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MugaSofer comments on Rationality Quotes January 2013 - Less Wrong
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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.
I'm, ah, not sure what this refers to. Going with my best guess, here:
If you have some problem with my formulation of, and responce to, the quote retooled for "rationality", please provide your own.
He is not "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." He is attemppting to demonstrate to Christians that they do not alieve that they should do anything God says. I think he is mistaken in this, but it's not inconsistant or trivially wrong, as some commenters here seem to think.
(He also appears to think that this is the wrong position to hold, which is puzzling; I'd like to see his reasoning on that.)
It seems trivially wrong to me, but maybe that's just from having some small familiarity with how intellectually serious Christians actually do things (and the non-intellectual hicks are unlikely to be knocked down by Penn's rhetoric either). It is absolutely standard in Christianity that any apparent divine revelation must be examined for its authenticity. The more momentous the supposed revelation the more closely it must be examined, to the extent that if some Joe Schmoe feels a divine urge to kill his son, there is, practically speaking, nothing that will validate it, and if he consults his local priest, the most important thing for the priest to do is talk him out of it. Abraham -- this is the story Penn is implicitly referring to -- was one of the greatest figures of the past, and the test that God visited upon him does not come to ordinary people. Joe Schmoe from nowhere might as well go to a venture capitalist, claim to be the next Bill Gates, and ask him to invest $100M in him. Not going to happen.
And Penn has the affrontery to say that anyone who weighs the evidence of an apparent revelation with the other sources of knowledge of God's will, as any good Christian should do, is an atheist. No, I stand by my characterisation of his remark.
Having just tracked down something closer to the source, I find it only confirms what I've been saying.
I was going to point out that your comment misrepresents my point, but reading your link I see that I was misrepresenting Penn's point.
Whoops.
I could argue that my interpretation is better, and the quote should be judged on it's own merits ... but I wont. You were right. I was wrong. I shall retract my comments on this topic forthwith.
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: