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saturn comments on The elephant in the room, AMA - Less Wrong Discussion
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In your opinion, why did God create harlequin ichthyosis?
Wowww. How abjectly horrifying. o_o But of course, this does not preclude the existence of God. Mormons tend to believe in some form of evolutionary theory (varying degrees of strength, in other words) in addition to creationism; this is caused by a mutation, so it's a natural side-effect of genetics.
Claiming God created the world does not equate to saying that this world is perfect. On the contrary, I know of no Christian religion who would claim that. This is explicitly a sub-perfect world, and has been since the fall of Adam.
Actually perfect worlds do not devolve into sub-perfect worlds.
The best of all logically-self-consistent worlds does not necessarily have every imaginable desirable feature. If you believe otherwise, please respond to the ontological argument for the existence of God.
That is true, but it doesn't mean that we can't notice that a truly omnibenevolent being could do a much better job than the world we find ourselves in. I would consider harlequin ichthyosis as evidence that our world is not perfect, as it seems way more likely given an uncaring universe than in a perfect universe in which some horrifying features are logically neccessary.
Well, yes.
On the other hand, it's not totally clear to me what a truly omnibenevolent being would do. An all-powerful being with ordinary human values would probably create a fairly unpleasant world for most other humans, and if we posit a value-system sufficiently alien not to become a cackling dictator, then I kind of feel like all bets are off.
Because a resistance to "devolution" is a necessary aspect of perfection? Surely if God exists, he can nudge a few things out of their resting places. :P
This is a common fallacy: "If God is omnibenevolent, He would not have such-and-such bad thing happen". You presuppose His motives. If He wanted us to all exist in a state of eternal bliss, then there would have been no need to create the earth. No, His goal is to have His children become even as He is, which requires refining them through fire.
Ok, but why would he want to. A perfect God would not choose nudge a perfect world out of perfection.
No, I take the motives advocates of a god even existing ascribe to him, and show that assuming that produces predictions wildly different from our observations. If you want to approach it from the other direction, here is an investigation into what sort of god would explain our observations.
It seems unlikely that some of his children would take so much more fire than others to refine. Or perhaps the supposedly perfect god has given some of these children suboptimal initial conditions or refining processes. It is unlikely even that a refining process is even better, a perfect god should get the children right when they are created.
Again, presupposition of His motives; if He wanted us to become stronger, we must have had opposition, which could not have taken place in the paradisaical Garden of Eden.
Unfortunately, you are using the arguments of other Christian sects against this one. Are you aware that many sects don't even consider the LDS faith to be Christian, because we differ so wildly from the Established Truth?
Ha! Yes, I've read it, and yes, it was well-written, as many of Eliezer's posts are. I, unlike "other Christians", do not deny that evolution is true.
Intelligence is no match for experience; He could have programmed robots to be perfect Gods, I suppose, but they wouldn't be children, because they wouldn't have the spark of life. (Yes, I know, my entire argument has as a predicate the existence of a non-physical (for certain definitions of "physical") entity that controls the physical aspects of life.) As for "initial conditions"... I'm hesitant to answer this point, because the explanation may well exceed the inferential distance.
Why?
Why would he want us to become stronger, if that strength is only needed to cope with adversity that didn't have to be there?
Why would he put us in the Garden of Eden in the first place if it couldn't give us the growth he intended for us?
Why couldn't he just make us stronger and skip the adversity? Humans develop to resist negative stimuli when they're exposed to them, and not when they aren't, because such developments take biological resources. If, for instance, your body insisted on building up your muscles for optimal weight lifting capacity, you would be in big trouble if what you really needed was to survive in a hot desert. We strengthen ourselves in response to adversity because until very recently in our evolutionary history, like all other animals, we did not have the capacity to predict what sort of adversity we'd have to adapt to in advance. An all powerful and intelligent being creating a species could have done much better, and instead of going through all the nonsense of making us suffer so we could get stronger, could have made us stronger so we wouldn't have to suffer.
