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byrnema comments on Belief in Belief - Less Wrong
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When I used the words "active denial" I did so deliberately.
If you asked me about my son's health, and I had cause to worry, I'd say something like: "We're arranging the best care we can given our situation; we're aware there's a limit to how much we can know about what's the matter with him, and a limit to how much we can control it."
What a phrase like "God's will" conveys is quite different. The meaning I get from it is that my efforts are futile: if it is part of God's plan that my son should die, he will, no matter how much I arrange for the best care. If it is part of God's plan that he should live, he will live, even if all I do is feed him herbs.
Now of course, in Bayesian terms, I have no usable priors about God's plan. I can't ever reason from the evidence - my son lives or dies - back to the hypothesis, since the hypothesis can explain everything. And if everybody admitted as much, it would be admissible to call this "a matter of faith, distinct from matters of evidence". To say that everyone is free to form whatever bizarre beliefs they like.
The big issue, the elephant in the drawing room, is that faith is not just a private matter. There are people who do claim that they have privileged information about God's plan - that matters of faith, for them, are matters of evidence. And this privileged access to God's plan gives them a right to pass judgment on matters of worldly policy, for instance the current Pope's recent proclamations on the use of condoms to fight the AIDS epidemic.
How is that not denying things in this magisterium?
If the "separate magisteria" hypothesis was tenable, we would have no reason to see so many people hold correlated beliefs about the non-physical magisterium. Each person would form their own private faith, and let each other person do the same. (The humor of Pastafarianism resides precisely in the ironic way they take this for granted.)
Correlated beliefs can only mean that the magisteria are not separate. To be one of the faithful is to claim - even indirectly, by association - some knowledge that outsiders lack.
The real issue, when you think of it that way, isn't faith. It's power - political power.
Just curious -- are you a moral realist?
The correlation of beliefs (discounting bible literalists, etc.) is mainly over value judgements rather than empirical facts. For example, if you disagree with the Pope, you probably disagree with his ethics rather than any scientific statements he is making.
Yikes! NYtimes
I have no idea. My meta-ethics are in flux as a result of my readings here.
I have described myself as a "Rawlsian", if that will help. It seems to me that most of our intuitions about ethics are intutions about how people's claims against each other are to be settled, when a conflict arises.
I believe that there are discoverable regularities in what agreements we can converge on, under a range of processes for convergence, humanity's checkered history being one such process. What convinced me of this was Axelrod's book on cooperation and other readings in game theory, plus Rawls. The veil of ignorance is a brilliant abstraction of the processes for coming to agreements.
I think the Pope is being an ass when he says that condoms would worsen the AIDS epidemic rather than mitigate it. I don't know much about his personal ethics. I don't pay much attention to Popes in general.
I most emphatically do not believe that the Pope has "every right to express his opposition to the use of condoms on moral grounds". Perhaps he has a right to a private opinion on the matter.
But when he makes such a claim, given his influence as pontiff, it is a fact that large numbers of people will act in accordance, and will suffer needlessly as a result - either by contracting the disease or by remaining celibate for no good reason. They are not acting under their own judgement: if the Pope said it was OK to wear rubber, they would gladly wear rubber.