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gjm comments on Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015 - Less Wrong
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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".)
I think it's like trying to discern tone. Poe's law says this is hard in the context of sarcasm, but it seems hard in general from text. Seems doubly hard for people coming from a different background from you, the more different the more difficult the problem (xenoanthropology). People use language differently, people parse things differently (dog whistles, etc.)
What do we really know about how someone whose life trajectory resulted in the Papacy uses language?
But let's say you are even right. Why talk about tone at all? Are you trying to stick it to the Pope? What is the point of doing that? Why use emotionally non-neutral language?
Er, no. Why would I be trying to do that?
This seems like an awfully general argument against interpreting anyone's words. Encyclicals are intended to be widely read and understood. Is it really likely that some special papal quality makes them particularly difficult for others to interpret?
Because the question at issue is whether the official position (on evolution) of the Vatican is indistinguishable from the naturalistic evolution commonly held by unbelieving biologists; and the relevant documents are few and ambiguous and vague; and so attempting to extract whatever nuances one can from them seems worthwhile. Humani Generis is one of the key documents for understanding the RCC's view of evolution, and it seems to me reasonable to draw different conclusions from the document as it actually is than we would from a document that was more unequivocally accepting of biological evolution.
Well, I am not saying we should not try to interpret what people say or write. But:
(a) This is hard to do for tone (Poe's law, principle of charity, etc.)
(b) Meaning is a binary relation between text and interpreter, and isn't always so simple (author is dead)
(c) Effective communication depends on shared cultural context and gets progressively harder as context gets less and less shared. In the limit, you get "communication is impossible" (a lot of Stanislav Lem stories are about this).
Why not be charitable, then? From the CC point of view, there is no profit in making falsifiable claims, so they will probably retreat from making them. They don't want to look stupid, and at any rate, science isn't their business.
Sure. But I don't see any reason to think we're near the limit in this case. Pius XII was pope and I'm not, true enough. But we're reasonably close in time (he was born a little less than 100 years before me), from reasonably similar cultures (both Western European), of at least overlapping religious backgrounds (my family was RC and I was a Christian although not an RC for something like 30 years) -- this all seems to me like the sort of situation in which interpretation should be less problematic than usual.
I really don't see that I'm being uncharitable. If you insist that I am and ask why, I suppose the answer is that in cases of conflict I'd rather be accurate than charitable; I see the PoC as (inter alia) a tool for avoiding wrongness that comes from assuming people who disagree with you are evil or stupid. But I'm not (I promise) assuming that either Pius XII or John Paul II were evil or stupid, and my real answer to your question is that I don't see how I'm failing to be charitable.
There is profit (if we must put it that way) in making correct claims, and if a pope thinks that theological considerations lead to a particular empirical claim then I don't expect him to refuse to state it on those grounds. (It seems to me that expecting otherwise is the less charitable position.) And there is profit (again, if we must put it that way) in making claims that sound confident and informative rather than vague.
But, as it happens, I am not (I think) claiming that the RCC's official documents make a falsifiable claim that is incompatible with naturalistic evolution. I am claiming that the position they state is deliberately less specific than naturalistic evolution; in particular, you will search in vain for any statement that evolution proceeds as if there were no god guiding it. Or that it probably does. Or, I think, even that it might do. And that the official documents give the impression (to me, at least) that their authors think it probably doesn't.
I repeat that none of that seems to me uncharitable. I am saying that the RCC has declined to make official statements that would likely be interpreted as endorsements of godlessness and as incompatible with their past positions, and that the RCC's position on aspects of evolution that are hard to get clear empirical evidence about is probably shaped by the religious doctrines that it endorses. All of which is as it should be, conditional on its being the sort of organization it is.
You are failing to be charitable when you use fnords like "grudgingly." It's not emotionally neutral language, it conjures in the mind stupid old men blocking scientific progress for silly reasons, and getting Galileo in trouble, etc., being dragged forward, kicking and screaming by our side, the hero scientists.
