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CCC comments on Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015 - Less Wrong
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I... occasionally find humour in taking things very, very literally even when clearly intended otherwise. (That, and accidental puns. Accidental puns can be hilarious.)
Alright, yes, you can create a spectrum between "there is a god, who set up the universe and has left it alone since then" and "there is a god, who created every species separately in recent history, and evolution is just a lie" - but I don't think that you can really tack "there is no god" to one end of the spectrum and consider it part of the same thing. That's like saying that there's a spectrum from "planet teeming with life" to "lifeless planet" and then sticking "planet does not exist" onto the lifeless planet end of the spectrum.
...agreed.
The way I see it, people decide where on the spectrum they think the universe is. And some of them sit on the "evolution is a lie" end. And, if and when they find evidence that evolution is, in fact, not a lie, they don't generally just adjust their position on the spectrum; many of them will rather jump off the spectrum entirely, becoming atheists.
...you're probably right. A survey could be created to try to avoid these problems, but it would have to be specifically created, simply looking up old stats probably won't do it.
You can talk about a spectrum between "planet large enough for life to exist", "planet which is a little smaller which makes it a little harder for life to exist" all the way down to "no planet with no life". You can do that because in this spectrum, the extent to which the planet exists and the chance of life are connected. In the God example, the spectrum is "degree to which things can be explained without God". If you have evolution, there is one less thing that you need God to explain, and you get one step closer to not needing God to explain anything. And with nothing to need God for you can then reject the existence of God.
You could do a planet-size-spectrum like that; but reversing the analogy would be - I don't know, some sort of spectrum ranging from "God doesn't exist" to "God exists"? That seems a pretty binary set of points to me - how can the state of "God 50% exists" make any sort of sense?
Similarly, if nothing that you ever see requires the existence of Jim, then you can reject the existence of Jim, right?
Suppose it turns out that the skeptics are mostly right about Christianity, but that there really was an itinerant preacher called Yeshua in Galilee about 2000 years ago who talked about forgiveness and love and had a reputation for casting out demons and the like; but he didn't really work any miracles, he didn't get crucified, and he certainly didn't rise from the dead.
Then: Did Jesus exist? Well, kinda. Someone existed who's fairly clearly the person the gospels are about. No one existed about whom they're actually accurate accounts. Many of the most important things about "Jesus" don't apply to anyone. While it might feel a bit weird to say something like "Jesus 50% existed" in that case, I think it would give a reasonable idea of the situation.
...I wouldn't describe that as "God 50% exists". I'd describe that as "someone with strong similarity to the biblical Jesus existed".
To take an analogy, again, let us consider Dr. Joseph Bell. Dr. Bell was a medical school lecturer who emphasised the importance of close observation in making a diagnosis, and made a game of observing a stranger and deducing his occupation and recent activities. He was also the inspiration for the fictional character of Sherlock Holmes (who was famous for doing the same).
Does this imply that Sherlock Holmes 50% existed? No. Sherlock Holmes 0% existed; Dr. Joseph Bell 100% existed.
As I think I said somewhere else in this discussion, the way this issue arose wasn't by anyone actually claiming in so many words that "God 50% exists" is a sensible thing to say. Although I've kinda-sorta defended saying some things of that kind, I agree that it's not actually the best way to describe any state of affairs I can envisage. The actual question, IIRC, was whether it's reasonable to regard theistic evolution as intermediate between special creation and naturalistic evolution. Those are all positions that can be held by theists (though in practice not many theists embrace naturalistic evolution) and seeing them as points on a continuum really doesn't require one to endorse saying "God 50% exists" in any possible world.
I don't think manipulating definitions can (or should) give rise to probability claims along the lines of "Jesus 50% existed".
Jesus-the-Son-of-God and Jesus-the-itinerant-preacher are two very different people/concepts. No, they will not blend.
I wouldn't want to defend the "50% existed" claim too seriously, but note that the discussion here was never really about explicit claims of that kind. It was about whether it's appropriate to consider, e.g., "there is a god who gets involved in biological evolution" intermediate between "there is no god" and "there is a god who created every kind of living thing ex nihilo". I say yes; CCC says no. The affirmative answer doesn't require, e.g., being willing to say that a god who never does anything "50% exists"; only regarding a less-active god as in some sense intermediate between a more-active god and no god.
You can definitely plot all three points on the same graph - you can even plot them such that the distance from "there is no god" to "there is a god who created every kind of living thing ex nihilo" is greater than the distance from "there is a god who gets involved in biological evolution" to either of the two aforementioned points. That can all be done perfectly sensibly.
