I'm going to make a meta-comment here.
I think that your ultimate goal should NOT be to convince your dad that you are right and he is wrong. If he eventually changes his mind, he's going to have to do that on his own. Debates just don't change participants' minds very often.
Instead, your goal should be to make him respect your beliefs as genuine.
Christians generally respect people who are genuinely seeking truth, in part because the Bible promises that "those who seek will find". The good news is that you ARE legitimately seeking truth, so you should be able to convince him of this.
Hopefully you already have a good relationship with your father based on mutual love and respect. You want to build on that and preserve it as much as possible. He is going to be your dad for the rest of your life, and how you interact with him now is going to determine in part how that relationship develops.
More practically: It sounds like you aren't sure exactly why you've changed your mind, and are having difficulty articulating it. Nobody on this site is going to be able to articulate it for you. Rationality is a method, not a conclusion. So here is my suggestion: do a stack-trace on your c...
A bunch of largely disconnected thoughts.
I agree with others here that if you're going to have this sort of debate, then your goal should not be primarily "convince my father to agree with me" but "improve the accuracy of both his thinking and mine", and talk of "arguments that I ... need help shutting down" is probably indicative of sloppy thinking.
If someone else has an argument that you can't find a good answer to, this doesn't necessarily mean that they are correct. It just means that you haven't found a good answer to that argument. There is nothing wrong with saying "Yes, that seems like a good point and I don't have a good answer to it right now, but it's not enough to convince me to switch sides." (But of course if you find a lot of such arguments on one side and way fewer on the other, it's suggestive of which side is nearer the truth.)
The parallel Keller draws between religion and science is badly broken. Specifically, if anyone said "Evolution just makes sense to me; I feel in my bones that it's right" and regarded that as a good reason to believe in evolution, then they would be terribly wrong, every bit as wrong a
I don't see why you need to debate this with your father. On several forums I've advised young atheists with religiously obsessive parents that they need to secure themselves financially so that they don't have to move back in with these parents in our bad economy. A teenage or college-aged atheist shouldn't announce his apostasy until he can finish college with a marketable degree, get a job, pay off all debts down to zero and then save up about a year's worth of living expenses in case he becomes unemployed. Young atheists who do this will have the financial protection they need to tell their respective families about their atheism.
I think this is the best piece of advice overall. You are likely not going to convince your father, whose opinions probably even predate your birth. The real thing at stake here isn't scientific truth, and trying to convince him is to fight the wrong battle.
People have a lot of beliefs they don't feel the need to constantly justify to others, and I think it's an accepted social convention to seek shelter in that principle. Being evasive and using relativism can help : admitting you can't be sure about science and evolution is an acceptable compromise if you can trade it for the opposite fact that your father and people like him can't be sure about God either.
Once swamped in such a position on both sides, you can also simply chose not to pursue the argument further, and believe your stuff "just because I feel this is the truth", the same way they do for their own stuff, at which point it would be hypocritical for them to still try to convince you they're right. This may not seem like a "truth seeker" thing to do, but you're playing by his rules already anyway, and in his world, truth may not have the same meaning as it does in ours.
Also, trying to justify athe...
Oh, and of course, silly me: remember to use the heuristic "what does this argument have to say about the Norse pantheon?"
However, if we can't trust our belief-forming faculties to tell us the truth about God, why should we trust them to tell us the truth about anything
This is such a lousy argument. Seriously, "If our first wild guessed ass-grab explanation is wrong, why should we trust any explanation about anything ever?" Well, because other explanations have proof, logic, and real world application backing them up. That's why we trust them. Arguments with proof get trusted; arguments without proof get discarded. We believe in evolution because applications of evolutionary theory lets us create evolved semiconductors via artificial selection, and every time we develop a new application it's another reason to believe.
If you look closely, Keller's argument doesn't even directly address evolution. It's a slight of hand in the wording to make you think it's about evolution. In actuality, this is a fully general argument against using reasoning to change society's mind about anything ever. "If we were wrong about , we can't use reason to change our minds about ." This is basically the exact opposite of human history. I'm imagining two Roman philosophers arguing and one ...
And of course, I'm talking to a guy with an especially exacting definition of "truth" (100% certainty about the territory)- I could use an LW post that succinctly discusses the role and definition of truth, there.
It's not an LW post, but how about an Isaac Asimov essay instead?
A few thoughts. Theists love to use an argument script like this:
If you accept that script you're bound to lose the argument at some point, because there will always be some odd fact that can't currently be explained. Science isn't omniscient, and never will be.
