the human brain is one of the most arbitrary and hard-to-understand pieces of equipment that we know about. There have been a lot of very smart people trying to build AI for a very long time; if the creation of intelligence were highly non-arbitrary and followed well-known rules, we would have working AI by now.
So, yes; I think that intelligence can arise from arbitrary randomness. I’d go further, and claim that if it can’t arise from arbitrary randomness then it can’t exist at all; either intelligence arose in the form of God who then created an orderly universe (the theist hypothesis), or an arbitrary universe came into existence with random (and suspiciously orderly) laws that then led to intelligence in the form of humanity (the atheist hypothesis).
So in this particular case, no, I don’t think you can assume that if God exists, then He is sufficiently intelligent, just like I can’t respond to your original point by assuming that if the universe exists, then it is orderly.
Fair enough. Then let me put it this way; if God is not sufficiently intelligent, then God would be unable to create the ordered universe that we see; in this case, an ordered universe would be no more likely than it would be without God. An ordered universe is therefore evidence in favour of the claim that if God exists, then He is sufficiently intelligent to create an ordered universe.
I disagree. Intelligence makes its own rules once it is there; but the human brain is one of the most arbitrary and hard-to-understand pieces of equipment that we know about. There have been a lot of very smart people trying to build AI for a very long time; if the creation of intelligence were highly non-arbitrary and followed well-known rules, we would have working AI by now.
I agree that intelligence itself is an optimizing process (which I presume is what you mean by “making its own rules”), but it is also the product of an optimizing process, natural selection. Your claim that it is arbitrary confuses the map and the territory. Just because we don’t fully understand the rules governing the functioning of the brain does not mean it is arbitrary. Maybe it is weak evidence for this claim, but I think that is swamped by the considerable evidence that intelligence is exquisitely optimized for various quite complex purposes (and also that it operates in accord with the orderly laws of nature).
Also, smart people have been able to build AIs (albeit not AGIs), and the procedure for building machines that can perform intelligently at various tasks involves quite a bit of design. We may not know what rules govern our brain, but when we build systems that mimic (and often outperform) aspects of our mental function, we do it by programming rules.
I suspect, though, that we are talking past each other a bit here. I think you’re using the words “random” and “arbitrary” in ways with which I am unfamiliar, and, I must confess, seem confused. In what sense is the second horn of your dilemma an “arbitrary universe [coming] into existence with random (and suspiciously orderly) laws”? What does it mean to describe the universe as arbitrary and random while simultaneously acknowledging its orderliness? Do you simply mean “uncaused”, because (a) that is not the only alternative to theism, and (b) I don’t see why one would expect an uncaused universe (as opposed to a universe picked using a random selection process) not to have orderly laws.
Fair enough. Then let me put it this way; if God is not sufficiently intelligent, then God would be unable to create the ordered universe that we see; in this case, an ordered universe would be no more likely than it would be without God. An ordered universe is therefore evidence in favour of the claim that if God exists, then He is sufficiently intelligent to create an ordered universe.
OK, but this doesn’t respond to Eliezer’s point. If you conditionalize on the existence of (a Christianish) God, then plausibly an intelligent God is more likely than an unintelligent one, given the orderliness of the universe. But Eliezer was contesting your claim that the orderliness of the universe is evidence for the existence of God, while also not being evidence for the existence of a Metagod.
So Eliezer’s question is, if P(orderliness | God) > P(orderliness | ~God), then why not also P(intelligent God | Metagod) > P(intelligent God | ~Metagod)? Your response is basically that P(intelligent God | God & orderliness) > P(~intelligent God | God & orderliness). How does this help?
I don’t really follow this. Things in Platonia or Tegmark level IV don’t have separate probabilities Any coherent mathematical stucture is guranteed to exist. (And infinite ones are no problem). So the probabilty of a infinite stack of metagods depends on the coherence of a stack of metagods being considered a coherent mathematical structure, and the likelihood of our living in a Tegmark IV.
In what sense is the second horn of your dilemma an “arbitrary universe [coming] into existence with random (and suspiciously orderly) laws”? What does it mean to describe the universe as arbitrary and random while simultaneously acknowledging its orderliness? Do you simply mean “uncaused”, because (a) that is not the only alternative to theism, and (b) I don’t see why one would expect an uncaused universe (as opposed to a universe picked using a random selection process) not to have orderly laws.
What I mean is, not planned. If I toss a fair coin ten thousand times, I have an outcome (a string of heads and tails) that would be arbitrary and random. It is possible that this sequence will be an exactly alternating sequence of heads and tails (HTHTHTHTHTHT...) extending for all ten thousand tosses (a very orderly result); but if I were to actually observe such an orderly result, I would suspect that there is an intelligent agent controlling that result in some manner. (That is what I mean by ‘suspiciously orderly’ - it’s orderly enough to suggest planning).
So Eliezer’s question is, if P(orderliness | God) > P(orderliness | ~God), then why not also P(intelligent God | Metagod) > P(intelligent God | ~Metagod)? Your response is basically that P(intelligent God | God & orderliness) > P(~intelligent God | God & orderliness). How does this help?
Well, it makes sense that P(intelligent God | Metagod) > P(intelligent God | ~Metagod). And therefore P(Metagod | Metametagod) > P(Metagod | ~Metametagod), and so on to infinity; but an infinity of metagods and metametagods and so on is clearly an absurd result. The chain has to stop somewhere, and that ‘somewhere’ has to be with an intelligent being. Therefore, there has to be an intelligent being that can either exist without being created by an intelligent creator, or that can create itself in some sort of temporal loop. (As I understand it, the atheist viewpoint is that a human is an intelligent being that can exist without requiring an intelligent creator).
And my point was that P(intelligent God | ~Metagod) is non-zero. The chain can stop. P(Metagod | intelligent God) may be fairly high; but P(Metametagod | intelligent God) must be lower (since P(Metametagod | Metagod) < 1). If I go far enough along the chain, I expect to find that P(Metametametametametametametagod | intelligent God) is fairly low.
but an infinity of metagods and metametagods and so on is clearly an absurd result.
That’s not clear.. There is presumably something like that in Tegmark’s level IV.
The chain has to stop somewhere, and that ‘somewhere’ has to be with an intelligent being.
You haven’t established the ‘has to’ (p==1.0). You can always explain Order coming from Randomness by assuming enough randomness. Any finite string can be found with p>0.5 in a sufficiently long infinite string. Assuming huge amounts of unobserved randomness is not elegant, but neither is assuming stacks of metagods. Your prreferred option is to reject god-needs-a-metagod without giving a reason, but just because the alternatives seem worse. But that is very much a subjective judgement.
That’s not clear.. There is presumably something like that in Tegmark’s level IV.
Assume that P(
%5E{x+1})god |
^{x})god) = Q, where Q < 1.0 for all x. Consider an infinite chain; what is P(
^{\infty})god|god)?
This would be lim{xtoinfty} P(
^{x})god|god) = Q∞. Since Q<1.0, this limit is equal to zero.
...hmmm. Now that I think about it, that applies for any constant Q. It may be possible to craft a function Q(x) such that the limit as x approaches infinity is non-zero; for example, if I set Q(1)=0.75 and then Q(x) for x>1 such that, when multiplied by the product of all the Q(x)s so far, the distance between the previous product and 0.5 is halved (thus Q(2)=5/6, Q(3)=9/10, Q(4)=17/18, and so on); then Q(x) asymptotically approaches 1, while P(
^{\infty})god|god) = 0.5.
You haven’t established the ‘has to’ (p==1.0)
You’re right, and thank you for pointing that out. I’ve now shown that p<1.0 (it’s still pretty high, I’d think, but it’s not quite 1).
You seem to be neglecting the possibility of a cyclical god structure. Something which might very well be possible in Tegmark level IV if all the gods are computable.
Not strictly speaking. Warning, what follows is pure speculation about possibilities which may have little to no relation to how a computational multiverse would actually work. It could be possible that there are three computable universes A, B & C, such that the beings in A run a simulation of B appearing as gods to the intelligences therein, the beings in B do the same with C, and finally the beings in C do the same with A. It would probably be very hard to recognize such a structure if you were in it because of the enormous slowdowns in the simulation inside your simulation. Though it might have a comparatively short description as the solution to a an equation relating a number of universes cyclically.
In case that wasn’t clear I imagine these universes to have a common quite high-level specification, with minds being primitive objects and so on. I don’t think this would work at all if the universes had physics similar to our own; needing planets to form from elementary particles and evolution to run on these planets to get any minds at all, not speaking of computational capabilities of simulating similar universes.
I don’t really follow this. Things in Platonia or Tegmark level IV don’t have separate probabilities Any coherent mathematical structure is guaranteed to exist. (And infinite ones are no problem). So the probabilty of a infinite stack of metagods depends on the coherence of a stack of metagods being considered a coherent mathematical structure, and the likelihood of our living in a Tegmark IV.
I don’t see why the probability would decompose into the probability of its parts—a T-IV is all or nothing, as far as I can see. It actually contains very little information .. it isn’t a very fine-grained region in UniverseSpace.
My intuition is that universes with more metagods will be less common in the space of all that can possibly be. We exist in a given universe, which is perforce a universe that can possibly be; I’m trying to guess which one.
T-IV is already a large chunk of UniverSpace—it is everything that is mathematically possible. The T-IV question is more about how large a region of UnverseSpace the universe is, than about pinpointing a small region.
I disagree. Intelligence makes its own rules once it is there; but the human brain is one of the most arbitrary and hard-to-understand pieces of equipment that we know about.
It’s not arbitrary in the sense of random. It’s arbitrary in the sense of not following obvious apriori principles. It may impose its own higher-order rules, but that is something that happens in a system that already combines order and chaos in a very subtle and hard to duplicate way. Simple, comprehensible order of the kind you detect and admire in the physical unverse at large is easier to do than designing a brain. No one can build an AGI, but physicists build models of physical systems all the time.
It’s not arbitrary in the sense of random. It’s arbitrary in the sense of not following obvious apriori principles.
Agreed. The human brain is the output of a long, optimising process known as evolution.
Simple, comprehensible order of the kind you detect and admire in the physical unverse at large is easier to do than designing a brain. No one can build an AGI, but physicists build models of physical systems all the time.
Yes. Simple, comprehensible order is one of the easiest things to design; as you say, physicists do it all the time. But a lot of systems that are explicitly not designed (for example, the stock market) are very chaotic and extremely hard to model accurately.
Why is positing unobserved Matrix Lords better than positing unobserved randomness or unobserved failed universes?
Those options would also explain the observations that I am basing my argument on. I don’t have any argument for why any one of those options is at all better than any other one.
I’m not sure I understand your argument, then. If intelligence can arise from “arbitrary randomness”, then a universe that contains intelligence is evidence neither for nor against a creator deity, once you take the anthropic principle into account.
Yes, intelligence can arise from arbitrary randomness; I’m not using intelligence as evidence of an intelligent Creator. Using intelligence as an indicator of anything falls foul of anthropic principles.
My argument is that a universe that’s as straightforward, as comprehensible in its natural laws, as our universe seems about as unlikely as tossing a coin ten thousand times and getting an exact alternating pattern of heads and tails (HTHTHTHTHTHT...), or a lottery draw that consists of the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in that order.
Isn’t this just the anthropic principle in action ? Mathematically speaking, the probability of “123456” is exactly the same as that of “632415″ or any other sequence. We humans only think that “123456” is special because we especially enjoy monotonically increasing numbers.
Isn’t this just the anthropic principle in action ?
I’m not sure. The anthropic principle is arguing from the existence of an intelligent observer; I’m arguing from the existence of an orderly universe. I don’t think that the existence of an orderly universe is necessarily highly correlated with the existence of an intelligent observer. Unfortunately, lacking a large number of universes to compare with each other, I have no proof of that.
Mathematically speaking, the probability of “123456” is exactly the same as that of “632415″ or any other sequence. We humans only think that “123456” is special because we especially enjoy monotonically increasing numbers.
Yes. I do not claim that the existence of an orderly universe is undeniable proof of the existence of God; I simply claim that it is evidence which suggests that the universe is planned, and therefore that there is (or was) a Planner.
Consider the lottery example; there are a vast number of sequences that could be generated. Such as (35, 3, 19, 45, 15, 8). All are equally probable, in a fair lottery. However, in a biased, unfair lottery, in which the result is predetermined by an intelligent agent, the sort of patterns that might appeal to an intelligent agent (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) are more likely to turn up. So P(bias|(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)) > P(bias|(35, 3, 19, 45, 15, 8)).
anthropic principle is arguing from the existence of an intelligent observer; I’m arguing from the existence of an orderly universe. I don’t think that the existence of an orderly universe is necessarily highly correlated with the existence of an intelligent observer.
This depends on the direction of correlation doesn’t it? It could well be that P[Observer|Orderly universe] is low (plenty of types of order are uninhabitable) but that P[Orderly universe|Observer] is high since P[Observer|Disorderly universe] is very much lower than P[Observer|Orderly universe]. So, for example, if reality consists of a mixture of orderly and disorderly universes, then we (as observers) would expect to find ourselves in one of the “orderly” ones, and the fact that we do isn’t much evidence for anything.
Another thought is whether there are any universes with no order at all? You are likely imagining a “random” universe with all sorts of unpredictable events, but then are the parts of the universe dependent or independent random variables? If they are dependent, then those dependencies are a form of order. If they are independent, then the universe will satisfy statistical laws (large number laws for instance), so this is also a form of order. Very difficult to imagine a universe with no order.
