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nyan_sandwich comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong
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This is a very odd epistemic position to be in.
If you expect there to be strong evidence for something, that means you should already strongly believe it. Whether or not you will find such evidence or what it is, is not the interesting question. The interesting question is why do you have that strong belief now? What strong evidence do you already posses that leads you to believe this thing?
If you haven't got any reason to believe a thing, then it's just like all the other things you don't have reason to believe, of which there are very many, and most of them are false. Why is this one different?.
The correct response, when you notice that a belief is unsupported, is to say oops and move on. The incorrect response is to go looking specifically for confirming evidence. That is writing the bottom line in the wrong place, and is not a reliable truth-finding procedure.
Also, "debate style" arguments are generally frowned upon around here. Epistemology is between you and God, so to speak. Do your thing, collect your evidence, come to your conclusions. This community is here to help you learn to find the truth, not to debate your beliefs.
That's a very good point. From what I've seen, most Christians who debate atheists end up using all kinds of convoluted philosophical arguments to support their position -- whereas in reality, they don't care about these arguments one way or another, since these are not the arguments that convinced them that their version of Christianity is true. Listening to such arguments would be a waste of my time, IMO.
The same is the case for a lot of atheist arguments.
See my comment here.
Yeah, you make a good point when you say that we need "Bayesian evidence", not just the folk kind of "evidence". However, most people don't know what "Bayesian evidence" means, because this is a very specific term that's common on Less Wrong but approximately nowhere else. I don't know a better way to put it, though.
That said, my comment wasn't about different kinds of evidence necessarily. What I would like to hear from a Christian debater is a statement like, "This thing right here ? This is what caused me to become a Reformed Presbilutheran in the first place." If that thing turns out to be something like, "God spoke to me personally and I never questioned the experience" or "I was raised that way and never gave it a second thought", that's fine. What I don't want to do is sit there listening to some new version of the Kalaam Cosmological Argument (or whatever) for no good reason, when even the person advancing the argument doesn't put any stock in it.
I was raised Roman Catholic. I did give it a second thought; I found, through my life, very little evidence against the existence of God, and some slight evidence for the existence of God. (It doesn't communicate well; it's all anecdotal).
I do find, on occasion, that the actions of God are completely mysterious to me. However, an omniscient being would have access to a whole lot of data that I do not have access to; in light of that, I tend to assume that He knows what He is doing.
The existence of God also implies that the universe has some purpose, for which it is optimised. I'm not quite sure what that purpose is; the major purpose of the universe may be something that won't happen for the next ten billion years. However, trying to imagine what the purpose could be is an interesting occasional intellectual exercise.
May I ask what you expected evidence against the existence of God to have looked like?
That is entirely the right question to ask. And the answer is, I don't have the faintest idea.
The question there is, what would a universe without God look like? And that question is one that I can't answer. I'd guess that such a universe, if it were possible, would have more-or-less entirely arbitrary and random natural laws; I'd imagine that it would be unlikely to develop intelligent life; and it would be unlikely for said intelligent life, if it developed, to be able to gather any understanding of the random and arbitrary natural laws at all.
The trouble is, this line of reasoning promptly falls into the same trouble as any other anthropic argument. The fact that I'm here, thinking about it, means that there is intelligent life in this universe. So a universe without intelligent life is counterfactual, right from the start. I knew that when I started constructing the argument; I can't be sure that I'm not constructing an argument that's somehow flawed. It's very easy, when I'm sure of the answer, to create an argument that's more rationalising than rationality; and it can be hard to tell if I'm doing that.
Doesn't this argument Prove Too Much by also showing that without a Metagod, God should be expected to have arbitrary and random governing principles? The universe is ordered, but trying to explain that by appealing to an ordered God begs the question of what sort of ordered Metagod constructed the first one.
I don't think that necessarily follows. A sufficiently intelligent mind (and I think I can assume that if God exists, then He is sufficiently intelligent) can impose self-consistency and order on itself.
