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ibidem comments on Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Hello,
I am a young person who recently discovered Less Wrong, HP:MOR, Yudkowsky, and all of that. My whole life I've been taught reason and science but I'd never encountered people so dedicated to rationality.
I quite like much of what I've found. I'm delighted to have been exposed to this new way of thinking, but I'm not entirely sure how much to embrace it. I don't love everything I've read although some of it is indeed brilliant. I've always been taught to be skeptical, but as I discovered this site my elders warned me to be skeptical of skepticism as well.
My problem is that I'd like an alternate viewpoint. New ideas are always refreshing, and it's certainly not healthy to constantly hear a single viewpoint, no matter how right your colleagues think they are. (It becomes even worse if you start thinking about a cult.)
Clearly, the Less Wrong community generally (unanimously?) agrees about a lot of major things. For example, religion. The vast majority of "rationalists" (in the [avoid unnecessary Yudkowsky jab] LW-based sense of the term) and all of the "top" contributors, as far as I can tell, are atheists.
Here I need to be careful to stay on topic. I was raised religious, and still am, and I'm not planning to quit anytime soon. I don't want to get into defending religion or even defending those who defend religion. My point in posting this is simply to ask you—what, in your opinion, are the most legitimate criticisms of your own way of thinking? If you say there aren't any, I won't believe you. I sincerely hope that you aren't afraid to expose your young ones to alternate viewpoints, as some parents and religions are. The optimal situation for you is that you've heard intelligent, thoughtful, rational criticism but your position remains strong.
In other words, one way to demonstrate an argument's strength is by successfully defending it against able criticism. I sometimes see refutations of pro-religious arguments on this site, but no refutations of good arguments.
Can you help? I don't necessarily expect you to go to all this trouble to help along one young soul, but most religious leaders are more than happy to. In any case, I think that an honest summary of your own weak points would go a long way toward convincing me that you guys are any better than my ministers.
Sincerely, and hoping not to be bitten, a thoughtful but impressionable youth
What good arguments do you think LW hasn't talked about?
Religion holds an important social and cultural role that the various attempts at rationalist ritual or culture haven't fully succeeded at filling yet.
The 2012 survey showed something around 10% non-atheist, non-agnostic.
From most plausible to least plausible:
It's possible to formulate something like an argument that religious practice is good for neurotypical humans, in terms of increasing life expectancy, reducing stress, and so on.
Monocultures tend to do better than populations with mixed cultural heritage, and one could argue that some religions do very well at creating monocultures where none previously existed, e.g., the mormons, or perhaps the Catholic Church circa 1800 in the states.
I've heard some reports that religious affiliation is good for one's dating pool.
See, but these are only arguments that religion is useful. Rationalists on this site say that religion is most definitely false, even if it's useful; are there any rational thinkers out there who actually think that religion could realistically be true? I think that's a much harder question that whether or not it's good for us.
Yes.
This is great, thanks. I know there must be people out there, but I'm not entirely convinced most atheists ever bother to actually consider a real possibility of God.
I no longer have any idea what evidence would convince you otherwise.
Rationalists who take religion seriously, for instance.
Take seriously in what sense?
For instance, I spent about six years seriously studying up on religions and theology, because I figured that if there were any sort of supreme being concerned with the actions of humankind, that would be one of the most important facts I could possibly know. So in that sense, I take religion very seriously. But in the sense of believing that any religion has a non-negligible chance of accurately describing reality, I don't take it seriously at all, because I feel that the weight of evidence is overwhelmingly against that being the case.
What sense of "taking religion seriously" are you looking for examples of?
That's what I mean—a non-negligible chance. If your estimation of the likelihood of God is negligible, then it may as well be zero. I don't think that there is an overwhelming weight of evidence toward either case, and I don't think this is something that science can resolve.
This doesn't follow. For example, if you recite to me a 17 million digit number, my estimate that it is a prime is about 1 in a million by the prime number theorem. But, if I then find out that the number was in fact 2^57,885,161 -1, my estimate for it being prime goes up by a lot. So one can assign very small probabilities to things and still update strongly on evidence.
Why not?
So, you're saying that in your view no atheist could possibly take the question of the truth of religion seriously? Or, alternately, that one could be an atheist but still give a large probability of God's existence? Both of these seem a bit bizarre...
See my first comment in this thread. There's a 10% minority that takes religion seriously. Presumably some of them consider themselves rationalists, or else they wouldn't bother responding to the survey.
You may find this helpful: http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/archives/2012/02/results-of-the-.html
This is interesting. It shouldn't be surprising coming from philosophers, but it can be instructional anyway. There are as many atheists who have never heard a decent defense of religion as there are religious fundamentalists who have never bothered to think rationally.
This seems improbable, considering that there are vastly more religious people than atheists.
Props for being technical. You know what I meant.
Even in the non-technical sense, he's still making a relevant counterpoint, because it's much, much harder for atheists to go without exposure to religious culture and arguments than for a religious person to go without exposure to atheist arguments or culture (insofar as such a thing can be said to exist.)
I don't just mean being exposed to religious culture and arguments, I mean good arguments. I know, practically everyone here was raised religious and given really bad reasons to believe. But I think those may become a straw dummy—what I'm skeptical of is how many people here have heard a religious argument that actually made them think, one that has a chance in a real debate.
good arguments don't in general have a chance in a real debate, because debates are not about reasoning. But that's a nitpick.
I've seen a lot of religious people claiming to have access to strong arguments for theism, but have never seen one myself.
As JoshuaZ asks, you must have a strong argument or you wouldn't think this line of discussion was worth anything. What is it?
I'm going to second JoshuaZ here. There's a lot of disagreement among theists about what the best arguments for theism are. I'd rather not try to represent any particular argument as the best one available for theism, because I can't think of anything that theists would universally agree on as a good argument, and I don't endorse any of the arguments myself.
I would say that most atheists are at least exposed to arguments that apologists of some standing, such as C.S. Lewis or William Lane Craig, actually use.
So why not present what you think these good arguments are?
A-causal blackmail, once I thought deeply about why it might be scary. Took about an hour to refute it (to my satisfaction) - whether it would have a chance in a 'real debate': debate length, forum, allotted quiet thinking time and other confounds make me uncertain of your intended meaning.
I have been vocally anti-atheist here and elsewhere, though I was brought up as a "kitchen atheist" ("Obviously there is no God, the idea is just silly. But watch for that black cat crossing the road, it's bad luck"). My current view is Laplacian agnosticism ("I had no need of that hypothesis"). Going through the simulation arguments further convinced me that atheism is privileging one number (zero) out of infinitely many possible choices. It's not quite as silly as picking any particular anthropomorphization of the matrix lords, be it a talking bush, a man on a stick, a dude with a hammer, a universal spirit, or what have you, but still an unnecessarily strong belief.
If you are interested in anti-atheist arguments based on moral realism made by a current LWer, consider Unequally Yoked. It's as close to "intelligent, thoughtful, rational criticism" as I can think of.
There is an occasional thread here about how Mormonism or Islam is the one true religion, but the arguments for either are rarely rational.
That's a really good way of looking at things, thanks. From now on I'm an "anti-atheist" if nothing else...and I'll take a look at that blog.
Could you bring yourself to believe in one particular anthropomorphization, if you had good reason to (a vision? or something lesser? how much lesser?)
I find it unlikely, as I would probably attribute it to a brain glitch. I highly recommend looking at this rational approach to hypnosis by another LW contributor. It made me painfully aware how buggy the wetware our minds run on is, and how easy it is to make it fail if you know what you are doing. Thus my prior when seeing something apparently supernatural is to attribute it to known bugs, not to anything external.
The brain glitch is always available as a backup explanation, and they certainly do happen (especially in schizophrenics etc.) But if I had an angel come down to talk to me, I would probably believe it.
How would you tell the difference? Also see this classic by another LWer.
Personally, I think this one is more relevant. The biggest problem with the argument from visions and miracles, barring some much more complicated discussions of neurology than are really necessary, is that it proves too much, namely multiple contradictory religions.
It's a very interesting post. You're right that we can't accept all visions, because they will contradict each other, but in fact I think that many don't. It's entirely plausible in my mind that God really did appear to Mohammed as well as Joseph Smith, for instance, and they don't have to invalidate each other. But of course if you take every single claim that's ever been made, it becomes ridiculous.
Does it prove too much, then, to say that some visions are real and some are mental glitches? I'm not suggesting any way of actually telling the difference.
Well, it's certainly not a very parsimonious explanation. This conversation has branched in a lot of places, so I'm not sure where that comment is right now, but as someone else has already pointed out, what about the explanation that most lightning bolts are merely electromagnetic events, but some are thrown by Thor?
Proposing a second mechanism which accounts for some cases of a phenomenon, when the first mechanism accounts for others, is more complex (and thus in the absence of evidence less likely to be correct) than the supposition that the first mechanism accounts for all cases of the phenomenon. If there's no way to tell them apart, then observations of miracles and visions don't count as evidence favoring the explanation of visions-plus-brain-glitches over the explanation of brain glitches alone.
It's possible, but that doesn't mean we have any reason to suppose it's true. And when we have no reason to suppose something is true, it generally isn't.
It's a good post, but overly logical and technically involved for a non-LWer. Even if you agree with the logic, I can hardly imagine a religious person alieving that their favorite doctrine proves too much.
FWIW, I've had the experience of a Presence manifesting itself to talk to me. The most likely explanation of that experience is a brain glitch. I'm not sure why I ought to consider that a "backup" explanation.
Right, obviously it's a problem. There are lots of people who think they've been manifested to, and some of them are schizophrenic, and some of them are not, and it's a whole lot easier to just assume they're all deluded (even if not lying). But even Richard Dawkins has admitted that he could believe in God if he had no other choice. (I have a source if you want.)
Certainly, if you're completely determined not to believe no matter what—if you would refuse God even if He appeared to you himself—then you never will. But if there is absolutely nothing that would convince you, then you're giving it a chance of 0.
Since you are rationalists, you can't have it actually be 0. So what is that 0.0001 that would convince you?
There's a big difference between "no matter what" and "if He appeared to you himself," especially if by the latter you mean appearing to my senses. I mean, the immediate anecdotal evidence of my senses is far from being the most convincing form of evidence in my world; there are many things I'm confident exist without having directly perceived them, and some things I've directly perceived I'm confident don't exist.
For example, a being possessing the powers attributed to YHWH in the Old Testament, or to Jesus in the New Testament, could simply grant me faith directly -- that is, directly raising my confidence in that being's existence. If YHWH or Jesus (or some other powerful entity) appeared to me that way, I would believe in them.
I'm assuming you're not counting that as convincing me, though I'm not sure why not.
Actually, that isn't true. It might well be that I assign a positive probability to X, but that I still can't rationally reach a state of >50% confidence in X, because the kind of evidence that would motivate such a confidence-shift simply isn't available to me. I am a limited mortal being with bounded cognition, not all truths are available to me just because they're true.
But it may be that with respect to the specific belief you're asking about, the situation isn't even that bad. I don't know, because I'm not really sure what specific belief you're asking about. What is it, exactly, that you want to know how to convince me of?
That is... are you asking what would convince me in the existence of YHWH, Creator of the Universe, the God of my fathers and my forefathers, who lifted them up from bondage in Egypt with a mighty hand an an outstretched arm, and through his prophet Moses led them to Sinai where he bequeathed to them his Law?
Or what would convince me of the existence of Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, who was born a man and died for our sins, that those who believe in Him would not die but have eternal life?
Or what would convince me of the existence of Loki, son of the All-Father Odin who dwells in highest Asgard, and will one day bring about Ragnarok and the death of the Gods?
Or... well, what, exactly?
With respect to those in particular, I can't think of any experience off-hand which would raise my confidence in any of them high enough to be worth considering (EDIT: that's hyperbole; I really mean "to convince me"; see below), though that's not to say that such experiences don't exist or aren't possible... I just don't know what they are.
With respect to other things, I might be able to.
Huh. That's interesting. For at least the first two I can think of a few that would convince me, and for the third I suspect that a lack of being easily able to be convinced is connected more to my lack of knowledge about the religion in question. In the most obvious way for YHVH, if everyone everywhere started hearing a loud shofar blowing and then the dead rose, and then an extremely educated fellow claiming to be Elijah showed up and started answering every halachic question in ways that resolve all the apparent problems, I think I'd be paying close attention to the hypothesis.
Similar remarks apply for Jesus. They do seem to depend strongly on making much more blatant interventions in the world then the deities generally seem to (outside their holy texts).
Technically the shofar blowing thing should not be enough sensory evidence to convince you of the prior improbability of this being the God - probability of alien teenagers, etcetera - but since you weren't expecting that to happen and other people were, good rationalist procedure would be to listen very carefully what they had to say about how your priors might've been mistaken. It could still be alien teenagers but you really ought to give somebody a chance to explain to you about how it's not. On the other hand, we can't execute this sort of super-update until we actually see the evidence, so meanwhile the prior probability remains astronomically low.
In this context I think it makes sense to ask "showed up where?" but if the answer were "everywhere on earth at once," I'd call that pretty damn compelling.
Yeah, you're right, "to be worth considering" is hyperbole. On balance I'd still lean towards "powerful entity whom I have no reason to believe created the universe, probably didn't lift my forefathers up from bondage in Egypt, might have bequeathed them his Law, and for reasons of its own is adopting the trappings of YHWH" but I would, as you say, be paying close attention to alternative hypotheses.
Fixed.
You're right, I'm assuming that God doesn't just tweak anyone's mind to force them to believe, because the God of the Abrahamic religions won't ever do that—our ultimate agency to believe or not is very important to Him. What would be the point of seven billion mindless minions? (OK, it might be fun for a while, but I bet sentient children would be more interesting over the course of, say, eternity.)
As I said at the time, it hadn't been clear when I wrote the comment that you meant, specifically, the God of the Abrahamic religions when you talked about God.
I've since read your comments elsewhere about Mormonism, which made it clearer that there's a specific denomination's traditional beliefs about the universe you're looking to defend, and not just beliefs in the existence of a God more generally.
And, sure, given that you're looking for compelling arguments that defend your pre-existing beliefs, including specific claims about God's values as well as God's existence, history, powers, personality, relationships to particular human beings, and so forth, then it makes sense to reject ideas that seem inconsistent with those epistemic pre-commitments.
That's quite a given, though.
And if it were a demon? A ghost? A fairy? A Greek deity? If these are different, why are they different? What about an angel that 's from another religion?
The optimal situation could also be hearing intelligent, thoughtful, rational criticism, learn from it and having a new 'strong position' incorporating the new information. (See: lightness).
How legitimate does "most legitimate" have to be? If I thought there were any criticisms sufficiently legitimate to seriously reconsider my viewpoints, I would have changed them already. To the extent that my religious beliefs are different than they were, say, fifteen years ago, it's because I spent a long time seeking out arguments, and if I found any persuasive, I modified my beliefs accordingly. But I reached a point where I stopped finding novel arguments for theism long before I stopped looking, so if there are any arguments for theism that I would find compelling, they see extremely little circulation.
The arguments for "theism" which I see the least reason to reject are ones which don't account for anything resembling what we conventionally recognize as theism, let alone religion, so I'm not sure those would count according to the criteria you have in mind.
I'd be happy to hear what you've got. I can't just ask you to share all of your life-changing experiences, obviously. Having looked for new arguments and not found any good ones is a great position, I think, because then you can be pretty sure you're right. I don't know if I could ever convince myself there are no new arguments, though.
I'm certainly not convinced that there are no new arguments, but if there were any good arguments, I would expect them to have more currency.
If you want to explain what good arguments you think there are, I'd certainly be willing to listen. I don't want to foist all the work here onto you, but honestly, having you just cover what you think are the good arguments would be simpler than me covering all the arguments I can think of, none of which I actually endorse, without knowing which if any you ascribe to.
I'm sorry, I can't help you with that. I'm sure that you've done much more research on this than I have. I'm looking for decent arguments because I don't believe all these people who say there aren't any.
Well, what do you mean by decent? Things I accept as having a significant weight of evidence, or things I can understand how people would see them as convincing, even if I see reasons to reject them myself?
In the latter sense, it makes sense to assume that there must be good arguments, because if there weren't arguments that people found convincing, then so much of the world would most likely not be convinced. But in the former sense, it doesn't make sense to assume that there must be good arguments in general, because for practical purposes it means you'd be assuming the conclusion that a god is real, and it makes even less sense to assume that I specifically would have any, because if I did, I wouldn't disbelieve in the proposition that there is a god.
One of the things that those of us who're seriously trying to be rational share is that we try to conduct ourselves so that when the weight of evidence favors a particular conclusion, we don't just say "well, that's a good point, and I acknowledge it," we adopt that conclusion. Our positions should represent, not defy, the evidence available to us.
This is largely a problem of the nature of each side's evidence. MOst of the evidence in favor of God is quickly dismissed by those who think they're more rational than the rest of humanity, and the biggest piece of evidence I'm being given against God is that there is no evidence for Him (at least none that you guys accept). Absence of evidence is at best a passive, weak argument (which common wisdom would generally reject).
And no, I'm not assuming that God is real, I'm simply assuming that there's a non-negligible chance of it. Is that too much to ask?
And the same question arises that has been raised several times: how ought I address the evidence from which many Orthodox Jews conclude that Moses was the last true Prophet of YHWH?
From which many Muslims conclude that Mahomet was the last true Prophet of YHWH?
From which many Christians conclude that Jesus was the last true Prophet of YHWH?
From which millions of followers of non-Abrahamic religions conclude that YHWH is not the most important God out there in the first place?
Is it not reasonable to address the evidence from which Mormons conclude that Lehi, or Kumenohni, or Smith, or Monson, were/are Prophets of YHWH the same way, regardless of what tradition I was raised in?
If skepticism about religious claims is not justified, then it seems to follow naturally that skepticism about religious claims is not justified.
It's important to note that in fact, most Muslims and many Christians (I don't know Judaism as well) believe that Moses, Mohammed, and Jesus were all true prophets. They differ in a few details, but the general message is the same.
I think it is definitely reasonable to address all of this evidence. One of Thomas Monson's predecessors expressly stated that he believed God truly did appear to Mohammed.
I never said I was necessarily skeptical of claims by Jews or Muslims. Some of them must have been brain glitches, just as some claims by Mormons probably are too. But I have no problem accepting that Jews, Muslims, and Christians (maybe even atheists) can all receive divine revelation.
As I said before, it's impractical to try to stretch this logic to argue in favor of any one religion. I'm talking about the existence of God in general.
FWIW, the form of Judaism I was raised in entails the assertion that Jesus Christ was not the Messiah, so is logically incompatible with most forms of Christianity.
That aside, though, I'm content to restrict our discussion to non-sectarian claims; thanks for clarifying that. I've tried to formalize this a little more in a different thread; probably best to let this thread drop here.
Well, if we're mistaken in dismissing the evidence theists raise in support of the existence of gods, then of course, with the weight of evidence in favor of it, it's reasonable to assign a non-negligible probability to it.
The important question here is whether the people dismissing the purported evidence in favor are actually correct.
Suppose we're discussing the question of how old the earth is. One camp claims the weight of evidence favors the world being about 4.5 billion years old, another claims the weight of evidence favors it being less than 12,000 years old. Each camp has arguments they raise in favor of this point, and the other camp has reasons for rejecting the other camp's claims.
At least one of these camps must be wrong about the weight of evidence favoring their position. There's nothing wrong with rejecting purported evidence which doesn't support what its advocates claim it supports. Scientists do this amongst each other all the time, picking apart whether the evidence of their experiments really supports the authors' conclusions or not. You have to do that sort of thing effectively to get science done.
As far as I've seen, you haven't yet asked why we reject what you consider to be evidence in favor of an interventionist deity. Why not do that? Either we're right in rejecting it or we're not. You can try to find out which.
As long as we're not sure of the truth (you may be, but our society in general is not), it's silly to go around saying who's "correct" in accepting or rejecting a particular piece of evidence.
I believe I understand why you reject all evidence in favor of God. I know a lot of atheists, and I've read a lot of rationalism. To simplify: the books are all made up and the modern revelation is all brain glitches. And you believe that according to your rationalist way of thinking, this is the only "correct" conclusion to draw.
I think that you're fully justified in rejecting this evidence based on the way you look at the situation. I look at things differently, and I accept some of the evidence. And thus we disagree. What I'm wondering now is whether you think it's necessarily "wrong" to accept such evidence.
Suppose a researcher performs an experiment, and from its results, concludes that lemons cure cancer. Another scientist analyzes their procedure, and points out "Your methodology contains several flaws, and when I perform experiments with those same flaws, I can show with the same level of significance that ham, beeswax, sugarpill, and anything else I've tested, also cures cancer. But if I correct those flaws in the methodology, I stop getting results that indicate that any of these things cure cancer."
Do you continue to accept the experiment as evidence that lemons cure cancer?
It's hard to get around this without seeming arrogant or condescending, but yes, I do.
It's a major oversimplification to say that my position is simply "the books are all made up and the modern revelation is all brain glitches," but I do believe that every standard of evidence I've encountered in support of any religion (and I've encountered a lot) can be re-applied in other situations where the results are easier to check, and be shown to be ineffective in producing right answers.
If a person does science poorly, then the poorness of their research isn't a matter of opinion, it's a fact about how effectively their experiments allow them to draw true conclusions about reality.
I have no sense of what's important, and respond to stimuli that I should just ignore.
That's a complicated question in general, because "our own way of thinking" is not a unary thing. We spend a lot of time disagreeing with each other, and we talk about a lot of different things.
But if you specifically mean atheism in its "it is best to reason and behave as though there are no gods, because the alternative hypotheses don't have enough evidence to justify their consideration" formulation, I think the most legitimate objection is that it may turn out to be true that, for some religious traditions -- maybe even for most religious traditions -- being socially and psychologically invested in that tradition gets me more of what I want than not being invested in it, even if the traditions themselves include epistemically unjustifiable states (such as the belief that an entity exists that both created the universe and prefers that I not eat pork) or false claims about the world (as they most likely do, especially if this turns out to be true for religious traditions that disagree with one another about those claims).
I don't know if that's true, but it's plausible, and if it is true it's important. (Not least of which because it demonstrates that those of us who are committed to a non-religious tradition need to do more work at improving the pragmatic value of our social structures.)
As for atheism, I don't mean those that think religion is good for us and we ought to believe it whether or not it's true. I meant rational thinkers who actually believe God realistically could exist. It's definitely interesting to think about trying to convince yourself to believe in God, or just act that way, but is it possible to actually believe with a straight face?
Well, you asked for the most legitimate criticisms of rejecting religious faith.
Religious faith is not a rational epistemology; we don't arrive at faith by analyzing evidence in an unbiased way.
I can make a pragmatic argument for embracing faith anyway, because rational epistemology isn't the only important thing in the world nor necessarily the most important (although it's what this community is about).
But if you further constrain the request to seeking legitimate arguments for treating religious faith (either in general, or that of one particular denomination) as a rational epistemology, then I can't help you. Analyzing observed evidence in an unbiased way simply doesn't support faith in YHWH as worshiped by 20th-century Jews (which is the religious faith I rejected in my youth), and I know of no legitimate epistemological criticism that would conclude that it does, nor of any other denomination that doesn't have the same difficulty.
Now, if you want to broaden your search to include not only counterarguments against rejecting religious faith of specific denominations, but also counterarguments against rejecting some more amorphous proto-religious belief like "there exist mega-powerful entities in the universe capable of feats I can barely conceive of" (without any specific further claims like "and the greatest one of them all divided the Red Sea to free our ancestors from slavery in Egypt" or "and the greatest one of them all wrote this book so humanity would know how to behave" or even "and they pay attention to and direct human activity") then I'd say the most legitimate counterargument is Copernican: I start out with low confidence that my species is the most powerful entity in the universe, and while the lack of observed evidence of such mega-powerful entities necessarily raises that confidence, it might not legitimately raise it enough to accept.