It could well be that P[Observer|Orderly universe] is low (plenty of types of order are uninhabitable) but that P[Orderly universe|Observer] is high since P[Observer|Disorderly universe] is very much lower than P[Observer|Orderly universe].
Yes, it could be. And if this is true, then my line of argument here falls apart entirely.
Another thought is whether there are any universes with no order at all? You are likely imagining a “random” universe with all sorts of unpredictable events, but then are the parts of the universe dependent or independent random variables? If they are dependent, then those dependencies are a form of order. If they are independent, then the universe will satisfy statistical laws (large number laws for instance), so this is also a form of order. Very difficult to imagine a universe with no order.
Huh. A very good point. I was thinking in terms of randomised natural laws—natural laws, in short, that appear to make very little sense—but you raise a good point.
Hmmm… one example of a randomised universe might be one wherein any matter can accelerate in any direction at any time for absolutely no reason, and most matter does so on a fairly regular basis (mean, once a day, standard deviation six months). If the force of the acceleration is low enough (say, one metre per second squared on average, expended for an average of ten seconds), and all the other laws of nature are similar to our universe (so still a mostly orderly universe) then I can easily imagine intelligence arising in such a universe as well.
Hmmm… one example of a randomised universe might be one wherein any matter can accelerate in any direction at any time for absolutely no reason, and most matter does so on a fairly regular basis
Well let’s take that example, since the amount of “random acceleration” can be parameterised. If the parameter is very low, then we’re never going to observe it (so perhaps our universe actually is like this, but we haven’t detected it yet!) If the parameter is very large, then planets (or even stars and galaxies) will get ripped apart long before observers can evolve.
So it seems such a parameter needs to be “tuned” into a relatively narrow range (looking at orders of magnitude here) to get a universe which is still habitable but interestingly-different from the one we see. But then if there were such an interesting parameter, presumably the careful “tuning” would be noticed, and used by theists as the basis of a design argument! But it can’t be the case that both the presence of this random-acceleration phenomenon and its absence are evidence of design, so something has gone wrong here.
If you want a real-word example, think about radioactivity: atoms randomly falling apart for no apparent reason looks awfully like objects suddenly accelerating in random directions for no reason: it’s just the scale that’s very different. Further, if you imagine increasing the strength of the weak nuclear force, you’ll discover that life as we know it becomes impossible… whereas, as far as I know, if there were no weak force at all, life would still be perfectly possible (stars would still shine, because that ’s the strong force, chemical reactions would still work, gravity would still exist and so on). Maybe the Earth would cool down faster, or something along those lines, but it doesn’t seem a major barrier to life. However, the fact that the weak force is “just in the right range” has indeed been used as a “fine-tuning” argument!
Dark energy (or a “cosmological constant”) is another great example, perhaps even closer to what you describe. There is this mysterious unknown force making all galaxies accelerate away from each other, when gravity should be slowing them down. If the dark energy were many orders of magnitude bigger, then stars and galaxies couldn’t form in the first place (no life), but if it were orders of magnitude smaller (or zero), life and observers would get along fine. By plotting on the right scale (e.g. compared to a Planck scale), the dark energy can be made to look suspiciously small and “fine-tuned”, and this is the basis of a design argument.
You raise a good point, and I do indeed see the pattern that you are claiming. I personally suspect that radioactivity, and dark energy, will both turn out to be inextricably linked to the other rules of the universe; I understand that that is already the case for the weak force, apparently a different aspect of electromagnetism (which is exceedingly important for our universe).
Yes. I do not claim that the existence of an orderly universe is undeniable proof of the existence of God; I simply claim that it is evidence which suggests that the universe is planned, and therefore that there is (or was) a Planner.
Wait, isn’t the Planner basically God, or at least some kind of a god ?
However, in a biased, unfair lottery, in which the result is predetermined by an intelligent agent, the sort of patterns that might appeal to an intelligent agent (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) are more likely to turn up.
That would be an interesting test to run, actually, regardless of theism or lack thereof: are sequential numbers more likely (or perhaps less likely) than chance in our current American lottery ? If so, it would be pretty decent evidence that the lottery is rigged (not surprising, since it was in fact designed by intelligent agents, namely us humans).
That depends on the value of P(Agent prefers sequential numbers|Agent is intelligent).
In any case, are sequential numbers more likely to turn up in sequences that are not directly controlled by humans, f.ex. rolls of reasonably fair dice ?
Wait, isn’t the Planner basically God, or at least some kind of a god ?
Yes. That was my point.
That would be an interesting test to run, actually, regardless of theism or lack thereof: are sequential numbers more likely (or perhaps less likely) than chance in our current American lottery ? If so, it would be pretty decent evidence that the lottery is rigged (not surprising, since it was in fact designed by intelligent agents, namely us humans).
Hmmm. I’m not sure about the American lottery, but the South African one has 49 numbers, from which 6 are chosen (for the moment, I shall ignore the bonus ball). There are 44 sets of sequential numbers; a set of sequential numbers should be drawn, in sequential order, an average of once in 228 826 080 draws; or drawn in any order (e.g. 6, 3, 4, 2, 5, 1) once every 317814 draws.
There have been, to date, 1239 draws. These results are available. There is just under a 0.4% chance that at least one of these sets of results would consist of six sequential numbers, in any order. There is a 99.6109% chance that none of the draws consist of six sequential numbers, drawn in any order.
I imported the data above into a spreadsheet, looked at the difference between the highest and the lowest numbers in each draw, and then found the minimum of those differences; it is 10. Therefore, the South African lottery has never had six sequential numbers drawn, in any order. This is the result that I would expect from an unrigged draw.
That depends on the value of P(Agent prefers sequential numbers|Agent is intelligent).
Surely it depends more directly on the value of P(Agent is intelligent|Agent prefers sequential numbers)? To convert between those requires Bayes’ Theorem, which depends on finding a good approximation for P(Agent is intelligent), which is going to be a whole debate on its own.
I think I may have misread your previous statement then:
I do not claim that the existence of an orderly universe is undeniable proof of the existence of God; I simply claim that it is evidence which suggests that the universe is planned, and therefore that there is (or was) a Planner.
But since you agreed that the Planner is basically God, I read that sentence as saying,
I do not claim that the existence of an orderly universe is undeniable proof of the existence of God; … it is evidence which suggests that the was planned by a God.
Is the only difference between the two statements the “undeniable” part ? If so, then I get it.
Surely it depends more directly on the value of P(Agent is intelligent|Agent prefers sequential numbers)?
My point was that it’s possible that any intelligent agent who developed via some form of evolution would be more likely to prefer sequential numbers, merely as an artifact of its development. I’m not sure how likely this is, however.
Is the only difference between the two statements the “undeniable” part ? If so, then I get it.
Yes. That is correct. I see the orderly universe as evidence of God, but not as undeniable proof thereof.
My point was that it’s possible that any intelligent agent who developed via some form of evolution would be more likely to prefer sequential numbers, merely as an artifact of its development. I’m not sure how likely this is, however.
...hmmm. It is possible. I’m not sure how that can be measured, or what difference to my point it would make if true, though.
May I ask what you expected evidence against the existence of God to have looked like?
That is entirely the right question to ask. And the answer is, I don’t have the faintest idea.
Richard Dawkins does. The universe we see (he says somewhere; this is not a quote) is exactly what a world without God would look like: a world in which, on the whole, to live is to suffer and die for no reason but the pitiless working out of cause and effect, out of which emerged the blind, idiot god of evolution. A billion years of cruelty so vast that mountain ranges are made of the dead. A world beyond the reach of God.
To be fair, this type of argument only eliminates benevolent and powerful gods. It does not screen out actively malicious gods, indifferent gods, or gods who are powerless to do much of anything.
I don’t see what’s so bad about mountain ranges being made of dead bodies. The creatures that once used those bodies aren’t using them anymore—those mere atoms might as well get recycled to new uses. The problem of death is countered by the solution of the afterlife; an omniscient God would know exactly what the afterlife is like, and an omniscient benevolent God could allow death if the afterlife is a good place. (I don’t have any proof of the existance of the afterlife at hand, unfortunately).
Suffering, now; suffering is a harder problem to deal with. Which leads around to the question—what is the purpose of the universe? If suffering exists, and God exists, then suffering must have been put into the universe on purpose. For what purpose? A difficult and tricky question.
What I suspect, is that suffering is there for its long-term effects on the human psyche. People exposed to suffering often learn a lot from it, about how to handle emotions; people can form long-term bonds of friendship over a shared suffering, can learn wisdom by dealing with suffering. Yes, some people can shortcut the process, figuring out the lessons without undergoing the lesson; but many people can’t.
Suffering, now; suffering is a harder problem to deal with. Which leads around to the question—what is the purpose of the universe? If suffering exists, and God exists, then suffering must have been put into the universe on purpose. For what purpose? A difficult and tricky question.
What I suspect, is that suffering is there for
This is using your brain as an outcome pump. Start with a conclusion to be defended, observations that prima facie blow it out of the water, and generate ideas for holding onto the conclusion regardless. You can do it with anything, and it’s an interesting exercise in creative thinking to come up with a defence of propositions such as that the earth is flat, that war is good for humanity, or that you’re Jesus. (Also known as retconning.) But it is not a way of arriving at the truth of anything.
What your outcome pump has come up with is:
What I suspect, is that suffering is there for its long-term effects on the human psyche.
War really is good for humanity! But what then is the optimal amount of suffering? Just the amount we see? More? Less?
I expect that the answer is that the omniscience and omnibenevolence of God imply that what we see is indeed just the right amount. God is perfect, therefore this is the best of all possible worlds. But that would just be more outcome-pumping. No new data or reasoning is entering the argument: the idea that God has got it just right has been generated by the desired conclusion.
At some point one has to ask, where did that conclusion come from? Why do I believe it so intensely as to make all of the retconning seem sensible? Why indeed? Because earlier you expressed only a lukewarm belief:
I found, through my life, very little evidence against the existence of God, and some slight evidence for the existence of God.
This is using your brain as an outcome pump. Start with a conclusion to be defended, observations that prima facie blow it out of the water, and generate ideas for holding onto the conclusion regardless. You can do it with anything, and it’s an interesting exercise in creative thinking to come up with a defence of propositions such as that the earth is flat, that war is good for humanity, or that you’re Jesus. (Also known as retconning.) But it is not a way of arriving at the truth of anything.
I don’t see how this is any different with what Richard Dawkins is doing with his claim.
I don’t see how this is any different with what Richard Dawkins is doing with his claim.
You mean, Dawkins has latched onto atheism for irrational reasons and is generating whatever argument will sustain it, without regard to the evidence?
For anyone who has taken on the mantle of professional atheist, as Dawkins has, there is a danger of falling into that mode of argument. Do you have any reason to think he has in fact fallen?
Dawkins’s “the world looks like we would expect it to look like if there were no God argument” strikes me as a case of this. Notice how religious people claim to see evidence of God’s work all around them.
Dawkins’s “the world looks like we would expect it to look like if there were no God argument” strikes me as a case of this.
Dawkins has a case for drawing that conclusion. He is not merely pointing at the world and saying “Look! No God!” I have not actually read him beyond soundbites, merely know his reputation, so I can’t list all the arguments he makes, but one of them, I know, is the problem of evil. The vast quantity of suffering in the world is absolutely what you would expect if there is no benevolent deity overseeing the show, and is not what you would expect if there were one. (It could be what you would expect if there were an evil deity in charge, but Dawkins is arguing with the great faiths, none of which countenance any such being except in at most a subordinate role.)
Theists, on the other hand, must work hard to reconcile suffering with omnibenevolence, and what they work hard at is not the collecting of evidence, but the erection of an argumentative structure with the bottom line written in advance. For example, “suffering is good for the soul”, or “suffering is punishment for past sins”, or “man is inherently depraved and corrupt, and suffering is the inevitable consequence of his fallen state”, or just “God works in mysterious ways”.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so to someone for whom “There is no God” is a sufficiently extraordinary claim, the existence of suffering may be insufficiently extraordinary evidence. But then one must ask, according to the principle of Follow-the-Improbability, where did that extraordinariness come from? What evidence originally led from ignorance of God (for we are all born ignorant) to such certainty that the Problem Of Evil becomes the problem of reconciling Evil with God, not the problem of whether that God really exists?
Notice how religious people claim to see evidence of God’s work all around them.
If they’re just pointing at things and saying “Look! God’s work!”, then that would be an example of the fallacy in the quote you linked. More often, though, they’re making the argument from design, pointing at specific things in the world that looked designed, and concluding the existence of a designer. This is not a stupid argument, but in the end it didn’t work. Historically, natural selection wasn’t invented by atheists striving to explain away apparent design: Darwin was driven from his theism by the mechanism that he found.
I can imagine lots of ways in which the world would be different if a superpowerful superbeing was around with the ability and will to shape reality for whatever purpose—but when I imagine the superbeing’s absence it looks like the world around us.
The trouble with theists considering a “world without God” is they generally think God created the world, so without him there wouldn’t be a world at all. Obviously, this is not what we observe.
On the other hand, attempting to point at things which clearly couldn’t exist without a Creator generally falls into the category of “god of the gaps”, both in terms of the criticisms it levies and, alarmingly often, in terms of already-understood science.
Perhaps a world of Boltzmann Brains? But then, I’ve never really seen the logic behind “if there was no God, everything would just be random”—where would this randomness come from, anyway?
