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-- Karl Marx, in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
So, I think this quote does have a slight amount of value for rationality. But driving away most of Earth's population from existential risk (or at least from LW and MIRI) would appear to have much lower E(U) than doing nothing.
What happened to the idea of rewriting the Sequences to remove all religious examples? (This is a real question.)
What about including the idea that religious thinking isn't limited to religion? After all. religious people aren't wired up in some fundamentally different way to everyone else.
I suppose Marx (if brought suitably up to date) would reply that the downside of driving some people away would be more than compensated by the upside of liberating some people from their religious delusions and thus enabling them to think more clearly about existential risk.
(I've no idea whether he'd be right.)
There's a comment from one of the people responsible for the Sequences ebook, arguing that it wouldn't be feasible to remove all the anti-religious material and speculating on whether re-ordering what's there might make it less of an immediate turn-off for religious readers.
As a religious person myself, I have to say that's the one part of the Sequences that seems to me to be poorly fitted. (I haven't read them all, but in the ones I have read). Its inclusion seems to follow one of two patterns.
The first pattern is, "all religion is false and I do not have to explain why because it is obvious". These I ignore, as they give me no information to work from. (Your use of the phrase "religious delusions" I also class under this category).
The second pattern is, "I have known religious people who have fallen into this fallacy, this trap, this way of reasoning poorly, and have used it to support their claims". Again, this tells me nothing about whether or not God exists; it merely tells me that some people's arguments in favour of God's existence are flawed. It means nothing. I can give you a flawed argument for the proposition that 16/64 is equal to 1/4; the fact that my argument is flawed does not make 16/64 == 1/4 false.
...so, as far as I've so far seen, that's pretty much where things stand. The Sequences praise the virtues of clear thought, of looking at evidence before coming to a conclusion, of not writing the line at the bottom of the page until after you have written the argument on the page... and then, in this one matter, insist on giving the line at the bottom of the page and not the argument? It just gives the feeling of being tacked on, an atheist meme somehow caught up where it doesn't, strictly speaking, belong.
...maybe there's something in the parts I haven't yet read that explains this discreprency. I doubt it, because if there was I imagine it would be linked to a lot more often, but it is still possible.
I think (with the caveat that I've read a lot but not all of the sequences) that it is Yudkowsky's position that religions are specific manifestations of a whole cluster of more general failures of rationality, and that once someone truly internalises all of the best techniques for separating probable truths from probable untruths, it will be more-or-less impossible for that person to remain religious (unless, of course, they are sitting on a mountain of evidence in favour of the existence of one or more gods which has not been made available to the rest of us), and that it will be <i>obvious</i> that the specific claims of religions are false.
So yes, there is not much in there that explicitly rebuts the god hypothesis, but probably the closest thing to what you are looking for is <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/1e/raising_the_sanity_waterline/">Raising the Sanity Waterline,</a> which lists the ideas that ought to make discarding religions into one of the low-hanging fruits of any attempt at upgrading one's rationality.
The thing is, if it really was such a low-hanging fruit, then it would seem likely that the most successful scientists would have done so already (there's a lot in rationality which makes it good at science). Since the same article points out the existence of Nobel laureates who are religious in one or other way, I think it is not nearly as obvious a matter as the article suggests...
Religious belief is apparently much less common
especially if one defines "religious belief" in a way that makes it have actual consequences for the observable world (e.g., a god who actually affects what happens in the world rather than just winding it up and then leaving it alone).
See e.g. this summary of the results of asking scientists about their beliefs and the letter to Nature that the summary is mostly about. (Note: there's some scope for debate about the interpretation of these results, though I find the arguments at the far end of that link extremely unconvincing.)
[EDITED to fix a wrong link; thanks to CCC for pointing it out.]
I notice that their definition of "greater scientists" - which seems to have been what you referred to as "very successful scientists" - was "members of the National Academy of Sciences". While I have no doubt that one needs to be a pretty great scientist to become a member, the results lead me to wonder whether the membership process for joining the Academy has an atheist bias in it somewhere.
I notice that the figures for scientists generally are more constant from 1914 to 1996, with approximately 60% of scientists expressing "disbelief or doubt in the existence of God" - since the selection of respondents here is not subject to the (potentially biased) membership process of a single organisation, I would give this general figure far greater credence that it shows what it purports to show.
(Also, I think you may have linked the wrong page in your "scope for debate" link - it's linking to the same page as your "this summary" link)
It's possible. (I suppose new members are nominated and elected by existing members, and people may tend to favour candidates who resemble themselves and be influenced by politics, religion, skin colour, etc., etc., etc.) It would need to be quite a strong bias to produce the reported results in the absence of a tendency for "greater scientists" to be less (conventionally) religious than scientists in general.