But we've now wandered pretty far afield from "my way of thinking," as I'm perfectly comfortable positing the existence of mega-powerful entities in the universe capable of feats I can barely conceive of.
Thank you for answering my question. If I read it right you're saying "No, it's not possible to reconcile religion and rationality, or at least I can't refer you to any sane person who tried."
If I understand what you're using "religion" and "rationality" to mean, then I would agree with the first part. (In particular, I understand you to be referring exclusively to epistemic rationality.)
As for the second part, there are no doubt millions of sane people who tried. Hell, I've tried it myself. The difficulty is not in finding one, but rather in finding one who provides you with what you're looking for.
I'm much closer to "below average" than to the "top" as far as LW users go, but I'll give it a shot anyway.
I assume that by "way of thinking" you mean "atheism", specifically (if not, what did you mean ?).
I don't know how you judge which criticisms are "legitimate", so I can't answer the question directly. Instead, I can say that the most persuasive arguments against atheism that I'd personally seen come in form of studies demonstrating the efficacy of prayer. If prayer does work consistently with the claims of some religion, this is a good indication that at least some claims made by the religion are true.
Note, though, that I said "most persuasive"; another way to put it would be "least unpersuasive". Unfortunately, all such studies that I know of have either found no correlation between prayer and the desired effect whatsoever; or were constructed so poorly that their results are meaningless. Still, at least they tried.
In general, it is more difficult to argue against atheism (of the weak kind) than against theism, since (weak) atheism is simply the null hypothesis. This means that theists must provide positive evidence for the existence of their god(s) in order to convince an atheist, and this is very difficult to do when one's god is undetectable, or works in mysterious ways, or is absent, etc., as most gods tend to be.
Many people would disagree that atheism is the null hypothesis. "All things testify of Christ," as some say, and in those circles people honestly believe they've been personally contacted by God. (I'm talking about Mormons, whose God, from what I've heard, is not remotely undetectable.)
Have most atheists honestly put thought into what if there actually was a God? Many won't even accept that there is a possibility, and I think this is just as dangerous as blind faith.
I would venture a guess that atheists who haven't put thought into the possibility of there being a god are significantly in the minority. Although there are some who dismiss the notion as an impossibility, or such a severe improbability as to be functionally the same thing, in my experience this is usually a conclusion rather than a premise, and it's not necessarily an indictment of a belief system that a conclusion be strongly held.
Some Christians say that "all things testify of Christ." Similarly, Avicenna was charged with heresy for espousing a philosophy which failed to affirm the self-evidence of Muslim doctrine. But cultures have not been known to adopt Christianity, Islam, or any other particular religion which has been developed elsewhere, independent of contact with carriers of that religion.
If cultures around the world adopted the same religion, independently of each other, that would be a very strong argument in favor of that religion, but this does not appear to occur.
OK, that works. But what evidence do we have that unambiguously determines that there is no deity? I'd love to hear it. Not just evidence against one particular religion. Active evidence that there is no God, which, rationally taken into account, gives a chance of ~0 that some deity exists.
What evidence of no deity could you possibly expect to see? If there were no God, I wouldn't expect there to be any evidence of the fact. In fact, if I were to find the words "There is no God, stop looking" engraved on an atom, my conclusion would not be "There is no God," but rather (ignoring the possibility of hallucination) "There is a God or some entity of similar power, and he's a really terrible liar." Eliezer covers this sort of thing in his sequence entry You're Entitled to Arguments But Not That Particular Proof.
If you really want to make this argument, describe a piece of evidence that you would affirmatively expect to see if there were no God.
Right, I don't see how there could be any evidence to convince a person to the point of a 0.0001 chance of God. And so when all of these people say that they've concluded that the chance of God is negligible, I think that they're subject to a strong cognitive bias worsened by the fact that they're supposed to be immune to those.
Two things that your perpsective appears to be missing here:
1) Lots of people here were raised in religious families; they didn't start out privileging atheism. (Or they aren't atheists per se; I'm agnostic between atheism and deism; it's just the anthropomorphic interventionist deity I reject.)
2) You aren't the first believer to come here and present the case you are trying to make. See, for example, the rather epic conversation with Aspiringknitter here. You aren't even the first Mormon to make the case here. Calcsam has been quite explicit about it.
Note that both of those examples are people who've accumulated quite a bit of karma on LessWrong. People give them a fair hearing. They just don't agree that their arguments are compelling.
Thank you for pointing out perceived fundamental flaws. It's so much more helpful than disputing technical details.
1) I know that. However, I would guess that most people here have fully privileged atheism since the time they started considering themselves rationalists, and this is a big difference.
2) I was aware of that too; however, thanks for the specific links. I certainly got on here loudly proclaiming that I was religious; however, my original stated purpose was not to start an argument. That said, I really was asking for it, and when people argued, I argued back. Where I live it's so hard to find people willing to have an intellectual debate about this sort of thing. So if I did something "taboo," I apologize. But the reaction I've gotten suggests that people are interested in what I've said, and so my thoughts were worth something at least.
I suppose that when this thread resolves itself I'll make a grand post on the welcome page just like AspiringKnitter did.
Let me see if I can explain my objection to (1) a different way. Rationalists do not privilege atheism. They privilege parsimony. This is basically a tautology. The only way to subscribe to both rationality and theistic religion is compartmentalization. Saying you want to be rational and a theist is equivalent to saying you want to make a special exception to the principles you follow in every other situation when the subject of God comes up. That's going to take a particular kind of strong argument.
The problem is that you're not being consistent in your handling of unfalsifiable theories. A lot of what's been brought to the table are Russell's Teapot-type problems and other gods, but I think I can find one that's a bit more directly comparable. I'll present a theory that's entirely unfalsifiable, and has a fair amount of evidence supporting it. This theory is that your friends, family, and everyone you know are government agents sent to trick you for some unclear reason. It's a theory that would touch every aspect of your life, unlike a Russell's Teapot. There's no way to falsify this theory, yet I assume you're assigning it a negligible probability, likely .0001 or even less. To remain consistent with your position on religion, you must either accept that there's a significant chance you're trapped in some kind of evil simulation run by shadowy G-Men, or accept that the impossibility of counterevidence isn't actually a good argument in favor of something. (Which still wouldn't mean that you'd have to turn atheist - as you've mentioned, there is some evidence for religion, even if the rest of us think it's really terrible evidence.)
First of all, in an intellectual debate, you don't go around telling someone that they're cornered. That ought to raise all sorts of red flags as to your logic, but in fact I'm perfectly happy to accept both of those propositions.
I would quite agree that there's a chance worth considering that I'm the center of a government conspiracy. (It's got a name.) I don't have any idea how that chance actually ranks in my mind, and any figure I did give would be a Potemkin (a complete guess). But it's entirely possible.
However, the fact that it isn't an argument in favor of religion surely doesn't mean that it's an argument in favor of atheism. Jeez.
And thank you for admitting that there is at least a tiny bit of evidence for religion. It would be really silly not to.
No, my understanding is that it's a fairly typical tactic.
Yes, I was indeed thinking of the Truman Show Delusion. My point, though, is that it shouldn't be any less credible than religion to you, meaning that you should be acting on that theory to a similar degree to religion.
Counterevidence for atheism is not impossible at all, as people have been saying up and down the thread. If the skies were to open up, and angels were to pour down out of the breach as the voice of God boomed over the landscape... that would most certainly be counterevidence for atheism. (Not conclusive counterevidence, mind. I might be insane, or it could be the work of hyperintelligent alien teenagers. But it would be more than enough evidence for me to convert.) And, in less dramatic terms, a simple well-designed and peer-reviewed study demonstrating the efficacy of prayer would be extremely helpful. There are even those miracles you've been talking about, although (again) most of us consider it poor evidence.
