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CCC comments on Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015 - Less Wrong
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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).
Don't forget that at that point the atheists are all out at orgies and baby-killing parties. (Seriously: yeah, that would be stupid, and I'm pretty sure they weren't that stupid.)
I don't agree with your interpretation of it. The reported numbers (no god : theistic evolution : creationism) go 55:40:5 for scientists and 9:40:46 for the general public; both the no-god and creationism options are very different between those populations.
It's hard to infer anything from only three numbers per distribution, but it looks to me very much like an overall shift, with the similarity of the "theistic evolution" numbers on both sides being basically coincidence.
Really? I would have expected either sleeping late or watching the rugby.
Fair enough. It's only three numbers, that's consistent with thousands of possible reasons.
It's not impossible. I don't see it as a spectrum, though; I see it as three entirely opposing positions. And the young-earth creationists either change their minds when becoming scientists (and since, in their minds, the concept of God is tied up with young-earth creationism, they abandon both) or fail to become scientists entirely.
...actually, now that I think of it, it should be possible to tell the difference between those two ideas, at least. Young-earth creationism is linked to geography in America, right? So if there are less scientists who grew up in in areas where young-earth creationism is more widely known, then that would imply that fewer young-earth creationists become scientists. That, in turn, would imply that my interpretation is incorrect, and there is something about becoming a scientist which makes theistic evolution also less likely than in the general population...
Do you have any idea where these stats can be found?
In case it wasn't obvious: I was joking. (I, for one, spend very little of my time at orgies and baby-killing parties.)
I think actually both views are right. I mean, (1) there is definitely a spectrum there (there is no god - there is a god, who set up the universe and has left it alone since then - there is a god, who mostly leaves the universe alone but sometimes gets involved in subtle ways like inspiring people to do good - there is a god, who mostly leaves the universe alone but sometimes tweaks evolution a bit to arrange for the emergence of a species capable of loving relationship with him - there is a god, who made a world in which life evolves precisely so that he could steer that process in all kinds of ways, which he does - there is a god, whose influence on the variety of life on earth mostly operates through evolution but who also sometimes makes more dramatic changes - there is a god, who directly created lots of different kinds of living thing but who has let them evolve since then, which is responsible for much small-scale variation - there is a god, who created every species separately in recent history, and evolution is just a lie) but (2) the gap between theism and atheism is a particularly big one, and so is the gap between "life is old and basically has common ancestry" and "life is recent and involves lots of special creation" and (3) I'm sure quite a lot of people do flip from near one end to near the other when they change their minds about what gods, if any, exist.
I worry that they'd be hard to disentangle from other things (e.g., wealthier versus poorer areas, which would affect education and what kinds of jobs people do and so forth; socially entrenched attitudes to academic learning; etc.). I'd guess that (1) there are indeed fewer, and worse, scientists from areas with a lot of young-earth creationism but (2) this doesn't really tell us much about direct influence of science on religion or vice versa, because of all those other factors. There are some US government statistics that might tell you some of what you want to know.
[EDITED to add: If anyone has a clue why this was downvoted, I'd be very interested. It seems so obviously innocuous that I suspect it's VoiceOfRa doing his thing again, but maybe I'm being stupid in some way I'm unable to see.]
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.
No, but it does mean that if you want to argue that humans exist you must provide strong positive evidence, perhaps telling us an address where we can meet a real live human ;)
I could stand to meet a real-life human. I've heard they exist, but I've had such a hard time finding one!
No idea where you get that from. Theories don't get a complexity penalty for the complexity of things that appear in universes governed by the theories, but for the complexity of their assumptions. If you have an explanation of the universe that has "there is a good god" as a postulate, then whatever complexity is hidden in the words "good" and "god" counts against that explanation.
Yes, and God would care about game theory concepts and apply them to whatever being exist.
If I'm correctly understanding what you're claiming, it's something like this: "One can postulate a supremely good being without needing human-level concepts that turn out to be really high-complexity, by defining 'good' in very general game-theoretic terms". (And, I assume from the context in which you're making the claims: "... And this salvages the project, mentioned above by CCC, of postulating God as an explanation for the world we see, the idea being that ultimately the details of physical law follow from God's commitment to making the best possible world or something of the kind".)