Remember that every If or Maybe you offer up, every piece of information you propose about God's intentions, qualities or character that is not itself sufficiently evidenced for people to believe it without first buying into your religious framework, is another burden on your hypothesis, something that should lower your estimate of your religion being true.
But then how could we teach our... future children... to be....
.... huh.
Ponderin' time.
It seems that for every observation you might be called to explain, you can say "God could have done that", and in response to any speculation of whether God would choose to do that you can accuse "presupposition of His motives". What can your theory not explain?
That is not at all a response to the first major criticism: "It seems unlikely that some of his children would take so much more fire than others to refine."
Experience is not mysterious thing. It is a means of accumulating data that an agent could be designed to start with. It is a way of traing behaviors that an agent can be designed to start out executing. We would design an agent to grow more powerful from experience because we do not know now what data and behaviors to give it. A perfect God would know.
Got it! I've been racking my brain, and I've come up with an answer: my theory would be proven false by the discovery of sentient extraterrestrial life that did not look like us.
This follows from a non-soulist perspective, which means that we fundamentally differ in our opinions. Sorry. And I know it isn't a response; the proper response, as I said, requires too great an inferential distance.
Here lies the key to my puzzle; the reason I'm attempting to instigate a crisis of faith. I don't know the answer to this question, but I am searching desperately for it.
You do however seem to rationalize evolution as a simulated process built for our sake so we could "discover" our own origins. I don't doubt a super-intelligence could convince me of that but what i fail to understand is why you think that our preparedness to help with the celestial kingdom is determined by our faith in the Morman explanation. Why are devout Mormons given more responsibility in the next layer of reality then someone like Eliezer who wants to save the world and goes about it as rationally as he can? I fail to understand how you can say that someone who has never had any love of the Morman God due to semi-random environmental factors and genetics is somehow less valuable in the future kingdom then someone who believes with a good portion of their soul, but causes much damage to the future of the base layer of reality unknowingly.
It seems to me that the LDS church believes that people who believe in the LDS God somehow contribute more to the base layer of reality than people with skepticism of it or no knowledge at all and that clashes with everything i know and understand about the nature of consciousness.
Well, I'll answer first your point, then your digression. First, I don't believe that evolution is a "simulated" process; I believe that it's entirely a natural byproduct of the mechanics of reproduction. It wasn't put there for us to discover and be confused by (the way that Fundamentalists believe that "dinosaur bones exist to test our faith"); it's the natural order of this type of world.
As far as just reward for non-Mormon good people, like Eliezer? Well, I personally believe that any sufficiently rational person should end up going to the Celestial Kingdom. We have been taught that during the Millennium - that time between when Jesus comes to establish His reign on earth, and the Final Judgement - the wicked will be cleansed from the earth, and the righteous will be here, doing the work of the Kingdom. However, there will still be those on the earth during that time who choose not to follow Jesus, even given all evidence.
What does this mean? Well, ethical non-Mormon rationalists, such as Eliezer (or, I presume, yourself!) are not Wicked People. I presume that they will remain on the earth during the Millennium. This means that y'all will have all the weight of evidence you could possibly hope for! I predict that this means that, when the Judgement comes, those who converted during the Millennium will have no disadvantage (minimal disadvantage? I don't know for sure) compared to those who were Mormon during their natural lifetimes.
What about rationalists who die before the Millennium? If they were "good" (there's a reason I don't ever, ever judge whether someone is "good" or not; it takes a perfect ethical mind to do that, and I don't have one!), they'll come back for the Millennium. If not, they'll hang out in the spirit world. But right now, spirits of those who have passed on are being taught the tenets (thank you, Alicorn!) of the Gospel, and being given the opportunity to receive or reject the gospel based upon the weight of evidence, which I can only imagine is somewhat greater on the other side than it is here, since they died but still exist, therefore proving some form of "soulism".
So why be Mormon now if you can just join up later? Because, since the tenets of our religion are true, following them will lead to a greater degree of happiness here on Earth.
After reading the wiki article, I clicked through to actual pictures... That is one of the more horrifying things I've seen.
And it's no less amazing that several afflicted people managed to survive and function reasonably well.