Well, as I linked previously, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. If God were a proposition which did not have low probability in the absence of evidence, then it would be unique in that respect.
I'm prepared to argue in favor of the propositions that we do not have evidence favoring God over no God, and that we have no reason to believe that god has uniquely high probability in absence of evidence. Would that satisfy you?
This "in the absence of evidence" theme is popping up all over but doesn't seem to be getting anywhere new or useful. I'm going to let it be.
And I'm not momentarily interested in a full-blown argument about the nature of the evidence for and against God. I believe there is evidence of God; you believe there is none, which is practically as good as evidence that there is no God. We can talk over each other about that for hours with no one the wiser. I shouldn't be surprised that any debate about this boils down to the evidence—but the nature of the evidence (remember, we've been over this) means that it's really impossible to firmly establish one side or the other.
Why is that?
If god were really communicating and otherwise acting upon people, as you suggest, there's no reason to suppose this should be indistinguishable from brain glitches, misunderstandings, and exaggerations. I think that the world looks much more like we should anticipate if these things are going on in the absence of any real god than we should expect it to look like if there were a real god. You could ask why I think that. A difference of anticipation is a meaningful disagreement to follow up on.
You might want to check out this post. The idea that we can't acquire evidence that would promote the probability of religious claims is certainly not one we can take for granted.
No thanks, not today at least. I think we just disagree here.
The same is true of science.
if you define "science" as carrying on in the tradition of Bacon, sure. But that didn't stop the greeks from making the antikythera device long before he existed. Astronomy has been independently discovered by druids, mesoamerican cultures, the far east, and countless others where "independent" is more vague. If you consider "science" as a process of invention as well as research and discovery there are also tons of examples in eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology_in_China#Magnetism_and_metallurgy and so on of inventions that were achieved in vastly different places seemingly independently at different times. Moveable type is still movable type whether invented in China or by Gutenberg. On the other hand, Loki is not Coyote.
A lot of actual pagans may disagree with you. True, there are some differences between the cults involved, there are also differences between Babylonian and Chinese mathematics. (As for your example of Greek science, much of it is on the same causal path that led to Bacon.)
Don't know. Most probably have something better to do. I have thought about what would happen if there was a God. If it turned out the the god of the religion I was brought up in was real then I would be destined to burn in hell for eternity. If version 1 of the same god (Yahweh) existed I'd probably also burn in hell for eternity but I'm a bit less certain about that because the first half of my Bible talked more about punishing people while alive (well, at the start of the stoning they are alive at least) than the threat of torment after death. If Alah is real... well, I'm guessing there is going to be more eternal pain involved since that is just another fork of the same counterfactual omnipotent psychopath. Maybe I'd have more luck with the religions from ancient India---so long as I can convince the gods that lesswrong Karma counts.
So yes, I've given some thought to what happens if God exists: I'd be screwed and God would still be a total dick of no moral worth.
Assigning probability 0 or 1 to a hypothesis is an error, but rounding off 0.0001 to 0 is less likely to be systematically destructive to an entire epistemological framework than rounding 0.0001 off to 1.
So, with no evidence either way, would you honestly rate the probability of the existence of God as 0.0001%?
That probability is off by a factor of 100 from the one I mentioned.
(And with 'no evidence either way' the probability assigned would be far, far lower than that. It takes rather a lot of evidence to even find your God in hypothesis space.)
You're right, I'm sorry. It was 0.0001. That's still pretty small, though. Is that really what you think it is?
Don't think of my God, then. Any deity at all.
Do we want to be Bayesian about it? Of course we do. Let's imagine two universes. One formed spontaneously, one was created. Which is more likely to occur?
Personally I think that the created one seems more likely. Apparently you think that the spontaneity is more believable. But as for the probability that any given universe is created rather than accidental, 0.0001 seems unrealistically low. And if that's not the number you actually believe—it was just an example—what is?
What evidence makes you think this?
I don't have any evidence. I know, downvote me now. But I suspect some sort of Bayesian analysis might support this, because if there is a deity, it is likely to create universes, whereas if there is no deity, universes have to form spontaneously, which requires a lot of things to fall into place perfectly.
Okay, so what makes you think this is true? I'm wondering how on earth we would even figure out how to answer this question, let alone be sure of the answer.
What has to fall into place for this to occur? Exactly how unlikely is it?
It isn't obvious that this is at all meaningful, and gets quickly into deep issues of anthropics and observer effects. But aside from that, there's some intuition here that you seem to be using that may not be shared. Moreover, it also has the weird issue that most forms of theism have a deity that is omnipotent and so should exist over all universes.
Note also that the difference isn't just spontaneity v. created. What does it mean for a universe to be created? And what does it mean to call that creating aspect a deity? One of the major problems with first cause arguments and similar notions is that even when one buys into them it is extremely difficult to jump from their to theism. Relevant SMBC.
Certainly this is a tough issue, and words get confusing really quickly. What intuition am I not sharing? Sorry if by "universe" I meant scenario or existence or something that contains God when there is one.
What I mean by "deity" and "created" is that either there is a conscious, intelligent mind (I think we all agree what that means) organizing our world/universe/reality, or there isn't. And of course I'm not trying to sell you on my particular religion. I'm just trying to point out that I think there's not any more inherent reason to believe there is no deity than to believe there is one.
Ok. So in this context, why do you think that one universe is more likely than the other? It may help to state where "conscious" and "intelligent" and "mind" come into this argument.
On the contrary, that shouldn't be an "of course". If you sincerely believe and think you have the evidence for a particular religion, you should present it. If you don't have that evidence, then you should adjust your beliefs.
Even if one thinks one is in a constructed universe, it in no way follows that the constructor is divine or has any other aspects one normally associates with a deity. For example, this universe could be the equivalent of a project for a 12 dimensional grad student in a wildly different universe (ok, that might be a bit much- it might just be by an 11 -dimensional bright undergrad).
What do you mean as an "inherent" reason? Are you solely making a claim here about priors, or are you making a claim about what evidence there actually is when we look out at the world? Incidentally, you should be surprised if this is true- for the vast majority of hypotheses, the evidence we have should assign them probabilities far from 50%. Anytime one encounters a hypothesis which is controversial in a specific culture, and one concludes that it has a probability close to 1/2, one should be concerned that one is reaching such a conclusion not out of rational inquiry but more out of an attempt to balance competing social and emotional pressures.
As JoshuaZ says, there's no "of course" about it. If some particular religion is right and I am wrong, then I absolutely want to know about it ! So if you have some evidence to present, please do so.
The universe looks very undesigned -- the fine-tuned constants and the like only allow conscious observers and so can be discounted on the basis of the anthropic principle (in a set of near-infinite universes, even undesigned ones, conscious observers would only inhabit universes with constants such that would allow their existence -- there's no observer who'd observe constants that didn't permit their existence)
So pretty much all the evidence seems to speak of a lack of any conscious mind directing or designing the universe, neither malicious nor benevolent.
The intuition you're not sharing is that presence is inherently less likely than absence. I'm not entirely sure how to convey that.
What would be your prior probability for God existing before updating on your own existence?
I have absolutely no idea. Good question. What would be yours?
It's not a well-defined enough hypothesis to assign a number to: but the the main thing is that it's going to be very low. In particular, it is going to be lower than a reasonable prior for a universe coming into existence without a creator. The reason existence seems like evidence of a creator, to us, is that we're used to attributing functioning complexity to an agent-like designer. This is the famous Watchmaker analogy that I am sure you are familiar with. But everything we know about agents designing things tells us that the agents doing the designing are always far more complex than the objects they've created. The most complicated manufactured items in the world require armies of designers and factory workers and they're usually based on centuries of previous design work. Even then, they are probably no manufactured objects in the world that are more complex than human beings.
So if the universe were designed, the designer is almost certainly far more complex than the universe. And as I'm sure you know, complex hypotheses get low initial priors. In other words: a spontaneous Watchmaker is far more unlikely than a spontaneous watch. Now: an apologist might argue that God is different. That God is in fact simple. Actually, they have argued this and such attempts constitute what I would call the best arguments for the existence of God. But there are two problems with these attempts. First, the way they argue that God is simple is based on imprecise, anthropocentric vocabulary that hides complexity. An "omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and omnibenevolent creator" sounds pretty simple. But if you actually break down each component into what it would actually have to be computationally it would be incredibly complex. The only way it's simple is with hand-waving magic.
