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Endovior comments on Rationality Quotes January 2013 - Less Wrong
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-- Penn Jilette.
This argument really isn't very good. It works on precisely none of the religious people I know, because:
A: They don't believe that God would tell them to do anything wrong.
B: They believe in Satan, who they are quite certain would tell them to do something wrong.
C: They also believe that Satan can lie to them and convincingly pretend to be God.
Accordingly, any voice claiming to be God and also telling them to do something they feel is evil must be Satan trying to trick them, and is disregarded. They actually think like that, and can quote relevant scripture to back their position, often from memory. This is probably better than a belief framework that would let them go out and start killing people if the right impulse struck them, but it's also not a worldview that can be moved by this sort of argument.
Seems a perfectly sensible way to think. Being religious doesn't mean being stupid enough to fall for that argument.
My experience is that this framework is not consistently applied, though.
For example, I've tried pointing out that it follows from these beliefs that if our moral judgments reject what we've been told is the will of God then we ought to obey our moral judgments and reject what we've been told is the will of God. The same folks who have just used this framework to reject treating something reprehensible as an expression of the will of God will turn around and tell me that it's not my place to judge God's will.
Yeah, that happens too. Best argument I've gotten in support of the position is that they feel that they are able to reasonably interpret the will of God through scripture, and thus instructions 'from God' that run counter to that must be false. So it's not quite the same as their own moral intuition vs a divine command, but their own scriptural learning used as a factor to judge the authenticity of a divine command.
Penn Jilette is wrong to call someone not following a god's demands an atheist. Theism is defined by existence claims regarding gods (whether personal or more broadly defined), as a classifier it does not hinge on following said gods' mandates.
Although it seems like an overly-broad definition of "atheist", I think that the quote is only intended to apply to belief in the monotheistic Supreme Being, not polytheistic small-g-gods.
My comment applies just the same, whether you spell god God, G_d, GOD or in some other manner: You can believe such a being exists (making you a theist) without following its moral codex or whatever commands it levies on you. Doesn't make you an atheist.
Although, if you believe it always tells the truth, then you should follow whatever counterintuitive claim it makes about your own preferences and values, no? So if God were to tell you that sacrificing your son is what CEV_(Kawoomba) would do, would you do it?
I have a certain probability I ascribe to the belief that god always tells the truth, let's say this is very high.
I also have a certain probability with which I believe that CEV_(Kawoomba) contained such a command. This is negligible because (from the definition) it certainly doesn't fit with "were more the [man] [I] wished [I] were".
However, we can lay that argument (evening out between a high and a very low probability) aside, there's a more important one:
The point is that my values are not CEV_(Kawoomba), which is a concept that may make sense for an AI to feed with, or even to personally aspire to, but is not self-evidently a concept we should unequivocally aspire to. In a conflict between my values and some "optimized" (in whatever way) values that I do not currently have but that may be based on my current values, guess which ones win out? (My current ones.)
That aside, there is no way that the very foundation of my values could be turned topsy turvy and still fit with CEV's mandate of "being the person I want to be".
The quote specifies God, not "a voice claiming to be God". I'm not sure what evidence would be required, but presumably there must be some, or why would you follow any revelation?
In that case, the Christian's obvious and correct response is "that wouldn't happen", and responding to that with "yeah, but what if? huh? huh?" is unlikely to lead to a fruitful conversation. Penn's original thought experiment is simply broken.
Replace "God" by "rationality" and consider the question asked of yourself. How do you respond?
Except that most Christians think that people have, in reality, been given orders directly by God. I suspect they would differ on what evidence is required before accepting the voice is God, but once they have accepted it's God talking then reusing to comply would be ... telling. OTOH, I would totally kill people in that situation (or an analogous one with an FAI,) and I don't think that's irrational.
[EDIT: I had to replace a little more than that to make it coherent; I hope I preserved your intentions while doing so.]
My answer is, of course, yes. If someone claims that they would not kill even if it was the rational choice then ... ***** them. It's the right damn choice. Not choosing it is, in fact, the wrong choice.
(I'm ignoring issues regarding running on hostile hardware here, because you should be taking that kind of bias into account before calling something "rational".)
What do the real Christians that you know say about that characterisation? I don't know any well enough to know what they think (personal religious beliefs being little spoken of in the UK), but just from general knowledge of the doctrines I understand that the sources of knowledge of God's will are the Bible, the church, and personal revelation, all of these subject to fallible human interpretation. Different sects differ in what weight they put on these, Protestants being big on sola scriptura and Catholics placing great importance on the Church. Some would add the book of nature, God's word revealed in His creation. None of this bears any more resemblance to "direct orders from God", than evolutionary biology does to "a monkey gave birth to a human".
