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Dreaded_Anomaly comments on Rationality Outreach: A Parable - Less Wrong
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My suggested resolution is as follows:
1) "Don't ask and for God's sake don't tell." This is a group where people come to speak freely about rationality. If you don't talk about your beliefs about God, no one will press you on it or demand that you affirm anything.
2) However, part of our zeitgeist is that it's okay to question beliefs, or even try your hardest to destroy beliefs you think are false, because that which can be destroyed by the truth should be. There are no exceptions for anything, and if you say anything indicating that you think religious beliefs should be exempt, people are not going to nod along, instead they are going to start talking about "The rule that you have to look at a city in order to draw an accurate map of it has no exceptions".
3) Criticism of religion is not taboo - it goes against both the ideals of rationality we believe in, and the atmosphere of freedom that draws us to the group, to have that sort of taboo for that reason. So, to put it bluntly, you will overhear other people comparing belief in God to the Tooth Fairy, and if you contradict them they will contradict you back, and if you say that everyone has a right to their own opinion they will start trying to explain to you the concept of "anti-epistemology".
4) Atheism might not be mandatory inside a rationalist community - but what is mandatory is the idea that it's allowed to argue beliefs, and that attacking the belief isn't the same as attacking the person. And if you decide that you're offended, you will not get sympathy or agreement on that point from the group, because the idiom of "I Am Offended, Shut Up" is something we have explicitly decided to give up.
5) Atheists are obliged to argue carefully with theists, and hold their arguments contradicting theism to the same sort of skeptical standard that they would use for arguments in favor of a dislikable conclusion instead of a likable one. If you, say, claim that "Time didn't exist before the Big Bang" is a complete and satisfactory solution to the problem "Why does something exist instead of nothing?", rather than (as is the correct answer) trying to explain why saying "God" (a) doesn't help and (b) constitutes the cardinal sin of Just Making Stuff Up, then you have lost all claim to any moral victory. (This last point is really a more general one, but it is an example of the sort of respect that you do owe to a religious newcomer, and if you deny them that respect - if they see that you are allowed to throw bad arguments at them that you wouldn't throw at anyone else - they are quite justified in walking away in a huff.)
6) Don't sweat losing some possible recruits. There's enough atheists in the world, or theists who can tolerate disrespect for theism, that in the present stage of the community's growth it is definitely not worth compromising community values of rationality in order to hang onto people who still have a sense of entitlement to their Offense.
Upvoted, but one quibble:
The point of that sort of argument, in my view, is not to propose a satisfactory solution, but to demonstrate why the question isn't meaningful. When a person asks a question like "What caused the universe?", ey is assuming that the universe needs a cause. However, causality is a property of events within a time-ordered system, and the universe is such a system, rather than being within the system. Time and space are unified, so considering them separately (which is what the question does) is erroneous.
This is similar for questions like "why is there something rather than nothing?". Implicit in the question is the possibility that there could have been nothing, and that's wholly unsupported by observation; even the vacuum is full of virtual particles. We may think that we can imagine that possibility, but that doesn't make it viable. That kind of question is never going to have a satisfactory answer, because the underlying premise is faulty.
I agree that it's important to point out how "God" isn't a good answer to those questions, but I think it's more important to point out the flawed thinking which leads to asking the questions in the first place.
You are interpreting "why is there something rather than nothing?" as "Given the observed laws of physics, why is there something rather than nothing?", when what is being asked is "Why are the laws of physics these laws which you say makes the question 'why is there something rather than nothing?' meaningless instead of some other laws that result in there being nothing?"
The suggestion that the laws of physics could have been different is just a hypothesis, and that class of hypotheses usually involves some form of a multiverse scenario in which all the possibilities are realized in different universes. The idea that there is one universe, and something caused it to have these laws instead of laws which lead to nothingness, is a terribly contrived dilemma.
From an empirical point of view, we observe the laws of physics, and speculation about other laws is unjustified. From a philosophical point of view, it makes much more sense to think that we observe whatever universe in which we can exist.
If I ask you why the laws of chemistry are what they are you can avoid answering by talking about how we observed the laws of chemistry and speculating about other laws of chemistry would be unjustified. But that is not nearly as satisfying as producing an actual answer, by applying quantum mechanics to collections of electrons, protons, and nuetrons, and deriving chemistry from lower level physics.
In the same way, you are avoiding answering the "why is there something rather than nothing?", not actually answering it. And while I don't know how to answer that question, and see no reason why you should be expected to know how either, it is better to honestly avoid answering it with "I don't know".
I don't see that as the same kind of question. The laws of chemistry are a higher-level approximation of quantum mechanics. Maybe the laws of quantum mechanics are a higher-level approximation of something else, too. Talking about that is different than talking about alternative versions of the laws.