On the other hand, a world without any life at all, or at least intelligent life, could be argued—after all, most of the universe is lifeless as it is, and probably always will be. But then we run into all sorts of awkward anthropic issues where nobody’s quite sure how to reason about probabilities anymore. Still, if God leads to intelligent agents with high probability, then our very existence seems to count as evidence for Him—even if we’re reasoning a priori from “I think therefore I am.”
But let’s assume life exists, which it does, so that’s a fairly solid assumption. God is good, right? Clearly a torture-world would be proof of his nonexistance, as what sort of omnibenevolent superbeing would tolerate it? But then there is disagreement on how much pain would prove the nonexistence of God. Some say a sufficiently superintelligent God should be able to arrange for no pain at all without sacrificing what we value. Others claim that morality actually requires unfathomably vast numbers of people’s horrific suffering because of Justice or somesuch.
And, of course, you get the people who claim that the world they observe fits exactly with what they deduce a priori about a world without God. On the other hand, these people never seem to make original predictions, which leads me to believe that their deductions are actually incorporating things science has already told them about this world instead of the logical consequences of their priors. (The same goes for believers who claim this is exactly what they would expect a world with God to look like if they found one.)
So … yeah, I have no idea why I wrote this long, rambling comment.
Well, the natural theology seems to suffer from the problem of arbitrary, easy-to-vary hypotheses. One could, as an alternative, engage in reflection on which hypotheses are non-arbitrary and hard to vary (otherwise know as, whisper it: metaphysics).
I can imagine lots of ways in which the world would be different if a superpowerful superbeing was around with the ability and will to shape reality for whatever purpose
Looking at your examples, they all seem to boil down to “things that violate this-world!ArisKatsaris’s intuitions about how the world works”. If you lived in a world were any of the things you described in your comment occurred you wouldn’t be impressed by them. To adapt the post I linked to: If you demand miracles, miracles won’t convince you.
If you lived in a world where any of the things you described in your comment occurred you wouldn’t be impressed by them.
What does being “impressed” have to do with anything? I’m talking about believing in someone’s existence.
I don’t deny the existence of the Pope. I don’t deny the existence of the American President. I’m not impressed by either but I don’t deny them. I don’t deny the past existence of dinosaurs. I don’t even deny the existence of King David and Agamemnon as historical figures. I make fun of the people who deny the existence of historical Jesus (or Socrates or Mohammed). So why would I deny the existence of God, if I saw a world that looked to me like it has more evidence about his existence than his non-existence?
You are assuming that I started looking this from a non-believer’s perspective, but it’s what made me an unbeliever. Back when I was at school I started by just disbelieving in the Genesis story because the world looked like it would look as if evolution was true—a God throwing around dinosaur bones to prank us was even more incompatible with Christianity than “look, it’s not meant as a literal story”. Then step-by-step, more and more things spoken by Christianity just didn’t seem to fit the world around me. Not the omnibenevolence and omnipotence of god, not the nature of the soul (why does the mind depend so much on biochemistry of the brain). By my college years only some unanswered questions about the mystery of consciousness or existence could be said to even be used as a hole to fit a relevant God in.
From “Christian” in my childhood to “Christian mostly but I don’t accept everything that religion says” in highschool, to “agnostic” in college, to “agnostic-leaning-atheist” in my post-college years, and finally having the guts to just say “atheist”.
I didn’t start from a position of disbelief which I found ways to maintain—I started from a position of belief which could simply no longer be honestly maintained in the face of the evidence.
Notice how religious people claim to see evidence of God’s work all around them.
But they can only see it after the fact. I am not aware of any case in which a theist said “If God exists, we would expect to see X. Now we haven’t seen X yet, but God exists so we probably will observe X some time in the near future.” And then we observed X.
Religious people do this all the time; they call it “fulfilling prophecies”. Atheists usually discover that such prophecies are hopelessly vague, but theists disagree; they believe the prophecies to be quite specific; or, at least, specific enough for their purposes, given the fact that their God obviously exists.
This is using your brain as an outcome pump. Start with a conclusion to be defended, observations that prima facie blow it out of the water, and generate ideas for holding onto the conclusion regardless.
That may be what I am doing. But sometimes, there are things that really are different to what the prima facie evidence seems to suggest. Heat is not an effect of the transfer of a liquid called phlogiston; the Sun does not go round the Earth; the Sun is bigger than the Earth. Sometimes, there are hidden complexities that change the meaning of some of the evidence.
War really is good for humanity! But what then is the optimal amount of suffering?
Ah, an excellent question. I can’t be sure, but I expect that the optimal amount of suffering is a good deal less than we see.
This leads to the obvious question; why would a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent God create a universe with more suffering than is necessary? This requires that there be something that is more important than reducing suffering; such that the increased suffering optimises better for this other something. I do think that this something that is more important exists, and I think that it is free will. Free will implies the freedom to cause unnecessary suffering in others; and some people do this. War, for example, is a direct consequence of the free will of military leaders and politicians.
At some point one has to ask, where did that conclusion come from? Why do I believe it so intensely as to make all of the retconning seem sensible? Why indeed? Because earlier you expressed only a lukewarm belief:
I found, through my life, very little evidence against the existence of God, and some slight evidence for the existence of God.
I don’t see that as necessarily a statement of lukewarm belief. I just didn’t couch it in impressive-sounding terms.
What about suffering which is not caused by humans ? For example, consider earthquakes, floods, volcano eruptions, asteroid impacts, plague outbreaks, and the like. To use a lighter example, do we really need as many cases of the common cold as we are currently experiencing all over the world ?
The common answer to this question is something along the lines of “God moves in mysterious ways”—which does make sense once you posit such a God—but you said that “the optimal amount of suffering is a good deal less than we see”, so perhaps you have a different answer ?
I think that suffering that is limited only to what humans cannot prevent would be the optimal amount. This is because it is the amount that would exist in the optimal universe, i.e. where each individual human strives to be maximally good.
As for cases of the common cold, a lot of those are preventable; given proper medical research and distribution of medicines. Since they are preventable, I think that they should be prevented.
Well, technically, volcano eruptions and such can be prevented as well, given a sufficient level of technology. But let’s stick with the common cold as the example—why does it even exist at all ? If the humans could eventually prevent it, thus reducing the amount of suffering, then the current amount of suffering is suboptimal. When you said that “the optimal amount of suffering is a good deal less than we see”, I assumed that you were talking about the unavoidable amount of suffering caused by humans exercising their free will. The common cold, however, is not anthropogenic.
...that is a very good question. The best idea that I can come up with is that the optimal amount of suffering is time-dependent in some way. That, if the purpose of suffering is to try to improve people to some ideal, then a society that produces people who are closer to that ideal to start with would require less suffering. And that a society in which the cure to the common cold can be found, and can then be distributed to everyone, is closer to that ideal society than a society in which that is not the case.
That kind of makes sense. Of course, the standard objection to your answer is something like the following: “This seems like a rather inefficient way to design the ideal society. If I was building intelligent agents from scratch, and I wanted them to conform to some ideal; then I’d just build them to do that from the start, instead of messing around with tsunamis and common colds”.
It does seem inefficient. This would appear to imply that the universe is optimised according to multiple criteria, weighted in an unknown manner; presumably one of those other criteria is important enough to eliminate that solution.
It’s pretty clear that the universe was not built to produce a quick output. It took several billion years of runtime just to produce a society at all—it’s a short step from there to the conclusion that there’s some thing or things in the far future (possibly another mere billion years away), that we probably don’t even have the language to describe yet, that are also a part of the purpose of the universe.
It’s pretty clear that the universe was not built to produce a quick output. It took several billion years of runtime just to produce a society at all—it’s a short step from there to the conclusion that there’s some thing or things in the far future (possibly another mere billion years away), that we probably don’t even have the language to describe yet, that are also a part of the purpose of the universe.
This suggests a new heresy to me: God, creator of the universe, exists, but we, far from being the pinnacle of His creation, are merely an irrelevant by-product of His grand design. We do not merit so much as eye-blink from Him in the vasty aeons, and had better hope not to receive even that much attention. When He throws galaxies at each other, what becomes of whatever intelligent life may have populated them?
The quotidian implications of this are not greatly different from atheism. We’re on our own, it’s up to us to make the best of it.
That’s a very interesting thought. Personally, I don’t think that we’re a completely irrelevant by-product (for various reasons), but I see nothing against the hypothesis that we’re more of a pleasant side-effect than the actual pinnacle of creation. The actual pinnacle of creation might very well be something that will be created by a Friendly AI—or even by an Unfriendly AI—vast aeons in the future.
When He throws galaxies at each other, what becomes of whatever intelligent life may have populated them?
Given the length of time it takes for galaxies to collide, I’d guess that the intelligent life probably develops a technological civilisation, recognises their danger, and still has a few million years to take steps to protect themselves. Evacuation is probably a feasible strategy, though probably not the best strategy, in that sort of timeframe.
What makes suffering any harder a problem than death? Surely the same strategy works equally well in both cases.
More precisely… the “solution of the afterlife” is to posit an imperceptible condition that makes the apparent bad thing not so bad after all, despite the evidence we can observe. On that account, sure, it seems like we die, but really (we posit) only our bodies die and there’s this other non-body thing, the soul, which is what really matters which isn’t affected by that.
Applied to suffering, the same solution is something like “sure, it seems like we suffer, but really only our minds suffer and there’s this other non-mind thing, the soul, which is what really matters and which isn’t affected by that.”
Personally, I find both of these solutions unconvincing to the point of inanity, but if the former is compelling, I see no reason to not consider the latter equally so. If my soul is unaffected by death, surely it is equally unaffected by (e.g.) a broken arm?
If my soul is unaffected by death, surely it is equally unaffected by (e.g.) a broken arm?
I don’t think that the soul is entirely unaffected by death. I just think that it continues to exist afterwards. Death can still be a fairly traumatic experience, depending on how one dies; there’s a difference between dying quietly in my sleep, and dying screaming and terrified.
This, in effect, reduces the problem of death to the problem of suffering; it may be unpleasant, but afterwards there’s still a ‘me’ around to recover.
Of course, there’s the question of what goes into a soul; what it is that the soul consists of, and retains. I’m not sure; but I imagine that it includes some elements of personality, and probably some parts of memory. Since personality and memory can be affected by e.g. a broken arm, I therefore conclude that the soul can be affected by e.g. a broken arm.
Absolutely agreed: if I assume that I have a soul and a body, that what happens to my soul is important and what happens to my body is unimportant, and that my soul suffers when I suffer but does not die when I die, then what follows from those assumptions is that suffering is important but dying isn’t.
And if I instead assume that I have a soul and a body, that what happens to my soul is important and what happens to my body is unimportant, and that my soul does not suffer when I suffer and does not die when I die, then what follows from those assumptions is that neither suffering nor dying is important.
If assuming the former solves the problem of death, then assuming the latter solves both the problem of death and the problem of suffering.
I understand that you assume the former but not the latter, and therefore consider the problem of death solved but the problem of suffering open.
What I’m asking you is: why not make different assumptions, and thereby solve both?
I mean, if you were deriving the specific properties of the soul from your observations, and your observations were consistent with the first theory but not the second, that would make sense to me… but as far as I’ve understood you aren’t doing that, so what makes one set of assumptions preferable to another?
What I’m asking you is: why not make different assumptions, and thereby solve both?
This comes down to the question of, what is it that makes a soul? What is it that survives after death? For this, I will have to go to specifics, and start using a quote from the Bible:
31 “When the Son of Man comes as King and all the angels with him, he will sit on his royal throne, 32 and the people of all the nations will be gathered before him. Then he will divide them into two groups, just as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the righteous people at his right and the others at his left. 34 Then the King will say to the people on his right, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father! Come and possess the kingdom which has been prepared for you ever since the creation of the world. 35 I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me a drink; I was a stranger and you received me in your homes, 36 naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you took care of me, in prison and you visited me.’ 37 The righteous will then answer him, ‘When, Lord, did we ever see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you a drink? 38 When did we ever see you a stranger and welcome you in our homes, or naked and clothe you? 39 When did we ever see you sick or in prison, and visit you?’ 40 The King will reply, ‘I tell you, whenever you did this for one of the least important of these followers of mine, you did it for me!’
41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Away from me, you that are under God’s curse! Away to the eternal fire which has been prepared for the Devil and his angels! 42 I was hungry but you would not feed me, thirsty but you would not give me a drink; 43 I was a stranger but you would not welcome me in your homes, naked but you would not clothe me; I was sick and in prison but you would not take care of me.’ 44 Then they will answer him, ‘When, Lord, did we ever see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and we would not help you?’ 45 The King will reply, ‘I tell you, whenever you refused to help one of these least important ones, you refused to help me.’ 46 These, then, will be sent off to eternal punishment, but the righteous will go to eternal life.”
(the numbers are verse numbers)
So. Here we have a list of certain criteria that souls can hold. A soul can be responsible for feeding the hungry; giving drink to the thirsty; welcoming and sheltering the homeless; clothing the naked; taking care of prisoners, and of the sick. In short, charitable works.
Now, there are people who experience some great loss (such as the death of an only child) and then, as a result, change their lives and begin to do a lot of charity work; often in some way related to the original source of their suffering.
Therefore, we have a change in behaviour, in a way that can be related to the soul, in people who have suffered. Therefore, suffering can have an observable effect on the soul.
You know, like CCC, I’m not sure what I would expect a world truly beyond the reach of God to look like—but I really doubt it would look like reality; even if God does not exist. I lack both the knowledge and, I suspect, the capacity to deduce arbitrary features of reality a priori. If our world is exactly what Dawkins would expect from a world without God, why isn’t he able to deduce features that haven’t been corroborated yet and make original discoveries based on this knowledge?
