NelsonRushton
Doctorate in mathematics, specializing in probability theory, from the University of Georgia. Masters in AI from the University of Georgia. 15 years as a computer science professor at Texas Tech. Now I work as a logician for an AI startup. Married with one son. He's an awesome little dude.
I identify as an Evangelical Christian, but many Evangelicals would say that I am a deist mystic, and that I am going to Hell. Spiritually, the difference between me and Jordan Peterson is that I believe in miracles. The difference between me and Thomas Paine (an actual deist mystic) is that I believe the Bible is a message to us from the Holy Spirit, and the difference between me and Billy Graham is that I think there is noise in the signal.
User ID: 2940
This is a reply jointly to several comments so I will put it as a new semi-top level post. Several of the responses, including such as (what I consider) the most thoughtful ones of @sqeecoo and @Gillitrut, point in the direction that the mission of science is not to discover natural laws that are literally true, but to produce useful fictions -- stories about the world that we are better off believing and acting on. That position, if you really believe it, is immune from my argument. But if you take that position, and at the same time embrace the study of science, then you cannot, at the same time, argue against theism on the grounds that it is literally false.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
By "inflammatory" do you mean (a) inflammatory in the eyes of a reasonable person, or (b) something that will, if widely seen, get a lot of people riled up, reasonably or unreasonably?
Is this like a hypocrisy claim? That since science isn't literally true it would be hypocritical to criticize theism for not being literally true?
Yes, that's what I'm saying.
If there is some causally inert god or gods out there, who do not interact with our reality in an empirically testable way, I am not that concerned with their existence.
God's pronouns are He/Him. (For the sarcasm-impaired, that's a joke)
Incidentally, I think this is the deepest and most informed comment in the thread so far.
Sure, the things we call the "laws of nature" may not be the true causal description of the universe at some level. What matters is that the universe acts as if they were universally true, as best we can tell.
This may be the view of many scientists who think about the epistemology of science if you pin them down (their motte!), but I think if you talk to people walking down the street, they think we are in the business of discovering natural laws that are actually true. I suspect that when we are not pinned down, scientists like to think that we are searching for truth ourselves (our bailey!), and it seems like the phrase "May not be the true causal description... at some level [emphasis added]" hedges against giving up that bailey. As I recall, the word for not-true is "false", unqualified by levels.
If you would affirm that science has no hope of attaining even tentative knowledge of natural laws that are literally true -- but instead that its mission is purely to discover useful (but presumptively fictitious) models of the physical world -- then that position is consistent with my argument, with or without miracles. From the post, I am perhaps a little more than halfway confident you would affirm that, but I am not sure, and I'd like to know.
NelsonRushton
10d ago
From reading Nixonland, he documents a bunch of right wing protestors doing the same thing left wing protestors did in the 1960's. We never really hear about it though. We only hear about left wing protestors vs police or the National Guard.
How many is a bunch, and what counts as the same thing? I'm curious to see a list of these and I challenge you to a game: you name a documented act of Republican act of mob violence (where most of the protesters presumably self-identified as republicans and at least one person was injured), and I will name two Democrat acts of mob violence, etc., back and forth for as long as you can come up with them. "A dollar a ball until the loser says quit" [The Hustler].
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
Science is stories about the world that we are better off acting on. This phrasing seems better to me. In this way, can't I argue against theism (whatever you mean by that) by saying "acting on theism doesn't make us better off"?
Yes, feel free. But not (under the premises I described) on the grounds that there is no objective evidence that God actually exists (since that is also true of universal gravitation).
The 1960's example is a bad example because many of those Democrats switched to being Republicans such as Strom Thurmond after the Democrats started pushing Civil Rights legislation.
"Many" is how many? I am skeptical of this claim of fact. I would like to see a list of pols in the US House and Senate who (a) voted against the civil rights acts of the 1960's, and who (b) ever (before or after) switched parties from Democrat to Republican. Is there more than one (Strom Thurmond)? Robert Byrd, champion of segregation who filibustered the 1964 civil rights act, was a lifelong Democrat who was praised by Hilary Clinton as a "Friend and mentor", and Barak Obama gave the eulogy at his funeral.