Second, A simple agent is totally contrary to our actual experience with agents and their designs. But that experience is the only thing leading us to conclude that existence is evidence for a designer in the first place. We don't have any evidence that a complex design can come from a simple creator.
This a more complex and (I think) theoretically sophisticated way of making the same point the rhetorical question "Who created the creator?" makes. The long and short of it is that while existence perhaps is very good evidence for a creator, the creator hypothesis involves so much complexity that the prior for His spontaneous existence is necessarily lower than the prior for the universe's spontaneous existence.
In which direction?
I mentioned 0, 1 and 0.0001. Ibidem asked about 0.0001%. That's 100 times lower.
Ah, sorry. I misread your statement as talking about a prior rather than with the evidence at hand and didn't notice the percentage mark. Your edited comment is more clear.
There's quite a bit of evidence against. Absense of expected evidence is evidence of absence.
There's also quite a bit of evidence for, if you bother to listen to sincere believers. Which I do.
The problem is that "quite a bit" is far, far too little. Though religious people often make claims of religious experience, these claims tend to be quite flimsy and better explained by myriad other mechanisms, including random chance, mental illness, and confirmation bias. Scientists have studied these claims, and thus far well-constructed studies have found them to be baseless.
You may be forgetting here that a lot of people here (including myself) grew up in pretty religious circumstances. I'm familiar with all sorts of claims, ranging from teleological arguments, to ontological arguments, to claims of revelation, to claims of mass tradition, etc. etc. So what do you think is "quite a bit of evidence" in this sort of context? Is there anything remotely resembling the Old Testament miracles for example that happens now?
Yes. They don't casually share them with every skeptic who asks, because miracles are personal, but there is an amazing number of modern miracle stories (among Mormons if not others.) And not just lucky coincidences with easy explanations—real miracles that leave people quite convinced that God is there.
And don't be too hasty to dismiss millions of personal experiences as mental illness.
I suspect that you and JoshuaZ are unpacking the phrase "Old Testament miracles" differently. Specifically, I suspect they are thinking of events on the order of dividing the Red Sea to allow refugees to pass and then drowning their pursuers behind them.
Such events, when they occur, are not personal experiences that must be shared, but rather world-shaking events that by their nature are shared.
First of all, Joshua didn't bring up mental illness here. But since you do: how hasty is "too" hasty? To say that differently: in a community of a billion people, roughly how many hallucinations ought I expect that community to experience in a year?
Curiously, nearly identical claims are made by other religions also. For example, you see similar statements in the chassidic branches of Judaism.
But it isn't at all clear why in this sort of context miracles should be at all "personal" and even then, it doesn't really work. The scale of claimed miracles is tiny compared to those of the Bible. One has things like the splitting of the Red Sea, the collapse of the walls of Jericho, the sun standing still for Joshua, the fires on Mount Carmel, etc. That's the scale of classical miracles, and even the most extreme claims of personal miracles don't match up to that.
They aren't all mental illness. Some of them are seeing coincidences as signs when they aren't, and remembering things happening in a more extreme way than they have. Eye witnesses are extremely unreliable. And moreover, should I then take all the claims by devout members of other faiths also as evidence? If so, this seems like a deity that is oddly willing to confuse people. What's the simplest explanation?
Many people here are grew up in religious settings. Eliezer for example comes from an Orthodox Jewish family. So yes, a fair number have given thought to this.
Curiously many different people believe that they've been contacted by God, but they disagree radically on what this contact means. Moreover, when they claim to have been contacted by God but have something that doesn't fit a standard paradigm, or when they claim to have been contacted by something other than God, we frequently diagnose them as schizophrenic. What's the simplest explanation for what is going on here?
Simple explanations are good, but not necessarily correct. It's awfully easy to say they're all nutcases, but it's still easy and a bit more fair to say that they're mostly nutcases but maybe some of them are correct. Maybe. I think it's best to give it a chance at least.
Openmindedness in these respects has always seemed to me highly selective -- how openminded are you to the concept that most thunderbolts may be mere electromagnetic phenomena but maybe some thunderbolts are thrown down by Thor? Do you give that possibility a chance? Should we?
Or is it only the words that current society treats seriously e.g. "God" and "Jesus", that we should keep an open mind about, and not the names that past societies treated seriously?
If billions of people think so, then yes, we should.
It's not just that our society treats Jesus seriously, it's that millions of people have overwhelming personal evidence of Him. And most of them are not rationalists, but they're not mentally insane either.
Is the number of people really all that relevant?
I mean, there are over a billion people in the world who identify as believers of Islam, many of whom report personal experiences which they consider overwhelming evidence that there is no God but Allah, and Mahomet is His Prophet. But I don't accept that there is no God but Allah. (And, I'm guessing, neither do you, so it seems likely that we agree that the beliefs of a billion people at least sometimes not sufficient evidence to compel confidence in an assertion.)
Going the other way, there was a time when only a million people reported personal evidence of Jesus Christ as Lord.
There was a time when only a hundred thousand people had.
There was a time when only a thousand people had.
Etc.
And yet, if Jesus Christ really is Lord, a rationalist wants to believe that even in 13 A.D., when very few people claim to. And if he is not, a rationalist wants to believe that even in 2013 A.D. when billions of people claim to.
I conclude that the number of people just isn't that relevant.
I think that if in 13 A.D. you had asked a rationalist whether some random Nazarene kid was our savior, "almost certainly not" would have been the correct response given the evidence. But twenty years later, after a whole lot of strong evidence came out, that rationalist would have adjusted his probabilities significantly. The number of people who were brought up in something doesn't matter, but given that there are millions if not billions of personal witnesses, I think God is a proposition to which we ought to give a fair chance.
And by "God" here you specifically mean God as presented in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints' traditional understanding of the Book of Mormon, and our collective traditional understandings of the New Testament insofar as they don't contradict each other or that understanding of the Book of Mormon, and our traditional understandings of the Old Testament insofar as they don't contradict each other or any of the above.
Yes?
But you don't mean God as presented in, for example, the Sufis' traditional understanding of the Koran, and our collective traditional understandings of the New Testament insofar as they don't contradict each other or that understanding of the Koran, and our traditional understandings of the Old Testament insofar as they don't contradict each other or any of the above.
Yes?
Is this because there are insufficient numbers of personal witnesses to the latter to justify such a fair chance?
I agree. As soon as a theist can demonstrate some evidence for his deity's existence... well, I may not convert on the spot, given the plethora of simpler explanations (human hoaxers, super-powered alien teenagers, stuff like that), but at least I'd take his religion much more seriously. This is why I mentioned the prayer studies in my original comment.
Unfortunately, so far, no one managed to provide this level of evidence. For example, a Mormon friend of mine claimed that their Prophet can see the future. I told him that if the Prophet could predict the next 1000 rolls of a fair six-sided die, he could launch a hitherto unprecedented wave of atheist conversions to Mormonism. I know that I personally would probably hop on board (once alien teenagers and whatnot were taken out of the equation somehow). That's all it would take -- roll a die 1000 times, save a million souls in one fell swoop.
I'm still waiting for the Prophet to get back to me...
This one is a classic Sunday School answer. The God I was raised with doesn't do that sort of thing very often because it defeats the purpose of faith, and knowledge of God is not the one simple requirement for many versions of heaven. It is necessary, they say, to learn to believe on your own. Those who are convinced by a manifestation alone will not remain faithful very long. There's always another explanation. So yes, you're right, God (assuming Mormonism is true for a moment, as your friend does) could do that, but it wouldn't do the world much good in the end.
The primary problem with this sort of thing is that apparently God was willing to do full-scale massive miracles in ancient times. So why the change?