I'm very pessimistic about the prospects for defining "good" in abstract game-theoretic terms with enough precision to carry out any project like this. You'd need your definition to pick out what parts of the world are to count as agents that can be involved in game-like interactions, and to identify what their preferences are, and to identify what counts as a move in each game, and so forth. That seems really difficult (and high-complexity) to me, whether you focus on identifying human agents or whether you try to do something much more general. Evidently you think otherwise. Could you explain why?
(I'll mention two specific difficulties I anticipate if you're aiming for simplicity through generality. First: how do you avoid identifying everything as an agent and everything that happens as an action? Second: if the notion of goodness that emerges from this is to resemble ours enough for the word "good" actually to be appropriate, it will have to give different weight to different agents's interests -- humans should matter more than ducks, etc. How will it do that?)
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?
Yes, but the point is that the "perfectly" part (1) isn't what I'm blaming for the complexity and (2) doesn't appear to me to make the complexity go away by its presence.
I don't see how you can be sure about, when there is so much disagreement about the meaning of good. Human preferences are complex because they are idiosyncratic, but why would a deity, particularly a "philosopher's god", have idiosyncratic preferences? And an omniscient deity could easily be a 100% accurate consequentialist..the difficult part of consequentialism, having reliable knowledge of the consequences, has been granted...all you need to add to omniscience is a Good Will.
IOW, regarding both atheism and consequentialism as slam-dunks is a bit of a problem, because if you follow through the consequences of consequentialism, many of the arguments atheism unravel: a consequentialist deity is fully entitled to destroy two cities to save 10, that would be his version of a trolley problem.
It seems to me that no set of preferences that can be specified very simply without appeal to human-level concepts is going to be close enough to what we call "good" to deserve that name.
I entirely agree, but I don't see how this makes a substantial fraction of the arguments for atheism unravel; in particular, most thoughtful statements of the argument from evil say not "bad things happen, therefore no god" but "bad things happen without any sign that they are necessary to enable outweighing gains, therefore probably no god".
Not if the deity is omnipotent.
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.
I would expect heavier tails than that. (For other questions besides that of gods, too.) I'd expect that there might be dozens of reasons providing half a bit or so.
For what it's worth, I might rate it at maybe 7 bits. Whether I'm a reasonable and intelligent person isn't for me to say :-).
Fair enough. That 80% figure was kindof pulled out of nowhere, really.
You think the theistic explanation might be as much as a hundred times more complex?
...there may be some element of my current position biasing my estimate, but that does seem a little excessive.
So far as this debate goes, my impression is that you either are both reasonable and intelligent or you're really good at faking it.
No, as much as seven bits more complex. (More precisely, I think it's probably a lot more more-complex than that, but I'm quite uncertain about my estimates.)
Damn, you caught me. (Seriously: I'm pretty sure that being really good at faking intelligence requires intelligence. I'm not so sure about reasonable-ness.)
"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.
The length (in bits for a program in a universal Turing machine) of the smallest algorithm which will output the same outputs as the agent if the agent were given the same inputs as the algorithm.
Do note that I said "insofar as free will is a meaningful term when discussing a deterministic universe". Many definitions of free will are defined around being non-deterministic, or non-computable. Obviously you couldn't write a deterministic computer program which has those properties. But there are reasons presented on this site to think that once you pare down the definition to the basic essentials of what is really meant and stop being confused by the language used to traditionally describe free will, that you should in principle be able to have a deterministic agent who does, in fact, have free will for all meaningful purposes.
I don't read it this way. The approach you linked to basically says that free will does not exist and is just a concept humans came up with to confuse themselves. If you accept this, then you should not use the "free will" terminology at all because there is no point to it. So I still don't understand that concept.
And yet here we have someone talking about "free will" as if it meant something, and CCC's usage seems entirely consistent with the meaning described here. (The link is a spoiler for the questions linked in the grandparent, but I've already tried to direct CCC's attention to the computable kind of "free will" in the hope of clarifying the discussion. That user claimed to have read a large part of the Sequences.)
Exactly so.
The only reason I'm using the free will terminology at all here is because the hypothesis under consideration (an entity with free will which resembles the Abrahamic God is responsible for the creation of our universe) was phrased in those terms. In order to evaluate the plausibility of that claim, we need a working definition of free will which is amiable to being a property of an algorithm rather than only applying to agents-in-abstract. I see no conflict between the basic notion of a divinely created universe and the framework for free will provided in the article hairyfigment links. One can easily imagine God deciding to make a universe, contemplating possible universes which They could create, using Their Godly foresight to determine what would happen in each universe and then ultimately deciding that the one we're in is the universe They would most prefer to create. There's many steps there, and many possible points of failure, but it is a hypothesis which you could, in principle, assign an objective Solomonoff prior to.