And what makes you say it was Democrats who pushed Civil Rights Legislation more than Republicans? For example, looking at the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 39% of House Republicans voted nay, but only 20% of Republicans, while in the Senate 31% of Democrats voted nay but only 18% of Republicans. I think the story was the same for other similar bills. Am I mistaken?
Since you yourself admit that this argument is restrained to humanist rule utilitarianism, shouldn't you edit the title to include the full phrase?
I don't actually admit that. It starts off with the humanistic version, but the later paragraphs address broader forms of the view. Do you have a particular variation in mind?
I clicked this post expecting a serious attack on the compromise between deontology and consequentialism that rule utilitarian offers,... to hell with clickbait and false advertising.
I don't think the title suggests this topic exclusively. Even if I am mistaken, and it did, "clickbaiting" is a deliberate deception, and I plead innocent to that charge.
Good question. The theft of fire from the gods is the most common, indeed the default archetypal original sin in world religions [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_of_fire]. I don't believe there is any natural moral law forbidding people from making or using fire, or that we ought to give it back. The cultures that held (or hold) the stories sacred, including the classical Greeks, also didn't think they needed to relinquish fire or give it back. At the same time, I do believe there is a lot of wisdom in those stories. If that perplexes you, it might be because you are approaching religious mythology with the wrong hemisphere of your brain.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
People also tend to upvote a nice, spicy polemic
Incidentally, I don't care for the term "spicy" as a euphemism for things that are uncomfortable, or potentially expensive, or potentially dangerous to say. If someone declines to make an objectively reasonable post because it is spicy", then maybe they just don't like spicy stuff; different strokes! On the other hand, if someone declines to make a post because it is uncomfortable (or expensive or dangerous), they are keeping their head down, or perhaps cowering, instead of speaking the truth. There are times to keep your head down, but there is never a time to deceive yourself about the fact that you are keeping your head down.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
Okay well in that case it's also hypocritical to criticize Cthulhu and Star Wars lore for not being literally true. Hooray, solipsism. This entire line of argument advances absolutely nothing.
If someone just jumped into this thread without reading the history, they might gather that I (or someone else) had criticized Cthulhu on the grounds of not being literally true. So for anyone who is jumping in in the middle, nothing of the sort happened.
Moreover, I would never detract from the merit of Shakespeare or Homer on the grounds that there is no evidence for the literal truth of their writings. Nor would I detract from the merit of a physics text on the grounds that there is no objective evidence that its contents are literally true. I do not think I am asking for special status for anything. I am arguing against a special status for the physical sciences, that I believe is widely attributed to them.
It essentially amounts to a theist's special request for their beliefs to be treated as intellectually serious even though they can't point to any justification... request denied until one of these arguments successfully and meaningfully distinguishes Christianity, theism, whatever, from an infinite number of bullshit things I could make up on the spot.
I agree that you should deny that request if somebody made it -- but I don't think I did (unless "whatever" casts a very wide net).
My thesis is that (1) if you hold nonzero confidence in the literal truth of a universal physical law, then you should be able to give reasons for your belief, and (2) the only rule of evidence I know of that would justify such a conclusion (abductive inference) -- and the one that is actually used in the physical sciences to establish credibility of physical theories -- rests on premises that are infinitesimally unlikely to hold in the absence of a miracle.
Success rates matter.
The success rate of science in enabling improvements to our material lives is pretty good. The success rate of science in yielding justifiable nonzero confidence in universal natural laws may be zero. Can you defend the proposition that it is not? It would be a compelling refutation of my argument if someone were to give a single universal natural law of the physical world -- take your pick -- and give an objective argument why we should have greater than zero confidence in its literal truth. Now that I think about it, that is the straightforward path to refuting my argument, and it is notable that one has attempted to take it.
