Since I was once where you are now, I would like to (helpfully?) mention that the only real difference between You and Alternate Universe You That Believes the Same Things but Identifies as an Atheist is that the latter doesn't spend so much mental energy rationalizing a label to erself.
Maybe, if you have modelled where I am now accurately.
I don't identify as an atheist because I don't reject theism. I'm actually more of an untheist, in that I have no epistemological basis for believing in any particular god, but I don't rule out every possible view of the divine, including for example a universal ethical theorem for sentient life which we have glimpsed fragments of but can't prove yet. Or, you know, something weird.
If, when you say "God", you actually mean "universal ethical theorem for sentient life" or something other than "supernatural being that created/help create the world", you're probably best off coming up with a different word; the one you're currently using has been hopelessly entangled in its present context, and continuing to use it for something other than that will only result in confusion.
I'm probably done using that word here anyway :)
But I don't think a word can truly be "hopelessly entangled in its present context". Apart from anything else, the present is a moving target, and people's ideas of divinity are incredibly diverse already. I could talk about a mathematical god-as-theorem at a Quaker meeting for example, and nobody would raise an eyebrow.
While I'm here, as a matter of politeness, I will entertain the community consensus of god as "imaginary friend" if you like.
But for the purposes of this article I will be describing myself as a christian realist.
...
I'm actually more of an untheist, in that I have no epistemological basis for believing in any particular god...
Please stop abusing the language. :) You do not fall into the cluster of beliefs that most people understand "christian" to signify. You do yourself no favors by using nonstandard meanings for words...
Is this a "no true Scotsman" situation? When I became and was baptised as a Christian, what made me so was acceptance of Jesus' teachings. Since I haven't rejected them as ethical heuristics and general good advice, I feel entitled to keep using that adjective, while reserving judgement on other beliefs that "most people understand 'christian' to signify".
I literally DO NOT SEE how this is a problem, given that the whole point of my article was that when you are a realist you don't have to carry around beliefs and ways of thinking that are imposed by anything other than objective reality. That totally includes what "most people" think "christian" means.
Also, it's a waste of time discussing it here. Among theists, it's a talking point that can maybe lead others who identify as "christian" to realise that they don't need to believe everything they are told in order to be the person they want to be in relationship with a God that is real to them. Among rationalists it's apparently just an annoying distraction. If all you're saying is I shouldn't have mentioned it, yes, I'm beginning to think so :)
Is this a "no true Scotsman" situation? When I became and was baptised as a Christian, what made me so was acceptance of Jesus' teachings
Is this true? Did you at the time think that Jesus had performed miracles, or died and been resurrected? More to the point, whether you had or not, and if you hadn't, and had told the people who were baptizing you that you hadn't, would they have gone through with the baptism?
Is this a "no true Scotsman" situation?
Not really. There's a problem here that some terms have fuzzy boundaries and yet come with all sorts of connotative baggage. In the case of "Christian" the boundaries are somewhat blurry, but when one self-identifies as Christian one is triggering a whole host of connotations and emotional, tribal aspects, whether or not one hits a standard definition of the term.
To use a slightly more extreme example, if I started calling myself Christian, simply because I like some aspects of Jesus's teachings, and yet don't believe in any supernatural connection to Jesus, and have never been baptized, and semi-regularly go to Jewish services and no Christian ones, one would probably see something at best confusing about this choice. Thinking about this in terms of some abstraction like bleggs might help.
I think you should avoid giving yourself a label at all in that case ("Keep your identity small"). Tacking "Christian" in front of "realist" makes your position less clear, not more clear. I can see doing that if you're trying to exploit in-group bias or something, but I think it's much healthier to be honest to yourself about what you're doing.
but I don't rule out every possible view of the divine, including for example a universal ethical theorem for sentient life which we have glimpsed fragments of but can't prove yet. Or, you know, something weird.
Neither do I, but I'm definitely an atheist. You can be unable to rule out a possibility without lending it any credence.
You can take it beyond the possibility of gods. Everything I think I know about logic and reasoning might be wrong. The universe might be held together by dream physics. I can't rule the possibility out, but I can dismiss it as remote to the point of irrelevance.
