gwern comments on How to Not Lose an Argument - Less Wrong

109 Post author: Yvain 19 March 2009 01:07AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (409)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Lawless 15 August 2012 06:27:11PM -2 points [-]

The psychological resistance I felt to admitting God's existence, even after having seen Him descend to Earth, was immense. And, I realized, it was exactly the amount of resistance that every vocally religious person must experience towards God's non-existence.

I'm amazed. I totally can't understand this kind of thinking (which you believe to be human nature).

Me, I don't believe that God exists. In fact, I hold the belief in God for little less than a mental disease. That is because there is virtually no evidence to support the existence of God, and a lot of evidence that seems to suggest that God doesn't exist. I don't need to read any of Richard Dawkins's books, because everything he says about religion is so self-evident to me that I find it astonishing that there are people in the world to whom it isn't.

However, should I be shown proof that God exists, I would accept it without any resistance whatsoever. I would simply discard the hypothesis "God doesn't exist" because it has been proven wrong, and base my future actions on the discovery "God does exist". And I wouldn't feel silly in front of all the religious people – because they were still fools to believe in God without any proof. That they happened to guess right on this occasion doesn't mean that their method of forming one's opinions (randomly believing in things regardless of evidence) was superior to mine (believing what is supported by evidence). This one time they were right and I was wrong, but in the long run, I will still be right more often than them.

To sum up, the reason why I don't believe in God, is because the information available to me at this moment strongly supports that. Nevertheless, I am not married to the hypothesis that God doesn't exist. Should He really exist, I absolutely want to know about it as soon as possible. My primary interest is to learn, not to uphold any of my current beliefs.

The people like you, however, don't seem to be interested in finding out the truth. Rather it somehow seems to be important to you that the God do not exist. That's what would make you react with resistance when provided with evidence that He exists. In other words, you believe to be a rationalist, but the thought that the truth might be different from what you believe now horrifies you.

Why would that be so?

Comment author: gwern 15 August 2012 11:49:41PM *  6 points [-]

I'm amazed. I totally can't understand this kind of thinking (which you believe to be human nature)....everything he says about religion is so self-evident to me that I find it astonishing that there are people in the world to whom it isn't....In fact, I hold the belief in God for little less than a mental disease. That is because there is virtually no evidence to support the existence of God, and a lot of evidence that seems to suggest that God doesn't exist....However, should I be shown proof that God exists, I would accept it without any resistance whatsoever.

If you really believe that then you can test this with hallucinogens; in a non-trivial fraction of users (in good settings), they induce mystical or religious experiences and so there's a good shot they would do so for you. Have such an experience and still maintain your atheism, and maybe I will credit your claims to be atheistic based on purely rational grounds. Otherwise, you just look to me like, say, SF author John Wright: a strident atheist until he had some hallucinations after surgery and immediately flipped his views to become a strident theist.

Seriously. Standard hallucinogens like psilocybin or LSD are easily obtained, cheap, and safe for at least a few doses.

What's stopping you? Don't you believe your beliefs why you don't believe?

Comment author: gwern 05 September 2012 10:44:55PM *  2 points [-]

Interesting datapoint: MacLean et al 2011 did a RCT of psilocybin. Those reporting a mystical experience saw a rise in their Openness, while those reporting no mystical experience show, if anything, a fall. See the graph on pg6. (It's almost like they're updating on their experience.)