The last paragraph of the Larson-Witham letter to Nature looks to me like (weak) evidence against a strong atheistic bias in the NAS, in that if there were such a bias I would expect its public utterances and those of its leaders to be a bit less conciliatory. As I say, weak evidence only.
(There could also be a bias in responses; maybe atheists are more cooperative in surveys or something. I would expect any such bias to be small and it's not obvious to me which way it's more likely to go.)
Yup, I did. I've linked the right one now. Sorry about that.
Yes, that's the sort of thing I'm thinking of. People (in general) are usually more comfortable associating with people who share their opinions.
Very weak evidence; it's easy to be conciliatory if one can also be smugly superior in pointing out how wrong the other party is (which is one possible, not necessarily correct interpretation of the last sentence of that paragraph).
That is a point which I had not considered. I'm not sure which way it would go either (unless they did the survey by phoning people at their homes on a Sunday morning, when many Christians would be at church, but that would just be stupid)
Ah, thanks.
...that Gallup evolution poll at the start seems quite telling. It suggests that the difference between scientists and the general public is entirely in the (much larger) rejection of young-earth creationism. This fits with my expectations (which is probably why I draw attention to it).
Comments use markdown syntax, not html, so you're looking for the following:
Raising the Sanity Waterline,
Similarly, italics are achieved by putting a * in front of and behind the italicized word. You can find more by clicking the "Show help" button in the bottom right.
I would note that at present, "religious" is mostly synonymous with "supernaturalist," but this does not have to be the case. The truth destroys supernaturalism, but whether or not it destroys humanism is unclear. See Feeling Rational for a related discussion.
For the avoidance of doubt, I was putting that in the mouth of Hypothetical Modern-Day Karl Marx rather than expressing my own attitude to religion. (In case you care: I am an atheist; my wife is an active Christian; I firmly disagree with all the religions I know enough about to have an opinion but don't think words like "delusion" are generally helpful for describing them.)
As for the use of religion in the Sequences, I think what's going on is this:
That all seems reasonable (whether or not correct) to me.
...ah. I completely misconstrued your intentions there. My apologies.
I think you are very probably correct, or close to correct. Unfortunately, it seems to have had the effect of turning atheism into something of an applause light in the comments.
Well, religious (and anti-religious) debates have the reputation they have for a reason :-).
The basic form of the atheistic argument found in the Sequences is as follows: "The theistic hypothesis has high Kolmogorov complexity compared to the atheistic hypothesis. The absence of evidence for God is evidence for the absence of god. This in turn suggests that the large number of proponents of religion is more likely due to God being an improperly privileged hypothesis in our society rather than Less Wrong and the atheist community in general missing key pieces of evidence in favour of the theistic hypothesis."
Now, you could make a counterpoint along the lines of "But what about 'insert my evidence for God here'? Doesn't that suggest the opposite, and that God IS real?" There is almost certainly some standard rebuttal to that particular piece of evidence which most of us have already previously seen. God is a very well discussed topic, and most of the points anyone will bring up have been brought up elsewhere. And so, Less Wrong as a community has for the most part elected to not entertain these sorts of arguments outside of the occasional discussion thread, if only so that we can discuss other topics without every thread becoming about religion (or politics).
yes, the debate here is well worn: the only novelty is less wrong's degree of confidence that they have right answer. Might that be what is attracting debate, as opposed to "most of us are atheists, but whatever".
"There is almost certainly some standard rebuttal to that particular piece of evidence..."
Evidence is not something that needs "rebuttal." There is valid evidence both for and against a claim, regardless of whether the claim is true or false.
That's fair. Though, I'd put my mistake less on the word "rebuttal" and more on the word "evidence." The particular examples I had in mind when writing that post were non-evidence "evidences" of God's existence like the complexity of the human eye, or fine structure of the universe. Cases where things are pointed to as being evidence despite the fact that they are just as and often more likely to exist if God doesn't exist than they would be if he did.
I find this unconvincing. The basic theistic hypothesis is a description of an omnipotent, omniscient being; together with the probable aims and suspected intentions of such a being. The laws of physics would then derive from this.
The basic atheistic hypothesis is, as far as I understand it, the laws of physics themselves, arising from nothing, simply existing.
I am not convinced that the Kolmogorov complexity of the first is higher then the Kolmogorov complexity of the second. (Mind you, I haven't really compared them all that thoroughly - I could be wrong about that. But it, at the very least, is not obviously higher).
