Of course it is just. How could you possibly doubt it? I mean, imagine the scene: you're at home watching TV when you suddenly realize that there's a button on your universal remote that you've never pressed and you have no idea what it does. You're too lazy to get up off the couch to get the manual (and you have no idea where it is anyway, you probably threw it out) so you just push it to see what it does. Nothing happens.
The next day you turn on the TV to discover that nuclear armageddon has broken out at 100 million people are dead. An hour later the FBI shows up at your door and says, "You didn't push that red button on your remote last night, did you?" "Why yes, yes I did," you reply. "Is that a problem?" "Well, yes, it rather is. You see, that button launched the nuclear missiles, so I'm afraid you are now the greatest mass murderer in the history of humanity and we're going to have to take you in. Turn around please."
For the analogy to match the Garden of Eden example, the red button needs to be clearly marked "Do Not Press".
And I'm not saying that the just punishment should be same for something done in ignorance. But, at the very least, having pushed the button on the remote, the person in this analogy needs to be very firmly told that that was something that he should not have done. A several-hour lecture on not pushing buttons marked "do not press" is probably justified.
Yeah, this theory has always struck me as rather bizarre. So before eating the fruit it's perfectly OK to torture kittens, perfectly OK to abuse and rape your children, and after you eat the fruit suddenly these things are not OK. Makes no sense to me.
Put like that, is does seem odd. But consider - biting a kitten's tail would be a form of torturing kittens. Is it okay for a three-month-old baby, who does not understand what it is doing, to bite a kitten's tail? (And is it okay for the kitten to then claw at the baby?)
Yeah, that's another weird thing. God educated Moses. Why not educate everyone? Why should Moses get the benefit of seeing God directly while the rest of us have to make do with second-hand accounts of what God said? And why should we trust Moses? Prophets are a dime a dozen. Why Moses and not Mohammed? Or Joseph Smith? Or L. Ron Hubbard?
Delegation?
And as long as we're on the topic, why wait so long to educate Moses? By the time we get to Moses, God has already committed a long string of genocides to punish people for sinning (the Flood, Sodom) despite the fact that they have not yet had the benefit of any education from God, even second-hand. That feels very much like the button scenario above, which I should hope grates on your moral intuition as much as it does on mine.
Lots of other people had some idea of what was right and wrong, even before Moses. Consider Cain and Abel - Cain knew it was wrong to kill Abel, but did it anyway. (I have no idea where that knowledge was supposed to have come from, but it was there)
Your either-or construct is missing the "or" clause.
Whoops.
Any designed object is either limited to actions that its designer can calculate and understand (in theory, given infinite time and paper to write on) or cannot be guaranteed to continue to perform to specification.
we can predict what they [computers] will do given knowledge of all relevant inputs
No, we can't. (link to the Halting Problem)
Okay, but we can still predict the output of the computer at any given, finite, time step.
I didn't say it was. But reliable knowledge of the future requires that the future be determined by the present. If it is possible to reliably predict the outcome of a coin toss, then the coin toss is deterministic, and therefore the coin cannot have free will.
The important thing in the coin example is not the coin, but the time traveller. The prediction of the coin tosses is not made from knowledge of the present state of the world, but rather from knowledge of the future state of the world; that is to say, the state in which the coin tosses have already happened. The mechanism by which the coin tosses happen is thus irrelevant (the coin tosses can be replaced by a person with free will calling out "head!" and "tail!" in whatever order he freely desires to do).
No, you've got this wrong. Quantum randomness is the only thing in our universe (that we know of) that is unpredictable even in principle.
...I'm going to read your further explanation article before I respond to this.
There are different ways of existing. There is existence-as-material-object (trees, houses). There is existence-as-fictional-character (Frodo). There is existence-as-patterns-of-bits-in-a-computer-memory (Firefox).
Agreed.
Each of these is orthogonal to the other.
Why? I can see how the rest of your argument follows from this; I'm not seeing why these different types of existence must be orthogonal, why they can't be colinear.
(Incidentally, I'd consider "George Washington the physical object" and "George Washington the fictional character" to be two different things which, confusingly, share the same name).
For the analogy to match the Garden of Eden example, the red button needs to be clearly marked "Do Not Press".
Not quite. It needs to have TWO labels. On the left it says, "DO NOT PRESS" and on the right it says "PRESS THIS BUTTON". (Actually, a more accurate rendition might be, "Do not press this button" and "Press this button for important information on how to use this remote". God really needs a better UI/UX guy.)
...Is it okay for a three-month-old baby, who does not understand what it is doing, to
[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.