ibidem comments on Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013 - Less Wrong
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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 think it's too difficult to take this reasoning into specific cases. That is, with the general reasoning I've been talking about, I'm going to conclude that I think it's best to take the general possibility of deity seriously.
Given that, and given my upbringing and personal experience and everything else, I think that it's best to take Thomas Monson very seriously. I hardly know anything about Sun Myung Moon so I can't say anything about him.
I can't possibly ask you to do that second part, but I think that the possibility of deity in general is a cause I will fight for. (edit: clarified)
I see.
So on your account, if I've understood it, I have sufficient evidence to justify a high confidence in a conscious higher Power consistent with the accounts of all believers in Abrahamic religions, though not necessarily identical to that described in any of those accounts, and the fact that I lack such confidence is merely because I haven't properly evaluated the evidence available to me.
Yes?
Just to avoid confusion, I'm going to label that evidence -- the evidence I have access to on this account -- E1.
Going further: on your account, you have more evidence than E1, given your upbringing and personal experience and everything else, and your evidence (which I'll label E2) is sufficient to further justify a high confidence in additional claims, such as Thomas Monson's exceptional ability to communicate with that Power.
Yes?
And since you lack personal experiences relating to Sun Myung Moon that justify a high confidence in similar claims about him, you lack that confidence, but you don't rule it out either... someone else might have evidence E3 that justifies a high confidence in Sun Myung Moon's exceptional ability to communicate with that Power, and you don't claim otherwise, you simply don't know one way or the other. .
Yes?
OK, so far so good.
Now, moving forward, it's worth remembering that personal experience of an event V is not our only, or even our primary, source of evidence with which to calculate our confidence in V. As I said early on in our exchange, there are many events I'm confident occurred which I've never experienced observing, and some events which I've experienced observing which I'm confident never occurred, and I expect this is true of most people.
So, how is that possible? Well, for example, because other people's accounts of an event are evidence that the event occurred, as you suggest with your emphasis on the mystical experiences of millions (or billions) of people as part of E1. Not necessarily compelling evidence, because people do sometimes give accounts of events that didn't occur, but evidence worth evaluating.
Yes?
Of course, not all such accounts are equally useful as evidence. You probably don't know Thomas Monson personally, but you still take seriously the proposition that he is a Prophet of YHWH, primarily on the basis of the accounts of a relatively small number of people whom you trust (due to E2) to be sufficiently reliable evaluators of evidence.
Yes?
(A digression on terminology: around here, we use "rational" as a shorthand which entails reliably evaluating evidence, so we might semi-equivalently say that you trust this group to be rational. I'm avoiding that jargon in this discussion because you're new to the community and "rational" in the broader world has lots of other connotations that might prove distracting. OTOH, "sufficiently reliable evaluator of evidence" is really tedious to type over and over, which is why we don't usually say that, so I'm going to adopt "SREoE" as shorthand for it here.)
Moving on: you don't know Sun Myung Moon personally, but you don't take seriously the proposition that he is a Prophet of the higher Power, despite the similar accounts of a relatively small number of people, presumably because you don't trust them to be SREoEs.
Yes?
And similarly, you don't expect me to take seriously the proposition that Thomas Monson is a Prophet of the higher Power, not only because I lack access to E2, but also because you don't expect me to trust you as a SREoE. If I did (for whatever reason, justified or not) trust you to be a SREoE, I would take that proposition seriously.
Yes?
Pausing here to make sure I haven't gone off the rails.
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."