A word of advice if you proceed: don't waste your time trying to use Bayesian reasoning; you will not get a nonzero posterior unless you have a nonzero prior, and that would be begging the question. And don't bother trying to use parametric statistics, because no finite number of observations will get you there.
So if you say aliens exist and I say they don't, we are both guessing (but not randomly: we are motivated, but not justified, by our other background beliefs). But either aliens exist or they don't. So despite both of us just guessing, one of us is right and has hit upon the truth, the absolute truth. So while Newton's L.O.G. is just a guess from an epistemological standpoint, I am also tentatively accepting it as true.
The fact that you have guessed right, or that you may have guessed right, does not entail that you are rationally licensed to embrace the proposition (I think you agree with this). For example, if a tarot card reader told me that I was going to get a job offer today, and I believed her and acted on it by taking out a car loan, and if the Gypsy turned out to be right by sheer luck, my action would still be irrational.
To clarify my position in this light, I never said that the physical laws we have in our corpus are all false, or anything of that sort. I said that we are not entitled to any rational confidence in them -- just as I am not entitled to any rational confidence in a tarot card reading (unless I am mistaken about that practice), even though they may be sometimes right as well -- except to the extent we also believe in miracles.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
It's not going away unless we eventually make some groundbreaking metaphysical discovery, and it's always going to be an inherent Achilles' heel of Positivism in particular and Empiricism in general.
I'm not dabbing on Empiricism. I am an empiricist. I'm dabbing on cold blooded materialism in conjunction with claims of the possibility of knowing universal natural laws.
Are you suggesting that everything bad should be illegal, and that the law should be a perfect mapping of all possible actions to their ethical value and from there to the punishment or reward that is appropriate
No, that would be stupid. On the other hand, if (1) action X is immoral and illegal because it tends to cause a certain harm, and (2) action Y tends to cause more of the same harm, then it seems to follow that action Y is at least as immoral, and ought to be punished at least as severely, as X. Does it not?
me: Do you believe, for example, that stealing a horse is immoral because it causes other people to steal other things if and when they find out about it?
you: Not solely because, but yes, among other things it contributes to the collapse of civil society, especially if it's never punished.
then why else?
Me: Is the immorality of A's theft mitigated by its secrecy, and the fact that it is instrumental in him promulgating anti-theft mores?
You: Not very much, but it's better than not hiding the theft, and better than using the proceeds from the theft to do more evil. Do you disagree?
Yes I disagree. The word "it" I think is a potential point of equivocation here. "It" could refer (a) to the theft, or (b) to the transaction of the theft, concealment, and essay-writing. Let me clarify that "it" is the theft, and ask the question again: is the immorality of the theft mitigated by the other two actions? If so, should A receive a lighter penalty for the theft, if he is caught, than if he had not carefully concealed the theft and written the essays?
Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of an organization that advocates for the violent overthrow of the government of the United States of America?
My guess is that this is supposed to be part of some implicit, clever argument, but it is too clever for me and I can't be sure what it is, so I have to guess. I wish I did not have to guess. My guess is that it is an example showing that speech inciting certain actions can be justifiably illegal in certain circumstances. I agree with that but I do not think it answers the questions I asked. Are you saying that B and C should go to jail? To the extent that theft is illegal because it has a tendency to cause other thefts, perhaps they should.
As you are likely aware, Jefferson was strongly influenced by John Locke in the writing of the Declaration. Locke wrote that the doctrine of equal natural negative rights was plainly discernable by independent reason:
The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions; [Locke, Two Treatises of Government, essay II, section II].
In the opening words of the Declaration, Jefferson follows Locke's wording in this passage fairly closely, writing "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", where Locke had written "life, health, liberty or possessions." In the same paragraph, Locke says, not that these precepts are part of English or Christian traditions, but that they can be ascertained by "all mankind who will but consult it [reason]". So the idea that these notions would be obvious is not a new idea in Jefferson's time, nor a straw man, but the stated opinion of the thinker who was probably most influential on Jefferson's writing. Logical inference from self-evident premises, in the style of Euclid, was in fashion during that period in writing on subjects from physics to politics -- however queer a fashion it now appears to us.