My claim is simply that the three points can't be colinear on that graph.
...I hope that makes it a bit clearer.
It seems to me that you can plot them wherever you want to, so this is really a question of aesthetics more than anything else. Or is there some actual consequence that follows from one or another answer to this question?
...it would be a bit like plotting 0, 1 and i colinearly. (I assume you're familiar with complex numbers?)
Yes, very familiar with complex numbers, thanks. But, I repeat, you can plot what you want however you want; the question is whether it's helpful, and that will depend on the application. (Suppose the values taken by your dependent variable are all on the circle of radius 1/sqrt(2) centred at (1+i)/2. Then plotting 0, 1, and i collinearly may make a whole lot of sense, though you might actually want to call them -3pi/4, -pi/4 and pi/4 respectively.)
The state isn't "God 50% exists" but "there is evidence which indicates that God might exist, but the evidence is 50% as good (or there is 50% as much of it) as the evidence at the far end of the spectrum". There's a continuous line from lots of evidence for God, to some evidence for God, to no evidence for God.
That is a sensible axis, and you can move along it in a straight line, yes.
It's just a different axis to either of the ones I was talking about.
Ah, OK. Yes, I do that too. I just thought I should check :-).
"No god" and "god who does nothing" are very different metaphysically but have the exact same observable consequences, and evidence for or against one will equally be evidence for or against the other. I don't see that it's obviously inadmissible to put them next to one another. Of course the more interesting notions of god are ones that do do something (even if only to create a universe according to their whims rather than according to the dictates of some "mindless" physical theory), but we've already agreed (I think) that those can be put on a spectrum that has "perfectly inactive god" on it.
My perspective is a little different. They decide the following three interlinked things: (1) where the observable features of the universe lie on that spectrum, (2) what their religious position is, and (3) how the universe should look if #2 is correct. They generally decide these so that they're reasonably consistent with one another. Then if they learn new things about #1, they may change either #2 or #3 to make it match; if they change #2 they may convert or deconvert; if they change #3 they may change their theology or their ideas about physics or something.
"There is a single universe" and "we are in one branch of a multiverse, but can't access the other branches" are very different metaphysically but have the exact same observable consequences, and evidence for or against one will equally be evidence for or against the other.
That's a thing about metaphysics, not a thing about theology.
I agree. Were you expecting me not to?
(On the other hand, if some particular believer believes in a perfectly inactive god then that is a thing about theology as well as metaphysics. Is that meant to be a problem somehow?)
While I agree that there will be no observable difference, you're talking about two different axes here. One axis is "how much God does", and most of your spectrum is running along this axis. The other axis is "whether God exists", and treating that as part of the same axis is an error. (Admittedly, the axes are related - the idea of a universe where God doesn't exist yet is nonetheless active is rather absurd - but they are still not the same axis).
...the way you've phrased #3 reduces your argument to a tautology on close reading (specifically, #1 and #3 must always match regardless of #2). I think (and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) that a better phrasing for #3 would be "how the universe should look if God exists" (instead of "...if #2 is correct"). Then, for theists, #2 would be "theist" and #1 would match #3; for atheists #2 would be "atheist" and #1 may or may not match #3.
Then my view is that those who start with creationist leanings (in #1 and #3, #2 being "theist") but pursue a scientific career find, in the course of their studies, that #1 (the observable features of the universe) are not as they had thought; then #1 and #3 no longer match. #3 is complex and difficult to change without feeling like it's being changed arbitrarily (and will probably need to be changed repeatedly as #1 changes with further study); but #2 is a switch, far easier to flick, and therefore far more commonly flicked.
I think we need to look back at why we're asking how many axes to use. The question was how to interpret the differences between two populations in the proportions of "special creation", "theistic evolution" and "naturalistic evolution" in their survey responses: we had something like 1:5:4 versus 4:5:1 and were trying to figure out whether what's happened is more that equivalent people in the two populations have made different choices between SC and NE, or that equivalent people in the two populations have made different choices between SC and TE, or TE and NE.
Let's stipulate that the difference between "no god" and "perfectly uninvolved god" is bigger than any difference between different theistic scenarios. Would that really do much to resolve our disagreement about how to explain the survey differences? I don't think so.