The trap is that it is very temping to try and solve such a puzzle yourself. The smarter you are, the easier it is to fall into that trap. If it's a really juicy teaser (like explaining human psychology, or aesthetics, or the origins of logical thought, or the nature of morality), then it's highly unlikely that you will succeed. A clever or experienced theist will already know the flaws (and counter-arguments) for most of the existing theories so can throw those at you. Or if you support a novel, or fringe theory (which theists haven't generally considered in the solution space, but which might work), they can dismiss it as "speculation".
What you have to defuse is the debating assumption that "God wins by default" I.e. that if there is anything at all which you can't explain, then God must have done it. When put so bluntly, it is a really outrageous fallacy that "God wins by default". Yet that seems to be what your Dad is relying on here. Don't accept it.
"Evolutionists say that if God makes sense to us, it is not because he is really there, it's only because that belief helped us survive and so we are hardwired for it. However, if we can't trust our belief-forming faculties to tell us the truth about God, why should we trust them to tell us the truth about anything, including evolutionary science?
What if you just said "my belief forming faculties tell me that I do not have near enough evidence to believe in the god you describe. So what if I just agree with you that I should trust my belief forming faculties?"
Another important tack to take: "OK I don't know in detail where love and the feeling that some things are wrong and some things are right come from. I do know from human history that humans have been wrong about things that felt very right to them: about the earth being flat, the earth being at the center of the universe, the sun going around the earth, the stars being pinprick sources of light in a "celestial sphere" that surrounded us, to mention a very small number. So I DO know that believing in something because it "feels right" is at best a crap shoot, and more likely a reci...
The "self-defeating" claim you mention is Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism. A number of mostly satisfying responses are listed on the wikipedia page. A brief search on LessWrong suggests that the EAAN hasn't been thoroughly critiqued here.
I suggest that you return to the Sequences, aggressively skipping the quantum stuff, until you've convinced yourself (and can convince others) that there's not much use worrying that evolution gave us a great faculty of instrumental rationality and a separate defective system of epistemic rationality. Such a situation has a vanishingly small probability and if it's true, there's not much to be done about it.
First, you should consider the possibility that your dad is right. I don't think he is, but if you want to really know anything, you need to seriously consider his arguments. If you are looking for counterarguments, you'll find them. But if you want to know what's really true, you have to evaluate the arguments yourself.
I guess I'll give you a hint on the "evolution predisposes us to see minds in everything" argument: Humans are adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers. So, it's absolutely true that being able to model other humans has historically key to our survival -- just as enjoying sugar has been. So, we believe in a god or gods because of that tendency. However, just because a certain tendency has historically helped us, doesn't mean it won't hurt us now or in the future.
Imagine yourself in your dad's place. You present a more fleshed out version of this argument to him. What does he say? Can he defeat this argument?
Imagine that he defeats this argument, which is a Genuine Less Wrong™-style argument (well, the sketch of one). It's even got a gratuitous link to a post in the Sequences™ Are you going to then give up your beliefs? If not, why are you arguing at all?
It's okay to listen and nod and go do what you were going to do anyway. But if you're wanting a scrap...
Your father mentions love, morality and beauty as natural and evidence of God. What happens when your father mentions equally-natural rape? Evidence of God, but a capricious God, would be consistent. Instead your father mentions things he likes as evidence of a God he likes, and things he doesn't like as evidence you're wrong.
Apply morality to biology in one person in one part of his or her life and you're going to be making up stories. Apply biology to large group behavior over long periods of time and you might be on to something. One man and one woman? No idea of their violent tendencies. A million men and a million women? Bet the farm that the men are more violent. Pointing out what one man or woman does as evidence for or against biological roots for morality is a misapplication of the tool.
"I'll think about that" is a fair response to anything your father says about God or your beliefs. You can then go think about it. Or not think about it. Then you can answer, or not answer. The answer of "I don't know" is also a fair response.
Here's one f...
I agree with the other commentors on two things: you very likely won't be able to change your father's mind and that shouldn't be your goal, and an evo-psych book probably won't help. There are successful statistical evo-psych studies, but I think you should take the conversation to another level.
Specifically, as another commenter posted, the Euthyphro dilemma makes his line of reasoning very questionable. God-centered theories of morality are SUBJECTIVE morality theories, as evidenced by a simple thought experiment: imagine Satan, instead of the Christian...
Reading a book on evolutionary psychology won't help you resolve most confusions about morality, in the same way that reading a book on cannons won't help you resolve most confusions about parabolas.
I think you have a lot of work left to do. And by that I don't mean reading about evolution - I mean dissecting a lot of confusing arguments and playing "why do I believe what I believe."
