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Sideways comments on Atheism = Untheism + Antitheism - Less Wrong
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I'm willing to think about it for another 5 minutes.
I am not so attached to the existence of God -- no social pressures to speak of (my father, one of my closest friends, is a boisterous atheist) and the only thing I am attached to is the value and meaning of life, not God. So I'm open to a Third Alternative.
Suppose, indeed, I were a rationalist of an Untheist society. As I observed the world around me, I would eventually, inevitably ask, how come the patterns are so consistent and dovetail with one another? Physical reality works, evolution works, mathematics works. Would it be very long before I asked if there was some kind of meta-organization?
Possible responses:
A pragmatic one: I wouldn't mind, perhaps, if someone told me, "apparently this is the limit of our knowledge". Like a fish that has evolved no ability to comprehend that the ocean is on a planet inside a solar system, you've simply not evolved an ability to understand or conclude anything at this level of abstraction. Anything you imagine might happen at the higher levels will only ever be imagination. So this would lead to agnosticism. And anti-philosophy.
A hopeful one: Things makes sense and have order on all lower levels, thus by induction (or by taking some kind of limit) they will as well on the higher levels. There is purpose and meaning, even on the meta-levels. So this would lead to faith, and actually theism since you expect a single connecting weave.
A depressing one: It is most justified to believe there is no meta-organization. You notice the patterns that exist and ignore the non-patterns. The occurrence of patterns is random, arbitrary, meaningless. Some patterns are more common than others (see, circles are everywhere, they have a high probability) but there's no pattern for the collection of the patterns.This would depress me, that I assume meaning on all these smaller scales of pattern but there isn't one at the higher level. It would at least negate my confidence in the value of the lower level patterns, and possibly even negate my belief in the perception of the patterns. (The same way an interesting pattern of numbers in a phone book column is not really a pattern, or the way a set of random dots will always appear to have some dots arranged in lines.)
I wonder if I take "B" but lean towards the first solution, which is why I feel rather equanimous about arguments for the "existence" of God. Then, I would feel very strongly that this go-nowhere philosophizing isn't exploited to project the superiority of the C group over the B group.
Is there anything supernatural about meta-organization?
Take your hypothetical a step further: suppose that not only were you born into an Untheist society, but also a universe where physical reality, evolution, and mathematics did not "work." In universe-prime, the laws of physics do not permit stars to form, yet the Earth orbits the Sun; evolution cannot produce life, but humans exist; physicists and mathematicians prove that math can't describe reality, yet people know where the outfielder should stand to catch the fly ball.
byrnema-prime would have an open-and-shut case that some supernatural agency was tampering with the forces of nature. The "miraculous" violations of its meta-organization would be powerful evidence for the existence of God.
"Imagine," byrnema-prime might argue to an untheist, "a universe very different from ours, where every known phenomenon arose predictably from other known phenomena. In such a universe, your rejection of the supernatural would be proper; supernatural causes would not be required to produce what people observe. But in our universe, where miracles occur, atheism just can't be justified."
Which byrnema has the stronger argument? Which is evidence for God's existence, A or ~A?
No. The meta-organization is a property of the natural world.
The God you are talking about in ~A -- the one causing the miraculous violations -- sounds like some kind of creature. It would be a subset of a larger universe U that includes ~A and includes the creature. Does this universe U have any rules?
Or suppose you really insist that the creature is God. This creature is not imposing logic, so logic is not one of the rules of ~A. Perhaps it doesn't impose any consistent rules. Then it is not endowing ~A with any consistent value or meaning. So you would have a situation where the humans in ~A have evidence of God, but the notion of God provides nothing.
You wrote:
It sounds like you're saying that your "God" is not supernatural. This isn't just a problem of proper usage. A theist who believes in a deity (which, given proper usage, is redundant) is at least being internally consistent when using ineffable language like "God," "belief," and "faith," because she's imagining something ineffable. Using ineffable language to describe natural phenomena just generates mysterious answers to mysterious questions.
The argument, "your puny God is a creature and mine isn't" sounds like one more retreat to mystery. A God that causes miracles is only required to be a creature insofar as a God that causes patterns to be "consistent and dovetail with one another" (in other words, prevents miracles) is also required to be a creature.
