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Have you read any of Alasdair MacIntyre?
I'm particularly reminded of his book Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. I haven't read all of it, but the point you highlighted about different visions of morality and rationality coheres rather nicely with what I understand to be his views.
I can't put my finger on it, but this just seems wrong somehow. It feels to me like moral uprightness and artistic beauty are sacred because they cohere with truth -- not necessarily bare "material factuality" but "reality as it really is," "existence as it really is," "humans as they really are." The strongest claims for moral uprightness are always undergirded by an appeal to things being in line with what they really are. It was decidedly not the enlightenment thinkers who synthesized the concept of natural law, nor was it them who developed a teleological approach to ethics.
I am not familiar with MacIntyre; I will check him out.
I will venture a guess at the thing you cannot put your finger on. There are two aspects to the meaning of "truth" that adhere at the same time for most English speakers:
In your reply, you renounced #1 explicitly ("not necessarily bare material factuality") but hung on to #2. In doing this, you have departed from Enlightenment use of the word in one of two ways that you could have. I departed in the other way, retaining #1 but (temporarily, for purpose of the posst) cutting loose of #2. I did this because I reckon that most readers here would have a hard time getting their heads around cutting loose of #1. It takes a long conversation to go in that direction.
In the scheme of things, I am with you: in a longer conversation, I would never grant the use of the word "truth" to denote material factuality -- precisely because I do not think material factuality is irreducibly sacred, and because we cannot simply strip phrases like "the search for truth" and "you are speaking untruthfully" of their spiritual connotations.
By the way, the "truth" Jesus claimed to be was not material factuality, but aletheia -- literally non-concealment and non-forgetting (or, to put it positively, revelation and remembrance). This is the Greek word that is translated as "truth" in Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament, etc. In Greek, aletheia is typically not a property of sentences, but a property of the way someone communicates with another person on a given occasion. The modern English equivalent would be something like, "being straight with someone". For example, when Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinski", his statement was materially factual, but he was not speaking with aletheia, because he was either concealing something or forgetting something (almost certainly concealing something).
I would not actually renounce that material factuality is part of truth, nor would I hold that material factuality lacks sanctity. But rather, by describing "bare material factuality," I was describing facts without reference to what we're actually supposed to do with them. You need both, or there is no sanctity.
While material factuality taken too far leads to nihilism (because it separates facts from values), truth-as-non-concealment taken too far leads to relativism (because it separates values from facts). My view would be that material factuality is sacred when tied in with the proper disposition towards factuality and with the larger ontological questions of what reality is. It is sacred to seek the truth, and it is even more sacred to find it. But moreover, the sacredness is applied to the sum total of things and experiences; it's reality that is sacred, sanity that is sacred.
Jesus was indeed describing himself as the full and unconcealed revelation of God, but it is only because that revelation points to something really real, factually real, actually real, that this matters. It would mean precious little for Jesus to be the unconcealed revelation of something that does not correspond to reality. That's not Christianity as the New Testament understands it. It is precisely that his audience believed in the factual existence of God that his claim to be the revelation of God meant anything to them, whether for good or for ill.
Put simply, I think the dichotomy between truth-as-factual-correspondance and truth-as-disposition is a false one, and frankly I see it as a means to smuggle in the epistemological nihilism of Postmodernism. Every discussion I read about the topic sounds like a thousand words saying nothing. There is a reality, and there is a means of humans reaching closer correspondence to it; this is not an enlightenment theory but one that is necessary for human existence in general, anything else also leads to nihilism. It beggars belief to state that when Plato or Aristotle wrote long discourses about the nature of justice or logical deduction, that they did not intend their views to approach material factuality. Whence else cometh the metaphor of the cave?
My disagreements with the Enlightenment have precious little to do with such a dichotomy, and everything to do with their intellectual overconfidence (the "self-evident" phrasing you cited) and limitation of the means of reaching an understanding of material factuality ("according to the rules of evidence used in science and mathematics"). That doesn't mean the tools of science and mathematics are useless in reaching truth, just that they're limited, and cannot at times approach the value of a good story or a compelling narrative in stating and revealing the truth of things within their purview, like human social relations.
This is what I am talking about when I am referring to the religious "gish gallop" style of operation. This whole screed could have been done in 3 sentences.
Actually, could you do that (Do the comment in three sentences)? I'd be impressed. It doesn't need to get quite everything, but the gist.
I don't think it's really a gish-gallop, as those make too many points to reasonably address. You're saying it's not dense, so that's just making a few points repeatedly or slowly. That's not a gish-gallop.
