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CCC comments on Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015 - Less Wrong
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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.
Fnord.
Believing in probabilities of 1 is bad practice here, right?
Vatican's official position on evolution is likely empirically indistinguishable from what we can see with our own eyes (e.g. the scientific view). This has old precedent, see e.g. how transubstantation is handled in Christianity.
If you think there's any real question about whether it was grudging, please actually read Humani Generis (it's not very long) and come back and tell me whether you still think so.
(If you mean something else, then I'm missing your point; consider explaining?)
Oh yes. But, again: please by all means go and read the encyclical and then tell me whether you really think Pius XII meant anything much like that. Tell me, in particular, whether you notice any reluctance to state that points of RC doctrine are definitely right. (Spoiler: it says in so many words, e.g., that some "religious and moral truths" delivered by revelation "may be known by all men readily with a firm certainty and with freedom from all error".)
Your charitable interpretation is false on all counts, at least until the Vatican gets around to making a new statement on the nature of "Adam".
I think a lot of that is the Vatican being really really cautious. They're ultra-cautious about just about everything they say (largely, I think, because they are well aware that (a) a lot of people will take what they say as gospel truth and (b) they don't get to take anything back, or hardly ever, so if they endorse evolution in some form and then a few decades later a scientist comes back and presents some improvement on the theory that contradicts that form then they will look silly).
So, yeah. What I'm reading into that is that they're not saying it's definitely true (in the same way as they do say it's definitely true that God exists) but they are saying it looks like it just might be.
As well as being ultra-cautious about evolution, Humani Generis says these things (emphasis mine):
(as well as many other things that don't appear to me at all ultra-cautious, but where the language is less clear-cut). So this isn't the result of any general policy of ultra-caution. They are being extra-ultra-cautious about evolution specifically. That was in 1950, and they are less cautious now, but still very cautious. This is why I say their position is notably different from that of naturalistic evolutionary biologists.
... Oh, wait. Have I misunderstood you? If so, we may be arguing at cross-purposes. Here's our exchange from upthread:
When you said "that", did you mean (1) "the exact same view of evolution as an atheist" or (2) "the idea that there's no fundamental reason why a theist couldn't, etc."? I've been assuming #1 but maybe you meant #2, in which case our disagreement is less sharp than I thought. On #2, my impression is that the Vatican hasn't said or implied much about what theists as such can reasonably believe about evolution; they're concerned, rather, with what faithful Catholics can reasonably believe about evolution; and what they've said about the latter is, inter alia, that faithful Catholics mustn't regard it as definitely right (a position that I don't think is negated by JP2's statement before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences), and from the things they are willing to call definitely right I don't think it's tenable to take this as meaning only that one shouldn't literally take Pr(evolution)=1. So I don't think the Vatican thinks it acceptable for Catholics to think about evolution in the same way as most atheists do. Again, what they think about theists more broadly is hard to tell.
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.