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SilasBarta comments on Anticipation vs. Faith: At What Cost Rationality? - Less Wrong
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When anthropologists study religion, they focus mostly on the rituals, the social cohesion, the punishment of defectors (in the PD sense), and formation of authority structures, and not so much on the factual content of the adherents' purported beliefs.
My position is just: do that.
I'm not suggesting that you rely only on their portrayal of their own beliefs. On the contrary, I'm suggesting long and careful observation of their behavior (including professions of belief) before you reach any confident conclusion.
And even after you've gathered many such observations, you will still be misled if you use the wrong approach in incorporating those observations into a model. Many natural-born atheists use the following fallacious approach to understanding the religious: They think to themselves, "What would it take to make me act like that and say those things? Well, for that to happen, I'd need to have the following things going on inside my mind: <...>. Therefore, those things must also be going on in the minds of theists (or at least of the intelligent ones)."
The flaw with this approach is that you're modeling the mind of a theists using the mind of a natural-born atheist, a mind which almost certainly works differently from a theist's mind when it comes to theological issues, almost by definition. That is why you should be skeptical that your mind contains an accurate model of a theist's mind.
Well, I'm already relying on a large data set, and I was born into a Catholic family. My theory still makes more sense. Here are some more data points:
-The parallels between religion and politics: how they force people into teams, say whatever it takes to defend the team, look for cues about whether you're on their team when they ask about your beliefs,
-The history of religious warfare. It makes no sense to view these people as going out to die for inscrutable theological doctrines, but complete sense to view their motives the same as they would be if you replaced the religion with some other memetic group.
I'd say that this data point supports my position. Get an extreme left-winger or right-winger drunk and you're not going to hear them say, "yeah, those extreme political positions I espouse, I don't really think they're true. I just pretend to because of the social benefits I reap." On the contrary, you're going to hear them spout even more extreme views, views that they'd realize they ought to keep to themselves had they been sober.
I agree. I'm not saying that every action ostensibly justified by religious beliefs is really done because of those beliefs. But that says nothing about whether those beliefs are sincerely held.
It's not necessary for my claim that they think about it in those terms. But they:
a) enjoy the bonding with people "on their team" (yeah, aren't those Republican's so greedy, heh heh, not like us nosiree)
b) would take back more extreme things they said to "support their team", e.g., "Yeah, I don't really think Obama's health plan is the best thing in the world, I just want policy to move in sorta that direction and this is best I can hope for -- of course there are flaws". Now, if you steer the conversation into a duel from the beginning, I'm sure you can get one.
No, that would be evidence that the belief in belief is sincerely held, not the belief itself. An actual belief (zeroth level) that "God's divine essense is embedded in children even before baptism" would correspond to some noticeable activity other than "let's kill the people who think God's divine essense isn't embedded in people until baptism". Yet in the history of religious wars, you saw exactly that.
Why would you think that? I see little reason to think so. I suspect that you think so because you reason, "Were I to believe that God's divine essence is embedded in children even before baptism, I would never kill people for thinking that God's divine essence isn't embedded in people until baptism. Therefore, anyone who holds that belief wouldn't kill people for that reason."
I've already tried to explain why I think that this reasoning is invalid. You're modeling how your own mind would behave under certain circumstances, and you're then extrapolating to how other minds behave under those circumstances. The problem is that the other minds are theistic, so, by definition, they differ from your mind in a way that's obviously highly relevant to how they will behave in the circumstances under consideration.
You're still blurring the distinction between belief and belief-in-belief, or, at least, incorrectly considering them to be similar.
I'm not saying, "If I believed X, this is what I would do." I'm saying the belief X has implications for your actions, at least in some counterfactual sense, or it's not really a belief, but better called a belief-in-belief.
Imagine: I tell you I think monsters live under my bed. I tell you I think that the monsters kill whoever sleeps in the bed. I tell you I don't want to die.
I sleep in my bed.
Tomorrow, I'm going to go a "BedMonster Study Group", a type of meeting at which many of my male friends have met their future wives.
Do you think I believe there's a monster under my bed, in the normal sense of the terms? Or do I just believe that I do?
You should argue your case using the actual pertinent facts (i.e., the actual actions and professed beliefs of the religious), not hypothetical ones.
But, even granting your hypothetical--
If I heard you say "there's a monster under my bed" with the same earnestness and insistence that I hear when the religious profess their beliefs,
then I would strongly suspect that your mind draws conclusions from evidence in a manner very different from that in which mine does. In particular, I would expect that you reason from your beliefs to your actions very differently from how I do. I would therefore be very cautious about inferring from your actions to your actual beliefs.
There's nothing wrong with presenting (what I consider) the same, relevant dynamic in a hypothetical context in order to make a point about the conclusions you should draw in a different one.
My hypothetical simply takes the problematic elements of the situation at hand and amplifies them. In religions, it's hard to see the disconnect between the professed beliefs and the adherent's actual internal predictive model of reality. My example made the disconnect obvious, and also showed the surrounding motives that give evidence as to what they really believe.
In such a scenario, I would conclude that the person is using the term "believe" differently than the term is normally used. You would conclude that the person knowingly puts himself in a situation where he expects to die, despite not wanting to die.
I think my conclusion is more reasonable.
If the relevant dynamic in the actual situation is really the same, then why not just refer to the actual situation? If you have to "amplify" the problematic elements, then you are giving yourself the burden of proving that you haven't amplified them to the point that they yield a different conclusion than the original setting would.
If the disconnect is "hard to see" in the case of religion, then you ipso facto need strong evidence to establish that the disconnect exists. By moving to a situation where the disconnect is easier to see, so that less evidence is necessary, you are moving to a situation where your burden of proof is less. Therefore, establishing your claim in your hypothetical does not suffice to establish your claim in the original situation.
Your conclusion would be one real possibility. Another possibility is that, although he doesn't want to die, he prefers it to sleeping somewhere other than his bed. Perhaps sleeping elsewhere seems, to him, a fate worse than death. Since I'm manifestly dealing with a crazy person, that remains a real possibility, at least until I learn more about how he thinks.
The more someone professes different beliefs from yours, the more evidence there is that their mind works differently from yours in some crucial respect, and so the less credit you should give to your mental model of them.
No; then you would have done that, rather than making an assertion about what they believed.
Perhaps you only believe that you believe that. :)
Well, I am doing that in the sense of judging religions by the factors anthropologists study rather than focusing on how I can well I can disprove the claim that the earth is 6000 years old.
Yes. Confucianism is the prototypical example of a "religion" which has no cosmological beliefs per se, but still provides for community cohesion (i.e. protection from perceived threats), an ethical code (the analects of Confucius are often quoted as proverbs/dogmas), a focus on authority figures and so forth.