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hyporational comments on Questions on Theism - Less Wrong
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Comments (188)
Thanks for the post, that must have been hard given your beliefs.
At first, please do note that it's a long leap from believing in miracles/magic to believing in the christian god.
It's not an assumption but an observation. You wouldn't call them miracles unless they were a gross deviation from your normal experience.
Did you know that the lifetime prevalence of psychosis exceeds 3%? That's a lot of people out of touch with reality willing to claim all sorts of stuff. This is just one example of a naturalistic explanation yet you can see that it could cover many of those claims.
This doesn't mean that someone else couldn't :)
I bet they're mostly events that never happened, people just claim they did. This doesn't require lying, although that happens too.
Interestingly only the first two of those seem like good arguments to me.
Think about the definition of "psychosis". From a supernaturalist point of view, "psychosis" and similar things like the classic "mass hysteria" sound like a fake explanation, i.e., a term the materialist can slap on the phenomenon that makes it seem "scientific".
It's exactly as much a fake explanation as saying "god did it". Either of them explain everything, so nothing points to one over the other.
Right. One of my patients thinks he's Robin Hood, has made a cape of his blanket and tries to rescue other patients on the wards. He doesn't remember who he is, how old he is, where he is or why. What's fake about saying his sense of reality is gravely distorted? Doesn't stating that predict anything about his behavior?
Calling him crazy doesn't explain his behavior. You can't predict what he'd do by calling him crazy. It's still better than calling him sane, which makes consistently inaccurate predictions.
If you know more about craziness than I do, and you actually can make accurate predictions based on his particular kind of craziness, then it is a good prediction. But, to my knowledge, theists can't predict miracles. They talk about the ineffable will of god, rather than teaching classes on theopsychology that let you predict when god will and will not create miracles.
Medicine is a bit more complicated than that and I shouldn't have hidden my assumptions. See my other comment.
Do you need to know anything more to make a comment on miracles than that people who are chronically/intermittently psychotic, have a diagnosis of schizophrenia for example, are much more likely to make erroneus statements about reality? Of course, this doesn't help someone who's chronically/intermittently psychotic.
Yes. Craziness explains everything. If you have an idea of god that explains some miracles but not others, and only the ones it explains happens, then the miracles are evidence for that idea of god. The problem is that god also seems to explain everything. In order for miracles to be evidence for god over a theory that explains everything, you'd have to be able to point to some possible miracle and say that it's evidence against god.
I'm sorry but I still don't understand you. "Craziness" might explain everything to you but it seems we have different ideas about what it means.
Are you saying it explains everything from a supernaturalist pov, or also from the naturalist pov? Wouldn't it seem to you that an account of a miracle by a schizophrenic person is less reliable than by a person who has no such diagnosis? Let's assume the person got the diagnosis by claiming outrageous things that have no relation to faith.
It's like you're saying "lying explains everything". No it doesn't and it's not meant to do so. That people lie and experience stuff that isn't there clearly is evidence against miracles.
I don't understand craziness, so craziness will explain all claims of miracles equally, and if there are more miracles that can easily be explained by a god than ones that could not (and gods doing miracles doesn't explain everything) then that's evidence towards a god. Also, it's evidence that crazy people just see miracles similar to what we'd expect from a god, which is admittedly a pretty good possibility since they're both supposed to be people.
Perhaps you understand craziness better, and it doesn't explain everything equally. In which case, there'd be some miracles that it doesn't explain. Those miracles would be evidence against the theory that all claims of miracles are from crazy people.
If you're discovering for the first time that there are crazy people and you suddenly have an alternative explanation, then it's evidence against gods. But it will just bring you to the same posterior probability of someone who knew about crazy people from the beginning and updated their beliefs in miracles appropriately.
Imagine someone tells you that the winning lottery numbers were 18-24-27-42-43 / 34. There's only a one in 175,223,510 chance that those are actually the lottery numbers that won. Since there's more than a one in 175,223,510 that they're lying, it might seem at first that you should conclude that they're lying. But lying explains all 175,223,510 possibilities equally. If they lie, there's still only a one in 175,223,510 chance that they'd say those numbers. So it's not evidence one way or the other.
Granted, some psychologist might be able to tell you that people are terrible random number generators, and that some combinations are more likely if they're lying. But someone who doesn't know about that has no evidence either way, and someone who does would need to look at the specific set of numbers to tell whether or not they were lying.
That's a summary description of his behaviour, not an explanation. An explanation would be a description of the causal mechanisms that produced the behaviour -- a description of things that are not themselves the phenomenon that is being explained.
Ok, poor choice of words. Change it to "doesn't stating that predict anything about his behavior?"
What would you predict that you would not already predict from the longer description?
The longer description is a specific type of psychosis. If I was told someone was psychotic I would expect them to behave erratically in some way. In the case of the longer description I would expect them to behave erratically in a more specific way. Different kinds of psychoses are prone to continue and develop in certain ways and have certain affective and somatic components which makes even the descriptions valuable even if the causal mechanisms are not properly understood.
In the example the patient has a Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, a rare case of psychosis where brain imaging is part of the diagnosis. Because we have identified this specific kind of a pattern of behavior and imaging findings, we know the person is unlikely to recover, will continue to wildly confabulate, and medications are of no help.
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
Yes, psychosis is a useful explanation for miracles only for people whose beliefs won't explain the whole category away. I doubt the op has such beliefs.
No, I don't have any beliefs that would claim that psychosis doesn't exist, don't worry. I can't think of any hypothesis that would claim this without being far more complicated than the conventional "mental illness is a thing" view, and thus being eliminated by Occam's Razor.
So would you agree that a significant number of the accounts of miracles, not all, happen because of psychosis? Of course, hallucinations could be one the ways that a god communicates. What do you think about that? :)
I thought about that, but a christian who isn't an outright supernaturalist otherwise would presumably accept that psychotic people exist, which should make them think a little harder about why certain religious experiences should be excluded from the definition.
I'd bet the overwhelming majority of people who believe in miracles also accept that psychosis exists.
I think this is wrong.
One part of the argument from miracles goes like this: There's such-and-such a rate of people reporting things that would have to be miraculous if anything like them happened; so either there are real miracles or all these people are either crazy or lying, which isn't plausible.
And one response goes like this: Well, actually being crazy isn't so very unusual; 3% of all people are downright psychotic at some point in their lives (according to definitions that don't reckon most instances of thinking miracles have happened to them as evidence of psychosis). So how implausible is it, really, that there's enough craziness around to account for most of those reports of miracles?
It's true that saying "X thought s/he witnessed a miracle because X was psychotic" is little more informative than "X thought s/he witnessed a miracle because God performed a miracle", but I don't think that matters here. The person making the response in the foregoing paragraph isn't claiming to have a good explanation for the alleged miracles, but only that the theist's argument that only a supernatural explanation is credible is incorrect.