That's a red herring. The question was not how she could have known that God was an authority figure. The question was how she could have known that the snake was NOT an authority figure too.
Oh, right. Hmmm. Good question.
...I want to say that it's common sense that not everyone who claims to be an authority figure is one, and that preferably one authority figure should introduce another on first meeting. But... Eve may well have been only hours old, and would not have any experience to back that up with.
Oh, come on. Even if we suppose that God can get bored, you really don't think he could have come up with a more effective way to spread the Word than just having one-on-one chats with individual humans? Why not hold a big rally? Or make a video? Or at least have more than one freakin' person in the room when He finally gets fed up and says, "OK, I've had it, I'm going to tell you this one more time before I go on extended leave!" ???
There are plenty of ways to handle it, yes. All of which work very well for one generation. Twenty, thirty years' time there's a new batch turning up. One either needs a recording or, better yet, get them to teach their children...
everyone would recognise the man who could not grow crops, and know he'd killed his brother
You do know that this is LessWrong, right? A site dedicated to rationality and the elimination of logical fallacies and cognitive bias? Because you are either profoundly ignorant of elementary logic, or you are trolling. For your reasoning here to be valid it would have to be the case that the only possible reason someone could not grow crops is that they had killed their brother. If you can't see how absurd that is then you are beyond my ability to help.
Yes, I know exactly what site this is. Yes, I know that the reasoning "he can't grow crops, therefore he killed his brother" is badly flawed. But the question is not whether people would think like that. The question is why would Cain, a human with biases and flawed logic, why would he think that people would reason like that?
And I think that the answer to that question is, because Cain had a guilty conscience. Because he had a guilty conscience, he defaults to expecting that, if anyone else sees something that is a result of his crime, they will correctly divine the reason for what they see (Cain was very much not a rationalist).
I don't think that there is any evidence to suggest that anyone else actually thought like Cain expected them to think.
Because "the good stuff" is essential to our survival. Humans cannot survive without cooperating with each other. That's why we are social animals. That's why we have evolved moral intuitions about right and wrong.
On a tribal level, yes, a cooperative tribe will outcompete a "pure evil" tribe easily. But even the "pure evil" tribe might hang around for two, maybe three generations.
I'm not claiming they'd be able to survive long-term, by any means. I just think one generation is a bit short.
What difference does that make? Yes, 14B years is a long time, but it's exactly the same amount of time for a computer. However much humans can calculate in 14B years (or any other amount of time you care to pull out of your hat) a computer can calculate vastly more.
That is true. However, in this case, if the universe if a computer, then the computer appears to have just sat around and waited for the first 14B years doing nothing. If it's intended to find the answer to some question faster than its creator could, then it must be a pretty big question.
I've been to SA twice. Beautiful country, but your politics are even more fucked up than ours here in the U.S., and that's saying something.
Yeah... wonderful climate, great biodiversity, near-total lack of large-scale natural disasters (as long as you stay off the floodplains), even our own private floral kingdom... absolutely horrible politicians.
why would Cain, a human with biases and flawed logic, why would he think that people would reason like that?
Maybe because God has cursed him to be a "fugitive and a vagabond." People didn't like fugitives and vagabonds back then (they still don't ).
I don't think that there is any evidence to suggest that anyone else actually thought like Cain expected them to think.
Well, God seemed to think it was a plausible theory. His response was to slap himself in the forehead and say, "Wow, Cain, you're right, people are going to try to kill y...
[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.