The CC is not playing that game. They are not very interested in empirical falsifiabilty, and I think when you say:
you are misreading their culture. The CC has long ago evolved away from their doctrine getting them in trouble with science. Science will always beat them in a debate about falsifiable claims, and losing will make them lose prestige. This is what I mean by "profit." The easiest thing for the CC to do is massage doctrine to make this not happen. This is precisely what had happened.
"Confident and informative" is language culture, and involves tone. How do we read confidence in text? What is informative in text? it's all based on allusions and references in the end. Would you find my papers informative? Probably not, because you don't share mathematical background with me. Do you share enough theological background with the Pope to peer review the Pope?
Have you noticed that you are doing to me exactly what you accuse me of doing to the Popes P12 and JP2?
I did not (so far as I can tell by introspection) write "grudgingly" in order to make people think of popes as stupid old men, or to summon up the spectre of the RCC blocking science for silly reasons, or to call Galileo to mind. I wrote it because CCC was saying that the RCC's official position on evolution is indistinguishable from that of naturalistic scientists, and I don't think it is, and the fact that the RCC's official documents talk about evolution as they do is one reason why I think so.
I have to ask: Did you read what I wrote above, explaining that I am not claiming that the RCC's position on evolution makes empirical claims incompatible with the findings of science? Because you appear to me to be writing exactly as if I hadn't written that.
I wonder on what basis you say that. (I work in industry as a mathematician; I have a PhD in pure mathematics from a top-rank university; reading mathematical papers that don't lie right within one's own areas of special expertise is hard work, but yes, I would expect to find your papers informative.)
I'm not attempting to peer review the Pope. But yes, I think I am sufficiently familiar with Christian thinking generally and RC thinking in particular to distinguish grudging from enthusiastic acceptance of an idea in a papal encyclical.
I am puzzled by what is happening in this thread. You are normally an outstandingly intelligent and sensible fellow, but here you have
and I'm wondering what's going on to make you (as it seems to me) behave in so uncharacteristic a manner. May I ask you to consider carefully whether there is anything that might possibly be pushing you to be more adversarial than usual? (I'd ask: are you in fact Catholic? but am fairly sure the answer to that one is no.)
I am not Catholic. I find LW attitudes about religion (and certain other things) kind of annoying, though, if you want to try to reverse engineer where I am coming from.
That's mostly what I meant, I am not trying to pull math rank (I don't think there is such a thing as math rank), merely that informativeness is a function of shared context. I am pretty happy to double down on "we don't share math background." I don't study much pure math, I doubt you study causal inference. I could study pure math, and you could study causal inference, but that's not the same thing.
Sorry, getting lost. You think RCC does make empirically distinguishable claims or not? If the former, we have a factual disagreement. If the latter, I still think it is uncharitable to inject tone reading.
I think it is bad practice to read tone. First of all, it's easy to be wrong, and second of all, it just increases room for misinterpretation of your own text.
Your word grudging conjured these things in my mind. Now you could say nothing could be further from the truth as far as your intentions were concerned. But that's the thing with texts and authors. How texts come across to others (independently of what the author wanted) matter, and this is why I think injecting tone reading is so dangerous, and why academic papers are generally written in an emotionally neutral tone (to avoid these types of issues).
I favor bilateral disarmament as far as tone in texts (this is probably utopian thinking on my part, as humans are all about status and social dominance when it comes to communication, and playing with tone is a big part of this, and further it is really hard to coordinate to not do that).
The closest you can get to an "official" statement on that would be in the document of the International Theological Commission "Communion and Stewerdship". That is not technically considered a teaching document but it had to be approved by Ratzinger as head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which at least means that he considered it acceptable.
Here is #69:
Notice what they are saying: "An unguided evolutionary process" cannot exist because nothing is unguided (according to the understanding of providence.) But this means that a falling rock is also not unguided, in that sense. So being "guided" in this sense is empirically indistinguishable from naturalistic evolution.
So they are recognizing pretty explicitly that the process of evolution might be indistinguishable from completely naturalistic evolution. And I suspect they are aware that it probably is, even if they didn't make this particular statement, probably because they wish that it weren't, and consequently don't object if people believe that it isn't.