Maybe it's because I've never been religious, but I have trouble figuring out what the main message of this post is. Is it, "when you look at the evidence, you'll realize that YEC and biblical morality are false" ? Or is there some deeper meaning ? You promised to buffet the reader with torrential emotions, but I'm only feeling bafflement...
Huh. Have not seen that before. That's very well done, with the video very good also. I really liked the bit about "seeking out the darkest place to better see the light." However, the song does repeat the common myth about Galileo being tortured, which was a bit jarring.
I guess my only question is:
If you are a realist about nature, if you believe that you should check your epistemology against the natural world, and if you accept that moral values and ethical systems are something you are free to choose based on your actual preferences...
What does a belief in God add?
In other words, if we both believe in a naturalistic view of the world, in testing our beliefs against reality, that proper beliefs are tested against the world, and that moral values and ethical systems are chosen rather than built into reality... it seems like at that point the belief in God isn't pulling any epistemic weight. I might be missing something, however, which is why I ask the question.
I like this post. You're coming from religion, you're seeking truth, you don't want to toss out the religion completely. I think asking what self-identified rationalists have to say about that is entirely appropriate. As mwengler implies, a religious background is as good a place to get values from as anyplace else.
I was raised as an atheist, toyed with Quakerism for a while, but went back to atheism, but with a kinder view of religion. Quakers may not be great at cost-benefit tradeoffs, but they've been at the forefront of progressive values forever. I'm also a Unitarian-Universalist atheist, and enjoy the community a church provides (a mix of atheists and theists). We teach our kids about all major religions, and then let them choose their beliefs (most choose what amounts to atheism, but they have some idea who they share the world with. One parent said he brought his kids to UU Sunday School to "inoculate them against religion").
But if I sing a line like, "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty... only thou art holy, there is none beside thee, perfect in power, love and purity." it makes me feel kind of teary and good. As does, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." What a great idea, that someone else is watching out for you, someone who knows best! Sometimes it can be helpful, for instance for reducing unproductive anxiety. 90% of me focuses on the fact it isn't true and 10% on its value. For a questioning believer, maybe it's 90-10 the other way.
All I ask of believers is to subscribe to what I've heard described as the liberal bargain. We do not expect to come to agreement on important issues of values and how life should be led. Persuasion is fine, but coercion is not. All you have to do is be a good neighbor, abiding by widely shared ethical beliefs: leave other people alone and treat them with a modicum of respect. Let the public schools teach (secular) science. We do interfere inside families enough to prevent child abuse, but that's about it (and arguably we do too much of that). And I hope/expect that all a believer needs to buy into the liberal bargain is just a little bit of doubt.
So I say go ahead and pray, go to church, whatever works. Churches do a lot of good works. You already know that God helps those who help themselves, which means you're doing pretty much the same thing with or without a God.
I realize some people who were raised with religion and reject it have substantial anger against religion and need to denounce religion in strong terms. Sometimes they seem to want to make believers feel like idiots. I think that is unfortunate.
We agree that no one has the Truth and people are free to believe what they want.
This seems like a bad idea at multiple levels. If Jack Chick or some other extremist is correct, he better spend the time convincing us, and it would be irresponsible not to. Moreover, if some moderate religion is correct, then I'd still like them to try and convince me because I'd rather have correct knowledge. Believing in something and deliberately not discussing or debating it might be a useful taboo for civil societies to function, but it may not be so great for people actually trying to understand.
I modified my comment slightly to not refer to Truth. But I do think it is unreasonable to expect that people will agree on many values, e.g. whether art, psychotherapy, the worship of some particular concept of God, maximizing lifespan, hedonism, making money etc. are how best to live one's life. Discussion and debate are fine (but not required). But if an opponent doesn't convince me that premarital sex is wrong (for instance), he or she may not harass or coerce me.
When deciding how to allocate your time in life, one choice to make is what arguments to listen to and what not. You have to make a judgment on very little information. The older you get, the more you are likely to judge that a new argument isn't of a kind to convince you (though it's still a probabilistic judgment). Fortunately, others whose opinions you respect may listen, and if it's really good they'll alert you.
expect that people will agree on many values, e.g. whether art, psychotherapy, the worship of some particular concept of God, maximizing lifespan, hedonism, making money etc. are how best to live one's life.