Yes, I believe that God is natural -- not supernatural.
I think what you're saying is that if I claim that the meta-pattern is natural, then it's part of the physical world – thus inside science, and thus not anything we mean by God.
But what I’ve been saying all along is that there are some things – patterns/meanings/interpretations – that are not within science but that are within the natural world. Theists believe (I think most fundamentally it is just this that they believe) that meanings and patterns exist in some real, meaningful way. Religions consist of describing these patterns in great detail, and they have all kinds of disagreements about what the patterns are and what parts are most relevant. And there’s a disagreement about whether the pattern is natural (and, usually, impersonal) or supernatural (usually, then, also personal and interactive).
Thus, there are theists that are ideologically scientists (e.g., Einstein) and those that are non-scientists (e.g., Creationists). What they have in common is the belief that the universe is organized (meaningful). There are rationalists that believe the universe is random (a chilling and impersonal place) and those that believe there is meaning. What rationalists have in common is the scientific ideology. IMO, rationalists that believe in meaning but call themselves atheists are a group of people who think it is more important to distinguish themselves from non-scientist theists than nihilist rationalists. If it isn’t clear, my long term goal would be to see this group pulled from anti-atheism. (But untheism, a matter of definition, is fine.) I think non-scientific theists need guidance to more greatly value science, not cultural annihilation of "theism" because it is so immutably antithetical to science. Theism is antithetical only to nihilism. Explaining that a scientific ideology doesn’t eradicate meaning is the first step to guiding theists, but this isn't done very well. And finally my argument that if you do not adequately (clearly, definitively) distinguish yourselves from nihilism when you try to convert theists with “science”, you won't succeed.
Could you give me an example of such a description, preferably from one of the big two religions. Because I don't recognise this feature of religion at all.
I think "love" is the most accessible example.
Love in a mundane sense is certainly part of the natural world: we observe it in a variety of organisms and there are sub-patterns (love between parents and their offspring, love between mates, love between an organism and its community.)
Religions take this and say that love is meaningful and that love is an important component of the meta-pattern. This is literally expressed as "God is love" or "God creates the world with his love" or "God loves you". When I hear these phrases, while I am also annoyed, I find that I can agree, after the translation that love is indeed an important pattern.
Certainly important to me, on a personal level. So suddenly it's about the personal aspect of a pattern existing in the physical world. Main religions, in practice, tend to focus on personal aspects so the inferential distance between the scientific observation of pattern and the personal experience of pattern starts getting really, extremely large. But science knows it can't yet explain the personal very well...
Wait a minute, byrnema. You're seriously saying that science can't explain why you love your kids? In a forum filled with evolutionary psychology wannabes?
Or do you simply say that science can't explain why the qualia of love feel this way instead of some other way? Then you don't need to bring love into the discussion, the mysterious redness of the color red would suffice. Is red mystery enough for you to posit a God? Me, I'd rather lament about the nascent state of brain science.
Interesting comment. I'll leave debating the development of the field to the evolutionary psychologists. For the record, it is clear that society at large usually calls on science for practical help in caring for their children, not the Bible. Science gives us all the information about the pattern, religion just tells us it matters (or how it matters; moral judgements). Religion sometimes says more, but I don't think it should.
Replace 'red' with 'beauty', and I would say 'yes'. Red is a fact and beauty is an interpretation.
Beauty is an interpretation assigned by physical systems such as human brains. An explanation would be in the realm of science, even though it may be complex enough that we haven't figured it out yet.
Beauty most definitely is not a fundamental property of the universe that is protected by some mysterious God or "meta-pattern". What we call beauty is not even likely to be considered beautiful by other intelligences, such as an AGI not specifically designed to share our notion of beauty, which would happily disassemble the Mona Lisa for paperclip parts.
Scientific rationalism not opposed to us having a concept of beauty, and assigning value to the concept and objects that embody it, but we cannot depend on the universe to protect these values for us, we have to do it ourselves. Note, this is not nihilism, scientific rationalism accepts that we have values, seeks to explain why we have those values, and enables us to protect those values.