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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28326 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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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.

Agnosticism is a method. A/Theism is a choice about personal morality, and whether to outsource it.

For God, like everything else, the devil is in the definitions. If you want to believe in god, change definitions until you have one that works for you. In one sense, there is no god. In another, everyone has their own god. In a third, god is created by the belief and institutions of the religion.

Who or what do you serve? How do you spend your time, energy and money? What causes do you kill and die for? What gives you meaning and purpose?

For a rough functional definition, that's your god.

A/Theism is a choice about personal morality, and whether to outsource it.

Strongly disagree here. I believe God to be good, but God doesn't define goodness. Morality is fundamental to reality itself.

I'd like to hear more. So far in my experience when people say that they're just talking about game theory.

Well let me preface this by saying I'm no philosopher, but also I don't believe philosophers have a monopoly on, or even a better-than-average understanding of, philosophy. They are no better at living moral principles than anyone else, and I consider firsthand experience a much better path towards actual truth than any amount of reasoning in a vacuum.

I believe morality is like math in that both exist and can be true or false. You can change your axioms, redefine two to mean three etc., but in the end moral conclusions inevitably follow from moral premises due to the nature of logic itself. Given the same premises, two independent people should always reach the same moral conclusions.

Further, I believe the premises themselves are also objectively correct or incorrect. Some are simply true, others simply false. Maybe a better way to put it is that some are ordered and others disordered, and some correlate with things universally recognized as good while others do not.

The logical equivalent is modus ponens. If you don't accept modus ponens, you don't accept it, but then the rest of logic is cut off to you. You won't accomplish anything. Perhaps, in a vaccuum, it is equally valid to accept or reject modus ponens, but to me it is straightforwardly obvious that modus ponens is simple Truth as defined by reality itself.

I believe we can experimentally verify moral axioms. Like with modus ponens, accepting a correct moral axiom will lead to more progress, growth, success, and sophistication in one's life and philosophy than rejecting it.

In the end I have to say this is mostly post-hoc justification, though, and my main reason for this belief is simple intuition. Certain beliefs--such as the belief that purposeless suffering is bad--feel just as objectively correct to me as any mathematical or logical proof.

For God, like everything else, the devil is in the definitions. If you want to believe in god, change definitions until you have one that works for you. In one sense, there is no god. In another, everyone has their own god. In a third, god is created by the belief and institutions of the religion.

OP said they wished they could believe in God. But this, while attempting to give advice, is basically presuming God is dead, which defeats the purpose.

If a person came to you and said "I really wanted to believe in quantum mechanics" after a particularly devastating article debunking it, it'd be very strange to tell them "well, quantum mechanics is whatever you want so long as you define it thus" (although this is true if you're a comic writer). Presumably they want to believe in something actually real that quantum mechanics points to and it does them little good to redefine quantum entanglement to mean the unseen connections that bind all people.

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