The fact that Jefferson was advised by Madison to keep his opinions to himself does not make them any less his opinions, and the fact that he was writing a public document does keep his opinion from working its way into the text. The text says what the text says.
An axiom is a premise to an argument. You don't set out to prove axioms within the scope of an argument not because they are obviously true, but because they are outside the scope of the argument by definition.
The phrase "self-evident" has meant the same thing from the time of Aquinas, through the time of Jefferson, up until now:
self-ev·i·dent\ /ˌselfˈevəd(ə)nt/
adjective
not needing to be demonstrated or explained; obvious.
[Oxford Dictionary of the English Language]
Can you explain more carefully, from a textual perspective, why you think it means something else in the Declaration? If this is your whole argument,
I said that "we hold these truths to be self-evident" is not the same as "self-evidently".
I don't buy it.
You can't rephrase "we hold these truths to be self evident" as "obviously."
Isn't that exactly what "self-evident" means?
self-ev·i·dent
/ˌselfˈevəd(ə)nt/
adjective
not needing to be demonstrated or explained; obvious.
[Oxford Dictionary of the English Language]
Also,
What Jefferson is doing here is declaring his axioms. He does make several arguments later in the Declaration, but they follow from those axioms; they aren't meant to prove them.
I don't dispute this; there is no need to prove something if it is self-evident, in the dictionary sense of being obvious.
Your conclusion, that handing down traditions takes effort, is sound, but Jefferson would likely agree.
I believe not only that it takes effort, but also that it a moral duty of each generation. I am curious why you think Jefferson would agree. For example, coincidentally, here is another use of the phrase "self-evident" by Jefferson:
The question Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another, seems never to have been started either on this or our side of the water. Yet it is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also, among the fundamental principles of every government. The course of reflection in which we are immersed here on the elementary principles of society has presented this question to my mind; & that no such obligation can be so transmitted I think very capable of proof. I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident, ‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it. The portion occupied by any individual ceases to be his when himself ceases to be, & reverts to the society...We seem not to have percieved that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independant nation to another.. [Letter to James Madison, (6 September 1789), emphasis added]
Jefferson seems to hold that a given generation has no obligation to carry on the traditions of its forebears, even from a single generation ago -- and, in the same letter to Madison of September 1789, he argues that, therefore, the national constitution should be rewritten every twenty years:
The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished then in their natural course with those who gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years.
He says in the same paragraph that the constitution should not merely be amended, but rewritten from scratch in each generation (that is, every 20 years). So much for sacred tradition.
One issue I have here is that I am not sure if three generations down the road - when this background morality of "normality" disappears - we actually won't end up eating babies as the new normal.
I believe that is where we are headed, and where we have been headed since the Enlightenment.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that the doctrine of equal, negative human rights under natural law was self-evident. Taken literally, this would mean that any mentally competent person who considered the matter would find it to be true -- like the axiom that m+(n+1) = (m+n)+1 for any two natural numbers m and n. Clearly the doctrine of human rights is not self-evident in this sense -- unless Plato, Aristotle and Socrates were morons after all.
For many years I charitably assumed that Jefferson meant that the doctrine of equal human rights defined us as a people. But now, after further reading, I believe that I was too charitable in my assessment of Jefferson, because I idolized him as a founding father. He actually failed to realize that the doctrine of equal human rights was not self-evident at all, but was part of his heritage as an Englishman and a nominal Christian.
The carrying on and handing down of our traditions takes effort, quite a lot of effort really. To the extent that we accept the Enlightenment liberal view that our moral traditions will take care of themselves, because they are spontaneously evident to any mentally competent person, we will not expend that effort -- and the consequence will be generational moral rot, slowly at first and then quickly. We are seeing this unfold before our eyes.
