I’m pretty new here. I heard about this site a few months ago and now I’ve read a few sequences, many posts, and all of HP:MoR.
About a week ago I created an account and introduced myself on the Open Thread along with a difficult question. Some people answered my question helpfully and honestly, but most of them mostly just wanted to argue. The discussion, which now includes over two hundred comments, was very interesting, but at the end it appeared we just disagreed about a lot of things.
It began to be clear that I don’t fully accept some important tenets of the thinking on this site—I warned I might fundamentally disagree—but a few community members became upset and decided to make me feel unwelcome on the site. My Karma dropped from 6 (+13, −7) to −25 in just a couple hours, and someone actually came out and told me I’d better leave the site for good. (Don’t let this person’s status influence your opinion of the appropriateness of such a comment, in either direction.)
Don’t worry, I’m not offended. I knew there might be a bit of backlash (though one can always hope not, because there doesn’t have to be) and I’m certainly not going to be scared away by one openly hostile user.
Now, before everyone reads the comments and takes sides because of the nature of the issue, I’d like to think about how and why this all happened. I have several different ways of thinking about it (“hypotheses”):
The easy justification for those opposing me is to blame my discourse: my opinions are not a problem as long as I present them reasonably. However, I have consistently been “incoherent” etc. and that’s why I got downvoted. Never mind that I managed to keep up hundreds of comments’ worth of intelligent discussion in the meantime.
The “contrarian” hypothesis: I am a troll. I never had anything helpful or constructive to say, and in fact everyone who participated in my discussion (e.g. shminux, TheOtherDave, Qiaochu_Yuan) ought to be downvoted for engaging with me.
The “enforcer” hypothesis: I came in here as a newbie, unaware that actually substantive disagreement is highly discouraged. The experienced community members were just trying to tell me that, and decided that being militant and aggressive would be the best way to do so.
The “militant atheist” hypothesis: my opinions are mostly fine, but I managed to really touch a nerve with a few people, who started unnecessarily attacking me (calling me irrational) and making the entire LW community look unreasonable and intolerant.
The “martyr” hypothesis: The LW community as a whole is not open to alternate ways of thinking, and can’t even say so honestly. They should have been nicer to me.
What do you think? Which of these are most accurate? Other explanations?
My generally impression has been—trying not to offend anyone—that the thinking here is sometimes pretty rigid.
I have found that there is a general consensus here that belief in God (and even a possibility that there could be a God) is fundamentally incompatible with fully rational thinking. (Though people have been reluctant to admit it because I personally think it’s unhealthy and reflects poorly on the site.)
But in any case, I’ve enjoyed the discussion and I’d guess that some other people have too. I’m definitely not going to leave as some have tried to coerce me to do; I like the way of thinking on this site, and it’s the best place I know of to find smart people who are willing to talk about things like this. I’ll keep reading at the very least.
I’m still undecided as to what I think generally of the people here.
Yours truly,
ibid.
(Oh, and I’m a Mormon. And intend to remain that way in the near future.)
I think probably none of those hypotheses are correct. I think you mean well and I think your comments have been stylistically fine. I also obviously don’t think people here are are opposed to substantive disagreement, close-minded or intolerant (or else I wouldn’t have stuck around this long). What you’ve encountered is a galaxy sized chasm of inferential distance. I’m sure you’ve had a conversation before with someone who seemed to think you knew much less about the subject than you actually did. You disagree with him and try to demonstrate you familiarity with the issue but he is so behind he doesn’t even realize that you know more than he does.
I realize it is impossible for this not to sound smug and arrogant to you: but that is how you come off to us. Really, your model of us, that we have not heard good, non-strawman arguments for the existence of God is very far off. There may be users who wouldn’t be familiar with your best argument but the people here most familiar with the existence of God debate absolutely would. And they could almost certainly fix whatever argument you provided and rebut that (which is approximately what I did in my previous reply to you).
To the extent that theism is ever taken under consideration here it is only in the context of the rationalist and materialist paradigm that is dominant here. E.g. We might talk about the possibility of our universe being a simulation created by an evolved superintelligence and the extent to which that possibility mirrors theism in it’s implications. Or (as I take it shminux believes) about how atheism is, like religion, just a special case of privileging the hypothesis. But you don’t appear to have spent enough time here to have added these concepts to your tool box and outside that framework the theism debate is old-hat to nearly all of us. It’s not that we’re close minded: it’s that we think the question is about as settled as it can be.
Moreover, while this is a place that discusses many things, we don’t enjoy retreading the basics constantly. So while a number of us politely responded to answer your question, an extended conversation about theism or our ability to consider theism is not really welcome. This isn’t because we are unwilling to consider it: it’s because we have considered it and now want to discuss newer ideas.
You don’t have to agree with this perspective. Maybe you feel like you have evidence and concepts that we’re totally unfamiliar with. But bracket those issues for now. It is nothing that will be resolvable until you’ve gotten to know us better and figured out how you might translate those concepts to us. So if you want to stick around here you’re welcome to. Learn more about our perspective, become familiar with the concepts we spend time on and feel free to discuss narrower topics that come up. But people here aren’t generally interested in extended debates about God with newcomers. That’s why you’ve been down voted. Not because we’re against dissent, just because we’re not here to do that. There are lots of places on the internet dedicated to debating theism.
Don’t mind wedrifid’s tone. That’s the way he is with everyone. But take his actual point seriously. Don’t preach your way of thinking until you’ve become a lot more familiar with our way of thinking. And a new handle at some point wouldn’t be a terrible idea.
Well put. I agree with all of this, except maybe for the need for a new nick, as people who appear to learn from their experience (“update on evidence”, in the awkward local parlance) are likely to be upvoted more generously.
I’m sure Ibidem could get more upvotes, perhaps even a great number of them, but negative one-hundred and twenty-eight is an awfully steep karma hill to climb.
Chaosmosis has a few hundred karma now after dropping at least that deep, being accused of being a troll, and facing a number of suggestions that he leave. It’s certainly not un-doable.
However, it’s important to note that I did not come in here expressly arguing my religion. I recognize how bad an idea that would be, and you’ve explained it well. So of course, anyone aiming to convert this lot of atheists is certainly going to fail. But that was never my goal, and in fact I never argued in favor of my particular God.
Look at my very first comment—it was not “this is why you are wrong,” it was “do you guys have any ideas how you could be wrong?” and the response was “no, we’re definitely not wrong.” My first comment presented a question, albeit a difficult one.
I mentioned up front that I was religious, though, as I don’t think trying to hide it would have helped anything. The community was therefore eager to argue with me, and I was happy to argue for some time. At the end, though, it was clear we simply disagreed and I said several times I wasn’t interested in a full-blown debate about religion.
To summarize, you just gave a very good explanation of why I was mistaken to come on here arguing for religion. But I didn’t come on here arguing for religion.
Really, your model of us, that we have not heard good, non-strawman arguments for the existence of God is very far off.
I’ll tell you what made me think that: I asked the community if they had any good, non-strawman arguments for God, and the overwhelming response was “Nah, there aren’t any.”
I’ll tell you what made me think that: I asked the community if they had any good, non-strawman arguments for God, and the overwhelming response was “Nah, there aren’t any.”
I’m not sure if anyone’s brought this up yet, but one of the site’s best-known contributors once ran a site dedicated to these sorts of things, though it does of course have a very atheist POV. That said, even there the arguments aren’t amazingly convincing (which you can guess by the fact that lukeprog hasn’t reconverted yet) though it does acknowledge that the other side has some very good debaters.
I’m not sure why you think it’s indicative of a problem with us that we haven’t found good arguments for the existence of God. It’s not a law that there be good arguments in favor of false propositions. I suppose you could make the naïve argument that if the position were as indefensible as it seems no one would believe in it, but unfortunately not many people judge arguments very rationally.
I asked the community if they had any good, non-strawman arguments for God, and the overwhelming response was “Nah, there aren’t any.”
Well, if there were any that we knew of, then no one here would remain an atheist for very long. We’d all convert to whichever religion made the most sense, given the strength of its arguments. IMO you should have anticipated such a response, given that atheists do, in fact, still exist on this site.
So far, we have heard many terrible arguments for religion (we’re talking logical fallacies galore), and few if any good ones. Thus, we are predisposed to thinking that the next argument for religion is going to be terrible, as well, based on past experience.
Well, if there were any that we knew of, then no one here would remain an atheist for very long.
That’s not true. The optimal situation is that both sides have strong arguments, but atheism’s arguments are stronger. A rationalist ought to have heard arguments and evidence that challenged his (dis)beliefs, and have come out stronger because of it.
IMO you should have anticipated such a response, given that atheists do, in fact, still exist on this site.
Yes, but what I expected was...um...atheists who were better than most, who had arrived at atheism through two-sided discourse.
There is a tradition of inquiry. But you only attack targets for purposes of defending them. You only attack targets you know you can defend.
In Modern Orthodox Judaism I have not heard much emphasis of the virtues of blind faith. You’re allowed to doubt. You’re just not allowed to successfully doubt.
The point being that this is exactly not how rationality is supposed to work. If you hear a convincing argument, you should update your belief in the direction of the belief the argument argues for. If you update in the other direction (“come out stronger”), then either it’s not a convincing argument (by definition), or you’re doing it wrong.
If you hear a convincing argument, you should update your belief in the direction of the belief the argument argues for. If you update in the other direction (“come out stronger”), then either it’s not a convincing argument (by definition), or you’re doing it wrong.
I didn’t mean that your initial beliefs should come out stronger. I meant that having updated for good arguments, and by incorporating them, your beliefs will be more complete, better thought-out, and more sustainable for the future.
Well, one example of such a thing might be the Simulation Argument, which I believe has been mentioned to you. It’s an argument for the possible existence of something which might be called a “god” or “gods” (though that’s usually inadvisable due to semantic baggage). Our view of what exists and what could exist certainly incorporates an understanding of the possibility that we’re living in a simulation.
Theistic arguments per se, however, are generally bad.
The Simulation Argument is certainly quite an interesting one, since it was invented by an atheist (Nick Bostrom), and as far as I can tell is only taken remotely seriously by other atheists. Many of them (including me) think it is a rather better argument for some sort of “god” or “gods” than anything theists themselves ever came up with.
For other interesting quasi-theistic arguments invented by atheists, you might want to consider Tegmark’s Level 4 multiverse. Since any “god” which is logically possible can be represented by some sort of mathematical structure, it exists somewhere within the Level 4 multiverse. David Lewis’ modal realism has a similar feature.
All these arguments tend to produce massively polytheistic rather than monotheistic conclusions (and also they imply that Santa, the Tooth Fairy, Harry Potter and Captain Kirk exist somewhere or in some simulation or other).
If you want a fun monotheistic argument invented by atheists, try this one, which was published by Robert Meyer and attributed to Hilary Putnam. It’s a clever use of the Axiom of Choice and Zorn’s Lemma.
If you want a fun monotheistic argument invented by atheists, try this one, which was published by Robert Meyer and attributed to Hilary Putnam. It’s a clever use of the Axiom of Choice and Zorn’s Lemma.
Isn’t that just the First Cause argument, wrapped up in set-theory language?
Well yes, but it “addresses” one of the really basic responses to the First Cause argument, that there might—for all we know—be an infinite chain of causes of causes, extending infinitely far into the past. One of the premises of Meyer’s argument is that any such chain itself has a cause (i.e. something supporting the whole chain). That cause might in turn have a cause and so on. However, by an application of Zorn’s Lemma you can show that there must be an uncaused cause somewhere in the system.
If you don’t assume the Axiom of Choice you don’t have Zorn’s Lemma, so the argument doesn’t work. Conversely, if God exists, then—being omnipotent—he can pick one element from every non-empty set in any collection of sets, which is the Axiom of Choice. So God is logically equivalent to the Axiom of Choice,
He also defines away the causal-loop, or time travel, response, leaving only the uncaused cause; and then arbitrarily defines any uncaused cause as God. It looks like a good argument on the surface, but when I look at it carefully it’s not so great; it’s basically defining away any possible disagreement.
I should also mention that it’s not really a monotheistic argument. It only argues for the existence of at least one God. It doesn’t argue for the non-existence of fifty million more.
It’s reasonably fun as a tongue-in-cheek argument, but I wouldn’t want to use it seriously.
He also defines away the causal-loop, or time travel, response, leaving only the uncaused cause
Well I think premise 2 just assumes there aren’t any causal loops, since if there were, the constructed relation ⇐ would not be a partial order (let alone an inductive order).
There are probably ways of patching that if you want to explicitly consider loops. Consider that if A causes B cause C causes A, then there is some infinite sequence whereby every entry in the sequence is caused by the next entry in the sequence. So this looks a bit like an infinite descending chain.
The arguer could then tweak premise 2 so it states that any such generalised infinite chain (one allowing repeated elements) still has a lower bound (some strict cause outside the whole chain) and apply an adapted version of Zorn’s Lemma to still get an uncaused cause in the whole system.
The intuition being used there is still that any infinite sequence of causes of causes must have some explanation for why the whole sequence exists at all. For instance if there is an infinite sequence of horses, each of which arises from parent horses, we still want an explanation for why there are any horses at all (and not unicorns, say). Even if a pregnant horse if sent back in time to become the ancestor of all horses, then again we still want an explanation for why there are any horses at all.
The weakness of the intuition is that the “explanation” in such a weird case might well not be a causal one, so maybe there is no further cause outside the chain, or loop. (But even then, there is a patch: the arguer could claim that the whole chain or loop should count as a combined “entity” with no cause, ie there is still some sort of uncaused cause in the system).
I agree with you that the really weak part is just defining the uncaused cause to be “God”. Apart from confusing people, why do that?
And thanks for spotting the non-uniqueness by the way… the argument as it stands does allow for multiple uncaused causes. To patch that, the arguer could perhaps define a super-entity which contains all these uncaused causes as its “parts”. Or else add an additional “common cause” premise, whereby for any two entities a, b, either a is a cause of b, or b is a cause of a, or there is some c which is a cause of both of them.
The arguer could then tweak premise 2 so it states that any such generalised infinite chain (one allowing repeated elements) still has a lower bound (some strict cause outside the whole chain) and apply an adapted version of Zorn’s Lemma to still get an uncaused cause in the whole system.
That’s just assuming the result you want. I don’t think it makes a strong argument.
(But even then, there is a patch: the arguer could claim that the whole chain or loop should count as a combined “entity” with no cause, ie there is still some sort of uncaused cause in the system).
Counting a loop as a combined entity, on the other hand, could be very useful. The combined-entity loop would be caused by everything that causes any element in the loop, and would cause anything that is caused by any element in the loop. Do this to all loops, and the end result will be to eliminate loops (at the cost of having a few extremely complex entities).
This seems fine as long as there are only a few, causally independent loops. However, if there are multiple loops that affect each other (e.g. something in loop A causes something in loop B, and something in loop B causes something in loop A) then this simply results in a different set of loops. These loops, of course, can also be combined into a single entity; but if the causality graph is sufficiently well connected, and if there is a large enough loop, the end result of this process might be that all entities end up folding into one giant super-entity, containing and consisting of everything that ever happens.
I have heard the theory before that the universe is a part of God, backed by a different argument.
I agree with you that the really weak part is just defining the uncaused cause to be “God”. Apart from confusing people, why do that?
It honestly looks like a case of writing down the conclusion at the bottom of the page and then back-filling the reasoning. He can’t justify that part, so he defines it quickly and hopes no-one pays too much attention to that line.
And thanks for spotting the non-uniqueness by the way… the argument as it stands does allow for multiple uncaused causes. To patch that
Why do you want to patch that? A quick patch looks like (again) writing the conclusion first and then filling in the reasoning afterwards.
OK, I think we both agree this is not at all a strong argument, that the bottom line is being written first, and then the premises are being chosen to get to that bottom line and so on. However, I still think it is fun to examine and play with the argument structure.
Basically, what we have here is a recipe:
Take some intuitions.
Encode them in some formal premises.
Stir with some fancy set theory.