(Note: This post should not be taken as saying that the theistic hypothesis is true. Only that its likelihood can successfully be evaluated. I know it is tempting to take arguments of the form "God is a hypothesis which can be considered" to mean "God should be considered" or even "God is real" due to arguments being foot soldiers and it being really tempting to decry religion as not even coherent enough to parse successfully.)
...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.
Whoops, you're right, he's been canonized now. Sorry about that.
I agree that the most convincing miracle stories aren't about the afterlife, but the question at issue here wasn't "do miracles ever happen?" but "do we have good evidence of an afterlife?"; the question arose because CCC cited the existence of an afterlife as something better explained by his variety of theism than by atheism.
(As to the specific alleged miracle you mention: at a remove of nearly 400 years, it seems difficult to say much about what actually happened; e.g., I don't see how we have enough evidence to rule out the possibility of a concerted fraud some time after the alleged events, the enquiry at Zaragoza being an outright fiction; or a smaller-scale earlier fraud along Dunning's lines, but with the doctors having been bribed to say what they did. Of course either of those would be a strange and unusual happening -- but stranger and more unusual than a completely amputated leg miraculously growing back?)
This is circular reasoning. You can argue that your theory makes it likely that the miracle didn't happen, but then you can't use it as evidence for your theory.
It's not circular reasoning; even without deciding between naturalism and the various candidate supernaturalisms we know from straightforward observation that major miracles are extremely rare and hoaxes are not so rare.
I agree that even the most convincing miracle accounts do not necessarily imply that it is more reasonable to accept them than to suppose that they most likely have strange and unusual human and natural explanations. That's what I said earlier in comparing claims of revelation to claims of intelligent design in biology.
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.
How do you know that? (For central examples of "animal").
Think about someone who owns a dog.
I did. How do you know that? You can't read the dog's mind and the dog can't talk to you. The dog could act in ways that you interpret as the dog being pleased, but trying to interpret it that way here would be circular reasoning since you are trying to show that the dog's actions show that things are pleasant to it.
The same way I know that you are a conscious being. In other words by comparing the way they behave with the way I behave.
That would imply that a bacterium engaging in things that feel pleasant to it. After all, like me, it tries to avoid things that cause it harm and tries to do things that benefit it.
It would also imply that a Roomba is engaging in things that feel pleasant to it.
That isn't in the laws of physics, except in the trivial sense in which everything that happens in the world is "in the laws of physics" (in which case of course there are vastly many benevolent and malicious things "in the laws of physics").
I think there's a false dichotomy there. They do those things because of how they feel, and they feel the way they do because of the laws of physics. (Note that if you deny the latter half of this then you definitely aren't entitled to say that this is "in the laws of physics".)
I agree that in the normal sense, they do those things because of how they feel, and that they feel the way they do because of the laws of physics.
That's kind of my point. When I said, "They do those things because of the laws of physics, not because of how they feel," I meant this: I can imagine laws of physics that would imply that they do more or less the same things they do now, but they constantly feel bad about it. This is not something that might be impossible, like a zombie hypothesis. It is certainly possible, as is evident from the rollercoaster example.
In other words, the question is why the laws of physics and the way people feel are related in the way that they are, instead of a different way which would be much worse. I don't see any strong argument that the actual way is intrinsically much more probable.
And even if we showed that it is intrinsically more probable, someone could simply say that this shows that God is intrinsically good.
Physics seems like a weirdly low-level thing if we're thinking about whether or not animals' behavior could remain the same and their subjective experience could be a state of what we would call suffering in some possible world. I just don't think that you could make edits on that level and have changes that are so fine-tuned. Editing physics doesn't leave everything alone except subjective experience; editing physics breaks fire.
