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Vladimir_Golovin comments on Raising the Sanity Waterline - Less Wrong
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Agreed, the term 'God-shaped hole' is misleading. Actually, I didn't mean any specific monotheistic God, but rather 'One or more anthropomorphic entities with supernatural powers who created the observable world'.
Yes, the Goddists learned to exploit the Hole quite well, but couldn't it be because the Hole provided a better environment for survival of memes involving powerful anthropomorphic entities than for other kinds of memes?
As for science filling the hole better, I of course agree with this, but a layperson may have a different definition of 'better' for this context. You, Dawkins, Sagan and most OB/LW readers define 'better' as 'more closely corresponding to reality', while a layperson may define 'better' as 'making me feel more comfortable'.
(Also, I don't quite understand what part of my post can be interpreted as suggesting to "act as though religion is the "real thing," or that scientific worldview is a quick-and-easy hole filler -- it obviously isn't. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough -- I'm not a native English speaker.)
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you were implying that religion is epistemically the real thing. More that...our sense of sweetness is supposed to detect sugar. Sugar is the real referent of our pleasure in sweet-tasting things, while something like sucralose is simply a substitute, a way of replacing it. I worry that by saying "God-shaped hole," we imply that the supernatural -- whether or not it exists -- really is the original referent of the desires which religion exploits. This could be true, but I do not think it is, and I do not think it is a point we should concede just yet.