I'm not sure whether you wrote that as a statement of your position or a re-statement of what you think my position is
Actually, not quite either; it's intended as a restatement not of your explicitly taken position (which I know it is contrary to) but of what seems to me to be implicit in how you write about these things. You say (and I agree) that some skeptics have "spiritual experiences" and some religious people don't; but I think no one reading the rest of what you write would get that impression.
Being heterosexual is normal. It does not follow that being homosexual is abnormal.
I am not saying "lisper says X is normal; therefore lisper says not-X is abnormal". Not at all. I am pointing at an instance where you wrote something more specific. I quoted it before; let me quote it again. "it might be an indication of a normal part of the wiring of the human brain that is missing from their brains". (Emphasis yours.) What would count as "abnormal", if having a normal part of the wiring of the human brain missing from your brain doesn't?
But the ability to digest dairy products is not "abnormal".
Again it seems that you're taking me to argue that if you think something is normal then you have to think its opposite is abnormal. I agree that you needn't do any such thing, and that is not the argument I was making. (See above.)
How would you describe lactose intolerance without using words that make implicit value judgements?
"Some people get sick when they consume dairy products" would do pretty well. If more detail is required: "Children's bodies produce an enzyme called lactase that breaks down one of the constituents in milk. Many adults' bodies don't, and if those people drink milk or eat things made from milk they feel ill afterwards. Some adults' bodies do, especially in Western Europe and places colonized by Western Europeans. Those people can digest milk products without feeling bad."
Or, if we need a brief technical-sounding term: "lactase nonpersistence".
He specifically denied a lot of things.
You know, I was hoping you might be specific. (I see that you give one specific example below, on which I will comment in a moment; it doesn't seem to me that it actually supports what you're saying.)
he didn't believe any concession whatsoever should be made to the proposition that some people have firsthand subjective experiences that cause them to believe in the supernatural
I hope you won't be offended by my saying this, but given your apparent inability in this discussion to state your thesis without using terms that (so it seems to me, and so it might plausibly have seemed to Richard Dawkins if you did the same in conversation with him) represent these believers as being better than skeptics who don't share their experiences, it seems plausible to me that what Dawkins actually took exception was those value judgements, rather than the bare assertions that, e.g., religious people sometimes have religious experiences and see those as evidence for their religion.
The specific example you give seems, actually, quite clearly not a matter of Dawkins disagreeing with the factual statements you've been making about spiritual experiences (as opposed to the value judgements you've been making, which as I already said are not obvious and uncontroversial). He didn't -- at least, those words you will never forget didn't -- deny that the idea of God can have beneficial effects. He just indicated that, as you put it, "allowing someone to believe in something that is not objectively true is the greater evil".
I wonder whether I've failed to communicate effectively what it is in what you're saying that I think is commonplace and obvious. I suggest that you're saying two main things. (1) Some religious people have religious experiences, and these are part of why they believe what they do, and the experiences are real experiences and very important to those people, and non-religious people talking to religious people should bear all that in mind. (2) These experiences are valuable and positive, and people who have them are normal and people who don't have them are not normal and have something missing from their brains and are like colour-blind or deaf people.
I think #1 is obvious and commonplace. I think #2 is a matter of values and definitions more than of facts, and I do not think you have given us good reason to agree with it.
The specific thing you quote Richard Dawkins as saying contradicts neither #1 nor #2 as such (though I bet he disagrees with #2) but a further claim you haven't explicitly made in this discussion (though you've made some gestures in its direction): that belief (as opposed to spiritual experiences) can have sufficiently positive consequences to make it a good thing even when incorrect. I think that's a more plausible claim than #2 and a more controversial one (especially around here) than #1. But it isn't what you've been saying here so far.
[...] Copenhagen interpretation [...]
I have the impression I didn't make it clear enough that I am not endorsing any of Motl's criticisms. I haven't watched your Google talk and therefore have no opinion about the correctness of any specific claims you made there, and I think Motl is a buffoon.
What mistake would that be?
The one Motl claims you made in the blog post you linked to. (Again, for the avoidance of doubt, the only thing I am saying about his claim is that it's consistent with the "opposite" criticisms you say you've received. I have no idea whether any of the criticisms from either side are correct because, again, I don't know any of the details of what you have said about quantum physics.)
when one of those attacks is [...] and the other is [...]
... you should consider the possibility that they are addressing different things you've said. Compare the old joke: "There is much in X's book that is new, and much that is correct. Unfortunately, the new parts are not correct and the correct parts are not new."
I repeat that I have no idea what you've said about quantum physics, and therefore no idea whether any complaint of that sort has any validity. But I might level a similar complaint at what you've been saying here about spiritual experiences.