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".
Where is the quote from?
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.
Yes; there are some things that the Vatican is extremely certain of (e.g. the divine origin of the Christian religion). Their ultra-caution extends to everything else - a rather large category which just so happens to include evolution.
I don't think they're less cautious, I just think they recognise that there's more evidence. At the very least, the fact that no-ones convincingly refuted it in the last sixty-odd years despite all the attention being paid to it counts for quite a bit.
I meant that there's no reason why a theist can't hold a view of evolution that makes exactly the same predictions in all circumstances as an atheist does. Naturally, the theist's view will incorporate God as having (at the very least) set up the natural laws that permit it, while the atheist will presumably have those laws simply existing with no particular cause; but they can both agree on what those laws are.
I understand that as meaning that faithful catholics shouldn't take Pr(evolution)=1.
The thing is, the things that they are willing to consider as definitely right are things like the divine origin of Christianity; and as far as I understand it, they do expect faithful catholics to take Pr(Christianity has a divine origin)=1.
Unfortunately, I think what you're clarifying isn't what I was asking about :-). Let P be the proposition "as far as scientifically observable consequences go, evolution behaves as if it's entirely natural and undesigned". You and I agree that a theist can consistently believe P; call this thing that we believe Q. (Perhaps you also believe P, as I do, but that's a separate question.) You made a remark about the RCC (which has spawned a discussion entirely out of proportion to the importance of that remark in anyone's arguments, but no matter!) which I interpreted as saying that the RCC's official position is P, whereas in fact perhaps you were saying that the RCC's official position is Q (or perhaps the closely related Q', which says that a good Catholic can consistently believe P).
So my question was: were you saying that the RCC's position is (something like) P, or that the RCC's position is (something like) Q?
I agree that HG can be read as saying faithful Catholics mustn't take Pr(evolution)=1 but must take Pr(souls)=1 (where both "evolution" and "souls" are brief abbreviations for more complicated things, of course). I suppose what I was getting at is that saying "don't take Pr(X)=1" effectively means quite different things depending on whether the community you're addressing is in the habit of taking Pr(various things)=1 or scrupulously avoids it as e.g. LW tends to for good reason; and the fact that HG firmly endorses taking some probabilities to be 1 indicates that it's in the former camp, which to me suggests that HG is saying not what an LWer would express by "don't take Pr(evolution)=1" but something more like "don't treat evolution as definitely true in the same sort of way as you treat other ordinary things as definitely true".
But it's possible, as you say, that actually the position being sketched in HG would be, if written out with more care, something more like this: there are essential dogmas of RC faith, for which one must assign p=1; there are ordinary statements of fact, like (ha!) "the earth orbits the sun", for which one would be ill-advised to assign p=1 but the RCC doesn't take any particular position on that question; but for evolution the RCC specifically says not to take p=1 but leaves open the possibility of taking p=1-10^-20 or something.
I suspect these are questions that have no answers, in the following sense: senior RC clergy don't generally think in terms that correspond so directly to the very quantitative probabilistic approach commonly taken here as to enable a clear distinction between p=1 and p=1-10^-20, etc., and any "translation" that makes them out to have been making statements in those quantitative probabilistic terms is liable to misrepresent their meaning. (E.g., p=1, as such, means that absolutely no possible evidence would change your mind, but I think Pius XII could probably have imagined possible happenings that would have convinced him that God doesn't after all directly attach souls to human bodies.)
Something almost exactly like Q'.
I get the impression they were hinting at something more like Pr(evolution)=0.9, which is a figure entirely unsupported by anything in the text and involves me taking a guess, but apart from that this is pretty much exactly how I read it, yes. (With the note that the only reason the RCC is specifically calling out evolution is because there's been such a brouhaha over it from the protestant churches that staying silent on the matter would have been bad politics).
While there may very well be senior clergy who do think in such terms (I wouldn't know, I've never met any seriously senior clergy) this is largely why I think that something like p=0.9 is probably closer to the intended reading. (Or p=0.95, or even p=0.99)
Even if so, I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't be the official Vatican position that that probability can ever be anything less than one. (Politics, again; if the Pope ever admits to that p being less than one and someone runs a headline based on it...)