This also leads to the possible alternate hypothesis that the universe is, in fact, an intelligent mind in and of itself; that would be pantheism, I think.
Of course, this does not prevent the possibility of a Pebblesorter God, or a Paperclipper God. To find out whether these are the case, we can look at the universe; there certainly don't seem to be enough paperclips around for a Paperclipper God. There might well be a Beetler God, of course; there's plenty of beetles. Or a Planetsorter God, a large-scale variant on the Pebblesorter; as far as we know, all the planets are neatly sorted into groups around stars. Order, by itself, does not necessarily mean an order that we would have to agree with.
This begs Eliezer's question, I think. Intelligence itself is highly non-arbitrary and rule-governed, so by positing that God is sufficiently intelligent (and the bar for sufficiency here is pretty high), you're already sneaking in a bunch of unexplained orderliness. So in this particular case, no, I don't think you can assume that if God exists, then He is sufficiently intelligent, just like I can't respond to your original point by assuming that if the universe exists, then it is orderly.
Richard Dawkins does. The universe we see (he says somewhere; this is not a quote) is exactly what a world without God would look like: a world in which, on the whole, to live is to suffer and die for no reason but the pitiless working out of cause and effect, out of which emerged the blind, idiot god of evolution. A billion years of cruelty so vast that mountain ranges are made of the dead. A world beyond the reach of God.
To be fair, this type of argument only eliminates benevolent and powerful gods. It does not screen out actively malicious gods, indifferent gods, or gods who are powerless to do much of anything.
I don't see what's so bad about mountain ranges being made of dead bodies. The creatures that once used those bodies aren't using them anymore - those mere atoms might as well get recycled to new uses. The problem of death is countered by the solution of the afterlife; an omniscient God would know exactly what the afterlife is like, and an omniscient benevolent God could allow death if the afterlife is a good place. (I don't have any proof of the existance of the afterlife at hand, unfortunately).
Suffering, now; suffering is a harder problem to deal with. Which leads around to the question - what is the purpose of the universe? If suffering exists, and God exists, then suffering must have been put into the universe on purpose. For what purpose? A difficult and tricky question.
What I suspect, is that suffering is there for its long-term effects on the human psyche. People exposed to suffering often learn a lot from it, about how to handle emotions; people can form long-term bonds of friendship over a shared suffering, can learn wisdom by dealing with suffering. Yes, some people can shortcut the process, figuring out the lessons without undergoing the lesson; but many people can't.
This is using your brain as an outcome pump. Start with a conclusion to be defended, observations that prima facie blow it out of the water, and generate ideas for holding onto the conclusion regardless. You can do it with anything, and it's an interesting exercise in creative thinking to come up with a defence of propositions such as that the earth is flat, that war is good for humanity, or that you're Jesus. (Also known as retconning.) But it is not a way of arriving at the truth of anything.
What your outcome pump has come up with is:
War really is good for humanity! But what then is the optimal amount of suffering? Just the amount we see? More? Less?
I expect that the answer is that the omniscience and omnibenevolence of God imply that what we see is indeed just the right amount. God is perfect, therefore this is the best of all possible worlds. But that would just be more outcome-pumping. No new data or reasoning is entering the argument: the idea that God has got it just right has been generated by the desired conclusion.
At some point one has to ask, where did that conclusion come from? Why do I believe it so intensely as to make all of the retconning seem sensible? Why indeed? Because earlier you expressed only a lukewarm belief:
What makes suffering any harder a problem than death? Surely the same strategy works equally well in both cases.
More precisely... the "solution of the afterlife" is to posit an imperceptible condition that makes the apparent bad thing not so bad after all, despite the evidence we can observe. On that account, sure, it seems like we die, but really (we posit) only our bodies die and there's this other non-body thing, the soul, which is what really matters which isn't affected by that.
Applied to suffering, the same solution is something like "sure, it seems like we suffer, but really only our minds suffer and there's this other non-mind thing, the soul, which is what really matters and which isn't affected by that."