Before seeing this I thought you rejected all priors based on Kolmogorov complexity, as that seemed like the only way to save your position. (From what you said before you've read at least some of what Eliezer wrote on the difficulty of writing an AGI program. Hopefully you've read about the way that an incautious designer could create levers which do nothing, since the human brain is inclined to underestimate its own complexity.)
While guessing is clearly risky, it seems like you're relying on the idea that a program to simulate the right kind of "omnipotent, omniscient being" would necessarily show it creating our laws of physics. Otherwise it would appear absurd to compare the complexity of the omni-being to that of physics alone. (It also sounds like you're talking about a fundamentally mental entity, not a kind of local tyrant existing within physics.) But you haven't derived any of our physics from even a more specific theistic hypothesis, nor did the many intelligent people who thought about the logical implications of God in the Middle Ages! Do you actually think they just failed to come up with QM or thermodynamics because they didn't think about God enough?
Earlier when you tried to show that assuming any omni-being implied an afterlife, you passed over the alternative of an indifferent omni^2 without giving a good reason. You also skipped the idea of an omni-being not having people die in the first place. In general, a habit of ignoring alternatives will lead you to overestimate the prior probability of your theory. And in this case, if you want to talk about an omni^2 that has an interest in humans, we would naively expect it to create some high-level laws of physics which mention humans. You have not addressed this. It seems like in practice you're taking a scientific model of the world and adding the theistic hypothesis as an additional assumption, which - in the absence of evidence for your theory over the simpler one - lowers the probability by a factor of 2^(something on the order of MIRI's whole reason for being). Or at least it does by assumptions which you seem to accept.
Maybe the principle will be clearer if we approach it from the evidence side. Insofar as an omni^2 seems meaningful, I'd expect its work to be near optimal for achieving its goals. I say that literally nothing in existence which we didn't make is close to optimal for any goal, except a goal that overfits the data in a way that massively lowers that goal's prior probability. Show me an instance. And please remember what I said about examining alternatives.
Yes, I think so.
Yes, that is correct.
A few seconds' googling suggests (article here) that a monk by the name of Udo of Aachen figured out the Mandelbrot set some seven hundred years before Mandelbrot did by, essentially, thinking about God. (EDIT: It turns out Udo was an April Fools' hoax from 1999. See here for details.)
Mind you, simply starting from a random conception of God and attempting to derive a universe will essentially lead to a random universe. To start from the right conception of God necessarily requires some sort of observation - and I do think it is easier to derive the laws of physics from observation of the universe than it is to derive the mindset of an omniscient being (since the second seems to require first deriving the laws of physics in order to check your conclusions).
You are right. I skipped over the idea of an entirely indifferent omni-being; that case seems to have minimal probability of an afterlife (as does the atheist universe; in fact, they seem to have the same minimal probability). Showing that the benevolent case increases the probability of an afterlife is then sufficient to show that the probability of an afterlife is higher in the theistic universe than the atheistic universe (though the difference is less than one would expect from examining only the benevolent case).
I also skipped the possibility of there being no death at all; I skipped this due to the observation that this is not the universe in which we live. (I could argue that the process of evolution requires death, but that raises the question of why evolution is important, and the only answer I can think of there - i.e. to create intelligent minds - seems very self-centred)
I question whether it has an interest in humans specifically, or in intelligent life as a whole. (And there is at least a candidate for a high-level law of physics which mentions humans in particular - "humans have free will". It is not proven, despite much debate over the centuries, but it is not disproven either, and it is hard to see how it can derive from other physical laws)
This seems likely. It implies that the universe is the optimal method for achieving said goals, and therefore that said goals can be derived from a sufficiently close study of the universe.
It should also be noted that aesthetics may be a part of the design goals; in the same way as a dance is generally a very inefficient way for moving from point A to point B, the universe may have been designed in part to fulfill some (possibly entirely alien) sense of aesthetics.
I can't seem to think of one off the top of my head. (Mind you, I'm not sure that the goal of the universe has been reached yet; it may be something that we can't recognise until it happens, which may be several billion years away)
Took me a while to check this, because of course it would have been evidence for my point. (By the way, throughout this conversation, you've shown little awareness of the concept or the use of evidence in Bayesian thought.)
Are you trolling us?
...no, I am not intentionally trolling you. Thank you for finding that.
This is the danger of spending only a few seconds googling on a topic; on occasion, one finds oneself being fooled by a hoax page.