Now look at what you had to do to get that answer: reduce the matter to a tautology by ignoring all of the issues that would arise in any real situation in which you faced this decision, and conditioning on them having been perfectly solved. Speculating on what you would do if you won the lottery is more realistic. There is no "rationality" that by definition gives you perfect answers beyond questioning, any more than, even to the Christian, there is such a God.
They think you should try and make sure it's really God (they give conflicting answers as to how, mostly involving your own moral judgments which seems kinda tautological) and then do as He says. Many (I think all, actually) mentioned the Binding of Isaac. Of course, they do not a believe they will actually encounter such a situation.
AFAIK, all denominations of Christianity, and for that matter other Abrahamic religions, claim that there have been direct revelations from God.
As I said, simply replacing the word "God" with "rationality" yields clear nonsense, obviously, so I had to change some other stuff while attempting to preserve the spirit of your request. It seems I failed in this. Could you perform the replacement yourself, so I can answer what you meant to ask?
Your own moral judgements, of course, come from God, the source of all goodness and without whose grace man is utterly corrupt and incapable of anything good of his own will. That is what conscience is (according to Christians). So this is not tautological at all, but simply a matter of taking all the evidence into account and making the best judgement we can in the face of our own fallibility. A theme of this very site, on occasion.
Yes, I mentioned that ("personal revelation"). But it's only one component of knowledge of the divine, and you still have the problem of deciding when you've received one and what it means.
Not at all. Your formulation of the question is exactly what I had in mind, and your answer to it was exactly what I expected.
Ah, good point. But the specific example was that He had commanded you to do something apperently wrong - kill your son - hence the partial tautology.
Whoops, so you did.
... how is that compatible with "None of this bears any more resemblance to "direct orders from God", than evolutionary biology does to "a monkey gave birth to a human"."?
Then why complain I had twisted it into a tautology?
You cannot cross a chasm by pointing to the far side and saying, "Suppose there was a bridge to there? Then we could cross!" You have to actually build the bridge, and build it so that it stays up, which Penn completely fails to do. He isn't even trying to. He isn't addressing Christians. He's addressing people who are atheists already, getting in a good dig at those dumb Christians who think that a monkey gave birth to a human, sorry, that anyone should kill their child if God tells them to. Ha ha ha! Is he not witty!
The more I think about that quote, the stupider it seems.
There is a biblical description of how to tell if a given instruction is divine or not, found at the start of 1 John chapter four:
One can also use the example of Jesus' temptation in the desert to see how to react if one is not sure.
And yet, I have never had a theist claim that "Every spirit who acknowledges that Jesus the Messiah has become human—and remains so—is from God." That any spirit that agrees with scripture, maybe.
Was Jesus unsure if the temptation in the desert was God talking?
No, but the temptation was rejected specifically on the grounds that it did not agree with scripture. Therefore, the same grounds can surely be used in other, similar situations, including those where one is unsure of who is talking.
For those unaware of how the story goes:
That seems like a misuse of the word "rationality". The "rational" course of action is directly dependent upon whatever your response will be to the thought experiment according to your utility function (and therefore values mostly) and decision algorithm, and so somewhat question-begging.
A better term would be "your decision theory", but that is trivially dismissible as non-rational - if you disagree with the results of the decision theory you use, then it's not optimal, which means you should pick a better one.
If a utility function and decision theory system that are fully reflectively coherent with myself agree with me that for X reasons killing my child is necessarily and strictly more optimal than other courses of action even taking into account my preference for the survival of my child over that of other people, then yes, I definitely would - clearly there's more utility to be gained elsewhere, and therefore the world will predictably be a better one for it. This calculation will (must) include the negative utility from my sadness, prison, the life lost, the opportunity costs, and any other negative impacts of killing my own child.
And as per other theorems, since the value of information and accuracy here would obviously be very high, I'd make really damn sure about these calculations - to a degree of accuracy and formalism much higher than I believe my own mind would currently be capable of with lives involved. So with all that said, in a real situation I would doubt my own calculations and would assign much greater probability to an error in my calculations or a lack / bias in my information, than to my calculations being right and killing my own child being optimal.
Any other specifics I forgot to mention?