(On the other hand, I note that Dawkins also endorses the theory that our physical laws are as a result of natural selection among black holes, does he not? So that could be a prediction, I guess, since it “explains” our laws of physics and so on.)
why isn’t he able to deduce features that haven’t been corroborated yet and make original discoveries based on this knowledge?
Just so I’m clear: if I observe an aspect of my environment which the prevailing religious establishment in my community explains the existence of by positing that God took certain actions, and I’m not confident God in fact took those actions (perhaps because I’ve seen no evidence to differentially support the hypothesis that He did so) so I look for an alternative explanation, and I find evidence differentially supporting a hypothesis that does not require the existence of God at all, and as a consequence of that I am able to make certain predictions about the world which turn out to be corroborated by later observations, what am I entitled (on your account) to infer from that sequence of events?
If our world is exactly what Dawkins would expect from a world without God, why isn’t he able to deduce features that haven’t been corroborated yet and make original discoveries based on this knowledge?
Because all of the deductions one can get from it have already been made, and amply confirmed. The basic idea that nature can be understood, if we look carefully enough and avoid resorting to the supernatural, has been enormously successful over the last few centuries. Awe at the mystery of God has not.
Even when a scientist is motivated by a religious urge to understand God’s creation, he leaves ideas of divine intervention behind when he walks into the laboratory.
Because all of the deductions one can get from it have already been made, and amply confirmed.
Funny how they were all made before anyone suggested they were deducible from atheism.
The basic idea that nature can be understood, if we look carefully enough and avoid resorting to the supernatural
… was originally predicted as a result of a rational Creator, not the lack of one. Arguably it was the wrong deduction given the premise, but still.
Let me repeat myself.
If a hypothesis actually gave enough information to deduce our current model of the universe plus or minus how uncertain we are about it, what are the odds it wouldn’t reveal more?
If an atheist from any period up to the present could have gained information not already discovered (but that we now know, of course) why does this effect mysteriously vanish when we move from a hypothetical past atheist to actual current atheists living in the modern world?
This reminds me of people who claim that they rationally evaluated everything they grew up being taught, and lo and behold they were right about everything already, despite having believed it for arational reasons.
The basic idea that nature can be understood, if we look carefully enough and avoid resorting to the supernatural
… was originally predicted as a result of a rational Creator, not the lack of one. Arguably it was the wrong deduction given the premise, but still.
Other way around, I would think. References? Everyone was a theist back in the days of Roger Bacon, they had to be. So did anyone decide, “God is rational”, and then deduce “we can attain all manner of powers if we just investigate how things work”? Or was it a case of discovering the effectiveness of empirical investigation, then deducing the rationality of God—either from genuine faith or just as a way of avoiding charges of heresy?
If an atheist from any period up to the present could have gained information not already discovered (but that we now know, of course) why does this effect mysteriously vanish when we move from a hypothetical past atheist to actual current atheists living in the modern world?
Because, as I said, it’s been done, mined out before open atheism was even a thing. “There is no God” has precious little implication beyond “this is not a benevolent universe and it’s up to us to figure everything out and save ourselves.” In contrast, “There is a God (of the Christian/Jewish/Muslim type)” leads to the false prediction that the universe is benevolent, rescued by postulating hidden or mysterious benevolence. The theist can take their pick of it being understandable (“the rational works of a rational God”) or not (“mysterious ways”), although the former is in some conflict with the postulate of benevolence passing human understanding.
Here’s a small piece of corroborating evidence while I try and remember:
‘Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. In most modern scientists this belief has died: it will be interesting to see how long their confidence in uniformity survives it. Two significant developments have already appeared—the hypothesis of a lawless sub-nature, and the surrender of the claim that science is true. We may be living nearer than we suppose to the end of the Scientific Age.’
-Lewis, C.S., Miracles: a preliminary study, Collins, London, p. 110, 1947.
Because, as I said, it’s been done, mined out before open atheism was even a thing.
It’s possible I was generalizing from having people claim to deduce more, um, recent theories. You’re right, it doesn’t stand or fall on that basis.
As far as I can tell, most arguments of this kind hinge on that “slight evidence for the existence of God” that you mentioned. Presumably, this is the evidence that overcomes your low prior of God’s existence, thus causing you to believe that God is more likely to exist than not.
Since the evidence is anecdotal and difficult (if not impossible) to communicate, this means we can’t have any kind of a meaningful debate, but I’m personally ok with that.
My parents are intelligent and thoughtful people. Anything that they agree is correct, gets a high prior by default. In general, that rule serves me well.
There are many other intelligent and thoughtful people who disagree. Why—epistemically, not historically—do you place particular weight on your parents’ beliefs? How did they come by those beliefs?
I’m afraid my reasons are mainly historical. My parents were there at a very formative time in my life. The best epistemic reason that I can give is that my father is a very wise and experienced man, whose opinions and knowledge I give a very large weight when setting my priors. There are intelligent and thoughtful people who would disagree on this matter; but I do not know them as well as my father, and I do not weigh their opinions as highly when setting priors.
How did they come by those beliefs?
Ah; for that, we shall have to consider the case of my grandparents, one in particular… it’s a long historical chain, and I’m not sure quite where it ends.
If you expect there to be strong evidence for something, that means you should already strongly believe it. Whether or not you will find such evidence or what it is, is not the interesting question. The interesting question is why do you have that strong belief now? What strong evidence do you already posses that leads you to believe this thing?
The problem here is that there is confusion between two senses of the word ‘evidence’:
a) any Bayesian evidence
b) evidence that can be easily communicated across an internet forum.
Easily communicated in a “ceteris paribus, having communicated my evidence across teh internets, if you had the same priors I do, just by you reading my description of the evidence you’d update similarly as I did when perceiving the evidence first hand”, yea that would be a tall order.
However, all evidence can at least be broadly categorized / circumscribed.
Consider: “I have strong evidence for my opinion which I do not present, since I cannot easily communicate it over a forum anyways” would be a copout, in that same sentence (119 characters) one could have said “My strong evidence partly consists of a perception of divine influence, when I felt the truth rather than deduced it.” (117 letters) - or whatever else may be the case. That would have informed the readers greatly, and appropriately steered the rest of the conversation.
If someone had a P=NP proof / a “sophisticated” (tm) qualia theory, he probably wouldn’t fully present it in a comment. However, there is a lot that could be said meaningfully (an abstract, a sketch, concepts drawn upon), which would inform the conversation and move it along constructively.
“What strong evidence do you already posses (sic) that leads you to believe this thing” is a valid question, and generally deserves at least a pointer as an answer, even when a high fidelity reproduction of the evidence qua fora isn’t feasible.
Easily communicated in a “ceteris paribus, having communicated my evidence across teh internets, if you had the same priors I do, just by you reading my description of the evidence you’d update similarly as I did when perceiving the evidence first hand”, yea that would be a tall order.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen people around here through the Aumann’s agreement theorem in the face of people who refuse to provide it. Come to think of it, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Aumann’s agreement theorem used for any other purpose around here.
Yes there are two senses. I meant “a”. If ibidem has some bayesian evidence, good for him. If it’s not communicable across the internet (perhaps it’s divine revelation), that’s no problem, because we aren’t here to convert each other.
Everyone here is expecting me to provide good arguments. I said from the start that I didn’t have any, and hoped you would, but when you guys couldn’t help meI said “but there must be some out there.”
Wait a minute.
You came here without any good reasons to believe in the truth of religion, and then were surprised when we, a group of (mostly) atheists, told you that we hadn’t heard of any good reasons to believe in religion either?
I am honestly curious: what makes you think such good reasons exist? Why must there be some good arguments for religion out there? You, a religious person, have none, and you are (apparently?) still religious despite this.
P.S. For what it’s worth, I hope you continue to participate in the discussion here, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts, and how your views have evolved.
I am honestly curious: what makes you think such good reasons exist? Why must there be some good arguments for religion out there? You, a religious person, have none, and you are (apparently?) still religious despite this.
Sure, that distinction exists. I gather your point is that it explains why ibidem is religious? That was not mysterious to me. However what he wanted from us, evidently, was (by definition, it seems to me) the sort of arguments that could be communicated via an internet forum; but he himself had no such arguments. It’s not clear to me why he thought such things must exist.
Actually, having written that, I suspect that I’m not entirely grasping what you’re getting at by pointing me to that comment. Clarify?
My point is that he feels like he has some (Bayesian) arguments (although he wouldn’t phrase it that way) and is trying to figure out how to state them explicitly.
Also, going around saying that beliefs need to be supported by “evidence” tends to result in two failure modes,
1) the person comes away with the impression that “rationality” is a game played by clever arguers intimidating people with their superior arguing and/or rhetorical skill skill.
2) the person agrees interpreting “evidence” overly narrowly and becomes a straw Vulcan and/or goes on to spend his time intimidating people with his superior arguing and/or rhetorical skill.
The tendency to dismiss personal experience as statistical flukes and/or hallucinations doesn’t help.
Well, the subject of “arguments” for or against the existence of God was first brought up in this thread by ibidem, I believe. I entirely agree that verbal reasoning is not the only or even the main sort of evidence we should examine in this matter, unless you count as “arguments” things like verbal reports or summaries of various other sorts of evidence. It’s just that verbal “arguments” are how we communicate our reasons for belief to each other in venues like Less Wrong.
That having been said, it’s not clear to me what you think the alternative is to saying that beliefs need to be supported by “evidence”. Saying beliefs… don’t need to be supported by evidence? But that’s… well, false. Of course we do need to make it clear that “evidence” encompasses more than “clever verbal proofs”.
Personal experience of supernatural things does tend to be statistical flukes and/or hallucinations, so dismissing it as such seems reasonable as a general policy. Extraordinary claims require etc. If someone’s reason for believing in a god entirely boils down to “God appeared to me, told me that he exists, and did some personal miracles for me which I can’t demonstrate or verify for you”, then they do not, in fact, have a very good reason for holding that belief.
I want to know what everyone thinks of my [response] to EY
I think it’s confused.
If I were part of a forum that self-identified as Modern Orthodox Jewish, and a Christian came along and said “you should identify yourselves as Jewish and anti-Jesus, not just Jewish, since you reject the divinity of Jesus”, that would be confused. While some Orthodox Jews no doubt reject the divinity of Jesus a priori, others simply embrace a religious tradition that, on analysis, turns out to entail the belief that Jesus was not divine.
Similarly, we are a forum that self-identifies as rational and embraces a cognitive style (e.g., one that considers any given set of evidence to entail a specific confidence in any given conclusion, rather than entailing different, equally valid, potentially mutually exclusive levels of confidence in a given conclusion depending on “paradigm”) which, on analysis, turns out to entail high confidence in the belief that Jesus was not divine. And that Zeus was not divine. And that Krishna was not divine. And that there is no X such that X was divine.
It is similarly confused to say on that basis that we are a rationality-and-atheism-centric community rather than a rationality-centric community.
I guess the core of the confusion is treating atheism like an axiom of some kind. Modelling an atheist as someone who just somehow randomly decided that there are no gods, and is not thinking about the correctness of this belief anymore, only about the consequences of this belief. At least this is how I decode the various “atheism is just another religion” statements. As if in our belief graphs, the “atheism” node only has outputs, no inputs.
I am willing to admit that for some atheists it probably is exactly like this. But that is not the only way it can be. And it is probably not very frequent at LW.
The ideas really subversive to theism are reductionism, and the distinction between the map and the territory (specifically that the “mystery” exists only in the map, that it is how an ignorant or a confused mind feels from inside). At first there is nothing suspicious about them, but unless stopped by compartmentalization, they quickly grow to materialism and atheism.
It’s not that I a priori deny the existence of spiritual beings or whatever. I am okay with using this label for starters; I just want an explanation about how they interact with the ordinary matter, what parts do they consist of, how those parts interact with each other, et cetera. I want a model that makes sense. And suddenly, there are no meaningful answers; and the few courageous attempts are obviously wrong. And then I’m like: okay guys, the problem is not that I don’t believe you; the problem is that I don’t even know what do you want me to believe, because obviously you don’t know it either. You just want me to repeat your passwords and become a member of your tribe; and to stop reflecting on this whole process. Thanks, but no; I value my sanity more than a membership in your tribe (although if I lived a few centuries ago or in some unfortunate country, my self-preservation instinct would probably make me choose otherwise).
When you write your argument “in favor of religion”, consider potential objections that this forum is likely to offer, steelman them, then counter them the best you can, using the language of the forum, then repeat. Basically, try to minimize the odds of a valid (from the forum’s point of view) objection not being already addressed in your post. You are not likely to succeed completely, unless you are smarter than the collective intelligence of LW (not even Eliezer is that smart). But it goes a long way toward presenting a good case. The mindset should be “how would DSimoon/Desrtopa/TheOtherDave/… likely reply after reading what I write?”. Now, this is very hard, much harder than what most people here usually do, which is to present their idea and let others critique it. But if you can do that, you are well on your way to doing the impossible, which is basically what you have to do to convince people here that your arguments in favor of theism have merit.
EDIT: When you think you are done, read Common Sense Atheism for Christians and see if you did your best to address every argument there to the author’s (not your) satisfaction and clearly state the basis for the disagreement where you think no agreement is possible. Asking someone here for a feedback on your draft might also be a good idea.
I’m going to unify a couple comment threads here.
Honestly, I think you’d be coming across as much more reasonable if you were actually willing to discuss the evidence than you do by skirting around it. There are people here who wouldn’t positively receive comments standing behind evidence that they think is weak, but at least some people would respect your willingness to engage in a potentially productive conversation. I don’t think anyone here is going to react positively to “There’s some really strong evidence, and I’m not going to talk about it, but you really ought to have come up with it already yourself.”