The general opinion around here (which I share) is that the complexity of those is much higher than you probably think it is. "Human-level" concepts like "mercy" and "adultery" and "benevolence" and "cowardice" feel simple to us, which means that e.g. saying "God is a perfectly good being" feels like a low-complexity claim; but saying exactly what they mean is incredibly complicated, if it's possible at all. Whereas, e.g., saying "electrons obey the Dirac equation" feels really complicated to us but is actually much simpler.
Of course you're at liberty to say: "No! Actually, human-level concepts really are simple, because the underlying reality of the universe is the mind of God, which entertains such concepts as easily as it does the equations of quantum physics". And maybe the relative plausibility of that position and ours ultimately depends on one's existing beliefs about gods and naturalism and so forth. I suggest that (1) the startling success of reductionist mathematics-based science in understanding, explaining and predicting the universe and (2) the total failure of teleological purpose-based thinking in the same endeavour (see e.g., the problem of evil) give good reason to prefer our position to yours.
That sounds really optimistic.
They can be derived from simple game theory as applied to humans.
I'm not entirely convinced, but in any case even "human" is a really complicated concept.
I guess that means humans don't exist. Oh, wait.
Note that infinite sets can have very low informational complexity-- that's why complexity isn't a slam-dunk against MUH.
Don't think of infinite entities as very large finite entities.
I'm pretty sure I wasn't thinking of infinite entities as very large finite entities, nor was I claiming that infinite sets must have infinite complexity or anything of the kind. What I was claiming high complexity for is the concept of "good", not God or "perfectly good" as opposed to "merely very good".
Wouldn't "perfectly good" be the appropriate concept here?
That is possible. I have no idea how to specify such things in a minimum number of bits of information.
This is true; yet there may be fewer human-level concepts and more laws of physics. I am still unconvinced which complexity is higher; mainly because I have absolutely no idea how to measure the complexity of either in the first place. (One can do a better job of estimating the complexity of the laws of physics because they are better known, but they are not completely known).
But let us consider what happens if you are right, and the complexity of my hypothesis is higher than the complexity of yours. Then that would form a piece of probabilistic evidence in favour of the atheist hypothesis, and the correct action to take would be to update - once - in that direction by an appropriate amount. I'm not sure what an appropriate amount is; that would depend on the ratio of the complexities (but is capped by the possibility of getting that ratio wrong).
This argument does not, and can not, in itself, give anywhere near the amount of certainty implied by this statement (quoted from here):
I should also add that the existence of God does not invalidate reductionist mathematics-based thinking in any way.
Well, I suppose in principle there might. But would you really want to bet that way?
Yes, I completely agree.
Almost, but not exactly. It makes a difference how wrong, and in which direction.
One in a billion is only about 30 bits. I don't think it's at all impossible for the complexity-based calculation, if one could do it, to give a much bigger odds ratio than that. The question then is what to do about the possibility of having got the complexity-based calculation (or actually one's estimate of it) badly wrong. I'm inclined to agree that when one takes that into account it's not reasonable to use an odds ratio as large as 10^9:1.
But it's not as if this complexity argument is the only reason anyone has for not believing in God. (Some people consider it the strongest reason, but "strongest" is not the same as "only".)
Incidentally, I offer the following (not entirely serious) argument for pressing the boom-if-God button rather than the boom-with-small-probability button: the chances of the world being undestroyed afterwards are presumably better if God exists.
Insufficient information to bet either way.
Yes, that's what I meant by "capped" - if I did that calculation (somehow working out the complexities) and it told me that there was a one-in-a-billion chance, then there would be a far, far better than a one-in-a-billion chance that the calculation was wrong.
Noted.
If I assume that the second-strongest reason is (say) 80% as strong as the strongest reason (by which I mean, 80% as many bits of persuasiveness), the third-strongest reason is 80% as strong as that, and so on; if the strength of all this (potentially infinite) series of reasons is added together, it would come to five times as strong as the strongest reason.
Thus, for a thirty-bit strength from all the reasons, the strongest reason would need a six-bit strength - it would need to be worth one in sixty-four (approximately).
Of course, there's a whole lot of vague assumptions and hand-waving in here (particularly that 80% figure, which I just pulled out of nowhere) but, well, I haven't seen any reason to think it at all likely that the complexity argument is worth even three bits, never mind six.
(Mind you, I can see how a reasonable and intelligent person might disagree on me about that).
...serious or not, that is a point worth considering. I'm not sure that it's true, but it could be interesting to debate.
"Omnipotent", "omniscient", and "being" are packing a whole shit-ton of complexity, especially "being". They're definitely packing more than a model of particle physics, since we know that all known "beings" are implemented on top of particle physics.