Extract the desired conclusion : namely that there is an “uncaused cause”
It’s certainly interesting to see how weak you can make the ingredients (in step 1) before the recipe fails. Also, the process of then translating them into premises (step 2) looks interesting, as at least it helps decide whether the intuitions were even coherent in the first place. Finally, if the desired conclusion wasn’t quite strong enough for the arguer’s taste (hmm, missing that true monotheistic kick), it’s fun to work out what extra ingredient should be inserted in to the mix (let’s put in a bit of paprika)
That’s basically where I’m coming from in all this..
Ah… I think I get it. You want to play with intuitions, and see which premises would have to be proved in order to end up with monotheism via set theory.
I don’t think it would be possible to get around the point of defining God in terms of set theory. Once you have a definition, you can see if it turns up; if God is not defined, then you don’t know what you’re looking for. Looked at from that point of view, the definition of God as a first cause is probably one of the better options.
Loops can still be a problem...
The arguer could then tweak premise 2 so it states that any such generalised infinite chain (one allowing repeated elements) still has a lower bound (some strict cause outside the whole chain) and apply an adapted version of Zorn’s Lemma to still get an uncaused cause in the whole system.
This can still fail in the case where two loops have their external causes in each other. (I think. Or would that simply translate into an alternate set of loops? …I think I could figure out a set of looped entities, such that each loop has at lest one cause outside that loop, that has no first cause).
To patch that, the arguer could perhaps define a super-entity which contains all these uncaused causes as its “parts”. Or else add an additional “common cause” premise, whereby for any two entities a, b, either a is a cause of b, or b is a cause of a, or there is some c which is a cause of both of them.
Either of those would be sufficient; though the first seems to fit more possible sets.
This can still fail in the case where two loops have their external causes in each other. (I think. Or would that simply translate into an alternate set of loops? …I think I could figure out a set of looped entities, such that each loop has at lest one cause outside that loop, that has no first cause)
I think if two loops were caused by each other, then there would be a super-loop which included all the elements from both of them, and then you could look for the cause of the super-loop. The Axiom of Choice would still be needed to show that this process stops somewhere.
Finally, I rather liked your thought that causality may be so loopy that everything is a cause of everything else. The only way to get a first cause out of that mess is to treat the entire “super-duper-loop” of all things as a single uncaused entity, and if you insist on calling that “God”, you’re a pantheist.
Let’s consider loops A->B->C->A->B->C and D->E->F->D->E->F.
Let’s say, further, that B is a cause of E and D is a cause of A. Then each loop has an external cause.
Then there are also a few other loops possible:
A->B->E->F->D->A->B->E->F->D (external cause: C)
A->B->E->F->D->A->B->C->A->B->E->F->D… huh. That includes all of them, in a sort of double-loop with no external cause. I guess that would be the super-loop.
Finally, I rather liked your thought that causality may be so loopy that everything is a cause of everything else. The only way to get a first cause out of that mess is to treat the entire “super-duper-loop” of all things as a single uncaused entity, and if you insist on calling that “God”, you’re a pantheist.
Better yet; no matter what causality looks like, you can still always combine everything into a single giant, uncaused entity. You don’t need to assume away loops or infinite chains without external causes if you do that.
I’ve been doing a bit more “stir in fancy set theory” over the weekend, and believe I have an improved recipe! This builds on the idea to treat chains and loops as a single “entity” and look for a cause of that entity. It is a lot subtler than just throwing every entity together into one super-duper-entity.
Here are a bunch of premises that I think will do the trick:
A1. The collection of all entities is a set E, with two relations C and P on E, such that: x C y if and only if x is a cause of y; x P y if and only if x is a part of y.
Note: This ensures we can apply Zorn’s Lemma when considering chains in E, but is not as strong as the full Axiom of Choice. If the set E is finite or countable, for instance, then A2 applies automatically.
A3. If x C y and x P z then z C y.
Informally, “anything caused by a part is caused by the whole”.
Definitions: We define ⇐ such that x ⇐ y if and only if x = y or there are finitely many entities x1, …, xn such that x1 = x, xn = y and xi is a cause of xi+1 for i=1.. n-1. Say that a set S is a “chain” in E iff for any x, y in S we have x ⇐ y or y ⇐ x. Say that such an S is an “endless chain” iff for any x in S there is some y not equal to x in S with y ⇐ x. Say that an entity y is “uncaused” if and only if there is no z distinct from y with z ⇐ y. Also say that x is a “proper part” of y iff x is not equal to y but x P y.
Note: These definitions ensure that ⇐ is a pre-order on E. Note that an endless chain may be an infinite chain of distinct elements, or a causal loop.
A4. Let S be any endless chain in E. Then there is some z in E such that every x in S is a proper part of z.
Lemma 1: For any chain S in E, there is an element x of E with x ⇐ y for every y in S.
Proof: Suppose S has an end (not endless). Then there is some x in S such that for no other y in S is y ⇐ x. By the chain property we must have x ⇐ y for every member y of S. Alternatively, suppose that S is endless, then by A4, there is some z in E such that every x in S is a part of z. Now consider any y in S. There is some x not equal to y in S with x ⇐ y, so there are x = x1… xn = y with each xi C xi+1 for i=1..n-1. Further, by A3, as x C x2, we have z C x2 and hence z ⇐ y.
Lemma 2: For any x in E, there is some y in E such that: y ⇐ x, and for any z ⇐ y, y ⇐ z.
Theorem 3: For any x in E, there is some uncaused y in E such that y ⇐ x.
Proof: Take a y as given by Lemma 2 and consider the set S = {s: s ⇐ y}. By Lemma 2, y ⇐ s for every member of S, and if S has more than one element, then S is an endless chain. So by A4 there is some z of which every s in S is a proper part, which implies that z is not in S. But by the proof of Lemma 1, z ⇐ y, which implies z is in S: a contradiction. So it follows that S = {y}, which completes the proof.
I’ve also got some premises for aggregating multiple uncaused entities into a single entity. This gives another approach to “uniqueness”. More on my next comment, if you’re interested.
For uniqueness, we build on the idea of all uncaused causes being part of a whole. The following premises look interesting here:
B1. If x P y and y P z then x P z; x = y if and only if x P y and y P x.
This states that P is a partial order, which is reasonable for the “part of” relation.
B2. If S is any chain of parts, such that for any x, y in S we have x P y or y P x, then there is some z in E of which all members of S are parts.
This states that E is inductively ordered by the “part of” relation.
B3. If x C z and y P z then x C y.
Informally, “a cause of the whole is a cause of any part”.
B4. Suppose that y ⇐ x and z ⇐ x and both y, z are uncaused. Then y P z or z P y, or there is some w of which both y and z are proper parts.
Informally, two uncaused y and z can’t independently conspire to cause x unless they are parts of a common entity.
Definition: Say that entities x and y are causally-connected if and only if x = y, or there are entities x=x1,..,xn=y with either xi C xi+1 or xi+1 C xi for each i=1..n-1.
B5. Any two entities in E are causally-connected.
Informally, E doesn’t “come apart” into completely disconnected components, such as a bunch of isolated universes.
Theorem 4: For any x in E, there is a unique entity f(x) in E such that: f(x) is uncaused, f(x) ⇐ x, and any other uncaused y with y ⇐ x satisfies y P f(x).
Proof: For any x, define a subset E’ = {y in E: y ⇐ x, y is uncaused}. Consider any chain of parts S in E’ with at least two elements. By B2 there is some z in E of which all members of S are parts. By B3, z must be uncaused (or else some w C z would also be a cause of all the members of S, which would require them all to be equal to w, so S would be a singleton), and by A3, z ⇐ x. So z is also a member of E’. By application of Zorn’s Lemma to E’, there is a P-maximal element f in E’ such that there is no other y in E’ with f P y. But then, by B4, for any y in E’ we must have y P f; this makes f unique.
Theorem 5: For any x, y in E, f(x) = f(y) if and only if x and y are causally-connected.
Proof: It is clear that if f(x) = f(y) then x is causally-connected to y (just build a path backwards from x to f(x) and then forward again to y). Conversely, suppose that x C y, then f(x) is uncaused and satisfies f(x) ⇐ y so we have f(x) P f(y). This implies f(x) = f(y). By a simple induction on n we have that if x is causally-connected to y, then f(x) = f(y).
Corollary 6: There is a single entity g in E such that f(x) = g for every entity x in E.
(Huh. One of the ancestors to this comment—several levels up—has been downvoted enough to require a karma penalty. I wonder if there should be some statute of limitations on that; whether, say, ten levels of positive-karma posts can protect against a higher-level negative-karma post?)
A4. Let S be any endless chain in E. Then there is some z in E such that every x in S is a proper part of z.
An interesting assumption. Necessary for theorem 3, but I suspect that it’ll mean that the original cause described in theorem 3 will then very probably be an entity z that is the earliest cause.
I also note that, while z consists of all the parts in the endless chain, there is no guarantee that any of the elements in the chain, even those that cause other elements in the chain, is in any way a cause of z. In fact, the way that z is defined, z may well be causeless (or, then again, z may have a cause). While I can’t actually find anything technically invalid in theorem 3, or in assumption 4, I get the general feeling of wool being pulled over my eyes in some way.
When I consider B3, it becomes even more important to note that z as a whole is not necessarily caused by any element that is a proper part of z. The cause of a part may or may not be the cause of the whole.
Hmmm… B4 appears to be pretty much just shoehorning monotheism in. It seems a questionable assumption; if I decide to get into my car and drive, and you decide to get into your car and drive, and we drive into each other, then we both are causes of the resultant accident but we are not the same. (We are not causeless, either, so it’s not quite a counterexample, just an explanation of why I don’t think B4 is justified,) B5 is unsupported, but I can prove that all entities that I will ever observe evidence of are causally connected (i.e. they are connected to the effects on my actions of having observed them) so it will look true whether it is or not.
Though I can raise questions about your assumptions, I can’t find anything wrong with your logic from then on. So congratulations; you have a very convincing argument! …as long as you can persuade the other person to accept your assumptions, of course.
Ah… I think I get it. You want to play with intuitions, and see which premises would have to be proved in order to >end up with monotheism via set theory.
I don’t think it would be possible to get around the point of defining God in terms of set theory.
Well now, here’s a devious approach, which would probably appeal to me if I ever needed to make a career as a philosopher of religion.
Let’s suppose a theist wants to “prove” that God—by his favourite definition—exists. For instance he could define a type G, whereby an entity g is of type G if and only if g is omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good and so on, and has all those characteristics essentially and necessarily. Something like that. Then the theist finds a set of premises P, with some intuitive support, such that P ⇒ There is an uncaused cause.
And then he adds one other premise “Every entity that is not of type G has a cause” into the recipe to form a new set P’. He cranks the handle, and then P’ ⇒ There is an entity of type G. Job done!
Just in case someone accuses him of “begging the question” or “assuming what he set out to prove” he then pulls out the modal trick. He just claims that it is possible that P’ is true. This leads to the conclusion that “It is possible that there is an entity of type G”. And then, remembering he’s defined G so it includes necessary existence (if such a being is possible at all, it must exist), he can still conclude
“There is a being of type G”. Job done even better!
The modal trick reminds me of Descarte’s approach… God is definitionally perfectly good, which implies existence (since something good that doesn’t exist isn’t as good as something good that does), therefore God exists.
Huh. That modal trick is devious. But it doesn’t work. I can assume an entity that does something easily measurable (e.g. gives Christmas present to children worldwide), and then slap on a necessary existence clause; but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I can expect Santa later this year.
I think the ‘necessary existence’ clause requires a better justification in orderto be Templeton-worthy.
On reflection, the fact that an atheist would be able to come up with an argument for a god that’s more persuasive to atheists is unsurprising, especially when you consider the fact that most religious people don’t become religious via being persuaded by arguments. It’s definitely still amusing, though.
I’m definitely aware of Tegmark’s theory, though I admit I hadn’t considered it as an argument for any kind of theism. That seems like an awfully parochial and boring application of the ultimate ensemble, although you’re right that it can have that sort of application… although, if we define “supernatural” entities to mean “ontologically basic mental entities” a la Richard Carrier, would it really be the case that Tegmark’s multiverse implies the existence of such? I’m not sure it does.
Meyer’s argument begins with premises that are hilariously absurd. Defining entities as being able to be causes of themselves? Having “entities” even able to be “causes”? What? And all this without the slightest discussion of what kinds of things an “entity” can even be, or what it means to “exist”? No, this is nonsense.
Meyer’s argument begins with premises that are hilariously absurd. Defining entities as being able to be causes of themselves? Having “entities” even able to be “causes”?
I think this is mostly a presentational issue. The purpose of the argument was to construct a non-strict partial order “<=” out of the causal relation, and that requires x<=x. This is just to enable the application of Zorn’s Lemma.
To avoid the hilarity of things being causes of themselves, we could easily adjust the definition of ⇐ so that “x<=y” if and only if “x=y or x is a cause of y”. Or the argument could be presented using a strict partial order <, under which nothing will be a cause of itself. The argument doesn’t need to analyse “entity” or “exists” since such an analysis is inessential to the premises.
And finally, please remember that the whole thing was not meant to be taken seriously; though rather amusingly, Alexander Pruss (whose site I linked to) apparently has been treating it as a serious argument. Oh dear.
FWIW, the probability I place on the Simulation Argument being true is only a little higher than the probability I place on traditional theistic gods existing. Could be just me, though.
Well, traditional theistic gods tend to be incoherent as well as improbable. (Or one might say, improbable only to the extent that they are coherent, which is not very much.) So, I’m not sure how we’d integrate that into a probability estimate.
God-wise, I’ve never seen any evidence for anything remotely supernatural, and plenty of evidence for natural things. I know that throughout human history, many phenomena traditionally attributed to gods (f.ex. lightning) have later been demonstrated to occur by natural means; the reverse has never happened. These facts, combined with the internal (as well as mutual) inconsistencies inherent in most major religions, serve to drive the probability down into negligibility.
As for the Simulation Argument, once again, I’ve never seen any evidence of it, or any Matrix Lords, etc. Until I do, it’s simply not parsimonious for me to behave as though the argument was true. However, unlike some forms of theism, the Simulation Argument is at least internally consistent. In additions, I’ve seen computers before and I know how they can be used to run simulations, which constitutes a small amount of circumstantial evidence toward the Argument.
EDIT: I should mention that the prior for both claims is already very low, due to their complexity.
Epsilon is not a number, it’s a cop-out. Unless you put a number you are reasonably confident in on your prior, how would you update it in light of potential new evidence?
Well, so far, I have received zero evidence for the existence of either gods or Matrix Lords. This leaves me with, at best, just the original prior. I said “at best”, because some of the observations I’d received could be interpreted as weak evidence against gods (or Matrix Lords), but I’m willing to ignore that for now.
If I’m using some measure of algorithmic complexity for the prior, what values should I arrive at ? Both the gods and the Matrix Lords are intelligent in some general way, which is already pretty complex; probably as complex as we humans are, at the very least. Both of them are supremely powerful, which translates into more complexity. In case of the Matrix Lords, their hardware ought to more complex than our entire Universe (or possibly Multiverse). Some flavors of gods are infinitely powerful, whereas others are “merely” on par with the Matrix Lords.
I could keep listing properties here, but hopefully this is enough for you to decide whether I’m on the right track. Given even the basics that I’d listed above, I find myself hard-pressed to come up with anything other than “epsilon” for my prior.
Theistic arguments per se, however, are generally bad.
Why would we expect there to be good arguments for the wrong answer?
We here at Less Wrong have seen many arguments for the existence of God...All of those arguments are wrong.
Thank you for being unambiguous, this is exactly the sort of thing I wanted to see if this community actually believed. Personally I think it reflects poorly on anyone’s intellectual openness for them to believe the other side literally has no decent arguments.
Then you must believe the same with respect to homeopathic remedies, the flat earth society, and those who believe they can use their spiritual energy in the martial arts. Give us some good arguments for those.
