Perplexed comments on The annoyingness of New Atheists: declaring God Dead makes you a Complete Monster? - Less Wrong
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Three reasons I downvoted:
Hope that helps.
Yes, exactly. Telling someone that the experiences which have convinced them of their religious beliefs aren't actually strong evidence for those beliefs requires explaining at minimum* Occam's Razor and Bayesian statistics. I've tried shortcuts, such as saying "it's just like how a patient is usually less qualified to diagnose their symptoms than a doctor," but that has never succeeded in conveying the message. If someone doesn't actually understand why entities shouldn't be multiplied beyond necessity and how to use evidence to evaluate claims, they're not going to accept what you say about their claims. We can keep trying to explain these concepts, and I do, but they have to decide they want to learn them.
*It's usually much more than just that, because religious people tend to come from a very anthropocentric worldview, where morality is objective, life has inherent meaning, human beings have souls, etc. We might speak the same language, but we're using very different systems of thought.
Edit to add: Eliezer has a very good post on this subject which makes the point better than I did: it's not enough just to cite Occam's Razor, Bayes' Theorem, etc.; there has to be understanding. Importantly, developing that understanding requires taking doubt seriously.
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Empirically many people deconvert for reasons that have nothing to do with Bayesianism. Indeed most former theists I know don't even know what Bayesianism is. If this is what it would take then almost no one would ever deconvert. People can deconvert for many different reasons. Occam's Razor or Bayesianism can be reasons, but there are a lot of other reasons that people deconvert, such as realizing that their holy texts are full of contradictions, or deciding the only reasonable interpretations of the texts are literalist ones which contradict the physical evidence.
That's all true. My statement was intended to apply only to those people who have had "religious experiences" and are convinced because of those. In general, people become convinced of religious beliefs for a variety of reasons, and similarly can become unconvinced for a variety of reasons.
Occam's Razor has never even been a factor in my turning: I was never looking for "the simplest theory", only "the most consistent theory". It is religion's inconsistencies and predictive uselessness that did the trick for me. Perhaps Occam is implicit in that?
Consistency and predictive ability are also important for beliefs, and recognizing that religion lacks them may help turn away someone who is already feeling unsteadiness. The people about whom I'm talking are those who are absolutely convinced of their beliefs by subjective experiences (because, in my experience, these are the most difficult people against whom to argue). We can't deny the fact of the experience, but we can deny the explanation it is claimed to support.
You are absolutely right. While I felt deeply pressured to put this out of the way, I should have saved a draft and waited until I had clarified and organized the concept before presenting it here. Not so much because I fear hurting the readers' sensibilities, but because a badly written post hurts the integrity of this site I love so much. *I have discussed with religious people left, down and right, and have been confronted with a very large variety of arguments. There was a part of my way to atheism where I was literally *begging theists I trusted to help me find arguments to protect my faith. They kept disappointing me. Only when I felt as certain as I thought I would ever be that no new arguments could come up, I decided to make the great leap over Hell, and officially abandon religion. If I thought there was a non-negligible chance of new arguments swaying me, I wouldn't have abandoned theism, purely out of fear of Hell. *Not necessarily: as other posters have pointed out in this discussion, some arguments need more reduction of inferential distance than other, which are much more immediate. Pointing out incosistencies and counterexamples, for example, is far more efficient in making people doubt than explaining the epistemiological merits of Occham's Razor and reductionism.