And if he does see such evidence, he has to consider the possibility that he is hallucinating, or being intentionally tricked by someone; if p is high enough, then it may very well be the case that any sufficiently convincing evidence will merely convince him to report to the nearest psychologist with complaints of extraordinarily detailed and persistent hallucinations.
OK; then many of my earlier comments in this thread (which were essentially arguing that the RCC's position is very different from P) have been entirely not-to-the-point and have wasted everyone's time. I repent in dust and ashes.
Yeah, this is roughly my reading too. (Maybe more like p=0.7 or something back in 1950 with Humani Generis.)
So much the worse for the Vatican, then. (But I think you're probably right.)
Something in that general order of magnitude is probably more-or-less right.
...I think we've pretty much come to agreement on these points, then.
The Church has no official statements about probability one way or another. There are certainly Catholics who think that the probability of their beliefs is one (which is insane), but typically they do not hold this by saying that no possible evidence would convince them. They say, "such and such would convince me that Catholicism is false, but such and such is absolutely impossible, and I am absolutely certain that it is absolutely impossible."
On the other hand there are many far more reasonable Catholics who admit that their probability is less than one, admit that there is evidence that would convince them their beliefs are false, and admit that they might later observe the evidence. The Church has never said anything against such opinions (or against the first kind of opinion).
One person I know, whom pretty much everyone considers to be a devout and orthodox Catholic, told me that he would be happy with a probability of 30% (that is, he would be happy to believe with that probability, based on Pascal's wager type reasoning). I suspect that in practice his personal probability is around 50%.
The discussion about probabilities was all concerning the following specific question: How should we interpret the language in, e.g., Humani Generis about how faithful Catholics are required not to hold that some things are definitely true but the RCC teaches that some other things are definitely true? For sure, no translation into LW-style probabilityese is going to reproduce the meaning exactly, but one might reasonably hope to approximate what the RC documents say in terms that make some kind of sense to rationalists.
I think you need to understand that in terms of doxastic voluntarism. The Church holds that faith is voluntary, so that people can reasonably be praised or blamed for what they believe. They may not say it explicitly about other kinds of belief, but if they are right about religious beliefs, it would probably also be true that accepting or rejecting the theory of evolution (and any other similar thing) is also voluntary.
Given that account of belief, saying "you are obliged to say that this is definitely true and that this other thing is at least not definitely true," is a statement about the choices you should make. You should choose to say (according to Pius XII), "Christianity comes from God," and "Christianity definitely comes from God," but not (according to Pius XII), "The theory of evolution applied to human beings is definitely true."
Because it's a question of choices, probability is not really relevant one way or another (except in the sense that the probability that something is true might be one reason that should affect whether or not you say something). That is why I gave the example of someone who estimates the chance of his beliefs being right, based on the evidence, to be about 50%. But despite that he chooses to say "this is simply true," probably based on various moral considerations. Kind of like you might want to believe your brother about something rather than saying he is lying, not because of strong evidence for that, but because it's hurtful to say "you're lying."
If this account is correct, the reason you can't translate statements like that into statements resembling claims about probability is because that is simply not what they are about.
Rationalists say many things which have similar moral implications, and which don't ultimately make a lot of sense apart from a similar doxastic voluntarism (e.g. "you ought to update on evidence," which implies that you can and should choose to do so), but most people don't accept an account like this explicitly. If you don't accept doxastic voluntarism, you should simply say that the Catholic Church's statements about such things are presuming an incorrect theory of belief, and just don't make any sense apart from that theory.
(I agree with doxastic voluntarism, so such statements do make sense to me, whatever I happen to think about them on an object level.)
From the same document (of the International Theological Commission) that I quoted earlier:
"Since it has been demonstrated that all living organisms on earth are genetically related, it is virtually certain that all living organisms have descended from this first organism." Given Ratzinger's approval of that document I don't think you can reasonably say that a Catholic who thinks that evolution is definitely right (in the ordinary sense of thinking that something is definitely right) is not a faithful Catholic.
