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ibidem comments on Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013 - Less Wrong
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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.
You're telling me that it's essentially impossible to be theist and fully rational. You're saying that not only do rationalists privilege atheism, but if fact they have to follow it by definition, unless they manage to deceive themselves.
I disagree with your objection and I believe that it is possible to reconcile rationality and religion.
That is not the case. Observing something for which one can provide no natural explanation is going to cause a rationalist to increase their probability estimate for the supernatural. It's not going to increase it to near certainty, because the mysteriousness of the universe is a fact about the limits of our own understanding, not about the universe, so it's still possible that something we can't explain has natural causes we don't yet have the ability to measure or explain. But it will cause the estimate to rise. And if inexplicable things keep happening, their estimate will keep rising.
The question, though, is whether there is anything that could ever cause you to lower your estimate of the probability that your religion is correct. If the answer is no, then you're not being rational right off the bat, and your quest is doomed.
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.
Sure, cornering your opponent in her arguments is a very common tactic, but it seems a bit silly to go telling me you've succeeded in it. In any case, I sure don't feel cornered. :)
See, I've got evidence for religion. What's my evidence for the Truman Show?
QED. Counterevidence, yes, but not any conclusive or good or rational counterevidence.
If you actually believed in the Truman Show hypothesis? Confirmation bias would provide a whole pile of evidence. Every time someone you know stutters, or someone stares at you from across the lunchroom, or the whole room goes quiet as you enter. Whenever there's been a car following you for more than three blocks, especially if it's a black SUV. Certain small things will happen by chance to support any theory. We'd argue that the same bias is likely responsible for most reports of miracles, by the way.
By "conclusive," I mean "assigning it probability of 1, not rounded or anything, just 1, there must be a god, case closed." But, rationalists don't believe that about any evidence, about anything. And we shouldn't, as you've been saying all this time about probability 0. The evidence I posited would, on the other hand, be extremely good rational evidence and I don't want to diminish that at all.
Downvoted for paraphrasing Intrism in a way that does not reflect what he actually said in your third quote.
What's your evidence for religion? It's one thing for you to claim that that your own estimate for the truth of your religion is high based on supposedly strong evidence that you refuse to share. It's quite another to expect anyone else to move their estimate.
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?
Look, let's just admit that this line of reasoning is entirely speculative anyway...
Um, why cut off the conversation at this point rather than your original one, in that case?
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.
How about this, from Mormon user calcsam:
Seems legit to me.
I'd actually consider that deity in the sense of a conscious, intelligent being who created the universe intentionally. As opposed to it happening by cosmic hazard. (That is, no conscious creator.)
Would you assign that being any of the traits normally connected to being a deity? For example, if the 11 dimensional undergrad say not to eat shellfish, or to wear special undergarments, would you listen?
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.
I think that my religion is right and you are misguided. I really do, for reasons of my own. But I don't have any "evidence" to share with you, especially if you are committed to explaining it away as you may not be but many people here are.
Remember that my original question was just to see where this community stood. I don't have all that many grand answers myself. I suppose I could actually say that if you honestly absolutely want to know and are willing to open your mind, then you should try reading this book—I'm serious, but I'm aware how silly that would sound in such a context as this. Really, I don't want to become that guy.
I'm young, and I myself am trying to find good, rational arguments in favor of God. I'm trying to reconcile rationality and religion in my mind, and if I can't find anyone online, I'll figure it out myself and write a blog post about it in twenty years.
But what it seems I've found is that no, most of the people on this site (based on my representative sample of about a dozen, I know) have never been presented with solid arguments in favor of religion. Maybe I'll manage to find some or write them myself, and maybe I'll decide that the population of Less Wrong is as closed-minded as I feared. In any case, thank you for being more open than certain others.
Ah, no, haven't you read the How to Actually Change Your Mind sequence? Or at least the Against Rationalization subsequence and The Bottom Line? You can't just decide "I want to prove the existence of God" and then write a rational argument. You can't start with the bottom line. Really, read the sequence, or at least the subsequence I pointed out.
I wasn't under the impression that the Book of Mormon was substantially more convincing than any other religious holy book. I have, however, heard that the Mormon church does exceptionally well at building a community. If you'd like to talk about that, I'd be extremely interested.
How sure are you that more solid arguments exist? We don't know about them. You apparently don't know about them. If you've got any that you're hiding, remember that if God actually exists we would really like to know about it; we don't want to explain anything away that isn't wrong.
I was honest when I said that I'd love to see some convincing evidence for the existence of any god. If you have some, then by all means, please present it. However, if I look at your evidence and find that it is insufficient to convince me, this does not necessarily mean that I'm closed-minded (though I still could be, of course). It could also mean that your reasoning is flawed, or that your observations can be more parsimoniously explained by a cause other than a god.
A big part of being rational is learning to work around your own biases. Consider this: if you can't find any solid arguments for the existence of your particular version of God... is it possible that there simply aren't any ?
So this is a problem. In general, there are types of claims that don't easily have shared evidence (e.g. last night I had a dream that was really cool, but I forgot it almost as soon as I woke up, I love my girlfriend, when I was about 6 years old I got the idea of aliens who could only see invisible things but not visible things, etc.) But most claims, especially claims about what we expect of reality around us should depend on evidence that can be shared.