There’s a lot of stuff out there for which it seems to me there is no good argument. I mean really, let’s try to maintain some sense of perspective here. The belief that everyone has a decent argument is, I think, pretty much demonstrably false. You presumably want us to believe that you’re in the same category as people who ought to be taken seriously, but I don’t really see how a belief in God is any more worthy of that than a belief in homeopathic remedies. At least, not based on your argument that all positions ought to be considered to have good arguments. If you’re trying to make a general argument, you’re going to get lumped in with them.
An argument can be “decent” without being right. If you want an example, and can follow it Kurt Godel’s ontological argument looks pretty decent. Consider that:
A) It is a logically valid argument
B) The premises sound fairly plausible (we can on the face of it imagine some sense of a “positive property” which would satisfy the premises)
C) It is not immediately obvious what is wrong with the premises
The wrongness can eventually be seen by carefully inspecting the premises, and checking which would go wrong in a null world (a possible world with no entities at all). Axiom 1 implies that if an impossible property is positive, then so is its negation (since an impossible property logically entails its negation). Axiom 2 says that can’t be true—a property and its negation can’t both be positive. So together these are a coded way of saying that all positive properties are possible properties. And then Axiom 5 (Neccessary existence is a positive property) goes wrong, because necessary existence is not a possible property in the null world. So it is not a positive property. Axiom 5 is inconsistent with Axioms 1 and 2.
There are arguments for the existence of God that are good in the sense that they raise my estimate of the likelihood of the existence of God by a substantial factor.
They aren’t sufficient to raise the odds to an overall appreciable level.
Sometimes, the issues really are cut-and-dried, though. To use a rather trivial example, consider the debate about the shape of the Earth. There are still some people who believe it’s flat. They don’t have any good arguments. We’ve been to space, we know the Earth is round, it’s going to be next to impossible to beat that.
Why would we expect there to be good arguments for the wrong answer?
I meant this as the rhetorical “we”, not “we, Less Wrong”.
And in general, you shouldn’t take me, or any other commenter in particular (even Eliezer), to represent all of Less Wrong. This is a community blog, after all.
Personally I think it reflects poorly on anyone’s intellectual openness for them to believe the other side literally has no decent arguments.
Edit: Sorry, I see that you quoted from that comment, so presumably you did read it. That said, I’m not sure that what I said was clear, given your subsequent comments...
I didn’t mean that your initial beliefs should come out stronger. I meant that having updated for good arguments, and by incorporating them, your beliefs will be more complete, better thought-out, and more sustainable for the future.
That is what many people here have done regarding theism. Seen the best arguments, and decided that they fail utterly. Eliezer quoted above talks about Modern Orthodox Judaism allowing doubt as a ritual, but not doubt as a practice leading to a result. You would have us listen to arguments as ritual, but not actually come to a conclusion that some of them are wrong.
Yes, but what I expected was...um...atheists who were better than most, who had arrived at atheism through two-sided discourse.
Bob Altemeyer asked college students about this, some of whom had a strong allegiance to ‘traditional’ authority and some less so:
Interestingly, virtually everyone said she had questioned the existence of God at some time in her life. What did the authoritarian students do when this question arose? Most of all, they prayed for enlightenment. Secondly, they talked to their friends who believed in God. Or they talked with their parents. Or they read scriptures. In other words, they seldom made a two-sided search of the issue. Basically they seem to have been seeking reassurance about the Divinity, not pro- and con- arguments
about its existence—probably because they were terrified of the implications if there is no God.
Did low RWA students correspondingly immerse themselves in the atheist point of view? No. Instead they overwhelmingly said they had tried to figure things out for themselves. Yes they talked with nonbelievers and studied up on scientific findings that challenged traditional beliefs. But they also discussed things with friends who believed in God and they talked with their parents (almost all of whom believed in God). They exposed themselves to both yea and nay arguments, and then made up their minds—which often left them theists. In contrast, High RWAs didn’t take a chance on a two-sided search.
Despite what he says at the end, this “RWA” attitude correlates with religion—and Less Wrong seems to have unusually low RWA in any case. We also have a certain tendency to read books. You should therefore expect some of us to know the ‘strongest’ arguments for religion, and consider them bad. Don’t just assert that we don’t. Name an argument and see if we know it!
On a related note, you seem statistically in danger of losing your faith. If you want to keep it, you should use some form of Crowley’s general method of religious devotion. While I failed to produce a vision of the Goddess Eris in the short time I allotted to this method, a kind of ‘sophisticated’ Discordianism did come to seem reasonable for a while.
I don’t know what you think a “strong argument” is. Arguments are not weapons, with a certain caliber and stopping power and so forth, such that two sides might go at each other with their respective arguments, and whoever’s got the most firepower wins. That’s not how it works.
An argument may be more or less persuasive (relative to some audience!), but that depends on many things, such as whether the argument hits certain emotional notes, whether it makes use of certain common fallacies and biases, or certain commonly held misconceptions; or whether it is structured so as to obscure its flaws; or even whether it’s couched in fancy or beautiful sounding language.
Whether an argument is correct (i.e. valid and sound) is another matter entirely, and may have little to do with whether the argument, in actual fact, tends to persuade many people.
We here at Less Wrong have seen many arguments for the existence of God, many of which are found to be persuasive by many people who are not aware of their flaws (by “their” I can mean the arguments’ flaws, or the flaws of the audience, i.e. cognitive biases and so forth).
All of those arguments are wrong (invalid, unsound, full of fallacies, etc.). That’s what we mean when we say they’re not “good” arguments.
The optimal situation is that both sides have strong arguments, but atheism’s arguments are stronger.
What do you mean, “optimal”? Look, for any question where there is, in principle, a correct answer (which might not be known), the totality of the information available to us at any given time will point to some answer (which might not be the correct one, given incomplete information). Arguments for that answer might be correct. Arguments for some other answer will be wrong.
Why would we expect there to be good arguments for the wrong answer?
Yes, but what I expected was...um...atheists who were better than most, who had arrived at atheism through two-sided discourse.
What does two-sided discourse look like, in your view?
Look, for any question where there is, in principle, a correct answer (which might not be known), the totality of the information available to us at any given time will point to some answer (which might not be the correct one, given incomplete information). Arguments for that answer might be correct. Arguments for some other answer will be wrong.
It may help to note that ibidem has made earlier claims about how the meaning of “reliably evaluate evidence” is variable, so I suspect they would reject the claim that there’s a correct answer towards which available information points at any given time.
More specifically, I would expect them to claim that there can be two or more mutually exclusive answers to which the same information points equally strongly, “depending on your paradigm.”
The optimal situation is that both sides have strong arguments, but atheism’s arguments are stronger.
Why is that the “optimal” situation ? Optimal according to what metric ?
who had arrived at atheism through two-sided discourse.
I personally never was religious, but AFAIK I’m an outlier. Most atheists arrived at atheism exactly in the way that you describe; others got there by reading the Bible. I don’t have hard data to support this claim, though, so I could be wrong.
I think the holy books are kind of hampering mainstream religions, to be honest. We live in a world where pictures of distant galaxies are considered so mundane that they hardly ever make the news, and where the average person carries a supercomputer in his pocket, which connects him to a global communication network that speaks via invisible light. The average person typically wields this unimaginable power in order to inform his friends about quotidian matters such as “look at what I had for lunch today”.
Against the backdrop of this much knowledge and power, the holy books look… well… kind of drab. They tell us that the world is a tiny disc, covered by a crystalline dome, and that the space outside this dome is inhabited by vaguely humanoid super-powered beings who, despite having the power to create worlds and cover them with crystalline domes, actually do care about what we had for lunch today. Hopefully it wasn’t ham. Gods hate ham.
I understand that most theists don’t take their holy books quite that literally, and that it’s all supposed to be a big allegory for something or other, but still, it’s hard to get excited about a text that didn’t even get the shape of the Earth right.
To be fair, the crystal sphere thing doesn’t appear in any Abrahamic holy books (that I know of); it’s a feature of Aristotelian cosmology that the Church picked up during the period when it was essentially the only scholarly authority running in what used to be called Christendom and therefore needed an opinion on natural philosophy. I believe the bit in Genesis about erecting a firmament in the primordial water does ultimately refer to a traditional belief along similar lines, but it’s pretty ambiguous.
Flat-earth cosmology was known to be false by Aristotle’s time, although some monks in the early Middle Ages seem to have missed the memo—again without explicit Biblical support, though. Science in the Islamic world always used a round-earth model as far as I know, and I don’t remember reading anything in the Koran that contradicts that, although it’s been several years.
To be fair, the crystal sphere thing doesn’t appear in any Abrahamic holy books (that I know of)
Ok, I may have overreached with the “crystal” thing, but there are definitely several passages that refer to a solid dome separating two sections of the world. This dome is typically referred to as the “firmament”, and is referred to in passages outside of Genesis on occasion.
As for the flat Earth, I admit that the claims there are weaker. The Bible manages “four corners of the Earth”, but that could be a metaphor. The Devil also transports Jesus to the top of a tall mountain to show him “all the kingdoms of the Earth”, but that could’ve been an illusion.
I agree with Jack here, but I’m going to add the piece of advice that used to be very common for newcomers here, although it’s dropped off over time as people called attention to the magnitude of the endeavor, and suggest that you finish reading the sequences before trying to engage in further religious debate here.
Eliezer wrote them in order to bring potential members of this community up to speed so that when we discuss matters, we could do it with a common background, so that everyone is on the same page and we can work out interesting disagreements without rehashing the same points over and over again. We don’t all agree with all the contents of every article in the sequences, but they do contain a lot of core ideas that you have to understand to make sense of the things we think here. Reading them should help give you some idea, not just what we believe, but why we think that it makes more sense to believe those things than the alternatives.
The “rigidity” which you detect is not a product of particular closedmindedness, but rather a deliberate discarding of certain things we believe we have good reason not to put stock in, and reading the sequences should give you a much better idea of why. On the other hand, if you don’t stick so closely to the topic of religion, I think you’ll find that we’re also open to a lot of ideas that most people aren’t open to.
If we’re to liken rationality to a martial art, then it would be one after the pattern of Jeet Kune Do; “Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless.” A person trained in a style or school which lacked grounding in real life effectiveness might say “At my school, we learned techniques to knock guys out with 720 degree spinning kicks and stab people with knives launched from our toes, and they were awesome, but you guys just reject them out of hand. Your style seems really rigid and closed-minded to me.” And the Jeet Kune Do practitioner might respond “Fancy spinning kicks and launching knives from your toes might be awesome, but they’re awesome for things like displaying your gymnastic ability and finesse, not for defending yourself or defeating an opponent. If we want to learn to do those things, we’ll take up gymnastics or toe-knife-throwing as hobbies, but when it comes to martial arts techniques, we want to stick to ones which are awesome at the things martial arts techniques are supposed to be for. And when it comes to those, we’re not picky at all. ”
If Mormonism is incorrect, do you want to know that?
It’s a very important question and one I need to think about more. In the next few days I’ll write a Discussion post addressing my beliefs, including why I’m planning not to lose my faith at the moment.
But you haven’t showed much willingness so far to discuss your reasons for your belief in which way the evidence falls or ours.
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.
rather than concluding from your experience with us that we’re rigid and closed-minded on the matter, you’ve taken it as a premise to begin with
I didn’t come here expecting people to be rigid. But when I asked people what the best arguments for theism were, they either told me that there were none, or they rehashed bad ones that are refuted easily.
Are you familiar enough with the evidence that we’re prepared to bring to the table that you think you could argue it yourself?
Yes, I definitely am. In an intellectual debate I could probably defend atheism better than belief; I was originally looking for good arguments in favor of theism and I thought that you guys of all people ought to know some. Suffice it to say that I was largely wrong about that.
I didn’t come here expecting people to be rigid. But when I asked people what the best arguments for theism were, they either told me that there were none, or they rehashed bad ones that are refuted easily.
I was originally looking for good arguments in favor of theism and I thought that you guys of all people ought to know some. Suffice it to say that I was largely wrong about that.
Sorry, I can’t tell you what I don’t know. All the arguments for theism that I’ve ever heard were either chock-full of logical fallacies, or purely instrumental, of the form “I don’t care if any of this stuff is true or not, but I’m going to pretend that it is because doing so helps me in some way”. I personally believe that there’s a large performance penalty associated with believing false things, and thus arguments of the second sort are entirely unconvincing for me.
I am looking forward to your discussion post, however. Hopefully, I’ll finally get to see some solid arguments for theism in there !
I am looking forward to your discussion post, however. Hopefully, I’ll finally get to see some solid arguments for theism in there !
Sorry to disappoint you there. As I’ve said, I have no hope of convincing all of you and I’m not going to try; I wouldn’t stand a chance in a formal debate against a dozen of you.
I was thinking more along the lines of why I think it’s best to take the conclusions of a certain way of thinking with a grain of salt no matter how right its members think they are. Being skeptical of skepticism, one could say. So yes, it’s likely going to seem like a long criticism of Less Wrong’s fundamental philosophy, and chances are it won’t be too popular—but you never know. I think it’s a very good practice in life, not to accept any philosophy too fully.
What gives me the authority to say such things? An outside perspective.
We don’t all agree with all the contents of every article in the sequences, but they do contain a lot of core ideas that you have to understand to make sense of the things we think here.
I’ve read most of the sequences. If you believe there are core ideas I’m missing, tell me which ones and I’d be happy to research them. But chances are I’ve read that sequence already, especially if you mention ones about religion.
the magnitude of the endeavor
It’s an important point. If you demand that a user read every word Dear Leader has ever written, you’re not going to get many new voices willing to contribute, which as we all know is bad for the intellectual diversity of the group.
Fancy spinning kicks and launching knives from your toes might be awesome, but they’re awesome for things like displaying your gymnastic ability and finesse, not for defending yourself or defeating an opponent.
See, the problem here is a difference in the perception of what is “useful.” If you only learn martial arts because you want to defeat opponents, then sure, it’s fine to reject 720 degree spinning kicks. But self-defense is not in fact the only point of martial arts. There is often an element of theater or even ritual that is lost when you reject what Jeet Kune Do thinks is “useless.”
the things martial arts techniques are supposed to be for.
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.”
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.
My generally impression has been—trying not to offend anyone—that the thinking here is sometimes pretty rigid.
Of course, that’s to be expected for a community that defines itself as rationalist. There are ways of thinking that are more accurate than others, that, to put it inexactly, produce truth. It’s not just a “Think however you like and it will produce truth,” kind of game.
The obsession that some people have with being open minded and considering all ways of thinking and associated ideas equally is, I suspect, unsustainable for anyone who has even the barest sliver of intellectual honesty. I don’t consider it laudable at all. That’s not to say they have to be a total arse about it, but I think at best you can hope that they ignore you or lie to you.
Are you saying it’s more rational not ever to consider some ways of thinking?
Yes. Rationality isn’t necessarily about having accurate beliefs. It just tends that way because they seem to be useful. Rationality is about achieving your aims in the most efficient way possible.
Oh, someone may have to look into some ways of thinking, if people who use them start showing signs of being unusually effective at achieving relevant ends in some way. Those people would become super-dominant, it would be obvious that their way of thinking was superior. However, there’s no reason that it makes sense for any of us to do it at the moment. And if they never show those signs then it will never be rational to look into them.
It’s a massive waste of time and resources for individuals to consider every idea and every way of thinking before making a decision. You’re getting closer to death every day. You have to decide which ways of thinking you are going to invest your time in—which ones have the greatest evidence of giving you something you want.
That’s the thing for rationalists really, I think—chances of giving you what you want. It’s entirely possible that if you don’t want to achieve anything in this world with your life that it may just be a mistake for you personally to pursue rationality very far at all—at the end of the day you’re probably not going to get anything from it if all you really want to do is feel justified in believing in god.
Are you saying it’s more rational not ever to consider some ways of thinking?
(I’m pretty sure I’m not completely confused about what it means to be a rationalist.)
Given your earlier claims about how the meaning of reliably evaluating evidence depends on your paradigm, I have no confidence that you and I share an understanding of what “good epistemic hygiene” means either, so that doesn’t really help me understand what you’re saying.