Will Newsome gets like that sometimes, and when he does, his karma tends to plummet even faster than yours has, and he’s built up a lot of it to begin with.
If you want to judge whether our inability to provide “good” arguments really is due to our lack of familiarity with the position we’re rejecting, then there isn’t really a better way than to expose us to the arguments you think we ought to be aware of and see if we’re actually familiar with them.
Well, if you want to learn techniques for historical value, to show off your gymnastic ability, etc. learning Jeet Kune Do doesn’t preclude that, but it’s important to be aware of what the techniques are useful for and what they’re not.
Similarly, being a rationalist by no means precludes appreciating tradition, participating in a tight knit community, appreciating the power of a thematic message, etc. But it’s important to be aware of what information increases the likelihood that a belief is actually true, and what doesn’t.
I second this recommendation.
Ibidem, it seems that you don’t want to be put in the position of defending your beliefs among people who might consider them weird, or stupid, or even harmful. I empathize a lot with that; I’ve been in the same situation enough times to know how nasty and unfun it can get.
But unfortunately, I don’t think there’s another way the conversation can continue. You’ve said a few times that you expected us to know of some good arguments for theism, and that you’re disappointed that we don’t have any. Well, what can anyone say in response to that but “Okay, please show us what we’re missing”?
I think you can at least trust the community here to take what you say seriously, and not just dismiss you out of hand or use it as an opportunity to score tribal points and virtual high-fives. We’re at least self-aware enough to avoid those discussion traps most of the time.
Okay.
I’d be happy to end the conversation here, as you’re right that it’s no longer getting anywhere, but I realize that that would be lame and unsportsmanlike of me. Everyone here is expecting me to provide good arguments. I said from the start that I didn’t have any, and hoped you would, but when you guys couldn’t help meI said “but there must be some out there.” I acknowledge now that I have little choice but to come up with some, and I’ll do my best.
I will try to explain my position, and since everyone is asking I’ll include formal debate-style arguments in favor of religion.
Please, though, give me a few days. I’m still unsure where I stand in many ways, but in the last week has my views have evolved on a lot of issues.
So I’m going to write about a) my arguments in favor or religion, though I don’t feel they are sufficient and I want to improve them, and b) why I don’t fully accept the LW way of thinking.
I’m still thinking about it, and will be until I post to the Discussion thread in a few days or, perhaps (but not likely), weeks.
And then on a topic that seems to be mostly unrelated, I want to know what everyone thinks of my response to EY concerning the appropriateness of religious discussion on this website.
(I’m assuming that everyone interested in my other threads will see this here through “recent comments.”)
EDIT: I on second thought, my arguments and my thoughts probably ought to be in two separate posts.
I expect this is a bad idea. The post will probably get downvoted, and might additionally provoke another spurt of useless discussion. Lurk for a few more months instead, seeking occasional clarification without actively debating anything.
I’ve now had an overwhelming request to hear my supposed strong arguments. It would be awfully lame of me to drop out now.
People want to discuss this, which means they don’t think it’s useless.
Just say “Oops” and move on. My point is that you almost certainly don’t have good arguments, which is why your post won’t be well-received. If it is so, it’s better to notice that it is so in advance and act accordingly.
Have you tested the strength of these arguments?
I know you’ve heard this from several other people in this thread, but I feel it’s important to reiterate: this seems to be a really obvious case of putting the cart before the horse. It just doesn’t make sense to us that you are interested only in finding arguments that bolster a particular belief, rather than looking for the best arguments available in general, for all the beliefs you might choose among.
I’m not asking you to respond to this right now, but please keep it firmly in mind for your Discussion post, as it’s probably going to be the #1 source of disagreement.
This is a very odd epistemic position to be in.
If you expect there to be strong evidence for something, that means you should already strongly believe it. Whether or not you will find such evidence or what it is, is not the interesting question. The interesting question is why do you have that strong belief now? What strong evidence do you already posses that leads you to believe this thing?
If you haven’t got any reason to believe a thing, then it’s just like all the other things you don’t have reason to believe, of which there are very many, and most of them are false. Why is this one different?.
The correct response, when you notice that a belief is unsupported, is to say oops and move on. The incorrect response is to go looking specifically for confirming evidence. That is writing the bottom line in the wrong place, and is not a reliable truth-finding procedure.
Also, “debate style” arguments are generally frowned upon around here. Epistemology is between you and God, so to speak. Do your thing, collect your evidence, come to your conclusions. This community is here to help you learn to find the truth, not to debate your beliefs.
That’s a very good point. From what I’ve seen, most Christians who debate atheists end up using all kinds of convoluted philosophical arguments to support their position—whereas in reality, they don’t care about these arguments one way or another, since these are not the arguments that convinced them that their version of Christianity is true. Listening to such arguments would be a waste of my time, IMO.
The same is the case for a lot of atheist arguments.
See my comment here.
Yeah, you make a good point when you say that we need “Bayesian evidence”, not just the folk kind of “evidence”. However, most people don’t know what “Bayesian evidence” means, because this is a very specific term that’s common on Less Wrong but approximately nowhere else. I don’t know a better way to put it, though.
That said, my comment wasn’t about different kinds of evidence necessarily. What I would like to hear from a Christian debater is a statement like, “This thing right here ? This is what caused me to become a Reformed Presbilutheran in the first place.” If that thing turns out to be something like, “God spoke to me personally and I never questioned the experience” or “I was raised that way and never gave it a second thought”, that’s fine. What I don’t want to do is sit there listening to some new version of the Kalaam Cosmological Argument (or whatever) for no good reason, when even the person advancing the argument doesn’t put any stock in it.
I was raised Roman Catholic. I did give it a second thought; I found, through my life, very little evidence against the existence of God, and some slight evidence for the existence of God. (It doesn’t communicate well; it’s all anecdotal).
I do find, on occasion, that the actions of God are completely mysterious to me. However, an omniscient being would have access to a whole lot of data that I do not have access to; in light of that, I tend to assume that He knows what He is doing.
The existence of God also implies that the universe has some purpose, for which it is optimised. I’m not quite sure what that purpose is; the major purpose of the universe may be something that won’t happen for the next ten billion years. However, trying to imagine what the purpose could be is an interesting occasional intellectual exercise.
May I ask what you expected evidence against the existence of God to have looked like?
That is entirely the right question to ask. And the answer is, I don’t have the faintest idea.
The question there is, what would a universe without God look like? And that question is one that I can’t answer. I’d guess that such a universe, if it were possible, would have more-or-less entirely arbitrary and random natural laws; I’d imagine that it would be unlikely to develop intelligent life; and it would be unlikely for said intelligent life, if it developed, to be able to gather any understanding of the random and arbitrary natural laws at all.
The trouble is, this line of reasoning promptly falls into the same trouble as any other anthropic argument. The fact that I’m here, thinking about it, means that there is intelligent life in this universe. So a universe without intelligent life is counterfactual, right from the start. I knew that when I started constructing the argument; I can’t be sure that I’m not constructing an argument that’s somehow flawed. It’s very easy, when I’m sure of the answer, to create an argument that’s more rationalising than rationality; and it can be hard to tell if I’m doing that.
Doesn’t this argument Prove Too Much by also showing that without a Metagod, God should be expected to have arbitrary and random governing principles? The universe is ordered, but trying to explain that by appealing to an ordered God begs the question of what sort of ordered Metagod constructed the first one.
I don’t think that necessarily follows. A sufficiently intelligent mind (and I think I can assume that if God exists, then He is sufficiently intelligent) can impose self-consistency and order on itself.
This also leads to the possible alternate hypothesis that the universe is, in fact, an intelligent mind in and of itself; that would be pantheism, I think.
Of course, this does not prevent the possibility of a Pebblesorter God, or a Paperclipper God. To find out whether these are the case, we can look at the universe; there certainly don’t seem to be enough paperclips around for a Paperclipper God. There might well be a Beetler God, of course; there’s plenty of beetles. Or a Planetsorter God, a large-scale variant on the Pebblesorter; as far as we know, all the planets are neatly sorted into groups around stars. Order, by itself, does not necessarily mean an order that we would have to agree with.
This begs Eliezer’s question, I think. Intelligence itself is highly non-arbitrary and rule-governed, so by positing that God is sufficiently intelligent (and the bar for sufficiency here is pretty high), you’re already sneaking in a bunch of unexplained orderliness. So in this particular case, no, I don’t think you can assume that if God exists, then He is sufficiently intelligent, just like I can’t respond to your original point by assuming that if the universe exists, then it is orderly.
I disagree. Intelligence makes its own rules once it is there; but the human brain is one of the most arbitrary and hard-to-understand pieces of equipment that we know about. There have been a lot of very smart people trying to build AI for a very long time; if the creation of intelligence were highly non-arbitrary and followed well-known rules, we would have working AI by now.
So, yes; I think that intelligence can arise from arbitrary randomness. I’d go further, and claim that if it can’t arise from arbitrary randomness then it can’t exist at all; either intelligence arose in the form of God who then created an orderly universe (the theist hypothesis), or an arbitrary universe came into existence with random (and suspiciously orderly) laws that then led to intelligence in the form of humanity (the atheist hypothesis).
Fair enough. Then let me put it this way; if God is not sufficiently intelligent, then God would be unable to create the ordered universe that we see; in this case, an ordered universe would be no more likely than it would be without God. An ordered universe is therefore evidence in favour of the claim that if God exists, then He is sufficiently intelligent to create an ordered universe.
I agree that intelligence itself is an optimizing process (which I presume is what you mean by “making its own rules”), but it is also the product of an optimizing process, natural selection. Your claim that it is arbitrary confuses the map and the territory. Just because we don’t fully understand the rules governing the functioning of the brain does not mean it is arbitrary. Maybe it is weak evidence for this claim, but I think that is swamped by the considerable evidence that intelligence is exquisitely optimized for various quite complex purposes (and also that it operates in accord with the orderly laws of nature).
Also, smart people have been able to build AIs (albeit not AGIs), and the procedure for building machines that can perform intelligently at various tasks involves quite a bit of design. We may not know what rules govern our brain, but when we build systems that mimic (and often outperform) aspects of our mental function, we do it by programming rules.
I suspect, though, that we are talking past each other a bit here. I think you’re using the words “random” and “arbitrary” in ways with which I am unfamiliar, and, I must confess, seem confused. In what sense is the second horn of your dilemma an “arbitrary universe [coming] into existence with random (and suspiciously orderly) laws”? What does it mean to describe the universe as arbitrary and random while simultaneously acknowledging its orderliness? Do you simply mean “uncaused”, because (a) that is not the only alternative to theism, and (b) I don’t see why one would expect an uncaused universe (as opposed to a universe picked using a random selection process) not to have orderly laws.
OK, but this doesn’t respond to Eliezer’s point. If you conditionalize on the existence of (a Christianish) God, then plausibly an intelligent God is more likely than an unintelligent one, given the orderliness of the universe. But Eliezer was contesting your claim that the orderliness of the universe is evidence for the existence of God, while also not being evidence for the existence of a Metagod.
So Eliezer’s question is, if P(orderliness | God) > P(orderliness | ~God), then why not also P(intelligent God | Metagod) > P(intelligent God | ~Metagod)? Your response is basically that P(intelligent God | God & orderliness) > P(~intelligent God | God & orderliness). How does this help?
I don’t really follow this. Things in Platonia or Tegmark level IV don’t have separate probabilities Any coherent mathematical stucture is guranteed to exist. (And infinite ones are no problem). So the probabilty of a infinite stack of metagods depends on the coherence of a stack of metagods being considered a coherent mathematical structure, and the likelihood of our living in a Tegmark IV.
What I mean is, not planned. If I toss a fair coin ten thousand times, I have an outcome (a string of heads and tails) that would be arbitrary and random. It is possible that this sequence will be an exactly alternating sequence of heads and tails (HTHTHTHTHTHT...) extending for all ten thousand tosses (a very orderly result); but if I were to actually observe such an orderly result, I would suspect that there is an intelligent agent controlling that result in some manner. (That is what I mean by ‘suspiciously orderly’ - it’s orderly enough to suggest planning).
Well, it makes sense that P(intelligent God | Metagod) > P(intelligent God | ~Metagod). And therefore P(Metagod | Metametagod) > P(Metagod | ~Metametagod), and so on to infinity; but an infinity of metagods and metametagods and so on is clearly an absurd result. The chain has to stop somewhere, and that ‘somewhere’ has to be with an intelligent being. Therefore, there has to be an intelligent being that can either exist without being created by an intelligent creator, or that can create itself in some sort of temporal loop. (As I understand it, the atheist viewpoint is that a human is an intelligent being that can exist without requiring an intelligent creator).
And my point was that P(intelligent God | ~Metagod) is non-zero. The chain can stop. P(Metagod | intelligent God) may be fairly high; but P(Metametagod | intelligent God) must be lower (since P(Metametagod | Metagod) < 1). If I go far enough along the chain, I expect to find that P(Metametametametametametametagod | intelligent God) is fairly low.
Does that help?
That’s not clear.. There is presumably something like that in Tegmark’s level IV.
You haven’t established the ‘has to’ (p==1.0). You can always explain Order coming from Randomness by assuming enough randomness. Any finite string can be found with p>0.5 in a sufficiently long infinite string. Assuming huge amounts of unobserved randomness is not elegant, but neither is assuming stacks of metagods. Your prreferred option is to reject god-needs-a-metagod without giving a reason, but just because the alternatives seem worse. But that is very much a subjective judgement.