So, a little background- I've just come out as an atheist to my dad, a Christian pastor, who's convinced he can "fix" my thinking and is bombarding me with a number of flimsy arguments that I'm having trouble articulating a response to
Being articulate has nothing to do with the truth. If your dad isn't willing to explore where he's wrong, then you shouldn't be talking about your world views with him. If you can't establish your world view without him, then you're not ready to establish it at all.
I'd advise not worrying about "the big que...
"Evolutionists say that if God makes sense to us, it is not because he is really there, it's only because that belief helped us survive and so we are hardwired for it. However, if we can't trust our belief-forming faculties to tell us the truth about God, why should we trust them to tell us the truth about anything, including evolutionary science? If our cognitive faculties only tell us what we need to survive, not what is true, why trust them about anything at all?" -Timothy Keller
This is so laden with assumptions that are not substantiated t...
However, if we can't trust our belief-forming faculties to tell us the truth about God, why should we trust them to tell us the truth about anything, including evolutionary science?
I trust my belief-forming faculties to tell me the truth about God. They say there isn't one.
On the particular argument, you might want to take a look at the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_argument_against_naturalism
The "evolutionary argument against naturalism" seems to go back to CS Lewis, and Alvin Plantina attempted to formulate it in Bayesian terms. There is a rather devastating response from Fitelson and Sober. In particular:
...For the fact of the matter is that our cognitive mechanisms are reliable on some subjects, unreliable on others, and of unknown reliability on still others. We should divide our
However, if we can't trust our belief-forming faculties to tell us the truth about God, why should we trust them to tell us the truth about anything, including evolutionary science? If our cognitive faculties only tell us what we need to survive, not what is true, why trust them about anything at all?
Rewrite the paragraph; but remove all unnecessary particulars and emotive words, leaving the propositions in the abstract:
...... if we can't trust our beliefs ... to tell us the truth ... why should we trust them to tell us the truth ...? ... If our cognitiv
Morality arguments from theists have always struck me as silly. If there was no god, can your dad really not think of any reason to not murder his neighbor? I can think of SEVERAL good reasons not to go and murder my neighbor. There you go.
The only thing that actually having a belief in god does is simply add one additional reason to a long list of reasons - fear of divine punishment (or conversely, seeking divine reward). ALL the other reasons STILL exist. I'm willing to bet that the divine punishment/reward is actually a very small percentage of the reason the theist chooses to take any particular action.
Are you saying it was justified for [insert historical monster] to do [atrocity] because it would make him reproductively successful?
Evolution doesn't define morality. We evolved to pass our genes on, but now that we've evolved smart brains, we can choose to do other stuff.
Having eight or ten children might maximize my impact on the gene pool, but that's not my personal goal. Likewise, I don't like it that other people's children are dying from malnutrition and disease, so I can take steps to prevent that even though it doesn't help my reproductive fi...
Timothy Keller's argument becomes absurd when you reduce "cognitive faculties". Evolutionary psychology doesn't tell us not to trust our faculties at all (or he's correct, it would be self defeating). Rather it tells us to be wary of specific cognitivve faculties.Those of us claiming sanity make the assumption that our basic logical faculties are the most reliable (even those of us who believe in belief). Communication would be futile otherwise. Reason can be used to debug higher order functions that deliver conclusions to us wholesale - such as the intuitions telling us that God exists. And part of the means to carry out this debugging is to analyze them with evolutionary psychology.
What is this "our belief-forming faculties" category? Humans have lots of vastly different ways of forming beliefs. Although all of them are imperfect, some of them have turned out to be incredibly effective, while others have obvious, repeatedly demonstrated failure modes. Rationality isn't about recognizing we're wrong and then giving up, it's about recognizing we're wrong and then figuring out how we can become less so.
You're playing, I think, the wrong game. If you both believe to have the truth about the existence of God, there is no updating nor justifiable epxlanations to be given: you just become two fundamentalists on the opposite side of the barricade who are trying to outwit each other. Not very effective.
I suggest you to shift to a different game, a more Bayesian game that starts from evidence. Then you don't need ev-psych, you just need Occam's razor.
You first put God's existence at 0 dB, then clear the game field: the fact that God is conceivable doesn't const...
Contemporary evolutionary discussions about love, morality, beauty, and truth will only be superficial, because these are phenomena of the senses, the will, and intentionality, and current science only knows about atoms, behavior, and computation. First they have to be understood psychologically and metaphysically, then their relationship to the physical and biological must be figured out, and by then most of the deep questions would be solved. The main value of considering evolution in these contexts, at present, is that it reminds us of the contingency of how we respond to stimuli, and also to look for hidden reasons and hidden motives. But the deepest insights will have to come from elsewhere.
One thing that can help:
The source of something is not the same as its effect.
Yes, evolution is responsible for human psychology, which has concepts such as love and morality. But this doesn't mean that evolution has concepts such as love or morality within it.