Right, but hopefully this explains one of the reasons why I'm still an atheist. From my perspective, gods are no more real than 18th-level Wizards or Orcs or unicorns; I don't say this to be insulting, but merely to bring things into perspective. There's nothing special in my mind that separates a god (of any kind) from any other type of a fictional character, and, so far, theists have not supplied me with any reason to think otherwise.
In general, any god who a priori precludes any possibility of evidence for its existence is a very hard (in fact, nearly impossible) sell for me. If I were magically transported from our current world, where such a god exists, into a parallel world where the god does not exist, how would I tell the difference ? And if I can't tell the difference, why should I care ?
Well, if in one world, your disbelief results in you going to hell and being tormented eternally, I think that would be pretty relevant. Although I suppose you could say in that case you can tell the difference, but not until it's too late.
Indeed. I have only one of me available, so I can't afford to waste this single resource on figuring things out by irrevocably dying.
Right, simpler explanations start with a higher probability of being correct. And if two explanations for the same data exist, you should assign a high chance to the one that is simpler.
Why should one give "it a chance" and what does that mean? Note also that "nutcase" is an overly strong conclusion. Human reasoning and senses are deeply flawed, and very easy to have problems. That doesn't require nutcases. For example, I personally get sleep paralysis. When that occurs, I get to encounter all sorts of terrible things, demons, ghosts, aliens, the Borg, and occasionally strange tentacled things that would make Lovecraft's monsters look tame. None of those things exist- I have a minor sensory problem. The point of using something like schizophrenia is an example is that it is one of the most well-known explanations for the more extreme experiences or belief sets. But the general hypothesis that's relevant here isn't "nutcase" so much as "brain had a sensory or reasoning error, as they are wont to do."
In this case, "there are no gods" is still the null hypothesis, but (from the perspective of those people) it has been falsified by overwhelming evidence. Some kind of overwhelming evidence coming directly from a deity would convince me, as well; but, so far, I haven't see any (which is why I haven't mentioned it in my post, above).
I can't speak for other atheists, but I personally think that it is entirely possible that certain gods exist. For example, I see no reason why the Trimurti (Brahma/Vishnu/Shiva) could not exist in some way. Of course, the probability of their existence is so vanishingly small that it's not worth thinking about, but still, it's possible.
I appreciate that you try to keep the possibility open, but I think it's kind of silly to say that there is a possibility, just a vanishingly small one. Mathematically, there's no sense in saying that an infinitesmal is actually any greater than 0 expect for technical reasons—so perhaps you technically believe that the Trimurti could exist, but for all intents and purposes the probability is 0.
If you're ruling out infinitesimals then yes, I don't think there's any chance any chance the gods worshipped by humans exist.
A chance of 0 or effectively 0 is not conducive to a rational analysis of the situation. And I don't think there's enough evidence out there for a probability that small.
Why not ? What probability would you put on the proposition that the following things exist ?
I honestly do believe that all of these things could, potentially, exist.
If I really thought about it, I would have to say that there's quite a good chance that somewhere through all the universes there's some creature resembling a Keebler elf.
All right, so does this mean that living your life as though Keebler Elves did not exist at all would be irrational ? After all, there's a small probability that they do exist...
What probability do you actually think I should assign? More or less than to me winning the lottery if I buy a ticket? Is winning the lottery an infinitesimally small chance or should I actually consider it?
Do you mean to ask this about specifically the religion issue or things in general? Keep in mind, that while policy debates should not be one sided, that's because reality is complicated and doesn't make any effort to make things easy for us. But, hypotheses don't function that way- the correct hypotheses really should look extremely one-sided, because they reflect what a correct description of reality is.
So the best arguments for an incorrect hypothesis are by nature going to be weak. But if I were to put on my contrarian arguer hat for a few minutes and give my own personal response, I'd say that first cause arguments are possibly the strongest argument for some sort of deity.
It's a good point. Of course, hundreds of years ago, the argument was also pretty one-sided, but that doesn't mean anyone was correct. I also don't think that the argument really is one-sided today, I just think that the two sides manage to ignore each other quite thoroughly. I
'm not expecting this site to house a debate on the possibility of God's existence. Clearly this site is for atheists. I'm asking, is that actually necessary? I suppose you're saying that yes, it is impossible for rationality and religion to coexist, and that's why there are very few theistic rationalists. I'm still not convinced of that.
First cause arguments are a strange existential puzzle, depending on the nature of your God. Any thought system that portrays God as a sort of person will run into the same problem of how God came into existence.
A rationalist should strive to have a given belief if and only if that belief is true. I want to be a theist if and only if theism is correct.
Note also that getting the right answers to these sorts of questions matters far more than some would estimate. If Jack Chick is correct, then most people here (and most of the world) is going to burn in hell unless they are saved. And this sort of remark applies to a great deal of religious positions (less so for some Muslims, most Jews and some Christians but the basic point is true for a great many faiths). In the other direction, if there isn't any protective, intervening deity, then we need to take serious threats to humanity's existence, like epidemics, asteroids, gamma ray bursts, nuclear war, bad AI, nanotech, etc. a lot more seriously, because no one is going to pick up the pieces if we mess up.
To a large extent, most LWians see the basics of these questions as well-established. Theism isn't the only thing we take that attitude about. You also won't see here almost any discussion of continental philosophy for example.
So is LW for people who think highly rationally, or for atheists who think highly rationally? Are those necessarily the same? If not, where are the rational theists?
You're assuming that "no God" is the null hypothesis. Is there a good, rational reason for this? One could just as easily argue that you should be an atheist if and only if it's clear that atheism is correct. Without any empirical evidence either way, is it more likely that there is some sort of Deity or that there isn't?
IMO there's no such thing as a null hypothesis; epistemology doesn't work like that. The more coherent approach is bayesian inference, where we have a prior distribution and update that distribution on seeing evidence in a particular way.
If there were no empirical evidence either way, I'd lean towards there being an anthropomorphic god (I say this as a descriptive statement about the human prior, not normative).
The trouble is that once you start actually looking at evidence, nearly all anthropomorphic gods get eliminated very quickly, and in fact the whole anthropomorphism thing starts to look really questionable. The universe simply doesn't look like it's been touched by intelligence, and where it does, we can see that it was either us, or a stupid natural process that happens to optimize quite strongly (evolution).
So while "some sort of god" was initially quite likely, most particular gods get eliminated, and the remaining gods are just as specific and unlikely as they were at first. So while the "gods" subdistribution is getting smashed, naturalistic occamian induction is not getting smashed nearly as hard, and comes to dominate.
The only gods remaining compatible with the evidence are things like "someone ran all possible computer programs", which is functionally equivalent to metaphysical "naturalism", and gods of very specific forms with lots of complexity in the hypothesis that explains why they constructed the world to look exactly natural, and then aren't intervening yet.
Those complex specific gods only got a tiny slice of the god-exists pie at the beginning and cannot collect more evidence than the corresponding naturalistic explanation (because they predict the same), so they are pretty unlikely.
And then when you go to make predictions, what these gods might do gets sliced up even further such that the only useful predictive framework is the occamian naturalism thing.
There is of course the chance that there exists things "outside" the universe, and the major implication from that is that we might some day be able to break out and take over the metauniverse as well.
Neither, really. It's for people who are interested in epistemic and instrumental rationality.
There are a number of such folks here who identify as theists, though the majority don't.
Can you clarify what you mean by "some sort of Deity"? It's difficult to have a coherent conversation about evidence for X without a shared understanding of what X is.
In general, it's not rational to posit that anything exists without evidence. Out of the set of all things that could be posited, most do not exist.
"Evidence" need not be direct observation. If you have a model which has shown good predictive power, which predicts a phenomenon you haven't observed yet, the model provides evidence for that phenomenon. But in general, people here would agree that if there isn't any evidence for a proposition, it probably isn't true.
ETA: see also Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Certainly. But why is "God" the proposition, and not "no God?"
Because nearly all things that could exist, don't. When you're in a state where you have no evidence for an entity's existence, then odds are that it doesn't exist.
Suppose that instead of asking about God, we ask "does the planet Hoth, as portrayed in the Star Wars movies, exist?" Absent any evidence that there really is such a planet, the answer is "almost certainly not."