I'm not avoiding answering the question; I'm rejecting the premise of the question. I don't think there is an answer, any more than there's an answer to the question "What is the smell of the color green?". We can construct the question linguistically and imagine scenarios in which it's valid, but that doesn't mean it applies to reality.
No. Quantum mechanics explains why we have the observed laws of chemistry and not alternative laws of chemistry. The issue of alternatives is a distraction. Remove it and the question of why we have the laws of physics we observe still remains.
Yes, I agree. The question of how things work is what's important.
I agree with this comment except for the last part:
I happen to think pointing out how "God" is a bad answer is actually more important.
Nonetheless, the other lesson -- that the laws of physics do not necessarily have to carve up reality the way your brain wants to -- is also important, and I think Eliezer exaggerates when he says that your answer is "every bit as terrible as the religious one". As Sean Carroll puts it:
That probably has more short-term importance for exposing theistic irrationality, but in the long-term, I think overcoming flawed thinking is more important for making progress.
Disagree with Sean Carroll. The property that Judea Pearl defines in "Causality" is a central part of the character of physical law.
And even if what Sean Carroll said was true, there'd still be a big important problem to be resolved somehow.
It's okay to have big outstanding problems. You don't have to say "God" and you don't have to sweep them under the rug either.
I'd have to strongly disagree with that. It's certainly why we're interested in physical law, and how we test our understanding of physical law. But the central character of physical law admits no interventions when describing things at the lowest level.
The question "Why does something exist instead of nothing?" is different from "What caused the Universe?". The former question is not asking about causation in time.
Suppose that your interlocutor grants that some event didn't need a cause, so that the Big Bang didn't violate causality. Well, the occurrence of no event also doesn't seem to need a cause. That is, causality would still have not been violated had nothing happened. So, it still seems reasonable to ask why something happened rather than nothing.
Although not a complete and satisfactory solution, my favorite answer is this one.
Yes, that's true; I tried to distinguish them in my reply, because the point about time and causality doesn't really apply to the something vs. nothing question.
"Everything not forbidden is compulsory." – Murray Gell-Mann (from T.H. White)
Suppose we grant this claim as an axiom. Then, from the fact that X happened, we may deduce that X was compulsory.
But that doesn't tell us why X was compulsory. It doesn't provide us with an argument showing how the happening of X was a compulsory (or even probable) consequence of self-evident premises. Gell-Mann's axiom doesn't tell us why X had to happen, or even just why X happened — never mind the "had to". So it doesn't answer the question "Why does something exist instead of nothing?".
As I posted below, I'm not planning on continuing this specific discussion. However, if you're interested in continuing to discuss the general topic, I recommend heading over to this discussion topic that I just started, which addresses some of the same issues in what I feel is a clearer way.
What's forbidden about there simply being... nothing? :)
No, the point is that there's nothing forbidden about there being something.
What I meant was, if there's neither anything forbidden about there simply being... nothing, and there being something, what leads to the "something" winning out over the nothing?
ie, even given "everything not forbidden is compulsory", there still seems to be stuff unexplained.
The still-confusing part of "Why is there something rather than nothing?" isn't "Why is there stuff within this universe rather than no stuff within it?", it's "Why are there these particular laws of physics in the first place?". That may yet (probably will) turn out to be confused/meaningless, but nobody has satisfactorily shown how it's meaningless. I still very strongly suspect that Tegmark is on the right track, but the measure-of-experience problem currently prevents it from counting as a satisfactory dissolution of the problem.
For the reasons given by McAllister and Weissman, I think your answer is every bit as terrible as the religious one. I'm sure we're asking the wrong question but if we knew the right question we'd be done. And meanwhile, there's a very real problem and trying to sweep it under the rug like this is every bit as bad as claiming that "God did it" cleans it up.
I'm not trying to sweep the problem under the rug. I just don't want it to get tangled in a web of false dilemmas based on poor premises. Those kinds of questions are narrow in scope, and dwelling on them might prevent us from seeing the right questions. I don't think the average person who asks this sort of question is seriously interested in solving the problem; ey already has a solution in mind, and the question is constructed to imply it.
I dunno. I think many people are at least interested/curious about the whole "why is there something instead of nothing?" and related "why these laws/equations and not others?" issues.
I know I am. There's a genuine gap in our (or at least my) understanding. Obviously goddidit is not at all an answer, but that fact doesn't mean that there's nothing at all that needs to be answered (even if that answer turns out to amount to a precise way of untangling the confusion that led to the question.)
I think some people may settle for bad answers, but...