Can you give me some representative concrete examples of good epistemic hygiene, on your account?
Or carefully evaluating both sides of an issue, for instance. Even if it’s not specifically a LW thing it’s considered essential for good judgment in the larger academic community.
Are we ever allowed to say “okay, we have evaluated this issue thoroughly, and this is our conclusion; let’s end this debate for now”? Are we allowed to do it even if some other people disagree with the conclusion? Or do we have to continue the debate forever (of course, unless we reach the one very specific predetermined answer)?
Sometimes we probably should doubt even whether 2+2=4. But not all the time! Not even once in a month. Once or twice in a (pre-Singularity) lifetime is probably more than necessary. -- Well, it’s very similar for the religion.
There are thousands of issues worth thinking about. Why waste the limited resources on this specific topic? Why not something useful… such as curing the cancer, or even how to invent a better mousetrap?
Most of us have evaluated the both sides of this issue. Some of us did it for years. We did it. It’s done. It’s over. -- Of course, unless there is something really new and really unexpected and really convincing… but so far, there isn’t anything. Why debate it forever? Just because some other people are obsessed?
I guess instead of the purple boxes of unread comments, we should have two colors for unread new comments and unread old comments. (Or I should learn to look at the dates, but that seems less effective.)
As I respond to this, your comment is outlined in a wide purple border. When I submit this response, I expect that your comment will no longer be outlined, but my comment will. If I refresh the screen, I expect neither of ours will.
This has been true since I started reading LW again recently, and I have mostly been paying no attention to it, figuring it was some kind of “current selection” indicator that wasn’t working very well. But if it’s an “unread comment” indicator, then it works a lot better.
Edit—I was close. When I submit, your comment is still purple, and mine isn’t. If I refresh once, yours isn’t and mine is. If I refresh again, neither is.
I’m not still worrying about it, most of the time. It’s interesting to see how all these threads turned out. I’m no longer especially active here, although I still find it a great place. My intention was never to come arguing for religion, as obviously you’ve made up your minds, but I was a bit disappointed in the reactionary nature of the responses. I have since found the types of arguments I was looking for, however, and I would highly recommend this book—The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions, by David Berlinski (a secular jew and mathematician).
But of course there is no place for such impossible questions in most of everyday life. God and religion need to be pondered sometimes, but I’m done for now.
I did not find The Devil’s Delusion to be persuasive/good at all. It’s scientific quality is perhaps best summarized by noting that Berlinski is an opponent of evolution; I also recall that Berlinski spent an enormous amount of time on the (irrelevant) topic of whether some atheists had been evil.
ETA: Actually, now that I think about, The Devil’s Delusion is probably why I tend to ignore or look down on atheists who spend lots of time arguing that God would be evil (e.g. Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris)- I feel like they’re making the same mistake, but on the opposite side.
Berlinski’s thesis is not that evolution is incorrect or that atheists are evil; rather it is that our modern scientific system has just as many gaping holes in it as does any proper theology. Evolution is not incorrect, but the way it’s interpreted to refute God is completely unfounded. Its scientific quality is in fact quite good; do you have any specific corrections or is it just that anything critical of Darwin is surely wrong?
How so? Someone involved with CFAR allegedly converted to Catholicism due to an argument-from-morality. Also, I know looking at the Biblical order to kill Isaac, and a general call to murder that I wasn’t following, helped me to realize I didn’t believe in God as such.
My point is that various atheists may wish to convince people who actually exist. Such people may give credence to the traditional argument from morality, or may think they believe claims about God while anticipating the opposite.
I’m curious too. Can you give me an example of a particular way of thinking that you considered, yet ended up rejecting ? I’m not sure what you mean by “ways of thinking”, so that might help.
OK, I’m ready to entertain new ideas: What’s sacred about Mormon underwear?
You’re free to answer, or you may notice that not all ideas deserve to be elevated above background noise by undue consideration. Rejecting an Abrahamic God as (is ludicrous too harsh?) … not all too likely helps in demoting a host of associated and dependent beliefs into insignificance.
OK, I’m ready to entertain new ideas: What’s sacred about Mormon underwear?
I’m not a Mormon, and I actually don’t know that much about their underwear, but this is still rather a silly question. A Mormon might answer that, given that the Mormon god does exist and does care about his followers, the underwear symbolizes the commitment that the follower made to his God. It serves as a physical reminder to the wearer that he must abide by certain rules of conduct, in exchange for divine protection.
Such an answer may make perfect sense in the context of the Mormon religion (as I said, I’m not a Mormon so I don’t claim this answer is correct). It may sound silly to you, but that’s because you reject the core premise that the Mormon god exists. So, by hearing the answer you haven’t really learned anything, and thus your question had very little value.
Which is the point I was trying to make when talking about that question in the second paragraph. As goes “is there an Abrahamic god”, so goes a majority of assorted ‘new’ - but in fact dependent on that core premise—ideas.
I didn’t get the impression that ibidem was talking about specific tenets of any particular religion when he mentioned “new ideas”, but I could be wrong.
The same applies to many ideas that build upon other concepts being the case. You could probably make an argument that no ideas at all are wholly independent facts in the sense that they do not depend on the truth value of other ideas. Often you can skip dealing with a large swath of ideas simply by rejecting some upstream idea they all rely upon.
Religion, in this case, was a good example. That, and there’s always some chance of hearing something interesting about holy underwear.
Only that God makes it sacred. But I’m actually too young to be wearing it myself, so I don’t know if I’m qualified to talk. And I think it would be better for me not to get into defending my particular religion.
There are threads about theism, etc. in which theists have received positive net karma. It should be possible to learn which features of discourse tend to accrue upvotes on this site.
Even if someone’s overall karma fluctuates a lot, karma can still be a good indicator of how LW feels about one of their comments if the comment’s score is reasonably stable.
FWIW, I neither upvoted nor downvoted your posts; I think they are typical for a newcomer to the community. However, I must admit that your closing line comes across as being very poorly thought out:
Oh, and I’m a Mormon. And intend to remain that way in the near future.
This makes it sound like your Mormonism is a foregone conclusion, and that you’re going to disregard whatever evidence or argumentation comes along, unless it is compatible with Mormonism. That is not a very rational way of thinking. Then again, that’s just what your closing statement sounds like, IMO; you probably did not mean it that way.
Just as I’ve been told repeatedly that your atheism is a foregone conclusion.
Can you point to where you’ve been told that?
What I think most of us would agree on, and what it seems to me that people here have told you, is that they consider atheism to be a settled question, which is not at all the same thing.
I wouldn’t walk into a Mormon forum and call atheism a settled question. ’Twould be logically rude to them.
Is this an atheist forum?
...
That’s a serious question. You have been pretty clear about the issue, but users are quick to point out that just because you say something doesn’t mean the community believes it.
There are a few theists on this site, but based on last year’s survey results it’s an awfully small number. However, the fact that this forum is composed mostly of atheists does not mean it’s officially an “atheist forum.” Is LW a rationality community, or a rationality and atheism community? I don’t believe that rationality in general is incompatible with religious belief, but if this community thinks that their particular brand of rationality is, people like me would love to know that.
I think, in fact, that it might help your outside perception to clearly state the site’s philosophy when it comes to issues like religion. If you say that you’re a rationality community, but are actually an atheist community as well, people accuse you of being an atheist cult under the guise of rationality. If you say up front that you are an atheist community as well as a rationality one, you appear a lot more “legit.”
And if you don’t like theists like me on this site, then officially declaring the site’s atheism would a) deter most of them, and b) give you full justification for rejecting the rest out of hand.
I think it that most of your problems with theists would go away if you clarified LW’s actual position. If this is an atheist forum, say so from the beginning. (Not just that there are a lot of atheists—that atheism is the “state religion” around here.) If LW is not necessarily atheist, kindly stop saying things that make it seem like it is.
(Ridiculous idea: you could hold a referendum! I’d be very curious to see what the community thinks.)
I know this is all-or-nothing thinking, but the alternative is harmful ambiguity.
It’s a forum where taking atheism for granted is widespread, and the 10% of non-atheists have some idea of what the 90% are thinking. Being atheist isn’t part of the official charter, but you can make a function call to atheism without being questioned by either the 10% or the 90% because everyone knows where you’re coming from. If I was on a 90% Mormon forum which theoretically wasn’t about Mormonism but occasionally contained posters making function calls to Mormon theology without further justification, I would not walk in and expect to be able to make atheist function calls without being questioned on it. If I did, I wouldn’t be surprised to be downvoted to oblivion if that forum had a downvoting function. This isn’t groupthink; it’s standard logical courtesy. When you know perfectly well that a supermajority of the people around you believe X, it’s not just silly but logically rude to ask them to take Y as a premise without defending it. I would owe this hypothetical 90%-Mormon forum more acknowledgement of their prior beliefs than that.
I like your use of “function calls” as an analogy here, but I don’t think it’s a good idea; you could just as easily say “use concepts from” without alienating non-programmer readers.
Since I’m momentarily feeling remarkably empowered about my own life, I’m going to take this chance to officially bow out for a few weeks.
We all knew it was coming—it’s the typical reaction for an overwhelmed newbie like me, I know, and I’m always very determined not to give up, but I really think I had better take a break.
My last week has hardly involved anything except LW and related sites, and we all know that having one’s mind blown is a very strenuous task. I’ve learned a lot, and I will definitely be back after four weeks or so.
I’ve decided I’m not going to let myself be pressured into expressly arguing in favor of religion. I’ve said several times I’m not interested in that, and that I don’t have these supposed strong arguments in favor of religion. If you guys want a good theist, check out William Lane Craig.
When I come back I will, however, explain my own beliefs and why I can’t fully accept the LW way of thinking. Please don’t get misunderstand what I’m saying: I think you guys are right, more so than any group of people I’ve ever met. But for now I’m going to shelve philosophy and take advantage of my situation. In the next four weeks I’m going to a) learn Lambda Calculus and b) study Arabic intensively.
This is not an atheist forum, in much the same way that it is not an a-unicorn-ist forum. Not because we do not hold a consistent position on the existence of unicorns, but because the issue itself is not worth discussing. The data has spoken, and there is no reason to believe in them. Whatever. Let’s move on to more important things like anthropics and the meta-ethics of Friendly AI.
You are fixating on atheism for some reason. Assigning low probability to any particular religion, and only a marginally higher probability to some supernatural creator still actively shaping the universe results naturally from rationally considering the issue and evaluating the probabilities. So do many other conclusions. This reminds me of the creationists picking a fight against evolution, whereas they could have picked a fight against Copernicanism, the way flat earthers do.
I don’t believe that rationality in general is incompatible with religious belief, but if this community thinks that their particular brand of rationality is, people like me would love to know that.
Might we not, instead, disagree with you about rationality in general being compatible with religious belief, rather than asserting that we have some special incompatible brand of rationality?
I think it that most of your problems with theists would go away if you clarified LW’s actual position.
The comment above from EY is over-broad in calling this an “atheist forum”, but I think it still has a good point:
It’s logically rude to go to a place where the vast majority of people believe X=34, and you say “No, actually X=87, but I won’t accept any discussion on the matter.” To act that way is to treat disagreement like a shameful thing, best not brought up in polite company, and that’s as clear an example of logical rudeness as I can think of.
It’s logically rude to go to a place where the vast majority of people believe X=34, and you say “No, actually X=87, but I won’t accept any discussion on the matter.”
You’re right, that would be very rude.
I’ve been happy to take part in extensive discussion on the matter already, and now I’m working on putting a post together. I have no problem with disagreement. I never thought I could avoid disagreement, posting the way I did. But it’s also true that I can’t hope to win a debate against fifteen of you. And so I didn’t come here looking to win any debates.
Sounds fine to me. Consider it this way: whether or not you “win the debate” from the perspective of some outside audience, or from our perspective, isn’t important. It’s more about whether you feel like you might benefit from the conversation yourself.
But you haven’t showed much willingness so far to discuss your reasons for your belief in which way the evidence falls or ours.
I can understand not wanting to discuss a settled question with people who’re too biased to analyze it reasonably, but if you’re going to avoid discussing the matter here in the first place, it suggests to me that rather than concluding from your experience with us that we’re rigid and closed-minded on the matter, you’ve taken it as a premise to begin with, otherwise where’s the harm in discussing the evidence?
I consider the matter of religion to be a settled question because I’ve studied the matter well beyond the point of diminishing returns for interesting evidence or arguments. Are you familiar enough with the evidence that we’re prepared to bring to the table that you think you could argue it yourself?
Because it seems to be an important part of the issue. I know, I could have left it off, but it has come up elsewhere and I don’t see any need to hide it. If people have a problem with it, that’s not my fault. I thought it best to clarify this from the beginning.
If people have a problem with it, that’s not my fault.
It might or it might not be. As a general rule, if two people think that a single issue of fact is a settled question, in different directions, then either they have access to different information, or one or both of them is incorrect.
If the former is the case, then they can share their information, after which either they will agree, or one or both will be incorrect.
If we’re incorrect about religion being a settled question, we want to know that, so we can change our minds. If Mormonism is incorrect, do you want to know that?
Told by someone other than myself, hopefully. While I do not expect to become a theist of any kind in the near future, neither do I intend to remain an atheist. Instead, I intend to hold a set of beliefs that are most likely to be true. If I gain sufficient evidence that the answer is “Jesus” or “Trimurti”, then this is what I will believe.
If you want to raise my openness to the possibility of a god-level power, then provide me with evidence of consistent, accurate, specific prophecies made hundreds of years in advance of the events. Or provide me of evidence of multiple strong rationalists who are also religious and claim that their religion is based on assessment of the evidence/available arguments.
My atheism isn’t a foregone conclusion. It’s simply that no-one’s ever seriously challenged it and at this point I’ve heard so many bad arguments that people need to come up with evidence before I’m prepared to take them seriously. But you could totally change my mind, if you had the right things.
I suspect what people mean when they say their atheism is a settled question or whatever is that they don’t have time to listen to yet another bad argument for theism. That you need some evidence before they’re prepared to take you seriously. Which seems quite reasonable.
When your comments get downvoted, respond by refraining from making similar comments in the future and/or abandoning the topic (this is a simple heuristics whose implementation doesn’t require figuring out the reasons for downvoting). Given the current trend, if that doesn’t happen, in a while your future comments will start getting banned. (You are currently at minus 128, 17% positive. This reflects the judgment of many users.)
Excuse me, but I watched my Karma drop a hundred points in three minutes. Look me in the eye and tell me that’s the coincidental result of “the judgment of many users.” Even if I were a brilliant, manipulative troll, I doubt I could get to −128 without someone deliberately and systematically doing so.
Someone has probably just discovered your work and found it systematically wanting. By “many users” I mean that many of the more recent comments are at minus 2-3 and there are only a few upvotes, so other people don’t generally disagree.
You essentially accused the community of being ashamed of being atheist when you said:
Though people have been reluctant to admit it because I personally think it’s unhealthy and reflects poorly on the site.
We aren’t ashamed. As Jack said to you in a parallel comment, we generally think the question is a solved problem. We aren’t interested in having the same basic conversation over and over again.
Accusing us of being ashamed of the position because we don’t throw our atheism in your face makes it hard to interpret the rest of your comments as saying anything beyond repeating the basic apologetics. And we’ve heard the basic apologetics a million times.
Once the lurkers think you aren’t interesting, they’ll downvote—and there are WAY more lurkers than commenters. Given that, your karma loss isn’t all that surprising.
Possible, but given that all your comments are on only a small number of threads and arguing for the same basic points, it is also plausible that someone just went through those threads an downvoted most of your comments while upvoting others. I for example got about +20 karma from what as far as I can tell is primarily upvotes on my replies to you.
I’d like to point to myself as a data point; I’m a theist, specifically a Roman Catholic, and I consider myself a rationalist. I know that there’s a strong atheistic atmosphere here, but I just thought I should point out that it’s not all-inclusive.
The site culture treats serious adherence to supernatural beliefs associated with a religion as a disease. First it will try to cure you. If that doesn’t seem to be working, it will start quarantining you.