But one of these isn't just a value question but a factual question about the real world. For example even if one is a utilitarian, if there's a classical vengeful deity, then knowing so is important. It isn't a good idea to confuse questions of values with questions about the nature of the universe.
All I ask of believers is to subscribe to what I've heard described as the liberal bargain. We agree that no one has the Truth and people are free to believe what they want.
I much prefer the simpler bargain "people are free to believe what they want." Worrying too much about The Truth is bad.
Quakers may not be great at cost-benefit tradeoffs
It took me a long time to realize that was my main problem with Quakerism. I did finally wise up enough to commit to not being on any committees.
No need to apologize for emotion. LessWrong is all about rationally pursuing your values. The rationality part isn't helped by emotions, but the values part comes from nowhere else. At the deepest level, a value is just something you like. Rationality is about tethering yourself to the real world as you decide how to maximize your goodness taking your values as an assumption, as a given, as a BELIEF, as a FAITH.
To the extent "Christian" means a belief in some "supernatural" aspect to some man who lived here for 33 years about 2000 years ago, and indeed a belief that this man in some sense is or was an omnipotent omniscient supernatural being who not only created everything, but is also somehow deserving or automatically eligible for our love, our worship, our slavish devotion, well that's a bunch of low entropy statements with extraordinarily small amounts of evidence OTHER THAN MERE ASSERTION by some other humans of its truth. So it is probably hard to be a "rationalist christian" by that definition since that definition of christian sets so much belief on things that follow only from the authority and not from observation of reality.
But if by Christian all you mean is you have a taste for some of his moral/ethical statements, then heck, you can be a Dawknsist, a Yudkovskyist, a Feynmanist, a Ghandiist, and still have a strong role for rationality in realizing your values.
And since Jesus was supposedly talking about being a slave to sin - what is sin but imperfection? And what kind of imperfection can you be freed from just by knowing the truth? Obviously, an imperfect understanding of the world. So realising this, I cheered up immensely. I could still be a Christian (and possibly a better one) by doubting, by seeking the truth and letting myself be freed by it.
Why did you "cheer up immensely"? Have you traced the logical chain behind this emotion? My guess is that you had your cognitive dissonance resolved by rationalizing your faith.
Yeah of course the cognitive dissonance was reduced. That made the process much less painful, but it was in no way a retreat back to faith. If anything, most of the cognitive dissonance was already inherent in what I was pretending to believe.
You lost me at
(BTW, I am using the conventional spelling of Him with the capital letter as a gender-irrelevant variable name rather than a male personal pronoun).
First off, I'd like to say, I have met Christians who similarly were very open to rationality and applying it to the premises of their religion, especially the ethics. In practice, one of these was the only person who directly recognized me as an immortalist a few sentences into our first discussion, where no one else around me even knew what that is. I find that admirable, and fascinating.
I also think it likely that human beings as they are now need some sort of comfort, reassurance, that their universe is not that universe of cold mathematics.
So I'm not sure I should point this out, but, in the end, you're still trying to find a God of the gaps. In the end, you're still basing your view of the universe on a very special premise, that is, God.
Eventually, this can only be resolved in a few ways : either God exists, or He doesn't, or using its existence as a premise doesn't make a difference, and a theist would eventually come to the same understanding of the universe as a down-to-earth, reductionist atheistic rationalist.
But I also began to feel depressed, and then sort of hollow inside. I had no attachment to young-earth creationism, but I suppose I was trying to keep a sort of "God of the gaps" with regard to the beginning and development of intelligent life on Earth. Having seen why there were considerably fewer gaps than I had thought, I couldn't un-see it. A little part of me had been booted out of Eden.
I don't think God exists, and I'm still puzzled by how anyone could come to believe it does. Here I mean believe in that sense where you don't just "like to pretend something is real for the comfort it brings", which I do too, but rather in the sense where you think "stop kidding yourself now, you need a real, practical, useable answer now".
