Now that I have seeped in Less Wrong for another month, I would like to revisit the question of theism. I have always defined God to myself as "whatever is minimally required to make sense" since I have an innate belief that things should make sense. So I found it interesting that at Less Wrong, it is consistently maintained that nothing extra is needed. I found this idea very attractive and I have spent many hours here trying to learning what kind of world view is held here.
It has certainly been a challenging study in inference to figure out what Less Wrong is about. I'm only beginning to understand what "rationality" is (i.e., the core, fundamental principles) and I may only infer what it is by observing the arguments that rationalists make, considering of course the obvious complications that rationalists are not perfectly rational nor is there a single "rational" view.
I've observed sincerely, I think, to some extent, and I induce that the probability that "rationality" is a meaningful, self-consistent, complete theory is tiny. Do you guys know this? I suspect so, because there are ribbons, here and there, of the suggestion that meaning is actually indeed too much to ask of authentic observation of "reality".
It is not obvious, of course, that any theory developed by human beings must be consistent and complete and meaningful. Perhaps, by some metric, rationality is as good a theory as another.
But theism. I don't know if the assumption of God is necessary for a consistent and complete theory, but certainly it would be sufficient? I think I've heard from Bayesians before that God is not impossible, just extremely unlikely. Your argument from the beginning has been that belief in God is not justified. Yet, if belief in God results in a meaningful theory, isn't that more justified than a set of beliefs that result in a meaningless theory?
Perhaps "God" is not the missing element required to make "rationality" consistent and complete -- however, anything that I can think of adding that might fix the theory could be eliminated by exactly the same arguments that you use to eliminate belief in God. (For example: Truth. Love. Quality. etc.)
I'm hoping that someone here is much wiser than me and can point me in a fruitful direction. Can you validate the existence of the inconsistency I speak of, in your terms, and explain how you resolve it?
"I have always defined God to myself as "whatever is minimally required to make sense" since I have an innate belief (that I cannot excise, even if I wished to) that things should make sense."
This is needlessly obscure and far from the normal meaning of the term, and the use of such a loaded word is suspicious.
I would like to argue that there could be a more tolerant view of religion/theism here on Less Wrong. The extent to which theism is vilified here seems disproportionate to me.
It depends on the specific scenario how terrible religion is. It is easy to look at the very worst examples of religion and conclude that religion can be irrational in a terribly wrong way. However, religion can also be nearly rational. Considering that any way we view the world is an illusion to some extent. Indeed the whole point of this site is to learn ways to shed more of our illusions, not that we have no illusions.
There are the religious beliefs that contradict empirical observation and those that are independent of it...
A) Could it be rational for a person to hold beliefs that are independent of empirical observation if (a) the person concedes that they are
irrationalnot empirically based and (b) is willing to drop them if they prove to not be useful?B) Could it be rational for a person to hold unusual beliefs as a result of contradicting empirical observations?
As a least convenient world exercise, what is the most rational belief in God that you can think of?