Actually, the behavior Risto_Saarelma described fits the standard pattern. People who cannot be helped are ignored or rejected. Take any stable community, online or offline, and that’s what you see.
For example, f someone comes to, say, the freenode ##physics IRC channel and starts questioning Relativity, they will be pointed out where their beliefs are mistaken, offered learning resources and have their basic questions answered. If they persist in their folly and keep pushing crackpot ideas, they will be asked to leave or take it to the satellite off-topic channel. If this doesn’t help, they get banned.
Again, this pattern appears in every case where a community (or even a living organism) is viable enough to survive.
There’s the difference between being wrong and being wrong as a member of a social group that derives its identity from being wrong in that particular way. Experience has taught to expect less from discussion in the latter case.
Keeping one’s identity small is hard, be it “Mormon” or “Rationalist” or “Brunette” or whatever. I don’t think we should discourage people from joining the site just because they haven’t fully mastered Bayes-Fu (tm) yet.
Why do you think so? It’s usual to express things in terms of one’s identity (for example, people often say “I don’t believe in God”, a property of the person, instead of asserting “There is no God”, a statement about the world), but this widespread tradition doesn’t necessarily indicate that it’s difficult to do otherwise, if people didn’t systematic try (in particular, in the form of a cultural tradition, so that conformity would push people to discard their identity).
We all live within a culture, though. Some of us live in several subcultures at the same time. But unless you are a hermit living in a cave somewhere, escaping that cultural pressure to conform would be very difficult.
A lot of things are culturally normal, but easy to change in yourself, so this alone doesn’t help to explain why one would believe that keeping one’s identity small would be difficult.
What are some examples of such things, specifically those things that contribute to a person’s identity within a culture ? By contrast, a preference for, say, yogurt instead of milk is culturally normal, is probably easy to acquire (or discard), but does not usually contribute to a person’s identity.
I started responding to you, but then I decided I wanted you to remain religious. For the benefit of others, here’s why. (Also note that this guy is Mormon, and as far as I can tell, Mormonism is pretty great as religions go.)
Hello, Less Wrong world. (Hi, ibidem.)
I’m pretty new here. I heard about this site a few months ago and now I’ve read a few sequences, many posts, and all of HP:MoR.
About a week ago I created an account and introduced myself on the Open Thread along with a difficult question. Some people answered my question helpfully and honestly, but most of them mostly just wanted to argue. The discussion, which now includes over two hundred comments, was very interesting, but at the end it appeared we just disagreed about a lot of things.
It began to be clear that I don’t fully accept some important tenets of the thinking on this site—I warned I might fundamentally disagree—but a few community members became upset and decided to make me feel unwelcome on the site. My Karma dropped from 6 (+13, −7) to −25 in just a couple hours, and someone actually came out and told me I’d better leave the site for good. (Don’t let this person’s status influence your opinion of the appropriateness of such a comment, in either direction.)
Don’t worry, I’m not offended. I knew there might be a bit of backlash (though one can always hope not, because there doesn’t have to be) and I’m certainly not going to be scared away by one openly hostile user.
Now, before everyone reads the comments and takes sides because of the nature of the issue, I’d like to think about how and why this all happened. I have several different ways of thinking about it (“hypotheses”):
The easy justification for those opposing me is to blame my discourse: my opinions are not a problem as long as I present them reasonably. However, I have consistently been “incoherent” etc. and that’s why I got downvoted. Never mind that I managed to keep up hundreds of comments’ worth of intelligent discussion in the meantime.
The “contrarian” hypothesis: I am a troll. I never had anything helpful or constructive to say, and in fact everyone who participated in my discussion (e.g. shminux, TheOtherDave, Qiaochu_Yuan) ought to be downvoted for engaging with me.
The “enforcer” hypothesis: I came in here as a newbie, unaware that actually substantive disagreement is highly discouraged. The experienced community members were just trying to tell me that, and decided that being militant and aggressive would be the best way to do so.
The “militant atheist” hypothesis: my opinions are mostly fine, but I managed to really touch a nerve with a few people, who started unnecessarily attacking me (calling me irrational) and making the entire LW community look unreasonable and intolerant.
The “martyr” hypothesis: The LW community as a whole is not open to alternate ways of thinking, and can’t even say so honestly. They should have been nicer to me.
What do you think? Which of these are most accurate? Other explanations?
Here is a link to my original comment.
These are the most honest and helpful responses I received,
and this is the most hostile one.
My generally impression has been—trying not to offend anyone—that the thinking here is sometimes pretty rigid.
I have found that there is a general consensus here that belief in God (and even a possibility that there could be a God) is fundamentally incompatible with fully rational thinking. (Though people have been reluctant to admit it because I personally think it’s unhealthy and reflects poorly on the site.)
But in any case, I’ve enjoyed the discussion and I’d guess that some other people have too. I’m definitely not going to leave as some have tried to coerce me to do; I like the way of thinking on this site, and it’s the best place I know of to find smart people who are willing to talk about things like this. I’ll keep reading at the very least.
I’m still undecided as to what I think generally of the people here.
Yours truly,
ibid.
(Oh, and I’m a Mormon. And intend to remain that way in the near future.)
I think probably none of those hypotheses are correct. I think you mean well and I think your comments have been stylistically fine. I also obviously don’t think people here are are opposed to substantive disagreement, close-minded or intolerant (or else I wouldn’t have stuck around this long). What you’ve encountered is a galaxy sized chasm of inferential distance. I’m sure you’ve had a conversation before with someone who seemed to think you knew much less about the subject than you actually did. You disagree with him and try to demonstrate you familiarity with the issue but he is so behind he doesn’t even realize that you know more than he does.
I realize it is impossible for this not to sound smug and arrogant to you: but that is how you come off to us. Really, your model of us, that we have not heard good, non-strawman arguments for the existence of God is very far off. There may be users who wouldn’t be familiar with your best argument but the people here most familiar with the existence of God debate absolutely would. And they could almost certainly fix whatever argument you provided and rebut that (which is approximately what I did in my previous reply to you).
To the extent that theism is ever taken under consideration here it is only in the context of the rationalist and materialist paradigm that is dominant here. E.g. We might talk about the possibility of our universe being a simulation created by an evolved superintelligence and the extent to which that possibility mirrors theism in it’s implications. Or (as I take it shminux believes) about how atheism is, like religion, just a special case of privileging the hypothesis. But you don’t appear to have spent enough time here to have added these concepts to your tool box and outside that framework the theism debate is old-hat to nearly all of us. It’s not that we’re close minded: it’s that we think the question is about as settled as it can be.
Moreover, while this is a place that discusses many things, we don’t enjoy retreading the basics constantly. So while a number of us politely responded to answer your question, an extended conversation about theism or our ability to consider theism is not really welcome. This isn’t because we are unwilling to consider it: it’s because we have considered it and now want to discuss newer ideas.
You don’t have to agree with this perspective. Maybe you feel like you have evidence and concepts that we’re totally unfamiliar with. But bracket those issues for now. It is nothing that will be resolvable until you’ve gotten to know us better and figured out how you might translate those concepts to us. So if you want to stick around here you’re welcome to. Learn more about our perspective, become familiar with the concepts we spend time on and feel free to discuss narrower topics that come up. But people here aren’t generally interested in extended debates about God with newcomers. That’s why you’ve been down voted. Not because we’re against dissent, just because we’re not here to do that. There are lots of places on the internet dedicated to debating theism.
Don’t mind wedrifid’s tone. That’s the way he is with everyone. But take his actual point seriously. Don’t preach your way of thinking until you’ve become a lot more familiar with our way of thinking. And a new handle at some point wouldn’t be a terrible idea.
Well put. I agree with all of this, except maybe for the need for a new nick, as people who appear to learn from their experience (“update on evidence”, in the awkward local parlance) are likely to be upvoted more generously.
I’m sure Ibidem could get more upvotes, perhaps even a great number of them, but negative one-hundred and twenty-eight is an awfully steep karma hill to climb.
Chaosmosis has a few hundred karma now after dropping at least that deep, being accused of being a troll, and facing a number of suggestions that he leave. It’s certainly not un-doable.
Good, thank you.
However, it’s important to note that I did not come in here expressly arguing my religion. I recognize how bad an idea that would be, and you’ve explained it well. So of course, anyone aiming to convert this lot of atheists is certainly going to fail. But that was never my goal, and in fact I never argued in favor of my particular God.
Look at my very first comment—it was not “this is why you are wrong,” it was “do you guys have any ideas how you could be wrong?” and the response was “no, we’re definitely not wrong.” My first comment presented a question, albeit a difficult one.
I mentioned up front that I was religious, though, as I don’t think trying to hide it would have helped anything. The community was therefore eager to argue with me, and I was happy to argue for some time. At the end, though, it was clear we simply disagreed and I said several times I wasn’t interested in a full-blown debate about religion.
To summarize, you just gave a very good explanation of why I was mistaken to come on here arguing for religion. But I didn’t come on here arguing for religion.
I’ll tell you what made me think that: I asked the community if they had any good, non-strawman arguments for God, and the overwhelming response was “Nah, there aren’t any.”
I’m not sure if anyone’s brought this up yet, but one of the site’s best-known contributors once ran a site dedicated to these sorts of things, though it does of course have a very atheist POV. That said, even there the arguments aren’t amazingly convincing (which you can guess by the fact that lukeprog hasn’t reconverted yet) though it does acknowledge that the other side has some very good debaters.
I’m not sure why you think it’s indicative of a problem with us that we haven’t found good arguments for the existence of God. It’s not a law that there be good arguments in favor of false propositions. I suppose you could make the naïve argument that if the position were as indefensible as it seems no one would believe in it, but unfortunately not many people judge arguments very rationally.
Well, if there were any that we knew of, then no one here would remain an atheist for very long. We’d all convert to whichever religion made the most sense, given the strength of its arguments. IMO you should have anticipated such a response, given that atheists do, in fact, still exist on this site.
So far, we have heard many terrible arguments for religion (we’re talking logical fallacies galore), and few if any good ones. Thus, we are predisposed to thinking that the next argument for religion is going to be terrible, as well, based on past experience.
That’s not true. The optimal situation is that both sides have strong arguments, but atheism’s arguments are stronger. A rationalist ought to have heard arguments and evidence that challenged his (dis)beliefs, and have come out stronger because of it.
Yes, but what I expected was...um...atheists who were better than most, who had arrived at atheism through two-sided discourse.
You keep using that word...
In Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points, Eliezer says:
The point being that this is exactly not how rationality is supposed to work. If you hear a convincing argument, you should update your belief in the direction of the belief the argument argues for. If you update in the other direction (“come out stronger”), then either it’s not a convincing argument (by definition), or you’re doing it wrong.
I didn’t mean that your initial beliefs should come out stronger. I meant that having updated for good arguments, and by incorporating them, your beliefs will be more complete, better thought-out, and more sustainable for the future.
Well, one example of such a thing might be the Simulation Argument, which I believe has been mentioned to you. It’s an argument for the possible existence of something which might be called a “god” or “gods” (though that’s usually inadvisable due to semantic baggage). Our view of what exists and what could exist certainly incorporates an understanding of the possibility that we’re living in a simulation.
Theistic arguments per se, however, are generally bad.
The Simulation Argument is certainly quite an interesting one, since it was invented by an atheist (Nick Bostrom), and as far as I can tell is only taken remotely seriously by other atheists. Many of them (including me) think it is a rather better argument for some sort of “god” or “gods” than anything theists themselves ever came up with.
For other interesting quasi-theistic arguments invented by atheists, you might want to consider Tegmark’s Level 4 multiverse. Since any “god” which is logically possible can be represented by some sort of mathematical structure, it exists somewhere within the Level 4 multiverse. David Lewis’ modal realism has a similar feature.
All these arguments tend to produce massively polytheistic rather than monotheistic conclusions (and also they imply that Santa, the Tooth Fairy, Harry Potter and Captain Kirk exist somewhere or in some simulation or other).
If you want a fun monotheistic argument invented by atheists, try this one, which was published by Robert Meyer and attributed to Hilary Putnam. It’s a clever use of the Axiom of Choice and Zorn’s Lemma.
Isn’t that just the First Cause argument, wrapped up in set-theory language?
Well yes, but it “addresses” one of the really basic responses to the First Cause argument, that there might—for all we know—be an infinite chain of causes of causes, extending infinitely far into the past. One of the premises of Meyer’s argument is that any such chain itself has a cause (i.e. something supporting the whole chain). That cause might in turn have a cause and so on. However, by an application of Zorn’s Lemma you can show that there must be an uncaused cause somewhere in the system.
If you don’t assume the Axiom of Choice you don’t have Zorn’s Lemma, so the argument doesn’t work. Conversely, if God exists, then—being omnipotent—he can pick one element from every non-empty set in any collection of sets, which is the Axiom of Choice. So God is logically equivalent to the Axiom of Choice,
All totally tongue-in-cheek and rather fun.
He also defines away the causal-loop, or time travel, response, leaving only the uncaused cause; and then arbitrarily defines any uncaused cause as God. It looks like a good argument on the surface, but when I look at it carefully it’s not so great; it’s basically defining away any possible disagreement.
I should also mention that it’s not really a monotheistic argument. It only argues for the existence of at least one God. It doesn’t argue for the non-existence of fifty million more.
It’s reasonably fun as a tongue-in-cheek argument, but I wouldn’t want to use it seriously.
Well I think premise 2 just assumes there aren’t any causal loops, since if there were, the constructed relation ⇐ would not be a partial order (let alone an inductive order).
There are probably ways of patching that if you want to explicitly consider loops. Consider that if A causes B cause C causes A, then there is some infinite sequence whereby every entry in the sequence is caused by the next entry in the sequence. So this looks a bit like an infinite descending chain.
The arguer could then tweak premise 2 so it states that any such generalised infinite chain (one allowing repeated elements) still has a lower bound (some strict cause outside the whole chain) and apply an adapted version of Zorn’s Lemma to still get an uncaused cause in the whole system.
The intuition being used there is still that any infinite sequence of causes of causes must have some explanation for why the whole sequence exists at all. For instance if there is an infinite sequence of horses, each of which arises from parent horses, we still want an explanation for why there are any horses at all (and not unicorns, say). Even if a pregnant horse if sent back in time to become the ancestor of all horses, then again we still want an explanation for why there are any horses at all.
The weakness of the intuition is that the “explanation” in such a weird case might well not be a causal one, so maybe there is no further cause outside the chain, or loop. (But even then, there is a patch: the arguer could claim that the whole chain or loop should count as a combined “entity” with no cause, ie there is still some sort of uncaused cause in the system).
I agree with you that the really weak part is just defining the uncaused cause to be “God”. Apart from confusing people, why do that?
And thanks for spotting the non-uniqueness by the way… the argument as it stands does allow for multiple uncaused causes. To patch that, the arguer could perhaps define a super-entity which contains all these uncaused causes as its “parts”. Or else add an additional “common cause” premise, whereby for any two entities a, b, either a is a cause of b, or b is a cause of a, or there is some c which is a cause of both of them.
That’s just assuming the result you want. I don’t think it makes a strong argument.
Counting a loop as a combined entity, on the other hand, could be very useful. The combined-entity loop would be caused by everything that causes any element in the loop, and would cause anything that is caused by any element in the loop. Do this to all loops, and the end result will be to eliminate loops (at the cost of having a few extremely complex entities).
This seems fine as long as there are only a few, causally independent loops. However, if there are multiple loops that affect each other (e.g. something in loop A causes something in loop B, and something in loop B causes something in loop A) then this simply results in a different set of loops. These loops, of course, can also be combined into a single entity; but if the causality graph is sufficiently well connected, and if there is a large enough loop, the end result of this process might be that all entities end up folding into one giant super-entity, containing and consisting of everything that ever happens.
I have heard the theory before that the universe is a part of God, backed by a different argument.
It honestly looks like a case of writing down the conclusion at the bottom of the page and then back-filling the reasoning. He can’t justify that part, so he defines it quickly and hopes no-one pays too much attention to that line.
