So lets assume that Being a fundamentalist Christian is P=1, and being a fundamentalist atheist is P=0. Keeping in mind that I didn't use the term P=1 originally, and even in context it was not set down as a binary equation (I was assuming that the 1 meant you were sure there is no god, not an immutable belief in the fact, while .75 meant you might lean heavily towards no god but had some doubts).
Yes, P = 1 is the theologically required Christian belief. However, and I've never even been Catholic, your post is rife with Atheist propaganda about Catholicism that shows you did not do your research before condemning an entire group of people. I'm not even sure how I ended up on the Xtian side of this debate, except I dislike fundamentalism of any stripe. I do take Atheists to task for their beliefs as often as I take Xtians to task for their beliefs. However, this is a site dedicated to Rationality. Which means if you're going to say "yes I'm sure", I expect you to have proof, no matter what side of the debate you're on. If you're not sure whether or not god exists, you're an agnostic. If you are sure (G=0), then you are an athiest. If you believe God exists, you could be any religion, not just Xtian. But for some reaosn Xtian's get picked on, because they're not as scary as Muslims but just as fervent. But lets get to you statements.
To begin with, the type of 4000 year old Earth, 6 day creation, no evolution debate is a Protestant belief, not Catholic. In fact, in 1950 Pope Pius XII said it was fine to discuss Human Evolution: "The Church does not forbid that...research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter." Source: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis_en.html
Whether or not god created the universe, according to the bible (Where he created it twice, read Genesis 1, or just accept that it was a book written by people.) He certainly didn't create only two people. To answer the statement that only Adam and Eve were created by God AND that he resitricted himself Later to being god of just the Jewish nation, I bring you, Genesis 4:15-17
15 Then the LORD said to him, "Not so! If any one slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold." And the LORD put a mark on Cain, lest any who came upon him should kill him. 16 Then Cain went away from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, east of Eden. 17 Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he built a city, and called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch.
Now wait, Cain, brother of Abel, went to the land of Nod, and found a wife. That sure does imply that, biblically, there were more people on Earth than Adam and Eve. Dangerous people too, since Cain was worried about being killed by them enough to ask God for protection. So, biblically, even if God created Adam and Eve, not everyone is a child of God. Which is good, because part of the horrifying great commission is to convert nonbelievers. The Biblical God is the God of the descendants of Adam and those who follow him.
Flood tales are rife in any ancient theology, including being in Gilgamesh. What a surprise they're in the bible too, mentioning that God protects his people. Shocking. There probably was a great flood at some point, but I'm linking to Wiki out of spite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_stories
Jesus still hasn't been reconciled by the Abrahamic religions (Another reason why god chose to protect them. Abraham trusted God, biblically. Seeing as God also gave human free will, biblically, why would he protect people who didn't trust him?)
There is nothing biblically about Jesus making Peter the pope. He did assign the apostles to the Great Commission of going forth and spreading his word, but even guys like Paul got in on that act later. The first official Pope was Anacletus.
Requires them to obey the pope? The Pope is only infallible sitting on his big chair. The pope is not God. Throught the history of Catholicism there have been hundreds of examples of not listening to the pope, especially when there were TWO popes. And if you think the church has problems now, read about the period between 860–1050. The pope is a man according to doctrine. Catholics can blame him all they like, and risk excommunication by disobeying him, but it's still an option. He's more like the king of an institution than a holy being.
However, thanks for proving my point. You listed a bunch of "facts" about Catholicism that either dealt with protestants, were folklore and tradition instead of doctrine, or were just incorrect. Don't forget that both sides have propaganda mills. Go to the source, and see what Xtians are supposed to believe. Then Take them to task. And anyway, am I not supposed to take both sides to task for irrationality? If you are being irrational, you are not excused because you are a fundamentalist. Go do your research.
They had me for 20 years, and I can attest that except for the Young Earth Creationism, Phil is just about right. The position of Roman Catholic church, like that of other institutions, changes with times and with external politics and I notice that individual priests and religious education teachers often have widely divergent beliefs from what is supposedly the established party line.
I agree with your overall point because the priors required for a beleif in a Flying Spaghetti Monster are in the same order of magnitude as, say, belief in a Flying Chow Fu...