If we reverse this, and ask "Does the planet Hoth, as portrayed in the Star Wars movies, not exist?" the answer is "almost certainly."
It doesn't matter how you specify the question, the informational content of the default answer stays the same.
I don't think that the Hoth argument applies here, because what we're looking for is not just some teapot in some random corner of the univers—it's a God actively involved in our universe. In other words, in God does exist, He's a very big part of our existence, unlike your teapot or Hoth.
That's a salient difference if his involvement is providing us with evidence, but not if it isn't.
Suppose we posit that gravitational attraction is caused by invisible gravity elves, which pull masses towards each other. They'd be inextricably tied up in every part of our existence. But absent any evidence favoring the hypothesis, why should we suspect they're causing the phenomenon we observe as gravity? In order for it to make sense for us to suspect gravity elves, we need evidence to favor gravity elves over everything else that could be causing gravity.
Not really. Bayesian reasoning doesn't have any notion of a null hypothesis. I could just as well have said "I want to be an atheist if and only if atheism is correct".
One can talk about the prior probability of a given hypothesis, and that's a distinct issue which quickly gets very messy. In particular, it is extremely difficult to both a) establish what priors should look like and b) not get confused about whether one is taken for granted very basic evidence about the world around us (e.g. its existence). One argument, popular at least here, is that from an Occam's razor standpoint, most deity hypotheses are complicated and only appear simple due to psychological and linguistic issues. I'm not sure how much I buy that sort of argument. But again, it is worth emphasizing that one doesn't need control of the priors except at a very rough level.
It may help if you read more on the difference between Bayesian and frequentist approaches. The general approach of LW is primarily Bayesian, whereas notions like a "null hypothesis" are essentially frequentist.
You're right that prior probability gets very, very messy. It's a bit too abstract to actually be helpful to us.
So, then, all we can do is look at the evidence we do have. You're saying that the argument is one-sided; there is no evidence in favor of theism, at least no good evidence. I agree that there is a lot of bad evidence, and I'm still looking for good evidence. You've said you don't know of any. Thank you. That's what I wanted to know. In general I don't think it's healthy to believe the opposing viewpoint literally has no case.
You cannot escape the necessity of dealing with priors, however messy they are.
The available evidence supports an infinite number of hypotheses. How do you decide which ones to consider? That is your prior, and however messy it may be, you have to live with it.
Do you think that young earth creationists have no substantial case? What about 9/11 truthers? Belief in astrology? Belief that cancer is a fungus(no I'm not making that one up)? What about anything you'll find here?
The problem is that some hypotheses are wrong, and will be wrong. There are always going to be a lot more wrong hypothesis than right ones. And in many of these cases, there are known cognitive biases which lead to the hypothesis type in question. It may help to again think about the difference between policy issues (shouldn't be one-sided), and factual questions (which once one understands most details, should be).
What do you mean by "your own way of thinking" here? I can think of the following possible interpretations:
Any of these, really. It takes incredible strength to recognize flaws in your entire way of thinking, but if anyone can do it, the Rationalists ought to be able to.
What I'd really love is a link to someone smart saying "This is why I think the Less Wrong people are all misled, and here are good reasons why." But that's probably too much to expect, even around here.
Okay. This may not be the kind of thing you had in mind, but the way I personally think about things:
is probably not focused enough on emotions. I'm not very good at dealing with emotions, either myself or other people's, and I imagine that someone who was better would have very different thoughts about how to deal with people both on the small scale (e.g. interpersonal relationships) and on the large scale (e.g. politics).
may overestimate the value of individuals (e.g. in their capacity to affect the world) relative to organizations.
The way this community thinks about things:
is biased too strongly in directions that Eliezer finds interesting, which I suppose is somewhat unavoidable but unfortunate in a few respects. For example, Eliezer doesn't seem to think that computational complexity is relevant to friendly AI and I think this is a strong claim.
is biased towards epistemic rationality when I think it should be more focused on instrumental rationality. This is a corollary of the first bullet point: most of the Sequences are about epistemic rationality.
is biased towards what I'll call "cool ideas," e.g. cryonics or the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. I've been meaning to write a post about this.
is hampered by a lack of demographic diversity that is probably bad for cognitive diversity (my impression is that LW is overwhelmingly male, white, 18-24 years old, etc.).
Atheism and skepticism in general:
Eh, does it? I think it just requires a cultural meme about criticism being a good thing. LW has this, maybe too much of this, and my impression is that so does Judaism (based on e.g. avoiding your belief's real weak points). This is some evidence that you are thinking reasonably but it isn't extremely strong evidence.
Could you elaborate?
On why Eliezer doesn't seem to think that or why I think that this is a strong claim? We had a brief discussion about this here.
These are good, thank you.
About epistemic vs. instrumental rationality, though: I had never heard those terms but it seems like a pretty simple difference of what rationality is to be used for. The way I understand it, Less Wrong is quite instrumentally focused. There are many posts as well as sequences (and all of HPMOR) about how to apply rationality to your everyday life, in addition to those dealing only with technical probabilities (like Pascal's Mugging—not realistic).
Personally I'm more interested in the epistemic side of things and not a fan of assurances that these sequences will substantially improve your relationships or anything like that. But that's just me.
That usually gets you a culture of inconsequential criticism, where you can be as loudly contrarian as you want as long as you don't challenge any of the central shibboleths. This is basically what Eliezer was describing in "Real Weak Points", but it shows up in a lot of places; many branches of the modern social sciences work that way, for example. It gets particularly toxic when you mix it up with a cult of personality and the criticism starts being all about how you or others are failing to live up to the Great Founder's sacrosanct ideals.
I'm starting to think it might not be possible to advocate for a coherent culture that's open to changing identity-level facts about itself; you can do it by throwing out self-consistency, but that's a cure that's arguably worse than the proverbial disease. I don't think strength of will is what's missing, though, if anything is.
Yes. And that's what I'm unrealistically looking for—not just disagreement, but fundamental disagreement. And by fundamental I don't mean the nature of the Singularity, as central as that is to some. I mean things like "rational thought is better than irrational thought" or "religion is not consistent with rational thought." Even if they're not spoken, they're important and they're there, which means they ought to be up for debate. I mean "ought to" in the sense that the very best, most intellectually open society imaginable would have already debated these and come to a clear conclusion, but would be willing to debate them again at any time if there was reason to do so.
What, on your view, constitutes a reason to debate issues about which a community has come to a conclusion?
Relatedly, on your view, can the question of whether a reason to debate an issue actually exists or not ever actually be settled? That is, shouldn't the very best, most intellectually open society imaginable on your account continue to debate everything, no matter how settled it seems, because just because none of its members can currently think of a reason to do so is insufficient grounds not to?
I think it's safe to end a debate when it's clear to outside observers (these are important) that it's not going anywhere new. An optimal society listens to outsiders as well.
OK. Thanks for answering my question.
There are people here who say that kind of thing all the time... whether they are smart and the reasons are actually good is somewhat less certain.
Right, that's the problem. There are plenty of sites saying why LW is a cult, just as there are plenty of ignorant religion-bashers. I've found many intelligent atheists, and I'm sure that there are rational intellectuals out there who disagree with LW. But where are they?
If you mean rational intellectuals who are theists and disagree with LW I cannot help you. Finding those who disagree with LW on core issues is less difficult. Robin Hanson for example. For an intelligent individual well informed of LW culture who advocates theism you could perhaps consider Will Newsome. Although he has, shall we say, 'become more eccentric than he once was' so I'm not sure if that'll satisfy your interest.
Thanks, I'll look them up.
As far as I know, most criticism of LW focuses on its taking certain strange problems seriously, not on atheism. LW has an unusual focus on Pascal-like problems, on artificial intelligence, on acausal trade, on cryonics and death in general, and on Newcomb's Problem. Many of these focuses result in beliefs that other rationalist communities consider "strange." There is also some criticism of Eliezer's position on quantum mechanics, but I'm not familiar enough with that issue to comment on it.