Why do you want to patch that? A quick patch looks like (again) writing the conclusion first and then filling in the reasoning afterwards.
OK, I think we both agree this is not at all a strong argument, that the bottom line is being written first, and then the premises are being chosen to get to that bottom line and so on. However, I still think it is fun to examine and play with the argument structure.
Basically, what we have here is a recipe:
Take some intuitions.
Encode them in some formal premises.
Stir with some fancy set theory.
Extract the desired conclusion : namely that there is an “uncaused cause”
It’s certainly interesting to see how weak you can make the ingredients (in step 1) before the recipe fails. Also, the process of then translating them into premises (step 2) looks interesting, as at least it helps decide whether the intuitions were even coherent in the first place. Finally, if the desired conclusion wasn’t quite strong enough for the arguer’s taste (hmm, missing that true monotheistic kick), it’s fun to work out what extra ingredient should be inserted in to the mix (let’s put in a bit of paprika)
That’s basically where I’m coming from in all this..
Ah… I think I get it. You want to play with intuitions, and see which premises would have to be proved in order to end up with monotheism via set theory.
I don’t think it would be possible to get around the point of defining God in terms of set theory. Once you have a definition, you can see if it turns up; if God is not defined, then you don’t know what you’re looking for. Looked at from that point of view, the definition of God as a first cause is probably one of the better options.
Loops can still be a problem...
This can still fail in the case where two loops have their external causes in each other. (I think. Or would that simply translate into an alternate set of loops? …I think I could figure out a set of looped entities, such that each loop has at lest one cause outside that loop, that has no first cause).
Either of those would be sufficient; though the first seems to fit more possible sets.
I think if two loops were caused by each other, then there would be a super-loop which included all the elements from both of them, and then you could look for the cause of the super-loop. The Axiom of Choice would still be needed to show that this process stops somewhere.
Finally, I rather liked your thought that causality may be so loopy that everything is a cause of everything else. The only way to get a first cause out of that mess is to treat the entire “super-duper-loop” of all things as a single uncaused entity, and if you insist on calling that “God”, you’re a pantheist.
Let’s consider loops A->B->C->A->B->C and D->E->F->D->E->F.
Let’s say, further, that B is a cause of E and D is a cause of A. Then each loop has an external cause.
Then there are also a few other loops possible:
A->B->E->F->D->A->B->E->F->D (external cause: C) A->B->E->F->D->A->B->C->A->B->E->F->D… huh. That includes all of them, in a sort of double-loop with no external cause. I guess that would be the super-loop.
Better yet; no matter what causality looks like, you can still always combine everything into a single giant, uncaused entity. You don’t need to assume away loops or infinite chains without external causes if you do that.
I’ve been doing a bit more “stir in fancy set theory” over the weekend, and believe I have an improved recipe! This builds on the idea to treat chains and loops as a single “entity” and look for a cause of that entity. It is a lot subtler than just throwing every entity together into one super-duper-entity.
Here are a bunch of premises that I think will do the trick:
A1. The collection of all entities is a set E, with two relations C and P on E, such that: x C y if and only if x is a cause of y; x P y if and only if x is a part of y.
A2. The set E can be well-ordered
Note: This ensures we can apply Zorn’s Lemma when considering chains in E, but is not as strong as the full Axiom of Choice. If the set E is finite or countable, for instance, then A2 applies automatically.
A3. If x C y and x P z then z C y.
Informally, “anything caused by a part is caused by the whole”.
Definitions: We define ⇐ such that x ⇐ y if and only if x = y or there are finitely many entities x1, …, xn such that x1 = x, xn = y and xi is a cause of xi+1 for i=1.. n-1. Say that a set S is a “chain” in E iff for any x, y in S we have x ⇐ y or y ⇐ x. Say that such an S is an “endless chain” iff for any x in S there is some y not equal to x in S with y ⇐ x. Say that an entity y is “uncaused” if and only if there is no z distinct from y with z ⇐ y. Also say that x is a “proper part” of y iff x is not equal to y but x P y.
Note: These definitions ensure that ⇐ is a pre-order on E. Note that an endless chain may be an infinite chain of distinct elements, or a causal loop.
A4. Let S be any endless chain in E. Then there is some z in E such that every x in S is a proper part of z.
Lemma 1: For any chain S in E, there is an element x of E with x ⇐ y for every y in S.
Proof: Suppose S has an end (not endless). Then there is some x in S such that for no other y in S is y ⇐ x. By the chain property we must have x ⇐ y for every member y of S. Alternatively, suppose that S is endless, then by A4, there is some z in E such that every x in S is a part of z. Now consider any y in S. There is some x not equal to y in S with x ⇐ y, so there are x = x1… xn = y with each xi C xi+1 for i=1..n-1. Further, by A3, as x C x2, we have z C x2 and hence z ⇐ y.
Lemma 2: For any x in E, there is some y in E such that: y ⇐ x, and for any z ⇐ y, y ⇐ z.
Proof: This is the version of Zorn’s Lemma applied to pre-orders.
Theorem 3: For any x in E, there is some uncaused y in E such that y ⇐ x.
Proof: Take a y as given by Lemma 2 and consider the set S = {s: s ⇐ y}. By Lemma 2, y ⇐ s for every member of S, and if S has more than one element, then S is an endless chain. So by A4 there is some z of which every s in S is a proper part, which implies that z is not in S. But by the proof of Lemma 1, z ⇐ y, which implies z is in S: a contradiction. So it follows that S = {y}, which completes the proof.
I’ve also got some premises for aggregating multiple uncaused entities into a single entity. This gives another approach to “uniqueness”. More on my next comment, if you’re interested.
For uniqueness, we build on the idea of all uncaused causes being part of a whole. The following premises look interesting here:
B1. If x P y and y P z then x P z; x = y if and only if x P y and y P x.
This states that P is a partial order, which is reasonable for the “part of” relation.
B2. If S is any chain of parts, such that for any x, y in S we have x P y or y P x, then there is some z in E of which all members of S are parts.
This states that E is inductively ordered by the “part of” relation.
B3. If x C z and y P z then x C y.
Informally, “a cause of the whole is a cause of any part”.
B4. Suppose that y ⇐ x and z ⇐ x and both y, z are uncaused. Then y P z or z P y, or there is some w of which both y and z are proper parts.
Informally, two uncaused y and z can’t independently conspire to cause x unless they are parts of a common entity.
Definition: Say that entities x and y are causally-connected if and only if x = y, or there are entities x=x1,..,xn=y with either xi C xi+1 or xi+1 C xi for each i=1..n-1.
B5. Any two entities in E are causally-connected.
Informally, E doesn’t “come apart” into completely disconnected components, such as a bunch of isolated universes.
Theorem 4: For any x in E, there is a unique entity f(x) in E such that: f(x) is uncaused, f(x) ⇐ x, and any other uncaused y with y ⇐ x satisfies y P f(x).
Proof: For any x, define a subset E’ = {y in E: y ⇐ x, y is uncaused}. Consider any chain of parts S in E’ with at least two elements. By B2 there is some z in E of which all members of S are parts. By B3, z must be uncaused (or else some w C z would also be a cause of all the members of S, which would require them all to be equal to w, so S would be a singleton), and by A3, z ⇐ x. So z is also a member of E’. By application of Zorn’s Lemma to E’, there is a P-maximal element f in E’ such that there is no other y in E’ with f P y. But then, by B4, for any y in E’ we must have y P f; this makes f unique.
Theorem 5: For any x, y in E, f(x) = f(y) if and only if x and y are causally-connected.
Proof: It is clear that if f(x) = f(y) then x is causally-connected to y (just build a path backwards from x to f(x) and then forward again to y). Conversely, suppose that x C y, then f(x) is uncaused and satisfies f(x) ⇐ y so we have f(x) P f(y). This implies f(x) = f(y). By a simple induction on n we have that if x is causally-connected to y, then f(x) = f(y).
Corollary 6: There is a single entity g in E such that f(x) = g for every entity x in E.
Proof: This follows from Theorem 5 and B5.
Done!
(Huh. One of the ancestors to this comment—several levels up—has been downvoted enough to require a karma penalty. I wonder if there should be some statute of limitations on that; whether, say, ten levels of positive-karma posts can protect against a higher-level negative-karma post?)
An interesting assumption. Necessary for theorem 3, but I suspect that it’ll mean that the original cause described in theorem 3 will then very probably be an entity z that is the earliest cause.
I also note that, while z consists of all the parts in the endless chain, there is no guarantee that any of the elements in the chain, even those that cause other elements in the chain, is in any way a cause of z. In fact, the way that z is defined, z may well be causeless (or, then again, z may have a cause). While I can’t actually find anything technically invalid in theorem 3, or in assumption 4, I get the general feeling of wool being pulled over my eyes in some way.
When I consider B3, it becomes even more important to note that z as a whole is not necessarily caused by any element that is a proper part of z. The cause of a part may or may not be the cause of the whole.
Hmmm… B4 appears to be pretty much just shoehorning monotheism in. It seems a questionable assumption; if I decide to get into my car and drive, and you decide to get into your car and drive, and we drive into each other, then we both are causes of the resultant accident but we are not the same. (We are not causeless, either, so it’s not quite a counterexample, just an explanation of why I don’t think B4 is justified,) B5 is unsupported, but I can prove that all entities that I will ever observe evidence of are causally connected (i.e. they are connected to the effects on my actions of having observed them) so it will look true whether it is or not.
Though I can raise questions about your assumptions, I can’t find anything wrong with your logic from then on. So congratulations; you have a very convincing argument! …as long as you can persuade the other person to accept your assumptions, of course.
Well now, here’s a devious approach, which would probably appeal to me if I ever needed to make a career as a philosopher of religion.
Let’s suppose a theist wants to “prove” that God—by his favourite definition—exists. For instance he could define a type G, whereby an entity g is of type G if and only if g is omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good and so on, and has all those characteristics essentially and necessarily. Something like that. Then the theist finds a set of premises P, with some intuitive support, such that P ⇒ There is an uncaused cause.
And then he adds one other premise “Every entity that is not of type G has a cause” into the recipe to form a new set P’. He cranks the handle, and then P’ ⇒ There is an entity of type G. Job done!
Just in case someone accuses him of “begging the question” or “assuming what he set out to prove” he then pulls out the modal trick. He just claims that it is possible that P’ is true. This leads to the conclusion that “It is possible that there is an entity of type G”. And then, remembering he’s defined G so it includes necessary existence (if such a being is possible at all, it must exist), he can still conclude “There is a being of type G”. Job done even better!
Can I have the Templeton Prize now please?
The modal trick reminds me of Descarte’s approach… God is definitionally perfectly good, which implies existence (since something good that doesn’t exist isn’t as good as something good that does), therefore God exists.
ZZZZzzzzzz....
A closer parallel is Plantinga’s “victorious ontological argument”.
That one was from the late 20th century, not the 17th. All rather sad really...
Huh. That modal trick is devious. But it doesn’t work. I can assume an entity that does something easily measurable (e.g. gives Christmas present to children worldwide), and then slap on a necessary existence clause; but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I can expect Santa later this year.
I think the ‘necessary existence’ clause requires a better justification in orderto be Templeton-worthy.
And here I always thought God corresponded to an inaccessible cardinal axiom.
On reflection, the fact that an atheist would be able to come up with an argument for a god that’s more persuasive to atheists is unsurprising, especially when you consider the fact that most religious people don’t become religious via being persuaded by arguments. It’s definitely still amusing, though.
I’m definitely aware of Tegmark’s theory, though I admit I hadn’t considered it as an argument for any kind of theism. That seems like an awfully parochial and boring application of the ultimate ensemble, although you’re right that it can have that sort of application… although, if we define “supernatural” entities to mean “ontologically basic mental entities” a la Richard Carrier, would it really be the case that Tegmark’s multiverse implies the existence of such? I’m not sure it does.
Meyer’s argument begins with premises that are hilariously absurd. Defining entities as being able to be causes of themselves? Having “entities” even able to be “causes”? What? And all this without the slightest discussion of what kinds of things an “entity” can even be, or what it means to “exist”? No, this is nonsense.
I think this is mostly a presentational issue. The purpose of the argument was to construct a non-strict partial order “<=” out of the causal relation, and that requires x<=x. This is just to enable the application of Zorn’s Lemma.
To avoid the hilarity of things being causes of themselves, we could easily adjust the definition of ⇐ so that “x<=y” if and only if “x=y or x is a cause of y”. Or the argument could be presented using a strict partial order <, under which nothing will be a cause of itself. The argument doesn’t need to analyse “entity” or “exists” since such an analysis is inessential to the premises.
And finally, please remember that the whole thing was not meant to be taken seriously; though rather amusingly, Alexander Pruss (whose site I linked to) apparently has been treating it as a serious argument. Oh dear.
FWIW, the probability I place on the Simulation Argument being true is only a little higher than the probability I place on traditional theistic gods existing. Could be just me, though.
Well, traditional theistic gods tend to be incoherent as well as improbable. (Or one might say, improbable only to the extent that they are coherent, which is not very much.) So, I’m not sure how we’d integrate that into a probability estimate.
Agreed; but this doesn’t apply to lesser gods such as Zeus or Odin or whomever.
What are the values for these probabilities and how have you estimated them?
Both of the values are somewhere around epsilon.
God-wise, I’ve never seen any evidence for anything remotely supernatural, and plenty of evidence for natural things. I know that throughout human history, many phenomena traditionally attributed to gods (f.ex. lightning) have later been demonstrated to occur by natural means; the reverse has never happened. These facts, combined with the internal (as well as mutual) inconsistencies inherent in most major religions, serve to drive the probability down into negligibility.
As for the Simulation Argument, once again, I’ve never seen any evidence of it, or any Matrix Lords, etc. Until I do, it’s simply not parsimonious for me to behave as though the argument was true. However, unlike some forms of theism, the Simulation Argument is at least internally consistent. In additions, I’ve seen computers before and I know how they can be used to run simulations, which constitutes a small amount of circumstantial evidence toward the Argument.
EDIT: I should mention that the prior for both claims is already very low, due to their complexity.
Epsilon is not a number, it’s a cop-out. Unless you put a number you are reasonably confident in on your prior, how would you update it in light of potential new evidence?
Well, so far, I have received zero evidence for the existence of either gods or Matrix Lords. This leaves me with, at best, just the original prior. I said “at best”, because some of the observations I’d received could be interpreted as weak evidence against gods (or Matrix Lords), but I’m willing to ignore that for now.
If I’m using some measure of algorithmic complexity for the prior, what values should I arrive at ? Both the gods and the Matrix Lords are intelligent in some general way, which is already pretty complex; probably as complex as we humans are, at the very least. Both of them are supremely powerful, which translates into more complexity. In case of the Matrix Lords, their hardware ought to more complex than our entire Universe (or possibly Multiverse). Some flavors of gods are infinitely powerful, whereas others are “merely” on par with the Matrix Lords.
I could keep listing properties here, but hopefully this is enough for you to decide whether I’m on the right track. Given even the basics that I’d listed above, I find myself hard-pressed to come up with anything other than “epsilon” for my prior.
Thank you for being unambiguous, this is exactly the sort of thing I wanted to see if this community actually believed. Personally I think it reflects poorly on anyone’s intellectual openness for them to believe the other side literally has no decent arguments.
Then you must believe the same with respect to homeopathic remedies, the flat earth society, and those who believe they can use their spiritual energy in the martial arts. Give us some good arguments for those.
There’s a lot of stuff out there for which it seems to me there is no good argument. I mean really, let’s try to maintain some sense of perspective here. The belief that everyone has a decent argument is, I think, pretty much demonstrably false. You presumably want us to believe that you’re in the same category as people who ought to be taken seriously, but I don’t really see how a belief in God is any more worthy of that than a belief in homeopathic remedies. At least, not based on your argument that all positions ought to be considered to have good arguments. If you’re trying to make a general argument, you’re going to get lumped in with them.