Do concepts such as "love" and "don't murder" help with human fitness? Yes. Would murder be right if it helped fitness? No.
Imagine somewhere in the universe, there is a species that murders its own members as a matter of course and they evolved to do so. They call murder something...
It's not exactly a book on evolutionary psychology, but I recommend this book for some information regarding why we might be neurologically inclined to be religious in the absence of an actual god.
I would point out that it's not necessarily the case that religiousness was ever positively selected for as something that promoted survival, it could very easily be a consequence of other traits that were selected for interacting with each other. For instance, humans have strong pattern recognition capacities, but also a strong bias in favor of seeing patterns,...
Just reading the title, I thought this was going to be about yet another failure of Evo-Psych (YAFEP).
Another thing Dad likes to do is back me into a corner WRT morality and moral relativism- "Oh, but can you really believe that the act of rape doesn't have an inherent [wrongness]? Are you saying it was justified for [insert historical monster] to do [atrocity] because it would make him reproductively successful?"
I can't say I disagree with him on that. Evolutionary psychology isn't much help when it comes to evaluating moral claims.
I don't know the answer to "is there such a thing as inherent wrongness?" - it probably depends on wha...
Evolution is going to give you a good sense of how the world is. Figuring out how the world should be -that is, morality- is a different matter, to be informed by (but probably not based on) what you know of evolution. That's a little like trying to make a cake using your knowledge of physics.
If you want to Sequences' answer to this question, I'd go with this post: http://lesswrong.com/lw/sm/the_meaning_of_right/ . There's also a wealth of other writing on the subject from any number of authors - don't feel compelled to limit yourself to any single author ...
Well, there is an initial immediate problem with saying that people are hardwired for belief.
I think evolutionary psychology is pretty far from the crux of the theism/atheism debate.
On one hand, I don't think evolutionary psych at the moment provides very strong evidence against god. It's true that if god doesn't exist, there is probably some evolutionary explanation for widespread cross-cultural religious belief, and if god does exist, there might not be. But evolutionary psychology so far only really has educated guesses for why religious belief might be so common, without knock-down proof that any of them are the true reason. The existence of s...
So, a little background- I've just come out as an atheist to my dad, a Christian pastor, who's convinced he can "fix" my thinking and is bombarding me with a number of flimsy arguments that I'm having trouble articulating a response to, and need help shutting down. The particular issue at the moment deals with non-theistic explanations for human psychology and things like love, morality, and beauty. After attempting to communicate explanations from evolutionary psychology, I was met with amused dismissal of the subject as "speculation".
There's one book in particular he's having me read- The Reason for God by Timothy Keller. In the book, he brings up evolutionary psychology as an alternative to theistic explanations, and immediately dismisses it as apparently self-defeating.
"Evolutionists say that if God makes sense to us, it is not because he is really there, it's only because that belief helped us survive and so we are hardwired for it. However, if we can't trust our belief-forming faculties to tell us the truth about God, why should we trust them to tell us the truth about anything, including evolutionary science? If our cognitive faculties only tell us what we need to survive, not what is true, why trust them about anything at all?" -Timothy Keller
The obvious answer is that knowing the truth about things is generally advantageous to survival- but it hardly addresses the underlying assertion- that without [incredibly specific collection of god-beliefs and assorted dogmas], human brains can't arrive at truth because they weren't designed for it. And of course, I'm talking to a guy with an especially exacting definition of "truth" (100% certainty about the territory)- I could use an LW post that succinctly discusses the role and definition of truth, there.
Another thing Dad likes to do is back me into a corner WRT morality and moral relativism- "Oh, but can you really believe that the act of rape doesn't have an inherent [wrongness]? Are you saying it was justified for [insert historical monster] to do [atrocity] because it would make him reproductively successful?" Armed only with evolutionary explanations for their behavior, I couldn't really respond- possibly my fault, since I haven't read the Morality sequence on account of I got stuck in the Quantum Physics ultrasequence, and knowing that reality is composed of complex amplitudes flowing between explicit configurations or aaasasdjgasjdga whatever the frig even (I CAN'T) has proven to be staggeringly unhelpful in this situation.
In addition to particular arguments WRT the question posed, I could also use recommendations for good, well-argued and accessible books on the subject of evolutionary psychology, with a focus on practical experimental results and application- the guy can't be given a book and not read it, so I'm hoping to at least get him to not dismiss the science as "speculation" or a joke. It's likely he's aware that the field evolutionary psychology is really prone to hindsight bias and thus ignores it completely, so along with the book, a good article or study demonstrating the accuracy and predictive power of the evolutionary psychological model would be appreciated.
Thanks!