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.
Topo: Of course if the Bible is a work of extraordinary moral and artistic depth, you could not be expected to see it.
Henry V: Eliezer, you've really begun to go far afield from your desire to "overcome bias". An atheist can have a neutral reading of the Bible? A Jew? A Muslim?
Ahem. (Clears throat:)
But I guess neither of you can possibly look at this translated poetry and guess whether the original was a worthy work of art, since you are atheists with respect to the existence of Grendel. You take a position on the existence of dragons: you are biased in the guise of rationality!
It is pure Judeo-Christian-Islamic exceptionalism, I regret to inform you, to think that failing to believe in the Bible God signifies anything more than failing to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Likewise the notion that no one can properly judge the Lord of the Rings as literature, because we either believe in Frodo's factual existence or disbelieve it.
Now I am, as it happens, probably prejudiced against the text of the Old Testament in particular, not because I'm an atheist, but because my parents and teachers forced me to read the damn thing; and because it represents part of a great corruption that nearly ruined my childhood and still divides my parents from me. Even so, I can read literary works that praise Death, and to praise death is also a great corruption of human spirit, and yet I judge these works as well-executed. Having being forced to read the whole damn thing, I think I'd have noticed if the Old Testament resembled literature, rather than a census report. It's boring. Full stop.
Silas: Admiring Shakespeare also seems to better correlate with "trying to activate the applause lights" than actual admiration. How do people's use of their own time on Shakespeare compare to e.g. the Halo series?
I'm on record as stating that the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is more emotionally moving than Romeo and Juliet. But even so, Buffy is not written in iambic pentameter. I have to concede Shakespeare credit for writing poetry and literature at the same time. Perhaps many greater contemporaries were lost to time; but still the feat is impressive. (I couldn't do it... maybe poets find it less impressive.)
Daniel: Judging ancient works by modern standards is a Freshman Comp 101 mistake.
Only if you're trying to be fair. Isaac Newton was one of the great discoverers of the ages. He is no longer a good physicist. This is right and proper. All arts should move forward, and if they don't, something is wrong. If no one had ever done better than Shakespeare - as evaluated by a blinded judge who didn't know Shakespeare was supposed to be great - it would be cause for deep concern. Not all arts are like the art of science, but artists should still learn from each other.
A proper reading of an ancient work should take into account the frame of mind the author expected the reader to have. But modern novels are better, not just different, because modern novels don't include boring damn censuses right in the middle of their text like the Old Testament does. John Galt's lecture in Atlas Shrugged, as disruptive as it may have been to Rand's text - I still remember my incredulity, counting the pages as I flipped them over, searching for the resumption of the plot - has nothing on the Old Testament.
Time moves forward; well it should. Incidentally, if that last sentence had been in Ecclesiastes I'm sure it would be a famous proverb by now, whether it deserved to be or not, just because it "sounds profound" if you read it while expecting profundity.