Heeding others' impressions often increases accuracy. But "agreement" and "majoritarianism" are not magic; in a given circumstance, agreement is or isn't useful for *intelligible* reasons.
You and four other contestants are randomly selected for a game show. The five of you walk into a room. Each of you is handed a thermometer drawn at random from a box; each of you, also, is tasked with guessing the temperature of a bucket of water. You’ll each write your guess at the temperature on the card; each person who is holding a card that is within 1° of the correct temperature will win $1000.
The four others walk to the bucket, place their thermometers in the water, and wait while their thermometers equilibrate. You follow suit. You can all see all of the thermometers’ read-outs: they’re fairly similar, but a couple are a degree or two off from the rest. You can also watch, as each of your fellow-contestants stares fixedly at his or her own thermometer and copies its reading (only) onto his or her card.
Should you:
Choice 2, of course. Thermometers imperfectly indicate temperature; to have the best possible chance of winning the $1000, you should consider all the information you have, from all the (randomly allocated, and so informationally symmetric) thermometers. It doesn’t matter who was handed which thermometer.
Forming accurate beliefs is *normally* about this simple. If you want the most accurate beliefs you can get, you’ll need to pay attention to the evidence. All of the evidence. Evenly. Whether you find the evidence in your hand or mind, or in someone else’s. And whether weighing all the evidence evenly leaves you with an apparently high-status social claim (“My thermometer is better than yours!”), or an apparently deferential social claim (“But look -- I’m trying to agree with all of you!”), or anywhere else.
I’ll try to spell out some of what this looks like, and to make it obvious why certain belief-forming methods give you more accurate beliefs.
Principle 1: Truth is not person-dependent.
There’s a right haircut for me, and a different right haircut for you. There’s a right way for me to eat cookies if I want to maximize my enjoyment, and a different right way for you to eat cookies, if you want to maximize your enjoyment. But, in the context of the game-show, there isn’t a right temperature for me to put on my card, and a different right temperature for you to put on your card. The game-show host hands $1000 to cards with the right temperature -- he doesn’t care who is holding the card. If a card with a certain answer will make you money, that same card and answer will make me money. And if a certain answer won’t make me money, it won’t make you money either.
Truth, or accuracy, is like the game show in this sense. “Correct prediction” or “incorrect prediction” applies to beliefs, not to people with beliefs. Nature doesn’t care what your childhood influences were, or what kind of information you did or didn’t have to work with, when it deems your predictions “accurate!” or “inaccurate!”. So, from the point of view of accuracy, it doesn’t make any sense to say “I think the temperature is 73°, but you, given the thermometer you were handed, should think it 74°”. Nor “I think X, but given your intuitions you should think Y” in any other purely predictive context.
That is: while “is a good haircut” is a property of the (person, haircut) pair, “is an accurate belief” is a property of the belief only.
Principle 2: Watch the mechanisms that create your beliefs. Ask if they’re likely to lead to accurate beliefs.
It isn’t because of magic that you should use the median thermometer’s output. It’s because, well, thermometers noisily reflect the temperature, and so the central cluster of the thermometers is more likely to be accurate. You can see why this is the accuracy-producing method.
Sometimes you’ll produce better answers by taking an average over many peoples’ impressions, or by updating from other peoples’ beliefs, or by taking disagreement between yourself and someone else as a sign that you should debug your belief-forming process. And sometimes (e.g., if the people around you are choosing their answers by astrology), you won’t.
But in any of these circumstances, if you actually ask yourself “What belief-forming process is really, actually likely to pull the most juice from the evidence?”, you’ll see what the answer is, and you’ll see why the answer is that. It won’t be “agree with others, because agreement is a mysterious social ritual that rationalists aim for”, or “agree with others, because then others will socially reciprocate by agreeing with you”. It won’t be routed through the primate social system at all. It’ll be routed through seeing where evidence can be found (seeing what features of the world should look different if the world is in one state rather than another -- the way thermometer-readings should look different if the bucket is one temperature rather than another) and then seeing how to best and most thoroughly and evenly gather up all that evidence.
Principle 2b: Ask if you are weighing all similarly truth-indicative mechanisms evenly.