No, I don't think it does. It might if everyone always insisted on perfect consistency among their beliefs, but in practice most of us accept that we're wrong about some things (even though we don't know which things) and so when we find inconsistencies we don't immediately change our minds. So someone may believe, e.g., that Christianity is right, and that in the absence of compelling contrary evidence Christianity would lead to creationism, and that there is in fact such evidence and therefore one should accept evolution. And there's nothing terribly wrong with holding those views, though of course someone who does should make some effort to figure out where the mistake is.
For someone in that position, #1 and #3 don't match. The same might be true for an atheist who reads a pile of creationist literature arguing that a godless universe should look very different from ours and is not currently able to refute it (either because actually creationism is right, or because they just happen not to have the relevant information and arguments at their fingertips).
I don't think the god-switch (#2) is so easily flicked. My impression -- which of course may be wrong, and for which I don't have statistics or anything -- is that if you take a generally-thoughtful creationist and show them compelling evidence for evolution, the most common responses are (a) rejection of the evidence and/or associated arguments and (b) transition to some sort of theistic evolutionary view, with (c) leaping to atheism some way behind.
The size of the difference has absolutely nothing to do with my point. My point is that the difference is of an entirely different kind.
To take an analogy; let us say you have a duck, and you are measuring the greyness of its feathers. This runs along a spectrum from snowy white to ebony black. There is no point on this axis where the duck is actually a swan.
Both of your examples appear to me to show someone, having changed their ideas about #1, in the process of altering #2 or #3 to match. On consideration of this, I will admit that I was thinking only of the steady-state case (when someone's beliefs are internally consistent) and not really thinking about the transitional period during which they are not (even though some people might spend a majority of their lives in such a transitional state).
It's not so much that it's easily flicked as that it has less moving parts; flicking it requires adjusting one thing as opposed to many things. (Of course, changing either can be difficult - the default reaction would still be to reject any unwanted evidence and/or associated arguments).
...though I could be wrong about that.
The point I'm making is that actually the discussion was about the colour of the feathers, and swan-ness as such is a mere distraction.
As you go on to remark, this process may never actually get as far as altering either #2 or #3 to match, and there's nothing terribly wrong with that (beyond the fact that we have unreliable information, finite brainpower, etc., all of which is simply part of the human condition). I suggest that most people's beliefs, most of the time, are not internally consistent. This is boringly true if we count it as inconsistent when someone thinks probably-P1, probably-P2, ..., probably-Pk, and P1,...,Pk can't all be true -- which doesn't have to indicate any suboptimality in belief-structure -- and less boring but surely still true if we only count it as inconsistent when someone's probability assignments (so far as they can be said to have such things) can't all be close to correct (e.g., thinking Pr(A)>=0.9, Pr(B)>=0.9, and Pr(A&B)<0.7).
So, to reverse the analogy, are you saying that the spectrum is "God exists but doesn't touch evolution -> God exists and guides evolution -> God exists and created everything in the recent past", with the "God exists/doesn't exist" axis being a mere distraction?
...this does make your viewpoint a good deal less tautological.
Yes, that's about it. (I guess "tough" was meant to be either "touch" or something like "work through".) It happens that most people who believe evolution operates without divine intervention or design believe that there are no gods to intervene or design in the first place, but there's no fundamental reason why a theist couldn't hold pretty much the exact same view of evolution as an atheist.
"Tough" was supposed to be "touch", yes (and I've edited that correction into my previous post).
This axis makes sense to me as a single axis, then.
Not only is there no fundamental reason, but that's also pretty much the official position of the Vatican, who are about as theist as you get...
The Vatican's official position is less than perfectly clear. Humani Generis in 1950 grudgingly accepted that Roman Catholics scientists could work on evolution, provided they didn't hold that evolution was definitely right and provided they accepted that souls are directly created by God. Then in 1996, addressing the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, JP2 accepted that evolution is "more than a hypothesis" (but do see the footnote about that phrase), but he by no means said that evolution proceeds without any divine involvement, and indeed it seems he rather conspicuously avoids saying anything that could be taken as endorsing that view.
Your initial puzzling definition of what you believed had two parts ("omnipotent and omniscient"). You quickly added that you attributed many other traits to God, but were less certain of them (!) and thus presumably could change them more easily.
Are you saying that the whole set of claims has a common cause and they are therefore likely to go together?
Yes, that is correct.
No. In the grandparent post here, I'm talking about (what I understand is) the average person's idea of God. I recognise that my conception is not average, and some debate with other people has convinced me that a lot of people have far more complicated ideas of what God is, with far more moving parts.