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shminux comments on How confident is your atheism? - Less Wrong
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Not-quite-numbers: specifically Christianity: at a noise level (i.e. same as pastafarianism). Some kind of omniscience/omnipotence, including being in a matrix-like simulation: somewhat above the noise level, but not high enough to change anything I do or worry about.
Christianity has a much more coherent theology than pastafarianism.
Christianity loses me at "God sacrificed his only begotten son to save the world". Omnipotent God had to sacrifice? Omnipotent God had to impregnate a mortal woman to produce a god-child? What is he, Zeus? Save his own world from whom? Why such a circuitous route? I'm sure all these questions have a perfectly reasonable answer to a Christian, but it is silly to argue that the whole thing is coherent in any objective sense.
Just to play advocatus dei for a moment, most of the above makes a lot more sense to me in the context of a God trying to reconcile his perspective with that of a set of mortals with whom he shares a preexisting special relationship and set of behavioral rules but whose psychology he doesn't fully understand. Seen in this light, the whole New Testament story starts to look like self-modification on God's part in service to a package of, essentially, legal reforms designed to relax the fairly brutal and self-limiting Old Testament rules. I'm not a theist, though, and from a Christian perspective a lot of this is rank heresy: it's compatible with functional omnipotence but requires only limited omniscience, for example, and it's flatly inconsistent with a lot of trinitarian perspectives. Still, that's about as best I can make sense of the mythology without falling back on "mysterious ways".
Similarly, a theistic friend of mine likes to describe God in terms of a frustrated roleplaying GM who's fed up with trying to keep his players from going off the rails; Jesus in this metaphor could be thought of as a GM-run character joining the campaign for a session or two in order to capture the experience from a player perspective and maybe point the story in a less disastrous direction. Not necessarily a great idea, but it beats "rocks fall, everybody dies".
...And then giving up after the plot backfires?
It's more of a Jewish thing, but I find apologetics becomes a lot easier when I recall that God has a (trollish) sense of humor. Imagine Christians taking Christianity super seriously, and atheists getting all sneering and masturbatory about how the plot seems to be totally incoherent, and everything gets all heated, and in the background God's just going "trolololololol". By hypothesis He trolls you because He loves you—recall that Socrates and the Buddha also tended towards trollishness, mostly as a didactic method. Also relevant is that saints and members of Christian monasteries often tended to flout societal norms, and that an emphasis on the "foolishness" of Christian doctrine has been around since at least Paul: "For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe." This book about psi and "the trickster" is relevant. Muflax recently wrote a blog post on gods and trolling.
It all makes sense now!
I don't think any modern christianity would agree that god could seriously misunderstand human psychology as you say.
What do you mean? Google tells me the school of open theism, which includes "one of the twenty most influential Christian scholars alive today," would likely allow for this possibility. Given that some self-described Christian denominations don't seem to require belief in God, it would surprise me greatly if none of them allowed God to learn on this scale.
Though as I said before, I think I could make the source material of Pastafarianism as consistent with itself and observations as any school of theology has made the Christian Bible.
Which of the many exclusive theologies do you mean? And what will you give me if I can make pastafarianism at least equally coherent? ^_^
How about Thomism?
Let's just say I'd be really surprised if you can do this.
Are we both talking about logical consistency of the theory with itself and observations? (You know about self-hating number theory, how it shows that truth doesn't enter into this?) Or do you mean to include some aesthetically consistent style that you perceive in Thomism but not Pastafarianism? (In that case, your aesthetic preference is wrong.)
If one of those is right, are you willing to put $500 against $50? I'd need you to tell me all the questions and problems you think Pastafarianism should address. I'd also want up to one month per issue.
I'm talking about logical consistency with itself and observation as well as with itself on a meta-level.
So you admit that it's possible for aesthetic preferences to be wrong.
I can't make bets involving money as that would break my pseudonymity. Also, who would judge?
Dude says he can construct a Pastafarian theology better than Thomism in one month, gets upvoted, dude who expresses doubt of this gets downvoted. LW is completely batshit insane sometimes. (From a strictly epistemic standpoint anyway. Politically speaking I'm sure blindly shouting "boo God yay science" is a reasonable strategy.)
I'd forgotten that mass-downvoter and sockpuppeteer Eugine Nier was the one who refused this bet. (Of course he wants to keep his anonymity!) I'd also mostly forgotten that you defended his nonsense. In retrospect, you encouraged him to try and drive me away from the site.
Note that I was totally correct, and the two of you were totally wrong. There is nothing special about the Bible that prevents me from just taking all the dishonest tricks used by Thomism to defend it, and applying them to Pastafarianism. In fact, a religion that praises pirates is a more natural fit for the theology originally written by Aristotle (tutor of famed pirate/emperor Alexander).
hahahaha
haaaaaaaaaaaahahahahaha
Ah, well.
Just for the sake of clarity, do you think it contradicts facts about the 'natural' meaning of "natural law" -- about the rules that every smart human (or suitably extrapolated human) who cares about "being provident for itself and for others," would agree with? Certainly if we assumed no such rules exist, that would contradict the 'natural' reading.
Thomism does feel self-consistent to me if I assume that every law comes from a medieval ruler or similar source. Now assume instead that pirates are divine beings. I'm thinking here of John "I Wanna Be a Pirate" Rackham, Anne Bonny, and Mary "Totally a Man" Read. See also "Kenpachi".
That was also a joke? I do think you'd change your positive opinion of Thomism (v Pastafarianism) if you looked at all aspects of the situation.