I don't think mind designs are dependent on their underlying physics. The physics is a substrate, and as long as it provides general computation, intelligence would be achievable in a configuration of that physics. The specifics of those designs may depend on how those worlds function, like how jellyfish-like minds may be different from bird-like minds, but not the common elements of induction, analysis of inputs, and selection of outputs. That would mean the simplest a priori mind would have to be computed by the simplest provision of general computation, however. An infinitely divine Turing Machine, if you will.
That doesn't mean a mind is more basic than physics, though. That's an entirely separate issue. I haven't ever seen a coherent model of God in the first place, so I couldn't begin to judge the complexity of its unproposed existence. If God is a mind, then what substrate does it rest on?
"Being" surely does not have more complexity than particle physics. Particles are already beings.
"Being" in the sense of intelligent mind sure as hell does. Particles are not beings in that sense of the word, and that's the common sense.
We don't know that beings require particle physics - if the only animal I've ever seen is a dog, that is not proof that zebras don't exist.
I'm not saying that there isn't complexity in the word "being", just that I'm not convinced that your argument in favour of there being more complexity than particle physics is good.
Kolmogorov complexity is, in essence, "How many bits do you need to specify an algorithm which will output the predictions of your hypothesis?" A hypothesis which gives a universally applicable formula is of lower complexity than one which specifies each prediction individually. More simple formulas are of lower complexity than more complex formulas. And so on and so forth.
The source of the high Kolmogorov complexity for the theistic hypothesis is God's intelligence. Any religious theory which involves the laws of physics arising from God has to specify the nature of that God as an algorithm which specifies God's actions in every situation with mathematical precision and without reference to any physical law which would (under this theory) later arise from God. As you can imagine, doing so would take very, very many bits to do successfully. This leads to very high complexity as a result.
If we assume that God is a free-willed agent, then that might even be impossible in a finite number of bits...
The number of bits required to specify an agent with free will (insofar as free will is a meaningful term when discussing a deterministic universe) is definitely finite. Very large, but finite. Which is a good thing, since Kolmogorov priors specify a prior of 0 for a hypothesis with infinite complexity and assigning a prior of 0 to a hypothesis is a Bad Thing for a variety of reasons.
I don't understand the concept of specifying (in bits) an agent with free will.
...could you elaborate on this point a bit more? I'd really like to know how you prove that.
Is this an instance of the template "As someone who believes X, I have to say that where this book argues against X is its weakest part."?
Obviously it is. The more interesting question is whether, as with many instances of that template, CCC thinks the anti-religious material is weakest only because it conflicts with CCC's opinions.
(Those of us who think religion is Bad and Wrong are of course at the same risk of overrating them as CCC is of underrating them.)
Yes, it probably is :)
However, I do think that I can provide an objective argument for it being poorly fitted. That argument is as follows; it is an important part of the Sequences that one should never write the conclusion to an argument before writing down the argument that leads to that conclusion (the last line on the page should not be written first).
Yet, in the particular case of atheism, we are shown only the last line, and not the supporting argument(s). Hence, poorly fitted to the Sequences as a whole.
What can you predict with the existence of your God that you can't predict without?
And what makes your God more likely than any other God or Gods?
I suppose it's a question of granularity. While there have been a number of sound arguments for 16/64 equalling 1/4, there are hitherto no arguments of equal strength for the existence of any particular deity.
16/64 being equal to 1/4 allows people to predict what will happen when they scale objects.
The existence of an afterlife. The presence of free will.
I start with the question, "Is there a God?", by which I mean a being both omnipotent and omniscient. I am confident that the answer to that question is "yes".
I have since assigned a number of further ideas to this concept, some of which are almost certainly wrong (but I'm not sure which ones). It is highly likely that someone else has come up with a more accurate idea of God than my idea. (There are seven billion people on Earth; the odds of my idea being the most accurate are laughably small).
...does that answer your question?
Yes, it does, though those answers lead to further questions.
How can you gain information from a prediction you cannot test, until you die? Is there some way to test it? Or have you encountered personal evidence of an afterlife already?
Why does free will or an afterlife require a God?
It's hard to convey tone in text, but these are honest questions. If they make you uncomfortable, it's fine if you ignore them.
Regarding the sequences, you may find it easier to derive the same information from books popularizing a lot of the source material it is based on, if the sequences themselves turn you off.
Well, the obvious answer is "by dying". However, this also prevents me from communicating my results, calling the usefulness of the procedure into question...
No, but there are people who have. Feel free to look them up.