The current battle lines of elite and counter elite in the west are once again drawn on a precise difference between two modes of dealing with modernity. And that difference is quite exactly the one we are talking about here, between an individual desire of transcendence, escape and a collective desire of management, control.
Management and control by what agency and to what end?
This is kind of the opposite of my statement.
These are the statements I am comparing:
- @AhhhTheFrench: So you really must "call out" every moment of evil you see in the world or you're guilty too?
- The serpent: Did God actually say, You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?
They are both phrased as questions; notably both use some version of "actually"/"really", and both suggest a narrative that, in order to do right, you have to go to onerous extremes -- which makes a great excuse to do as you please. Generally, I think it is a common pattern when someone is confronted with a duty, that they respond by saying, "What am I supposed to do, Give away all of my stuff? go around jumping in every time someone is getting bullied? Starve myself so kids in Uganda can eat? Never have any fun? Fall on my sword over every little thing? etc. etc. etc.
If you're not playing some kind of game that amounts to wanting people to stop snorting when someone brings up god in an intellectual context?
I'm glad you mentioned that. I am actually not interested in the reactions of people who scoff (or "snort") when someone brings up God in an intellectual context. The readers that interests me for this argument are people like political scientist Charles Murray and historian Tom Holland, who do not scoff, and who are even sympathetic to the idea, but who are not believers because they cannot find reasons to believe.
just parsing the differences between degrees of philosophical certainty that no one out in the world ever thinks about when making decisions?
My argument isn't about parsing degrees of certainty
Then I'll leave you to your hobby and continue to be puzzled as to the appeal. Back in the world where people make decisions, the fact that science does in fact produce functional results obliterates every other consideration anyway.
Look, I'll be honest:...
I'm glad you are being honest. In that same spirit, I think it is Philistine to separate the effort to reveal the true laws of nature from "the world where people make decisions". Science, conceived as the effort to reveal the laws of nature, involves making many of decisions; I believe it is what many scientists perceive themselves as doing, and I believe it is a worthwhile pursuit for its own sake -- independently from its applications to such things as bread and circuses.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
(4) For OP: you suggest downthread that we should be inclined to trust models like Newtonian or Einsteinian physics. Why should we trust them (if we cannot infer universal physical laws with nonzero confidence) and how much should we trust them?
We should trust them for two reasons. First, we do not need nonzero confidence in full generality to trust them for practical purposes. Being 99% sure the technology works 99% of the time is good enough -- or something like that, depending on the application. Second, I didn't say we cannot infer universal physical laws with nonzero confidence, just that we can't do it without believing in one more miracle, viz. that we are blessed with just enough intelligence, and a simple enough universe, that abductive reasoning is reliable (on top of the miracle that certain equations are physically instantiated in the form of a physical systems and consciousness, that this system continues persistently to be governed by those laws, that the parameters of those laws fall into the narrow range required for stars to form, etc.).
and how much should we trust them?
That depends on how many miracles you believe.
Why can't I let the other shoe drop and say that "theism is literally false" is also a story about the world that we are better off believing and acting on?
A far as I'm concerned, you are welcome to make that argument; be my guest. I just said that, under certain premises, you couldn't rationally make the other one.
NelsonRushton
1mo ago
if both theories A and B have passed all their tests, the evidence says nothing about them. We are free to tentatively accept them as true. We don't have to, though - my guess might be that quantum computing theory is not true, or it might be that I think that quantum computing has been only weakly tested and I'm not willing to bet on it working for my missile defense system.
I think I am beginning to understand your position better. So, here is my question. Do you think that the preference for acting on a better-tested theory over acting on a worse-tested theory is an arbitrary, subjective preference? like, some people like chocolate; some people like vanilla; different strokes? I assert that it is only rational to be more willing to act on a better tested theory.
We are free to tentatively accept them as true. We don't have to, though.
When did anybody ever have to accept a theory? By have to do you mean rationally ought to? If rationally ought to is what you mean, then, as I said, I disagree.
Whatever it is, I think it is the same thing that motivated Dr. Frankenstein.
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