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lisper comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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I am indeed quite confident in my prediction that God will never again make the sun stand still. I'm a little surprised that anyone here on LW would find this remarkable.
On the basis of what? (no, I'm not asking you to quote me the appropriate chapter and verse)
There is an old theological debate about constraints on God. Is He really omnipotent, literally, or there are things He is unable to do? I don't think this debate has a satisfactory resolution.
Why are you surprised about finding this attitude on LW?
Um... physics?
Really? If you are willing to seriously entertain the possibility that the answer could be "no", why is that not a satisfactory resolution? It seems to me to be consistent with all the data.
I guess I'm surprised to find religious people here. Pleasantly surprised, but surprised nonetheless. I've never understood how anyone can maintain faith in the face of rational scrutiny. Maybe someone here will be able explain it to me.
God is not constrained by physics, is He?
Which data?
I am not religious.
One obvious answer is reliance on personal experience.
I'm pretty sure He is.
Oh my goodness, where to begin? How about here.
I didn't say you were.
That's usually a mistake.
Hmm. I don't see how else to make sense of the exchange you and Lumifer have just had. Let me follow the steps backward, and you can tell me what I've got wrong. (Unless all you mean is that you only implied Lumifer is religious by saying things that don't make sense on other assumptions, and didn't explicitly say he is. In which case I agree but I'm not sure why it's relevant: Lumifer's denial of religiosity is just as relevant if you merely implied its contrary as if you explicitly stated it.)
I can't figure out any explanation of the conversation you and Lumifer have just had that doesn't involve you (mis)identifying Lumifer as a religious person.
What am I missing?
My surprise at finding religious people on LW was not specifically a reaction to anything Lumifer said, it was more general than that. I guess my surprise was triggered more by something ChristianKi said in another branch of this discussion than anything Lumifer said. But this has become a very long and branchy discussion so it's very likely that any attempt on my part to reconstruct my past mental states will have some errors.
I tentatively concluded that Lumifer was religious because that seemed like the most charitable interpretation of his remarks to that point. When he told me he wasn't, I update my Bayesian posteriors and concluded that he's probably a troll. But I didn't want to say so because my Bayesian estimate on the possibility that he might have something worthwhile to teach me is not yet indistinguishable from zero. But it's getting damn close.
"But it's not true!"
That would run contrary to omnipotence.
Indeed it would.
When you say "God is constrainted by physics", what do you mean by the word "God"? The God of Abraham, being omnipotent, doesn't seem to be.
Not sure, what a link to Wikipedia on theodicy is doing here.
As to not relying on personal experience, well, it calls to mind "Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?" X-)
OK, I'm getting a little confused about what point you're trying to make. Most of the time when people talk about what God can and cannot do it's because they believe God is real. But you said you're not religious, so you don't believe God is real. So what does it even mean for a non-real God to be omnipotent?
The reason I'm confident that God is constrained by the laws of physics is that I believe that God is a fictional character. That doesn't mean God doesn't exist, it means that He exists in a different ontological category than people who believe in God think He's in. Fictional characters are subject to the laws of physics insofar as they can only do things that their authors can describe, and so they are subject to the limitations of computability theory. God cannot tell us the value of Chaitin's Omega to more precision than we ourselves can compute it.
Fictional characters can have effects in the real world. People alter their behavior because of things that fictional characters are reported to have said. But those kinds of effects are still limited by the laws of physics, and generally do not extend to making radical changes in the angular velocity of a planet, hence my confident prediction.
Generally speaking, if you are discussing things like attributes of God, there are two positions you might take.
One position is that God is not real, so discussing His attributes is no better than debating patterns on wings of fairies. At this point we're done, there is nothing else to say.
Another position is to add an implicit "conditional on God being real" to statements. That allows you to discuss e.g. theology without necessarily being religious.
I thought we are operating in the second mode, but if we're not, there isn't really anything to talk about, is there? And when you said "I am indeed quite confident in my prediction that God will never again make the sun stand still" what you meant was simply "it did not happen" -- right? The "again" was an unnecessary flourish?
Fictional characters are subject to fictional laws of physics in the fictional worlds the authors create. If you just want to say that gods do not exist, the question of whether they are subject to (real) laws of physics is a nonsensical question.
Not quite. People's beliefs (which might or might not involve fictional characters) do have effects in reality via actions of these people. But that's a trivial observation, so I'm not sure of the point you're making.
I disagree. People can (and do) have interesting and constrained discussions and even debates about fictional characters all the time.
OK, but that begs the question of which god (lower-case g) you're conditioning on. This was actually the mode I was arguing in when I cited the story of Rabbi Eliezer and the carob tree.
That too, but they are also subject to constraints imposed by the theory of computation on their authors (at least so long as their authors are Turing machines). That actually rules out omnipotent gods even in fiction. Simply saying that something is omnipotent doesn't make it omnipotent even in a fictional world.
It might be a trivial observation, but it has very profound consequences that are not immediately apparent. Specifically, there's a positive feedback loop where certain beliefs produce effects which provide evidence that support those beliefs. Such beliefs can become self-sustaining even in cases where the beliefs themselves are objectively false. But because they are self-sustaining, they can be very hard to dislodge.
Ironically, an example of such a self-sustaining but objectively false belief is the belief that rationalism will win the battle of ideas, or even that it's a better way to live your life, simply because, well, it's rational. (I'm not saying you believe this, but many people do.)
Since the context of the discussion involved quotes from Torah/Bible, I thought it was apparent.
Speaking of ontological categories... Humans are not Turing machines.
Sure, but I still don't see it as particularly profound. It happens all the time and is the mechanism involved in some well-known biases. I understand your point that "personal experience" of a believer is suspect as evidence and that point has some validity, but this is a complex discussion involving interpretations, cultural expectations, philosophy of qualia, etc. etc. :-)