bill comments on The uniquely awful example of theism - Less Wrong

36 Post author: gjm 10 April 2009 12:30AM

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

Comments (169)

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

Comment author: Alicorn 10 April 2009 02:27:51AM 5 points [-]

In my (admittedly not immense) experience, intelligent theists who commit to rationality (and stay theists indefinitely) either engage in some heavy-duty partitioning of their beliefs - that is, they commit only partially to rationality, and consider part of their belief network exempt - or cover the gaps in their communicable rationality with incommunicable religious experience. In the first case, it's a clear case of not being wholly rational; if we can talk about those people as a convenient, accessible example of not-wholly-rational individuals with an obvious area of non-rationality, and happen not to severely offend anyone here, there seems no harm.

The latter case, however, makes me nervous, perhaps because I have a lot of Mormon friends and they seem to have a lot of incommunicable religious experiences as a group. From talking to my smart, generally rational Mormon friends - at least those of them who will let me interrogate them about this sort of thing - I find that they act and speak exactly like they're applying rational principles to experiences that they have had, which I just have not happened to have.

Since theists include both the partitioners and the experiencers (and probably some overlap and some categories I haven't thought of or met), perhaps we should stop talking about theists in general as our target group and start speaking of some narrower collection of people, if we want to stay with the example of religion for whatever reason. "Fundamentalists", perhaps - anyone who has met an intelligent, rational, non-partitioning fundamentalist will surprise me, but is of course welcome to shoot down this suggestion.

Comment author: bill 10 April 2009 04:20:37PM 3 points [-]

Intelligent theists who commit to rationality also seem to say that their "revelatory experience" is less robust than scientific, historical, or logical knowledge/experience.

For example, if they interpret their revelation to say that God created all animal species separately, then scientific evidence proves beyond reasonable doubt that that is untrue, then they must have misinterpreted their revelatory experience (I believe this is the Catholic Church's current position, for example). Similarly if their interpretation of their revelation contradicts logical arguments; logic wins over revelation.

This seems consistent with the idea that they have had a strange experience that they are trying to incorporate into their other experience.

For me personally, I have a hard time imagining a private experience that would convince me that God has revealed something to me. I would think it far more likely that I had simply gone temporarily crazy (or at least as crazy as other people who have had other, contradictory revelations). So I don't think that such "experiences" should update my state of information, and I don't update based on others' claims of those experiences either.