Both are different, the first is fine and necessary for many people, but if you use God in the latter I'm worried you're going to be up for a few disappointing experiences for the next few decades.
I actually like the idea of the universe of cold mathematics. I would find the idea of a non-mathematical universe sort of disappointing and hopeless.
I think a few people are assuming odd things about what I currently believe, and that's probably to be expected after a post like that.
For me now, my "faith" isn't "epistemic belief in the existence of a particular God", but "provisional trust in the hypothesis of an admittedly poorly expressed ideal". This is no different than provisional trust in any other hypothesis, except inasmuch as I don't have a nice clean experiment to falsify it. I'm just living my life and seeing how it goes. It's not impossible that I will find that it goes badly enough to make me abandon some of the heuristics I currently adopt.
What do you make of "If I speak in the tongues[a] of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal"?
I find at least a partial truth in it-- that communication is at least made much more difficult if there's no good will, though I think an assumption of good will by the listener is at least as important as actual good will from the speaker.
I hope never to have to protect something I love from crazy people with unshakeable beliefs that make no sense.
Amen.
I think I might add this sentiment to my heuristic for determining whether someone is sufficiently similar to me to TDT-cooperate on the Prisoner's Dilemma.
(Uh, if you're not familiar with TDT, just take it as high praise.)
One goal of religious commitment is to become righteous. You may want to be righteous, but in order to be righteous, you first have to be right.
People who think of themselves as righteous are never right.
I have a small prediction. Some time before the end of the next paragraph you are going to form a strong opinion as to whether this article has any value to you. I'm going to be using the G word, appealing to emotion, and generally flinging around rhetoric not backed by any mathematics. If it helps, you can think of this as epistemic wheelchair access for those of us unable to leap tall equations at a single bound and enter the temple of pure reason by flying in through the upper windows.
According to a casual Google search I did, St Francis was said to have asked:
I am not going to be offering any answers to the first question. But for the purposes of this article I will be describing myself as a christian realist. What I mean by a realist is that I identify myself as someone who seeks to engage with reality - the universe as it really is. And by christian, I mean that I came to this desire by the rather circuitous route of becoming a Christian, and then getting deconverted from most of the associated dogma, while retaining many of the ethical heuristics and respect for the teachings attributed to Jesus.
Most readers can now sigh sadly, roll their eyes and go read something more interesting. But if you are still here, either having a belief in God that you are not willing to abandon, or you want to try to engage in rational discussions with those who do, what this article is about is that without requiring self-identification as a "rationalist", theists and untheists can and should meet half way and at least agree on the logical necessity of being a realist.
First of all, if God is real, then rejecting reality runs the risk of rejecting the real God in favour of a personal and therefore flawed delusion about Him. This is generally held to be a bad thing from a theological point of view, (BTW, I am using the conventional spelling of Him with the capital letter as a gender-irrelevant variable name rather than a male personal pronoun).
Secondly, I don't think it is honest or sane to insist on the reality of God but exempt any opinions from testing against reality just because they relate to God in some way. It's almost redundant to point out the atrocities that have been carried out on the pretext of slightly different interpretations of religious doctrine between tribal sub-groups of Christianity. Absent that, some other pretext might have been used, but even so if there is to be any stable common ground between hotly disputed opinions, reality must be it.
But can we really know what is real? The world is a lot more complex and nuanced than you can ever understand. It's comforting to have a simple set of beliefs (actually, little stories about the world you tell yourself rather than a coherent model that explains what you observe) but there comes a point where you have to stop thinking and reasoning as a child and put away childish things.
Whatever religious, political, emotional, cultural, traditional, tribal or accidental views you have accrued about the world so far are mostly wrong. And always will be. There is an objective reality, but you can only know a tiny piece of it. Painful as it may be to realise this, refusing to deal with it is not a viable option. Well, it wasn't for me.
