Copied from my blog at http://www.jame5.com/
Does truth matter?
Sure it does. Science is all about The Truth (tm). But what about fitness? Yes, I mean Darwinian fitness as in 'survival of the fittest'. According to my AI friendliness theory, that is good which increases fitness. In that sense knowledge of truth is good if and only if said knowledge increases fitness. Is there a set of false believes - as in scientifically unjustifiable believes - that if held by an individual would increase said individual's fitness? Yes there is: religion.
Sorry folks - there is no way to prove or disprove neither the existence nor the absence of a God. But that's why it is called a religious believe and not a religious truth - right? Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennet and Sam Harris have written book after book in defense of The Truth and science versus the misguided belief in religion.
Most popular counter beliefs aimed at ridiculing religion are the Pastafarian belief in a flying spaghetti monster and the more sophisticated Celestial Teapot by Bertrand Russell.
It stands to argue however that the belief in an undetectable monster or a celestial teapot on the one hand does not add to an individual's fitness while the belief in Christianity, Islam or the Jewish faith on the other hand does. Religions increase an individual's fitness by allowing for the development of groups larger then what can be evolutionary stable by sheer face to face monitoring by creating internalized restraints in their followers and thereby increasing the likelihood of sticking to a shared moral code.
For an in depth explanation I suggest reading Selection of Organization at the Social level: obstacles and facilitators of metasystem transitions. Particularly chapter four: Social Control Mechanisms.
The sentence 'No Good without God' becoming true in the sense of religion increasing fitness must burn like chili sauce on the eye lids of intelligent designers and religion bashing Darwinists alike. Oh the sweet irony!
Other examples of false beliefs increasing an individual's fitness include the optimism bias for example.
Time out! Reality Check: Is the truth bad? Or are some truths good while others are evil? Far from it... The solution lies in the big picture. The truth is not that there is no God but that internalized restraints improve how well humans function as part of large groups. The truth is not that Joe average is less likely to succeed as he thinks but that those that try may loose but those that don't have lost already.
These truths just happened to have manifested themselves in the course of genetic and memetic evolution in phenotypes that don't make them immediately deducible from said phenotypes. So before you argue for the abolishment of religion please design a set of implementable internalized restrains that are at least as efficient and effective.
Or more generally put: before you argue for the truth make sure it is not just the debunking of a false belief without replacing the false belief with something that is not at least as effective and efficient at increasing an individual's and/or a group's fitness respectively.
It stands to argue however that the belief in an undetectable monster or a celestial teapot on the one hand does not add to an individual's fitness while the belief in Christianity, Islam or the Jewish faith on the other hand does. Religions increase an individual's fitness by allowing for the development of groups larger then what can be evolutionary stable by sheer face to face monitoring by creating internalized restraints in their followers and thereby increasing the likelihood of sticking to a shared moral code.
Stefan:
It seems to me that you are sa...
Many Christians who’ve stopped really believing now insist that they revere the Bible as a source of ethical advice. The standard atheist reply is given by Sam Harris: “You and I both know that it would take us five minutes to produce a book that offers a more coherent and compassionate morality than the Bible does.”1 Similarly, one may try to insist that the Bible is valuable as a literary work. Then why not revere Lord of the Rings, a vastly superior literary work? And despite the standard criticisms of Tolkien’s morality, Lord of the Rings is at least superior to the Bible as a source of ethics. So why don’t people wear little rings around their neck, instead of crosses? Even Harry Potter is superior to the Bible, both as a work of literary art and as moral philosophy.2
“How can you justify buying a $1 million gem-studded laptop,” you ask your friend, “when so many people have no laptops at all?” And your friend says, “But think of the employment that this will provide—to the laptop maker, the laptop maker’s advertising agency—and then they’ll buy meals and haircuts—it will stimulate the economy and eventually many people will get their own laptops.” But it would be even more efficient to buy 5,000 One Laptop Per Child laptops, thus providing employment to the OLPC manufacturers and giving out laptops directly.
I’ve touched before on the failure to look for third alternatives. But this is not really motivated stopping. Calling it “motivated stopping” would imply that there was a search carried out in the first place.
In “The Bottom Line,” I observed that only the real determinants of our beliefs can ever influence our real-world accuracy. Only the real determinants of our actions can influence our effectiveness in achieving our goals. Someone who buys a million-dollar laptop was really thinking, “Ooh, shiny,” and that was the one true causal history of their decision to buy a laptop. No amount of “justification” can change this, unless the justification is a genuine, newly running search process that can change the conclusion. Really change the conclusion. Most criticism carried out from a sense of duty is more of a token inspection than anything else. Free elections in a one-party country.
To genuinely justify the Bible as an object of laudation by reference to its literary quality, you would have to somehow perform a neutral reading through candidate books until you found the book of highest literary quality. Renown is one reasonable criterion for generating candidates, so I suppose you could legitimately end up reading Shakespeare, the Bible, and Gödel, Escher, Bach. (Otherwise it would be quite a coincidence to find the Bible as a candidate, among a million other books.) The real difficulty is in that “neutral reading” part. Easy enough if you’re not a Christian, but if you are . . .
But of course nothing like this happened. No search ever occurred. Writing the justification of “literary quality” above the bottom line of “I ♡ the Bible” is a historical misrepresentation of how the bottom line really got there, like selling cat milk as cow milk. That is just not where the bottom line really came from. That is just not what originally happened to produce that conclusion.
If you genuinely subject your conclusion to a criticism that can potentially de-conclude it—if the criticism genuinely has that power—then that does modify “the real algorithm behind” your conclusion. It changes the entanglement of your conclusion over possible worlds. But people overestimate, by far, how likely they really are to change their minds.
With all those open minds out there, you’d think there’d be more belief-updating.
Let me guess: Yes, you admit that you originally decided you wanted to buy a million-dollar laptop by thinking, “Ooh, shiny.” Yes, you concede that this isn’t a decision process consonant with your stated goals. But since then, you’ve decided that you really ought to spend your money in such fashion as to provide laptops to as many laptopless wretches as possible. And yet you just couldn’t find any more efficient way to do this than buying a million-dollar diamond-studded laptop—because, hey, you’re giving money to a laptop store and stimulating the economy! Can’t beat that!
My friend, I am damned suspicious of this amazing coincidence. I am damned suspicious that the best answer under this lovely, rational, altruistic criterion X, is also the idea that just happened to originally pop out of the unrelated indefensible process Y. If you don’t think that rolling dice would have been likely to produce the correct answer, then how likely is it to pop out of any other irrational cognition?
It’s improbable that you used mistaken reasoning, yet made no mistakes.
1In Harris’ “Is Religion Built Upon Lies?” dialogue with Andrew Sullivan, http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/debate-with-andrew-sullivan-part-two.
2If I really wanted to be cruel, I would compare the Bible to Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series.