An argument can be “decent” without being right. If you want an example, and can follow it Kurt Godel’s ontological argument looks pretty decent. Consider that:
A) It is a logically valid argument
B) The premises sound fairly plausible (we can on the face of it imagine some sense of a “positive property” which would satisfy the premises)
C) It is not immediately obvious what is wrong with the premises
The wrongness can eventually be seen by carefully inspecting the premises, and checking which would go wrong in a null world (a possible world with no entities at all). Axiom 1 implies that if an impossible property is positive, then so is its negation (since an impossible property logically entails its negation). Axiom 2 says that can’t be true—a property and its negation can’t both be positive. So together these are a coded way of saying that all positive properties are possible properties. And then Axiom 5 (Neccessary existence is a positive property) goes wrong, because necessary existence is not a possible property in the null world. So it is not a positive property. Axiom 5 is inconsistent with Axioms 1 and 2.
There are arguments for the existence of God that are good in the sense that they raise my estimate of the likelihood of the existence of God by a substantial factor.
They aren’t sufficient to raise the odds to an overall appreciable level.
Sometimes, the issues really are cut-and-dried, though. To use a rather trivial example, consider the debate about the shape of the Earth. There are still some people who believe it’s flat. They don’t have any good arguments. We’ve been to space, we know the Earth is round, it’s going to be next to impossible to beat that.
I should clarify that when I said:
I meant this as the rhetorical “we”, not “we, Less Wrong”.
And in general, you shouldn’t take me, or any other commenter in particular (even Eliezer), to represent all of Less Wrong. This is a community blog, after all.
Did you read what I wrote about what makes arguments good or bad...?
Edit: Sorry, I see that you quoted from that comment, so presumably you did read it. That said, I’m not sure that what I said was clear, given your subsequent comments...
That is what many people here have done regarding theism. Seen the best arguments, and decided that they fail utterly. Eliezer quoted above talks about Modern Orthodox Judaism allowing doubt as a ritual, but not doubt as a practice leading to a result. You would have us listen to arguments as ritual, but not actually come to a conclusion that some of them are wrong.
Bob Altemeyer asked college students about this, some of whom had a strong allegiance to ‘traditional’ authority and some less so:
Despite what he says at the end, this “RWA” attitude correlates with religion—and Less Wrong seems to have unusually low RWA in any case. We also have a certain tendency to read books. You should therefore expect some of us to know the ‘strongest’ arguments for religion, and consider them bad. Don’t just assert that we don’t. Name an argument and see if we know it!
On a related note, you seem statistically in danger of losing your faith. If you want to keep it, you should use some form of Crowley’s general method of religious devotion. While I failed to produce a vision of the Goddess Eris in the short time I allotted to this method, a kind of ‘sophisticated’ Discordianism did come to seem reasonable for a while.
I don’t know what you think a “strong argument” is. Arguments are not weapons, with a certain caliber and stopping power and so forth, such that two sides might go at each other with their respective arguments, and whoever’s got the most firepower wins. That’s not how it works.
An argument may be more or less persuasive (relative to some audience!), but that depends on many things, such as whether the argument hits certain emotional notes, whether it makes use of certain common fallacies and biases, or certain commonly held misconceptions; or whether it is structured so as to obscure its flaws; or even whether it’s couched in fancy or beautiful sounding language.
Whether an argument is correct (i.e. valid and sound) is another matter entirely, and may have little to do with whether the argument, in actual fact, tends to persuade many people.
We here at Less Wrong have seen many arguments for the existence of God, many of which are found to be persuasive by many people who are not aware of their flaws (by “their” I can mean the arguments’ flaws, or the flaws of the audience, i.e. cognitive biases and so forth).
All of those arguments are wrong (invalid, unsound, full of fallacies, etc.). That’s what we mean when we say they’re not “good” arguments.
Oh, and another thing:
What do you mean, “optimal”? Look, for any question where there is, in principle, a correct answer (which might not be known), the totality of the information available to us at any given time will point to some answer (which might not be the correct one, given incomplete information). Arguments for that answer might be correct. Arguments for some other answer will be wrong.
Why would we expect there to be good arguments for the wrong answer?
What does two-sided discourse look like, in your view?
It may help to note that ibidem has made earlier claims about how the meaning of “reliably evaluate evidence” is variable, so I suspect they would reject the claim that there’s a correct answer towards which available information points at any given time.
More specifically, I would expect them to claim that there can be two or more mutually exclusive answers to which the same information points equally strongly, “depending on your paradigm.”
Why is that the “optimal” situation ? Optimal according to what metric ?
I personally never was religious, but AFAIK I’m an outlier. Most atheists arrived at atheism exactly in the way that you describe; others got there by reading the Bible. I don’t have hard data to support this claim, though, so I could be wrong.
I think the holy books are kind of hampering mainstream religions, to be honest. We live in a world where pictures of distant galaxies are considered so mundane that they hardly ever make the news, and where the average person carries a supercomputer in his pocket, which connects him to a global communication network that speaks via invisible light. The average person typically wields this unimaginable power in order to inform his friends about quotidian matters such as “look at what I had for lunch today”.
Against the backdrop of this much knowledge and power, the holy books look… well… kind of drab. They tell us that the world is a tiny disc, covered by a crystalline dome, and that the space outside this dome is inhabited by vaguely humanoid super-powered beings who, despite having the power to create worlds and cover them with crystalline domes, actually do care about what we had for lunch today. Hopefully it wasn’t ham. Gods hate ham.
I understand that most theists don’t take their holy books quite that literally, and that it’s all supposed to be a big allegory for something or other, but still, it’s hard to get excited about a text that didn’t even get the shape of the Earth right.
That’s my own personal perspective, at least.
To be fair, the crystal sphere thing doesn’t appear in any Abrahamic holy books (that I know of); it’s a feature of Aristotelian cosmology that the Church picked up during the period when it was essentially the only scholarly authority running in what used to be called Christendom and therefore needed an opinion on natural philosophy. I believe the bit in Genesis about erecting a firmament in the primordial water does ultimately refer to a traditional belief along similar lines, but it’s pretty ambiguous.
Flat-earth cosmology was known to be false by Aristotle’s time, although some monks in the early Middle Ages seem to have missed the memo—again without explicit Biblical support, though. Science in the Islamic world always used a round-earth model as far as I know, and I don’t remember reading anything in the Koran that contradicts that, although it’s been several years.
Ok, I may have overreached with the “crystal” thing, but there are definitely several passages that refer to a solid dome separating two sections of the world. This dome is typically referred to as the “firmament”, and is referred to in passages outside of Genesis on occasion.
As for the flat Earth, I admit that the claims there are weaker. The Bible manages “four corners of the Earth”, but that could be a metaphor. The Devil also transports Jesus to the top of a tall mountain to show him “all the kingdoms of the Earth”, but that could’ve been an illusion.
I agree with Jack here, but I’m going to add the piece of advice that used to be very common for newcomers here, although it’s dropped off over time as people called attention to the magnitude of the endeavor, and suggest that you finish reading the sequences before trying to engage in further religious debate here.
Eliezer wrote them in order to bring potential members of this community up to speed so that when we discuss matters, we could do it with a common background, so that everyone is on the same page and we can work out interesting disagreements without rehashing the same points over and over again. We don’t all agree with all the contents of every article in the sequences, but they do contain a lot of core ideas that you have to understand to make sense of the things we think here. Reading them should help give you some idea, not just what we believe, but why we think that it makes more sense to believe those things than the alternatives.
The “rigidity” which you detect is not a product of particular closedmindedness, but rather a deliberate discarding of certain things we believe we have good reason not to put stock in, and reading the sequences should give you a much better idea of why. On the other hand, if you don’t stick so closely to the topic of religion, I think you’ll find that we’re also open to a lot of ideas that most people aren’t open to.
If we’re to liken rationality to a martial art, then it would be one after the pattern of Jeet Kune Do; “Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless.” A person trained in a style or school which lacked grounding in real life effectiveness might say “At my school, we learned techniques to knock guys out with 720 degree spinning kicks and stab people with knives launched from our toes, and they were awesome, but you guys just reject them out of hand. Your style seems really rigid and closed-minded to me.” And the Jeet Kune Do practitioner might respond “Fancy spinning kicks and launching knives from your toes might be awesome, but they’re awesome for things like displaying your gymnastic ability and finesse, not for defending yourself or defeating an opponent. If we want to learn to do those things, we’ll take up gymnastics or toe-knife-throwing as hobbies, but when it comes to martial arts techniques, we want to stick to ones which are awesome at the things martial arts techniques are supposed to be for. And when it comes to those, we’re not picky at all. ”
Oh, and since I currently have negative karma, I’m unable to directly respond to your other comments.
In response to this one:
It’s a very important question and one I need to think about more. In the next few days I’ll write a Discussion post addressing my beliefs, including why I’m planning not to lose my faith at the moment.
And this one:
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.
I didn’t come here expecting people to be rigid. But when I asked people what the best arguments for theism were, they either told me that there were none, or they rehashed bad ones that are refuted easily.
Yes, I definitely am. In an intellectual debate I could probably defend atheism better than belief; I was originally looking for good arguments in favor of theism and I thought that you guys of all people ought to know some. Suffice it to say that I was largely wrong about that.
How does this response mean that we’re rigid?
Sorry, I can’t tell you what I don’t know. All the arguments for theism that I’ve ever heard were either chock-full of logical fallacies, or purely instrumental, of the form “I don’t care if any of this stuff is true or not, but I’m going to pretend that it is because doing so helps me in some way”. I personally believe that there’s a large performance penalty associated with believing false things, and thus arguments of the second sort are entirely unconvincing for me.
I am looking forward to your discussion post, however. Hopefully, I’ll finally get to see some solid arguments for theism in there !
Sorry to disappoint you there. As I’ve said, I have no hope of convincing all of you and I’m not going to try; I wouldn’t stand a chance in a formal debate against a dozen of you.
I was thinking more along the lines of why I think it’s best to take the conclusions of a certain way of thinking with a grain of salt no matter how right its members think they are. Being skeptical of skepticism, one could say. So yes, it’s likely going to seem like a long criticism of Less Wrong’s fundamental philosophy, and chances are it won’t be too popular—but you never know. I think it’s a very good practice in life, not to accept any philosophy too fully.
What gives me the authority to say such things? An outside perspective.
An always open mind never closes on anything. There is a time to confess your ignorance and a time to relinquish your ignorance and all that...
I’ve read most of the sequences. If you believe there are core ideas I’m missing, tell me which ones and I’d be happy to research them. But chances are I’ve read that sequence already, especially if you mention ones about religion.
It’s an important point. If you demand that a user read every word Dear Leader has ever written, you’re not going to get many new voices willing to contribute, which as we all know is bad for the intellectual diversity of the group.
See, the problem here is a difference in the perception of what is “useful.” If you only learn martial arts because you want to defeat opponents, then sure, it’s fine to reject 720 degree spinning kicks. But self-defense is not in fact the only point of martial arts. There is often an element of theater or even ritual that is lost when you reject what Jeet Kune Do thinks is “useless.”
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.”
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.
Of course, that’s to be expected for a community that defines itself as rationalist. There are ways of thinking that are more accurate than others, that, to put it inexactly, produce truth. It’s not just a “Think however you like and it will produce truth,” kind of game.
The obsession that some people have with being open minded and considering all ways of thinking and associated ideas equally is, I suspect, unsustainable for anyone who has even the barest sliver of intellectual honesty. I don’t consider it laudable at all. That’s not to say they have to be a total arse about it, but I think at best you can hope that they ignore you or lie to you.
Are you saying it’s more rational not ever to consider some ways of thinking?
(I’m pretty sure I’m not completely confused about what it means to be a rationalist.)
Yes. Rationality isn’t necessarily about having accurate beliefs. It just tends that way because they seem to be useful. Rationality is about achieving your aims in the most efficient way possible.
Oh, someone may have to look into some ways of thinking, if people who use them start showing signs of being unusually effective at achieving relevant ends in some way. Those people would become super-dominant, it would be obvious that their way of thinking was superior. However, there’s no reason that it makes sense for any of us to do it at the moment. And if they never show those signs then it will never be rational to look into them.
It’s a massive waste of time and resources for individuals to consider every idea and every way of thinking before making a decision. You’re getting closer to death every day. You have to decide which ways of thinking you are going to invest your time in—which ones have the greatest evidence of giving you something you want.
That’s the thing for rationalists really, I think—chances of giving you what you want. It’s entirely possible that if you don’t want to achieve anything in this world with your life that it may just be a mistake for you personally to pursue rationality very far at all—at the end of the day you’re probably not going to get anything from it if all you really want to do is feel justified in believing in god.
What does it mean to be a rationalist?
I suppose what Estarlio and I are actually referring to (as in “a community that defines itself as rationalist”) is “good epistemic hygiene.”
Given your earlier claims about how the meaning of reliably evaluating evidence depends on your paradigm, I have no confidence that you and I share an understanding of what “good epistemic hygiene” means either, so that doesn’t really help me understand what you’re saying.
Can you give me some representative concrete examples of good epistemic hygiene, on your account?
Articles like this one, obviously.
Or carefully evaluating both sides of an issue, for instance. Even if it’s not specifically a LW thing it’s considered essential for good judgment in the larger academic community.
Are we ever allowed to say “okay, we have evaluated this issue thoroughly, and this is our conclusion; let’s end this debate for now”? Are we allowed to do it even if some other people disagree with the conclusion? Or do we have to continue the debate forever (of course, unless we reach the one very specific predetermined answer)?
Sometimes we probably should doubt even whether 2+2=4. But not all the time! Not even once in a month. Once or twice in a (pre-Singularity) lifetime is probably more than necessary. -- Well, it’s very similar for the religion.
There are thousands of issues worth thinking about. Why waste the limited resources on this specific topic? Why not something useful… such as curing the cancer, or even how to invent a better mousetrap?
Most of us have evaluated the both sides of this issue. Some of us did it for years. We did it. It’s done. It’s over. -- Of course, unless there is something really new and really unexpected and really convincing… but so far, there isn’t anything. Why debate it forever? Just because some other people are obsessed?
So, I basically agree with you, but I choose to point out the irony of this as a response to a thread gone quiet for months.
LOL
I guess instead of the purple boxes of unread comments, we should have two colors for unread new comments and unread old comments. (Or I should learn to look at the dates, but that seems less effective.)
(blinks)
Oh, is THAT what those purple boxes are!?!
learns a thing *
Wait, what purple boxes? Am I missing something?
As I respond to this, your comment is outlined in a wide purple border. When I submit this response, I expect that your comment will no longer be outlined, but my comment will. If I refresh the screen, I expect neither of ours will.
This has been true since I started reading LW again recently, and I have mostly been paying no attention to it, figuring it was some kind of “current selection” indicator that wasn’t working very well. But if it’s an “unread comment” indicator, then it works a lot better.
Edit—I was close. When I submit, your comment is still purple, and mine isn’t. If I refresh once, yours isn’t and mine is. If I refresh again, neither is.
Oh now I see. Both of our comments are purple-boxed. Let’s see what happens when I comment and refresh.
I’m not still worrying about it, most of the time. It’s interesting to see how all these threads turned out. I’m no longer especially active here, although I still find it a great place. My intention was never to come arguing for religion, as obviously you’ve made up your minds, but I was a bit disappointed in the reactionary nature of the responses. I have since found the types of arguments I was looking for, however, and I would highly recommend this book—The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions, by David Berlinski (a secular jew and mathematician).
But of course there is no place for such impossible questions in most of everyday life. God and religion need to be pondered sometimes, but I’m done for now.
From the book’s website:
I guess there is some tension between “narrow and oppressive orthodoxy of thought and opinion” and “willing to believe in anything”...
Willing to believe in anything the oppressive orthodoxy (“Science”) claims to have proven, I think.
I did not find The Devil’s Delusion to be persuasive/good at all. It’s scientific quality is perhaps best summarized by noting that Berlinski is an opponent of evolution; I also recall that Berlinski spent an enormous amount of time on the (irrelevant) topic of whether some atheists had been evil.