There I was, being mostly a Christian without really thinking it through, and I watched Richard Dawkins giving the BBC Christmas Lectures on evolution. It all made sense, it was interesting, and I was enjoying it. But I also began to feel depressed, and then sort of hollow inside. I had no attachment to young-earth creationism, but I suppose I was trying to keep a sort of "God of the gaps" with regard to the beginning and development of intelligent life on Earth. Having seen why there were considerably fewer gaps than I had thought, I couldn't un-see it. A little part of me had been booted out of Eden, and Dawkins was standing guard over it like an angel with a fiery sword, forbidding re-entry forever. I don't suppose Professor Dawkins would like that analogy particularly well, but when you're doing God's work, people will say unwelcome things about you. He's had worse. :)
What happened next? Let's go back to those "teachings attributed to Jesus". Specifically, "the truth shall make you free". Yeah I know, he wasn't talking about the same thing. But he was dead right. If you have a mistaken belief, your actions in regard to it will not produce the outcome you would wish. You are restricted against your will from attaining your desire. Blindfolded, shackled. Enslaved almost. And since Jesus was supposedly talking about being a slave to sin - what is sin but imperfection? And what kind of imperfection can you be freed from just by knowing the truth? Obviously, an imperfect understanding of the world. So realising this, I cheered up immensely. I could still be a Christian (and possibly a better one) by doubting, by seeking the truth and letting myself be freed by it.
So, what's the deal then? The light burden you take up as a realist is that you no longer get to complacently accept things that may not be true, and face things that are true no matter how uncomfortable. In return, you get to lay down the impossible burden of constantly maintaining your mind in the unnatural shape of what you "ought to believe".
An example: young earth creationism. Now there are many theological reasons not to insist that the earth is less than 10000 years old (e.g. Jesus never said so and when God told St Peter to preach to the gentiles who no doubt had different creation stories, he omitted to mention it as being in any way important). Let's leave them aside since they don't belong here.
The realist approach here is to ask what reason we have to believe that a young earth is factually true. Parts of the bible imply it indirectly, and some humans have said that the bible is the word of God, but we know it was at least written down by imperfect humans, and the bible itself as it now exists doesn't even say that all of itself is the word of God.
It can't. Because when the 66 books that it comprises were written, they hadn't been assembled into the document we now call the bible, so that document had no reference in any of them. Believing that the whole bible is the literal word of God is one of those "ought to believe" burdens that we can put down, leaving our hands free for some investigation. Is there any other source of information on which to draw? Something made directly by God that we can always refer to, cross-reference, and check against mere human opinion?
Well, ironically, if you claim to believe the bible, then yes, but it's not the bible; it's The Entire Universe. The cosmic microwave background, the half-lives of the isotopes, the mathematical inevitability of evolution by selection under survival constraints (as observed in the laboratory and in genetic algorithms), the strata of rock visible in the Grand Canyon and the deep ice cores extracted from the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets. If God is real, and God made all that stuff, and it consistently and lawfully meshes together into a coherent picture of the world that flatly contradicts a young earth, then what are you gonna do? Call God a liar because you've favour one interpretation of a book that says otherwise?
So much for epistemology. What about ethics?
If you only need to believe true facts, you are more free to choose ethical values, with the only constraint being that they are not provably inconsistent with the true facts. Want a love-centred pro-social system of ethics based on the benevolent will of God? Take it, and be joyful. Reason does not preclude it. Want this without condoning all the incest and genocide in the bible, or getting your panties in a bunch over gay marriage? You got it.
One goal of religious commitment is to become righteous. You may want to be righteous, but in order to be righteous, you first have to be right. Otherwise you're just wrongeous, and who wants that? :)
And if you merely want to feel righteous without caring or believing that you might be wrong, then that's called self-righteous. Try this thought on for size: what would Jesus say about those who hunger and thirst for self-righteousness? Not so blessed, I'm guessing.
This stuff matters whichever set of moral values you prefer, because every ethical decision has real consequences. Having a mistaken view of the world can get people killed and most humans, whether atheist, Christian, Jedi, Muslim or Pastafarian can probably agree that they at least don't want the wrong people getting killed by mistake.
I hope never to have to protect something I love from crazy people with unshakeable beliefs that make no sense. I doubt I can fully prevent that no matter how much I try to encourage realism in others, but at least by being a realist I'm trying not to be that crazy person.