First, I want to thank you for continuing to engage on this. Your feedback is very much appreciated. But we may need to agree to disagree on this.
"Some people get sick when they consume dairy products" would do pretty well.
Some people derive a net benefit from believing in deities, notwithstanding that their beliefs are objectively false. How's that?
Dawkins
If you want to formulate a question to direct to Dawkins that is phrased in a way that you would accept his answer as definitive, I will forward it to him, thought it's possible that...
[Originally published at Intentional Insights in response to Religious and Rational]
Spirituality and rationality seem completely opposed. But are they really?
To get at this question, let's start with a little thought experiment. Consider the following two questions:
1. If you were given a choice between reading a physical book (or an e-book) or listening to an audiobook, which would you prefer?
2. If you were given a choice between listening to music, or looking at the grooves of a phonograph record through a microscope, which would you prefer?
But I am more interested in the answer to a third question:
3. For which of the first two questions do you have a stronger preference between the two options?
Most people will have a stronger preference in the second case than the first. But why? Both situations are in some sense the same: there is information being fed into your brain, in one case through your ears and in the other through your eyes. So why should people's preference for ears be so much stronger in the case of music than books?
There is something in the essence of music that is lost in the translation between an audio and a visual rendering. The same loss happens for words too, but to a much lesser extent. Subtle shades of emphasis and tone of voice can convey essential information in spoken language. This is one of the reasons that email is so notorious for amplifying misunderstandings. But the loss in much greater in the case of music.
The same is true for other senses. Color is one example. A blind person can abstractly understand what light is, and that color is a byproduct of the wavelength of light, and that light is a form of electromagnetic radiation... yet there is no way for a blind person to experience subjectively the difference between red and blue and green. But just because some people can't see colors doesn't mean that colors aren't real.
The same is true for spiritual experiences.
Now, before I expand that thought, I want to give you my bona fides. I am a committed rationalist, and an atheist (though I don't like to self-identify as an atheist because I'd rather focus on what I *do* believe in rather than what I don't). So I am not trying to convince you that God exists. What I want to say is rather that certain kinds of spiritual experiences *might* be more than mere fantasies made up out of whole cloth. If we ignore this possibility we risk shutting ourselves off from a vital part of the human experience.
I grew up in the deep south (Kentucky and Tennessee) in a secular Jewish family. When I was 12 my parents sent me to a Christian summer camp (there were no other kinds in Kentucky back in those days). After a week of being relentlessly proselytized (read: teased and ostracized), I decided I was tired of being the camp punching bag and so I relented and gave my heart to Jesus. I prayed, confessed my sins, and just like that I was a member of the club.
I experienced a euphoria that I cannot render into words, in exactly the same way that one cannot render into words the subjective experience of listening to music or seeing colors or eating chocolate or having sex. If you have not experienced these things for yourself, no amount of description can fill the gap. Of course, you can come to an *intellectual* understanding that "feeling the presence of the holy spirit" has nothing to do with any holy spirit. You can intellectually grasp that it is an internal mental process resulting from (probably) some kind of neurotransmitter released in response to social and internal mental stimulus. But that won't allow you to understand *what it is like* any more than understanding physics will let you understand what colors look like or what music sounds like.
Happily, there are ways to stimulate the subjective experience that I'm describing other than accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Meditation, for example, can produce similar results. It can be a very powerful experience. It can even become addictive, almost like a drug.
I am not necessarily advocating that you go try to get yourself a hit of religious euphoria (though I wouldn’t discourage you either -- the experience can give you some interesting and useful perspective on life). Instead, I simply want to convince you to entertain the possibility that people might profess to believe in God for reasons other than indoctrination or stupidity. Religious texts and rituals might be attempts to share real subjective experiences that, in the absence of a detailed modern understanding of neuroscience, can appear to originate from mysterious, subtle external sources.
The reason I want to convince you to entertain this notion is that an awful lot of energy gets wasted by arguing against religious beliefs on logical grounds, pointing out contradictions in the Bible and whatnot. Such arguments tend to be ineffective, which can be very frustrating for those who advance them. The antidote for this frustration is to realize that spirituality is not about logic. It's about subjective experiences that not everyone is privy to. Logic is about looking at the grooves. Spirituality is about hearing the music.
The good news is that adopting science and reason doesn’t mean you have to give up on spirituality any more than you have to give up on music. There are myriad paths to spiritual experience, to a sense of awe and wonder at the grand tapestry of creation, to the essential existential mysteries of life and consciousness, to what religious people call “God.” Walking in the woods. Seeing the moons of Jupiter through a telescope. Gathering with friends to listen to music, or to sing, or simply to share the experience of being alive. Meditation. Any of these can be spiritual experiences if you allow them to be. In this sense, God is everywhere.