And if we have to settle for a physics that leaves at least most everything the same and life remains possible, then why wouldn't we expect reward mechanisms to evolve and for the default state of affairs to be one in which adaptive experiences 'feel good' and others 'feel bad'?
gjm called this a false dichotomy, but I think a better though perhaps more complex way of putting it is that you're mixing up your multi-level maps. Take free will and determinism as an example. Some people become fatalists because they think that determinism contradicts their idea of what possibility means. But they're contaminating their maps. You have a low-level map of physics where everything is lawful and there is no thing similar to what you might call 'possibility.' Then you have a high-level map of decision-making, and the fatalists take the lawfulness from their low-level physics map and draw it onto their high-level decision-making map, and say, "Well, the lawfulness overrules the possibility", and then they start making null decisions, but that's wrong. Possibility is a primitive notion in your high-level decision-making map and only in that map, just like the laws of physics are primitive notions in your low-level physics map and only in that map. In the territory, your brain runs on physics and your decision-making algorithm runs on physics, and your decision-making algorithm computing the output of logical nodes making decisions other than the one that it must make makes you feel possibility, and the whole process is lawful, and you have a bridge map between these two levels of maps; but the map is not the territory, and that goes both ways, and your high-level decision-making map is not the territory either, and sticking physics into it is like mixing apples and oranges. And even if that seems counterintuitive, I would say that any other policy is wrong, because the fatalists lose and the compatabilists win.
I see a very strong argument that the actual way is much more probable. What does it mean to say that something feels bad? Mostly, I think, that whoever (or whatever) it feels bad to is strongly motivated to make it not happen. That's what feeling-bad is for, evolutionarily; it's what distinguishes those feelings as bad ones. So of course we should expect that people (and other animals) tend to do things that feel better in preference to things that feel worse.
(You might argue that the overall level of good-feeling is higher than we'd expect. But I don't see any reason to think that.)
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.
With what definition of "free will"?
"Free will" consists of the ability of a person to determine their own future actions by some entirely internal process (which can observe, but is not controlled by, external factors); where "person" is defined as a collection of stuff such that the collection of stuff that makes up you has no overlap with the collection of stuff that makes up me and neither of us have any overlap with the collection of stuff that makes up (say) Barack Obama, or Trevor Noah, or Jacob Zuma.
Do you understand "is not controlled by" in such a way that having "free will" is inconsistent with (1) purely deterministic physics and/or (2) purely deterministic+random physics? (On the face of it your definition makes free will inconsistent with #1 but not with #2, but I can e.g. imagine a definition that restricts those "external factors" to, say, the state of the world outside one's body in at most the last year, in which case "free will" might be compatible with outright determinism.)
"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.
You are treating puppet and zombie as equivalents, but they are not. Rational deterministic agents may or may not succeed in co operating. Co-operation is probably the outcome that ideal rational agents would tend to , but non ideal agents face barriers to co operation. Puppets in a theistic universe may or may not co-operate depending on what the Puppetteer wants: some Purposes are served by struggle. Maybe the Puppetteer is a Nietzchian , who wants conflict and struggle to develop strength.
Puppets may or may not oppose each other, zombies may or may not oppose each other, free agents may or may not oppose each other. There's nothing you can deduce.
You are right that I am treating them as equivalent. How are they different?
Zombie=driven determinstitcally by their own inner workings, inherently predictable.
Puppet=controlled by an external force, not necessarily predictable, since the Puppeteer could be controlling them whimsically.
You were earlier when the topic first came up in this thread.
Er... no, I wasn't.
The question that was asked was "What can you predict with the existence of your God that you can't predict without?" I parsed this as "What can be shown, taking the existence of God as a postulate, that cannot be shown without that postulate?"
And one of the things that can be shown to be at least more likely with that postulate than not, is free will. Thus, I included it in the response to the question.
...I'm now beginning to wonder if I entirely missed the point of that question.
I think you did (but maybe I was the one who did); I took it to be presupposing that your belief in God is (or should be) the result of thinking that God explains some things about the world better than absence-of-God would, and asking what such things you had in mind. But maybe raydora was asking a question more like "what use is your belief?" than "what basis has your belief?". raydora, if you're reading this, which (if either) did you have in mind?
Anyway: my apologies for failing to consider the possibility that you were interpreting the question so differently from me and consequently misunderstanding the point of your answers!
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.
If it's a parable, isn't the parable about the fact that certain actions like gay sex are bad enough that they warrant a God engaging in genocide? Even if the God didn't actually commit the genocide but merely wanted to make the point that doing so is justified, that still seems bad to me.
I think there are multiple morals.
What exactly do you mean by option (b)?
It seems to me that the first three of these imply a certain degree of incompetence on the part of the writers, editors, or god concerned, given how widely the story has been treated as history since its incorporation into scripture.
The fourth is fair enough, but it seems to me that (what I take to be) ChristianKI's inference "the bible contains this story, which is not true, so we should reduce our general confidence in what the bible says" is then reasonable (and indeed the decision to understand as fiction something in the bible that wasn't originally intended that way amounts to conceding that point).