Well ... the very next sentence of that document is this:
and while that's pretty positive about evolution it seems not to be saying that evolution is definitely right. I think what's going on here is that the authors of that document are happy being very confident about common descent but not so happy being equally confident about evolution.
As to just what sort of evolution, here's an extract from further on in that document:
As the section of that document that you quoted before makes clear, giving God a "truly causal role" doesn't necessarily mean endorsing divine intervention. Section 68 -- the one before the one you quoted before -- suggests what alternatives the authors had in mind, most notably the idea that he designed the universe in such a way that its natural operation would produce particular results.
This, again, is quite far from any view of evolution that would be endorsed by naturalists.
Even in section 68, I don't see them saying that God necessarily "designed the universe in such a way that its natural operation would produce particular results," in any sense stronger than the one which would be absolutely necessary for someone who believes that God is omnipotent and omniscient and the cause of everything that happens. In other words, given that you believe such things about God, then if you see a rock fall and land on the ground, you must believe that God wanted it on the ground. But that wouldn't necessarily imply that it would have bothered God if it landed in the water instead.
Obviously naturalists would not accept God's design even in this sense. But it is not a scientific theory one way or another and makes no differences in what you expect to find in nature. So that would still allow for someone to say that naturalistic evolution is definitely true with respect to every prediction that it makes.
Also, I agree that in practice, at least in other places, there is the implication that the world was designed (at least by initial conditions) for the sake of some results rather than others. This comes up especially in regard to marriage and sexuality. However, I don't see that proposed in any dogmatic way, and it seems to be wishful thinking: if it is objectively by chance that reproduction works the specific way it does, then it becomes harder or impossible to justify Catholic sexual morality. For example, if human beings had developed by evolution in such a way that sexual reproduction required one partner killing the other, it would be obviously justified for them to make technological changes in the way they reproduce.
I'm not sure what sense you have in mind. It seems to me that taking seriously the idea that God is omniscient and the cause of everything that happens more or less commits one to seeing everything as designed by God to achieve whatever his purposes might be.
It is fairly common to say: no, despite having that power God conferred free will upon some of his creatures, so that what they do is not chosen by him. I'm not sure that actually makes sense when looked at clearly, but in any case it seems hard to apply this idea to the laws of nature.
In any case, the document we're discussing seems to me to be saying that God may guide natural processes like evolution by being a "cause of causes", and setting up the web of natural causation so as to achieve his ends.
(I don't mean to imply that it's saying he did so in such a way as to predetermine everything that happens, by the way; one can imagine God setting up a world that operates at random, and optimizing for a particular probability distribution or something of the kind.)
I'm not sure if we're disagreeing about anything. I'm not saying that any Church authority has said that "the process of evolution looks exactly like a naturalistic process", but that what they do say is consistent with this being true. Even assuming God had some motive for setting up things the way they are, how would that imply something in the process of evolution that doesn't look naturalistic?
I certainly agree that if you say God is relevant at all, that is not something that naturalism would say. But it also doesn't seem to mean anything concrete about the process.
Neither am I. I think that
(Not all of those things are directly related to the questions we were discussing.) Does that help?
Ok. I think I agree at least mostly with this summary, although I might qualify a few points.
In itself it's likely that someone who believes in God will estimate a higher probability of evidence of non-natural processes in evolution than for an atheist. But there is also the third point you mention, namely that even theists may notice that there is currently no such evidence and may suspect that there never will be any. So this might mitigate the difference in their expectations somewhat.
Regarding what is grudgingly permitted or what is encouraged, I think this is less about probability assignments about the facts at issue, and more about the probability that a belief will tend to keep people in the Church or to lead to them leaving the Church. I think this is true even when the Church authorities are explicitly aware that a belief is probably false, at least in some cases. They still will not discourage that belief if it makes it more likely for someone to stay in the Church, unless there is some other motive for discouraging it (e.g. if the belief is very obviously ridiculous, they may discourage it because it could make the Church look bad.)