Even when the processes that create our beliefs are truth-indicative, they generally aren’t fully, thoroughly, and evenly truth-indicative. Let’s say I want to know whether it’s safe for my friend to bike to work. My own memories are truth indicative, but so are my friends’ and neighbors’ memories, and so are the memories of the folk in surveys I can find on line. The trouble is that my own memories arrive in my head with extreme salience, and move my automatic anticipations a lot; while my friend’s have less automatic impact, and those of the surveyed neighbors still less. So if I just go with the impressions that land in my head, my predictions will overweight a few samples of evidence at the expense of all the others.
That is: our automatic cognition tends not to weigh the evidence evenly *at all*. It takes conscious examination and compensation.
Principle 3: Ask what an outside observer would say.
Since truth doesn’t depend on who is asking -- and since our feelings about the truth often do depend -- it can help to ask what an outside observer would say. Instead of asking “Am I right in this dispute with my friend?” ask: “If I observed this from the outside, and saw someone with my track record and skillset, and someone else with my friend’s track record and skillset, disagreeing in this manner -- who would I think was probably right?”.
(See also Cached Selves.)
Common pitfall: Idolatry
We’re humans. Give us a good idea, and we’ll turn it into an idol and worship its (perhaps increasingly distorted) image. Tell us about the Aumann Agreement Theorem, and we’re liable to make up nonsense rituals about how one must always agree with the majority.
The solution is to remove the technical terms and ask *why* each belief-forming method works. Where is the evidence? What observations would you expect to see, if the universe were one way rather than another? What method of aggregating the evidence most captures the relevant data?
That is: don’t memorize the idea that “agreement”, the “scientific method”, or any other procedure is “what rationalists do”. Or, at least, don’t *just* memorize it. Think it through every time. Be able to see why it works.
Common pitfall: Primate social intuitions
Again: we’re humans. Give us a belief-forming method, and we’ll make primate politics out of it. We’ll say “I should agree with the majority, so that religious or political nuts will also agree with the majority via social precedent effects”. Or: “I should believe some of my interlocutor’s points, so that my interlocutor will believe mine”. And we’ll cite “rationality” while doing this.
But accurate beliefs have nothing to do with game theory. Yes, in an argument, you may wish to cede a point in order to manipulate your interlocutor. But that social manipulation has nothing to do with truth. And social manipulation isn’t why you’ll get better predictions if you include others’ thermometers in your average, instead of just paying attention to your own thermometer.
Example problems: To make things concrete, consider the following examples. My take on the answers appears in the comments. Please treat these as real examples; if you think real situations diverge from my idealization, say so.
Problem 1: Jelly-beans
You’re asked to estimate the number of jelly-beans in a jar. You have a group of friends with you. Each friend privately writes down her estimate, then all of the estimates are revealed, and then each person has the option of changing her estimate.
How should you weigh: (a) your own initial, solitary estimate; (b) the initial estimates of each of your friends; (c) the estimates your friends write down on paper, after hearing some of the others’ answers?
Problem 2: Housework splitting
You get into a dispute with your roommate about what portion of the housework you’ve each been doing. He says you’re being biased, and that you always get emotional about this sort of thing. You can see in his eyes that he’s upset and biased; you feel strongly that you could never have such biases. What to believe?
Problem 3: Christianity vs. atheism
You get in a dispute with your roommate about religion. He says you’re being biased, and that your “rationalism” is just another religion, and that according to his methodology, you get the right answer by feeling Jesus in your heart. You can see in his eyes that he’s upset and biased you feel strongly that you could never have such biases. What to believe?
Problem 4: Honest Bayesian wannabes
Two similarly rational people, Alfred and Betty, estimate the length of Lake L. Alfred estimates “50 km”; Betty simultaneously estimates “10 km”. Both realize that Betty knows more geography than Alfred. Before exchanging any additional information, the two must again utter simultaneous estimates regarding the answer to G. Is it true that if Alfred and Betty are estimating optimally, it is as likely that Betty’s answer will now be larger than Alfred’s as the other way round? Is it true that if these rounds are repeated, Alfred and Betty will eventually stabilize on the same answer? Why?