So this is already a serious mistake. One shouldn't try to find rational arguments in favor of one thing or another. One should find the best evidence for and against a claim, and then judge the claim based on that.
You may want to seriously consider that the arguments you are looking for don't exist. In the meantime, may I recommend reddit's Debate Religion forum. They are dedicated to discussing a lot of these issues and may be a better forum for some of the things you are interested. Of course, the vast majority of things related to rationality has very little to do with whether or not there are any deities, and so you are more than welcome to stick around here. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on here.
You are privileging the hypothesis of (presumably one specific strain of) monotheism. That is not actually a rational approach. The kind of question a rationalist would ask is not "does God exist?" but "what should I think about cosmology" or "what should I think about ethics?" First you examine the universe around you, and then you come up with hypotheses to see how well they match that. If you don't start from the incorrectly narrow hypothesis space of [your strain of monotheism, secular cosmology acccording to the best guesses of early 21st century science], you end up with a much lower probability for your religion being true, even if science turns out to be mistaken about the particulars of the cosmology.
Put another way: What probability do you assign to Norse mythology being correct? And how well would you respond if someone told you you were being closed-minded because you'd never heard a solid argument for Thor?
As for the Book of Mormon... try to think of it this way.
Imagine that, tomorrow, you meet aliens from a faraway star system. The aliens look like giant jellyfish, and are in fact aquatic; needless to say, they grew up in a culture radically different from ours. While this alien species does possess science and technology (or else they wouldn't make it all the way to Earth !), they have no concept of "religion". They do, however, have a concept of fiction (as well as non-fiction, of course, or else they wouldn't have developed science).
The aliens have studied our radio transmissions, translated our language, and downloaded a copy of the entire Web; this was easy for them since their computers are much more powerful than ours. So, the aliens have access to all of our literature, movies, and other media; but they have a tough time making sense of some of it. For example, they are pretty sure that the Oracle SQL Manual is non-fiction (they pirated a copy of Oracle, and it worked). They are also pretty sure that Little Red Riding Hood is fiction (they checked, and they're pretty sure that wolves can't talk). But what about a film like Lawrence of Arabia ? Is that fiction ? The aliens aren't sure.
One of the aliens comes to you, waving a copy of The Book of Mormon (or whichever scripture you believe in) in its tentacles (but in a friendly kind of way). It asks you to clarify: is this book fiction, or non-fiction ? If it contains both fictional and non-fictional passages, which are which ? Right now, the alien is leaning toward "fiction" (it checked, and snakes can't talk), but, with us humans, one can never be sure.
What do you tell the alien ?
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.
I know many, many people who think that the universe looks designed. I can refer you to Ivy League scientists if you want.
There are 7 billion people in the world. One can find "many, many" people to believe all sorts of things, especially if one's going to places devoted to gathering such people together.
But the stuff that are really created by conscious minds, there's rarely a need to argue about them. When the remnants of Mycenae were discovered nobody (AFAIK) had to argue whether they were a natural geological formation or if someone built them. Nobody had to debate whether the Easter Island statues were designed or not.
The universe is either undesigned and undirected, or it's very cleverly designed so as to look undesigned and undirected. And frankly, if the latter is the case, it'd be beyond our ability to manage to outwit such clever designers; in that hypothetical case to believe it was designed would be to coincidentally reach the right conclusion by making all the wrong turns just because a prankster decided to switch all the roadsigns around.
There are many, many Ivy League scientists. Again beware confirmation bias, the selection of evidence towards a predetermined conclusion. Do you have statistics for the percentage of Ivy League scientists that say "the universe looks designed" vs the ones that say "the universe doesn't look designed" ? That'd be more useful.
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.
I agree that the "omnibenevolent" part would be incredibly complex (FAI-complete).
But "omnipotent", "omnipresent" and "omniscient" seem much easier. For example, it could be a computer which simulates this world -- it has all the data, all the data are on its hard disk, and it could change any of these data.
I actually think this illustrates my point quite nicely: the lower limit for the complexity of God (the God you describe) is by definition slightly more complicated than the world itself (the universe is included in your description!).
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 mean deity or God in general. Because although they don't agree on the details, these billions of people agree that there is some sort of conscious higher Power. And they don't have to contradict each other in that.
Well... hm.
Is there sufficient evidence, on your account, to conclude (or at least take very seriously the hypothesis) that Thomas Monson communicates directly with a conscious higher Power in a way that you do not?
Is there sufficient evidence, on your account, to conclude (or at least take very seriously the hypothesis) that Sun Myung Moon communicated directly with a conscious higher Power in a way that you do not?
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...
I never called anyone irrational for not believing in elves. I only said that a perfectly rational person would keep the possibility open.
Please stop exaggerating my arguments (and those of, for instance, the Book of Mormon) in order to make them easier to dismiss. It's an elementary logical fallacy which I'm finding quite a lot of here.
You kinda did:
In my own personal assessment, the probability of Keebler Elves existing is about the same as the probability of any major deities existing -- which is why I don't spend a lot of time worrying about it. My assessment is not dogmatic, though; if I met a Keebler Elf in person, or saw some reputable photographic evidence of one, or something like that, then I'd adjust the probability upward.
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?