Anyway, here's a (brief) case for Christianity, that might even seem rational from a secular, moral-free perspective, at least if you're motivated sufficiently highly by reason and argumentation:
Step 10 is what currently seem sketchiest to me; I'm not too familiar with Islam, unfortunately.
I don't expect you to care about arguments enough to do this (but not doing so is a really low expected value move on your part, if I'm right), but I do think this is fairly defensible, and I think you're irrational insofar as you don't act accordingly.
I don't understand Pascal's wager arguments.
I can just as easily claim that there is an invisible being in my garage that will torment you upon your death for all time if you don't believe in it, and grant you an eternal afterlife of bliss if you do. That wouldn't cause you to believe in it on the off chance I am telling the truth, would it? What about if I claim to have that power and if you don't pay me 1,000 dollars each month as an indulgence I'll damn you to hell, and if you do I'll make sure you get to the good place? Isn't 1,000 dollars cheap insurance against an eternity of suffering or missing out on bliss for all time?
I'm making that claim! I'll be waiting for my venmo transfer when you're ready.
Alternatively, suppose there is a god who only accepts atheists into heaven, and all of the religions in the world are tests created by it to sort out the overly credulous. There are infinite religions you can create, including ones where atheists are the only ones who go to heaven.
Okay, sure, those are all possible.
But are they more likely? Once we've gotten to the step of "ok, we should care about infinites" there's not really any going back. The game is no longer about feeling a little happier today, or satisfied in a few decades, or getting the next promotion. It's no longer a matter of mere life and death. Now the concern, the only concern, is about pursuit of those infinite goods, and flight from the infinite bads.
You ask, how should we know? How may we judge some more likely than others?
Well, you may find it hard. Fair enough. But that doesn't change that that is fundamentally what things are about, what matters.
So: is it possible that there's a god that rewards atheists with heaven, and punishes the religious? Sure. But is there reason to think that that's more likely than the reverse? I don't see any reason to. But if that is the most likely source of infinites, then sure, maximize around that, and flee religion like your life depends on it (or, well, do the most to forget about the whole thing). But do you actually have any reason to think that that is the case? Religions being divine revelation seems more straightforward.
So, do you think that that's more likely, or only that it's possible?
It seems like this is more or less isomorphic to utilitarianism, and my critique of it would be the same as my critique of utilitarianism: You seem to be trying to do math here, but I don't think it's actually math. That is to say, I don't think these calculations actually deliver repeatable answers independent of specific observers, and I don't think there's a way to fix that any more than there's a rigorous way to multiply potatoes by carrots.
I do, actually, think you can apply math here. You can use hyperreals or surreals: probabilities are able rigorously to be formulated in such contexts, I believe. And, mathematically, out comes Pascal's wager: a fanaticism for the infinite over the finite (and bigger infinites over smaller infinites, but I didn't want to complicate the matter), provided that we're always dealing with finite and not infinitesimal probabilities (which I'm relatively confident we are, but I didn't want to complicate the matter).
Now, assigning probabilities to things is tricky, but I think it's something that must be done. We can certainly think that things are more or less likely in general. It might be hard to do rigorously, to come up with exact numbers, but all you really need for this context is the balance of the matter, to figure out what's more likely from your own point of view, in the sense that the LessWrongers like talking about Bayes.
EDIT: just realized I wasn't quite addressing your objection. The Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theorem is pretty good evidence that your preferences, if you want them to have certain desirable properties (for example, one of the four is transitivity: if I would prefer to eat a hamburger now than to eat pasta, and I would prefer to eat pasta now than to eat brussels sprouts, then I must prefer to eat a hamburger now than to eat brussels sprouts), must be able to be modeled by a utility function. That of course isn't saying that you need to just calculate whether this makes more people happy or something, and there, ethics is done. You're free to have among the things you care about how subjectively likely it is that that course of action might be violating some divine law, for example. Nor is it saying that you ought to be pulling out a function and writing down numbers or you're Irrational. But it is saying that, if you want your preferences to follow some pretty reasonable seeming properties, they need to have that certain mathematical structure. But you don't necessarily need to think about in your day-to-day life, you can just live it, caring about the things you care about.
I just realized in that last paragraph I was switching back and forth between ethics and preferences. I don't think those are the same, but I do think that ideally, our preferences should follow ethics. In any case, both involve "how do I decide what to do," so the same argument is relevant for each.
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