Personally, I find both of these solutions unconvincing to the point of inanity, but if the former is compelling, I see no reason to not consider the latter equally so. If my soul is unaffected by death, surely it is equally unaffected by (e.g.) a broken arm?
You know, like CCC, I'm not sure what I would expect a world truly beyond the reach of God to look like - but I really doubt it would look like reality; even if God does not exist. I lack both the knowledge and, I suspect, the capacity to deduce arbitrary features of reality a priori. If our world is exactly what Dawkins would expect from a world without God, why isn't he able to deduce features that haven't been corroborated yet and make original discoveries based on this knowledge?
(On the other hand, I note that Dawkins also endorses the theory that our physical laws are as a result of natural selection among black holes, does he not? So that could be a prediction, I guess, since it "explains" our laws of physics and so on.)
Just so I'm clear: if I observe an aspect of my environment which the prevailing religious establishment in my community explains the existence of by positing that God took certain actions, and I'm not confident God in fact took those actions (perhaps because I've seen no evidence to differentially support the hypothesis that He did so) so I look for an alternative explanation, and I find evidence differentially supporting a hypothesis that does not require the existence of God at all, and as a consequence of that I am able to make certain predictions about the world which turn out to be corroborated by later observations, what am I entitled (on your account) to infer from that sequence of events?
Because all of the deductions one can get from it have already been made, and amply confirmed. The basic idea that nature can be understood, if we look carefully enough and avoid resorting to the supernatural, has been enormously successful over the last few centuries. Awe at the mystery of God has not.
Even when a scientist is motivated by a religious urge to understand God's creation, he leaves ideas of divine intervention behind when he walks into the laboratory.
As far as I can tell, most arguments of this kind hinge on that "slight evidence for the existence of God" that you mentioned. Presumably, this is the evidence that overcomes your low prior of God's existence, thus causing you to believe that God is more likely to exist than not.
Since the evidence is anecdotal and difficult (if not impossible) to communicate, this means we can't have any kind of a meaningful debate, but I'm personally ok with that.
Actually, I gave God's existence a fairly high prior from the start. The slight evidence merely reinforced that.
And yes, we can't really have a meaningful debate over it.
Why the high prior, out of curiosity ?
The problem here is that there is confusion between two senses of the word 'evidence':
a) any Bayesian evidence
b) evidence that can be easily communicated across an internet forum.
Easily communicated in a "ceteris paribus, having communicated my evidence across teh internets, if you had the same priors I do, just by you reading my description of the evidence you'd update similarly as I did when perceiving the evidence first hand", yea that would be a tall order.
However, all evidence can at least be broadly categorized / circumscribed.
Consider: "I have strong evidence for my opinion which I do not present, since I cannot easily communicate it over a forum anyways" would be a copout, in that same sentence (119 characters) one could have said "My strong evidence partly consists of a perception of divine influence, when I felt the truth rather than deduced it." (117 letters) - or whatever else may be the case. That would have informed the readers greatly, and appropriately steered the rest of the conversation.
If someone had a P=NP proof / a "sophisticated" (tm) qualia theory, he probably wouldn't fully present it in a comment. However, there is a lot that could be said meaningfully (an abstract, a sketch, concepts drawn upon), which would inform the conversation and move it along constructively.
"What strong evidence do you already posses (sic) that leads you to believe this thing" is a valid question, and generally deserves at least a pointer as an answer, even when a high fidelity reproduction of the evidence qua fora isn't feasible.
Unfortunately, I've seen people around here through the Aumann's agreement theorem in the face of people who refuse to provide it. Come to think of it, I don't believe I've ever seen Aumann's agreement theorem used for any other purpose around here.
Yes there are two senses. I meant "a". If ibidem has some bayesian evidence, good for him. If it's not communicable across the internet (perhaps it's divine revelation), that's no problem, because we aren't here to convert each other.
The thing is (b) is a common definition on internet forums so it might not be clear to a newcomer what you meant.
Edit: also I suspect ibidem means "b", most people don't even realize "a" is a thing.