Assume that P(
This would be lim{xtoinfty} P(
...hmmm. Now that I think about it, that applies for any constant Q. It may be possible to craft a function Q(x) such that the limit as x approaches infinity is non-zero; for example, if I set Q(1)=0.75 and then Q(x) for x>1 such that, when multiplied by the product of all the Q(x)s so far, the distance between the previous product and 0.5 is halved (thus Q(2)=5/6, Q(3)=9/10, Q(4)=17/18, and so on); then Q(x) asymptotically approaches 1, while P(
You’re right, and thank you for pointing that out. I’ve now shown that p<1.0 (it’s still pretty high, I’d think, but it’s not quite 1).
You seem to be neglecting the possibility of a cyclical god structure. Something which might very well be possible in Tegmark level IV if all the gods are computable.
Huh. You are right; I had neglected such a cyclical god structure. That would appear to require time travel, at least once, to get the cycle started.
Not strictly speaking. Warning, what follows is pure speculation about possibilities which may have little to no relation to how a computational multiverse would actually work. It could be possible that there are three computable universes A, B & C, such that the beings in A run a simulation of B appearing as gods to the intelligences therein, the beings in B do the same with C, and finally the beings in C do the same with A. It would probably be very hard to recognize such a structure if you were in it because of the enormous slowdowns in the simulation inside your simulation. Though it might have a comparatively short description as the solution to a an equation relating a number of universes cyclically.
In case that wasn’t clear I imagine these universes to have a common quite high-level specification, with minds being primitive objects and so on. I don’t think this would work at all if the universes had physics similar to our own; needing planets to form from elementary particles and evolution to run on these planets to get any minds at all, not speaking of computational capabilities of simulating similar universes.
...congratulations. I thought time travel would be a neccesity, I certainly didn’t expect that intuition to be disproved so quickly.
It may be speculative, but I don’t see any glaring reason to disprove your hypothesised structure.
I don’t really follow this. Things in Platonia or Tegmark level IV don’t have separate probabilities Any coherent mathematical structure is guaranteed to exist. (And infinite ones are no problem). So the probabilty of a infinite stack of metagods depends on the coherence of a stack of metagods being considered a coherent mathematical structure, and the likelihood of our living in a Tegmark IV.
Ah. I was trying to—very vaguely—estimate the probability that we live in such a universe.
I hope that closes the inferential gap.
I don’t see why the probability would decompose into the probability of its parts—a T-IV is all or nothing, as far as I can see. It actually contains very little information .. it isn’t a very fine-grained region in UniverseSpace.
My intuition is that universes with more metagods will be less common in the space of all that can possibly be. We exist in a given universe, which is perforce a universe that can possibly be; I’m trying to guess which one.
T-IV is already a large chunk of UniverSpace—it is everything that is mathematically possible. The T-IV question is more about how large a region of UnverseSpace the universe is, than about pinpointing a small region.
Ah. Then I think we’ve been talking past each other for some time now.
It’s not arbitrary in the sense of random. It’s arbitrary in the sense of not following obvious apriori principles. It may impose its own higher-order rules, but that is something that happens in a system that already combines order and chaos in a very subtle and hard to duplicate way. Simple, comprehensible order of the kind you detect and admire in the physical unverse at large is easier to do than designing a brain. No one can build an AGI, but physicists build models of physical systems all the time.
Agreed. The human brain is the output of a long, optimising process known as evolution.
Yes. Simple, comprehensible order is one of the easiest things to design; as you say, physicists do it all the time. But a lot of systems that are explicitly not designed (for example, the stock market) are very chaotic and extremely hard to model accurately.
I still don’t see why you would think order of a kind comprehensible to humans in the universe is evidence it was designed by a much smarter entity.
I’m trying to use it as evidence that it was designed at all.
Would it’s being designed by a Matrix Lord of non-superhuman intelligence help your case?
It would certainly explain the observations that I am using as evidence.
Why is positing unobserved Matrix Lords better than positing unobserved randomness or unobserved failed universes?
Those options would also explain the observations that I am basing my argument on. I don’t have any argument for why any one of those options is at all better than any other one.
The zero-one-infinity rule might help you out.
So, you’re suggesting there should be either zero, one, or a potentially infinite number of Matrix Lords, and never (say) exactly three?
Did you mean to say “can not” in that sentence ?
No, I did not.
I’m not sure I understand your argument, then. If intelligence can arise from “arbitrary randomness”, then a universe that contains intelligence is evidence neither for nor against a creator deity, once you take the anthropic principle into account.
Yes, intelligence can arise from arbitrary randomness; I’m not using intelligence as evidence of an intelligent Creator. Using intelligence as an indicator of anything falls foul of anthropic principles.
My argument is that a universe that’s as straightforward, as comprehensible in its natural laws, as our universe seems about as unlikely as tossing a coin ten thousand times and getting an exact alternating pattern of heads and tails (HTHTHTHTHTHT...), or a lottery draw that consists of the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in that order.
Isn’t this just the anthropic principle in action ? Mathematically speaking, the probability of “123456” is exactly the same as that of “632415″ or any other sequence. We humans only think that “123456” is special because we especially enjoy monotonically increasing numbers.
I’m not sure. The anthropic principle is arguing from the existence of an intelligent observer; I’m arguing from the existence of an orderly universe. I don’t think that the existence of an orderly universe is necessarily highly correlated with the existence of an intelligent observer. Unfortunately, lacking a large number of universes to compare with each other, I have no proof of that.
Yes. I do not claim that the existence of an orderly universe is undeniable proof of the existence of God; I simply claim that it is evidence which suggests that the universe is planned, and therefore that there is (or was) a Planner.
Consider the lottery example; there are a vast number of sequences that could be generated. Such as (35, 3, 19, 45, 15, 8). All are equally probable, in a fair lottery. However, in a biased, unfair lottery, in which the result is predetermined by an intelligent agent, the sort of patterns that might appeal to an intelligent agent (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) are more likely to turn up. So P(bias|(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)) > P(bias|(35, 3, 19, 45, 15, 8)).
This depends on the direction of correlation doesn’t it? It could well be that P[Observer|Orderly universe] is low (plenty of types of order are uninhabitable) but that P[Orderly universe|Observer] is high since P[Observer|Disorderly universe] is very much lower than P[Observer|Orderly universe]. So, for example, if reality consists of a mixture of orderly and disorderly universes, then we (as observers) would expect to find ourselves in one of the “orderly” ones, and the fact that we do isn’t much evidence for anything.
Another thought is whether there are any universes with no order at all? You are likely imagining a “random” universe with all sorts of unpredictable events, but then are the parts of the universe dependent or independent random variables? If they are dependent, then those dependencies are a form of order. If they are independent, then the universe will satisfy statistical laws (large number laws for instance), so this is also a form of order. Very difficult to imagine a universe with no order.
Yes, it could be. And if this is true, then my line of argument here falls apart entirely.
Huh. A very good point. I was thinking in terms of randomised natural laws—natural laws, in short, that appear to make very little sense—but you raise a good point.
Hmmm… one example of a randomised universe might be one wherein any matter can accelerate in any direction at any time for absolutely no reason, and most matter does so on a fairly regular basis (mean, once a day, standard deviation six months). If the force of the acceleration is low enough (say, one metre per second squared on average, expended for an average of ten seconds), and all the other laws of nature are similar to our universe (so still a mostly orderly universe) then I can easily imagine intelligence arising in such a universe as well.
Well let’s take that example, since the amount of “random acceleration” can be parameterised. If the parameter is very low, then we’re never going to observe it (so perhaps our universe actually is like this, but we haven’t detected it yet!) If the parameter is very large, then planets (or even stars and galaxies) will get ripped apart long before observers can evolve.
So it seems such a parameter needs to be “tuned” into a relatively narrow range (looking at orders of magnitude here) to get a universe which is still habitable but interestingly-different from the one we see. But then if there were such an interesting parameter, presumably the careful “tuning” would be noticed, and used by theists as the basis of a design argument! But it can’t be the case that both the presence of this random-acceleration phenomenon and its absence are evidence of design, so something has gone wrong here.
If you want a real-word example, think about radioactivity: atoms randomly falling apart for no apparent reason looks awfully like objects suddenly accelerating in random directions for no reason: it’s just the scale that’s very different. Further, if you imagine increasing the strength of the weak nuclear force, you’ll discover that life as we know it becomes impossible… whereas, as far as I know, if there were no weak force at all, life would still be perfectly possible (stars would still shine, because that ’s the strong force, chemical reactions would still work, gravity would still exist and so on). Maybe the Earth would cool down faster, or something along those lines, but it doesn’t seem a major barrier to life. However, the fact that the weak force is “just in the right range” has indeed been used as a “fine-tuning” argument!
Dark energy (or a “cosmological constant”) is another great example, perhaps even closer to what you describe. There is this mysterious unknown force making all galaxies accelerate away from each other, when gravity should be slowing them down. If the dark energy were many orders of magnitude bigger, then stars and galaxies couldn’t form in the first place (no life), but if it were orders of magnitude smaller (or zero), life and observers would get along fine. By plotting on the right scale (e.g. compared to a Planck scale), the dark energy can be made to look suspiciously small and “fine-tuned”, and this is the basis of a design argument.
Do you see the pattern here?
You raise a good point, and I do indeed see the pattern that you are claiming. I personally suspect that radioactivity, and dark energy, will both turn out to be inextricably linked to the other rules of the universe; I understand that that is already the case for the weak force, apparently a different aspect of electromagnetism (which is exceedingly important for our universe).
Wait, isn’t the Planner basically God, or at least some kind of a god ?
That would be an interesting test to run, actually, regardless of theism or lack thereof: are sequential numbers more likely (or perhaps less likely) than chance in our current American lottery ? If so, it would be pretty decent evidence that the lottery is rigged (not surprising, since it was in fact designed by intelligent agents, namely us humans).
That depends on the value of P(Agent prefers sequential numbers|Agent is intelligent).
In any case, are sequential numbers more likely to turn up in sequences that are not directly controlled by humans, f.ex. rolls of reasonably fair dice ?
Yes. That was my point.
Hmmm. I’m not sure about the American lottery, but the South African one has 49 numbers, from which 6 are chosen (for the moment, I shall ignore the bonus ball). There are 44 sets of sequential numbers; a set of sequential numbers should be drawn, in sequential order, an average of once in 228 826 080 draws; or drawn in any order (e.g. 6, 3, 4, 2, 5, 1) once every 317814 draws.
There have been, to date, 1239 draws. These results are available. There is just under a 0.4% chance that at least one of these sets of results would consist of six sequential numbers, in any order. There is a 99.6109% chance that none of the draws consist of six sequential numbers, drawn in any order.
I imported the data above into a spreadsheet, looked at the difference between the highest and the lowest numbers in each draw, and then found the minimum of those differences; it is 10. Therefore, the South African lottery has never had six sequential numbers drawn, in any order. This is the result that I would expect from an unrigged draw.
Surely it depends more directly on the value of P(Agent is intelligent|Agent prefers sequential numbers)? To convert between those requires Bayes’ Theorem, which depends on finding a good approximation for P(Agent is intelligent), which is going to be a whole debate on its own.
I think I may have misread your previous statement then:
But since you agreed that the Planner is basically God, I read that sentence as saying,
Is the only difference between the two statements the “undeniable” part ? If so, then I get it.
My point was that it’s possible that any intelligent agent who developed via some form of evolution would be more likely to prefer sequential numbers, merely as an artifact of its development. I’m not sure how likely this is, however.
Yes. That is correct. I see the orderly universe as evidence of God, but not as undeniable proof thereof.
...hmmm. It is possible. I’m not sure how that can be measured, or what difference to my point it would make if true, though.
Richard Dawkins does. The universe we see (he says somewhere; this is not a quote) is exactly what a world without God would look like: a world in which, on the whole, to live is to suffer and die for no reason but the pitiless working out of cause and effect, out of which emerged the blind, idiot god of evolution. A billion years of cruelty so vast that mountain ranges are made of the dead. A world beyond the reach of God.
To be fair, this type of argument only eliminates benevolent and powerful gods. It does not screen out actively malicious gods, indifferent gods, or gods who are powerless to do much of anything.
I don’t see what’s so bad about mountain ranges being made of dead bodies. The creatures that once used those bodies aren’t using them anymore—those mere atoms might as well get recycled to new uses. The problem of death is countered by the solution of the afterlife; an omniscient God would know exactly what the afterlife is like, and an omniscient benevolent God could allow death if the afterlife is a good place. (I don’t have any proof of the existance of the afterlife at hand, unfortunately).
Suffering, now; suffering is a harder problem to deal with. Which leads around to the question—what is the purpose of the universe? If suffering exists, and God exists, then suffering must have been put into the universe on purpose. For what purpose? A difficult and tricky question.
What I suspect, is that suffering is there for its long-term effects on the human psyche. People exposed to suffering often learn a lot from it, about how to handle emotions; people can form long-term bonds of friendship over a shared suffering, can learn wisdom by dealing with suffering. Yes, some people can shortcut the process, figuring out the lessons without undergoing the lesson; but many people can’t.
This is using your brain as an outcome pump. Start with a conclusion to be defended, observations that prima facie blow it out of the water, and generate ideas for holding onto the conclusion regardless. You can do it with anything, and it’s an interesting exercise in creative thinking to come up with a defence of propositions such as that the earth is flat, that war is good for humanity, or that you’re Jesus. (Also known as retconning.) But it is not a way of arriving at the truth of anything.