ETA: Actually, now that I think about, The Devil’s Delusion is probably why I tend to ignore or look down on atheists who spend lots of time arguing that God would be evil (e.g. Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris)- I feel like they’re making the same mistake, but on the opposite side.
Berlinski’s thesis is not that evolution is incorrect or that atheists are evil; rather it is that our modern scientific system has just as many gaping holes in it as does any proper theology. Evolution is not incorrect, but the way it’s interpreted to refute God is completely unfounded. Its scientific quality is in fact quite good; do you have any specific corrections or is it just that anything critical of Darwin is surely wrong?
How so? Someone involved with CFAR allegedly converted to Catholicism due to an argument-from-morality. Also, I know looking at the Biblical order to kill Isaac, and a general call to murder that I wasn’t following, helped me to realize I didn’t believe in God as such.
This is evidence that arguments-from-morality do persuade people, not that they should.
My point is that various atheists may wish to convince people who actually exist. Such people may give credence to the traditional argument from morality, or may think they believe claims about God while anticipating the opposite.
OK. Thanks for answering my question.
I’m curious too. Can you give me an example of a particular way of thinking that you considered, yet ended up rejecting ? I’m not sure what you mean by “ways of thinking”, so that might help.
OK, I’m ready to entertain new ideas: What’s sacred about Mormon underwear?
You’re free to answer, or you may notice that not all ideas deserve to be elevated above background noise by undue consideration. Rejecting an Abrahamic God as (is ludicrous too harsh?) … not all too likely helps in demoting a host of associated and dependent beliefs into insignificance.
I’m not a Mormon, and I actually don’t know that much about their underwear, but this is still rather a silly question. A Mormon might answer that, given that the Mormon god does exist and does care about his followers, the underwear symbolizes the commitment that the follower made to his God. It serves as a physical reminder to the wearer that he must abide by certain rules of conduct, in exchange for divine protection.
Such an answer may make perfect sense in the context of the Mormon religion (as I said, I’m not a Mormon so I don’t claim this answer is correct). It may sound silly to you, but that’s because you reject the core premise that the Mormon god exists. So, by hearing the answer you haven’t really learned anything, and thus your question had very little value.
Which is the point I was trying to make when talking about that question in the second paragraph. As goes “is there an Abrahamic god”, so goes a majority of assorted ‘new’ - but in fact dependent on that core premise—ideas.
I didn’t get the impression that ibidem was talking about specific tenets of any particular religion when he mentioned “new ideas”, but I could be wrong.
The same applies to many ideas that build upon other concepts being the case. You could probably make an argument that no ideas at all are wholly independent facts in the sense that they do not depend on the truth value of other ideas. Often you can skip dealing with a large swath of ideas simply by rejecting some upstream idea they all rely upon.
Religion, in this case, was a good example. That, and there’s always some chance of hearing something interesting about holy underwear.
Only that God makes it sacred. But I’m actually too young to be wearing it myself, so I don’t know if I’m qualified to talk. And I think it would be better for me not to get into defending my particular religion.
There are threads about theism, etc. in which theists have received positive net karma. It should be possible to learn which features of discourse tend to accrue upvotes on this site.
Having seen my karma fluctuate hundreds of points in the last 24 hours, I’ve lost all faith in karma as a general indication.
Even if someone’s overall karma fluctuates a lot, karma can still be a good indicator of how LW feels about one of their comments if the comment’s score is reasonably stable.
FWIW, I neither upvoted nor downvoted your posts; I think they are typical for a newcomer to the community. However, I must admit that your closing line comes across as being very poorly thought out:
This makes it sound like your Mormonism is a foregone conclusion, and that you’re going to disregard whatever evidence or argumentation comes along, unless it is compatible with Mormonism. That is not a very rational way of thinking. Then again, that’s just what your closing statement sounds like, IMO; you probably did not mean it that way.
Just as I’ve been told repeatedly that your atheism is a foregone conclusion.
Can you point to where you’ve been told that?
What I think most of us would agree on, and what it seems to me that people here have told you, is that they consider atheism to be a settled question, which is not at all the same thing.
Consider, then, that my Mormonism is a settled question.
I regard atheism as a slam-dunk issue, but I wouldn’t walk into a Mormon forum and call atheism a settled question. ’Twould be logically rude to them.
Is this an atheist forum?
...
That’s a serious question. You have been pretty clear about the issue, but users are quick to point out that just because you say something doesn’t mean the community believes it.
There are a few theists on this site, but based on last year’s survey results it’s an awfully small number. However, the fact that this forum is composed mostly of atheists does not mean it’s officially an “atheist forum.” Is LW a rationality community, or a rationality and atheism community? I don’t believe that rationality in general is incompatible with religious belief, but if this community thinks that their particular brand of rationality is, people like me would love to know that.
I think, in fact, that it might help your outside perception to clearly state the site’s philosophy when it comes to issues like religion. If you say that you’re a rationality community, but are actually an atheist community as well, people accuse you of being an atheist cult under the guise of rationality. If you say up front that you are an atheist community as well as a rationality one, you appear a lot more “legit.”
And if you don’t like theists like me on this site, then officially declaring the site’s atheism would a) deter most of them, and b) give you full justification for rejecting the rest out of hand.
I think it that most of your problems with theists would go away if you clarified LW’s actual position. If this is an atheist forum, say so from the beginning. (Not just that there are a lot of atheists—that atheism is the “state religion” around here.) If LW is not necessarily atheist, kindly stop saying things that make it seem like it is.
(Ridiculous idea: you could hold a referendum! I’d be very curious to see what the community thinks.)
I know this is all-or-nothing thinking, but the alternative is harmful ambiguity.
It’s a forum where taking atheism for granted is widespread, and the 10% of non-atheists have some idea of what the 90% are thinking. Being atheist isn’t part of the official charter, but you can make a function call to atheism without being questioned by either the 10% or the 90% because everyone knows where you’re coming from. If I was on a 90% Mormon forum which theoretically wasn’t about Mormonism but occasionally contained posters making function calls to Mormon theology without further justification, I would not walk in and expect to be able to make atheist function calls without being questioned on it. If I did, I wouldn’t be surprised to be downvoted to oblivion if that forum had a downvoting function. This isn’t groupthink; it’s standard logical courtesy. When you know perfectly well that a supermajority of the people around you believe X, it’s not just silly but logically rude to ask them to take Y as a premise without defending it. I would owe this hypothetical 90%-Mormon forum more acknowledgement of their prior beliefs than that.
I regard all of this as common sense.
As part of said minority, I fully endorse this comment.
I like your use of “function calls” as an analogy here, but I don’t think it’s a good idea; you could just as easily say “use concepts from” without alienating non-programmer readers.
I understand it now knowing that it’s a programming reference (I program), but I wouldn’t have recognized it otherwise. Thanks for the clarification.
Since I’m momentarily feeling remarkably empowered about my own life, I’m going to take this chance to officially bow out for a few weeks.
We all knew it was coming—it’s the typical reaction for an overwhelmed newbie like me, I know, and I’m always very determined not to give up, but I really think I had better take a break.
My last week has hardly involved anything except LW and related sites, and we all know that having one’s mind blown is a very strenuous task. I’ve learned a lot, and I will definitely be back after four weeks or so.
I’ve decided I’m not going to let myself be pressured into expressly arguing in favor of religion. I’ve said several times I’m not interested in that, and that I don’t have these supposed strong arguments in favor of religion. If you guys want a good theist, check out William Lane Craig.
When I come back I will, however, explain my own beliefs and why I can’t fully accept the LW way of thinking. Please don’t get misunderstand what I’m saying: I think you guys are right, more so than any group of people I’ve ever met. But for now I’m going to shelve philosophy and take advantage of my situation. In the next four weeks I’m going to a) learn Lambda Calculus and b) study Arabic intensively.
May the Force be with you ’til we meet again.
For the record, I once challenged Craig to a Bloggingheads but he refused.
This is not an atheist forum, in much the same way that it is not an a-unicorn-ist forum. Not because we do not hold a consistent position on the existence of unicorns, but because the issue itself is not worth discussing. The data has spoken, and there is no reason to believe in them. Whatever. Let’s move on to more important things like anthropics and the meta-ethics of Friendly AI.
You are fixating on atheism for some reason. Assigning low probability to any particular religion, and only a marginally higher probability to some supernatural creator still actively shaping the universe results naturally from rationally considering the issue and evaluating the probabilities. So do many other conclusions. This reminds me of the creationists picking a fight against evolution, whereas they could have picked a fight against Copernicanism, the way flat earthers do.
To clarify: you think LW’s brand of rationalism is incompatible with religious belief?
Might we not, instead, disagree with you about rationality in general being compatible with religious belief, rather than asserting that we have some special incompatible brand of rationality?
Do we really have “problems with theists”...?
I don’t. I just consider the debates about theism boring if they don’t bring any new information.
The comment above from EY is over-broad in calling this an “atheist forum”, but I think it still has a good point:
It’s logically rude to go to a place where the vast majority of people believe X=34, and you say “No, actually X=87, but I won’t accept any discussion on the matter.” To act that way is to treat disagreement like a shameful thing, best not brought up in polite company, and that’s as clear an example of logical rudeness as I can think of.
You’re right, that would be very rude.
I’ve been happy to take part in extensive discussion on the matter already, and now I’m working on putting a post together. I have no problem with disagreement. I never thought I could avoid disagreement, posting the way I did. But it’s also true that I can’t hope to win a debate against fifteen of you. And so I didn’t come here looking to win any debates.
Sounds fine to me. Consider it this way: whether or not you “win the debate” from the perspective of some outside audience, or from our perspective, isn’t important. It’s more about whether you feel like you might benefit from the conversation yourself.
But you haven’t showed much willingness so far to discuss your reasons for your belief in which way the evidence falls or ours.
I can understand not wanting to discuss a settled question with people who’re too biased to analyze it reasonably, but if you’re going to avoid discussing the matter here in the first place, it suggests to me that rather than concluding from your experience with us that we’re rigid and closed-minded on the matter, you’ve taken it as a premise to begin with, otherwise where’s the harm in discussing the evidence?
I consider the matter of religion to be a settled question because I’ve studied the matter well beyond the point of diminishing returns for interesting evidence or arguments. Are you familiar enough with the evidence that we’re prepared to bring to the table that you think you could argue it yourself?
Then why bring it up?
Because it seems to be an important part of the issue. I know, I could have left it off, but it has come up elsewhere and I don’t see any need to hide it. If people have a problem with it, that’s not my fault. I thought it best to clarify this from the beginning.
It might or it might not be. As a general rule, if two people think that a single issue of fact is a settled question, in different directions, then either they have access to different information, or one or both of them is incorrect.
If the former is the case, then they can share their information, after which either they will agree, or one or both will be incorrect.
If we’re incorrect about religion being a settled question, we want to know that, so we can change our minds. If Mormonism is incorrect, do you want to know that?
Told by someone other than myself, hopefully. While I do not expect to become a theist of any kind in the near future, neither do I intend to remain an atheist. Instead, I intend to hold a set of beliefs that are most likely to be true. If I gain sufficient evidence that the answer is “Jesus” or “Trimurti”, then this is what I will believe.
If you want to raise my openness to the possibility of a god-level power, then provide me with evidence of consistent, accurate, specific prophecies made hundreds of years in advance of the events. Or provide me of evidence of multiple strong rationalists who are also religious and claim that their religion is based on assessment of the evidence/available arguments.
My atheism isn’t a foregone conclusion. It’s simply that no-one’s ever seriously challenged it and at this point I’ve heard so many bad arguments that people need to come up with evidence before I’m prepared to take them seriously. But you could totally change my mind, if you had the right things.
I suspect what people mean when they say their atheism is a settled question or whatever is that they don’t have time to listen to yet another bad argument for theism. That you need some evidence before they’re prepared to take you seriously. Which seems quite reasonable.
When your comments get downvoted, respond by refraining from making similar comments in the future and/or abandoning the topic (this is a simple heuristics whose implementation doesn’t require figuring out the reasons for downvoting). Given the current trend, if that doesn’t happen, in a while your future comments will start getting banned. (You are currently at minus 128, 17% positive. This reflects the judgment of many users.)
Excuse me, but I watched my Karma drop a hundred points in three minutes. Look me in the eye and tell me that’s the coincidental result of “the judgment of many users.” Even if I were a brilliant, manipulative troll, I doubt I could get to −128 without someone deliberately and systematically doing so.
Someone has probably just discovered your work and found it systematically wanting. By “many users” I mean that many of the more recent comments are at minus 2-3 and there are only a few upvotes, so other people don’t generally disagree.
You essentially accused the community of being ashamed of being atheist when you said:
We aren’t ashamed. As Jack said to you in a parallel comment, we generally think the question is a solved problem. We aren’t interested in having the same basic conversation over and over again.
Accusing us of being ashamed of the position because we don’t throw our atheism in your face makes it hard to interpret the rest of your comments as saying anything beyond repeating the basic apologetics. And we’ve heard the basic apologetics a million times.
Once the lurkers think you aren’t interesting, they’ll downvote—and there are WAY more lurkers than commenters. Given that, your karma loss isn’t all that surprising.
Possible, but given that all your comments are on only a small number of threads and arguing for the same basic points, it is also plausible that someone just went through those threads an downvoted most of your comments while upvoting others. I for example got about +20 karma from what as far as I can tell is primarily upvotes on my replies to you.
Welcome.
I’d like to point to myself as a data point; I’m a theist, specifically a Roman Catholic, and I consider myself a rationalist. I know that there’s a strong atheistic atmosphere here, but I just thought I should point out that it’s not all-inclusive.
The site culture treats serious adherence to supernatural beliefs associated with a religion as a disease. First it will try to cure you. If that doesn’t seem to be working, it will start quarantining you.
Thanks for this honest assessment; it seems pretty accurate. (You also didn’t make any judgment as to the appropriateness of such a mindset.)
I think it’s a rather uncharitable assessment of the situation, though it’s possible some people do feel that way.
Being wrong is not the same thing as being a disease.
Actually, the behavior Risto_Saarelma described fits the standard pattern. People who cannot be helped are ignored or rejected. Take any stable community, online or offline, and that’s what you see.
For example, f someone comes to, say, the freenode ##physics IRC channel and starts questioning Relativity, they will be pointed out where their beliefs are mistaken, offered learning resources and have their basic questions answered. If they persist in their folly and keep pushing crackpot ideas, they will be asked to leave or take it to the satellite off-topic channel. If this doesn’t help, they get banned.
Again, this pattern appears in every case where a community (or even a living organism) is viable enough to survive.
Not being a disease. Having one.
Being wrong is not the same as having a disease, either.
There’s the difference between being wrong and being wrong as a member of a social group that derives its identity from being wrong in that particular way. Experience has taught to expect less from discussion in the latter case.
Keeping one’s identity small is hard, be it “Mormon” or “Rationalist” or “Brunette” or whatever. I don’t think we should discourage people from joining the site just because they haven’t fully mastered Bayes-Fu (tm) yet.
Why do you think so? It’s usual to express things in terms of one’s identity (for example, people often say “I don’t believe in God”, a property of the person, instead of asserting “There is no God”, a statement about the world), but this widespread tradition doesn’t necessarily indicate that it’s difficult to do otherwise, if people didn’t systematic try (in particular, in the form of a cultural tradition, so that conformity would push people to discard their identity).
We all live within a culture, though. Some of us live in several subcultures at the same time. But unless you are a hermit living in a cave somewhere, escaping that cultural pressure to conform would be very difficult.
A lot of things are culturally normal, but easy to change in yourself, so this alone doesn’t help to explain why one would believe that keeping one’s identity small would be difficult.
What are some examples of such things, specifically those things that contribute to a person’s identity within a culture ? By contrast, a preference for, say, yogurt instead of milk is culturally normal, is probably easy to acquire (or discard), but does not usually contribute to a person’s identity.
I started responding to you, but then I decided I wanted you to remain religious. For the benefit of others, here’s why. (Also note that this guy is Mormon, and as far as I can tell, Mormonism is pretty great as religions go.)