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I've been agnostic, rather than atheist, for most of my life. My argument was that life is too complex, especially with how organs work, for there not to be someone planning it. I guess the best word for my beliefs would be deist, but I only learned the term recently.
Anyway, I just read an essay by Yudkowsky and I'm now convinced there is almost certainly no God. This depresses me because I want there to be a God.. which is to say, an unmoved mover at the beginning of time that is sentient. The idea that something at the beginning of time was unaffected by the rules of cause and effect is still plausible to me, but is there any reason left to assume it was sapient? I'd appreciate help with this, because I want to convince myself there may be a God.
What argument that Yudkowsky made did you find convincing?
I admit I'm saying this from a perspective of finding the essay you linked banal and deeply uninteresting. It shows, I think, that it's from 2007 - it's a bit of sub-Dawkinsian New Atheist tat. Does there appear to be great chaos and cruelty in nature? Indeed there does! But we have always known this. The inference to God from nature was never premised on the idea that there is no evil in nature. On the contrary, evil spiritual forces and sin are also inferred from nature. No religion that I'm aware of asserts that this world must necessarily be a paradise, or that it cannot contain seeming chaos, orderliness, pain, or suffering.
You'd have to construct at least a basic syllogism to make that an argument against God - "If God exists, he would eliminate evil; evil exists; therefore God does not exist". We could jump straight into theodicy. But Yudkowsky doesn't seem to even offer that much? There just isn't any substance there.
But it sounds like something in Yudkowsky's essay really spoke to you, or hit on something you'd been asking yourself?
It's not that nature is cruel, but rather, that it's nonsensically cruel that's gotten to me. The artifacts that come from evolution truly being random.
The Fundamental Question of Rationality is: "Why do you believe what you believe?", or alternatively, "What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?" - LessWrong
If you find a mechanical wristwatch sitting on the side of the road, and when you take it home you discover it only ticks forward fifty-eight minutes every hour, you don’t believe it to have been imperfectly made to begin with; you believe its perfection to have become corrupted through circumstance.
Yud’s whole telos is using the scientific method (and Bayes Theorum) for everything in life. That’s the core of rationalism. The core of the scientific method is that once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how absurd or intricate, must be the truth. Science is perpetually trying to falsify all assumptions, all explanations, so that the truth may be seen in its naked glory.
But in that essay he spoke about a Judeo-Christian God, without the specifics of theology of any single religion, sect, or cult within that wide umbrella. He referenced a belief in a loving, immanent, benevolent God who deliberately used a cruel process of death and suffering to refine slugs to apes, and apes to humans, for the purpose of proclaiming His glory forever after death. And he did a fine job of destroying those cosmologies which embrace this patent absurdity.
Ken Ham, the premier creationist, does the same, using the same evidence.
Yes, Eliezer Yudkowsky has more in common with Ken Ham than either do with the theologians of ecumenical denominations, whether Judaic, Christian, or Hindu. Both Ham and Yud believe in a specific historical sequence (heh) of events which led to the world we live in now. Both believe in, and proclaim loudly, the purposelessness of evolution, and both loudly proclaim it is not God who made the world a place of toothless elephants or fat humans.
But where Yud says it is only man which brings the light of intellect to the universe, Ham points to the very first part of the ancient Scriptures of his religion and says it was man, not God, whose choice brought death into the world, who wrought entropy across the surface of the Earth and ended the perfection of a loving God’s garden.
Yudkowsky did not show that the artifacts of purposelessness inherent in an entropic and random world must be the result of a vast regression of chaos to the beginning of time; he didn’t see a need to falsify the only alternative which also fits the evidence.
Where he sees a Bronze Age civilization’s myths and just-so stories, Ham sees a miraculously preserved historical narrative documenting in detail a fall from a perfect world created by omniscience, resulting in the world we can see and measure, and dinosaur fossils we can dig up as evidence of this true history.
The mere existence of the “problem of pain” argument, however artfully phrased and carefully evidenced, is not in itself a proof of the nonexistence of the God of the Bible.
Now, I know I’m not going to convince anyone on this forum (of all places) to trust Ken Ham over Eliezer Yudkowsky. What I’m doing is making it crystal clear that Yud has handily falsified the weakman argument. The strongman is nowhere to be found in that essay.
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We have also always known that there is great apparent design in nature too, which people have taken to mean a designer with some sort of experience (since that's the easiest way to conceptualize the work being done).
If you look at the arms race between predator and prey, adaptations made to local conditions and other such things it's easy to see both chaos and design. You can blame the chaos on some sort of plan from the designer (in my religious tradition it's because - what else - humans fucked up) but you have to explain both the variety and how organisms seem to fit their niche.
It's probably especially important given the timescales certain religions claim (which are relatively truncated).
You're right, this is simplistic thinking (pointed out by Charles Taylor that "Darwin refuted the Bible" was said in the 1890s by a Harrow schoolboy; 2010s atheists weren't exactly breaking new ground) but I've actually gone on a journey similar to the midwit meme here: "Evolution disproved religion" -> "actually, it was probably a complex interplay of material and ideological factors involving the Protestan..." -> "Evolution disproved religion".
I don't think this has an impact on certain other philosophical arguments from God, but it undermines one of the most intuitive reasons to believe in one and when you start going down that road...eventually you may find that you don't need an alternate explanation. This is where people like Graham Oppy end up: most of the philosophical arguments are at least hard to conclusively settle but naturalism works without the need for additional supernatural entities and forces.
Yudkowsky makes much of "this aspect and that aspect of nature is cruel" but why do we think that? It's all part of the push and pull of varying forces. What is it about humans that makes us pass value judgements like "this is cruel, this is evil, I cannot accept a god that includes this as part of the world"?
That's the itch that is never scratched by atheism. We can reduce our feelings about cruelty down to "in the end, it's because what is 'cruel' is painful, and all organisms want to avoid pain and find pleasure, it's an instinctual drive" and get rid of morality in that way. But I think few people find "There is no morality, it's just what makes us go 'yuck' and we are now too smart and modern to give the disgust reaction any right over our behaviour".
If disgust reaction is no reason to go "homosexuality is wrong", it is also no reason to go "elderly elephants dying of starvation is cruel".
This Yudkowsky essay is about precisely this question.
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