Note that one of the requirements of canonisation as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church is that someone find evidence, sufficient to convince the Church, that the person being canonised is in the afterlife. So a look through the Vatican records will probably provide a number of examples to look over, if you'd like.
They do not require a God. My argument for both requires a God, but there may be other arguments that do not.
Actually, by and large they don't. There is one element of the Sequences which niggles at me a bit, but it doesn't really bother me all that much; Eleizer is perfectly entitled to his opinions.
This would be more impressive if it didn't so often happen that the ones with the best-sounding evidence so often turn out to be outright fraudulent. E.g., Eben Alexander's book ("Proof of Heaven") makes claims about his illness that are demonstrably untrue, and it turns out he's been in trouble before for reasons that call his integrity seriously into question (e.g., there is reason to think he's falsified patients' medical records); Alex Malarkey ("The Boy who went to Heaven") retracted his claims to have died and visited heaven.
Yeah, they do indeed require evidence sufficient to convince the church that the person is in the afterlife. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like the church needs terribly good evidence. Typically what they want to see is a miracle performed by the proto-saint's intercession. E.g., the miracle that qualified the former Pope John Paul II for beatification (he hasn't been canonized yet) is that a nun had a neurological condition, she prayed for him to intercede for her, and she stopped having symptoms. But (1) no one actually knows exactly what condition she has or had, and hence no one knows how likely remission is even without divine intervention, and (2) she appears to have had a relapse since the alleged miracle.
Yes, that is a problem - if you're making up the claim, you can make up evidence to be as convincing as you want.
Considering that the Church already thinks that there is an afterlife, the burden of proof they require is almost certainly lower - possibly significantly lower - than the burden of proof that you would be looking for... it's just the potential source of evidence that came most immediately to mind at the time.
John Paul II was canonized more than a year ago (you might have been looking at an older news source and not noticed the date on it.) There are definitely problems with the Church's canonization process, and if they really cared about the validity of miracles like that, they should publish the facts of the case and an explanation of why they think it was a miracle. But they don't do that, which allows for a lot more wishful thinking.
A more reasonable example of a miracle claim (which is not about the afterlife) is this. Most explanations which do not accept it as a miracle are mistaken in obvious ways, as for example Brian Dunning's explanation in the linked article. I'm not sure where he got the idea that doctors did not testify to the amputation, but that is simply completely false.
So, I can't help but note that the existence of an afterlife does not follow from "a being both omnipotent and omniscient." ("Free will" does not seem terribly well defined, but "possibility and could-ness" in the sense of that post does not follow either - save perhaps for the omni-being, and then only in a more general sense.)
What can you predict with the part you expressed confidence in? What makes you confident?
Ah. The presence of an omniscient, omnipotent being is important to the proof, but it is not the only element in that proof (the other elements are taken from observation of the universe, and are less controversial).
Consider; if an omnipotent, omniscient being exists, then it must take one of three stances with regard to humanity. It must either support the existence of humanity, or it must be neutral towards humanity, or it must support the non-existence of humanity. Since the being is omnipotent, if God wanted to wipe out humanity, God could (one or two well-placed asteroids a couple of million years back would have done it easily). Thus, I conclude that God is either in support of, or neutral towards humanity.
Now I also observe the universe around me, looking for traces of maliciousness in the laws of physics. So far, I have not found any. This implies that God is not into casual, petty cruelty without reason. It seems therefore likely that God is, at the very least, not evil.
The complete cessation of an intelligence would seem to be a great evil. Therefore, I postulate that there is a very strong probability that God has put some measures in place to prevent this. The measure most likely is some sort of afterlife; somewhere that a person can continue to survive, but not communicate back to those they leave behind.
Of course, this argument does not say that an afterlife is certain, given the existence of God, merely that it seems likely.
As to free will; here, I note that humans are demonstrably capable of the sort of casual cruelty that is absent from the laws of nature. Moreover, humans are capable of opposing each other. This strongly implies that at least some humans are capable of opposing what God wants. (This does not necessarily imply that said opposition has any chance of long-term success). This, in turn, seems to imply that humans do have some capacity to decide for themselves; hence, free will.
If the absence of maliciousness in the laws of physics is good evidence that God is not evil, is the absence of benevolence in the laws of physics good evidence that God is not good?
There is at least one thing in the laws of physics that seems like benevolence rather than the absence of it.
When animals have a strong tendency to do certain things, e.g. eat or engage in sex, those things tend to be pleasant to the animal.