What your outcome pump has come up with is:
War really is good for humanity! But what then is the optimal amount of suffering? Just the amount we see? More? Less?
I expect that the answer is that the omniscience and omnibenevolence of God imply that what we see is indeed just the right amount. God is perfect, therefore this is the best of all possible worlds. But that would just be more outcome-pumping. No new data or reasoning is entering the argument: the idea that God has got it just right has been generated by the desired conclusion.
At some point one has to ask, where did that conclusion come from? Why do I believe it so intensely as to make all of the retconning seem sensible? Why indeed? Because earlier you expressed only a lukewarm belief:
I don’t see how this is any different with what Richard Dawkins is doing with his claim.
You mean, Dawkins has latched onto atheism for irrational reasons and is generating whatever argument will sustain it, without regard to the evidence?
For anyone who has taken on the mantle of professional atheist, as Dawkins has, there is a danger of falling into that mode of argument. Do you have any reason to think he has in fact fallen?
YouTube source (44s)
I am itching to downvote Dawkins for that.
Dawkins’s “the world looks like we would expect it to look like if there were no God argument” strikes me as a case of this. Notice how religious people claim to see evidence of God’s work all around them.
Dawkins has a case for drawing that conclusion. He is not merely pointing at the world and saying “Look! No God!” I have not actually read him beyond soundbites, merely know his reputation, so I can’t list all the arguments he makes, but one of them, I know, is the problem of evil. The vast quantity of suffering in the world is absolutely what you would expect if there is no benevolent deity overseeing the show, and is not what you would expect if there were one. (It could be what you would expect if there were an evil deity in charge, but Dawkins is arguing with the great faiths, none of which countenance any such being except in at most a subordinate role.)
Theists, on the other hand, must work hard to reconcile suffering with omnibenevolence, and what they work hard at is not the collecting of evidence, but the erection of an argumentative structure with the bottom line written in advance. For example, “suffering is good for the soul”, or “suffering is punishment for past sins”, or “man is inherently depraved and corrupt, and suffering is the inevitable consequence of his fallen state”, or just “God works in mysterious ways”.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so to someone for whom “There is no God” is a sufficiently extraordinary claim, the existence of suffering may be insufficiently extraordinary evidence. But then one must ask, according to the principle of Follow-the-Improbability, where did that extraordinariness come from? What evidence originally led from ignorance of God (for we are all born ignorant) to such certainty that the Problem Of Evil becomes the problem of reconciling Evil with God, not the problem of whether that God really exists?
If they’re just pointing at things and saying “Look! God’s work!”, then that would be an example of the fallacy in the quote you linked. More often, though, they’re making the argument from design, pointing at specific things in the world that looked designed, and concluding the existence of a designer. This is not a stupid argument, but in the end it didn’t work. Historically, natural selection wasn’t invented by atheists striving to explain away apparent design: Darwin was driven from his theism by the mechanism that he found.
I don’t see how so.
I can imagine lots of ways in which the world would be different if a superpowerful superbeing was around with the ability and will to shape reality for whatever purpose—but when I imagine the superbeing’s absence it looks like the world around us.
When I try to ask the theists what the world would have looked like without God, I don’t get very convincing answers.
The trouble with theists considering a “world without God” is they generally think God created the world, so without him there wouldn’t be a world at all. Obviously, this is not what we observe.
On the other hand, attempting to point at things which clearly couldn’t exist without a Creator generally falls into the category of “god of the gaps”, both in terms of the criticisms it levies and, alarmingly often, in terms of already-understood science.
Perhaps a world of Boltzmann Brains? But then, I’ve never really seen the logic behind “if there was no God, everything would just be random”—where would this randomness come from, anyway?
On the other hand, a world without any life at all, or at least intelligent life, could be argued—after all, most of the universe is lifeless as it is, and probably always will be. But then we run into all sorts of awkward anthropic issues where nobody’s quite sure how to reason about probabilities anymore. Still, if God leads to intelligent agents with high probability, then our very existence seems to count as evidence for Him—even if we’re reasoning a priori from “I think therefore I am.”
But let’s assume life exists, which it does, so that’s a fairly solid assumption. God is good, right? Clearly a torture-world would be proof of his nonexistance, as what sort of omnibenevolent superbeing would tolerate it? But then there is disagreement on how much pain would prove the nonexistence of God. Some say a sufficiently superintelligent God should be able to arrange for no pain at all without sacrificing what we value. Others claim that morality actually requires unfathomably vast numbers of people’s horrific suffering because of Justice or somesuch.
And, of course, you get the people who claim that the world they observe fits exactly with what they deduce a priori about a world without God. On the other hand, these people never seem to make original predictions, which leads me to believe that their deductions are actually incorporating things science has already told them about this world instead of the logical consequences of their priors. (The same goes for believers who claim this is exactly what they would expect a world with God to look like if they found one.)
So … yeah, I have no idea why I wrote this long, rambling comment.
I agreed with that, although it seems
Well, the natural theology seems to suffer from the problem of arbitrary, easy-to-vary hypotheses. One could, as an alternative, engage in reflection on which hypotheses are non-arbitrary and hard to vary (otherwise know as, whisper it: metaphysics).
Looking at your examples, they all seem to boil down to “things that violate this-world!ArisKatsaris’s intuitions about how the world works”. If you lived in a world were any of the things you described in your comment occurred you wouldn’t be impressed by them. To adapt the post I linked to: If you demand miracles, miracles won’t convince you.
What does being “impressed” have to do with anything? I’m talking about believing in someone’s existence.
I don’t deny the existence of the Pope. I don’t deny the existence of the American President. I’m not impressed by either but I don’t deny them. I don’t deny the past existence of dinosaurs. I don’t even deny the existence of King David and Agamemnon as historical figures. I make fun of the people who deny the existence of historical Jesus (or Socrates or Mohammed). So why would I deny the existence of God, if I saw a world that looked to me like it has more evidence about his existence than his non-existence?
You are assuming that I started looking this from a non-believer’s perspective, but it’s what made me an unbeliever. Back when I was at school I started by just disbelieving in the Genesis story because the world looked like it would look as if evolution was true—a God throwing around dinosaur bones to prank us was even more incompatible with Christianity than “look, it’s not meant as a literal story”. Then step-by-step, more and more things spoken by Christianity just didn’t seem to fit the world around me. Not the omnibenevolence and omnipotence of god, not the nature of the soul (why does the mind depend so much on biochemistry of the brain). By my college years only some unanswered questions about the mystery of consciousness or existence could be said to even be used as a hole to fit a relevant God in.
From “Christian” in my childhood to “Christian mostly but I don’t accept everything that religion says” in highschool, to “agnostic” in college, to “agnostic-leaning-atheist” in my post-college years, and finally having the guts to just say “atheist”.
I didn’t start from a position of disbelief which I found ways to maintain—I started from a position of belief which could simply no longer be honestly maintained in the face of the evidence.
It has to do with computing P(our universe|God exists).
But they can only see it after the fact. I am not aware of any case in which a theist said “If God exists, we would expect to see X. Now we haven’t seen X yet, but God exists so we probably will observe X some time in the near future.” And then we observed X.
Religious people do this all the time; they call it “fulfilling prophecies”. Atheists usually discover that such prophecies are hopelessly vague, but theists disagree; they believe the prophecies to be quite specific; or, at least, specific enough for their purposes, given the fact that their God obviously exists.
That may be what I am doing. But sometimes, there are things that really are different to what the prima facie evidence seems to suggest. Heat is not an effect of the transfer of a liquid called phlogiston; the Sun does not go round the Earth; the Sun is bigger than the Earth. Sometimes, there are hidden complexities that change the meaning of some of the evidence.
Ah, an excellent question. I can’t be sure, but I expect that the optimal amount of suffering is a good deal less than we see.
This leads to the obvious question; why would a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent God create a universe with more suffering than is necessary? This requires that there be something that is more important than reducing suffering; such that the increased suffering optimises better for this other something. I do think that this something that is more important exists, and I think that it is free will. Free will implies the freedom to cause unnecessary suffering in others; and some people do this. War, for example, is a direct consequence of the free will of military leaders and politicians.
I don’t see that as necessarily a statement of lukewarm belief. I just didn’t couch it in impressive-sounding terms.
What about suffering which is not caused by humans ? For example, consider earthquakes, floods, volcano eruptions, asteroid impacts, plague outbreaks, and the like. To use a lighter example, do we really need as many cases of the common cold as we are currently experiencing all over the world ?
The common answer to this question is something along the lines of “God moves in mysterious ways”—which does make sense once you posit such a God—but you said that “the optimal amount of suffering is a good deal less than we see”, so perhaps you have a different answer ?
I think that suffering that is limited only to what humans cannot prevent would be the optimal amount. This is because it is the amount that would exist in the optimal universe, i.e. where each individual human strives to be maximally good.
As for cases of the common cold, a lot of those are preventable; given proper medical research and distribution of medicines. Since they are preventable, I think that they should be prevented.
Well, technically, volcano eruptions and such can be prevented as well, given a sufficient level of technology. But let’s stick with the common cold as the example—why does it even exist at all ? If the humans could eventually prevent it, thus reducing the amount of suffering, then the current amount of suffering is suboptimal. When you said that “the optimal amount of suffering is a good deal less than we see”, I assumed that you were talking about the unavoidable amount of suffering caused by humans exercising their free will. The common cold, however, is not anthropogenic.
...that is a very good question. The best idea that I can come up with is that the optimal amount of suffering is time-dependent in some way. That, if the purpose of suffering is to try to improve people to some ideal, then a society that produces people who are closer to that ideal to start with would require less suffering. And that a society in which the cure to the common cold can be found, and can then be distributed to everyone, is closer to that ideal society than a society in which that is not the case.
That kind of makes sense. Of course, the standard objection to your answer is something like the following: “This seems like a rather inefficient way to design the ideal society. If I was building intelligent agents from scratch, and I wanted them to conform to some ideal; then I’d just build them to do that from the start, instead of messing around with tsunamis and common colds”.
It does seem inefficient. This would appear to imply that the universe is optimised according to multiple criteria, weighted in an unknown manner; presumably one of those other criteria is important enough to eliminate that solution.
It’s pretty clear that the universe was not built to produce a quick output. It took several billion years of runtime just to produce a society at all—it’s a short step from there to the conclusion that there’s some thing or things in the far future (possibly another mere billion years away), that we probably don’t even have the language to describe yet, that are also a part of the purpose of the universe.
This suggests a new heresy to me: God, creator of the universe, exists, but we, far from being the pinnacle of His creation, are merely an irrelevant by-product of His grand design. We do not merit so much as eye-blink from Him in the vasty aeons, and had better hope not to receive even that much attention. When He throws galaxies at each other, what becomes of whatever intelligent life may have populated them?
The quotidian implications of this are not greatly different from atheism. We’re on our own, it’s up to us to make the best of it.
That’s a very interesting thought. Personally, I don’t think that we’re a completely irrelevant by-product (for various reasons), but I see nothing against the hypothesis that we’re more of a pleasant side-effect than the actual pinnacle of creation. The actual pinnacle of creation might very well be something that will be created by a Friendly AI—or even by an Unfriendly AI—vast aeons in the future.
Given the length of time it takes for galaxies to collide, I’d guess that the intelligent life probably develops a technological civilisation, recognises their danger, and still has a few million years to take steps to protect themselves. Evacuation is probably a feasible strategy, though probably not the best strategy, in that sort of timeframe.
I agree that this is a reasonable conclusion to make once you assume the existence of a certain kind of deity.
What makes suffering any harder a problem than death? Surely the same strategy works equally well in both cases.
More precisely… the “solution of the afterlife” is to posit an imperceptible condition that makes the apparent bad thing not so bad after all, despite the evidence we can observe. On that account, sure, it seems like we die, but really (we posit) only our bodies die and there’s this other non-body thing, the soul, which is what really matters which isn’t affected by that.
Applied to suffering, the same solution is something like “sure, it seems like we suffer, but really only our minds suffer and there’s this other non-mind thing, the soul, which is what really matters and which isn’t affected by that.”
Personally, I find both of these solutions unconvincing to the point of inanity, but if the former is compelling, I see no reason to not consider the latter equally so. If my soul is unaffected by death, surely it is equally unaffected by (e.g.) a broken arm?
I don’t think that the soul is entirely unaffected by death. I just think that it continues to exist afterwards. Death can still be a fairly traumatic experience, depending on how one dies; there’s a difference between dying quietly in my sleep, and dying screaming and terrified.
This, in effect, reduces the problem of death to the problem of suffering; it may be unpleasant, but afterwards there’s still a ‘me’ around to recover.
Of course, there’s the question of what goes into a soul; what it is that the soul consists of, and retains. I’m not sure; but I imagine that it includes some elements of personality, and probably some parts of memory. Since personality and memory can be affected by e.g. a broken arm, I therefore conclude that the soul can be affected by e.g. a broken arm.
Absolutely agreed: if I assume that I have a soul and a body, that what happens to my soul is important and what happens to my body is unimportant, and that my soul suffers when I suffer but does not die when I die, then what follows from those assumptions is that suffering is important but dying isn’t.
And if I instead assume that I have a soul and a body, that what happens to my soul is important and what happens to my body is unimportant, and that my soul does not suffer when I suffer and does not die when I die, then what follows from those assumptions is that neither suffering nor dying is important.
If assuming the former solves the problem of death, then assuming the latter solves both the problem of death and the problem of suffering.
I understand that you assume the former but not the latter, and therefore consider the problem of death solved but the problem of suffering open.