Of course if the fifth option is right then all of the above may be moot.
This is somewhat muddled by the idea that the original story may have been an oral tradition for some time before being written down - that is to say, the person who put pen to paper may not have been the one to create the story in the first place, and may in fact have been removed from that person by several generations.
So it is quite possible that whoever originally created the story may have intended it as fiction with a moral, but that it may have been understood as history by the person who put stylus to papyrus. Or it may have started out as history, gained some embellishment along the way, then rephrased to highlight a perceived moral, then embellished again to further highlight that moral, then only written down.
I am very uncertain of the history behind how it got there. I think that it is most probable that it is now fiction with a moral; and I think that there have been a whole lot of biblical passages that have been very firmly, and very publically, misunderstood by some people with very loud voices (such as pretty much the entire Creationism movement).
I think that the Bible, especially the Old Testament, is a collection of some fiction, some non-fiction - one of the clearest examples of fiction (to my eyes) is the book of Job, which seems to be an entire story written in such a way that it can be performed as a play by a handful of actors with little-to-no equipment (all the dramatic stuff happens off-stage and is introduced by messengers running in and shouting "This happened!").
I think that the morals that the fictional parts try to show are important; they should not be simply discounted and tossed aside because they did not happen.
Yeah. (I felt that my list of possibilities was already too long without bringing up the oral/written distinction, but it's important enough in view of the gradual evolution of oral traditions that that was probably a mistake on my part.)
I'm not sure quite what you mean by saying that it's now fiction with a moral; just that that's how believers do (or should) read it now, or something stronger?
I agree that some things in the Bible seem clearly to be intended as fiction; I'd put Jonah alongside Job in that category. And I agree that one absolutely shouldn't go from "X is fiction" to "let's ignore X". But going from "X was intended as history but turns out to be wrong history" to "let's ignore X" is more reasonable, though still not a slam-dunk (because maybe the story originated as wrong history but was kept around for the sake of things in it that don't depend on the history).
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."
Oh ye of little faith!
Global floods certainly happened in human history. What do you think happened to sea levels at the end of the last Ice Age (and humans were already around)?
There are claims that memories of such a flood are preserved in legends and stories in Australia, for example.
It doesn't even have to be a global flood: a big enough tsunami will suffice.
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).
Ok. But one of the main reasons biologists have considered the flagellum issue is because Behe proposed it as something that couldn't have evolved. So the point of that was that since there are basically an unlimited number of things in nature, many of them won't have been considered in detail by scientists, or at least we might not be able to personally find those considerations (if they are only available in some obscure academic journal, for example). So if I take some animal or some organ, check to see if anyone has found a plausible way that it could have evolved, and find out that, as far as I can determine, no one has done that, it would foolish to conclude that it must not have been produced by evolution.
The point of that argument was this: The number of historical events is even larger than than the number of animals and organs in biology, so it will be even more true that many such events have had no good analysis by historians. So if I take one of these events and I don't see how it could have had historical causes, and I don't find any historians giving it a historical treatment, it would be foolish to conclude that it could not have had historical causes but must have had a supernatural cause.
In both cases, in theory you could draw such a conclusion without being unreasonable, but you would need to have very strong reasons indeed. This is illustrated by the example of the difficulty of establishing that a prediction actually implies some knowledge of the future, as you conceded here.
And again, even assuming that you established such a fact, it would not be easy to know what else follows from that fact.
Right. The absence of evidence of an evolutionary origin is not evidence of the absence of an evolutionary origin.
Fair enough. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
So, in short, you're suggesting that any claim of a divine origin for any historical event actually needs to be accompanied by at least some evidence suggesting a divine origin, and not merely a lack of evidence suggesting a mundane one?
That seems reasonable to me.
I would agree with "at least some evidence," but I also said, "very strong reasons indeed."
Basically, we already have good evidence for this: "In many cases, some event appears to have meaningful evidence of a supernatural origin, but in fact it had natural historical causes." Thus, unless you happen to be a Mormon, you probably believe that Joseph Smith's religion had basically natural historical causes, despite the testimony of his witnesses that they saw the golden plates from which the Book of Mormon was translated (which presumably he would have a hard time coming up with naturally.) So there is some evidence of a supernatural origin there, but most people don't think it had a supernatural origin anyway. The corresponding behavior in other cases would be to ask for pretty strong evidence (not just some) before you accept a claim like that.
"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.