That seems like benevolence. I could imagine a situation where everything that animals tended to do, was painful to them. You might say that is absurd, since then they would not tend to do those things. But they do those things because of the laws of physics, not because of how they feel. So there is nothing absurd about it, just like a person can be on a rollercoaster without any control over what is happening. It would be pretty terrible if life was like that, but fortunately it's not.
That would be a reasonable argument to make.
I would follow it up by claiming that the existence of free will is evidence of benevolence in the laws of physics.
"Free will" is an ambiguous term. The sort of free will you've argued for here could be paraphrased as "not being God's puppets", but I hope it's obvious that that can't be evidence of God's existence. But you listed "free will" as something you can explain with God better than without!
I really don't think the fact that people sometimes do things a god should be expected to disapprove of can be evidence for that god's existence. Do you?
(Perhaps the argument you have in mind makes essential use of the fact that humans engage in a kind of cruelty "that is absence from the laws of nature". But I don't see how that can work. We should expect human behaviour, even if entirely derived from the laws of nature, to have features that aren't apparent when looking at the laws themselves -- just as, e.g., in Conway's "Game of Life" there are phenomena like gliders that aren't apparent from the almost-trivial rules of the game.)
Ah, let me elaborate, then.
Whether God exists or not, one can postulate a universe in which people are puppets - philosophical zombies, moving and acting according to some purely deterministic set of rules.
In the atheistic universe, those behaviours may be at odds with one another, because the rules are not guided; they do not have an aim. They may optimise for some goal on the individual, or even the group level, but there is no reason why they should do so in an efficient manner; a puppet universe may include humans who oppose each other.
In the theistic universe, the presence of an omnipotent, omniscient being suggests that there is some purpose to the universe. If all people are puppets, then, it is to be expected that all people work tirelessly towards a single goal, without opposing each other.
Therefore, the observation that people oppose each other cannot be used to argue for free will in the atheistic universe, but can do so in the theistic universe.
You've got it backwards. I'm not using it as evidence for God's existence; I'm using it as evidence for free will, given the existence of God as a postulate.
Not seeing maliciousness in the laws of physics is a very weak argument for an afterlife, because even if there is no afterlife, that doesn't mean that God is malicious. It just means that he doesn't prevent things from working the way they do naturally, just like he doesn't prevent a lion from eating a man, or a man from hunting the lion.
Does that mean the bible which assumes that God wiped out most of humanity with the flood is definitely wrong and to the extend that God exists it's not the God of the bible?
No.
a) The existence of an afterlife would mean that those people were not destroyed. They had a really bad day and then woke up someplace else.
b) The story of the flood, in itself, may be a parable (by which I mean, a story intended to teach a lesson, usually of a moral or ethical nature, without necessarily being true) like the parable of the Good Samaritan, or the story of the Garden of Eden.
c) There may have been reason for the flood.
Any one of these alternatives could answer your question; personally, I think (b) is the most likely, though (a) and (c) are also possible.
CCC already said that he thinks science is mostly right about the history of the universe, so presumably he does not believe such a flood ever happened.
Many Christians believe that such a flood never happened without thinking that the Bible is "definitely wrong" and without thinking that they believe in a God who is "not the God of the Bible."
You seem to have missed the "without reason" part.
That's called the "fallacy fallacy", BTW.
I agree with you that Eliezer nowhere presents very strong arguments against religion, although he says some things that are relevant. Most likely he doesn't bother for the reasons given by gjm or similar reasons.
Still, that doesn't mean that there aren't any such arguments. For example, do you think that intelligent design in biology is false?
If so, consider what happens if you apply similar reasoning to the idea of revelation, i.e. that certain human claims are "truths descended from heaven".
I think that the universe was created, fourteen-and-a-bit billion years ago, with a set of natural laws so designed as to end up at a desired configuration. Exactly what that configuration is, or whether the universe has reached it yet, is a question that I cannot answer.
I strongly suspect, though there may be some element of bias in this suspicion, that the presence of intelligence is somehow important to that eventual desired configuration. I am very much not convinced that the shape of the body that that intelligence finds itself inhabiting is at all important.
I think it is highly probable that science (in general) is more right than wrong about what happened in those fourteen-and-a-bit billion years, and that the parts that are not completely right will be made more right and less wrong by future generations of scientists.
...I'm not quite sure what you mean by "intelligent design" - I have a vague idea only - but hopefully the above will answer your question.
I think that some humans may claim revelations that they did not receive, possibly out of a desire for recognition.
The question would by why you would give special weight to some specific claims of revelation (in particular), if you wouldn't give special weight to the claim that the bacterial flagellum (in particular) could not have evolved.