What I’m asking you is: why not make different assumptions, and thereby solve both?
I mean, if you were deriving the specific properties of the soul from your observations, and your observations were consistent with the first theory but not the second, that would make sense to me… but as far as I’ve understood you aren’t doing that, so what makes one set of assumptions preferable to another?
This comes down to the question of, what is it that makes a soul? What is it that survives after death? For this, I will have to go to specifics, and start using a quote from the Bible:
(the numbers are verse numbers)
So. Here we have a list of certain criteria that souls can hold. A soul can be responsible for feeding the hungry; giving drink to the thirsty; welcoming and sheltering the homeless; clothing the naked; taking care of prisoners, and of the sick. In short, charitable works.
Now, there are people who experience some great loss (such as the death of an only child) and then, as a result, change their lives and begin to do a lot of charity work; often in some way related to the original source of their suffering.
Therefore, we have a change in behaviour, in a way that can be related to the soul, in people who have suffered. Therefore, suffering can have an observable effect on the soul.
I see. OK, thanks for answering the question.
You know, like CCC, I’m not sure what I would expect a world truly beyond the reach of God to look like—but I really doubt it would look like reality; even if God does not exist. I lack both the knowledge and, I suspect, the capacity to deduce arbitrary features of reality a priori. If our world is exactly what Dawkins would expect from a world without God, why isn’t he able to deduce features that haven’t been corroborated yet and make original discoveries based on this knowledge?
(On the other hand, I note that Dawkins also endorses the theory that our physical laws are as a result of natural selection among black holes, does he not? So that could be a prediction, I guess, since it “explains” our laws of physics and so on.)
Just so I’m clear: if I observe an aspect of my environment which the prevailing religious establishment in my community explains the existence of by positing that God took certain actions, and I’m not confident God in fact took those actions (perhaps because I’ve seen no evidence to differentially support the hypothesis that He did so) so I look for an alternative explanation, and I find evidence differentially supporting a hypothesis that does not require the existence of God at all, and as a consequence of that I am able to make certain predictions about the world which turn out to be corroborated by later observations, what am I entitled (on your account) to infer from that sequence of events?
That the prevailing religious establishment was wrong, somehow. In what way they were wrong depends on the details.
OK, thanks for clarifying.
Because all of the deductions one can get from it have already been made, and amply confirmed. The basic idea that nature can be understood, if we look carefully enough and avoid resorting to the supernatural, has been enormously successful over the last few centuries. Awe at the mystery of God has not.
Even when a scientist is motivated by a religious urge to understand God’s creation, he leaves ideas of divine intervention behind when he walks into the laboratory.
Funny how they were all made before anyone suggested they were deducible from atheism.
… was originally predicted as a result of a rational Creator, not the lack of one. Arguably it was the wrong deduction given the premise, but still.
Let me repeat myself.
If a hypothesis actually gave enough information to deduce our current model of the universe plus or minus how uncertain we are about it, what are the odds it wouldn’t reveal more?
If an atheist from any period up to the present could have gained information not already discovered (but that we now know, of course) why does this effect mysteriously vanish when we move from a hypothetical past atheist to actual current atheists living in the modern world?
This reminds me of people who claim that they rationally evaluated everything they grew up being taught, and lo and behold they were right about everything already, despite having believed it for arational reasons.
Other way around, I would think. References? Everyone was a theist back in the days of Roger Bacon, they had to be. So did anyone decide, “God is rational”, and then deduce “we can attain all manner of powers if we just investigate how things work”? Or was it a case of discovering the effectiveness of empirical investigation, then deducing the rationality of God—either from genuine faith or just as a way of avoiding charges of heresy?
Because, as I said, it’s been done, mined out before open atheism was even a thing. “There is no God” has precious little implication beyond “this is not a benevolent universe and it’s up to us to figure everything out and save ourselves.” In contrast, “There is a God (of the Christian/Jewish/Muslim type)” leads to the false prediction that the universe is benevolent, rescued by postulating hidden or mysterious benevolence. The theist can take their pick of it being understandable (“the rational works of a rational God”) or not (“mysterious ways”), although the former is in some conflict with the postulate of benevolence passing human understanding.
Damn you, source amnesia! shakes fist
Here’s a small piece of corroborating evidence while I try and remember:
-Lewis, C.S., Miracles: a preliminary study, Collins, London, p. 110, 1947.
It’s possible I was generalizing from having people claim to deduce more, um, recent theories. You’re right, it doesn’t stand or fall on that basis.
As far as I can tell, most arguments of this kind hinge on that “slight evidence for the existence of God” that you mentioned. Presumably, this is the evidence that overcomes your low prior of God’s existence, thus causing you to believe that God is more likely to exist than not.
Since the evidence is anecdotal and difficult (if not impossible) to communicate, this means we can’t have any kind of a meaningful debate, but I’m personally ok with that.
Actually, I gave God’s existence a fairly high prior from the start. The slight evidence merely reinforced that.
And yes, we can’t really have a meaningful debate over it.
Why the high prior, out of curiosity ?
My parents are intelligent and thoughtful people. Anything that they agree is correct, gets a high prior by default. In general, that rule serves me well.
There are many other intelligent and thoughtful people who disagree. Why—epistemically, not historically—do you place particular weight on your parents’ beliefs? How did they come by those beliefs?
I’m afraid my reasons are mainly historical. My parents were there at a very formative time in my life. The best epistemic reason that I can give is that my father is a very wise and experienced man, whose opinions and knowledge I give a very large weight when setting my priors. There are intelligent and thoughtful people who would disagree on this matter; but I do not know them as well as my father, and I do not weigh their opinions as highly when setting priors.
Ah; for that, we shall have to consider the case of my grandparents, one in particular… it’s a long historical chain, and I’m not sure quite where it ends.
Fair enough, that does make sense.
The problem here is that there is confusion between two senses of the word ‘evidence’:
a) any Bayesian evidence
b) evidence that can be easily communicated across an internet forum.
Easily communicated in a “ceteris paribus, having communicated my evidence across teh internets, if you had the same priors I do, just by you reading my description of the evidence you’d update similarly as I did when perceiving the evidence first hand”, yea that would be a tall order.
However, all evidence can at least be broadly categorized / circumscribed.
Consider: “I have strong evidence for my opinion which I do not present, since I cannot easily communicate it over a forum anyways” would be a copout, in that same sentence (119 characters) one could have said “My strong evidence partly consists of a perception of divine influence, when I felt the truth rather than deduced it.” (117 letters) - or whatever else may be the case. That would have informed the readers greatly, and appropriately steered the rest of the conversation.
If someone had a P=NP proof / a “sophisticated” (tm) qualia theory, he probably wouldn’t fully present it in a comment. However, there is a lot that could be said meaningfully (an abstract, a sketch, concepts drawn upon), which would inform the conversation and move it along constructively.
“What strong evidence do you already posses (sic) that leads you to believe this thing” is a valid question, and generally deserves at least a pointer as an answer, even when a high fidelity reproduction of the evidence qua fora isn’t feasible.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen people around here through the Aumann’s agreement theorem in the face of people who refuse to provide it. Come to think of it, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Aumann’s agreement theorem used for any other purpose around here.
Yes there are two senses. I meant “a”. If ibidem has some bayesian evidence, good for him. If it’s not communicable across the internet (perhaps it’s divine revelation), that’s no problem, because we aren’t here to convert each other.
The thing is (b) is a common definition on internet forums so it might not be clear to a newcomer what you meant.
Edit: also I suspect ibidem means “b”, most people don’t even realize “a” is a thing.
Wait a minute.
You came here without any good reasons to believe in the truth of religion, and then were surprised when we, a group of (mostly) atheists, told you that we hadn’t heard of any good reasons to believe in religion either?
I am honestly curious: what makes you think such good reasons exist? Why must there be some good arguments for religion out there? You, a religious person, have none, and you are (apparently?) still religious despite this.
P.S. For what it’s worth, I hope you continue to participate in the discussion here, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts, and how your views have evolved.
See my distinction here.
Sure, that distinction exists. I gather your point is that it explains why ibidem is religious? That was not mysterious to me. However what he wanted from us, evidently, was (by definition, it seems to me) the sort of arguments that could be communicated via an internet forum; but he himself had no such arguments. It’s not clear to me why he thought such things must exist.
Actually, having written that, I suspect that I’m not entirely grasping what you’re getting at by pointing me to that comment. Clarify?
My point is that he feels like he has some (Bayesian) arguments (although he wouldn’t phrase it that way) and is trying to figure out how to state them explicitly.
Also, going around saying that beliefs need to be supported by “evidence” tends to result in two failure modes,
1) the person comes away with the impression that “rationality” is a game played by clever arguers intimidating people with their superior arguing and/or rhetorical skill skill.
2) the person agrees interpreting “evidence” overly narrowly and becomes a straw Vulcan and/or goes on to spend his time intimidating people with his superior arguing and/or rhetorical skill.
The tendency to dismiss personal experience as statistical flukes and/or hallucinations doesn’t help.
Well, the subject of “arguments” for or against the existence of God was first brought up in this thread by ibidem, I believe. I entirely agree that verbal reasoning is not the only or even the main sort of evidence we should examine in this matter, unless you count as “arguments” things like verbal reports or summaries of various other sorts of evidence. It’s just that verbal “arguments” are how we communicate our reasons for belief to each other in venues like Less Wrong.
That having been said, it’s not clear to me what you think the alternative is to saying that beliefs need to be supported by “evidence”. Saying beliefs… don’t need to be supported by evidence? But that’s… well, false. Of course we do need to make it clear that “evidence” encompasses more than “clever verbal proofs”.
Personal experience of supernatural things does tend to be statistical flukes and/or hallucinations, so dismissing it as such seems reasonable as a general policy. Extraordinary claims require etc. If someone’s reason for believing in a god entirely boils down to “God appeared to me, told me that he exists, and did some personal miracles for me which I can’t demonstrate or verify for you”, then they do not, in fact, have a very good reason for holding that belief.
I think it’s confused.
If I were part of a forum that self-identified as Modern Orthodox Jewish, and a Christian came along and said “you should identify yourselves as Jewish and anti-Jesus, not just Jewish, since you reject the divinity of Jesus”, that would be confused. While some Orthodox Jews no doubt reject the divinity of Jesus a priori, others simply embrace a religious tradition that, on analysis, turns out to entail the belief that Jesus was not divine.
Similarly, we are a forum that self-identifies as rational and embraces a cognitive style (e.g., one that considers any given set of evidence to entail a specific confidence in any given conclusion, rather than entailing different, equally valid, potentially mutually exclusive levels of confidence in a given conclusion depending on “paradigm”) which, on analysis, turns out to entail high confidence in the belief that Jesus was not divine. And that Zeus was not divine. And that Krishna was not divine. And that there is no X such that X was divine.
It is similarly confused to say on that basis that we are a rationality-and-atheism-centric community rather than a rationality-centric community.
I guess the core of the confusion is treating atheism like an axiom of some kind. Modelling an atheist as someone who just somehow randomly decided that there are no gods, and is not thinking about the correctness of this belief anymore, only about the consequences of this belief. At least this is how I decode the various “atheism is just another religion” statements. As if in our belief graphs, the “atheism” node only has outputs, no inputs.
I am willing to admit that for some atheists it probably is exactly like this. But that is not the only way it can be. And it is probably not very frequent at LW.
The ideas really subversive to theism are reductionism, and the distinction between the map and the territory (specifically that the “mystery” exists only in the map, that it is how an ignorant or a confused mind feels from inside). At first there is nothing suspicious about them, but unless stopped by compartmentalization, they quickly grow to materialism and atheism.
It’s not that I a priori deny the existence of spiritual beings or whatever. I am okay with using this label for starters; I just want an explanation about how they interact with the ordinary matter, what parts do they consist of, how those parts interact with each other, et cetera. I want a model that makes sense. And suddenly, there are no meaningful answers; and the few courageous attempts are obviously wrong. And then I’m like: okay guys, the problem is not that I don’t believe you; the problem is that I don’t even know what do you want me to believe, because obviously you don’t know it either. You just want me to repeat your passwords and become a member of your tribe; and to stop reflecting on this whole process. Thanks, but no; I value my sanity more than a membership in your tribe (although if I lived a few centuries ago or in some unfortunate country, my self-preservation instinct would probably make me choose otherwise).
When you write your argument “in favor of religion”, consider potential objections that this forum is likely to offer, steelman them, then counter them the best you can, using the language of the forum, then repeat. Basically, try to minimize the odds of a valid (from the forum’s point of view) objection not being already addressed in your post. You are not likely to succeed completely, unless you are smarter than the collective intelligence of LW (not even Eliezer is that smart). But it goes a long way toward presenting a good case. The mindset should be “how would DSimoon/Desrtopa/TheOtherDave/… likely reply after reading what I write?”. Now, this is very hard, much harder than what most people here usually do, which is to present their idea and let others critique it. But if you can do that, you are well on your way to doing the impossible, which is basically what you have to do to convince people here that your arguments in favor of theism have merit.
EDIT: When you think you are done, read Common Sense Atheism for Christians and see if you did your best to address every argument there to the author’s (not your) satisfaction and clearly state the basis for the disagreement where you think no agreement is possible. Asking someone here for a feedback on your draft might also be a good idea.
This terminology would probably be obscure to a newcomer. For ibidem (and any confused others), here’s the explanation, on the Less Wrong wiki.
(I think your response link is broken, could you fix it? I’m interested in following it.)
Ha ha sorry, forgot to finish that, I’ll put it up.