In other words, it is perfectly possible that some organs could not have evolved, and it is perfectly possible that some claims do not originate from human causes. But the problem is giving good enough reasons for accepting that in a particular case. "It looks like it couldn't have evolved," or "It looks like it didn't have human sources" are not good enough.
...what does the bacterial flagellum have to do with anything? I think I am missing some important context here.
Well, the simplest argument for accepting some revelations would be that later events, unknown and unknowable at the time of the revelation, were later shown to be true (for example, predicting the time and place of a volcanic eruption or other natural disaster)
Michael Behe has used the bacterial flagellum as an example of something in biology which he supposes must have been directly designed and not evolved.
I don't know of any examples of detailed predictions of the future where the 1) it is clearly established that the prediction was actually made before the thing happened; 2) it is clearly established that the thing happened as stated; 3) the thing has a substantial degree of unknowable detail. Regarding the third, I mean more detail than things like, "I will die on May 3, 2020." It would be quite surprising if this turns out to be true, but not surprising enough to prove that I have some special source of knowledge, given the total number of predictions that are made by someone or other.
Given that you can satisfy all three conditions, I agree that this would be a good reason to suppose that someone has some special source of knowledge. That won't make it easy for you to know which of his opinions are influenced by that source, unless you know exactly what the source is and how it affects his opinions in particular. So it still won't easily give you a reason to accept particular revelations.
...a few minutes on Google suggests that biologists have by now worked out a few plausible ways in which a bacterial flagellum might have evolved. This seems reasonable to me; I assume that the biologists are competent and know their field.
...I can think of a few biblical examples, but given the length of time between then and now (and how much even recent eyewitness accounts can be distorted) I can also see how all those examples would probably fail on point (2) at the very least. (I think I can probably find examples that pass on points (1) and (3), at least).
"The" bacterial flagellum (actually there are different kinds and I think only one kind is relevant here) was a leading example used by proponents of "intelligent design", who claimed it was a complex system that couldn't possibly have evolved incrementally.
Thanks. A brief googling suggests that biologists have figured out how it could have evolved from similar organs with different functions, which seems to neatly solve the issue.
It would actually be pretty easy to transform all of the anti-religious material into e.g. anti-ufos as aliens material. Or if it would sound silly to constantly bring up the same example, alternate between similar cases.
I'm not so sure. Some of the anti-religious stuff is specifically concerned with Eliezer's upbringing, and so far as I know he wasn't brought up to believe aliens are visiting earth. Some of it is concerned with the fact that religious belief is widespread among (otherwise) reasonable people, which isn't so true of UFO theories. I would guess that most of what could be replaced with material about UFOs could about equally well just be removed; it's the rest that's difficult.
You're probably right about the personal material, although I suspect you could make the theoretical points in another way. But it wouldn't be a matter of easily substituting one thing for another.
One could make the points about religious beliefs relative to rationality without directly asserting that all religious beliefs are false, simply because it is obvious for simple logical reasons that the majority of such beliefs are false (because opposed religious beliefs cannot both be true), and even religious people will grant that this is the case. And the majority of such beliefs being false means that if you actually want to know the truth, you need to take a lot more care about such things than most people do, whether or not any religious beliefs are actually true.
The same general point is actually true about anti-religious beliefs as well, and this may be one reason why that wouldn't be a book Eliezer could have written. For example, he said that he would rather push a button that would destroy the world if God exists, than a button that had a known probability of one in a billion of destroying the world.
It seems to me more reasonable to believe that Mohammed or Joseph Smith was a prophet from God, than to push that "destroy the world if God exists" button. In other words, Eliezer's personal beliefs are unreasonable in a similar way, just in an opposite direction.
I suspect (but don't know) that a lot of religious people would be almost as upset at "most religious claims are false" as "your specific religious claims are false" even though, as you say, the former is almost a triviality. I also suspect that many would fall back on claims along the following lines: "Yes, superficially my beliefs and my Muslim neighbour's beliefs contradict one another. But we are fully agreed on the existence of God, and perhaps we are just seeing the same thing from different angles." -- and then they would not be willing to agree that most people's beliefs on religious topics are wrong.
I think I agree with you rather than Eliezer on the probability-of-God question, but the answer might well depend a lot on what range of possibilities we count as making "God exists" true.
I don't think I've heard this particular response within my social circle, but I wouldn't be too surprised to hear it from others. And in any case I do hear things which amount to, "That may be technically true, but saying it is suggesting that my religion is likely false, and implying that is really bad."
In that sense I agree that religious beliefs tend to make people have a hard time even with general abstract truths about rationality, at least as soon as they realize the implications for their beliefs.